Camels and Headscarves

I will start of by saying I really, really enjoyed my time in the south part of Morocco. After my time in the north, I was pretty unhappy and very worried about staying here for 2 more weeks. I didn’t really enjoy that part – it was all about seeing big cities, food problems and shopping – I know, be surprised! The problem here is that I have no room to carry things, so my love of shopping has been stinted. The only thing I bought was the rug, because they offered to ship it home for me. However, the south was completely different. We were able to get off the beaten path and see some really incredible little towns and we had some opportunities to do very different things. In addition, I was able to take some time and learn more about the culture of Morocco, which made me think a lot so much about my life verses theirs.

First, the cool stuff that we did. When we were in the northern part of Morocco we took trains and public buses everywhere, but in the southern part the transportation is not reliable, so we had a private mini bus. We visited so many out of the way places – we went to the High Atlas Mountains, the Sahara, the Mid Atlas mountains and spent a couple days on the beach. My favorite day, by far, was the day we went to see the Sahara. We had quite a long day on the bus to get there. We had a stop in the afternoon where we all bought head scarves and learned how to tie them. See, it’s not just me!

For a long time I thought that the scarf across the bottom of your face was only a religious thing, but I learned today that it is a necessity as well. When you are in the middle of the desert and the wind is whipping the sand everywhere, the last thing you want to do is take a swift mouthful of sand. The scarf in front of your face prevents this, the same way your sunglasses are imperative to protect your eyes. Once we were bundled up correctly, we all got on our camels. If you’ve never ridden a camel before, I will tell you it’s not as easy as it looks! They put a bunch of padding on a try really hard, but there is just no way to avoid that hump! You either have to sit super far forward and hit the handle ever time your camel walks, or you sit really far back and don’t hold on to anything – scary! This is a picture of my lovely camel and me…

After our camel ride we rode 4x4s out into the middle of the dunes. There wasn’t another soul around – there were just miles and miles of desert. It was soooo hot and windy and completely inhospitable, you realize there is no way people could live out here. And yet, people do. I have no idea how they do it, with nothing around you except the sand. People used to cross these deserts on camels with their whole nomad families, walking for 52 days at a time (there were signs everywhere that told you how many days to Timbuktu). How did they survive those journeys? What did they eat and drink? How did they stay safe from others they encountered? (we were only 35k from the border of Algeria, which freaked me out!) Even with all these thoughts rolling around in my head, I managed to admire the beautiful barrenness of the desert around me.

Besides our amazing day in the desert, we also saw some other crazy stuff. In one small area here, they actually have goats that climb trees. Don’t believe me? Here is a picture of a goat standing in a tree, eating nuts like this is nothing out of the ordinary!

We also got to spend a day touring Mollywood. What is Mollywood, you ask? Well, it’s Moroccan Hollywood, of course! I didn’t realize it before, but a fair number of movies are made in Morocco every year. It’s a lot of movies that take place in hot and dry places, for example Egypt, ancient Rome or the desert anywhere. The most famous two that they mentioned a lot were Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven. We got to spend the day walking around the large backdrops, putting ourselves in those scenes. If you didn’t know better, you might think I had actually gone to Egypt!

In addition to the fun places we visited, I had the opportunity to live in a world so far from my own. Being in Morocco has transported me to a culture completely foreign to me, one that has made me think about how my world compares to theirs. On the surface the differences are easy to see – the women here wear jilabas (the dress/robe) and some wear burhkas (the face covering), the call to prayer rings out over the city 5 times every day, and 99% of the people you see walking around or working are men. I’ve thought a lot about why they live the way they do – is it a choice each person makes or is it something forced on them by another member of their family? How is it possible that so many people live in such poverty? Why doesn’t their government help them more? Are they happy?

There are so many questions that I can’t answer. Maybe they are quite happy living in a world where less is more. Do we really all need cell phones and computers and high definition tvs and two cars to be content? We’re so used to being in a world that is go, go, go, but would it really be so bad to slow down for a while? One of the girls in my group, Lizzie, kept saying that she wanted to leave her normal life and join a nomadic family. They just move around all the time, seeing new places and not putting down roots. This is okay for them though, because the most important thing in their world is the people around them. I’m not quite ready to join the nomad tribe yet, but I think it’s good from time to time to slow down and take inventory of what is most important in our lives.

When you go into a city in Morocco, there are 5 main things you will find in all of them: a school, a bakery, a hammam (bath), a souk (shops) and a medina (old city). When I first arrived I took this to be how it is in some of the small cities, but assumed it wasn’t that way in a large city like Casablanca. However, yesterday I was wandering on my own and happened to come across a poor area of town. The time was about 7pm, and the sun goes down at 7:35, so everyone was preparing to break their fast for Ramadan. I smelled the incredible smell of baking bread, and started to see families walking by with a pie, or three loaves of bread, or an entire cake, still in its pan. I realized that they were all coming out of one door, and that’s when it hit me – this was still the bakery for the entire community. The people are so poor that they do not have electricity or hot water or an oven – they prepare their creations in their own home, but do not have the means to bake them. They have to take them in their pans to the local oven and have them baked there. To see this happening still in a large, urban town like Casablanca really puts things in perspective. After all, how often do you see the guy below just wandering through the streets of a major city?