morocco-bound: letting go & food struggles

One day, during the wedding week, I went home after school to find that my host family was gone, and was told to go over to Kristin's house and hang out there. Kristin's host sister, Habiba, told us we were going to get henna and then go to the big house for more wedding celebrations. Henna is sort of a big production, involving someone very carefully drawing on both sides of your hands with a syringe full of smelly paste, so we sit down on the couch and wait for Habiba's friend Aisha to do all of our hands. Normally, you just sit and let it dry, while also patting sugar water on it that helps the color set, but we had to go to the wedding and didn't have time to finish putting the stuff on my hands.

When we got to the wedding, Kristin and I went in to sit in the bride's room with a bunch of women, and are chatting (in English) about adjusting to life in Morocco. We were both agreeing about how to a certain extent it involves letting go of control over a lot of little things during the day, like eating dinner before 10:30 pm or not ingesting a pound of sugar each day. Meanwhile, the henna on our hands is still drying, and Habiba asks one of the women for sugar water. The woman comes back with a cup of sugar water, but Habiba is gone, so the woman goes to hand the glass to me, but my hands are all sticky with henna, so I put my hands up to indicate that I can't take it and could she put it on the table. However, instead of putting it on the table, she holds it up to my face and pours the water into my mouth. Habiba walks back into the room at this moment, sees the woman pour sugar water into my mouth and me spit it out in surprise, and just about dies laughing.

It turns out that the woman had heard about the coughing fit I had a few days earlier, and thought we were asking for sugar water to help my throat, and that I wanted her to feed it to me. I felt like an idiot, and she was really embarrassed, but now occasionally I hear people retelling the story to bouts of laughter. It was perfectly timed that just as Kristin and I were agreeing that it was good to accept letting go of control, a woman I don't know surprise-pours sugar water into my mouth.

Kristin and Habiba, her awesome host sister

my henna-ed hand

One thing that has been pretty difficult to get used to is how much food we are offered and expected to eat in a day. A major element of hospitality is offering tea or a meal to just about anyone who comes near your house. Particularly when we were new, almost everyone we met invited us to come into their home for tea, and tea is not just a drink here. First of all, it is inevitably made with about three or four times as much sugar as I would ever put in tea in the U.S. Secondly, it's always accompanied with food. My host mom generally offers people bread, jam, butter, olives, dates, and nuts, but some families will cook up fancy fried breads or eggs or other things. Any good host here (which is everyone) will keep trying to get you to eat ("Kul! Kuli!") until you've insisted that you're full multiple times. It's fine to say you're full, but it's considered a little rude to turn food down altogether. It's standard for people to eat five meals in a day here: breakfast, morning tea at about 12, lunch at 2 or 3, afternoon tea (called kaskroot) at 6 or 7, and dinner any time between 9:30 and 11:30.

Some days, however, are exceptional. One day a few weeks ago, Kristin's host sister was out of town, so my family temporarily adopted Kristin. It's a half day of school, so we have breakfast, morning tea, and lunch at school, and then go home to my house, where we are unsuccessful at convincing my host mom that we have already eaten at school and are full, so we eat more lunch. Then my host mom asks us if we want to come to this dance festival that was going on in the village at the time, so we follow her into the street, where we run into a bunch of women sitting around outside a house. We stop to greet them, and out of nowhere couscous appears and someone literally puts a bite into Kristin's mouth.

We sit in this alley for about ten minutes trying to eat couscous, and then my host mom tells us to come with her. We leave the spontaneous couscous party in the alley (still pretty unclear) and follow Zahara into a house down the street, where it becomes apparent that we are not going to the dance festival but to a baby shower. We have tea and politely refuse cookies, when all of a sudden they start bringing around the hand-washing basin, which is bad news, because it means we're about to have a meal. They bring out plates of couscous, and we politely take some small bites so as not to be rude. After insisting seriously that we are full, the couscous plates are cleared, but soon I see them bringing out bread, which is also bad news, because it means there's more meal.

The second course is huge hunks of beef cooked with dates and hard-boiled eggs, which, like everything but couscous, you eat with bread. Kristin looks like she's about to die, but we both eat a little, again to be polite, and because it's really hard to refuse when you have 8 women at your table insisting that you to eat. After the meat, there's plates of fruit (standard dessert at every meal,) and we politely eat a little fruit. Finally we leave, and go back to my house, where we literally almost passed out from food coma. My host mom tries to give us tea and kaskroot at 7 or so, but we obviously can't eat any more. Finally we pick at the dinner tajine at 10 or so.

The grand total for the day was nine meals. Nine. No wonder one of the first things they taught us was how to say, "I'm full, thank you," but I just learned the adjective "hungry" about a week ago.

Some unrelated pictures from one visit to the fields with my host family: