Wait, are those really sheep intestines? (And are they from the sheep I herded this morning?)

So, I know that this is two posts in a very short span, but I'm so far behind with so much to tell I just had to do it. I knew I'd completely lose your interest if it was all one post of monstrous length, so I figured that two of semi-ridiculous length would better serve all of us.

Small warning (again): I still haven't figured out the problem with my camera chip, so I will have to contribute photos in the future once again (insha'allah).

This post concerns my week-long stay in a rural Moroccan village with a homestay family. Life really couldn't be much different between there and my Rabat family, though they're only 3 hours apart by bus. We had no electricity (though some houses had solar panels on the roofs), no running water (instead a mule, jugs, and a well), a slightly distorted sense of time, and a very high illiteracy rate. We also had the best food I've yet eaten in Morocco, overly generous and loving people, and lots of animals and a cute 5 month-old baby for me to play with.

About a week and a half ago, 40 American students moved in with individual families in two small adjacent villages in the heart of Morocco. To echo one of my friend Dan's earlier blog posts, this was our last group trip, meaning our last forced together time. I suppose it was somewhat sentimental, a little. Anyway, my family consisted of my father Bouchta, mother Habiba, 10 year-old sister Mena, 6 year-old brother Yussef, and aforementioned baby sister named Su'aad. Bouchta and Yussef are literate in Derija, but my mother, sister, grandmother, aunts and uncles were all illiterate. I brought an old newspaper with me from Rabat to practice my reading skills, and they were really amazed that I could read in "Franazawiyya" and Arabic. Yussef, cute as he is, is a terribly spoiled brat sometimes, and the first night he was actually fighting me for sections of the newspaper, and trying to steal them when I wasn't looking so that he could show off his literacy skills. Before the trip, we were told by our directors that we would have a lot of down time in the village. I interpreted this as bring a book and journal, but if you are reading or writing in the village, it is seen as slightly anti-social and worrisome activity and a cloud of people will immediately surround you.

As for daily life in the village, my father gets up just before dawn, says his fajr prayer, and goes out herding with the goats or cultivates the family's small plot of land, and does not generally return to the house until 4 or so in the afternoon. My sister Mena does not attend school, but instead helps with chores in and out of the house, carrying firewood from distant, slightly-less deforested hills (for the time being) on the donkey, or herding the sheep, or taking care of Su'aad. She is only 10, but she's going on 30, and I still feel more like a child than she does, I'm sure. Yussef, when he's not being a mischeivous and spoiled kid, goes to school and plays with his friends in the fields; I never saw that he had any chores. Su'aad spends her day drooling, gurgling, breastfeeding, and sleeping--baby activities seem to be pretty universal. My mother, I have decided, actually posesses superhuman abilities. She did more than the rest of the family combined, and all with a baby strapped onto her back. She would be up as soon as my father was, pray, and make him food to take to the field. She would then begin on breakfast for the rest of the family, get Yussef to school, wash clothes, sweep the animal pen, make the bread, beat and reorganize the rugs and sheepskins we slept on, on and on and on. Furthermore, she is only 26 years old. Though the legal marriage age in Morocco is now 18, she was married at 15 and had Mena at 16. Trying to explain to her, only 5 years my senior, that 21 is really not that old in the States for getting married or joining the real world was a little difficult, especially in derija.

My daily activities more or less mirrored my mother's, though it often involved much more observation on my part than participation. My activities included washing dishes for one of the 4 or 5 meals we ate a day, washing clothes in a bucket (and then having my mom rewash them because they weren't literally spotless), playing with the baby, herding sheep (by yelling at them and throwing rocks in their general direction), and marathon eating. They fed me such a disporportionate portion each meal that I may have to fast another Ramadan without breaking for futours. A meal is not a meal here in the village unless it has two vital components, bread and sugar. The bread is some of the best I have ever eaten in my whole life, and I want to explain it just a little.

How to make bread rural Morocco style:
--First, you have to have the ingredients and their amounts memorized; in Morocco, measuring cups don't exist, you have eyes and hands for that.
--Next, you add water to the 2-flour, salt, yeast, and sugar mix until a very specific consistency, and then you knead vigorously in a certain pattern (like your hands are waltzing on the dough; I have two proverbial left feet when it comes to this, apparently). As you knead, periodic adjustments are made based on texture, taste, color-basically, it's one of those things you must intrinsically understand from years of experience.
--After thoroughly kneading, it is time to go heat the oven. The oven is made out of clay, shaped somewhat like an igloo or beehive, and is in the yard between the houses. (You've probably heard of or seen one of them before; it is the same as the traditional clay ovens in New Mexico, and similar to the "tandoor") It has two holes, the large "door" on the front, and the smaller ventilation hole on the side. You begin picking up firewood that has been carried down to the house by Mena and the donkey. This region, alog with many others in Morocco, has suffered severe deforestation and drought, and firewood comes from scrubby bushes with lots of thorns-careful!
--You stuff the thorns and goat poo into the oven and then go back into the kitchen hearth fire, still smoldering from the morning, and grab a nice stick or two for kindling. These are placed into the oven, and you blow into the ventilation hole to get the fire started (harder than it sounds, I think it requires some inherent skill level as well). Voila! Roaring fire.
--Continue adding thorns to the fire until your omnipotent homestay mom deems the fire acceptable. Somewhere in the interval, she has shaped the dough into 6 or so 8-in round loaves. You take the flat scrap metal pieces that serve as baking sheets and strategically toss them in over the raked ashes of formerly blazing fire. Then you douse the scrap clothes with water, carefully flip the bread onto a tray, poke it, and place it in the oven. Then the hub cap that covers the door is put into place and the scrap clothes are used to plug the ventilation hole and cover the entire oven.
--At some unspecified time, maybe 10 minutes later, you check on the loaves. They are rearranged, given a little more time, and then taken out with bare hands (futher proof of supernatural powers in rural homestay mothers).
--Enjoy some of the world's best bread with fried eggs, butter, s'men (a kind of rancidy butter), olive oil, honey, or salted diced tomatoes.
--Repeat whole routine every day (and the eating part about 6 times a day)

Some General Obsevations

• Donkeys are the most underappreciated creatures in creation. Our donkey would carry easily 200 pounds of water in jugs on its back along dry creek beds, rock-filled ravines and hillsides and all the while be beat on the side of the neck with a bamboo stick while my mom shouted "Brrrraa!" and clicked at it. Upon returning home, Yussef and my 5 year-old cousin and next-door neighbor Khadija would pull its hair and tail and bend its ears back while trying to figure out how climb on. He also always had flies in his eyes, which would be a terribly annoying way to go through life.


• General animal etiquette is not so great in rural villages here. People are scared of the dogs because they growl at them, so they throw rocks, and the dogs growl at the people because they are constantly being shouted at and having rocks thrown at them--cause and effect. Also, cats are generally targets for being kicked repeatedly, literally, out of the kitchen (though they've got it better than the dogs, no rocks).


• There is nothing here that goes to waste. All kitchen scraps go to the chickens/dogs, my used water bottles became baby rattles or well-water bottles, sheep poo went into the clay oven with the firewood to bake our bread (yes, sounds gross, but actually wasn't), and anything without removable parts (including cigarette lighters, hmmm) became Su'aad's toys.


• Sheep intestines are not my new favorite food. In fact, they are really just a little too chewy, a little too salty, and the texture of the sheep stomach kind of turns my stomach. After a meeting with the men of the village, we were served steaming plates of intestines, stomach, and little kabobs of liver wrapped in fat for lunch. Most everyone was game for at least trying it, and the liver in fat was the general consensus favorite, but we luckily had a little cat hiding under our table who finished off more food than the rest of us combined.


• Sheepskins and rugs are a very comfortable way to sleep on the floor.


• Perhaps the funniest/strangest sight I had in the village, completely at the expense of another student, was when she got sick after a meal and ran out of the house to throw up. As she threw up near the bushes (no toilets), the turkeys came running and gobbling and began to eat the vomit. It was pretty surreal.


• Along the lines of being without a toilet, it is pretty uncomfortable to have your mom and grandmother shining a flashlight on you in the dark while you squat in the middle of a field to pee. At least during the day, I had a nice, private clump of pricky pear cacti.


• When rural women do henna-the organic paste used to dye hands and feet in elaborate patterns-they are sure to include your finger and toenails in the dyeing process. Thus, my nails will be a rust orange color until at least the first of the year.

Ok, well, I feel like there's so much more I'd like to say, but this blog is already getting pretty long, so I'll just have to wait and talk your ears off when I see you again. Hope you are all off to a nice week. I don't think I'll have anything to write until after I move to Marrakech for my ISP. Our homestay in Rabat ends this coming Saturday morning, and I will be moving into a hotel with a friend in Rabat for a few days after that, doing some interviews and research here. Then, I will be moving to Marrakech, and living out of a super-cheap hotel there for about 2 weeks. I am very excited to be able to see Morocco on my own terms, without eating schedules and sleeping schedules, etc. dictated by classtimes and homestays--not that everyone hasn't been great, it's just that, well, I'm sure you understand. From Marrakech, I will be making several trips out to Essaouira, one of which will be for the Reggae festival on Nov. 22-what a great way to spend Thanksgiving day! So, hope to hear from you all, and happy early Thanksgiving if I don't talk to you before!

B'slaama!