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| Overview of Tineghir from my hotel room |
Today we participated in OAT's special program of feeling a part of a
place by going shopping for our dinner. That meant that we would go
into the market with a list of food items we were to buy and they
would be sent to the restaurant that would cook them. Yemani divided
us into three teams: meat, vegetables, and fruits. I was on the
vegetable team.
The thought of this exercise didn't appeal to me at first. I was
having a culture shock type of day where I was tiring of all the
differences around me—and my cold is lingering and/or coming back.
I'm also finding the trip to be so intensive and so full of
information that I was getting tired. It's been 10 days of travel
and constant movement on and off the bus, up and down stairways, in
and out of hotels. It is also a bit difficult relating to a group of
people every day. Thank God we are only 14 in the group! I've been
in travel groups of 50. The trick is to rotate hanging out with
different people on different days. Although this is the kind of
thing I like to do, it gets a little wearying about this point of the
trip. We have had very little down time. Keeping up a journal
doesn't make it any easier. But I would later take some time off in
the afternoon by myself and that would revive me.
As it turned out, the shopping exercise was fun. Our vegetable group
dove right into it and it wasn't too difficult communicating with the
vendors. They spoke French and that helped. Pointing at items
helped, too. The chef had made a list of items that included numbers
like 1 kilo or 2 kilos, and we'd show them in order to buy what we
needed. The vendors were also used to travel groups coming through
and they were especially nice to us. I think they are curious about
us or at least find us amusing as they try to figure out what we are
saying. It also wasn't very busy. It was not like being in the
Medina in Fez where there is so much going on all around you.
So
our mission was to buy 2 kilos of potatoes and onions, 1 kilo of
tomatoes and green beans. Yemani gave us 200 dh and we still had a
lot left, so we bought eggplant and red peppers with the hope that
the chefs would add garlic and make that special dish. (They did and
it was delicious!) Then we found some peanuts, which we had enjoyed
at the desert camp, and bought them. In all we spent 80 dh or $10.
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| Mawktar |
Mawktar,
a “blue man,” joined our group today as our local contact as we
would go through the oasis and meet some of the people who farmed
there. A “blue man” is a Berber who wears traditional blue
clothing. They live mostly in south Morocco and are descendants of
the Tware tribe that originally comes from Mali. They first
interacted with the Moroccans in the 16th
century. One big difference in their clothing between them and the
Arabs is that men wear veils and not the women. This is for the sand
storm.
After
our shopping expedition, Mawktar took us to the Jewish section of the
old town. Some of them left in the early 20th
century and went to Casablanca. About 100 families were left and
they emigrated to Israel, France, the U.S. in the 1960s along with
the 600,000 other Jews. They were a real loss to Morocco because
they had founded various industries and employed people in their
factories. Now their old mud homes were “melting down.” We saw
some poor kids were playing among the ruins while a couple of them
sat around a charcoal fire on this fine, warm morning. It turned out
that many of the Jews who went to Israel found life there difficult.
They missed the warm temperatures and the friendliness of the people
here. In fact, some of the Jewish families return here from time to
time to visit their old friends and see their old homes.
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Alfalfa grass is cut by hand. Nancy, dressed in
traditional garb does the work.
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The Berbers seem to be a very friendly and jovial people who love
life. They have easy smiles and are willing to be especially helpful
to others. Maybe because life is more leisurely here in an oasis
town. They certainly do not live the harried lives of the larger
cities we have visited. We would find this warmth especially in the
oasis as we walked on a dusty path through date palms and small plots
of wheat, barley, fava beans and alfalfa (for the livestock) that
were separated by foot-high banks. Each family that owns a plot
takes care of it. That includes owning a cow and spreading its dung
on the plot. All the food here is grown organically. Men
typically do the plowing while the women cut the alfalfa. However,
many of the men are working job abroad in Europe, so the women do
most of the agriculture here.
The
oasis is huge measuring
50 km long and 200 meters wide. Our walk through it was refreshing
and cool. The path was
dusty and it got on my socks more than the sands of the Sahara. As
we left it, I thought of the biblical advice that if you are not
accepted in a town, to shake the dust off your feet and move on to
the next one. While I like this town, the meaning of the quote makes
me think that I really need to plan a trip to the Holy Land soon.
Morocco has given me a taste of a desert culture and I think going to
the Middle East would immerse me in it totally.
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A donkey is used as a beast of burden and it can carry up to 100
kilos on its back. |
Overlooking
the oasis is the Glaoua Kasbah. The Glaoua (pronounced glowie) people owned salt mines
and they exchanged it 1:1 for gold, skins, and other goods from
Marrakech. Tineghir was a caravan town, so it provided caravan
hotels with bedrooms upstairs for the merchant travelers and stalls
downstairs for their goods and their dromedaries. Sultans ruled the
day at the time. They were like kings with power because they
collected taxes in goods from the different tribes that passed
through town. There is a story about a sultan who lived at the end
of the 19th
century who went on a tax collecting trip. He caught a cold and
stayed with a family here. He left behind a cannon with the family
who lived in the Glaoua Kasbah. This cannon gave the family a
decided advantage and it became powerful. After the French conquered
Algeria and then moved into Morocco in 1908, they used this family to
subdue the people here. When Morocco gained independence in 1954,
they expelled this family. Hassan II invited the family to return.
A book was written by Gavin Maxwell about this family. It is called
The Lords of the Atlas.
Sounds like a fascinating book I'd like to read.
We stopped to see the ruins of a Koran School or madrasa, a Muslim
boarding school that adjoins a mosque. Although it is “melting
down,” especially after being affected by a small earthquake 15
years ago, a caretaker lives in one of the rooms. He has, in fact,
restored the prayer area. The government is not interested in
restoring a mud building because it is concentrating on building new
buildings and mosques in concrete and steel that will last.
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The
niche (mihrab) faces the direction of Mecca as the Immam leads
prayers to rows of prayerful people behind him. His chair (minbar)
is where he stands when he gives his Friday sermon.
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The boys In Koran schools, usually between 8-10 years old, learned
the Koran by heart. Then they are able to work in mosques as immams
or as teachers in Koran schools. There were 50 students at this
school at one time.
This Berber shower was in the courtyard outside the madrasa. To use
it, you crawl through the entry way and sit inside it. It was
covered with mud on the outside while heated water was poured into
it.
Today,
people don't think that madrasas are a good idea for education. They
prefer modern schools. Immams were not traditionally trained in a
seminary as priests and ministers are. They would set up shop on
their own and be accountable to no overseeing body. Today, would-be
immams must have a degree and go to school. They get scholarships
and “licenses” from the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
After we refreshed ourselves at our hotel, we went to Dar Et-Taleb
Education Center to meet some high school students and have lunch
with them. This center is actually a place where 120 boys were
boarded while they go to school elsewhere. (There is another center
for girls, but we didn't visit it.) The center is one of the Grand
Circle Foundation's projects. (They are associated with OAT.) Grand
Circle has provided funds for showers, restrooms, and a soccer field.
Three of us met with three boys at our table. They were selected
because they spoke English. Only one boy spoke it well. Some of the
boys here come from town while others come from a distance. They get
help with their studies and they have a place to stay so that they
are more likely to complete them. Education is key to developing a
country!!
The boys were very polite and obviously prepared for our visit. They
came up to us and invited us to their tables. They were quite open
about their lives. Most of them we met wanted to be teachers or
engineers. The center is giving them the chance to do so.
Before we had the afternoon off, we stopped at a Berber carpet
cooperative. The head man there spoke excellent English and was very
entertaining as he explained how carpets are made, what they are made
of (camel hair), and what their designs and colors mean. Then he
took us to a showroom, served us tea (with an explanation about how
it was made), and then treated us to see all the different kinds of
carpets they sell. This was all a warm up for us to buy. I wished I
could get a wall hanging, but the expense was way too great, and the
pressure to buy was way too high. They started at $1800. I baulked,
as a good bargainer should, but I didn't come back with a counter
offer because I was not in the least interested. He forced it out of
me and I said $500. He asked me my name and told me his: Abdullah.
As I tried to leave, he chased me around the two-story store to make
me buy not one, but “three carpets for a good price.” He called
after me: “Canada, Canada.” (I was wearing my red jacket that
had Canada written on its back.) This was a little too much for me
and I ran to Yemani to rescue me. He told me how to get to the bus.
I had expected a more suave approach from the salesmen, like in the
leather goods store in Fez. This was a good experience, nonetheless.
We met for dinner at 6:30 and drove to a hotel that had prepared our
dinner from the groceries we purchased that morning. We had a
delicious potato/tomato/??? soup, grilled lamb chops, eggplant/red
pepper gnash, a tajine of potatoes, onions, green beans. For desert
we had fruit, chocolate wafer cookies, chocolate sandwich cookies,
and peanuts. I felt more full than I have been feeling at our meals
during the whole trip. I think it was the cookies that did me in.
We also had some entertainment by a “blue man” band. Sylvia, who
has been taking Middle Eastern dance, performed a dance for us. A
couple other people joined in. She is really good at it!!
We met Yemani's family, who lives in Marrakech. He has a wife and
two sons, Noor, 6 and Abdullah,14. It was obvious that he had missed them and was glad to see them--and was very proud of them. We took pictures of them and made
over them. Both sons speak French and Abdullah speaks English very
well.
