Movies

It was a relatively quiet day – we had a practice language test with Hoda, watched a couple movies in Tamazight and prepared for our good-bye party. First, a word about movies in Morocco. All TV and professional movies are in French or Moroccan Arabic, so there are many semi-professional and amateur movies in the local Berber languages. They range from ridiculous to almost professional with serious plot lines. My host family is currently watching a series about a young woman from a wealthy, educated background who marries a taxi driver, against the will of her parents. In the episode we watched this week, the woman's mother tricks her into getting divorced. We then flash forward 2 years to the woman with her toddler child, who is subsequently abducted by the ex-husband. The fight scene that follows involves the ex-husband running away with the child strapped to his back. When he gets caught there is a lot of obviously fake fighting and lots of grunting. The best part is when his aggressors slam him back into a tree with the baby still strapped on! Then someone gets a knife and slices the fabric holding the baby in – and the baby falls softly into its mothers arms! My group was so excited to see this scene that we sat through 45 minutes of a movie we mostly didn't understand just to see it.
Our good-bye party was a lot of fun – we invited all of our families and some of the other community members we worked with during our training. We drank a lot of soda and ate a lot of cookies, but because of a death in the community, we could not play any music. We even successfully told the group about our final sites and they understood! Language is getting better every day!
The afternoon ended almost appropriately because the trouble-maker in town followed Liz and I as we walked home. He's bothered us a couple times before and ignoring him usually works. Tonight, though, he was rather insistent that we play soccer with him. Neither Liz nor I wanted to engage him so we told him no, but he continued to follow us and eventually threw the soccer ball and nailed me in the back of the head. I flew around and started yelling at him in Tamazight, while shaking my fist at him. He was so startled that he ran away. Liz somehow caught the ball bouncing off my head and was going to keep it, but he came back for the ball and started bothering us again. She chucked the ball as far as she could and the boy chased after it, giving us enough time to get home.