Village!

Oh my. Where to begin?

On Friday I got back to Rabat after the rural village stay, and I was completely right in predicting that it would be one of the more intense things I’ve done. I don’t even know what to say about it. I have never encountered that kind of poverty before, and I’ve also never had to live that simply before. I got a lot out of it, but in the end I was so, so relieved to come back to Rabat, which seems normal and easy to me in comparison. And I was thrilled to see my host family here again--I appreciate them about ten times more now.

The village we were staying in, Feryat, has only a few hundred residents and is just west of the Middle Atlas Mountains. It’s a farming village—the houses are very spread out, with a gorgeous hilly landscape in all directions and herds of cattle everywhere you turn. I lived in close contact with donkeys, sheep, cows, dogs, cats, etc. It was wonderful to spend so much time outside and wander in enormous fields of wildflowers, but it’s a very, very isolated place. The nearest town that has any actual stores or modern amenities is Boujad, which is about twenty kilometers away.

So you can imagine how loud our presence was—-thirty American students, roaming around and shouting in English, living in practically every house in the village, and constantly doing bizarre things like brushing our teeth and reading. Everything I did was a source of endless fascination during the week; when I got up in the morning and went outside to crouch on the ground, splash some water on my face, and brush my teeth, my host siblings and cousins would crowd around to observe. Even going to the bathroom sometimes involved an audience whether we liked it or not (no bathrooms or toilets, just nature).

I was living in a relatively large housing compound with an extended family. Granny is the honored elder in the household, and her four sons all live there with their wives and families. (It’s a patriarchal system; granny has three daughters as well, but they all moved away to join their husbands’ families when they got married.) Each nuclear family unit has its own room to sleep in, but most everything else is shared—-kitchen, animals, the open central area, etc. My immediate host family consisted of Salah (my host dad and one of granny’s sons), his wife Naima (very young, very sweet), and their two kids, Halima (1) and Yassin (5). One of the other SIT students was living with one of the other sons and his family, so we were in the same larger compound and saw a lot of each other. This made things easier, because whenever one of us was really upset we could seek each other out to talk, and when Elizabeth got sick I was able to help her convince our family (using very, very broken Arabic) that they should stop trying to feed her and let her get some sleep. A difficult feat, since they didn’t really understand that the food was probably what made her sick to begin with.

I’ll just ramble off some of the interesting things I did: I rode a donkey, milked a cow, shook cheese, tried the local buttermilk (and pretended to like it at first, but then I thought I would vomit and had to hand it back to a very upset granny), ate the intestines and lungs of an animal I couldn't identify, had tea about twenty times a day in addition to numerous and huge meals, unsuccessfully tried to help my aunt make bread, learned to weave, helped plant an olive tree, helped plaster cement on the walls of the new village community building, did not bathe all week or change clothes more than once, did not have a one hundred percent happy stomach (although I never got actually sick, unlike some of my peers), and got “traditional” henna. Traditional means that the palms of my hands, soles of my feet, and nails are all bright orange. The stuff on my hands is starting to fade already, but my feet will be neon for some time.

There were some extremely difficult things to deal with in Feryat. Probably the biggest thing for me was gender dynamics. My host mom and aunts worked around the house from dawn until dusk with little acknowledgment from their husbands, which was really difficult for me. They would prepare dinner, set it out for the men, granny, and me (because I was a guest I got to eat with the men and elders), then wait until we were finished and eat the leftovers at a separate table. The men work hard too, don’t get me wrong, but at night they would mostly just sit around and watch TV (something every Moroccan household has, no matter how poor) while the women continued to clean, cook, prepare the bedding, whatever. Even my ten-year-old cousin, Fatima, was treated like a servant in some ways. She would go to school in the morning, but all afternoon and night she would help the women or serve tea and meals to the men. During a discussion that our academic director translated, the villagers told us that the local school is really bad, and besides minimal literacy, a lot of kids like Fatima are hardly getting an education and don’t have good chances of having a “better life,” as the women we talked to put it. They said that they want things to change for their daughters, but that those changes are only happening very slowly.

Once again, I can’t pretend to have any sort of “objective” perspective on this. I have a hard time dealing with the gender separation in urban Morocco, and having seen what things are like in a rural village, I feel even more strongly that things ought to change for women in this society. The depressing thing is, I’m not sure how that can happen. My ISP is going to deal with some of these issues—I’ve settled on researching women’s access to family planning services.

To wrap up about the village, another thing that was difficult was that my host dad was constantly asking Elizabeth and I to take his kids back to America, to help him get a visa, etc. My family was so welcoming and wonderful to me, but these moments were really uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure how much he thought I could actually do. It forced me to recognize the distance between us. Most people in Feryat have never known an American on a personal level before, and they knew, and I knew, that I have things that they probably never will. I left not knowing how to feel about this, and I still don’t.

Needless to say, I had had enough intensity when I got back from the village. Saturday was my 21st birthday, so I made it a particularly un-intense day. I went to have lunch at a pizza place/bar with my SIT friends, then went shopping in the souk, hung out at Janks’s house to watch “Mad Men” for a while, and had a party at my home stay that night. Hind and Hassan had their friends over, I had two of my close SIT friends stay the night, and we ate, drank, danced (I will never be able to dance as well as Moroccans), and made merry. It was exactly what I needed.