My American Constitution

We get back from on the train from Marrakech and I’m starving.  A group of us had spoken about grabbing some street grub on the way back to our homestays.  I go with him and 5 others to his sandwich guy on Mo5.  He’s not my sandwich guy for a reason.  He fries me up some meat with onions in it then tosses in a couple eggs.  I eat that as fast as possible and go home and have a huge dinner with the fam.  I don’t sleep very well and it feels like I’m having hot flashes although I don’t really know what it was.  Also some weird dreams where everyone looks like they did in high school.  When I wake up my stomach is miserable, I have a raging headache, and the part of my lower back where kidneys are found is throbbing.  Well this sucks. 

I go to Arabic at 8:30 getting no more than 4 hours of sleep feeling like what Mick Jagger had to have felt when he decided to get that blood transfusion in Canada. I make it through half of Arabic and I tell my teacher I have to go home.  I get back, and while waiting for mama haja to open the door, scare the hell out of my host brother who is returning home because the entrance way is something out of a Jack the Ripper movie.  Upstairs I go where I wrap myself up in a fat blanket, drink some crazy spice-juice concoction mama haja makes for me, and pass out for 7 hours.  I wake up intermittently to run to the bathroom after which I feel a pang of guilt/gastrointestinal problems and say sorry to the toilet. 

For the next few days I’m on a strict diet of vegetables and rice made with a little milk, cream cheese, and salt.  Last night my host sister told me, “For the next few days, you should only eat things that are white,” about which I screamed inside, “There is no white food here!”  I’m permitted yogurt and unsweetened mint tea, although today I snuck in potatoes, beans, and chicken at lunch.

This trip has been rough on my butt. :(

Kevin Moves In

So after three days of Orientation, my program has us all take one day of what they’re calling “survival Darija” and has us move in with families.  Even for those who came with prior Arabic experience don’t/can’t understand the majority of the words spoken in the Rabati streets.  So, for someone with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the language (I chuckle every time someone says “inshallah”), this should be easy.  

My host brother Youssef picks me up from the center, and I’m surprised and relieved when he introduces himself to me in English, which he speaks fluently.  We switch between French and English on the way to his home, an apartment with five other family members just off Mohammad 5 Avenue near the eastern entrance to the Medina.  The medina is laid out as I would imagine any twelfth century city is, devoid of any logic at all.  We take a left, the street wraps around to the right, where we turn down a street barely wide enough for a motorcycle (of which there are far too many found in streets like these).  Another left and right and I start to think we’re going in a giant circle and it’s just a cruel joke the Rabatis are playing on me.  Eventually, we arrive near the Restaurant de la Liberation, one of the few landmarks with which I’m familiar in the medina.  A couple more turns and we arrive at what will be my home for the better part of the next three months.

We walk upstairs to the front door of the apartment.  The first level is very small and closed, with a bathroom and two smaller rooms, those of my host sisters and host parents.  Youssef gives me a pair of sandals with which to walk around the house.  As I have come to know, every house in Morocco is covered ceiling to floor in tile, with the occasional white wall section.  I have since found out that this makes for a very beautiful mainroom, but in houses that lack central heating, also makes them incredibly cold, and I have been sleeping in two sweaters, under two large blankets, in my ski jacket, with pants, and wool socks.  One night it was even so cold I wore my hat. 

The room at the top of the stairs is laid out in a very stereotypical Moroccan fashion with low couches with pillows for backs.  This room, seldom used, is drenched in aqua and white, and the walls are covered in red-and-brown tiles.  The rest of the upstairs is divided into three other rooms, the kitchen, the guest room, and the family room.  I’ve been sleeping in the guest room, which is as visually stunning as it is oppressive.  The bright screaming-monkey red of the couches reflects off the beautiful chandelier overhead.  It is obviously reserved for guests and special occasions, as there is a table in the center perpetually set with dozens of napkins arranged in a circle.  Downstairs in the bathroom there is a Turkish toilet set up to the right of the shower.  Thankfully, there is a Western toilet upstairs, so I won’t have to be pooping in a hole all semester!

The main family room is set up similarly, except couches line the walls and in one corner is the 7^th member of the family, the television.  It is always on and it doesn’t matter what is on.  For example, as I write this, we have just finished dinner and we’re watching the most annoying sing-song children’s cartoon, with little 3D cylindrical creatures that have mouths that move like those of Canadians in South Park.  They also watch TV in a very interesting manner.  Rather than watching a movie or a program all the way through, they change the channel every two or three minutes, and every time a commercial comes on.  Only they never switch back.  I can’t get emotionally involved in a show, because I will never know what will happen in the end.  C’est la vie.

My first night here, on the way to a café to watch an African Cup match, my host brother Youssef takes me to a mall, where he has to buy casing for a phone.  During the time in the underground shopping center, the call to prayer rings overhead.  Youssef looks at me and brings me to a spot in a corner, tells me to stay there and wait for him while he goes into a nearby mosque to pray.  I’m standing there, the only white guy for miles around, as Moroccan men and women pass by staring at me.  Then, just as I’m feeling most uncomfortable, a man walks by me carrying with no hands a giant cookie sheet of freshly baked pastries on top of his Patagonia-flat head.  Right when the guy approaches me to buy sweets, Youssef returns from the mosque to tell him “la la la” (no, no, no).  As we leave, flat head accosts me for not speaking Arabic.  Thanks bro, I’m working on it.

For those that don’t know, Moroccan Darija is a combination language.  As Zahira put it, its 50% Arabic, 25% French, 10% Spanish, and the rest is an enigma.  When I’m at their house, my host family enjoys making fun of my inability to say the myriad h’s and k’s that exist in Arabic.  There are at least three h sounds in the alphabet and in order to say all of them you have to use different parts of your mouth and/or throat.  Baba hajj has made it a habit of making walking motions with his fingers and saying “baby steps” then laughing at me when I can’t say something.  Last night my host brother was trying to tell me how to say a word and he kept pointing at his Adam’s apple while he made a choking h noise.  They are very helpful, however, and all of my host siblings speak fluent French and three of the four speak fluent English.  Zahira, my host sister, confidently reassured me that students who have stayed with them in the past (I’m their twelfth) always get high marks in Arabic, so at least I have that going for me.

All said and done, Rabat is a beautiful city full of wonderful people who would give you the shirt off their back.  Its poor, but as always, there is more to wealth than being wealthy; a fact the by which the people live and lovingly embrace.