The wedding

First of all, let me say that my friend J is back in Taza, and that we are all happy to have her back.  I feel like with her here, some of the projects I have been researching can finally come to fruition.  We are planning on getting this woodstove thing off of the ground in the near future, just as the cold weather starts to hit.

Now let me continue on to the main subject of this post: the wedding. My buddy Hosien had a wedding last night, and suprisingly, it was my first wedding in Morocco.  I know a lot of other volunteers who went to weddings as far back as CBT, four months ago.  For some reason or other I was always busy with other prior engagements, off doing training, or otherwise unable to attend.  Also there were no weddings during Ramadan, so that adds on a whole month in of itself. But this was my friend Hosien, who had guided me through the local caves, and we were on pretty good terms.  I decided that I needed to make this wedding, and I'm glad I did. I had heard some things about weddings that made them seem not too fun to attend, that they were boring, that they dragged on.  Sometimes you don't even get to see the bride or the groom for goodness sake.  Well, apparently they do things differently in my town, because I had a great time.

As I got to my stop from the taxi, and made the hike down and back up the valley I could hear the festivities already going on.  Drums and horns were playing and a crowd of people were gathered together, all wearing traditional moroccan and berber garb.  It looked like all of the surrounding duars had come to visit, the most people I had ever seen gathered in my area.  I dropped off my bag at the house and wandered over to Hosien's house to see how things were going.  As I got there I must have shaken hands with a good fifty people, some of whom I had never met before.  A man named Mohammed handed me a Jelaba (imagine a Harry potter robe with a hood, and a traditional morrocan hat (a little bit like a fes without the tassle).

We did some singing and dancing, basic call and repeat stuff over and over, while linking hands.  Everyone was in a good mood and the dancing continued throughout the night.  And by everyone I mean, just the men.  The women sat and watched almost the entire night and only got up and danced one time that I saw.  Mostly it was small groups of men dancing with their particular shuffle, holding sticks in their hands, and tapping their feet.  Oh, and don't let me forget the shoulder shimmy.  That is an essential moroccan move.  In between dancing was the food. In shifts we ate dinner, because the room was not big enough to fit everyone at once.  It was a pretty typical meal: bread, olives, goat, followed by cous cous and a dessert of melon.  After dinner I convinced a couple of younger guys I knew to join me on the dance floor and do some American style dancing.  I'm not quite sure what they thought of it.  One old man came down and gave me a hand signal saying I was crazy, to which I replied, "yes, I know!"  He should have seen some of the Michael Jackson moves I wanted to pull out of the hat, but I figured that was too much.  Plus berber music isn't exactly conducive to the Robot.

 I think I was there from 2:30 in the afternoon until about 10:30 at night, at which point I called it quits and headed over to my house for some sleep.  Even so, all the activity from yesterday has left me exhausted.  Until next time, traq Salama!