The Daily Dose November 6, All yours. We enter a small house and meet his toothless, laughing professor, eat chicken and couscous. We want to be with the real people, not on some sanitized tour.
Three women swoop toward us, one older and shorter. Their eyes, heavily painted with kohl, glow like minerals in the earth. Two younger women carefully brush kohl into our bottom eyelids. They drape yellow scarves around our necks and step back, giggling when they look at us, our eyes framed with kohl and long, flowing scarves dripping off our shoulders like waterfalls.
They gesture for us to follow them back out to the main room. One woman smokes a cigarette and they wear lipstick. Odd, I think, for women in Morocco , where women are usually escorted by men. The men stand on the periphery, expressionless but watching. The women motion for us to sit down on the dirt floor around a small fire pit where one woman puts water in a kettle for mint tea.
Another woman opens a wooden box and offers us small candies dusted with sugar and then offers the candies to the men. The men still stand on the periphery as the women gather in the center of the room. I sing softly at first and Jaclyn joins in. I see them move closer to each other… their voices rising way up and falling way down into a grief-like wail. The three women clap their hands. They serve us mint tea, the leaves floating in the hot water.
The hut is cold and I warm my hands on the cup. As I look at the leaves, I wonder what my fortune will be. Will it be good? In a mud hut way up in the mountains. The yellow scarf wrapped around my neck makes me feel regal. How generous these women are, sharing their sugary treats that probably cost a lot of money, these women who live in a dirt hut and cook in a pit in the middle of the floor. Suddenly, I see them move closer to each other, three of them like the points of a star, their voices rising way up and falling way down into a grief-like wail that echoes out of the mud hut, their faces turned upward.
