Ramadan

January 22, 1996 village

It’s nighttime. Very to be exact. I keep wondering every once in a while how I’m holding myself together so well, not thinking about him as much as I expected to. I’m not thinking about smoking as much as I expected to either. I’ve just finished day number one of Ramadan, successfully fasting and ready to start again. I know that I will sleep wonderfully because I am again on my pallet with my pillow and teddy.

I believe my self-confidence is higher than it’s ever been and simultaneously I feel immense insecurity and paranoia. On the one hand I’m able to reach a perspective that sets all my life in the appropriate dimensions. On the other hand it falls like sand through my fingers, and remains only as an illusion.

January 23, 1996 village

It’s day number two and I’ve already cheated. I drank coffee and ate shebekiyah when I woke up. I went to the health center, then with S to the gardens to water his agree palm tree baby. Now Joelle and I are sitting on our tire rim chairs in R’s kitchen. I’m with a cat on my lap purring and asleep. Joelle is with Taslheit notebook. R’s beating an egg, making a cake. Her mom is leaning on the over supervising. Two birds are hopping along the floor teasing the other cat that seems oblivious, and this is what it’s like two hours before the Tinwichi, the evening call to prayer.

A tagine is slowly cooking on a pile of coals in a ceramic bowl. A whiff of wind just swept through and lifted the dust on the mud floor into the air. R’s mother, with tattooed forehead and chin, is telling us how upset she is that the Mexican soap opera changed time for Ramadan. Now it's on at 11:30 pm instead of 7:30 pm. The electricity needs to stay on until 12:30.

A group of children are playing outside, chanting what sounds like ring around the rosy, though that’s impossible. The sounds of baby goats crying for their mothers surround me. They won’t be back from the mountains until sunset. R’s mom is squatted on the floor giving orders. The cake is in the over. The harira soup is simmering on the burner. Water has come from the well to the black bucket by my side. Flies are buzzing my ears. Birds are chirping in the palm trees. R’s singing a happy tune.

11:35 pm

I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed as hard as I have in the last two hours. With Zaneb on the floor and tears streaming from F’s face in the kitchen. Z told me a funny story about how one night the cow ran away, got out of the animal coop. They went looking all over the gardens for it. For hours, Z, Isleeman, and S, with flashlights, searched for the escaped cow. The whole time they were searching for it, it stood just outside their house, chewing grass. Z found it after she gave up first and went home.

Z and F have been giving me scenarios to role-play. They want to see how I handle travel in Morocco without knowing Arabic. We did this as we were lighting a big fire to use the coals for warmth. They’d say something like, what would you say if you got on a bus and someone asked you where you were going? Every time I attempted my Arabic response they would start laughing so hard they had to hold their sides.

Yesterday, when I was sitting in the kitchen, a full kitchen, getting the meal ready for breakfast, I said something to Joelle in English. Z said, only speak to her in Tashlheit. I said, well, maybe I want to tell her something that I don’t want you to hear. I thought I got her there, until about ten minutes later when Z and Fatiha started speaking Arabic to one another, simultaneously giggling and glaring at me. Maybe we don’t want you to hear either, Fatiha sneered.

M, her husband and my ‘brother’, has left me five cigarettes on the sink. He (language funny again) walked in the room to find me bundled up in a blanket between Z and his daughter. He said, in English, where would you like me to put your umm, water? He knew I knew what he meant. He obviously felt really guilty or careful that Z might understand his English.