July 5, 2008 I Want To Be A Part of B.A. Buenos Aires – Big Apple (apologies to Evita)

OK, so I didn’t go to Buenos Aires, but I did go to one of Morocco’s biggest cities. Morocco has about seven major cities (depending how you count them), and I spent the weekend in one! It was beautiful, though expensive, and I had a fantastic visit. We stayed at a backpacker-filled hostel, famous for its rooftop. We ate up on the roof a few times, and two of our group (there were five of us) slept up there, too. It’s cooler/breezier than the rooms, although it got cool enough at night that the rooms were comfortable, too. (Unlike SouqTown, which was sweltering last night.)

After arriving and settling in, we went for a tour of the medina. Medina is just the Arabic word for “city”, but it’s used in most of Morocco’s big cities to refer to the older heart of the city, usually walled and crowded, as distinct from the newer, usually French-constructed part of the city. This medina sloped steadily downwards from our hotel, so walking out was fun, and walking back was a (slight) challenge. The city was amazing. No two walls abutting each other were the same age, I suspect, and J** and I agree that we either want placards on every wall, giving the history, or else a portable carbon-14 dater, like a portable GPS, that you can carry and which will tell you how old anything nearby is. It doesn’t exist yet, but we want one anyway. Engineers, you should get on that. ;)

One of our first stops was at an escargot stand. I’ve never eaten snails, though I’ve eaten plenty of their invertebrate cousins (oysters, clams, mussels, etc), and decided that this was absolutely the moment to try them. So there, in an alley off the main drag (which was probably all of six feet wide) of the Big Apple, in the heart of Morocco, I ate snails. They were good. A little salty, and a lot chewy, but good. The most fun part was prying them out of their snails. I don’t know what implement I’d have been handed in a chichi French restaurant, but here in the medina, I was given a safety pin that had been pried almost flat. I held the round end and used the point to pierce the snail and extract it from its home. After we’d finished our snack (10 DH for a good-sized bowl, which three of us shared), the chef/snailman encouraged us to drink the broth. J** and I did (B** passed), and it tasted exactly the same as the snails themselves, except without the chewyness, naturally. :)

We also visited the tanneries that the Big Apple is famous for. I managed to avoid the temptation to buy lots of leather goods – barely – but I was fascinated by the vats where sheepskin (almost exclusively) is turned into leather and then dyed. The tanner who showed us around his family’s tannery was delighted that we spoke the local languages (we had some Darija speakers and some Berber speakers in the group), so he talked to us in his own blend of Tamazight and Darija.

The architecture of the tannery – or maybe it’s just the architecture of the Big Apple – bewildered me. In order to get from the entrance level of the tannery up to the second story (so as to have a better view), we went outside, turned three corners, went uphill, down two alleys, and then emerged upstairs. (Anyone remember “Adventure”? “You’re in a maze of twisty passages. You’re in a twisting maze of passages.”) I’m not even entirely sure it was the same tannery, but we were looking down on somebody’s vats. Then he offered to take us up another flight, which involved walking the circumference of the building, up two external staircases, and emerging on the roof level. The building is open to the air, though, so the “roof” is more-or-less a portico from which you could look down on everything. Our guide then showed us the tannery next door, which he dismissed as “Arabiya”. They looked identical to me, but J** said that she knew which one she preferred. I asked her what difference she saw that I didn’t. “This one,” she said, pointing to the Berber tanners, “has music.” Once I started listening for it, I realized she was right. :)

Our tanner-guide then offered to show us the whole of the Big Apple. We followed him trustingly through another twisting series of alleys, abruptly emerging on a hilltop from which we had a panoramic view of the city. I took dozens of pictures, naturally, and then we were ready to go. He offered (in a blend of Tam and Darija that B** and I later pieced together) that after we finished our shopping, we could bring back any clothes we’d bought and he’d dye leather to match, for us. Oh, and he never asked for a tip, and that was the closest he came to offering to sell us anything. He was just a friendly, helpful guy who wanted to show us his family’s business. :)

From the entrance to the tannery (to which he returned us, safe and sound), we headed deeper into the medina. I was tempted by the leather jackets and purses, some amazing leather candleholders (which I’m feeling nostalgic about even now, as I type this up four days later), skirts, blouses, earrings, and ice cream. I managed to resist everything but the ice cream (4 DH for a big scoop, half chocolate and half something-orange-that-was-probably-mango-but-might-have-been-apricot). We stopped for a sandwich that was shared by two of our hungrier members, and then decided to go to a sit-down restaurant for dinner. We emerged from the medina, picked a restaurant (based on the view from its roof, since the menus all looked the same), and then ate spaghetti while watching the sunset glint off the minarets and beige walls around us. Swifts (or possibly barn or cliff swallows) provided our dinner entertainment; hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were spiraling and swirling around us, eating flies and performing impossible-looking aerial acrobatics.

We’d stopped by the fruit market briefly, between the medina and dinner, and so after dinner we munched on the juiciest and sweetest peaches imaginable. Mmmmm. They were 6 DH for a kilo, which works out to about 35 cents a pound. I love the fruit here! I think after I move out of my host family’s house, I might become a fruitarian. Mmmmm.

July 4, 2008 Word of the Day: Good (iHla)

(Happy 4th of July, Americans! I don’t get it as a holiday, because I’m on the Moroccan calendar, but I hope y’all are having a great one! Light up a sparkler and think of me! :) )

IHla. He is good, or that-masculine-thing is good. Like most adjectives in Tamazight, it’s conjugatable (Hlagh, tHlat, iHla, tHla, nHla, tHlam, tHlamt, Hlan, Hlant). It’s also unbelievably versatile.

In English, “good” has many shades of meaning. Consider:

I feel good. (health)
I look good. (beauty)
I do good. (charity)
I am good. (character)
Good student. (diligence)
Good idea. (cleverness)
It’s all good.

In Tamazight, “Hla” means all of these things. All. And without any helping verb (feel, look, do, be…) to clarify which meaning the speaker intends. You just get to figure it out from context.

There’s some obvious ambiguity created by this…among other things, it becomes possible to give a compliment with many possible interpretations. “Tabratnm tHla” – Your daughter is good – could mean anything from praising her character to calling her beautiful. Which enables potential suitors to get away with saying things that might be intended in a slightly Hshuma (inappropriate, shameful, naughty, etc) way, without getting decked.

I asked my multilingual host dad how to express “good idea”. He recognized the concept of “bonne idée” in French, and thought about it for a long minute before telling me that there was no equivalent expression. “You just say it’s iHla,” he finally admitted.

The flipside of this is “ixxa”, which is bad. (Be careful with this one – the “they are bad” conjugation is identical to the word for excrement.) Earlier today, I was having a fun conversation in the kitchen with my host mom and a few aunties and cousins – all female – and one of them made a rather naughty joke. I blushed and looked away. My rule of thumb in these kind of situations, to avoid crossing the line and being Hshuma, is to either act like I don’t get the joke or else act like I’m embarrassed by it – which sometimes isn’t an act at all! After everyone had finished their chuckling, my host mom, smiling, informed me that this auntie is crazy, which got another big laugh, and then she said that she’s bad. Txxa. And I suddenly realized that ixxa must have as many shades of meaning as iHla. And I don’t know what they are. Was Ama saying that my auntie is bad-mannered? Inappropriate? Naughty? A bad example? Using bad language? All of the above? Or was it a half-admiring, “Oooh, she’s so baaad,” kind of comment? (And yes, I’m fully aware of the irony that “bad” has as many shades in English as it does in Tam. But we have more hints in English, usually, as to which shade is intended. Or maybe it’s just because I’m fluent in American culture, and can read the glint in an eye or a pursed lip, and I’m still mostly illiterate in those, here.)

The versatility of language gives me hope that I might actually learn all of the words in Tam – that, like French, there just *aren’t* as many words as in English, and therefore that much less to memorize – but also makes me realize how much more there is to learn than the vocabulary…

July 3, 2008 Word of the Day: Ghori

Here’s a widely versatile Tamazight word: ghori. (BTY, the “gh” is more or less a bottom-of-the-throat gargling sound. It’s similar to last sound in “Bach”, but deeper and has a pronounced sound, not just air, behind it. It took me a long time to get it right, and I still probably don’t.)

The usual translation is “I have”, and it is used to indicate possession, as in I have tea. It can also be translated as “my place”, and that’s where the word vagues up beyond all recognition.

First off, it means “place” both literally and figuratively. You can use it to mean your home, your seat on a bus, etc. Figuratively, it more or less translates as “In my opinion” or “It seems to me,” but it’s stronger than that. There’s a regionally-used expression in the US – by which I mean that I’ve heard it, but when I used it during CBT, I discovered that folks from other parts of the country weren’t familiar with it – that goes, “…where I live…” It’s also used figuratively, not literally, and refers to something that affects you at a visceral level. You might hear, “That documentary Darfur was powerful; what got me where I live was seeing what’s happening to the women. [Or the children. Or whatever.]” It can be used to express anything with a deep personal resonance.

Ghori has that sort of meaning, too. If I say something is important ghori, it means that it’s viscerally, deep-down meaningful to me. Well, usually. Sometimes it does just mean “in my opinion.”

And, of course, it’s conjugatable. (It’s Tamazight, after all. There are virtually no words in Tam that have only one form.) Ghori, ghork, ghorm, ghors, ghorngh [which is a beast to pronounce], ghorun, ghorknt, ghorsn, ghorsnt.

There are a whole set of expressions that use it:

Ayd azad ghori = the best, IMHO
Qim ghori = stay with me (qim = sit or stay)
Ns ghori = spend the night with me [By the way, this has zero sexual connotation in Tamazight. It quite literally means spend a night sleeping in my home.]
Zri ghori = stop by my place (zri = pass by)
Illa ghori = I have in my possession, literally “There is, in my place” (also used to express ownership in the future, since “I have” has no direct future conjugation – you have to conjugate the illa, there is)
Sgh ghori = buy from me (sgh = buy)
Mnsu ghori = dine with me (mnsu = eat dinner)
Fdor ghori = have breakfast with me (fdor = eat breakfast)
Adud ghori = come here (adud = come)
Ghorm/ghork lHaq = you have the right OR you are right (funny how the same word means both things, in both English and Tam)

July 2, 2008 Bones

Food doesn’t get wasted here. I hadn’t really thought about how much waste there is in most American kitchens until I saw how efficient my host families have been.

Example: Before they wash out a tawa (cook pot / sauce pan), they take a piece of bread and sop up the leftover food. Why wash down the drain half a meal’s worth of calories and nutrients? (This is also one reason why Ama rarely eats with the guests when there’s a big meal – she’ll eat her fill as she cleans the kitchen.)

Another example: Whenever they eat meat served on the bone, as happens frequently, they’ll crack open the bones and suck out the marrow. I’ve heard that marrow is good for you, but I’ve never seen it pursued so vigorously. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of my little host sister, a delicately-built five-year-old, gnawing on a bone longer than her head with her tiny milk-teeth. (She’d scored the big thigh bone from the latest sheep.)

Intestines, too, are appreciated. I’ve seen them served a couple of ways, most memorably diced up into half-inch sections and skewered onto shish kebabs. I asked about a particularly crimson cut of meat, and was told that it was the kidneys. (It took a lot of charades to figure out what the word meant – organs weren’t covered when we studied body parts.) I haven’t seen the “man of the cow”*, at least not that I was aware, but my tutor confirms that it’s consumed just like any other meat.

The skins are treated and then used as extra rugs. They’re very comfortable to sit on, and more easily portable than the big rectangular tazrbits that line every room in the house.

* That was the translation offered by a friend’s English-speaking host brother, when she asked him what was on her plate. She told us the story the next day – this was back during CBT – and the rest of us have used that euphemism since then. If it’s not clear, I’ll try an American euphemism: Rocky Mountain Oysters. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about…you’re probably better off.

July 1, 2008 Mail!

After a bone-dry week ( :( ), I received not one, not two, but FOUR packages today. :D Two from Peace Corps, and two from the US.

And two letters, including one of the most gorgeous wedding invitations I’ve ever seen. [Update: Mail two days later included one of the most entertaining wedding invitations I’ve ever seen. I love my friends!]

I’ve been in a happy-skippy mood all afternoon. :)

There was Macaroni and Cheese, there were M&Ms (in two packages, one that I could keep for myself and one that I could share with my host family!), there were books, there were chocolate chips and brown sugar (chocolate chip cookies, here I come!!), there were colored pencils, there were toys, there were letters from loved ones… It was pretty doggoned fantastic, really.

Made my Ama’s day, too; she watched me open the packages (for the second time – I’d opened them for the first time in my apartment, where I squirreled away the M&C and cookie fixings) and it was like watching a kid at Christmas. She was so delighted to see what people had sent me! And she said she felt sorry for my friends and family back in the States, because they don’t get to see me. Awww…

June 30, 2008 Names

As I think I’ve mentioned before, there are a handful of names that appear in droves in the families of Berberville. Boys’ names, in descending order of frequency, are Mohammad, Ali, Sa3id, and variations on Mohammad like Moha and Hamo. For girls, it’s Fatima, 3isha, and the Berber names of Rebha, Rqia, and Ito. I’ve never met a Khadija, even though it’s supposed to be common, but I have met a Kalima, Habiba, Miriam, along with several Fatimas, 3ishas, Rebhas, and Itos. Just now, I was introduced to a Hajar. It took me a lot of tries to get it right – and I only just now figured out that it’s Hagar, mother of Ishmael, given the local g-to-j pronunciation and soft vowels – because it’s pretty much pronounced Ha-a.

“Tga tarbatinu. Ismins Hagar.” This is my daughter. Her name is Hagar.
“Mcharfin, Haza.” Nice to meet you, Haza.
“Oho, Hagar.” No, Hagar.
“Hada.”
“Hagar.”
“Hatha.”
Finally, my auntie intervened, and stretched the syllables out in slow motion.
“Hhhaaaaa-jjjjjjjaaaaarrrrrrrrrrr.”
“Hagar.”
“Eyyah!”
“Mcharfin, Hagar.”

The middle letter is almost inaudible, as is the final rolled r. Sort of like how “had to” in American English sounds more like “hadda”.

Just a day in the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer…..

June 30, 2008 Our New Pet

(Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!)

Pets come in all shapes and sizes. A childhood friend of mine had four rats that she adored. Several friends had hamsters or gerbils or rabbits, which are more or less fuzzy rats. One of my favorite teachers had a bird who rode around on her head. As a kid, I had fish, frogs, kittens, cats… I’ve even had a pet snake.

But I’ve never known anyone who had a pet hawk. Until now.

There’s a baby bird of prey living in a cardboard box in my courtyard. My little brothers feed him (I’m going to assume it’s a him, but what do I know) tiny pieces of animal flesh. Earlier today, I saw them cutting apart bits of intestine to feed him. The intestine was solidly rubbery, and the knife was dull, so this took serious effort and lots of hands. At least two would have to tug on the intestine, to put tension on the line, and then a third would saw at it until a piece gave way. Then a fourth would attempt to get the food into the baby predator’s mouth without getting bitten.

I don’t know what kind of hawk it is – it’s brown and white, with a barred tail, but aren’t they all?

When I found out about the hawk, my first response was indignation. Wild animals belong in the wild, birds don’t belong in boxes, babies should be with their mothers… I had a lot of reasons to be upset with the picture before me.

But as I thought about it, trying to see the scene from a perspective other than my own, I realized that Berbers and Touaregs (desert nomads, of whom there are many in Morocco) have been using hawks as hunting companions since time immemorial. (Then it occurred to me that Europeans did this too, at least for a time, and for all I know there are still falconers on the Queen of England’s payroll.) I don’t know how hawks are trained to hunt for a human, but it occurred to me that this might be part of the process. Catch one when it’s young, accustom it to humans, and once the relationship exists, work on the training.

Though my knee-jerk response was sympathy for a wild animal being held against its will, I had to admit that I saw no evidence of cruelty from either of my little brothers (or the friends and relatives who were part of the feeding process). Yes, the little hawklet was flailing and contorting itself, but it was being handled gently. And the boys were putting a lot of work into keeping it fed.

I still don’t know where it came from – I asked the boys, and they just said, “The mountain” – but it seems most likely that my host father, a wilderness guide, found it and brought it back to them. And if raising a baby hawk has their dad’s approval, who am I to intervene?

OK, I’m an environmental educator.

But there’s a chance that its mother was dead, or that it’s an introduced species whose numbers should be reduced… Anything is possible. And until I have more information, I’ll refrain from passing judgment.

[Update after talking to my host dad: It had fallen out of the nest, and it isn’t possible (he said) to return birds to their nests, so he brought it home to his boys to take care of. Once it’s strong enough to fly away, off it will go. Oh, and it’s a kestrel.]

June 28, 2008 Funereal Feast

I’m again tempted to paraphrase Hamlet, but the meats served for the funeral feast will not be reincarnated at a wedding banquet, so I’ll let it go.

But there was a lot of meat. Mountains of it.

My host father killed at least some of the sheep and goats himself, on the ground outside our courtyard; I stepped over the drying rivulet of blood when I came home.

When my blood has welled up visibly, it starts bright red, but as the drop grows, it darkens into a deep crimson shade, and is almost black before the surface tension breaks the blood drop into a smear.

I always imagined that large volumes of blood would have that deep, almost-black shade of red.

I was wrong.

The pooled sheep’s blood was almost comically bright. It looked like it should belong on Woody Woodpecker’s head, or primary school walls. It was brighter than ketchup, and with a different viscosity; it almost looked like a puddle of paint.

When I went in, I was quickly put to work in the kitchen. For fifteen minutes, I waved flies off the pile of meat on the table in front of me. Then someone* produced a giant stew pot, poured a gallon or two of water in it, transferred in the dozens of pounds of meat, and covered it securely. At that point, I was moved onto vegetable duty. Which I found easier. There’s no dried blood on vegetables. Plenty of dirt, though. I peeled countless potatoes and carrots before my round in the kitchen was done, and my place taken by another of the innumerable female relatives who are here. I also cored the carrots, which I’m not particularly good at. Did you know carrots can be cored? I didn’t. Some of the carrots have a green center, so I understand that maybe they shouldn’t be eaten, but I don’t know why the solidly orange carrots need to have their centers removed. Anyway, the trick is to cut shallowly along the side of the core, then, while the knife is still about a centimeter in, twist your wrist to pop out the carrot core. When it works, it’s pretty nifty. My host mother, aunts, and cousins were all doing carrots at a single stroke. My unpracticed hands usually needed multiple tries, and I still sometimes ended up digging it out.

Once peeled (and cored), the veggies were dropped into chlorine-treated water to soak, as is standard treatment for fruits and vegetables (since it kills off the bacteria/pesticide/whatever that is not good to eat), and then added to the stew.

They reappeared as duaz (doo-aaz) that night. After couscous. Couscous, by the way, is not only the national dish of Morocco, it’s also a really big deal. It takes hours to prepare, and is always the crown jewel of imikli n jam3a, Friday lunch, which is the Moroccan (and probably Muslim) equivalent of a Norman Rockwell Sunday dinner. So even if I’d known that a second course was possible – which hadn’t dawned on me – I would have never have dreamed that anything could come after couscous.

Prior to this week, I haven’t had any meals with more than one course. (Two courses if you count dessert.) Now I’ve had many. Well, four or five. Unfortunately, since I never expect a second course, I eat my fill during the first one. And then I have to put in a good showing for the second. Fortunately, Ama has been so busy running around, keeping the kitchen staff of nieces and cousins and sisters-in-law flowing smoothly, that she isn’t usually at whichever table I end up eating at…which means that she’s not around to tell me to eat more. :) So if I just nibble a carrot or two and a smidge of bread from the duaz course, nobody notices.

I’m also never sure when the meal is over. Dessert is sporadic. Often, but not always, tea is served after the final course. But sometimes it’s served during the meal, so even that’s not always conclusive evidence that the feast has ended. I don’t know if the ability to recognize the end of a feast is a skill I’ll acquire, or if Moroccans pride themselves on their ability to surprise guests with yet-another-course…

* The feasting that has marked the days since MaHallu’s death has provoked all kinds of thoughts, including a deep appreciation for the interdependence among the families of Berberville. I don’t know how many relatives and neighbors have been called upon to loan tables, cookware, etc. My family is quite wealthy, and many of the giant pots or piles of glassware and silverware have emerged from our own storage room, but many more have been brought by aunts or cousins or neighbors.

June 26, 2008 The Undiscovered City

After several weeks of devoted care from her children, my increasingly infirm MaHallu passed away last night. This was not at all surprising – she has been bedridden for weeks, and with steadily worsening symptoms – but maybe death always seems sudden.

In Moroccan Muslim practice, women are prohibited from funerals, because there is an expectation that they will scream and wail in paroxysms of grief that are inappropriate for religious ceremonies. When I first learned that, I was surprised; the three American funerals I’ve attended both had many women present, and while there were tears, there was no wailing or screaming. What I’d failed to consider was that there are cultural norms for grieving, just as there are for eating or marrying or bathing or any other way people interact.

As soon as MaHallu passed, just after midnight, and then throughout the night, women wailed, shrieked, moaned, and sang to themselves in an ongoing chorus of grief. It quieted some in the morning, as her body was prepared, and then crescendoed as she was carried to the tamdint*, the cemetery. She had been wrapped in several blankets and was then put into a white litter and carried by several men, including her sons and nephews, down to the grave. Because the women were not allowed in the cemetery, they filled the street between our house (which is the closest one in town to the cemetery entrance) and the gate. Some women collapsed onto the ground and were attended to by others; some stood quietly; some ran around hugging everyone; some sat against a wall… The full spectrum of grief was visible in the dozens of people who had gathered to say goodbye to my host-grandmother.

The men were quieter, almost silent. I didn’t see the graveside ceremony itself – there was a house in the way, which I was content with – but I know that funeral customs dictate that she be put in the ground, without a coffin, just wrapped in a white shroud, lying on her side so that she can face Mecca.

Once the graveside ceremony was complete, the men came back to the house, where they gathered in the back courtyard, while most of the women gathered in the largest of the formal rooms. One of my uncles gave me a handful of dates; I gave them to my littlest sister and one of my cousins, who I was holding onto both to give myself something to do and because they seemed rather adrift. (In fact, they looked as confused and uncertain as I felt.)

I hugged the family members who I’ve become close to, and said the appropriate phrase – Ajarlkomallah, which more or less translates as “May God help you through this difficulty” – to others.

…and then I fled. I’d had a scheduled trip out to SouqTown, and Ama insisted that I go ahead and take the trip. (I also got confirmation from several others, including my infallible tutor, that it wouldn’t be inappropriate to leave, and in fact might make others more comfortable.) So shortly after everyone returned to the house, I slipped out the side door and quietly headed out to the city.

* Vocabulary note: tamdint is the word for cemetery, but it could also be translated as “the little city”, hence my paraphrase of Shakespeare.

July 4, 2008 Trip to the Lake, cont

Happy 4th of July! I'm celebrating it here in SouqTown, where the sky is an implausible shade of coral-pink that perfectly matches the coral-pink buildings lining downtown. I'd take a picture, but I think this is something that a camera can't capture.

But what cameras can do...

Here are more pictures from my trip to the lake, which I didn't have time to upload during my last trip into town. And the accompanying text, which I opted not to post last time because it only makes sense with the pix. Enjoy!

...Speaking of faults and folds, check this out:


It’s not actually an anticline – though it looks like one! – it’s just eroded, vertically dipping beds. Which is geonerd speak for “Look, the whole mountain got tipped over! Wowsers!”


And lest you think I forgot the living parts of the environment, here are some flora and fauna for you:

…and before you point out how fuzzy the bird pictures are, bear in mind that these are blown up a TON. Turns out birds, unlike flowers and rocks, fly away when you try to take their picture. Even damselflies will pose demurely. See?

Well, songbirds fly away. (So these pictures - of “Yellow Wagtails”, I do believe - were taken at *quite* a distance.) Water birds just swim away. I saw at least 50 coots (I counted that many at once, and there were probably at least twice that number in the lake) but they were so far away that my pictures of them are just little fuzzy black smudges. By the way, I looked them up, and their local name is Tafulust n waman. That sounds nice, until you know that it translates as “Chicken of the water”. Turns out that’s the name for all ducks; these guys don’t appear to get their own designation.

The coots clustered at the eastern end of the lake. The southern shore was marked by muddy, marshy gentle slopes and lots of evaporites. The water level appears to have dropped by a foot or so, and given how gentle the slope is, that makes for 10-15 feet of salt-rimed stones. The northern shore has sharper relief, more like a cutbank. (Do lakes have cutbanks? I thought only streams do. But maybe if that’s where an inlet rushes in, during snowmelt?) I climbed over two large inlets, at least…

Oh, and my favorite local fauna:

I found him (and several siblings) in a sea of reeds that I’d stumbled into. I blundered through for a while before realizing that I was probably crushing the nests of all the coots I’d been admiring, at which point I took the shortest route out, instead of attempting to continue to follow the shoreline. I found their mom about half a kilometer away, apparently foraging for food.

My last big photo stop was the abrabilo* festival in the poplars. Some Moroccans I met on the path said that they were tabrabilot, which means that they’re either small or female. (Yes, they’re interchangeable concepts in Tamazight conjugation.) I’ve never heard of a tree that gets pollinated by moths, but that’s what looked to be happening: hundreds, maybe thousands, of small white (t)abribilo(t) were fluttering in and around a stand of poplar trees. I tried to photograph some in motion (left), but just got blurs. When I tried to get close enough for a good picture, they flew away. So…

* The word is generally translated as “butterfly”, but these were moths. Tamazight doesn’t draw a distinction between butterflies and moths. For that matter, I don’t know what the difference is. These guys, though, were all white, with overlapping wings and big fuzzy bodies. They *looked* like moths.