Natalie Camarena: L3id...awd

This past week and a half has been quite eventful. I don’t mean eventful in terms of work, but rather because of everything happening around me. You may remember that last year I wrote about “L3id Amkor.” Well, its that time of the year again and once more I want to share a bit about my experience with it. L3id(which means “holiday”) was on Saturday but my celebration of it really started on Friday night. I went over to a neighbor’s house to hang out and get henna done. First, I helped them make cookies. Everyone spends the day before l3id making cookies and other sweets to have handy on l3id when they are visited by their family and friends. After the baking party, my friend Namia mixed the henna and began to decorate my hands. J While waiting for the henna to dry I hung around the house and helped the family assemble their new washing machine. One part of l3id is that people get new things. So, for example, children are often given new clothes for the holiday. When going around to visit people everyone wears their new clothes. The youngest boy of this family was so excited by his new outfit that he ran over to me and showed me his new socks and shoes J Anyways, this family got themselves a washing machine for l3id. Very few families in my town can afford such a luxury so this was quite a big deal. The whole family gathered around to help set it up and everyone hovered around as they washed their first load of laundry. The younger children never strayed from the machine. I have yet to use a washing machine in Morocco so this was also my first time seeing how they work here. This particular one is small and doesn’t rinse clothes. So, the women still rinsed the clothes in buckets and then put them in the second compartment to spin dry them a bit. Despite still having to do some of the work themselves, they were extremely grateful for their new purchase. The older women in the family were ecstatic and kept talking about how much less work they were going to have to do each week. It was really great to see the effect something like that has on people.
I as mentioned last year, much of this holiday has to do with charity and being with family. On Saturday morning I went out to where my host family lives and partook in the sheep slaughtering festivities. We all went outside to watch it happen and then I hung around while they skinned it and took it apart. My host brother even quizzed me on the various organs. Haha. I spent the day with various people from that part of the village and then once it was getting dark I went out to watch the Boujuloud. I don’t know much about this tradition except what I have witnessed thus far. Young men take the skins from the sheep slaughtered that day and fashion them into outfits. Some young men also wear other costumes. For example, there were a couple dressed as women, one dressed as a monkey and others are religious figures. The whole troupe, along with some drummers, go from house to house asking for charity. My friend told me that people give them sugar, meat or money. They stop and sing at every house and occasionally stop and perform a theatrical piece of sorts. On one of their stops they pretended a boujuloud was sick and needed medical help. Its was actually a humurous piece and all the people watching really enjoyed it. I couldn’t understand a lot of it because my tamazigh isn’t that good and much of it was puns of the sort that only native speakers understand. My friends tried to explain some of it to me…Anyways, Sunday morning I had breakfast at my friend’s house and returned to the center of town to continue with my visits to my favorite families. I drank lots of tea, ate lots of bread and refused many meat skewers :)