Baking fun and fun with goats

So far July has been a good month. For the 4th of July I went to Imilchil to celebrate with other volunteers. We were going to go celebrate at the lake, but it was a stormy day so we ate at a volunteer’s house and then took a walk out to Lake Islit. It is a beautiful lake about an our walk from Imilchil, many tourists come to this lake. We basically just walked around for awhile and then we went back to Imilchil and ate awesome pizza and apple pie while celebrating 2 volunteers’ half birthdays with carrot cake. Overall a good time. Then I stopped by 2 volunteers’ sites on my way back to Errachidia. It’s always nice visiting other volunteers’ sites.

Then the following week as my counter part who is also the coop’s president was busy with her cousin’s wedding, none of the women were meeting, so I just relaxed a bit and worked on some personal projects. I also had tutoring Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as my tutor and I have been very busy this past month. She went over vocabulary and practices for Ramadan, the month before Ramadan, summer terms, and wedding information as summer is wedding season.

The month before Ramadan is a holy month in which many Moroccans begin preparing food items special to Ramadan and cleaning their houses. This month is called sh3ban. Two things that every Moroccan serves during Ramadan are shb3kiya and zmita. Shb3kiya is a fried bread item dipped in honey and sesame seeds, very yummy. Zmita is a dish made with burned flour, crushed fried almonds or peanuts, sesame seeds, fennel, and with whatever other spices Moroccans may wish to add. During sh3ban, Moroccans prepare these items which will be eaten throughout the entire month of Ramadan. Women will also bring their blankets down to the river to wash them and clean every corner of their home as well as all the clothing, pots, pans, etc. My neighbor told me the other day that whenever I want to wash my blankets she’ll go down to the river with me and help me out. It’s about the only way to wash a blanket here due to the nature of no washing machines and buckets can only hold so much. I tried my hand at hosing down a blanket in my upstairs room on one of my lines, it was fairly successful, but I would prefer the blanket to be a little cleaner.

Ramadan itself is the only month in which Muslims fast and pray. It’ll start around August 22 this year and is also when Moroccan time goes back an hour again and goes back to normal. They don’t observe daylight savings like the rest of the world. Even though we moved our clocks ahead an hour, the majority of Moroccans such as my village still run on what we lovingly call old time. During Ramadan Moroccans do not eat or drink anything during daylight hours. They will wake up very early in the morning to eat breakfast and drink as much water as they can, generally around 4am, and then sleep again. Then around 6pm, after the sun sets on TV, Moroccans eat Lftor, breakfast. This meal is very large and starts with a round of milk, juice and dates. On the first day each person eats 7 dates. Then after the milk and dates they eat melowee (flat fried bread), eggs, shb3kiya, zmita, and their main course of some kind of meat. Then later that night they have a 2nd lighter meal and then a 3rd meal around midnight before going to sleep and waking up at 4am for their final meal before fasting begins again.

That’s my little cultural piece for the day.

Saturday I went to my coop and just hung out with a few of the women for a bit working on my cross stitch while they worked on their tirz d fasi, fasi embroidery. Sunday I went into town and went swimming with my tutor, her mom, her friend and a friend of mine at an indoor swimming pool for women only. My friend and I felt like celebrities with all the Moroccan teens and kids coming up to us. It was good, the day was 42°C, 113°F, but the shade the pool was under and the coldness of the water actually made me cold. Was a good feeling. Then when I returned back to my village my retired Nomad neighbor invited me over for tea, it was my favorite, mint tea, :). Then she invited me to see their nomad tent that was set up beyond the small hills across the road from us, so I went over with her younger daughter, about 8, and hung out under the tent for awhile with her and her 2 friends, also neighbors of mine. I learned to how to play a rock game that I am horribly bad at, we played with a bunch of baby goats and I got to ride their donkey for a little bit. My little friend was just leading him around the area. I had a blast, I’ve missed horseback riding so much that riding a donkey was a nice surprise, :). While I was under the tend every time the baby goats came they would basically stampede down the hill and all I could hear would be this running of goat feet. I had so much hanging out with them.

My language is slowly improving little by little and making wonderful friends here. I think it’s so cool that my neighbors used to be roaming nomads, they actually still travel from time to time. I’d love to go with them sometime. I think it would be fun to wander the desert.

Been baking again and made awesome white bread. Decided to use a mixture of white flour and yellow flour to help give it stability and it turned out really well. Made myself a couple grilled cheese sandwiches, they were amazing. My next attempt is to make brown sugar using white sugar and date juice and make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Been told date juice has similar properties to molasses which is all brown sugar is, molasses sweetened white sugar.