The Merry Month of May

We have been in Morocco eight months now and the time is flying by. May is nearly over and soon the summer heat will begin. We’ve been without electricity and water most of the weekend daylight hours so I’m catching up on my blog. I’m a little fuzzy since there was a wedding across the street last night and the outdoor band with loudspeakers played ALL night until 5 am. Apparently this is standard for weddings.

The first week of May we went to Rabat for another craft fair. This one was a private showing for the American community at the American Club with its beautiful grounds. I had designed some new price tags, a flyer and signs (definitely not my area of expertise) for perhaps better marketability of their products. Unfortunately, the Americans didn’t show up in force, and many co-ops, including mine, didn’t sell enough to pay their expenses. My artisans had a good attitude though—they saw family, chatted with other artisans, and had time to nap in the sun on their carpets on the rare-for-Morocco, extensive and well-groomed lawn behind the tent.

To get to Rabat, I rode on the souk bus with one of the artisans. She had commandeered the front seats right behind the driver. At first I thought this was a bonus, but as the bus rolled out at 3:30 a.m., the driver started chain smoking and turned up the speakers right above our heads so we could listen to prayerful chanting and beseeching over and over all the way to Rabat. For six straight hours. The door didn’t work properly so every time we stopped for another passenger, the ticket-taker had to spend several minutes slamming the door before he could go back to sleeping in the aisle.

This morning I bought some vegetables at the little market in the village. I was short 5 dirham, but the vegetable seller told me to just bring it next time. How often would that happen in the US? Of course everyone knows where we live. When the telephone repair guy came to town to fix our line recently, I saw him drive up to a coffee shop and ask a question. Several people simultaneously pointed to our door. I’m pretty sure he was asking where the Americans live.