Five months in and still learning new things.

Fun Moroccan Fact: Women don’t take their husbands last name, they keep their own. More interestingly, even though they move into their husbands’ house- and this often means leaving their own village- they do not take their husbands family as a part of themselves. I am referring to the idea of the wife becoming a part of the husband’s family, ie “mother-in-law.” (the amazirt call them the parents of my husband/wife) Another example, even if I were to marry a Smith from Golden and move to Golden I would still consider myself a Pullen of Arvada my entire life. I imagine the adoption of the husband’s family is a product of our culture of taking on the last name so I see it as interesting. I fixate on this point b/c it created an Erika-puts-her-cultural-foot-in-her-cultural-mouth moment.
Remember my telling you guys that my site is all one big family? Well that means that all the families share the same name and when I leave the site it’s such a small village that, when asked where I live, I tell them Ait (the people of) that last name because nobody knows the village. Everyone knows that family though. Well I mentioned that to my host sister (who is a member of that family) and she laughed and said yes, it’s a small ighram and they are all related. Well some women were talking about this same thing a few days later, and I didn’t understand everything they were saying but I kind of was following. One woman said, yeah I have to tell people I live in Ait ____ b/c nobody know where _____ is. Then a bunch of the women got defensive that the place shouldn’t be called Ait _____ (It’s common to call bled tribes by the founding family’s name instead of coming up with a real name) So they looked to me to solve their dispute, remember I didn’t understand most of what they said so I decided to answer honestly. I said, When I talk to the gendarms I have to call it Ait ____ (bad idea). All the women threw their hands in the air and informed me that none of them were of that last name, that was when I learned the women who called it Ait ____ was one of the single women of that last name and all the other women had married into the village and, therefore, do not identify with my village.
Idle thought, because I have too much time on my hands thanks to Ramadan, marriage in Europe (specifically England is what I’m referencing but it’s pretty much the same across the board) just two or three centuries ago (a few hundred years is a “just” in the anthropologists mind) were not unlike these marriages. Women would have arranged marriages or be married off to anyone their parents could afford to marry them too and even so the woman would be considered part of her family from that region and not really a member of her husband’s family. She was just “accepted” into the cool kid group if she had a son.
So for simplification of explaining relationships out in the boondocks of Morocco, think of England in the mid 15 or 1600’s. I specify the boondocks because the big cities are much more revolutionary, in Marrakech people even date, not openly and they certainly don’t hold hands, but there is relationship building before marriage. The social upheaval of the rebellious youths is upon us, Lord have mercy.
In other news, Ramadan is going well. It started four days ago and, actually, it’s not as hard as I had thought. Actually, I’m kind of cheating, I’ve changed my day life for my night life, I stay up and eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at night till morning call to prayer at 4 am. After call to prayer I go to bed and stay there till about 11 am. Then I just have 8 hours to kill before I can eat again.