On Cultural Sensitivity

There are a lot of assumptions that go into making everyday life work. When you are immersed in another culture, you try to be sensitive to that which is going on around you. So for instance when you come back from a trip to your village to find candles lit on every store counter and get home to find a dark house lit by candles, you try to be culturally sensitive. ‘O you think, this must be something to do with the religious holiday coming up.’ But when you ask you don’t understand the response. ‘Well,’ you think, ‘there must be a good reason why we are sitting around in the dark. Maybe it’s a local custom, to do with the birthday of their local saint Ben-Moullay Idris, that might make sense.’

So you spend all this time being sensitive culturally, just accepting the fact that you’ve got to sit in the dark. Even in your own room, you don’t reach for the light switch for fear of being offensive. Your sisters make sure you get a candle. You spend all this time trying to be culturally sensitive, and just going along with whatever is happening.

Of course what you are not being is conscious of the possibility that you are sitting in the dark because power went out….

The obvious can make you feel so stupid sometimes.

On Orientating

When you spend all your life next to the ocean, it becomes a part of your thinking. You orient yourself by it. You think, ‘well the ocean is that way, I can’t see it but its there, just out of site…. So that makes that way West. Therefore North is there, ish.’ And that is how you navigate, be it cities or suburbs. But when you find yourself living in a new place, hundreds of miles from the ocean, it remains part of your thinking. You think, ‘Oh the ocean is that way, I can’t see it but its over there, just out of site,… or a ways out of site I guess… so that way, wait what? No that doesn’t work. Um, well Mecca is that way ish, and… Oh! The North Star is right there at night so therefore North is there.’ Nonetheless, you still expect that the ocean is out of sight, just beyond that set of hills, over there…somewhere.

Thanksgiving

I celebrated Thanksgiving today (Sunday, November 22). Not the first time I have done it in a foreign land by any means, but the first time I was responsible for actually cooking part of the meal. The stuffing. I went to the nearest town from my Dwar (about an hour and a half ride by grand taxi) and stayed with the PCVs there and we three made a thanksgiving meal to be proud of! It even had sparkling apple cider.

On Teeth

Whoever said that Britons have bad teeth clearly had never journeyed to Morocco. For whatever reason, be it a diet with a high sugar content, or the sensibility not to blow tones of money and waste years of smiles on orthodontia, there is a noticeably high percentage of crooked, decaying or missing teeth. It serves as a reminder of that cute poster in your stateside dentist’s office, ‘you don’t have to floss all your teeth, just the ones you want to keep.’   

Womanland

The flipside to having a public ‘manland’ is that there is a ‘womanland’ that exists behind closed doors. This makes Morocco actually seem like a woman’s country. Men’s lives are lived in a flash, a blur of interaction under the sun, and then they are over. There are a lot more ways to die young when your days are not spent mostly in the home. So while men die younger, their women live on. They maintain the households, carry on the job of raising the children and do what is necessary to keep life going. So while the public day to day is mostly the man’s land, the continuity, the private year to year, is woman’s land.

Manland

Manland is the term for nearly all public places in the non-metropolitan areas of Morocco. Manland is the impression one gets when walking through town that of all the people you see, drinking coffee at a café, or talking to friends in the street not one of them is female. Except it is more then impression, it is fact. It makes you think that an entire village is comprised totally of men and they have somehow learned how to procreate in what appears to be the total absence of women.

Of course there are women, they are just not publicly visible. Their lives are much more private.

The Souq

A Souq is a weekly market held in nearly every town with more then a thousand people in which all the accoutrements necessary for Moroccan life are on sale, from tomatoes to ducks and from skis to TVs. The Souq is the all-purpose mall of Morocco.

What is most interesting about the Souq is that it is a storyland. Whereas the American consumer can surmise that they are the first person to own a product and before they bought it from wherever, it was on a container ship from China where it was made, the Moroccan merchandise gives no such sterile story. You wander from mountain to mountain wondering how these jackets came to be here and what country these brand names are from. It seems as though once a week, a magical American landfill, not used since the 80’s is unearthed and put on display, enticing customers with dusty GameBoys, Plastation 2’s, faux impressionist paintings, random car parts and mountains of clothes waiting to be dug through before unearthing their discount treasures, dusty jellaba and ten matching red laCoste sweat suits.

It is important to note that everything on sale and some foreigners who have only been studying the language for one month may have made some incorrect comments, which may have given the wrong impression that, rather then liking FC Barcelona, led one vendor in particular to think that we wanted to buy the shirt off his back… At least he quoted a good price on account of it being sweaty.

That brings us to another subject, which is that all Souq items must be bargained for. It is a truly foolish person who agrees to pay either the first or second price quoted, or who believes a vendor when they declare, ‘But I bought it for Dh 9.50, if I sell it for less then Dh 10 I’ll lose money’ about a Dh 2 bar of soap.

Bargaining, it seems, is no small skill to master.