CBT and Famila Moroccan

Now for some news on the host family! For my CBT (Culture Based Training) I’m living in a tiny town outside of Fes, which is comparable to those tiny towns in places like North Dakota where it literally takes 3 minutes to drive the length of the main street and if you were to blink you would miss the entire town. We’ve been told that there are approximately 200-300 people living in the town! Our main street is basically part of the rural highway with a cluster of buildings on either side, there are three salon de teas (for men only), a butcher, a veterinary, a pharmacy, a tiny town hall, a dar chabab (youth center, similar to the one where ill be working at my permanent site), one cyber café with a really slow internet connection, two mosques and three hanoots (little stores comparable to “boutiques” in other African countries, they are normally connected to the owner’s house and sell everything from 10 cent candy to kilos of beans and olives to shampoo and batteries, basically the hanoots have everything you could ever want or need). The rest of the town is spread out behind the main street throughout the surrounding countryside. My house is about a 20 min walk from the main town center and includes walking past cornfields and olive groves and at least one if not two flocks of grazing sheep. There are also some foothill mountains and small views of nearby Fes in the background of the countryside. At night, in addition to a sea of stars, you can see the lights of both Fes and Meknes.

As for my host family, I am living with a lively all women feminist household. I have two xaltis (aunts) Amina and Idrissia and a ten-year-old girl Ghita (pronounced Rita), who is neither of their daughter but is their great niece who they have been raising since infancy. The actual house is beautiful, by Moroccan standards it’s really big for how many people are living in it (four including me), and is fairly modern. We have a washing machine, an espresso machine; satellite tv and a shower room (lots of Moroccans don’t have showers and instead use public baths called Hemmams). On the not so modern side, the shower consists of bucket baths of heated water, and my toilet facilities are of the Turkish type, but mashi muski (it’s not a big deal) I am quickly becoming very comfortable with both.

My xaltis are employed by a small hanoot that we have in front of our house, which services the rest of the people that are living out in the countryside. We also have six chickens and three cows which produce eggs and milk for the family’s consumption. In addition, our yard has olive, fig, pomegranate and orange trees and some fairly large rosemary and basil plants. Behind the house is probably about an acre of land that is filled with olives trees, all of which belong to my xaltis. I have already eaten my weight in olives, which we have at almost every meal, I drink fresh milk on an almost daily basis, and I’ve eaten fresh figs, and have had a variety of amazing food that is cooked by my xalti Amina.

So far my host family has been very patient with my language deficiency, luckily they speak French so, for now, it is our primary mode of communication until my Darija is up to par. Also, since it is only women I feel that it is a lot more relaxed then families with male members, since the mixing of genders is a lot more strict in Morocco, so far it seems that my house is a lot more at ease than some of the other PCV host families, and I don’t have to worry as much about making faux pas that wouldn’t be acceptable to do around men. My family has also given me a really good incite on the lives of two middle aged women in Morocco who had both never married but are both very educated (some of the other host moms or older women from the community that I’ve met are illiterate) and are running a successful hanoot business and seemingly living very comfortable and happy lives.

On Saturday night, after I got back from a Peace Corps meeting in Fes, Amina, Grita and another aunt (one who doesn’t live with us) had a henna party and my hands were covered in over two hours of detailed henna work. Unfortunately I’ve also gotten sick over the last couple of days and my host aunt’s have blamed this occurrence on the changing of seasons but more primarily on the fact that I go out in the morning with wet hair (from showering). So last night Idrissia told me that I would get better if I took a really hot hemmam in our shower room and that we’d do it after I got home from school today. Sure enough immediately when I got home from school she was filling up buckets and beginning to heat the water for a hot bathing session. I was informed that I would be bathing with her and my little cousin Ghita, so after the early evening tea and snack we all entered the bathroom and Ghita and I undressed to our underwear (just bottoms). Then Idrissia proceeded to brush and wash my hair for me and then rub me down with a home made olive salve type stuff and then scrub me with a course hand rag to the point where I think my entire top layer of skin was rubbed off. This experience is similar to what women do in the public Hemmans only you normally pay a stranger to scrub you down and not your host aunt, but another PCV went with her family and said her host sister did the scrubbing, so it’s all relative. I honestly cant remember the last time that someone bathed me or that I took a communal bath, but it was really nice to have someone exfoliate your entire body for you and wash your hair when your super congested and fatigued. After the shower I came out and almost got attacked with a hair dryer and a mound of blankets because my other aunt Amina said that I needed to stay away from the cold to keep from staying sick. Soon after I was fed the Moroccan version of chicken noodle soup, i.e. lentil noodle soup, which was amazingly delicious.

So far embracing Moroccan culture has been great, shweeya b shweeya (little by little) I’m getting integrated.