Goat Skinning (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm.

Lo and I were walking through the medina in Tangier, at the mouth of the Mediterranean on Morocco’s northern coast, when I saw a ring in one of the jeweler’s stores that was nearly big enough around for two of my fingers. What woman, I wondered, could possibly wear a ring that big? Haven’t you noticed the women’s hands here? Lo replied. It wasn’t until several days later, in Ain Chaib, that I understood.

The trip from Tangier to Ain Chaib, a village with just over 1,000 people in southern Morocco, consisted of an overnight train ride to Marrakech–a frantic city of stifling heat on the high plains–a five-hour bus ride farther southwest, up over the High Atlas Mountains to the coastal city of Agadir, and, finally, an hour riding in the back of a worn-out Mercedes Benz taxi, shoulder to shoulder with five other passengers headed home to villages and towns sprinkled along the highway.

We stayed with the same extended family, nearly 40 members across three generations, that Lo lived with during her service in the Peace Corps two years earlier. Family members cycled through the main house throughout the day, but for lunch and dinner everyone gathered.

Beyond taste and smell, every meal the family prepared was a tactile experience. Once one of the aunts or nieces placed the tagine, a conical clay dish used to cook many meals, in the middle of the table, another family member would take several rounds of hubz, a type of flat bread made by hand that morning by one of the women in the family, and tear them in half, and then in half again, giving everyone several rough quarters with which to scoop food. Tearing the hubz into perfect, bite-sized pieces with just my right hand, as even the youngest cousins were able to manage, required more dexterity than I was able to muster at first. Trying to gather tiny grains of couscous into a single, edible ball–again, with just one hand–proved even more difficult.

One morning, Elgada, the 70-year-old grandmother of the family, cracked Argan nuts to begin the process of making oil, which they use to add a smooth, nutty flavor to many dishes. Nearly blind from diabetes, Elgada sat on the ground, and with one stone balanced on her lap and a smaller one held in her right hand, she split open a nut she held pinched between her left index finger and thumb. Her calloused fingers then deftly separated the nut from the shell. As I sat in the shaded courtyard to avoid the heat, I watched her do this dozens of times without missing once. Years of doing this had given her the precision required to avoid smashing her fingers between two rocks.

Cracking Nuts (credit: Flickr user mgilbir)

The Sunday we were in the village, two of the brothers slaughtered and butchered a goat to make lunch and dinner for the family. Slaughtering a goat usually happens at the end of Ramadan, or for a birth or wedding, but I wanted to see it, to experience the ritual, so we helped the brothers pay for one. As they worked together to corral the goat, cut its neck, peel the skin back and remove the innards, there was little hesitation in any of their motions. Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm. In fact, the hands often seemed to lead the body, making quick work of a particularly odorous process and belying the grimaces on their faces.

Hands here made bread every morning, poured tea, slaughtered goats, peeled pricklypear fruits, all with an ease that could not come naturally to me. Some women in the village make jewelry, and those in other villages in the region weave carpets, or silversmith, all requiring dexterity and flexibility I can only admire.

In the two years since Lo had been in the village, the Internet has made its way to Ain Chaib. The family can now email a sister in Memphis without traveling to the nearby town, Ouled Teima, a 45-minute walk across an open, dry, dusty field. But the distance between the two communities won’t last. Ouled Teima is creeping toward Ain Chaib, extending a skeleton of development across the fields. A grid of roads, with a forest of solitary lamp posts at each corner, populates the otherwise barren landscape. In two more years, houses, families, markets, and taxi stands may fill the space.

Though the ring I marveled at in Tangier might fit the women in Ain Chaib, their fingers and palms large and muscled from years of  work, none of the women I met were wearing anything like it. Most will never go to Tangier. But Tangier is coming to them. And when it does, I wonder how their work, and their hands, will change.

Camels in Field (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

Graves (credit: Jeff Haskins)

Land is a complicated issue in Africa. It is one of the areas of African society where the colonial legacy still lives on. Rights claims to “ancestral homelands” often shift with the tides of political power. There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to who owns land, but the vagueness seems to clear up immediately when there is money to be made.

When you have land, you hold on to it.  This lesson was reinforced to me just a few weeks ago, while I was traveling with a few companions in Cameroon for a community site visit. Our vehicle had broken down about an hour outside of Yaoundé. It was just before 9:00 a.m. and since the weather was still cool, we decided to walk out of the forest and meet our pick-up vehicle along the way to our destination.

At the end of one road, we turned left.  The village center was hopping. Women walked to work or to fetch water. Older men sat under storefronts arguing, seemingly unaware of the three foreigners–an American, a French woman, and an Italian, covered in mud and sweat–walking out of the forest. Some teenagers hooted and hollered at us, perhaps trying to scare us.

The main street, though, had only a few storefronts.  One side featured a sign for a high-society-sounding “Americain Coiffure” barbershop nailed to a pole, but no barbershop was in sight.  On the other side, young men and women argued with motorbike taxis over fares to destinations farther down the road or maybe Yaoundé.

Americain Coiffure (credit: Jeff Haskins)

We walked farther. The road turned dusty. Many of the brick houses had large mounds in front, some covered by dirt, some by tile. It took me a few seconds to understand that these were graves. Some yards had two graves in front and one on the side. A large one designated adults who died, small ones were for children. We asked one of the scientists leading our group why people in the area buried the dead in front of their houses. “It’s a local custom,” he said. “So they can watch over the family.”

I wondered if there wasn’t more to it.

We approached a man carrying a machete and what looked like the trunk of an oil palm tree. In French, one of us asked, “Why do you bury dead here, in front of your house?”

He smiled. “So that they can watch over me and my family,” he said. “My father knows that he will be buried here, and he knows that he will watch over us and we will watch over him.”

But why hadn’t the village or a church set aside a plot of land for a cemetery?

“I’m not giving up my land for someone else’s family,” he said.

Perhaps that solved the mystery. Land was precious, and I thought to myself, it takes a village to raise a child, but you’re on your own when it comes to burying them.