This might be a boring blog post, but I wanted to write about what the day-to-day looks like in a Moroccan home – more specifically, our Moroccan home living with our host family. Of course, daily habits, meals, and household design varies from family to family, but I wanted to give people a sense of what Aaron and I’s host family’s home is like, because it’s very different from what homes look like in the US.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, the city we’re living in currently (for the next two months) has a population of 132,000 people. The nearest big city is Meknes, which is about 45 minutes away by taxi. The weather so far is pretty warm, averaging in the high 80s or low 90s most days. Our city has a daily soq (outdoor market) that opens at 5 pm each evening and sells everything from fish and fruit to appliances and clothing. There are also other specialized soqs around the city – for example, there is a soq dedicated entirely to fish separated from the main soq. There are main two streets that run through our city and happen to intersect right near the soq and the city plaza. The soq and the plaza are very popular places to gather, and on any given day, both are bustling. Below is a picture of a mosque and the soq below it, and the crown statue that's in the center of the plaza.
Our dar (house) is a three story building that’s about a 15 minute walk from the soq. We live two streets down one of the main roads, in a mostly quite neighborhood named Tdert (a word from the indigenous language that means “Home”). In Tdert, there are many smaller businesses – three chanuts (small shops), two bakeries, two gyms, a snak (the Moroccan word for restaurant) a martial arts dojo and a mechanic shop, to name a few. Our house is designed like many other Moroccan homes in our city– it’s connected to the two adjoining houses (like apartments would be) but has its own entrance and the three stories are only accessible to my family.
Our house doesn’t have a conventional yard, but it does have a tiny courtyard at the middle. The courtyard is essentially a hole cut through the three floors, inaccessible to anyone except people that enter through our front door. The open space is meant to allow each floor to have windows to the outside, which provides natural light and circulating air throughout the day. Aaron and I are lucky because our room is on the first floor, with a window opening out to the courtyard and a sliding door right outside our room for easy access to the courtyard.
The first floor of our house is comprised of bit na-ahs (our bedroom), a bedroom that’s being utilized as a pantry, a salon (living room), a kozina (kitchen) and a bit l’ma (bathroom). Near the front door is a staircase that leads upstairs, where there’s a second kitchen, two more salons, two other bedrooms and a second bathroom. Up one more floor you’ll find roof access and a laundry room. This is where all our clothes are washed and hung outside to dry. We’re fortunate to have access to a washing machine that not only has a wash cycle but a spin cycle as well – many of the people in our staj have to wash or wring out their clothes by hand. This is the basic anatomy of our house, where 6 people live, including us.
When we first got here, I was impressed and surprised by the scale and design of our dar. I was taken aback that our house had three salons and two kitchens – imagine coming across a home in the US with those amenities. As we’ve visited more Moroccan homes, I’ve noticed that just like in the US, there is a large disparity in size and style of any given house depending on the individuals living there. Just like back home, there are many large, fancy houses, and many smaller, more modest homes as well.
We share the first floor with our host cousin, but he’s 33 and often out working or with his friends. Our host parents and 11 year old host brother have bedrooms on the second floor but eat meals downstairs with us. Our daily routines while living in a Moroccan home are very different from our routines in the US. Our home doesn’t have air conditioning (AC units are expensive and somewhat of a luxury here) but keeps itself fairly cool by the virtue of being concrete and three stories tall. We’re lucky to be sleeping on the first floor, because it stays the most consistently cool. Our bedroom is the room with the most similar to a room back home – our bedroom has a bed, closet and chairs, much like a bedroom you'd find in the US. Our bed is very firm and I have no doubt I’ll be leaving Morocco with excellent posture!
Next to our bedroom is our bit l’ma (the literal translation is water room). For people who don’t want TMI about our new bathroom routines, feel free to skip ahead 😉
Moroccan bathrooms can either have a western toilet or what we’ve come to affectionately call a “squatty”. Our squatty is essentially a porcelain hole in the ground with a cement plug covering it. To use the potty, you uncover the hole, squat, and voila! To flush the squatty, one must fill a bucket with water from a nearby tap coming out of the wall. Toilet paper is an optional affair – some bathrooms have it, some have a bidet, and some use the hand wiping method. For this reason, I’ve taken to carrying toilet paper with me at all times. After filling the flushing bucket sufficiently, you dump it in the squatty and you’re done! Easy peasy. Some volunteers have westerns in their homes and find the squatty off putting, but I’ve come to like it. For one, squatting is easier on your intestines (Google “The Unicorn That Changed the Way I Poop” if you don’t believe me!) Secondly, bucket flushing saves a tonnnn of water when compared to flushing a western toilet. Which brings me to the showering routine.
Dush is the Darija word for shower, but I prefer to call it a bucket shower. Basically if you want to shower, you fill a bucket with the desired temperature of water, and scoop it over yourself until you’re clean. Our shower is slightly inset into the ground, but other than that, it isn’t differentiated much from the rest of the bathroom. There’s no shower curtain but getting the whole room wet is no big deal because there’s a giant squeegee mounted to a broom handle for cleaning the wet floor. We’re lucky enough to have a water heater (many volunteers heat their water on the stove) but unfortunately our bathroom water heater is out of gas, so we’ve been taking cold bucket showers. That isn’t bad right now, on 90 degree days, but I’m sure my outlook will change once winter hits. Bucket showering isn’t super glamorous or lavish but it’s very efficient, both time-wise and resource-wise. I can take my entire shower with about 3 gallons of water – by contrast, in the US, the average shower takes 17 gallons. The water I save makes me really enjoy and appreciate my Moroccan bathroom routines.
A Moroccan living room is called a salon, and as far as I can tell, this room acts as the center of the house for most activities. Meals take place here, socializing takes place here, and relaxing does as well. Every salon I’ve seen is structured is a similar manner – ornate, decorated couches called sadaris line three walls, and a large table sits between them. This table is a surface for meals, homework, games and of course, the teapot. The salon is a special place in the home – it sees by far the most foot traffic. Aaron and I came home one day and were surprised to find no less than 25 women crammed on our sadari, all chatting and drinking tea. Under the table in our salon is a beautiful Turkish carpet. The carpet brings me to the shoe situation. This was the hardest thing for me to adapt to in our house, because I’m so unaccustomed to it at home. Basically, upon entering the house, you take off your outside shoes immediately. Then you proceed to slip on your indoor shoes. Easy enough. However, once you reach a carpet, you’re expected to take off your indoor shoes and go barefoot, to avoid damaging and dirtying the carpet. BUT once you step off the carpet, you need to go immediately back into your indoor shoes. If not, you run the risk of the cold tile making you sick. Cold temperatures making you sick is a big thing here. According to our host mom, cold tile on our feet will make us sick. She tells us sitting outside at night (albeit on an 80 degree night) will make us sick. Leaving the hammam (public bathhouse) without my wet hair covered will make me sick. Sleeping with the window open at night will make me sick. Taking cold showers will make me sick. It’s a whole thing. Maybe it’s just being accustomed to all those things that’s keeping me healthy, but I can’t help but feel dubious about the alleged correlation between temperature and health. Anyways, it’s a big deal if you try and walk around the tile without your indoor shoes. I’ve already seen many a battle waged between my mom and my brother over him padding around barefoot. It gets really (excuse the pun 😉) heated.
The next room in the house is the kozina (kitchen). It’s not too different from a kitchen back home – fridge, cabinets, cutlery and dishes. Here, large communal platters, an assortment of tea ware, and pitchers for warm milk and water crowd our large kitchen cupboard. In the fridge you’ll find lots of beef, chicken (djej) and fish, as well as pumpkin (gra-ah), tomato (matesha), olives (zeitoun), marmalade (confiture) and yogurt (danon) to name a few staples. Eating here is obviously a total shift from eating back home. For one, Aaron and I have very little autonomy over our food. Everything we eat our host mom prepares. She’ll occasionally let us help her cook. Only a few days ago did she let us start cooking for ourselves, which I was very excited about. A big question I’ve gotten is if we’ve stayed vegan while being in Morocco. The answer is no and there are a few reasons why not. Aaron and I anticipated when joining the Peace Corps that it would be difficult to have an animal product free diet. When we interviewed for PC Morocco, our interviewer told us that we may need to shift our diet, as it would be rude to ask our host mom to prepare totally separate, vegan meals for us. Another reason we're consuming animal products is that we feel we’d be missing out on a huge part of the culture if we didn’t integrate our diet as well. I didn’t want to miss out on trying traditional Moroccan cuisine because I wasn’t eating meat. The third reason is that the meat we eat here comes from small farms and supports farmers – totally different from the factory farming we see so often in the US. That of course doesn’t eliminate the animal cruelty aspect of a omnivorous diet, but it does make me feel a little more at ease about the environmental impact. That being said, we fully intend to return to veganism once we live on our own come January. I do want to say many volunteers that come vegan or vegetarian are able to stick to their diets - so it totally is doable!
Another huge staple of the Moroccan diet is bread. Bread (khobz) is eaten with every meal and comes in just about every shape, size and color you could imagine. I used to love bread, but now I’ll be happy if I never see another khobz in my life.
We also eat a lot of yogurt, olives, dates, grapes, and couscous. Couscous is eaten every Friday and takes at least 4 hours to prepare. Aaron and I helped make it a few weeks back and it was so labor intensive. I’m incredibly impressed women find time to make it each week. Traditional couscous is made with seven vegetables: pumpkin, potato, garbanzo beans, parsnip, carrot, zucchini, and cabbage. A vegetable-based broth is poured over the whole platter, and a hunk of meat sits in the middle. The meat varies between chicken, lamb or beef, depending on the chef. It’s basically the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten, and I look forward to couscous Friday all week. Couscous is served with a traditional drink called leben. Leben is basically sour milk. I’m not in love with it, but it’s always served with couscous.
Overall, I’ve loved integrating into everyday Moroccan life, even if it means my days are governed by my host family and the Peace Corps schedule. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived under someone else’s roof, so in a way I feel juvenile. However, the love and antics of my host family make the relinquishing of freedom well worth it.
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