The Land of the Berbers
Morocco
Our Fes hotel didn’t have a shower in the room (only down the hall), so we thought it an opportune moment to try out a hamman (public bath). You can also pay extra for a massage, and we definitely needed one of those after our long travels. Janet and I decided to go to one nearby the hotel. (Tiina decided not to go, having visited a hamman in Turkey before.) Well, what an experience that was! After disrobing, except for the bottom of a bathing suit, we were taken to a big, steamy room where many women were bathing in front of big buckets. Some wore panties and others were nude. There was an area where the hot water was, and this was brought by buckets to the smaller buckets for each small group of people. Boy, did Janet and I feel like aliens there, not knowing what to do. But the other women were friendly and helpful to us.
The head of the hamman was an aggressive woman who also was in charge of giving us a massage. First she scrubs your skin with a scratchy cloth (that we brought with us), sloughing off dead skin (you can see it!) and then she massaged us, ending with her pushing us, making us slide across the slippery floor. We also washed ourselves on our own, including our hair (you need to bring all your own soap, shampoo and wash clothes). She additionally rinsed and combed our hair for us.
This is where we met Nora. A young student who befriended us in the hamman. She invited us to visit her in her home the next evening and we accepted, thinking what an opportunity to get to know a Moroccan woman. You see, up to then, we had only met men. It’s the men who work in hotels, (except for Illam in the Hotel Ali, but she certainly didn’t have any time to hang out with us) restaurants, shops, and are employed as guides (except for the young girls in Fes). So we were anxious to get to know a Moroccan woman.
The next day we bought some fruit to offer her family when we visited. She took us to a home in the medina (although the day before, I could have sworn she told me that she lived in the ville nouvelle). Anyway, she took us to a building where she said she lived with her uncle. We didn’t go to that apartment but instead to her neighbors (but she indicated by pointing to the door to her uncle’s home). We met her neighbor’s family and they gave us some Coca Cola to drink and soup to eat (with some pastries for desert). Oddly enough, no one else ate anything, they just served us. This home was very sparsely furnished – rather large, but almost without furniture or decorations at all. The previous home we visited (our guide’s home) was very small (tiny, in fact, for a whole family), but it was warm and cozy, with photos, and belongings adorning the room. So there were some odd things going on.
Nora told us that she was ill (I think with anemia) and that her uncle always demands money from her and mistreated her, saying horrible things to her and basically told her to leave his home that same day. We never went to her uncle’s home, but his children came into the house we were in and kept asking for money from Nora. Of course, we started feeling sorry for Nora and wanted to help her. Among ourselves we decided to leave her 100 dirhams when we left, to try and help her out. She had told us that she had needed to sell her bracelet for money to buy medicine and also needed to buy some more medicine for her uncle’s wife and she had no more money because her uncle took it all.
We enjoyed our time with her and danced to Egyptian music with the girls. When we decided to leave, Nora said she needed to go to the pharmacy, then she asked us if we could help her buy medicine. We had already planned to help her, but I asked her how much she needed for medicine. She said about 50 dirham, so I said okay. We went to the pharmacy with her and she got some supplies of medicines and the pharmacist presented me with the calculator which said 29,100 dirham! I thought, what is that? Crazy? That’s almost $290. Then Nora said, it’s 500 dirham. Then the price was 291 dirham. We discussed this amongst ourselves and decided to give her the 100 dirham we had decided to give her in the first place. The pharmacist took all the medicine away except one. Nora picked up one other box and looked at me questioningly. It was 55 dirham. Finally, I added another 50 myself and she was able to get one of each (all the medicines seemed like they were a supply of two different things). She thanked us and took us back to our hotel.
We really wondered afterward if this whole thing was a big scam. See how much you can get from the tourists…we’ll never know I guess. But we did enjoy meeting her and her neighbors and had a good time talking with them and dancing – so that’s not so bad, even if there was a scam involved. I really think that part of the story was indeed true, but how much, I’m not sure. I just hope that at least we paid for someone’s medicine that really needed it. I also wonder if that was the sole reason she invited us to her home (or rather her neighbor’s home). Additionally, when we left, the door to the uncle’s home was open and we could see inside. It was rather nice in there, with attractive decorations and furniture. So I wonder if the reason we were in the other place was to make it look like they were ‘poorer’ so we’d feel bad and want to give them money. Who knows? I do know that many people in Morocco are poor, but I also know that many people try to scam money out of foreigners, viewing them as naïve and stupid and having lots of money to give away. It’s actually illegal in Fes (and maybe all cities of Morocco) to be seen with tourists because of past problems involving scams.
The worse thing about Morocco is that you start to feel that everyone looks at you as a walking wallet – a $ sign on your forehead – “press here for cash.” You start to distrust people and that’s a shame, as there are nice people there – we met some. But you just have to be wary that you can tell them apart from the ones who befriend you to take advantage of you. But in the end, it’s all an experience, and you learn from your mistakes.
After Fes, we returned to Rabat to visit Antoine once more before our return to our respective homes, USA, Scotland and Finland. Tiina left after one day and Janet the next. We were able to go to the film set two more days and then only I was left on Sunday. I relaxed and went horse riding again with Antoine and some other friends of his on the beach, and then to dinner.
And so, the trip comes to an end. I still have warm memories of the trip…sweet, hot mint tea, so famous in Morocco; the eerie stillness and silence of the desert; the sweeping, majestic High Atlas mountains; the paradise that was the Cascade d’Ouzoud and the Dades Gorge; the lovely people we met in many different places (I’ll try and forget the scam artists and awful, aggressive guides).
Some of the nice people to remember include Hassan on the film set; Mohammed, the owner of a jewelry shop in Essaouria and his infamous phrase on our video “Email? What means email?”; the two guys in the shop who didn’t mind that we tried on a bunch of jellabas and scarves and filmed the whole thing (although Janet did buy two scarves), and they even invited us to lunch in their shop to share a fish tajine; Mustafa, whom we met in Ait Benhaddou who loved to be photographed (and is very photogenic, I must add) and gave us a tour of a local Berber woman’s house, a woman who posed for us in front of her ornate wooden door and warmly said goodbye to me, shaking my hand; the guides of both our desert camel rides, playing music long into the quiet of the desert night; and our third and last Mohammed (sure is a popular name there), our favorite waiter and friend in Fes; Anne and Andreas, two Germans we met on the Hotel Ali trip; and last but not least, our friend, Antoine…if not for him, we wouldn’t have even been there!
I’ll also always remember the intriguing Berber music playing as the minibus rocked along the twisting roads, through the mountains, the oasis valleys, the gorges, the desert. I still have that music too, forever imbedded in my memories and on my video of our adventure! And…thanks to “Magnum” Lausan, who gave us the name of the Berber bands, we also have a CD of this music to forever remind us of our trip into the land of the Berbers!
