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Part way through the evening, Habiba, another of Brahim’s sisters, arrived with her two-year old. \u00a0Habiba (in the pink hajib) had very good French and did hard labor translating for everyone. \u00a0Her son loves loves loves his aunt Jmia (and, I’m told, his uncle Brahim). Eventually, once the visitors were well well fed, Brahim’s mother sat down with the rest of her family; Fadwa’s mother (in the black and red) had arrived, as had Brahim’s cousin Mohamed, who speaks English!\u00a0 Impressive: to pull together multiple language speakers and different branches of the family on the spur of the moment!<\/p>\n After a good night’s sleep, and a breakfast of the very best milhui (rghaif, msemmen) I’ve had in Morocco, Mohamed and Jmia took us to visit the qasbah of Tifiltoute. I was delighted to see a couple of storks’ nests up close: they made me appreciate Tahir Shah’s account (in The Caliph’s House) of his guardiens’ attempting to encourage storks to nest on the house by accumulating a pile of garbage: James has a thing for ruined qasbahs, but even I appreciate the way the nesting pigeons look like jewels set in the side of this crumbling wall: We wandered around the back of the qasbah, to visit the place where the family’s house had once stood. \u00a0Jmia knew right where it was and could remember living there with Brahim. The structure of the walls was easy to see here, and the views out from the site were amazing. My friend and Swarthmore colleague Brahim el Guabli is in many ways the person who launched me into this Fulbright project, and he had urged me to visit his family during one of my visits to Ouarzazate. \u00a0(I’m probably going to mis-spell everyone’s name: apologies!)\u00a0On the way down to Ouarzazate, I got a message from … Continue reading Visiting Brahim’s family in Tifoultoute<\/span>
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\nWe had seen Habiba on the way and stopped at her house after the qasbah for more mint tea and cookies. \u00a0In fact, everyone was so wonderful to us and we liked everyone so well that it felt almost too difficult to leave. \u00a0We compromised by deciding to visit the Atlas movie studio, bringing Mohamed with us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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