Oujda, Morocco January 19, 1984 Dear Folks, How do I even begin to describe these past ten days spent crossing the sand dunes and desert of eastern Morocco? So much danger, love, exoticness, and mystery have I experienced that it is all I can do to remember I am in the 20th Century, not in the 10th or the 11th. It has been the sort of adventure that even a Marco Polo would have had to admire. So many anecdotes to share and yet so little time and space to write it down. Perhaps the best way to give you some idea of what I've been through is to relate to you the events of the day I passed through the town of Taza and began my entry into the heart of the desert

The day's last rays soaking into the mud homes of a Morocco village in the desert of the country's eastern region. One of the many pictures in the photo gallery

I started the day with a vivid reminder of how fear is still very much a part of life here. In the town of Qued, a teacher named AmliI (who I stayed the night with) showed me some documents that proclaimed him to be a "Registered Citizen of the World Government of World Citizens." The documents had been issued in Washington, D.C., and also included an official (but equally worthless) passport and a "Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Amlil had pulled the items out from deep in a bureau, where he had hidden them, and he showed them as if they were made of gold. In a land where so many have told me how much they want to get out, those documents and "passport" were probably the closest he'd ever get to having a real passport. And I didn't have the heart to not act impressed.

"If the government knew I had these, I'd be in big trouble and even go to jail," he said as he hid them back under his clothes in the bureau drawer.

It struck me as sad that a man could place so much hope--and fear--in something as harmless as papers describing the right of a man to be free. But then that is how it usually is under a dictatorial monarchy like that in Morocco.

Next came a danger of the kind I'd never expected in this day and age. I no sooner entered the large and slum-like town of Taza around noon than I suddenly found myself in the path of a runaway horse team pulling an unoccupied wagon madly down the main street. As I stood petrified an old, nearly-blind man and his donkey emerged from an alley between me and the horses, and it was the old man, not me, that was bowled down by the horses and wagon. With the horses' legs flailing and becoming entwined, there was the sickening sounds of raw flesh plowing into rough gravel, as the entire chaotic mass tumbled crazily but inches from me.

Quickly I tended to the severly injured man, while others untwisted the donkey's legs and kept any would-be thieves away from the backpack I'd flung to the side of the road. Incredibly, no one thought to unhitch the runaway horses from the upended wagon. Soon the terrified horses were back on their feet and racing off to cause yet more destruction--this time in a nearby bus terminal packed with commuters.

So typical of life here, many knew how to ease the poor donkey's pain, but yet no one seemed to know the first thing about how to treat the unconcious man's gaping flesh wounds. I shall be forever grateful for the first-aid training I'd received while working on the drilling rigs in Wyoming.

But wait. Death was not to leave me alone quite yet. Towards dusk a pack of three sickly wild dogs rushed at me from the sand dunes beside the empty road. As I screamed, they circled and rushed at me again and again, their jaws snapping and their minds evidently delirious from hunger, sun, and my own panic.

For at least five minutes I slashed at the dogs with my hunting knife and a walking stick, while I screamed for someone--anyone!--to come to my rescue. Were it not for a passing truck filled with soldiers, I might not have held out. Three shots from an officer's pistol, and the dogs quickly scattered.

The most striking memory I have of that encounter with the dogs is not of the dogs or of the pistol shots, but of three farm women who came out of a nearby adobe house and laughed deliriously while I fought off the dogs. I guess that the women thought the sight of me screaming at the dogs looked quite strange. But then what do they ever see in such an isolated area each day but sand, rocks, and sheep?

Then came night and the worst--and the best--yet. A strong feezing wind from the west forced me to keep walking long into the dark vastness. There was no way I could have erected my tent in the gale-force winds, and there was nothing larger than boulders to hide behind. Anyhow, my hands were so stiff I doubt I could have unpacked my backpack.

On and on I trudged, not a sign of lilfe anywhere--not even a blade of grass. All at once a darkly-robed and hooded figure came running at me from seemingly nowhere. Horrible memories of Tangiers raced through my mind, and I waited for a knife to come out from beneath the stranger's robe. Instead, a handshake materialized. It was a young road construction worker who had see me earlier out on the desert. He immediately led me to the camp he shared with several other workers. Their dwellings were nothing more than plywood-and-tin shacks, with only cots and kerosene lamps for furnishings. However, to my shivering body those shacks were mansions. Although unheated, the shacks provided me with much-needed relief from the continuous winds.

With the help of an older man who spoke some Spanish, we were able to communicate mostly about jobs and wages in America. All the time we drank glass after glass of mint tea--"Moroccan whiskey." (In most Moslem societys, real whisky is forbidden.)

Towards midnight I feel asleep under what seemed a ton of blankets. My stomach was full of sardines and bread soaked in olive oil (two Moroccan staples).

Right before I fell asleep, I realized that, once again, it had been a typically tiring day of living on the edge of death in what was an exceptionally fascinating country.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 3:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fes, Morocco
January 9, 1984

Dear Folks,

Last night I sat still for at least forty minutes in the cold darkness of my tent, with my head resting heavily upon my arm. Never before had I felt so fatigued and alone after only a week of walking through a new region.

My fatigue is not from difficult terrain or from boredom, for the land I've crossed thus far (between Morocco's capital city, Rabat, and its religious center, Fes) has been one of wide and gently-rolling grassy plains. It has been perhaps the easiest terrain I have walked to date. And with the days filled with such an abundance of warm sunshine and green scenery and blue skies I really could not ask for a more perfect place to be at this time of the year. Indeed, the scenery and the weather are much like what I would find if I was to walk through eastern Colorado or western Kansas in the early fall.

And my loneliness is not because of lack of conversation or because--as was the case in Spain's interior--I find few people. No, if anything, you are never physically alone in Morocco, and the people are hardly shy or unemotional.

Even with all the open plains, there is hardly a kilometer that passes beneath my well-worn boots that I do not pass two or three dozen Moroccans shuffling along farm animal trails on their pointed cloth slippers. More often than not, they are swaying percariously in horse-pulled carts, or just plain squatting on the ground beside small piles of carrots, or mushrooms, or tethered chickens.

My problem is simply that of being an American in a land of moochers. All day long, from the mouths of the young to those of the adults, it is a constant "Give me, give me, give me." So much so that on several occasions it has taken every ounce of my willpower to keep from striking out at their demanding hands and faces.

They come at me in dirty town after dirty town, and from one mud farmhouse after another. And because I am on foot, there is no way for me to escape as other travelers can. There is no denying that the vast majority of the Moroccans I pass are dirt poor, that their cities and villages are mostly slums, that jobs are few and that the work is of the type that breaks a man before he is 40. Nor can I argue with those Moroccans who lament that their king is more interested in his own forunes than in theirs.

But, does that give them any right to demand money from me immediately upon sight? And to do so in such a rude and incessant manner?

I feel beseiged. I feel in danger. There are no others of my kind to run to, to seek advice from, to hide behind. Even in my most worn clothes, and with my shoes now torn and my backpack splattered with mud, I still stick out starkly wherever I go.

They can "smell" an American as easily as I can smell their own unwashed bodies. They come so often I almost feel at times like sitting in the dirt and crying. I like to think of myself as a kind and gentle person, but many of the Moroccans are forcing me to be a hard and rude person if I am to preserve my sanity. I am not the money tree that many seem to think we Americans are.

"Everyone knows you have money in America. You cannot fool us," one shifty-eyed older man argued yesterday evening. He demanded six dirhams from me simply because I had talked with him. And when I refused to pay, he threatened to not let me pass.

"You are free to travel, to come to Morocco, to go anywhere you like, to take all this time so far from America, " he had continued in a nasty tone. "You must have much money to have such freedom."

I did not pay him of course, for I believe a man must have convictions, must not be afraid to take charge--two qualities that several Moroccans have told me separate the average American from the average Moroccan.

"Look what your country has done in only two hundred years," remarked a university student studying political science. At the time we met, I was crammed into a hellishly-crowded train taking me from the Jaquiths in Marrakech to Rabat, my walk's starting point in Morocco. "You Americans have become the number one country in all the world--the richest, the best! And then look at us. We are still the same as we were five thousand years ago. Perhaps we do not agree with everything you do, but we must admire your character, the way you Americans stick together and complete what you set out to do.

"We expect others to do everything for us...and you see how little we have because of our lack of courage."

He had been especially amazed at how my country was so united and concerned over one captured American pilot in Syria. That sense of "oneness" was something Arabs in general had never mastered, he observed. And, as did so many other Moroccans I've spoken with, he wanted to "escape" to the United States.

Last night, as I waited wearily in the dark for someone to sneak up on me for some of those "many" dollars I must surely have with me, I too was feeling an urge to flee this den of thieves and greedy eyes. Quite frankly, I am too vulnerable, I realized as I thought of how on the train ride from Marrakech I had had a new pair of walking shoes and all my food stolen from my backpack even as I'd slept beside it.

Morocco is definitely no place for a lone American walker.

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Marrakech, Morocco
December 23, 1983

Dear Folks,

It was the Morrocan king's birthday. Most shops in Marrakech (where I'm staying until I start my walk across North Africa in early January) were closed, and the streets were mostly empty. The quietness of the downtown area was almost unbelievable; normally a Monday morning in this fabled Arabic city beside the Sahara was a constant clatter of horses' hoofs clomping against asphalt, mopeds buzzing llike gigantic insects, auto horns honking wildly, donkeys braying spitefully at robed owners, and veiled women chattering excitedly in a way that--when viewed from a distance--reminded one of black-headed gray-and-white sparrows.

So where was everyone on this day of hot sun and blue sky? After all, wasn't a royal birthday all the more reason for making a commotion?

"Try the souk, the open-air marketplace in the ancient walled area of the city," advised my host, Rina Jaquith. A former Kansas fam girl who now lives with her doctor husband, Clifford, in this city of 1.5 million, she was a reader of my walk in Capper's Weekly (which they received here) and had invited me to stay with them over the Christmas season.

So, off I went to the Djemma Elfna at the end of the city's main drag, Mohammed V. And, sure enough, there were all our Moslem neighbors--along with sword dancers, snake charmers, mule-pulled carts of produce, and innumerable hawkers beseeching everyone all in their Arabic and French languages to "Make price, my friends! Make price!"

But, alas, there were the "leeches," too. These are the men who attach themselves to nearly every tourist with a ferociousness that is downright criminal. They alone have probably driven more foreigners out of this kingdom than all the wars, pestilences, and homesicknesses combined.

No sooner was my "rich American tourist" blonde hair observed than I was rushed at from all sides. And since poverty is so rampant--and money so scarce for the average Moroccan--there was no way these fellows were going to easily surrender my attention. In less than a minute I had everything from human teeth to curved daggers to jars filled with dead flies (to be drunk in tea as an aphrodisiac) shoved at my face. Scream as I might "No! No! No!," or "I don't want this!", they only pressed closer and clawed at me all the more.

I felt as if I was caught in a thorn bush, with a few hundred snakes thrown in for good measure. Out of desperation, I thrust a silvery dirham coin into the palm of a young innocent-eyed boy and begged him in caveman French to lead me tp a place where the market was more than writhing arms and spitting, hissing heads.

With the bravery of a saint, the wiry little lad grabbed my hand and, pushing aside beggers and foul-breathed camels, pulled me deep into a sunless maze of of alleyways that would have confounded Rubik himself. Slowly the leeches lost their grips and dropped away, until there was only the boy, me--and the Devil!

"Ooohhh...English or American?" crooned the tall, black salesman, flashing a mouth of gold and rubbing together fingers as long as dollar bills.

Incredible! Somehow I'd picked the sharpest hustler of the whole bunch, and I'd allowed myself to be led into the belly of a souvenir shop that had more expensive junk in one room than Macy's or Sak's 5th Avenue has in a dozen.

"You can pay in pounds or in dollars also, if you wish," the suave salesman kept reminding me, as he piled everything I dared even glance at into a large pile. How, I lamented mentally, do you explain to a possessed man that there is no way I am going to carry four hundred pounds of rugs, leather purses, brass teapots and candlesticks on my back for the next twelve thousand miles of my walk?

When he tried to drag me upstairs to show me even more items, I dived back into the marketplace and fled back to Mohammed V. And tagging alongside me were the leeches, dropping their prices several more dirhams for every stride I put between myself and their turf. One frantic man even offered his curved daggers for 40 dirhams ($6) a pair, instead of the 150 dirhams eachhe he'd said was such a good buy only one-half hour earlier.

At last I reached the barbed wire-topped steel gates of the Jaquith residence, and I was able to shut the leeches out. In my hosts' apartment I collapsed onto a kitchen chair. I was utterly exhausted, and I felt as if I was suffering from combat shock.

"Did you enjoy yourself?" Mrs. Jaquith asked with a knowing smile.

"It was h-hectic," I sighed, "but there were a lot of things being sold, and I was able to bargain and get some excellent buys." Then, like some little boy, I heaved my knapsack onto the table and showed her the knives, the teeth, the flies..."

Steven

Posted by Steven Newman at 1:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)