Yesterday my imma (host mother) told me to come over and help with making lunch, because she was having women over to “karshnt,” or card and spin wool. It occurs to me that stuff like this doesn’t often happen any more in the States. That is, have a community gathering to make light work of a tedious and difficult but necessary job that must be done. We do this type of thing often here.
Today at 9 am I walked into my imma’s kitchen, a long and wide room on the top level with three wood posts holding up the roof. The cement floor is half covered with rugs and mats surrounded by low wooden seats. Today 8 women have already taken seats on those mats. They have been at work for a while: there is a huge pile of fluffy white wool on the floor in between them, but there are also many stacks of carded wool next to each women. A couple women have begun the process of spinning. They use a hand-spindle, and turn the carded wool into loosely spun yarn. It’s sits piled next to them, a huge, long discarded snake skin of wool. The raw wool look like a tiny patch of fog took up residence on the floor in between them. I have to repress an irrational urge to jump into it like a child jumping into a pile of leaves. I go around the room and greet each woman personally, as is expected. I opt for the shaking hands variety because kissing people’s cheeks is tedious when they are all sitting cross-legged on the floor.
A few minutes later I’m sitting on a short stool, with about 2 kg of fool in front of me. Ever had fool? It’s tasty. Big long green-beans with soft foam-like skin, seeds the size of a largish fingernail and tough strings running down either side. Each bean-seed has to be checked for damage from bugs, and the strings come off, too. After that, it’s the carrots, then the potatoes. My imma likes the carrots de-cored. I don’t particularly like de-coring carrots, but I can do it now. I realize my wrist is going to be sore after all this veggie prep!
Ever watch carding and spinning by hand? Each person has their own rhythm, their hands never staying still… the wool going from little fog-patch to snagged on the carding paddles, then scrrratch—scrrrratch it is combed and pulled into line and turned and returned until it’s smooth and in little rectangles. Piles of the rectangles grow and are taken to the women spinning. They take two, catch the edge of them on the spindle and give it a few twists, then tug and twist, tug-tug-tug-tug and twist again until the wool stretches out, growing and twisting as it falls by their sides in tangley looking piles. Then they wrap it around arms and pull it through into a big knot with a twist of the wrist.
To pass the time the women start singing. They’re clever, making up songs about life on the spot, and they teach them to each other in a call-and-response style. Thus, the leader who made up the song teaches everyone else a refrain and then puts in little verses once they’ve got it. It’s cool. The tune is usually the same, and it’s as twisty and turny as the wool. Middling high pitched, it’s sweet and they love it. They sing until their voices get scratchy. The carding makes a low, rough counterpoint, and I add the soft popping noise of fool being broken into halves and quarters and eighths as I prep it. They sing about marriage, about cooking and what fuel they cook with, and then my host mother decides to sing about me to embarrass me. They laugh and we keep going. I wish I could sing with them but I can just barely catch the meaning… the words flow by to quickly for me to raise my voice. I finish before they do, and help set up the mid-morning snack. They put a little round table over the fog-patch of wool and eat up. Then they get back to it. Scrrrrrratch—scrrrrrrratch!
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Herding Nomads
The trouble with working with semi-nomadic herders is that they are, well, semi-nomadic. Families often keep a house here, and a tent or a stone house in the mountains as a base for the herders to come back to each night. The family is divided between the two places, and the family members switch back and forth and back and forth. Usually a pattern emerges, though.
For example, the president of the herders’ association here has his family divided up as follows. Like his father, he keeps the main family house here. His oldest daughter keeps house, with his youngest son who is still going to school here. His wife runs the mountain base camp, a tent in the summer and a rock house in the winter. Except when the winter is so hard that the rock house is covered in snow. Then they take the tent down to the foothills. His second oldest daughter is married and lives in Sefrou. His two youngest daughters are attending middle school/high school in Haj City, our market town. They are staying with family members. The president is slowly building a house in Haj City. When it is finished, he will move his oldest daughter and youngest son there, and his youngest daughters will move in until they are married or go elsewhere. The old family home will be abandoned, I guess. His wife will, I suppose, run the tent until she is too old to do so anymore. At which point he will also be old, and perhaps he will sell his 350 odd sheep and goats and live out as good a life as he can in Haj City. I wonder if his grandchildren will learn the language he learned first at all. Many children of Imazighen heritage are completely ignorant of the language and stories of their fathers. Why bother when Arabic is so much more universal anyway? His is not an unusual story: many families are planning their escape this way. The life of the nomadic herder, semi- or no, is a hard one.
Back to the original comment… in trying to help people improve their life, one has to hold many meetings. Meetings are hard to hold if half of the people who need to be there are always gone, and which half is missing is continually changing. Any meeting or work that needs doing takes careful planning, and good luck as well. The worst is when the herds are moving between summer and winter pastures. Everyone is in constant motion, because moving the herds means moving the tents, with all of the furnishings and accessories. Vans, trucks, and endless mule and donkey trains can be seen moving up and down roads and mountains paths for weeks. I give up organizing until those weeks pass.
The nice part about working with semi-nomadic herders is that you get to go hang out in the tents with them in the summer. High altitude grazing grounds are always cool and breezy. The mountains are beautiful, and stark. They are almost entirely bereft of trees, but lightly covered with tough bunch grasses, herbs, bushes and the occasional blades of new grasses making a break for some sunlight between the rocks. Thus, the colors of the rocks show through, with a soft haze of yellow green overlaying them. Except for the patches of forest, deep green and sparse. Those forest bits are small and shrinking, like patches of hair on a balding man’s head. They hang down in lower altitudes, too, much like said male pattern balding. I use them to teach about erosion. “See those trees? See those huge gullies cut into the mountains by the rains last year? See how they are hardly ever in the same place? That’s why trees are important!” Unfortunately, I only get to tell so many people because I work closely with only a few. They are the ones who really organize. They use their superior networking powers to contact and bring in the semi-nomadic herders. It works pretty well for the meetings, but not for the informal education.
For example, the president of the herders’ association here has his family divided up as follows. Like his father, he keeps the main family house here. His oldest daughter keeps house, with his youngest son who is still going to school here. His wife runs the mountain base camp, a tent in the summer and a rock house in the winter. Except when the winter is so hard that the rock house is covered in snow. Then they take the tent down to the foothills. His second oldest daughter is married and lives in Sefrou. His two youngest daughters are attending middle school/high school in Haj City, our market town. They are staying with family members. The president is slowly building a house in Haj City. When it is finished, he will move his oldest daughter and youngest son there, and his youngest daughters will move in until they are married or go elsewhere. The old family home will be abandoned, I guess. His wife will, I suppose, run the tent until she is too old to do so anymore. At which point he will also be old, and perhaps he will sell his 350 odd sheep and goats and live out as good a life as he can in Haj City. I wonder if his grandchildren will learn the language he learned first at all. Many children of Imazighen heritage are completely ignorant of the language and stories of their fathers. Why bother when Arabic is so much more universal anyway? His is not an unusual story: many families are planning their escape this way. The life of the nomadic herder, semi- or no, is a hard one.
Back to the original comment… in trying to help people improve their life, one has to hold many meetings. Meetings are hard to hold if half of the people who need to be there are always gone, and which half is missing is continually changing. Any meeting or work that needs doing takes careful planning, and good luck as well. The worst is when the herds are moving between summer and winter pastures. Everyone is in constant motion, because moving the herds means moving the tents, with all of the furnishings and accessories. Vans, trucks, and endless mule and donkey trains can be seen moving up and down roads and mountains paths for weeks. I give up organizing until those weeks pass.
The nice part about working with semi-nomadic herders is that you get to go hang out in the tents with them in the summer. High altitude grazing grounds are always cool and breezy. The mountains are beautiful, and stark. They are almost entirely bereft of trees, but lightly covered with tough bunch grasses, herbs, bushes and the occasional blades of new grasses making a break for some sunlight between the rocks. Thus, the colors of the rocks show through, with a soft haze of yellow green overlaying them. Except for the patches of forest, deep green and sparse. Those forest bits are small and shrinking, like patches of hair on a balding man’s head. They hang down in lower altitudes, too, much like said male pattern balding. I use them to teach about erosion. “See those trees? See those huge gullies cut into the mountains by the rains last year? See how they are hardly ever in the same place? That’s why trees are important!” Unfortunately, I only get to tell so many people because I work closely with only a few. They are the ones who really organize. They use their superior networking powers to contact and bring in the semi-nomadic herders. It works pretty well for the meetings, but not for the informal education.
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