In Fez, there is an amazing, almost magical, place. This is the American Fondouk, an animal hospital founded in the 1920s by Sidney Haines Coleman, who cared about the health of the working animals of Morocco. Almost a century later, the Fondouk - which means hotel in Arabic - still treats for free thousands of animals every year. Lots of working animals - mares and donkeys -, but also cats and dogs (though I guess they didn’t treat many of those in the 1920s).
Of course, I don’t have to tell you that the existence of such a place is both fantastic and weird, in a country where the public hospitals are awful, and where most of the people don’t have health insurance.
When our cats needed to be vaccinated, that’s where I wanted to go. Because it’s free, obviously, and also because it sounded like a strange place. Also because Paul Bowles, an American writer that I love, worked there in the 1930s.
And once there, I wasn’t disappointed - we even saw a mare having her teeth cleaned.
Of course, we left a little something in that box. Because most clients of the hospital are very poor.
Read the history of the American Fondouk here.
And they have a blog too.
Despite the heavy rains, despite our very busy schedule, despite the fact that our car doesn’t like the dirt roads, the mud, the rocks, we had to go back to Ouled Mgatel one last time before going back to France for Christmas.
The main reason was this :
We had to return the cats to their beloved Ouled Emgatel – because they missed so much Bachir, Fouad, and the thousand insects living in the house and in the garden.
So we put the cats in a box, we put the box in the car, and we left Fez for our country.
We realized that we wouldn’t be able to drive to our house. The road was wet, often covered with mud.
The car was parked on the top of the hill, Fred grabbed the box with the cats inside, and we walked down the path that leads to our house.
And, despite the rain, despite our life that, despite our car, that often grows tired to bring us here, Ouled Mgatel is still generous with us.
Like this path.
And this agave.
This fava bean field.
Those olive trees, that moutain.
and this beautiful empty house
welcomed us, soothed us.
(Of course, on our way back to Fez, the car got stuck in the mud - but the children of Ouled Mgatel, and their teachers, helped us out.)
I am stuck in a hotel in Fez (not the nicest hotel by the way), and I have to go to work (can you imagine ?). The rain won’t stop and keeps me far from home.
But my mind often wanders north of the city, in Ouled Mgatel.
And if I had wings, maybe I would see…
the turkeys bossing everybody
a gecko haunting the house at night
the silent inhabitants of the garden do their job
the cabbages and the lettuces I sowed before the rain grow, grow…
our little neighbor and his sheep, too close to our house if you ask me (they love our garden)
and the cat Mioche, of course, being his own self.
Watching the herd all morning can get boring.
So, they made this.
For a few months, since the end of the harvest, and that the fields are no longer off-limits to the animals, Smain and Houria have been spending their morning on our land, with their herds. They come early, at 7AM – which, given the, huh, jet-lag, are really 6AM for them -, and leave before the sun gets too hot, at around 11.
Houria is our neighbors’ daughter, and has to take care of a dozen of cows. Smain’s herd is much smaller since he only has… one cow.
This cow is very important.
Smain is Bachir’s younger brother. Bachir is the keeper of our house, and also often a worker. Their family is poor. I mean, most people in the area could be considered as poor, according to European standards. The reality is that a lot of people here are doing fine. That is, when they have a piece of land, which means wheat, hay, and maybe a few olive trees. When they have big farms, and tractors.
But Bachir’s family have none of this. In that case, men just wait for a job in somebody else’s fields, and sometimes, there is no work at all – and in Bachir’s family, “men” means himself, he’s 18,and his older brother, who spend a lot of time in Casablanca, trying to earn more money; their father is very old, and can’t work a lot.
Thanks to some microcredit, Bachir was able to loan the few thousands dirhams he needed to buy a cow. And a cow, as I said, is important. It means milk, whey, butter. It means that the family is getting richer, because of Bachir’s hard work.
With only one cow to watch, Smain’s job is much easier than Houria’s.
Actually, none of them is stressed out because of the job. They play with Houria’s little cousins, in the shade of our house.(link). They chat for hours. They fall asleep in the field – and then I understand why our reeds have been eaten…
And sometimes, they make a swing.
Climbing in the tree was a lot of fun too…
When we adopted our cats, we were hoping that they would eat a lot.
Of mice.
Four months later, I must say that they’ve come a long way since the dry cat food they ate in their first home (a nice house by the way, you can visit it here), until their plates of Ouled Mgatel.
Because here’s our secret – shocking, maybe, to American ears – we don’t feed our cats meat. Or any kind of canned/dry cat food. They eat a of eggs, and whatever food is left from our meals – including, sometimes, vegetables : and they like it !
Don’t worry though, they eat a lot of proteins, that they find both in the house and in the garden. They swallow flies and ants. Hunt mice – but they’re more difficult to catch. Scare to death spiders and wasps. Choke sometimes swallowing some delicious earwigs.
Some people may find this disguting. But I say : it’s useful. Much better than insecticide.
And also : they protect us.
The other morning, I found at the bottom of the stairs a big scolopendra. Dead. Killed – and a little chewed – by our brave protectors.
Since that day, I respect my cats. And if you knew the scolopendras that live here, you’d admire cats too.
Let’s say that scolopendras are as charming as scorpions, except that they’re bigger – no, longer. They’re black, with yellow legs, disgusting. They run really fast, and they’re difficult to kill (bravo, cats). And last but not least, they bite, like wasps.
Sorry, I don’t have any photo of scolopendras, they scare me too much.
But if you really want to know what they look like, take a peek here – don’t be scared !- on this wonderful website on Moroccan animals and plants (it's a the bottom of the page, on the right).
They ate all my melons… vandalized the garden… they wander around the house, clucking war songs… trample the sand in our ponds… showing their creepy faces in the fields…
And then they decided to sit on the bench, in the courtyard.
Where will I find them next time ? In my bedroom ? Rummaging through my stuff, or taking a bath in our bathroom ?
They gather under the olive tree to establish their plan of attack. A piece of advice for you : don’t look at them in the eyes.
When we built the water treatment ponds, we didn’t expect so many visitors.
First there were the huge frogs, that dived into the tanks and desperately tried to get out.
It wasn’t long before the dogs also found this unexpected spring, them who are always hungry and often very thirsty too.
A lot of birds came and enjoyed the water and the insects. There are field larks of course, but also a lot of other species, that fly away so fast that we can’t get to know them.
Hundreds of pacific bees colonized the wet sand of the tanks. I said, pacific.
But our last visitors are the most surprising ones. It’s a family of turkeys, with the mom and its dozen of babies. They came regularly and slosh in the water. We don’t know where they are from, but we don’t ask them any question, and we let them go away in the fields when they want.
I live in a house made of mud. There is straw in the walls, earth under my feet, reeds above my head.
But I’m very lucky. The house is as beautiful as the landscape in which it was born.
And my kitchen window opens in the middle of a wheat field.
I have to keep an open mind though. Strange things happen. Wheat grows on the roof. Birds make their nests under the beams. In fact, the whole house is a big nest, and the song of the birds wakes us every day, which is very nice. Earthworms, yes it happens, make holes in the soil of the bathroom. Well, it happened once, and it’s happening again, because the floor is too wet. It rained a lot this winter, and it seems that certain parts of the house just can’t get over it. I guess the Moroccan summer should definitely solve the problem of earthworms.
The house has a lot of inhabitants, besides me and Fred, I mean. Lots of insects. It was a little scary at first – although the spiders here aren’t too big don’t worry. But now when I see some strange insect that don’t exist in Europe, I just run and get my camera.
Some animals are not welcomed at all. Mice of course. They make their home in the roofs and in the walls and love the pasta we bought from the supermarket in Fez The walls are made of mud bricks, remember, and it can become a maze for the mice. We told Bachir about that and he said it was mushkil (a problem, you guessed). We asked him what to do. Get a cat of course. So we got two of them. Mice should relocate very soon, we hope.
An adobe house, it’s alive. It moves a little. It gets older and changes every day. And that’s good, because here you can’t get bored. Noticing the smallest changes, new animals, new plants. When you’ve spent your life in houses made of concrete, - like most of us – it’s an endless amazement. And when there are problems –the above mentioned mice, a leak in the roof, something that collapses a little, it’s so easy to fix. No need for any carpenter, or mason. The kids of our neighbors know how to do it. In fact, everybody here know how to build a house, because everybody does it all the time. That how life goes here. A fourteen-year-old can build his own house.
We moved here to feel more alive. I guess it’s working !
Since we had built the water treatment ponds, a lot of toads -African toads, that cannot live in water - a little depressive maybe, were diving in the tanks. We fished them, and let them dry under the sun.
We found this little turtle in a crate of plants that we brought back from Meknes two weeks ago. Did climb her way into the crate? No, she can't be that good a climber . Did one of our friend put it here, to make a joke? No, it sounds unlikely. Or maybe, was she buried in one of the flower-pots, sleeping until the end of her hibernation? Probably, because, as soon as we found her, she only wanted to hide under a rock or dive into the hay.
The turtle doesn't like parsley...
