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Family Life

April 12, 2009

When picking study abroad programs for this year, homestays were one of my required features—I wasn’t going to go half a world away, I reasoned, to live in a dorm with other American students and speak English all the time. At the same time, the prospect of living with total strangers was also one of my biggest pre-departure fears, compounded by not knowing anything about my potential hosts. In Spain my fears proved baseless: My host mother Nieves—a middle-aged single woman—was fantastic; our personalities meshed beautifully, we talked all the time, and I was very happy with her. One semester down, one to go.

This previous positive experience moderated my pre-Morocco anxiety, but a good-sized pit remained in my stomach. And not without reason: The differences of family structure, standard of living, culture, and language and would be very different from what I was used to in the states or what I experienced in Spain. This entry is dedicated to these differences and what I have learned from them so far.

As far as I know, I live with a fairly typical Moroccan family. My host father, Mohammed, is retired, though he used to work in health administration. Amina, my host mother, works as a nurse, though it can’t be many hours, because she’s at home most of the time. Of my four siblings, three are older than me—a weird feeling after growing up as the oldest. Badr (32) and Samir (25) both work and don’t seem to be home very often, and Nadia (29), my one sister, does not leave the house much. Hussein, the youngest, is thirteen and goes to school. Most of this I’ve learned through observation and through conversation with Badr, who speaks a little bit of English. There is also Gwin, the family dog, a friendly character who briefly took to following me to school in the morning and who still accosts me every time I come home, expecting a belly rub.

Though my Moroccan family only has one more member than my real family, it somehow seems large. This might have something to do with stream of visitors (at least one a day) who always seem to be showing up—sometimes just for coffee, sometimes for the day, sometimes to spend the night. Moroccan houses are conveniently set up for impromptu overnight stays: Couches line the walls of most rooms, and removing the back cushions converts them into beds. Add a blanket or two (the Moroccan nights can be cold) and you’re set. To my knowledge, there’s only one bed in the house, which is in Amina and Mohammed’s room. The rest of us sleep on the couches.

Last semester, four months of line-dried clothes made me realize for the first time how much I appreciate clothes dried in a drier. After being in Morocco for six weeks, I now know that, if forced to choose, I would happily give up a drier for a flush toilet. My homestay has a Turkish toilet; if you don’t know what that means, Google it. You’ll get the idea. On the bright side, I at least have a shower—it might not have a shower head, but at least I have hot running water coming out of a pipe over my head. That’s more than some students have. The house itself is one floor of an old Andalusian-style home that has been divided into multiple units and whose age seems to be catching up with it. The rooms surround a central patio, and the house is open to the fresh air. My family doesn’t have a computer, but there are at least three televisions which seem to be on most of the day, though how much my family actually watches them is anyone’s guess. Needless to say, Moroccan TV-watching habits have been a topic of much discussion among the students in the program.

On the issue of culture, I could go in many different directions, so I think it best to focus on something fundamental to all cultures: food. Moroccans generally eat from communal dishes. One large dish in the middle of the table will usually contain meat, with smaller dishes of “salads”—a delicious mix of eggplant, herbs and spices; a kind of salsa of tomatoes, onions, and green peppers; olives in various forms—surrounding it. Universal at all meals is khobz, bread, which one tears into small pieces and uses to scoop up bits of the other dishes. If it took me a while to get used to the Turkish toilet, it took me forever to become proficient at communal eating: For the first couple weeks I was continually dripping food all over myself and the low kitchen table, and I was sufficiently inept with the new “utensil” that my diet consisted mostly of bread. Happily, I have since improved. The Moroccan eating schedule resembles the Spanish (breakfast when you wake up, lunch around one, coffee or tea around six or seven in the evening, dinner between 9:30 and 10:30), though thankfully the Moroccans restrain themselves more in quantity. This can still be difficult sometimes—Amina is an amazing cook.

Before Spain, I had taken two and a half years of college Spanish, and my biggest obstacle to communication was confidence (or lack thereof); before Morocco, I managed about two months of Standard Arabic, which would still only be partially useful, as Moroccans speak a rather distinct Arabic dialect. And while many Moroccans speak French, I only know enough to ask if the unfortunate individual speaks English. Lots of people speak Spanish in the north, but Rabat is many kilometers south of that region. Thus, communicating with my family has been a major challenge, involving my limited Fus’ha (Standard Arabic), even more limited Darija (Moroccan Arabic), butchered French, a smattering of English, and abundant gestures and facial expressions. It’s frustrating not to be able to have as much as a casual conversation with my family—they’re nice people, and I wish I could interact with them more. At the same time, I am impressed at just how much we can communicate without language. It may not be complex intellectual discussions, but it gets the job done.

That covers the basics of life in an average Moroccan home. By Western standards my family doesn’t have much, but in Morocco they are somewhere in the middle class. They don’t have many things Americans take for granted, and I hope that I don’t seem to complain excessively. I knew coming into this semester that I would be roughing it a little, and even though it’s difficult sometimes I try to view everything as a learning experience. My family may not have the amenities I’m used to, but they are caring, generous people, and when they tell you that their home is your home, they truly mean it. That’s worth more than Wi-Fi, a drier, and a flush toilet put together.

Photo 1: A street near my house.
Photo 2: Gwin, the family dog.
Photo 3: Couscous, the quintessential Moroccan dish, served every Friday in many Moroccan homes, including mine.

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