African Cats

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This weekend I took my cat back to his mother. She promptly attacked him and he beat her up. It wasn’t a good beginning, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I will be working at the Moroccan Ministry of Youth & Sports summer camps all of August and into the first week of September. There was nobody in my town who would agree to take care of him, no matter how hard I pleaded. Cats are street creatures and even my downstairs neighbors were afraid of the kitten I brought home in April. So, back to the volunteer in Tazert he went.

My cat started out life in my home as a kitten named Binti. Bint means girl or daughter in Arabic, and adding an i on the end makes the possessive. Essentially I named the cat “my daughter.” At the age of five months I took the half-grown cat to Marrakech to get her spayed. In the afternoon I went back to the vet to pick up Binti and was told I had a male cat who had just been neutered. It took me a while to get used to talking to and about the cat in the masculine, rather than using feminine verbs and adjectives with him/her/it. But now I am considering renaming him Wildi, which, of course, means “my son.” (The first i is pronounced like in ‘little’ and the second like ‘Hawaii’).

I had to come home alone for one last day in Kelaa before taking off for camp. In the bush taxi on the way back from abandoning Wildi to defend himself for a month, I watched one of the best sunsets I have seen this summer and remembered that it was an African sunset. Living in a “city” of 80,000 and having daily access to internet and dodging speeding cars on the way to work every day sometimes distracts me from the fact that I am living in Africa. Especially since everything is so Arab here. Most small towns and even small cities in Morocco have a more Berber feel to them. My town is strongly Arab and often doesn’t feel very African. Plus, I get caught up in the daily routine that everybody deals with and forget to look around me and appreciate how extraordinary living here can be for a girl from Idaho.

Watching from the taxi, the perfect orange disk of the sun was sinking fast into blue hills as I sped along, squished against the window behind the driver, sharing the back seat with a wide Tamazight woman in a pink jellaba and two noisy twenty-something men who were still rehashing a World Cup game in loud Darija. Two men were in the front seat as usual and an extra person was even sharing the driver’s seat for part of this trip. Ten foot high walls of broad leafed cactus topped by reddening fruit line the road from Tazert to Kelaa, like most roads in my region. They serve as a fence protecting the fields of vegetables or olive groves and produce a tasty fruit throughout late summer. The wheat fields are bare, already exposing their covering of rocks in the dusk and the hay is piled up. Most of the hay stacks already covered with adobe to prevent the Sahara sandstorms from whisking them away. The sinking sun darted behind the pyramidish hay stacks, alternating with palm trees and the occasional red mud brick house built too close to the road as it sunk behind the low hills.

Back home the house is empty and quiet without Wildi. No cockroaches will be hunted tonight. I spent the evening up on the roof with my buckets doing laundry. Even when there are no sandstorms the summer dust invades everything and a clean floor is dusty in an hour even with the windows closed, so doing laundry is not only a good way to splash around in some water, but wash the accumulated dust off the roof which serves as my porch, terrace and garden. My pots of basil have taken off and if I wasn’t leaving for camp so soon I would make a few batches of pesto. My rose has produced it’s first bloom. It must be some special Moroccan variety to be brave enough to flower in this heat. I doubt we have had a day below 100F for well over a month.

But camp will be on the coast, in the city of El Jadida, south of Casablanca, where I will get to feel the cool Atlantic breezes. It is a Ministry language camp, but the American volunteers are asked to come to teach English in the mornings and lead activities in the afternoons. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Camp here is a lot more relaxed than camp in the US and nobody seems to mind if plans change at the last minute, or even get created at the last minute. I will find out what’s going on when I get there.

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Photos

Wildi in his new home
I bought him a can of sardines to try to convince him that this would be a good home for him.

Cream Cheese
Wildi's mother Cream Cheese with the new litter of three younger brothers, and a stray cat Cybele has named Psycho. This is Cybele's courtyard, a safe and homey place with a cute garden.

Before Leaving Home
Wildi was reading up on what makes me happy while I was cleaning house. I made this poster on one of my bluer days to remind myself of things that make me happy.