Nomads have the best dogs

After 2 months of intensive language training and super intensive fly-extermination, I swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer and moved to the site where I will spend the next 2 years. The language is a little different here, and the flies are a little more agile, so I am trying to adapt everything I learned in training to my new, more permanent life.

I am in the province of Errachidia, in a town of about 7,000 people in the eastern High Atlas Mountains. My town, henceforth referred to as Mitown (again, due to security, I can’t mention the real name of my town), is nestled in a valley between two mountain ranges. Actually Mitown is more than one town—it’s made up of quite a few smaller towns called douars, some of which are quite far away. The furthest is a 3 hour hike through a mountain pass and into a canyon. I tried to trek there the other day with the volunteer I’m replacing but we had to turn around before reaching our destination in order to make it home by nightfall. It was a beautiful but exhausting hike through an area rarely visited by anyone other than nomads, animals and the occasional wandering Peace Corps volunteer.

 Speaking of nomads and animals—in case you were wondering, nomads have the coolest dogs. Most dogs I’ve seen in rural Morocco are mangy, flea-infested, rabid Cujos with hardened hearts and hatred in their eyes. During training, I once spent a night quivering in the corner of my room while a pack of rabid dogs wreaked havoc upon the neighborhood. I didn’t see anything, but if I had to guess it sounded like they annihilated a puppy, then a sheep, then a donkey. The puppy was obviously pretty bad (what kind of sick creatures eat a puppy?), the sheep was baaaad (get it?), but the donkey was horrendous. I don’t know if you’ve heard a donkey bray when it isn’t being attacked by rabid dogs, but they don’t have the prettiest voice to begin with. I swear I haven’t heard such frightening and unnatural sounds since Brittany Spears performed at the MTV music awards.

So when we heard dogs in the distance that were presumably prepared to protect their master’s goats, we immediately armed ourselves with rocks and prepared for battle with a million possessed, foaming-at-the-mouth Cerberuses. As the nomad greeted us with surely the last “ssalam ualakum” we would ever hear, we saw the dogs leap over the horizon. Turns out, “dogs” is a misnomer for these majestic creatures. Furry-tailed sirens perhaps, canine nymphs maybe. If all dogs go to heaven perhaps some of them come back as angels and shepherd goats with nomadic Berbers in Morocco. I don’t know, I’m not an expert on these things. But these dogs were like a cross between Lassie, a five-time Iditirod-champion husky and Penelope Cruz. For my first project I hope to train a few of these magical Lassies to teach health lessons and deliver babies. Or maybe they can just sit there and look pretty while qualified Moroccan professionals teach health lessons and deliver babies. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m sure we can use them somehow.

OK so I got a little sidetracked by the dogs, but you would too if you saw them… I think.

Anyway, back to describing Mitown. There’s a river in my backyard and the house I am moving into has 2 bedrooms, a living room, a workshop, a kitchen, 2 courtyards and satellite TV with more channels than I have ever had in the US. This is not the Peace Corps of yesteryear. That said, it’s not as affluent as it sounds either. Practically everyone has satellite TV in Morocco it’s super cheap (about $100 for a TV and a satellite—and it’s a one-time fee) , so even the poorest areas (like my province) have satellite and watch all their favorite Turkish soaps (I, too, am hopelessly addicted. Who could resist Mohannad’s bedroom eyes and five o’clock shadow? His two wives couldn’t…).

Mostly, I sit with my host family and watch the Moroccan news and Al Jazeera. The news is a great way to learn the language—they rerun each broadcast in Tamazight, French and Arabic every day, so I generally watch at least two of them if not all three. I particularly enjoy watching with my host mother, who doesn’t speak Arabic or French, so when we watch the news neither of us have any idea what’s going on.

Speaking of watching the news with my host mom…

Moroccable Moment: Introducing the Secretary of State of the United States of America: tbillclintont!

One of the great features of Tamazight is the ability to feminize any word by adding t’s to the beginning and end of said word. Usually, this is done in an unsurprising manner—i.e. arba means boy, tarbat means girl, afooloos means rooster, tafooloost means hen, etc. So you would think I would have been prepared the other night when, while watching the nightly news on Al Jazeera, my host mom pointed at the TV and exclaimed, “tbillclintont!”

Now, I’m sure many people came up with offensive names for Hillary Clinton during the campaign, but this one seems unique. First, I should point out that women do, in fact, have their own names in Tamazight, but since my host mom did not know Hillary’s name, she reached for the convenient solution. Second, my host mom did not intend any offense—if anything, she might be happy to see that tbillclintont has reached a position of power in the United States.

But of course, regardless of my host mom’s intent, it’s kind of bitterly ironic—a woman who has worked so hard to craft her own political identity despite her presidential husband; a woman who was a United States Senator and is now the Secretary of State; a woman who may very well become the first female President of the United States—without a second thought, in a living room across the Atlantic, that woman is reduced to two “t”s bookending her husband’s insurmountably larger-than-life name.

Or perhaps this is a subtle triumph for feminists everywhere. Bill Clinton’s name is usurped by the “t”s of Tamazight womanhood—upside-down phonetic  scimitars conquering a masculine language in a masculine world. In a way, Tamazight’s simplicity grammatically promotes extreme gender equality—the language would probably refer to both Hillary and Bill with one name except that it would be impossible to understand who we are talking about, thus we add the “t”s. And lest you think female words are somehow inferior to masculine ones, take a look at the very name of the language. amazigh refers to a Berber man; tamazight both refers to a Berber woman and the language spoken by 11 million Berber women and men.

Whatever the case, although he could never say so to Hillary, I bet Bill would love the name. After all, he’s happiest when surrounded by femininity.

Llay 3awn,

M’barek