Tuesday was a day of 3 of those “oh yes, I am in Morocco” moments.
1. While I was at Naima's house (president of a women's weaving cooperative), a neighbor brought over some fresh “Leben” (fermented milk- in this case goat's milk) that had been made just the day before by Naima's neighbor's family who are nomadic herders and live in tents in the desert outside my town. As fermented milk goes, you can't get much fresher (or unpasteurized) than that! I'll say that this particular Leben tasted a lot like feta cheese...most definitely an acquired taste.
2. Again, while at Naima's she went up on the roof to adjust the satellite dish that the goshdarned chickens always screw with. She came downstairs with a gooey egg and said “well say congratulations to me because I saw this one pop right out of her! Here put it in your pocket and take it home!” So that night for dinner I had possibly the freshest egg I've ever eaten in my life. It didn't look fertilized, not that I would know, but there is a rooster up there. The yolk was almost orange, as opposed to yellow, and it was delicious. Who says I need a fridge when the food barely even makes it to room temperature after “production”!?
3. (this one is longer) The last two small business volunteers who were in my site terminated their service early (known as 'ET'ing, or as I like to call it 'quitting.') I don't know why they quit but one particular co-operative of artisans sought me out to help them since they no longer had a volunteer. Naima, the president of the weaving cooperative had been trying to communicate shipping a spinning wheel from my city, to Ourzazate, a city about 700km away, where another volunteer is working with another weaving co-op. Why so difficult? I can't really answer that. It shouldn't have been but it was. Part of the problem is that to co-op in Ourzazate who wanted Naima's spinning machine wanted her to escort it out there to show them how to use it properly. You may recall from a previous entry that it is Hshuma for a woman to travel alone and Naima just wouldn't do it and the cooperative in Ourzazate didn't have the money to send Naima and someone else.
That lead to some difficulties but after weeks and weeks of negotiations (my role in this was as translator because the Peace Corps volunteer outside Ourzazate doesn't speak Arabic- I believe she speaks Tashelheit, a berber language, which Naima does not speak, but I could be wrong about that. And it helps to have someone on hand) We finally decided that the best thing to do would be to ship the spinning wheel by a bus, under the seats, where the luggage goes. So to work all this out of course I had to go over to Naima's for lunch. I arrived about 12:30, early for lunch considering daylight savings time. I helped her knead some dough for bread, then we ate lunch and then we had tea and chitchatted. Finally....at about 3pm I was putting on my shoes and Casually mentioned that we might possibly ship the machine that night, on the overnight bus from my city that goes all the way to Agadir but would arrive in Ourzazate at around 6am. And she said “oh sure, Inchallah. Come back over around 6:30 or 7pm and we'll see.” So that was it- a 2.5hr lunch date for a three second conversation. Now, don't get me wrong, I LOVED having lunch with them and appreciate them very much but it is funny to me how absolutely necessary it was to spend that time talking about nothing in order to get business done.
In the end, we did get the sewing machine sent that night. Naima is a young newly wed who's husband lives in the next town over and said it would be a problem if she went to the bus station with me so her young nephew and I carried a Sleeping Beauty-esque spinning wheel across town and got it shipped off!
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