7/15 Salt Dancing

Awakened to the singing of roosters (at 4:30), I laugh to myself the parallels to my first experience with prayer calls. I return to interrupted sleep bouts until 8, but regardless wake up refreshed. After a breakfast of that fried bread with jam and instant coffee mix (just add milk), I head to the salt fields for the day. Before going to the fields, we make a stop at the well, filling up our donkey (Barbara, whose colt we nicknamed Eeyore) with bottles to the brim. Packed and ready, we trudge over a mountain cut road worn by footprints long-past. The road winds to overlook the beautiful surroundings, mountains crown the horizon, and distant villages peak out in spurts. Above we see Katrina and Steph picking Humus [chick peas] with their host sister. We wave as we continue to various fields seemingly haphazardly planted and shrubs framing our trail. The trek reminds me of scouting hikes, and every so often a guava plant will pop up here and a cactus will there – I’m a blink away from El Rancho Cima back in Texas. To top off the deja-vu, rural villagers traditionally wear wide brimmed straw hats (which we also totted today, gifts from the villagers), so the countryside is dispersed among wandering sombreros. Clefts of rocks and iffy footholds lead us down the mountain to the heart, a valley where tarped “fields” of puddles await us. We first see a gaggle of 20 or so of these pools maybe 10’x20’, with a brick structure overlooking the field. This, apparently, is the old/traditional field, we will be working elsewhere. We continue on to a slightly smaller set of black tarps divided by half-foot high dirt walls. These tarps house maybe 15 pools, each glittering with various amounts of white diamonds. These are the salt pools, and as the water evaporates off crystal sheets of salt flakes are left. We take off our shoes, roll up our jeans, and wash our feet before walking around these ladies’ “pastures.” Our learning style is ‘monkey-see, monkey-do’, though we do have some upper levels to translate certain specifics. As the women mainly spoke Darhija, we had a grand time at charades throughout the day.

Three of us grab brooms and start sweeping the salt in selected pools to their most downhill corners. Meanwhile, the rest of us “dance” on the salt, breaking up the crystals to more bite-size pieces. Once the salt piles have been accumulated and ground down, we all jump down to scoop up the salt with small buckets and small hands, dumping each full load into large sacks. These scoops still carry some water with them, which either evaporates off or drains out from the barley sack. We pretty much fill up an entire sack with one pool; we resweep and rescoop each one down to its tarp, before sweeping off the leftover water to the nearby pools. Then, we move to the next pool, doing about 6 in all. All the while, we crack jokes and sing and dance, Rachel stopped by and teaches a group to Salsa, and Mely and I teach another to line dance. After making the obvious pun possible concerning Julia’s falling skirt being a-salt-ed (somewhere Jeremy is smiling), I move on to give each of the SIT group salt nicknames:

Sam – Kosher Salt, Naomi – Saltine, Mat – Saltan, Mely – Crusty (self imposed), Geoffrey – Basalt, Katrina – Salt Spice (referencing her Moroccan nickname, Barbie), Steph – Salt Lake (first to fall into the salt pools), Rachel – Saltza (thank Mely for that name), Fadoua – Melikat Milhe (queen of the salt – was there ever any question), Hanan – Oustaitha Milhe, Fraisa – See-salt (or Sea-salt, whichever you prefer), Kacey – Ninja Assault, Bradley – Salt Lick.

Around 1 we break for an hour, and are taken by the group to a large shady tree next to our stuff, and pegged donkeys. The villagers provide a wonderful meal for us: eggplant, meat, rice, etc. but the highlight were the fries, which we could hilariously eat with our salt-stained fingers for the perfect taste. We lounge about for another good 30 minutes or so, some students nap, while others joke and laugh about various knickknacks. But the village star is by far Rachel. During her stay here she has obtained an extremely impressive command of Darhija, and the village ladies and children absolutely adore every word in their conversations.

We return to the fields for another hour, but as work depends on evaporation rates, we are pretty much done for the day (I learn later that we pretty much finished all the work for both days). We head back to the village, but along the way Hanan slipped on the aforementioned loose rocks, twisting her ankle. Opposed to taking a donkey back, she quickens her breathing, but we keep her talking, getting her water and wrapping her ankle with Mely’s donated skirt. Unfortunately, the skirt was thick and eventually untied while walking back (I wish I could use her hijab but that wouldn’t work culturally), and after retying it once she said she didn’t need it a third time. By then the shock of the fall had worn off, so Fadoua and I just continued to help her slowly hobble up the road back home. By the time we made it, Hanan was just about walking on her own, and with a few words of encouragement by Sam and I trying to use our small amount of complementary-flavored vocabulary, she made it back to the cushioned couch. We get her some more water and an instant icepack from the first aid kit, as she sits and rests with an elevated ankle. Meanwhile, the family heats a bucket of water for us, so we could take a “shower.” Unfortunately told we wouldn’t have such an opportunity, I didn't bring any soap and thus only rinsed off before lounging about for the night.