Since I've been so bad at updating this blog, here's a journal entry I had to write for class. It doesn't include my trip to the souk, where I ate some bad fried fish (by this I mean it was a whole fish that was fried) and got food poisoning again. Let's just say that I feel completely comfortable using a
Turkish toilet in any situation. That, and thank God for Immodium. srsly
I step off the van into the dirt parking lot of the President of the Association’s house. The mountains are bright in the morning sunlight across the fields. Cows moo. Chickens cluck, roaming free across mounds of manure and heaped grass. The group descends down the steps off the van, and a mass of men and a few women form a line in front of us, staring. I knew we were the first Americans, and maybe even the first white people, to ever step foot in Beni Amir, but I didn’t know what that would look like. I’m intimidated. All of those faces staring, oogling, giggling. The language barrier is immediate, an abyss over which modern technology could never cross.
After a five-course meal and a couple photo-ops with the men from the Association, Lincoln and I move in with our host family. We walk down the main street in town a mere block to a quaint house directly across from the mosque. I didn’t expect much and, to be honest, the amenities they did have were more than I expected. There is one wide hallway running the length of the single-story house (if there was a second story, I never caught a glimpse of it) with a sitting room and average-sized kitchen on the left and the living room and sleeping area on the right. Though paint is chipping on the walls in the living room and the sitting room lacks couches, my family has a television (with cable) and a computer. Lincoln and I step into the “backyard” where our host father keeps his prized possessions: cows and an automatic milk machine. We return to the living room and sit down with our host father and five host brothers. Except two of them belong to someone else, and to whom they belong is never discussed. Several other small children wander in and out of the house, a testament to several essential aspects of the community: the openness, the trust, and the family.
As opposed to Rabat, where whenever I return home I ring the doorbell and reply “Karim” to “Skoon” before a member of my family unlocks the door, the door in the village isn’t locked. Unlike Rabat, where it seems shadowy eyes loom around corners, under the gaze of which I’m constantly checking my back right pocket to make sure my wallet is still there. In the village, there seems an implicit understanding of property. Private property is hardly private, and shared property is hardly public. The best example is food, which is prepared in individual homes and I would assume on individual incomes, in individual kitchens, by women. However, the flexibility of public/private borders (if these borders exist at all) means that more than just the nuclear family is free to participate in meals. Sufiane, a friend of the family, ate with us several times, as did a nephew Muhammad, and an uncle. In return, we would eat at Sufiane’s home. Of course, whether this is a daily event in the village is obviously influenced by our presence, but there were no issues raised in any of these circumstances. In Rabat, I have yet to have dinner with anyone but my nuclear host family. In my time in the village, I did not ever have a dinner with the same people.
The entire village is essentially one huge family, made shockingly clear when innumerable men introduce themselves to me and call my host father their uncle. This is, unfortunately, a fragile relationship. With the increase of migration, the formal familial structures are increasingly undermined, especially the perception of property. Land, which formerly (and to some extent still does) separated the rich from the poor, is expendable so long as sons and daughters find the greener grasses of Europe. Remittances are spent mainly on luxury items, creating new demands and desires. This is, after all a two sided coin: on the one hand, remittances make household items like washing machines more affordable; on the other, it is increasing disputes between families over outward demonstrations of wealth. As a result, migration has the net effect of increasing levels of distrust among members of the community. The old walls that reinforced the levy are failing under the forces of globalization.
The forces of globalization are changing the gender dynamic of the community as well. With the establishment of the Association and a new governmental emphasis on human development as well as the prominence of male community members abroad, emerging is a class of educated women, whether that education is in technical skills such as sewing or formalized institutions. In effect, while men go abroad, women go to school. In my family, two of the three boys no longer attend school, including the youngest of eleven or twelve. To wit, my oldest host brother, Ayoub, recently completed his associate’s degree as an electrician, and has wired several homes, including our own. My host sister attends a boarding school in the north, returning on weekends. This is not to say that all women get this chance, and it is highly dependent on family interests (one of which I would be hesitant to say is a lack of perceived importance of education as saying so would provide a simple and overly-generalized answer to a difficult economic and cultural question). In our interview session with women from the village, for example, one woman was removed from school when one of her sisters was abused by a teacher. In a swift and probably heavy-handed response, her grandfather pulled all the women in his family out of school. Only since his death has she been able to take sewing classes at the Association.
While the women on our program spend almost their entire trip inside homes, being henna’ed and talking with older women from the village, Lincoln and I rarely spend time inside. We get daily invites to participate in soccer matches, walk into the fields to look at the stars at night, go to a, for lack of a better term, café to watch soccer, and spend time under olive trees writing and reading. We go over to the homes of friends of our family to visit others on the program who do not ever seem to leave the small interiors.
On last night of our visit, I do not want to leave. Lincoln and I go to Sufiane’s for an impromptu dance party while his mother looks on. Our host brother and Sufiane’s little brother—classmates in school—are with us, trying to teach us traditional dance. We play with a makeshift headscarf, laughing. In the homes, tea and laughter is always flowing, passing out through the windows and mixing in the night air under the brilliant Milky Way. Life is slow, time is untimely. People live on. Some challenge the norms, some breathe them. When we arrive home after spending our last meaningful hours with Sufiane and our host brothers and cousins, I fight off sleep to stay awake and read. Who needs to sleep when there is so much to experience, so much life to enjoy and understand? Why worry about waking up early in the cold, dewy morning when you can be in this brave, thriving world?
