A Village in the Atlas

Last Sunday we loaded up the ISA bus with sugar, tea, oil, couscous, and clothes to bring to a small Amazigh (Berber) village in the mountains outside of Ifrane. This was a joint effort between a group of American ISA students and facilitators, and some of the Moroccan students in the English department. Early in the morning all thirty of us piled into our rickety old bus and headed off. When it is just us Americans traveling together, the bus rides are relatively quiet and peaceful. However, that is not the case when about fifteen rowdy Moroccan girls are thrown into the mix. Soon, our old bus was swaying and bumping to the music as one girl after the other left their seats to join the dancers in the center aisle. The driver cranked up the volume, and soon we may as well have been in a dance hall. Nearly all of the girls knew traditional Moroccan dance, which is quite different from classic belly dance although it uses many of the same shimmying and shaking hip and booty movements. Even the driver, sick of being left out of the dance party, stopped the bus so as to get down with the girls, and proceeded to shake it like Shakira.

       After a while Fatima Zara grabbed the mic and started rambling away in a mix of Darija and English, explaining that if she stopped talking she would have a headache. Apparently this preventative method was not limited only to talking however, for she soon began singing her own rendition of Fergie’s My Hump. I never thought I would witness a proper (looking, at least) hijab wearing woman singing about her lovely lady lumps, but Fatima Zara is another brand of crazy and would proceed to break many stereotypes before the day was over.

       Eventually we turned off of the highway and onto a narrow dirt track which led to the village. Several times when the bus lurched and rocked over creek beds and ditches I thought the end had come, and that the last thing I would see would be the bus’s dirty green shag carpeted floor. Eventually, however, we reached the village alive and injury free. 

       The village was merely a series of tents and cement huts scattered about the wide open and rocky foothills, and was home to only thirty families, although we saw maybe half that. I am not sure exactly what I had hoped to find there. I think part of me expected to encounter the generosity and kindness that I have witnessed and read about in impoverished Native American communities. The stories my dad read to me as a child were often about starving Indian families who would share any scrap of food so that no one would eat less than another. Naturally I was shocked and let down when the villagers started bickering and fighting over who should receive the biggest bag of goods. These were people who had nothing and were now being presented with food that could be the next meal for their children. Naturally greed took over as each mother tried fiercely to win the most for her family. Yet still this attitude disappointed me.

       Because of this squabble we were forced to leave the village early. We delivered the last of the supplies to some families along the way and headed home. Although my first encounter with an Amazigh village was not as fantastic as I was hoping, it was still an eye opening experience for us as well as the Moroccan girls, and allowed us to spend time with each other and to bond over the shared experience.