It's my party and I'll . . .

...eat a live cow if I want to. Some like cake, others prefer live livestock, and no, there is no redundancy in that phrase. Yesterday was the the celebration of the Prophet Mohamed's birthday, known as Eid-al-Mawlid. And other than being a day off work, it's a rather important time for families to get together, eat special food, sing, dance, pray . . . and eat a living cow. Now, I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression. This practice is not characteristic of Islam as practiced by most Moroccans, but rather a Sufi tradition that is honored in celebration of the Prophet's birthday. So each year (this year it fell on March 9th) Sufis gather in a particular city here in Morocco, Meknes, which lies particularly close to where I live, Ifrane, and therefor gave me a particularly good reason to travel to Meknes and check out the festivities. Now, I have to admit that my interests were beyond pure cultural intrigue. No, I was ready to see some action, blood, and all the calamity this celebration is notorious for. In fact, what sparked my interest, was the experience of a colleague of mine the previous year. Here's how his story goes:

• French colleague goes to Meknes with his Moroccan wife.
• Couple takes all cultural precautions by not wearing black, red, or green, the forbidden colors on this particular day.
• Couple goes to Sufi procession to witness their wild dance, self-torture, and of course, rhythmic drumming.
• Tranced, whirling Sufis mistake French colleague's navy blue jacket for black and pounce on him.
• About half a dozen Sufis tear off his clothes, exposing his chest, biting and scratching, eating his black wallet, and ripping the hair off his frantic wife's scull. Maybe they mistook him for the cow.
• Moroccan bystanders break up the fight while the police watch.
• Couple leaves Meknes immediately.
• French colleague shows war wounds to me at work on Monday.

So, you can see why I was interested. But in all fairness, and for PC disclaimer purposes, this experience cannot be applied to all sects of Sufism.

Anyway, so my friend and I went to this same celebration, witnessed the same trancing, dancing, and drumming, but to our dismay, no livestock feasting. What we did see, however, were groups of 30-40 Sufis, whirling around each other in a circle, when suddenly a fight breaks out between two women. One woman actually rips out a clump of hair and throws it into the riled crowd. Then, as if on cue, the entire group stops their drumming, halts their dancing, and makes a sprinting dash towards the mosque entrance. Even men older than my grandmother were running like gazelles towards the arched doors. Later on, we discovered the reason for this hurried procession. They were simply hungry. The live cow that was to be eaten was inside the mosque, and if anyone can empathize with the severity of hunger pangs, it's me. So, next time you're planning your birthday, try to think outside the conventional box of ice-cream cakes and candles, and consider a more carnivorous concoction.

Morocco prepares for the Winter Olympics

SNOW DIVING

The enemy has taken the bridge

The Charlie was everywhere and me and my squad mates were still about 300 meters from safety and provisions. We huddled close together as we scrambled through the maze of exploding landmines. Sergeant Ansmann was in the lead followed by myself and Captain Ana. As Ansmann blazed the trail, a landmine exploded just next to her left leg. She jumped out of the way only to be barely nicked by a passing enemy tank. There were so many explosions and so much confusion that you couldn't tell who was who anymore. Everything just became a sea of screams and colorful bursts. We were about half way over the bridge when I saw a little boy igniting yet another missile from the middle of the street. Those inhumane bastards! Using child labor to set off their weapons. What kind of war was this? I almost ran over the little tyke as he was heading for cover. He looked at me right in the eye and yelled something in a foreign tongue, "Prosit Neujahr," or something of the sort. We finally found our base camp along with the other soldiers in our platoon. Pheew! Safety at last. I drank some of the bubbly liquid my platoon commander handed me. I suppose it was the only drink we could find in these foreign lands. Suddenly, everyone started counting backwards in that same foreign tongue, "FUNF! VIER! DREI! SWEI! EINS! PROSIT NEUJAHR!!!" More bombs were exploding now and my commander was passing around the bottle of bubbly to everyone, even the Charlie! "Happy New Year!" Srgt. Ansmann said to me as she gave me a big hug. Happy New Year? But what about the war? What about the child soldier on the bridge? Have I gone crazy or have I just drunken too much champagne? I think it must be the latter.

A Christmas Tree Makeover

Materials
scrap paper
scissors
colored lights
imagination
and lots of time and patience

Procedure

1. After explaining some general Christmas traditions to your Moroccan friend, convince him that it is also tradition for the guest (him) to decorate the tree as the others judge his character based on the creativity and beauty of his decorative skills. Be sure to emphasize that it's good luck to cover the tree in mustard once finished decorating.

2. Stop being a jerk and messing with a person's innocent cultural curiosities.

3. Using the scissors and scrap paper, make all kinds of paper snowflakes giving eah other creative inspiration by suggesting themed flakes such as "Transylvanian snow", "Christmas in Miami", and "breakfast for dinner" (not sure where that one came from).

4. Wait for your friend to recall his Japanese exchange student friend who taught him to make origami balls in the third grade. Once he remembers, and you have finished two bottles of mulled wine, have him painstakingly teach you.

5. Cover as many of the colored light bulbs with these paper balls until your tree looks like crystallized multi-colored marshmallows have taken over the world and are hovering among the branches.

6. Admire your tree by turning off all the lights, putting it up agaisnt the window, and faring the cold weather to view your pride and joy from outside, noting that you have the best looking Christmas tree in your neighborhood.

7. Hit the guy who reminds you that it is the ONLY Christmas tree in your neighborhood.

8. Make up over a hot mug of buttered rum.

A Lesson in Darija

Darija is the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. It's a combination of standard Arabic, French, Spanish, and some random English borrowings ("nta printk" - you print). Most other Arabic speakers can't understand Moroccans when they speak Darija, but most Moroccans can understand other Arabic speakers.

Shwiya bshwiya (little by little), I have been learning this spoken language in my highly interactive classroom, the local market (pictured above). I have found that the words and phrases that 'stick' fall into one of four categories: extremely useful, humorous associations, untranslatable, or just plain fun to say.

Extremely Useful
skut = shut up
ana mzuwja = I'm married
shuma halik = shame on you
insha'ala = God willing, or "yeah, I don't really want to do that, so I'll blame it on God if it doesn't get done.

Humorous Associations
matar = airplane, but "to kill" in Spanish (isn't it ironic?)
lice = actually French, but means highshcool. It comes from the Latin root "lycos", meaning "a gathering of dogs". I couldn't agree more.
baraka = same consonant as found in my first name (brk) and meaning "gift from god". Coincidence? I think not.
yo mama = dove

Untranslatable
tybtili tqlbi = you're baking my heart, not to be confused with you're breaking my heart.
Rbit ele kbda = You say this when you really love someone and you can't live without them. Direct translation = My liver is for you.
atak'ala mra xaiba = May God make your wife ugly

Fun to say
meshi mushkil = no problem!
yyyyella = Let's go!
xox = peach (the phoneme /x/ is a glotteral stop, or in non-linguistic terms, like hocking a loogie)

As I continue to learn this language, my conversations become richer. However, with this small lesson, I can successfully offend someone, discuss love and marriage, and get from the airport to the school on a dove, eating a peach with no problems.

The mystery of the solo shoes

I apologize if I haven't written in a while. You see, I've been trying to crack a case. A case where there is ample evidence, yet no viable explanation. Wandering around Morocco, and I mean anywhere in Morocco, the market, fields covered in grazing sheep, an international airport, or just in the middle of the road, there seems to be an abnormal amount of single shoes. Yes, one shoe with no pair in sight. And I'm not talking just every now and then do I come across these pairless peddlers. They are everywhere. Once I counted 36 pairs of solo soles within a 50 meter radius. Can anyone explain this phenomenon? Well, these are the theories me and my crew of outstanding detectives have come up with (and by "crew", I mean anyone willing to give me their two cents on the issue).

Theory 1
In Moroccan culture, it is impolite to eat with your left hand. And, upon entering a Sufi center of prayer, you need to step over the thresh hold with your right foot first. Well, maybe all this discrimination towards lefties, has carried over into "it is looked down upon to do anything with your left anything". So, no kicking a soccer ball with your left (or it is preferred with your right), no kicking your sheep with your left foot, no kicking wild dogs with your left foot. I apologize for all this violent talk, but those are the main things I see my left foot being used for here in Morocco. Anyway, what this translates to is that your right shoe is bound to get more worn down than your left, so there comes a time when you just have to give it up and find a new one to match your left shoe still in fairly good condition. Now, upon closer examination of this theory, and by viewing the evidence above, you'll notice that not all abandoned shoes are right footed. So, back to the drawing board.

Theory 2
Upon entering any mosque and most Moroccan households, it is custom to remove your shoes. I mean they decorate these places with the most beautiful hand-woven rugs, so any right minded person wouldn't want your sheep dung covered soles stepping foot on these colorful carpets. So, when everyone leaves their shoes at the door, and is distracted by prayer or tasty tagine, the shoe "shfar" (thief in Arabic) comes and takes one of each pair. Not to use for himself of course because what would he do with mismatching shoes of different styles and sizes, but just to make a statement. It reminds me of my time in Costa Rica where they was a man in my town by the name of Juan Tanga ("tanga" being the Spanish word for "thong"). Juan Tanga was notorious for stealing women's underwear off the line at night. He even got a hold of mine a few times. Who knows what he did with it once he got a hold of it. Who wants to know. But he made a name for himself in that small town and will be remembered for many years to come. So, maybe this was "shoe shfars" MO. But, one major detail stifles this theory. It is clearly forbidden in the Koran to steal and would be highly looked down upon in this culture, even if it was just to be infamous. So, that one goes out the window as well. Onto our last hypothesis, and the strongest yet.

Theory 3
There is a secret society composed of one-legged men and women living in the caves under Ifrane (Ifrane is "cave" in Berber). This society contains people of international importance, as well as humble locals. They leave their shoes all around the country, in city alleys, beside rural rivers, outside foreign embassies, as their form of communicating with other members of the one-legged society residing in other regions in Morocco.

Now, because this theory is so air tight, it has yet to be broken down. And that being the case, we have an even bigger puzzle to solve. What is this secret society's code of communication? Is it the direction the shoes are facing? The size of the shoe? How far apart they are? How expensive the shoe was when it was newly bought? How potent the odor is? Any ideas? My crew and I just can't seem to put our foot on it.

Hammam: Pleasureful paradise or painful primping?

So I had my first authentic hammam experience with my friend Fatima and her sister Meryem. Hammam, for those who may not know, is similar to a Turkish bath in that men and women from the neighborhood gather together in a steamy bath house, scrubbing each other's backs, and gossiping about the days events. In Morocco, most hammams consists of a series of rooms increasing in heat and steaminess as you venture deeper into the hammam. Women enter the hammam, pay their 7 Dirhams ($1), and strip down to their underwear.

In my experience, upon entering the first room, I found women sitting on little stools, gathered around a bucket of water, brushing their teeth idly. We continued through two more rooms of women gathered around buckets of water and henna paste as they scrubbed each other with a coarse rag not much different from sandpaper. We entered the final room of the hammam where there was one large tub with scalding hot water and another with freezing spring water. We each got our bucket and mixed water from the two tubs until we got a temperature we were happy with. Fatima and Meryem laid out their plastic mats to sit on and began situating all their soaps, shampoos, foot scrubs, hairbrushes, and oils around them. As I went to join them, I got cornered by a large, burly woman who brusquely positioned me in a corner and began building a little barricade of water buckets around me. I pleadingly looked at Fatima and Meryem, who were happily scrubbing each other's backs, for rescue. Fatima just smiled and waved her hand as if to indicate, "just go with it!" So . . . I went with it.

The women, whose name I found out to be Amina, motioned me to sit on a little plastic mat she laid out for me. She sat down beside me, straddled her legs and thrust my head onto one of her large, muscular thighs. She gripped my wrists and flung them up over my head. Now, to envision this a little more precisely, it was as if I was a washboard (minus the six-pack stomach) and she was setting up to scrub her laundry down the length of my body. She proceeded to take the sand paper scrub and violently brush it down my forearm all the way to my hips. She did this repeatedly for about 10 minutes until she felt that removing seven layers of skin and seeing my raw flesh glow red was suffice.

It actually reminded me of the time I was in the Peace Corps and I got incredibly sick off of some fruit I ate from a tree. My host mom told me to get naked, made me lie face down on my bed, and gave me a full body rub down with vegetable oil. Sounds like it could be pleasant, but if you could see the size of my mom and her coarse, strong hands, you would understand why her pushing my pressure points with all her might and body weight behind it was a painful experience. Apart from that, that fact that I barely knew the woman and was lying in the bed naked, vulnerable, and ready to be slow roasted made the situation all the more awkward.

Hammam was a similar experience. After she had peeled me from the front, she grunted and literally flipped me over onto my stomach and began the process all over again. She would scrub diligently around my neck and shoulders and then sand my butt until I seriously thought I may be bleeding. I probably would not have permitted the torture to continue if it weren't for the millions of white noodle-like clumps of dead skin all over my body. It was disgusting and incredible all at the same time. And I felt like it had to be good for me, so I endured.

After I thought she had finished with me, she propped me up, grabbed my cheeks with her pudgy fingers, looked at me in the eyes and began cracking up. I think she saw the tears of pain welling up and thought it was humorous. She then took the "brill-o pad" and scrubbed my face so hard that I think she was trying to remove the mole on my right cheek. Thankfully, she was unsuccessful and gave up on the beauty mark after about five minutes. Finally, she slapped me on the back and quickly got up and moved on to her next victim.

I sat their, skin stinging, utterly confused at what just happened and what to do next, and a little angry at my two friends. Then Fatima came up with some green, slimy, henna paste and began to gently rub it all over my body. The cool slime felt so good. I let her cover my entire body as I gradually drifted off into partial unconsciousness, listening to the muffled sounds of women chatting in darija and children splashing in the water tubs. Ahhhhh, it was heavenly and my skin felt softer than anything I had ever felt before. I couldn't stop rubbing my shoulders and thighs.

After we rinsed off with the remaining water in our buckets, brushed our teeth and towel-dried in the outer room, we got into comfy clothes and headed to the hair salon. It was 9 PM on a Sunday night and the salon was packed with other women who had just gone to hammam, painting their nails, getting their hair died with henna, and dancing with the owner of the salon to an Algerian pop video playing on the small TV overhead. I got what little hair I have trimmed and Fatima and Meryem got their nails painted. We had a couple pots of tea at the salon and then went back to Meryem's house to go to bed. I fell asleep, still rubbing my smooth skin and thinking of Amina's painful, yet pleasureful, powers.