Children's story hour

He was in Morocco on 9/11. He didn't take possession of that event. Fate said hello, hah, hah, hah. 

After two months he shifted to Cadiz, Spain with Omar, a blind Touareg writer.

His forward observer position allowed him to witness young and old sexually repressed Catholic couples steal kisses at night under yellow street lamps. They hid in recessed Moorish doorways getting a quick feel. Passion with a purpose.

Meals with a Gypsy family timed down Gades days with a simple breakfast of toast, butter, jam or muesli, a lunch of thick soup, fresh salad, bread, water, and a main course at 2:30 p.m. He read Don Quixote...true history...the crux of fiction, harder to read than fantasy. The world of floating images.

It was shifts, frequencies, and transitions moving from pre-terror North America to North Africa and old Southern European worlds. Everyone was connected by history in the making: Phoenician, Romans, Berbers haunting conquests, establishing bases in Europe, Moors fighting Christians, morphing cellular structures.

In Andalucía citizens exchanged belief windows, values, attitudes, construction projects, and 3,000 years of icon free Arabian art. It was about agriculture, water, light, form, and substance. Equality was the word at a Muslim burial exhibit at the Mondragon Palace in Ronda.

Cadiz was founded by Phoenicians in 1100 BC. They called it Gadir and traded amber and tin. It was a Roman navel base.

Greeks and Phoenicians introduced the potter’s wheel, writing, olive tree, donkey and hen to Spain. They replaced iron with bronze. Metals became currencies. People developed agriculture as growing populations built walls, towers, and castles for security. Romans contributed aqueducts, temples, theaters, circuses, and baths. They gave the Iberian Peninsula Castilian language based on 2,000-year old Latin.

Their desire, wanderlust and greed established communities to satisfy their impulse for cuisine, sex, music, and trade expanded their nation-state.

The Museo de Cadiz was filled with Roman artifacts. Humans wandered through archeological epoch discoveries from settlements in Gades along the coast extending inland to Seville and Cordoba.

Travellers discovered estuaries, towns, villages, isolated tight white pueblos and rooms full of coins, maps, heads, pottery and faces. They discovered vases, dynasties, ruins, Roman legion armor, burial sites, aqueduct maps, temples, theaters, masks, busts, sculptures, marble, glass, and utensils.

Three million-year old human remains slept in stoned chambers. Sharp sewing bones rested in dust.

Scientists collected anger, desire, jealousy, pride, and ignorance. Minute grains of mica. Archaeologists and mobile blood donation units explored rain forests and hacked through Angkor Wat jungles discovering isolated oceanic islands above simmering volcanic eruptions.

ACIN

STC

Taureg

Tuareg Berbers in flowing blue robes meandered through his dream.

A hustler on his bike materialized out of thin air.

“Where are you going? Come have a look at my shop. Only five minutes by bike. Great prices. You don’t have to buy.”

“Why should I?” 

“Great morning prices.” 

Five hundred years ago this guy would have been on a camel in his burnoose tending his flock in the Sahara. He’d be planning to invade Spain, married to a beautiful Berber girl with dark seductive eyes, had ten kids and conquered the Iberian peninsula in his spare time.

Now he was on a 50cc imported European bike wearing castoff designer jeans with slick black hair and grinning with all his teeth, a distinctive character trait.

Used to multiple dimensions and shifting frequencies the wandering ghost was passing through the transition machine being assaulted by monosyllabic well meaning idiots taking him for a fool.

Only the fool and children spoke the truth.

All the hustlers were released on parole for good behavior. They were out. They had no idea who, what, when, why, where and how he’d arrived in their jurisdiction. They lived in an inverted paradigm. He was a hunter gatherer of words and images. Hunting with a singular flair, a cunning intelligence — Metis — a hybrid form.

medina life

Once upon a time there was this small dusty town at the edge of the Medina. A huge decrepit filthy amazing series of connected passageways branched off the square.

A traveler found some high quality silver bracelets, inspected old Tuareg jewelry, rugs, carpets, bowls, dishes, green ionized utensils, a long bullwhip, elaborate Berber bags and junk. In a courtyard men bought and sold bags of recycled pots, pans, brass, and silver as merchants haggled. 

The day was hot. The souk was cool. As he walked past endless supplies of mass produced stuff for tourists he slipped into photographing mode without being obtrusive. The camera is an eye and mirror.

He was lost on purpose. He knew every twist and turn and followed the smell of leather. Inside a small narrow corridor he turned into a maze of tight alleys. People lived in poverty here, their scraps of clothing on thin lines in stale air. 

Inside a small room a boy, 10, applied coats of thick viscous liquid paste to leather. The traveler wanted to make a photograph of his face. An older boy demanded too much money. They offered him a chair. 

The bare room was 8x10. The fumes were overwhelming. The traveler sat, negotiated and tried to avoid inhaling the fumes. No ventilation. A dim light, empty walls with leather punching tools, piles of treated leather, new leather needing the brush. They engaged in broken animated conversation and when the traveler knew they had no deal he left.

This was the only way to deal with some people, show them your back, show them the soles of your shoes. Business is business. They sang. Brushing down leather. 

They were part of the production process puzzle.

An area of low wages. In these under-regulated workshops you either keep up the pace or go hungry. 

The boy earns $6 for a six-day week. Child labor and economic exploitation.

UNICEF has targeted Moroccan authorities to persuade artisans to stop hiring children under 12 and release those already employed for a few hours of schooling each week. 

Metalworking is the most hazardous field, followed by jewelry and mosaic-making, because of the chemicals used. Children working with slipper-makers are exposed to vapors from the glue and dust causes respiratory problems for those working in the pottery sheds.

Child labor was linked to the politically sensitive question of educational provision.

Poor families regard schooling as of little use in the real world.

There has been little pressure as yet from political parties, trade unions, or wider public opinion for any stricter stance on child labor.

In the old slave market sun burned past the Red City throwing light into dust as men shoveled their way through earth, hauling stones with broken wheelbarrows. They dumped large round chipped stones in a site where a man in his straw hat picked them up laying them end to end.

Donkeys clipped along a busted narrow road. Some hauled carts of fruits and vegetables stacked in boxes to the clear blue sky. Others pulled wooden rolling semi-trailers of mattresses, end tables, odd furniture pieces to a distant home. 

Homes were all cinder block. Men made the blocks, loaded them on pallets so donkeys could pull them to sites where they lay broken and whole waiting for generations to finish their education and get to work.

Donkeys pulled everything past men and boys repairing bikes and inoperable scooters along the road. Women with babies strapped to backs paced dust. Old men in djellabas hooded against wind shuffled in slippers. 

Men prepared tea in alleys. They chopped leaves bought from an old man on his bike with fresh smelling mint spilling out of his crushed baskets. They brewed water, crammed leaves into a dented polished tea kettle, poured in water, threw in huge blocks of white sugar, closed the lid, poured some into a small glass, swished it around and poured it back into the tea pot. They poured tea by raising the pot high above the glasses so the murky sweet liquid would mix well.

Bad teeth in the country was a big problem.

International Women's Day

Greetings,

To honor women this day, every day, everywhere, here are some cultural images.

Nature is what you are. Culture is what you can be.

Metta.

Natasha from Kiev

I recently read an article about how women are treated in some countries. For example, in Turkey, health care workers report that 65% of all wives are beaten by their husbands.  It's considered normal behavior because many, not all, women are treated as property. There and elsewhere. 

We've all read stories about arranged marriages, child marriages and the desperate plight of women in many countries.

It reminded me of a story I wrote about a women named Natasha. I put it in my book. Recycled. Here it is.

At the beginning of September 2001, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Youseif, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months. 

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5-year old son. Her name was Natasha and she was tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They'd met at the university in Kiev and now he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son.

He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home. 

Natasha had heard about her new home but had never seen it. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family for the first time and live their life. 

She did not speak Arabic. Her cheap red, white and blue Russian plastic baggage was falling apart at the seams. Her son was a terror and pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself. 

I'd finished a book that summer about a woman who spoke every language and I was jumping through a window into new adventures and gather new material. Everyone spoke the same language as night fell around the roar of planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere.

We were buried at gate 54D, miles from bright gleaming duty free shops full of perfume, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, gleaming diamond rings and watches, customs, clothing stores and business.

Shoppers carried plastic bags saying, “Buy and Fly.” 

It was midnight when we landed in Casablanca and walked through a towering hall full of intricate inlaid mosaic tiles and waterfalls. Huge framed images of smiling monarchs watched us. Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited. Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through green ‘nothing to declare’ zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her broken bags on a cart and she disappeared into the throng with her son. I watched her husband’s Berber family approach her. It was his father, mother, brother-in-law and grandmother dressed in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy.

As the old couple slowly walked away I knew they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their connection to their son. 

Natasha, an alien in their world, an aberration, would be relegated to a new life. She moved into their world with a Ukranian passport, speaking unknown languages where she'd be welcomed on one hand and relegated to a life in a new reality serving her new family. 

She was going to be many things to them and they would manifest their loss on her. She'd carry water and gather wood. She'd cook and clean and slave away. She'd carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and connections. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a sprawling chaotic city of five million.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his life. It was his dark eyed nomadic destiny. 

When his wife was trapped in the airport he was with a prostitute and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

This was the story I whispered to Natasha but she found it hard to believe.

Metta.