A Camel
Not a real camel, of course. This one is barely 4” tall, fashioned from coat hanger wire covered with purple felt, stitched together with blue thread and adorned with green yarn. It is a treasured gift.
Like the Cheshire Cat, Ahmed’s face vanishes into his grin. He is our 25 year old guide to the Chicaga Dunes in the Moroccan Sahara.
We meet in Ourazate, the Hollywood of the Sahara where movies requiring a lot of sand are filmed and even the authentic coral-colored buildings rising from the red sand amid rigid palms look like part of a movie set.
Amed has a weakness for awful jokes (remember why the chicken crossed the road?) In between giggles, he talks about his former Belgium girlfriend, going to nightclubs and his older brothers who were required to marry and have children.
Morocco is a religiously moderate and modernizing country, still it is conservative by our standards. The tourist industry provides a narrow, unstable bridge between the modern, secular world and another rooted in a religious and conservative past. Young people like Amed can get stranded in the middle, their fate determined by economic vagaries. Generational tensions occur everywhere but are magnified in developing countries where differences are more extreme.
Beyond the last dusty town, an ocean of sand stretches toward Algeria, interrupted by lumpy hummocks of sand coalescing around gaunt tamarisks fed by invisible springs. We fishtail between the hummocks following tracks which the wind erases at will to be replaced with new sets of tracks nearby depending on the settling of the sand.
Amed has planned a picnic. While gathering sticks from the hummocks to make a small fire, we spy a bright pointillist dot in the dun colored landscape – three young Berber women stationed at a remote well hoping to sell homemade trinkets to tourists happening along the obscure tracks.
They swiftly veil their faces as we approach. Undaunted, we clumsily invite them to lunch using hand gestures and a few Spanish words. Two readily accept while the third hurries away with the donkey to feed her infant left in their hidden camp.
The two Tourdas – aunt and 15 year old niece – settle in around our tiny campfire, soon dropping their veils and easily chatting with Yasim and Ahmed who translate.
We learn that Tourda, the elder at 30 is divorced. Morocco’s relatively progressive laws protecting women are often swamped by customs which penalize them, especially in rural areas. However, we weren’t about to interrogate Tourda about her personal life even though she admitted to her marital status in a frank, off-hand way.
Susan is keen to learn how to arrange the filmy haik she’d bought at a bazaar. The haik is the traditional women’s dress of Morocco although women in large cities often opt for western clothing. It consists of a large piece of cloth, often wonderfully colored and textured, wound about the body in the manner of a Roman toga from which it derived after the Roman invasion several thousand years ago. With fluid movements, the Tourdas speedily drape and twist the fabric around Susan body amid a lot of giggling.
While the chicken roasts, Amed dices tomatoes, cucumbers and onions for the traditional middle eastern salad served on a large communal tray. Instead of his usual jeans and tee-shirt, he opts this morning for a traditional blue djellaba and black turban. We expect he is attempting to make our experience feel somehow more authentic but without much real effect because he remains the light-hearted, modern boy in sneakers he is.
We dig in to the salad – left hand only as custom mandates because the right hand is considered contaminated. It’s easy to feel connected to people when sharing food so intimately. And, smiles make up in spades for the want of a shared language.
At the end of the meal, we send our guests off with the leftover chicken and the remains of the salad for their animals. Before they go, the Tourdas dig into their bag of trinkets and hand Susan and me each one of their tiny camels. Then they so quickly and thoroughly fade into the desert they might have been a brilliantly-colored mirage.