A pet goat, weaving, and collecting
Day 16
After a long morning plant collection and photo documentation we had a lovely survey with Fatim’s aunt on the west side of the douar Ait Toug-mud (everyone here is related since there are only 8 families making up all the households). It was a wash day so most of the young women were scrubbing and hanging the beautiful handmade rugs. A little goat joined us eating tanort out of one of the women’s hands. In one of the houses we visited later, they were also making a rug, but more colourful than the other one we’ve seen. We had a vegetable couscous (si-xsou in Tashelhit I think), and lantis (lentils) with tanort at another house. People are so generous and kind, but also so pushy sometimes when it comes to food- always wanting you to have more I’m so stuffed after interviewing. One of the women also gave us a large bag of walnuts- so delicious and we cracked some open to share with Fatim.
Day 17
Went to see Halti Iesha again- rather sad she lives alone, despite having so many children- she expressed to us that she does feel lonely often but is also shy to keep going to visit everyone so often. Its’ odd since all the old people live with their children- usually join the family of one of the sons so and help with the household or are cared for. She made us tea (with the most enormous block of sugar) and bread. During one of our interviews we got to watch a woman make si-xsou (couscous) in the taket (traditional/tanort) oven/chimney room of her kitchen as the chickens pecked up scrapes of bread while we sipped tea and ate peanuts dates and wholegrain tanort. Souad says their style of couscous takes about 3 hours to cook with the accompanying stew. She was quite helpful and gave us some interesting information about the walnut trees- the leaves used to be dried for animal fodder.
On the way to do ecology surveys Souad and I interviewed a man herding his 3 sheep- and he helped give me the names of some more names of the wild mountain fodder plants, although as with most of the people we have asked- aside from tescara, everything is just called touga unless it has some other ethnobotanical use like the ifsca broom plant that is used to sweep, as fever medicine (which I have used several times here), and to flavour tea and coffee. Managed to get in another transect survey of mountain plants before it was too dark, and on my way back I met some women we had interviewed- I offered to carry some of their touga (which they had just gather from the fields. This time they showed me how to hold it properly with the rope and sickle keeping the bag and plants in place. I’m always impressed with how well meshed the plant bundled are- laid so that they stay well together when the women don’t have bags for carrying. I was asking them about the different grass species- well pointing and using my minimal Tachelhit vocabulary, but they just say touga touga touga. It was about 20 minutes walking back and as with every time I do a participant observation (help them work) they men and children seemed very amused to see me carrying and helping the women with their work. All these mountain women are definitely quite strong to be doing this day after day- basically their own donkeys and horses. Even when the women care and get the feed for them it seems the men use the larger animals for work and carrying, while the women just use their own bodies. Though a few sometimes carry teseft and less often touga with horses/donkeys I haven’t seen anyone, except one elderly man, carrying fodder plants on his back or at all.