Life in Ouled Mgatel: 4 mariages and a convalescent

We waited the end of the heatwave to go back to Ouled Mgatel. There, we found our house very clean (thank you Fouad). We haven't begun the work yet; all the mudbricks are waiting for us in the garden. It's little weird to be there, in our mudbrick home, after all those months of living in the city. The beauty of the place is always a good surprise, but the empty shelves, the mould on our books and the kitchen, that haven't been used in 8 months now - except for the mint tea Bachir and Fouad drink everyday -, all of this makes me a little sad.






We were there on the day after Turia's wedding. Turia is one of Mohammed's daughters. This year, 4 of Mohammed's children get married. That's a little strange, given that it costs a lot of money - for the party (it lasts 2 days) and for the dowries. And it was a little strange, this day after the big party, when the bride is still in her family - and hasn't been in a room alone with her husband . On that night, she was going to her new home. For the first time, she was going to spend the night in a strange house. She was leaving to live forever with her new family - and a husband that, of course, her father chose for her.


But Turia seemed OK. She was dressed like a city girl - a light veil on her hair, pants matching her t-shirt, and heels. In one of the rooms of the house, there was everything she owned - the gifts, and what her father bought for her with the dowry: a bed, "farash" (Moroccan couches), a mirror, glasses and dishes, a blender, and lots, lots of tablecloths and blankets. There was also her luggage, full of clothes I had never seen her wear.

Her four sisters, the one that is already married, the one that is getting married in a month, the one that is getting married in a few years, and the one that will never get married, were inspecting the gifts and packing the luggage. Dunya, who will be married in one month, and who is much younger than Turia, was very chic too. She'll become soon a city girl, since her soon-to-be husband is living in Fès. Huria, the youngest of the 5 sisters, loses 2 sisters at the same time, but she gains two sisters-in-lawn, next month.

Abdelali seemed to be doing perfectly well. Life's smiling at him right now: the politics, a new tractor, and the land. And at the end of Ramadan, he's getting married with a girl from Fez - a striking symbol of his success, since usually the girls that grew up in the city don't marry guys from the country.



And what about our convalescent? It's Bachir, of course. He just had some tests done in Rabat - hmm, quite superficial I'm afraid - but apparently everything's fine. He still can't work, but he's getting better and better.






If somebody knows the name of that tree, which grew up very very fast, and is apparently in love with the earth of Ouled Mgatel - hmm, the same cannot be said of the other trees we planted - , I'm interested. Fred put a few seeds in a small container with some wet cotton, but somehow I doubt it's going to work...

Life in Fez : What we miss

Just a few photos of our Moroccan countryside, to show you what I missed this year, with the flood and all - watching the wheat grow, the people harvest their fields, seeing the countryside change.
I remember last year, each time we would come home from Fez, we would watch with amazement every little change in the landscape, every detail, every shade of green.

This is what our house looks like in April :

photo Nathalie Cardoso

Here's our land, with Bachir's wheat on it, in May :



And then, the harvest. In that field, the little stacks of wheat were hand-harvested - one of the hardest and most painful types of work people have to do here. Usually though, if they have the money, they use machines. They can't use them in that field.

A Glass of Tea in Ouled Mgatel

Tea glasses, teapots, and trays. Made from the gray earth of the fields of Ouled Mgatel.

A lot of teapots in fact – those kids must have been very thirsty when they made this tiny tea set. Watching the cows and the sheep can get very dull.

Do you want to take a closer look ?

And since wishes are often granted in Ouled Mgatel, real glasses of milk with apple juice and real cookies were soon served.

And when the little shepherds play, their herds scatters in the fields.

Read more about those children.

Busy summer in Ouled Mgatel

The houses have been whitewashed… (Not ours though. Not yet.)

Strange things have appeared in the fields.

That’s how they store wheat in Ouled Mgatel

Mohammed has built a house for his newly acquired tractor…

And Smaïn is still waiting for his cow to eat all the capers bushes.

Two kids, twelve cows, and a swing

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…

... as well as landing on the ground.

Caper Season in Morocco

For than 10 days now, it’s been more than 40° c. in the countryside. From time to time the Chergui, the hot wind coming from the Sahara desert, blows and makes all attempt of leaving the house very difficult.

Fortunately, the straw and the earth of our mudbrick house are very insulating. It’s easier to fall asleep in our house than in an appartment in Fez, because it keeps us cool.

Our garden suffers because of that crazy heat. In spite of our water tank and our water-treatment ponds, we’re running out of water. The ponds are empty, it’s so hot that the water evaporate instantly.

Only one plant seems to be adapted to this climate.

Caper trees do nothing like the other plants here and grow at the moment when everything else dies. Once the wheat harvest is over, small shrubs appear in the fields, and grow bigger every week. It seems that the less water there is, the more caper trees are happy.

Oddly enough, the caper trees grow in parallel lines, as if they had been planted by man – which had been maybe the case, a long time ago.

The inhabitants of Ouled Mgatel benefit from this indestructible plant. They don’t eat it though.

Our neighbors gather the capers

Caper trees make new caper every week. But do you know what are capers anyway ? They are not the fruit of the caper tree, but its flower buds. The flowers are beautiful, and they have a very nice fragrance.

People here gather the capers when they are big, much bigger than we’re used to see them in the jar in the European supermarket. Then the capers are sold at the market. This year, peasants get 15 dirhams (1,40 euro) for a kilogram of caper. Then, the capers of Ouled Mgatel (and of the all area of course !) begin their trip around the world; they are sold in China. There, it seems, people like big capers.

Believe me, capers are hard to pick, mainly because of the big thorns. Plus, they are only a few capers on each branch, which makes for a long picking. And the picking has to be done every week.

I really wanted to pick some, because I had this idea of jars of capers in my cupboard, and pizzas, and pastas… Well, I certainly was too confident. And I gave up, after 20 minutes of painful picking. Here is my (bad) harvest :

Yeah, I know, it’s disappointing, even if, contrary to my neighbors, I only picked the small ones, that is, the ones closer to the thorns…

I put my meager harvest in a jar, with a mixture of vinegar, salt, and water, but I won’t give you the recipe before I try to eat it !

A Crowded Garden

It's been a few months since we begun our garden, and it's beginning to get crowded.

The majestic sunflowers are in charge of welcoming our visitors.

But if you look at the ground you'll see other treasures...

Like the gold of the zucchini flower...

Cucumbers, with little thorns, but delicious !

... and the cantaloupe, that has all the sun it needs, but demands more water every day.

And if you search very hard, you can find a tiny turtle, eating some cucumber - actually, we don't know if we regularly find the same turtle, or if there are plenty of them in the field surronding our house.

To protect all those treausures from the hungry cows and goats, Bachir and Fouad have built this fence with reeds.

An Oasis in Ouled Mgatel

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.

Harvest

Well, it has been fun to live surrounded by all that wheat.

Remember, it was in March.

And three weeks ago.

But it's over now.

On Mohammed's farm and at the top of the hill the piles of haystacks get bigger every day.

The animals are finally allowed to eat what is left in the fields.

At our house, sunflowers took over and the haystack have been put in the courtyard, maybe waiting for, who knows, become houses some day.

A House in Ouled Mgatel and No Car

Why were we deprived of our car? Oh, yes, right, the Customs. It’s been a real problem for us since we moved in Morocco. I’ll spare you the details, as it is very complicated. The bottom line is, we had to leave our car home, and were not authorized to use it.

Well, by an amazing stroke of luck the problem was fixed on last Tuesday – a miracle really, since Fred left the day after to play in a festival in Poland, and that he couldn’t have left Morocco if the situation hadn’t been resolved. So now we can keep our car until July

Living in Ouled Mgatel without a car can seem difficult. And it was a little. For us. Because here nobody’s got a car. And when people have money, they usually buy tractors, not cars.

People here don’t travel that much. Every week, they go to the market to sell their crop or to buy food. They also have to get their electricity cards in a nearby town – yes, it’s the way it works here: it works with electricity like it does with cell phones. I guess the electric company doesn’t trust the people to pay their bills – and they’re probably right. Every once in a while, people visit family in Fez, or go see the doctor. But that’s all. Young men without a wife travel more often that the others; women rarely leaves their village, and young girls never do. The daughter of our neighbor, Houria, 14, has never even seen the road – she only knows Ouled Mgatel and Ouled Tahar, which is 1 kilometer away, and the dirt road between the 2 villages.

For three weeks we weren’t allowed to use our car, but we didn’t actually leave it at home all the time. The dirt roads here aren’t exactly considered as police territory – for many reasons, hum, I’ll explain why another time. So we drove to the main road, to Lotar Hmouchi (the Mouchi plain), where we hitchhiked.

As you can see, there are no trees. It makes for really hot wait for a cab, believe me !

I thought it would be very unpleasant, but, apart from the fact that we had to travel light and that we couldn’t bring as many things we wanted from Fez, it was not. We rarely waited for more than 10 minutes before somebody stopped. There are a lot of taxis on this road. Some of them are clandestine taxis, and it can be an adventure to take one of them - like 4 people in the front seat (3 is the norm for taxis). Sometimes, people just stop and give you a lift, like this local politician with a big car that drove us to Fez last week.

Feels better like this !

The dogs of Ouled Mgatel

You've certainly noticed them in our photos. The dogs are part of our life here. At first, however, I didn't like dogs, and Fred neither. But, you see, the dogs here are nothing like French dogs (or English dogs, or American dogs, I suppose...). They don't rub themselves against you. Nobody talks to them, except for telling them "go away !". Nobody touches them. They never go into the houses. They're not big babies. But instead:

1. They bark every time a stranger approaches the house (and that "stranger" can be the neighbor's little boy...) They are guard dogs, they live in packs, and their job is to protect the farm. They are really great for doing this, they can feel people a hundred miles away. Well, at night, it can be very annoying, all those concerts of barking !

2. They are always VERY VERY hungry. They eat mainly chunks of bread. So they are VERY VERY skinny. It gives them some kind of hyena look, not really reassuring I agree, but don't worry, they are completely harmless (well, if you're our friend...). According to Fred, who knows a lot of things about science, for the dogs, we're part of their pack, and they see us as other dominant dogs. So they fear us, and obey.

We haven't chosen to have dogs. THEY chose us. Mohammed, our neighbor, has 6 or 7 of them, some very strong dogs, and 2 of them regularly spend time with us.

The dogs Miloud and Lisa wonder when we'll decide to share our meal with them

Even if nobody ever calls the dogs by their names, they have names, strangely, because they have IDs. So I introduce you to our two more faithful companions, "Miloud" aka "Shfar" ("thief", he's not always very polite) and "Lisa", the old bitch, brave and noisy defender of our house.

When she's not hunting down strangers, she sometimes cuddles our orange tree, that surely appreciate her help, because it's been difficult for it to adapt to the earth of our garden.

And then, because she's too hot, she dives in the wheatfield... and it's pure happiness.

Making Olive Oil

The neighbors invited us for lunch. We were sitting on the bench, waiting for the potatoes tajine and the eggs the women prepared for us, when Mohammed came in the room, all covered with some black and sticky substance. He told us that it was olives, so we got back to our house, got the camera, and there we were, taking dozens of photographs of the mill, of the workers, and of the mule.

Mohammed's farm

We took these photographs before the rain... it explains the wonderful sun on the pics.

The mill

Mohammed uses his mill for his own olives, but he also leases it to other farmers. That was the case that day.
The olives were harvested in November. Then they were put in big bags with some salt. Apparently, they can wait there as long as you want, they can be any time.

1. The mule grinds the olives.

Let's go ! Watch it !


2. The olives are squeezed

The olive puree is put in some kind of bags made of rush, which are piled on the press.

The press. A glass of tea is hidden in the picture...

Of course the boss is in charge !

It's the third time that these olives are pressed, so they need boiling water to give all their oil.

That photo of the oil coming out of the rush bags is kind of creepy... that 's because of the flash I think. But be reassured, the oil is really delicious, Mohammed even drank a glass of it to show us how good it is...

Did you find it?

Outside the mill, just the fields, and a pile of feytor

Later, Mohammed will sell the feytor, the residue of the olives. It is a very good combustible.