By ahblackwell
As I ducked to slide under the rusted barbed wire that Ahmed held taut a few feet above the ground, my boot slipped in the mud, soft from rain, and I felt the nylon of my backpack catch on one of the reddish-brown barbs. He pulled me free, and I continued to follow my new host father over fields and brooks and several other fences until we reached our new home. Ahmed, tall and slender with tanned smiling cheeks, which peeked out from behind a bushy beard and a green wool cap, called out to Zahra and Miriam as we approached the grey concrete house that stood on a bouldery landscape surrounded by gardens and grazing animals. Zahra, our host mother, emerged from the house first, her head scarf tied up behind her ears, revealing her face and neck which were soft and brown from years of work and wear in the sun. She pulled me in to an embrace and gave me the customary kiss on each cheek to say hello. Miriam repeated the gesture and immediately made it clear that, as our eighteen-year-old host sister, we would be spending the majority of our week with her. After a brief lunch full of small-talk in Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic) and some French - Ahmed, after only completing an eighth-grade education, can speak perfect French - Miriam took us on a tour of the house and its surrounding grounds. Their house - “daar,” in Darija - consists of four enclosed rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom (complete with Turkish toilet), and a courtyard area that connects each of the sections of the house. It is surrounded by a beautiful fenced-in back yard where the chickens are free to roam, several enclosed fields for the cows and sheep to graze, a fairy-tale garden, and rolling hills and babbling brooks that descend into the valley, below. The family lives on the outskirts of Ait-Ouahi, a rural Amazigh village that settled as a tribe about 30 kilometers from modern-day Oulmes, a very small town in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Julia, Alex, and I lived with the family for the week and enjoyed their home and hospitality while we experienced village life in Morocco with our classmates.
Most of our week in the village was, unfortunately, spent dodging rain and puddles of mud on our way to our group discussions and activities. You have never felt how cold forty- to fifty-degree weather can be until you are living in a house with no heating or insulation and always sitting on the floor. The majority of our meals and our free-time in the house were spent in what would probably constitute as a living room. Though the room consisted only of several carpets and blankets layered on the floor, a chimney in the corner of the room, and a small TV (complete with all the channels available to my Moroccan family in Rabat), it quickly become my favorite room in the house. One day, when the weather was too rainy and frigid to venture outside, we spent the entire day sitting on that floor, wrapped in blankets, reading and quietly toasting by the fire. It was heaven. At night, to hide from the cold, Alex, Julia and I each slept on a thin mattress on the ground in the salon (“fancy” living room preserved for guests), buried under layers and layers of wool and fleece blankets. Although I could not even move under the weight of the stack of blankets, I never once felt cold. The Princess and the Pea knew what she was doing. During the day, I would retain my body heat by wearing almost all the clothing I brought at once: leggings, pants, three pairs of socks, a long-underwear shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, two heavy sweaters, a fleece jacket, a scarf, and my raincoat. Even when the weather cleared up long enough to take a long walk down Ait-Ouahi’s winding road, all of the village’s children in tow, it only became warm enough to shed a layer or so.
The people living in the village, including my host mother, had an uncanny ability for predicting the weather. “We will be done with school at five.” “Good, it will rain at six.” And so it rained at six. On Wednesday night, after an entire day inside hiding from the cold and rain, Zahra told us that the following day would be sunny. On Thursday morning, the morning of our last full day in the village, we awoke at seven to find the sun shining and warming the flat stones in front of our house. Mama Zahra was right, and I could not have been happier. We spent the entire day in the euphoria of nature’s beauty: we planted small almond and pomegranate trees at each of our families’ houses, we climbed one of the skeletons of an old stone house in a nearby field and reddened in the sun while we perched on the ruins and ate dried apricots, we laid on the rocks in front of our house after a huge lunch and waited for the chickens to get close enough for us to touch, and we danced along with traditional Amazigh Ahaydous dancers and musicians, flowers behind our ears and in our hair, as the sun turned gold and then red as it dipped below the mountains behind us.
Ait-Ouahi was one of the most picturesque places I have ever had the great fortune to live. However, the family that Julia, Alex and I had lived with were truly exceptional. Ahmed and Zahra were the most welcoming host parents we could have possibly had, despite the difficulty of the language barrier. Though their older sons Driss (27) and Mourad (25) were only around late in the evenings when they returned home from their taxi-driving jobs in Oulmes, the young men were pleasant and welcoming. Mina (21) and Miriam (18) spent a lot of time with us throughout the week. They walked us to and from classes and activities, lead us in winding paths through the hills surrounding their house in the rain, taught us games, and remained patient with our Arabic. Both girls could understand Fusha (Classical Arabic) fairly well, could understand and speak small amounts of French, and even knew a good amount of words in English. I was highly impressed. When Mina finished her Baccalaureate, she attended school to become a secretary. She is getting married in August to a man she met in school and will be moving with him to Tangiers, shortly after. Miriam is easily one of the silliest but sweetest girls I have ever met. She enjoyed playing “mother” all week as she brought us food and served us tea and tucked us in to our blankets every night. On our walks together, she would play music on her cellphone and make little squeaks and chirps as she jumped over puddles or sank in the mud. On our walk through the village with the entire group, as we paused for a picture on a ridge within sight of Miriam’s house, she told our professor that she had never walked that far from home, before. The more I talked to Miriam, the more I realized how much she longed for a different life. In a conversation with Julia, she expressed that her least favorite thing about living in the village was that women get married and have babies at a young age, and then their lives end. She talked with me about how she wants to go and live with her aunt in Italy when she attains her Baccalaureate and how she wants to travel and work in psychology or human rights. Her perspective was incredibly open and self-reflective, despite the fact that she is a girl growing up in an isolated village. I hope for her that she can continue learning languages and attain a job that she finds satisfying and marry a man whom she wants to marry when she wants to marry him.
Throughout the week, Miriam gave us several gifts, including pajamas of hers to borrow, a few strange and bedazzled hair clips, a head band with a doll sewn onto it, and imitation-pearl necklaces. On the last night, in an attempt to show our gratitude, the three of us put on our color-coded gifts (red, purple, and blue) and went to find Miriam. After many pictures with both Miriam and Zahra, our good-byes began with a tearful Miriam who gave us pictures of her and squeezed us tight. Mina also said good-bye with several hugs and kisses and a tight squeeze. The next morning, Zahra brought us to our bus and we all hugged good-bye with many tears and kisses. After only a week, it was so difficult to say good-bye to such a beautiful family and such a beautiful place. Perhaps I will return, some day.