{"id":1000,"date":"2013-11-06T20:17:23","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T20:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2024-04-19T19:24:14","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T19:24:14","slug":"visiting-a-tamazight-family-in-the-sands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/?p=1000","title":{"rendered":"An Amazigh family in the sands"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_1245\"<\/a>
\nAs we ride up on our tourist camels, an old woman is pulling dates off their orange stems in the shadow cast by a square Berber tent.
\n\"IMG_1256\"<\/a>
\nYoung Lahcen, our guide, leads us near the encampment.\u00a0 As the camels fold themselves down onto the sand, he pulls off the blankets that have served as saddles and hauls the food bag toward a separate tent that is clearly reserved for visitors.<\/p>\n

Khalid, the father of the family, comes to greet us with a warm hand and a warm smile.\u00a0 Two of his sons head off with a loaded mule, one riding, one leading.
\n\"IMG_1246\"<\/a>
\nThere\u2019s another smaller boy sitting beside the old woman, eating dates while pretending to help pull them off the stalks.\u00a0 We approach the date pile, asking tentatively whether we can help.\u00a0 The old woman gestures: feel free.\u00a0 Zoe, Jeremy, and I sit down and start to work, while James wanders around the camp.
\n\"IMG_1248\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Khalid returns and we go through the introductions: our names, their names.\u00a0 The boy is Hassan.\u00a0 He insists he\u2019s ten.\u00a0 He\u2019s smaller than Jeremy and he\u2019s missing a lower front tooth, so I would guess five or six.\u00a0 (His brother Mohamed later confirms that Hassan is 5; he himself is 6.)\u00a0 The old woman is \u201cHajja\u201d says Khalid, which is a term of respect.\u00a0 Zoe and I are fascinated by the deep red of her fingernails and the base of her feet.\u00a0 She grabs a stalk of the date and runs her hand down it so the dates fly off in all directions: much more efficient than pulling off a date at a time.\u00a0 \u201cOh, and there\u2019s Omar,\u201d they say, gesturing at a small green scarf bundled on a rug in the shade of the next tent over.
\n\"IMG_1268\"<\/a>
\nOh! we say, surprised.\u00a0 We would never have known that was a baby.<\/p>\n

James comes to tell us that there\u2019s a woman baking bread and he feels intrusive as a single foreign man, so I go with him up the side of the dune to see a small oven built out of mud or cement in the windbreak of a small shrub and a kind of lean-to made of a rug and a stick.\u00a0 Fatima, the mother of the family, pulls out a third loaf, wraps it in cloth with the other loaves of bread, feeds the fire, banks it, and heads down the slope into one of the family tents.
\n\"IMG_1249\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We wander back to the date work and a few minutes later, Fatima appears with a couple of bowls and a handful of vegetables.\u00a0 She picks up the green bundle, wraps herself and the baby in the folds of her black scarf and proceeds to feed him.\u00a0 A few minutes later, she reemerges, with the baby draped across her lap, at which point she begins scraping and chopping vegetables.
\n\"IMG_1257\"<\/a>
\nMoroccan women rarely bother with cutting boards and the good sense of this is forcibly born in on me in this context: with a cutting board, you\u2019d inevitably get loads of sand in your food.\u00a0 I go to sit near her and practice my little Darija.\u00a0 A month old? I ask.\u00a0 Aren\u2019t you tired?\u00a0 I was tired the first months after my kids were born.\u00a0 Fatima and Hajja laugh at this, quite emphatically.<\/p>\n

Fatima pulls back the green scarf\u2014green for Islam?\u2014to give me a better look at Omar\u2019s face.\u00a0 He has eyebrows drawn on in a thick black paste.
\n\"IMG_1269\"<\/a>
\n\u201cZween,\u201d I say admiringly. \u00a0Handsome. \u00a0She hands him to me and I dandle him.\u00a0 He\u2019s tied up in a small package: white wrapping inside the green cloth.\u00a0 His feet are tied together with a soft rope.\u00a0 His hands are inside the white swaddling: also tied?.\u00a0 Around his neck there\u2019s a string with beads and a small square of folded paper taped up or wrapped in plastic.\u00a0 It makes me think of an amulet, but when I ask, Fatima says it\u2019s just decoration.
\n\"IMG_1270\"<\/a>
\nThe swaddling seems to work: he\u2019s a remarkably quiet and placid baby.\u00a0 With his head uncovered, he peers dimly at me.\u00a0 When I remember to take off my sunglasses, he smiles.<\/p>\n

Khalid and his mother pick through the huge pile of dates, though I have a hard time telling whether they’re trying to sort out the half-eaten and rotten ones, or pick out the ripe ones.
\n\"IMG_1261\"<\/a>
\nI try handing Khalid bunches of each sort and he sets them aside together.\u00a0Oh, for better language skills! \u00a0I ask where the dates come from and Khalid gestures over a dune: they\u2019re from a nearby palm, shared with another Berber family. Khalid brings two large empty bags and we fill them with the dates we\u2019ve plucked.\u00a0 Half will be sold; half eaten by the family.
\n\"IMG_1263\"<\/a>
\nI think back to Aki or Karim telling us that his dates are premium dates\u2014the best to be found.\u00a0 They certainly seem more appealing than these\u2014but I\u2019m probably biased by the flies everywhere.\u00a0 Why does no one talk about flies in the desert?\u00a0 I point to what looks like mold covering the surface of many of the dates.\u00a0 No problem, Lahcen says, and Khalid clarifies: a little cold will take care of that.\u00a0 So first the dates are ripened with heat, then they\u2019re cooled and cleaned to remove the mold.
\n\"IMG_1262\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Slowly, we see a little of the rhythm of the day.\u00a0 The two older boys, Hamid and Mohamed, have taken a load of dates off to a little hut to ripen.\u00a0 Hajja and Khalid are preparing another load of dates. \u00a0Khadija, the oldest of the children and the only girl, has been doing laundry: she lays the clothes out on the sand to dry.
\n\"IMG_1276\"<\/a>
\nFatima has been baking bread and working on lunch and possibly dinner for her family.\u00a0 Along with piles of finely grated carrot, onion, potato, there\u2019s also a large joint\u2014by which I mean a two gray bones attached by a tendon or ligament\u2014which joins some more coarsely chopped vegetables in the ubiquitous and efficient pressure-cooker. There\u2019s a cooking hut with a small solar panel on the sand outside.\u00a0 Inside, there are multiple gas-fired burners.\u00a0 I imagine that donkey earns his keep carrying gas canisters back and forth to Merzouga.
\n\"IMG_1278\"<\/a>\u00a0\"IMG_1288\"
\n<\/a>Lahcen in the cooking hut, working on a veggie lunch for us.<\/p>\n

Khadija comes to check on the baby and corrects me when I remark with wonder at his being only a month old.\u00a0 Not yet! she insists.\u00a0 Only twenty-six days.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve been holding him, he\u2019s definitely done a poop, but no one seems very interested in changing him.\u00a0 Still, there seems to be a pile of disposable diapers bagged and waiting for disposal near the dead tree.
\n\"IMG_1283\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We eat lunch in the guest tent.\u00a0 Khalid has propped up the side wall, opposite the door, with a stick, to allow for some breeze, but it\u2019s still oppressively hot. \u00a0There\u2019s a nice cold salad assortment and \u201cBerber pizza\u201d or \u201csand pizza\u201d\u2014a traditional dish more conventionally known as medfouna (a word that means buried).\u00a0 A tomato-onion mixture is “buried” in ours.\u00a0 Hassan sits with us and plays at feeding Jeremy sections of hard-boiled egg; Jeremy reciprocates with medfouna, cucumber, and other sections of egg.\u00a0 After lunch, we head back to the shady wall of the main tent, where the heat is a touch less oppressive.<\/p>\n

James does card tricks to delight Khalid, Lahcen, and the boys.
\n\"IMG_1267\"<\/a>
\nThe women have retreated with Omar to one of the straw-walled huts: cooler in this heat.
\n\"IMG_1284\"<\/a>
\nHassan and Mohammed play Connect 4 with Jeremy, though it takes a while to get the concept of the game across.
\n\"IMG_1274\"<\/a>
\nLikewise with logic puzzles.<\/p>\n

Khadija comes and draws patterns in henna on my hands and on Zoe\u2019s.\u00a0 In the morning, she had asked me if I\u2019d like some henna, but she only starts on Zoe after I request it, confirming our assumption that no one in Morocco can quite tell whether Zoe is male or female.
\n\"IMG_1292\"<\/a>
\nJeremy shows Mohamed how to fold a secret letter; the two communicate very well with no common language beside gesture.\u00a0 Both Mohamed and Hassan use the crayons to draw on paper, but they look oddly at Jeremy\u2019s (admittedly idiosyncratic) drawing of a camel and the accompanying narrative he spells out alongside.<\/p>\n

The donkey comes back, driven by Hamid perhaps, and has had a feed before wandering off.\u00a0 The camels, hobbled lightly, have disappeared over the dunes.\u00a0 The boys head off to retrieve them.\u00a0 Brought back to the blanket depot, the camels collapse onto the sand, rolling occasionally with high comic effect.
\n\"IMG_1296\"\u00a0\"IMG_1299\"<\/a>
\nA group of four sheep come scampering in for a meal, chased by one of the boys, before heading back to the slim shade of their scrubby bush.
\n\"IMG_1298\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By about 3:30, it\u2019s time to head back to base camp.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lovely breeze.\u00a0 Mohamed and Hassan claim a couple of half-empty water bottles as loot; given the rest of the family’s water supply, I’d snag fresh water, too.
\n\"IMG_1279\"
\nThe boys are playing on their swing set
\n\"IMG_1247\"<\/a>
\nand waving to us as we pass the four sheep huddled under a shrub.<\/p>\n

Three minutes later, they are all hidden behind a dune; we might never know they were there.
\n\"IMG_1271\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we ride up on our tourist camels, an old woman is pulling dates off their orange stems in the shadow cast by a square Berber tent. Young Lahcen, our guide, leads us near the encampment.\u00a0 As the camels fold themselves down onto the sand, he pulls off the blankets that have served as saddles … Continue reading An Amazigh family in the sands<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8,6,9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4JDdJ-g8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2867,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions\/2867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}