Home stay, hammam, and other adventures

Hey everyone!

A ton has happened since I last wrote! Lots to say…I moved in with my host family on Saturday, spent the weekend bonding with them, and on Monday we started classes (last week was just orientation type things). It has been a busy week—we now have homework to do, as well as families to please and friends to hang out with. I’m a little tired, but also very content because everything is going very well so far. A breakdown:

First off, my home stay. I live with a 30-year-old couple, Hind and Hassan, and their three daughters--Bajia (7), Selma (5), and Malek (3). The girls are adorable, and Hind and Hassan are amazing to me, almost to the point of being overwhelming. Their house is small; the first floor has a parlor/living room (the prettiest room in the house, with gorgeous tiling all over the floor and walls), a "salon" (the guest room), a small side bedroom, and a beyond tiny bathroom (I'll get back to that). Up a treacherous set of concrete steps is the second floor, which has the kitchen and a sitting room where we eat, watch TV, and just generally hang out. The second floor is very simple and very exposed to the elements, which is mostly fine since the weather is generally good here. Hind gave me the first floor salon as a bedroom. This is customary, but it still makes me feel bad, because the three girls sleep together in the tiny bedroom and the parents sleep on the second floor. I definitely have the nicest sleeping arrangements. Also worth noting: No beds anywhere in the house, which is typical of a Moroccan home. Couches line essentially every wall of the salon and sitting rooms, and you remove the back pillows and convert these into beds at night.

I spend a lot of time with Hind and the girls, since Hind is often around the house and the girls have a school schedule similar to mine. I haven’t seen as much of Hassan so far, because he works for a cell phone company and is usually gone until later in the evening. Hind speaks Spanish, which is probably why they placed me with this family, because that's how we communicate. She helps me with darija, I help her to learn a few words of English, but we primarily speak in Spanish. This works out nicely because I'm able to get across to her whatever I need to, but there's still a lot of motivation to work on my Arabic, because her Spanish is far from perfect, as is mine.

Hind spent this entire past weekend leading me to the houses of various friends and relatives and introducing me to everyone she knows--talk about exhausting, but I also felt very welcomed, so overall it was great. She's really more like a host sister than a host mother, since we are relatively close in age (more so than I am to her daughters). In the morning she prepares coffee and pastries for my breakfast, and as soon as I get home at night I find mint tea and more snacks waiting for me. From thereon out she feeds me continuously until I go to bed. We don't eat supper until 10 or 11, by which point I'm usually too full to eat much anyhow. But I'm not complaining, because her food is AMAZING. Tagine, Moroccan salads (delicious--they make these salted tomatoes that are the best thing ever), crepes, fish, meat of every type, soups. I'm going to have to collect some of these recipes before I come home, because the food here is just generally unbelievable. Don't be shocked if I am very round upon my return. If Hind has any say, I definitely will be.

Another thing about my home stay is that Hind's friends and three sisters are in and out of the house constantly. They help her cook, they eat there, sometimes they sleep there--which so far I enjoy, because they all think I'm great fun and some of them speak a little English. Between them and the three girls crawling all over me at every waking moment, I don't get much alone time. That's Moroccan culture: You spend all of your time with other people. If I tell them I need to study, though, I can go to my room and no one will bug me.

I think religion is worth reflecting on here, since Islam is so predominant in Moroccan culture and exerts strong influence over pretty much every aspect of it. I can’t say how religious my family is since we haven’t discussed it, but compared with what I’ve heard from many of the other students on my program, my home stay seems a little more distanced from Islam. They have a Koran in the living room, but they ignore the calls to prayer (which are very very loud and happen throughout the day—the songs issuing from loudspeakers around the city frequently wake me up at 4 a.m.), and Hind doesn't wear a hijab or any form of traditional dress. They’ve never so much as mentioned Islam or religion to me. I wonder if this has something to do with age, level of education, and possibly the more “modernized” urban environment. They’re both literate and well-educated (Hind speaks Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Spanish, and French), they’re younger than most of the other students’ host parents, and they live in one of the most modern cities in Morocco. From what I’ve read and observed and from what my professors have talked about, it seems like the push towards a new lifestyle, differentiated from the traditional Muslim lifestyle, is centered in the population of young and well-educated city people. I don’t want to jump to a confident conclusion, since I’m totally making presumptions here, but it’s interesting to think about.

Also worth noting: Hygiene. Our bathroom has a Turkish toilet, a very low ceiling so that you must stoop to enter, maybe 4 by 4 feet of space, and a WINDOW looking onto the stairs (??). Again, no privacy. We don’t have a shower, so I sit on a stool in the bathroom and take bucket showers every few days. It was strange the first time around, but now I kind of like it. The reason we don’t have a shower is that most Moroccans bathe at the hammam. Which leads to a description of my hammam adventure.

I headed to the public bath with Hind, Malek (the youngest daughter), several of Hind’s friends, and Meghan, one of my SIT friends, on Tuesday. Two and a half hours in a steaming hot public bath with something like a hundred women, from toddlers to 90-year-old. (Yes, everyone was either naked or only wearing a pair of underwear. Sorry if this is too much information, but I know you’re all wondering.) It was quite the experience, and I have never felt so clean in my life. You fill massive buckets with steaming water, sit on stools or mats, use these little scrubby things to force off all of your dead skin, and do whatever else you want—shave your legs, shampoo your hair, etc. They have three sauna-type rooms that get progressively hotter from one to the next, so you just move back and forth when you get too hot or too cold. I came out exhausted, clean, and really interested in this whole aspect of the culture. Moroccan women are expected to be so modest in most situations, but this is a place where women from all walks of life hang out and cleanse themselves. Everyone lingers for a very long time and chatters--it is more than just bathing, it's a social occasion.

Well, I think I’ve provided everyone with enough reading material for now. Despite some difficulties, like the street harassment and the lack of privacy, I’m having a marvelous time and really trying to soak in everything that is going on around me. Living in the medina is a huge jumble of sights and sounds and smells, plus I get lost every other time I try to go somewhere. It’s mentally stimulating to the point of exhaustion. Not to mention that I rarely get to sleep through the night; last night there was something really loud going on in the street outside my house, and while I was too groggy to know for sure, I think it was a bunch of street animals making a racket.

This weekend our SIT group heads to Fes and Meknes, with brief stops in a few other imperial towns that I can’t remember the names of. I’ll write next week to talk about that.

Love to all!