Morocco Time

“The North African mule talks always of his mother’s brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.”
- Clifford Geertz

“That which is called firmness in a king is called obstinacy in a donkey.”
- John Erskine

“Fear can make a donkey attack a lion.”
- Arab Proverb

As some of you may have heard, Barbaro was euthanized this morning. What makes it even sadder is this statement from his owner:

Gretchen Jackson admitted during a May 24 news conference that the couple may have broken the golden rule of horse ownership.

“I’m very afraid so,” she said when asked if they loved Barbaro. “One of the things that one is supposed to do when one becomes a horse owner is to not fall in love with the animal, because it’s so painful when something like this happens. Yes, we’ve experienced this before to a greater and lesser degree.

“It’s part of life. There are losses and births again. With each loss, we have to pull ourselves together and look to the future of another great racehorse.”

You know, people who own horses for racing suck, and I’m not fooled by Gretchen’s “We loved him” bullshit. What they loved was the potential for stud fees, which some estimated could be as high as $30 million. Like Kevin Noonan wrote,

“So why did we care?

Maybe it’s because people understand that animals are dependent on us and, at the same time, vulnerable to us. That was true in Barbaro’s case, as humans exposed him to the dangerous sport that cost him his life and humans spent countless hours and millions of dollars trying to save that life.”

While I’m at it, people who own any kind of animal who think of it purely as meat or a machine (I’m talking to you, Moroccan donkey owners) suck.

Reading Cat in Rabat’s hilarious description of neighborhood hanuts, I was reminded of my own friendly hanuts back in Rabat – I miss those guys. As Cat points out, 99.8% of hanuts are owned by Berbers. These Berbers are almost always Soussis, therefore speaking Tachelheit as their primary language, not darija. Before my husband left me to my own devices in Agdal (foolish man!) he went around to each shop in the neigborhood and asked them to please “take care” of his wife, and get her anything she needed. This included a cafe/restaurant, a juice/patisserie shop, a small hanut, and a big hanut. Each one, owned and staffed by Berbers, was quite amenble – I suspect this was a combination of part Amazigh fellowship, part glee at future monetary gain from the tarroumit. (female foreigner) However, they proved helpful to me in many ways, as the following story will illustrate:

A few weeks into my stay, I realized I had an unexpected roommate. I had stupidly left a plate of half-eaten “Vietnamese” food on the table, and returned about a half hour later to find that the plate was clean. Hm. I checked the room, and discovered that each grain of rice and scrap of chicken had been laboriously transferred to a convenient hoarding spot behind one of my couch cushions. [insert gagging noises here] Totally disgusted, I dismantled the living room, which was no small feat – Moroccans are diabolical in their construction of huge couch sections with impossible stretchy covers. But I digress. I arranged the couch sections in a manner designed to route the intruder towards the street door, and prepared to do battle. As I lifted up the wooden sections that supported the couch, I spotted the enemy. I’m an animal lover, but rat poop, rat food storage, and rat chewing are too much to be borne by a civilized person. Having only a broom as my weapon, I attempted to “scare” the rat towards the door. Hah – a miserable failure, as this was a street-tough city rat. Once it tried to take a stroll up my leg, I decided I’d had enough. So had the rat, because he managed to squeeze through the couch cushions to my kitchen, and then out onto the terrace. The last glimpse I had of it was a fat butt disappearing down the drain.

I went to complain immediately to my neighbor, Fatna. She said that it was an old building, and had always had rats – she kept a concrete block over her drain to keep them from coming up. Gah. That night, I put a wooden scrubbing plank over the hole, and on top of that, a big bucket full of water. Did I mention that rats are strong? All through the night, I heard bang after bang on the bottom of the plank, and chewing, chewing, chewing. After a few nights of this, I decided, “Enough!”

Off I went to the big hanut. I realized I had no words for “mouse,” “rat,” “pest,” or anything remotely helpful. I made hand signs to indicate something crawling around on the floor, and said it was bad. “Ir-ha!” (bad) They showed me ant traps. Trying again, I held hands up to my head and made squeaky noises. Mass hilarity. Inspiration struck me, and I ran out the door to the friendly (female!) French butcher next door, who spoke excellent English. She understood immediately, and said something to the boy who’d followed me from the shop. A light bulb went on, and he dashed back into the shop to confer with the owner. In his normal droll fashion, he said he had none, but told the boy where to get them. Money changed hands, and off he went on his bike. A few minutes later, he returned, with mouse traps. I looked at them in slight dismay – the rat I’d seen would probably think they were laughable. I said, “Kebir, kebiiiiiir!” and held my hands about a foot apart. [Exaggeration, but I'd learned from the best of them - Moroccans!] Understanding dawned in his eyes, and he asked me for a few more dirhams for the larger traps. After more waiting, he was back. I asked for a brief demo on how they worked – never had rats before, you know – and I was quite leery of them. My fear was not eased by a test performed on a carrot, so I convinced the shop boy that I simply had to have a home installation visit. He knew where I lived, of course – the whole neighborhood kept tabs on me – and said he’d be over in 15 minutes. When he arrived, he very efficiently told me what to place in the traps (some stinky kiri cheese that I left in the fridge too long), where to place them (along the line of the wall, where the rats run), and what to do once one is caught in the trap (submerge trap and rat in a bucket of water – kills the rat quicker).

The rat was caught that very night, and I danced a little dance of morbid triumph. That was the best part of living in a Moroccan neighborhood – if something like that had happened here, do you think the guys at KMart would drive over to my house to set up rat traps? I think not.