FOM Moroccan-American Freindship Tour: Deane

Dear family and friends,
Greetings again from South Korea. I hope this letter finds you all well. School’s back in session and the memories of our summer travels have begun to fade as they are again pushed aside by Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmatic. Better write them down before they are lost completely...
In early July, our family packed up and headed for North Africa, a trip I’d been waiting to take again ever since I left the Peace Corps 17 years ago. I had shared my stories, photos, maps, and books on Morocco with Adrian and the girls for years, but it prepared them only a little for what was in store for us once we arrived. Our first week was spent in Marrakech where I was able to make a condo exchange. I hadn’t spent much time in this city when I was in the Peace Corps, so much was new to me, too. It didn’t take me long to regain my confidence in Arabic and I could always fall back on French when “le mot juste” eluded me. I was happy to see how enthusiastically everyone got into the culture. Chantel wanted to henna her hands and buy a hooded djelleba right away and Alison preferred taking the horse carts than a taxi around the city. Adrian found an appreciation for heavily sugared mint tea and let vendors at Jmaa el Fna hang snakes from his shoulders, pretend to pull his teeth with rusty pliers, and wrap turbans around his head. We visited the ancient Badi Palace and the girls loved tunneling through the remains of dungeons. The huge courtyard of this palace is the venue for a yearly folk festival and we found ourselves in Marrakech that very week! What luck! The wide courtyard has a 70 meter long pool and sunken gardens on each side. They fill the pool for the festival and build a platform from garden to garden, strewn with sunbleached carpets of every design and color. We bought tickets for the nightly show and enjoyed every minute as troupes from around the country showed off their unique costumes, songs, dances, and percussion rhythms. It was a truly hair-raising extravaganza as robed figures drew long, haunting shadows across the high mud walls of the crumbling remains of the palace.   Adrian was particularly amazed at the precision of the drumming, clapping, stomping, and gyrations of the dancers.
As our week in Marrakech came to a close, I spent an afternoon downtown in search of a good deal on renting a land rover or jeep for our second week of traveling through the deep south. We ended up using a family run company recommended to us by the condo’s front desk staff and got an incredible deal on a 4x4 land rover, complete with air conditioning (hard to get.) When they delivered it the next night, we broke into laughter as we noticed it was a Korean Galloper! What a great vehicle it was. Although Adrian was unimpressed by its power, it got us where we wanted to go in complete comfort and lots of room for baggage.
Our first stop outside of Marrakech was Boumalne du Dades where we stopped for the night.   I knew this town quite well as there had been another Peace Corps volunteer there years ago who was also a good friend. The Dades gorge is remarkable, but not nearly as much so as the Todra which we discovered on the next day. We stayed that night in an auberge deep in the gorge where the sheer cliffs rose straight up around us. A small stream, that was once the river that cut through this terrain, was a welcome relief.
From here we headed out of the mountains and across the baked hammada toward the sandy Sahara itself. Along the way, we stopped to step out onto the flat, black rocky terrain, but the incredible 125 degree temperature forced us back into the cool jeep and we continued on our way. Adrian was amazed at how a spot on the horizon soon transformed itself into a small oasis village. As soon as we entered the town, we were out of it and back on the hammada. “Why would anyone want to live way out here?” he kept asking. “Where do these people get their food and supplies?” As we rounded the corner in one of these towns, a bright red Coca Cola truck was just pulling back onto the road after dropping off a delivery of cases. “Which one is civilization?” we wondered. At Erfoud, we stopped at the 4-star Hotel Salam with its air-conditioned rooms and gorgeous swimming pool. This served as our base camp to the dunes of the Sahara. Before sunrise on the next day we headed out expecting to follow the telephone poles outside of town that lead across the now more sandy piste to the tremendous sand dunes of Merzouga. Little did we know that the information given in my old guide book was quite outdated and the poles disappeared halfway out. Yes, satellite dishes and cell phones have even reached this part of the world so that telephone wires are now unnecessary. We decided to follow a path marked with painted piles of stones only to end up in a sandy ditch with our wheels spinning on the rocks below the surface. Adrian and I desperately tried digging out the jeep, but only managed to move the vehicle a few feet. The smell of burning rubber filled the air and the sun was now above the horizon. Well, there went our plans to see the sun rise over the dunes. Just as we thought I would have to walk back to the nearest village about 4 kilometers away, one of the girls shouted and pointed to a small figure on a motor scooter. This man had heard our wheels spinning and came to rescue us. His son told us later, back at their modest mud house, that rescuing foreigners was his father’s “hobby.” The idea that this sort of thing happened to people all the time did not make us feel much better.   We “hired” his son, Hassan, a university student home for the summer, to drive us to the dunes. We arrived around 8 AM, but the sun was already high in the sky and the heat incredible. Hassan took us to the home of a friend and arranged for us to ride a ways into the dunes on his camels. This was the singular event the girls had most been looking forward to and they became quite anxious as we waited nearly two hours over the mandatory mint tea and conversation before we would be allowed to head out. (Nothing in Morocco, and especially in the desert, is done on a time schedule. Life revolves around tea and talk. Things get done “inshallah,” if God wills it, a concept that is difficult for North Americans to accept.) Although it was still morning and we would only be out for two hours, our camels were loaded with bottles of cold water which we soon appreciated. Our guide took us out on foot as we rode, our camels strung together one in front of the other. For some reason, I was given the oldest and biggest female of the bunch (hmmm...) and we laughed as she nuzzled Alison riding in front of us the whole the way, occasionally sampling her shirt.   It was an extraordinary experience, but two hours was plenty as we discovered camels are not the most comfortable mode of transportation.
The area around the dunes and the Ziz River Valley is also famous for its rock quarries and fossils. We spent a bit of time in Erfoud shopping for trilobites, snails, and nautilus. It’s hard to imagine that this terrain was covered by ocean millions of years ago before the continental drift.
We were nearing the end of our second week and had only 2 nights left to make it to Casablanca where we would board a plane heading back to NY. We left the desert and drove up through the High Mountains toward my old home of Midelt, a small town just on the other side of the range. When we entered the outskirts of the town, my heart raced with excitement. A few things had changed, but as we drove through (it only takes 5 minutes to do so from end to end) I noticed that it was not nearly as green as it was only 20 years ago. It was apparent that drought and desert encroachment had already reached this side of the mountains. The town looked pitifully dry, not at all like I remembered it. We stayed there at a new little hotel with a swimming pool(!), and the guy at the front desk helped me to look up my old friends in the phone book. After a few calls, Addi arrived at the hotel and we had a very tearful reunion. When he heard that an American woman was in town looking for him, he knew exactly who it was. Unfortunately he bore sad news. He and his wife Fatima, my girlfriend, had divorced just after I left Morocco in 1985. She had moved with their two daughters to Casablanca with her mother and step-father, but their first daughter died there in a car accident at the age of 12. A few years later, Fatima herself died of breast cancer, so their second daughter had gone back to Midelt to live with her father. Addi since remarried and has a lovely wife and family. He still teaches Math at the same Middle School in town and his parents still own the hardware store in the center of town. We had dinner with them that night and caught up on old times. The next day we continued our drive north.
The drive into the Middle Atlas Mountains slowly climbed to 2000 meters above sea level and we passed the high plains where eagles soared overhead. Then we headed into the cedar forests above the quaint Berber town of Azrou and stopped to see the Barbary Apes that inhabit the forest. I had talked about these monkey forests often and the girls were delighted to see families of them right along the roadside. They are large, confident and quite used to people and traffic coming through, so it is important to drive slowly as there may be a big male sitting in the middle of the road around any bend.
Finally, we arrived in Rabat, the capital city, where we spent our last night. After we checked into our hotel room, we took the girls out to a nearby McDonald’s (!) for lunch, a treat for being such great troopers over the past two weeks. We made a nostalgic visit to the Peace Corps office which hadn’t changed in 20 years, aqua blue shutters on the windows and all and taxied over to a large, modern supermarket to stock up on food stuffs we wanted to take back with us. The beloved La Mama’s and La Dolce Vita restaurants no longer existed, so supper was at the nearby Balima, Winston Churchhill’s favorite hotel in the world, or so he claimed. We sat under the huge trees of its famed cafe, watching people walk along Avenue Mohammed V just as I had done with my Peace Corps friends any time we were in Rabat.   It was here that an old, too familiar gnawing sensation began to grow. I was about to leave a land I had become so fond of and I didn’t want to! Two weeks had been enough to restore all the old memories and I didn’t want it to end. But the girls were looking forward to Massachusetts and seeing their grandparents and cousins again, so I had to let go.   I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t wait so long to return..."
Cheryl (Corkum) Deane
TEFL - Midelt (81-84)
Director of Admissions
Seoul International School
Seoul, South Korea
www.sis-korea.org

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