Dude, Where’s My French Textbook

So, now I am in Morocco and what do I do next? The language of choice here is French, the first language I ever learned in a classroom, and it shocks me how much comes back and, conversely, how much seems totally gone. I find at times I can ask someone the most random thing – ‘I would like you to make a copy of this key for me! (en francais, of course) -- but telling a taxi driver to go right or left is like trying to make a halal pot roast with a five kilo slab of pork. (Note to self: find out how to say ‘right’ and ‘left’)

Sunday morning I woke up in London and had a coffee in a lovely flat near Camden. I had stayed there with my friend, May, who manages the band of the guy who owned the flat (he’s the bassist, incidentally). Our trip to the train station was fun as we rode the bus through London chatting and laughing. I have known May for a few years and it was my second trip to see her in London. It was a great trip in fact and I didn’t want to let go when we hugged and said good-bye at the platform for the Heathrow Express. But letting go is a small death you have to endure to see new things happen every day.

Sunday night I arrived at the Moroccan airport and, despite promises by my new employer, there was no one there to pick me up. I met a new colleague taking the same flight as me who had come to Casablanca for work as well. We waited nearly 2 hours before I dared to leave the building. A huge crowd stood outside where only a few distant lights shone on the drive and the doorways were black, women cradled babies, men shouted ‘taxi’ over and over, and I clutched the pocket where my wallet was hidden. I turned and went back into the airport to find my compatriot sitting with her coffee.

“Do you trust me?” I said
She looked at me warily. “Yes”
“Going outside is a bad idea.”
A definitive moment of silence passed. I have been in lots of dodgy situations before and come through them. It takes a lot for me to be apprehensive. It takes even more for me to listen to my apprehension and turn around and go back the way I came. As you read this, I hope and pray that you never have the experience I did that night.

We took a train out of the airport at nearly 9pm. It looked far too old to ever be mistaken for modern and when I got on I suddenly regretted not staying in the airport. Luckily I had my new friend with me and at times like those I force a brave face for the person I am with. Six stops later we got out at Le Gare de Casa Voyageurs, the Casablanca train station, to look for an internet café where we might access email and get the personal number for our new employer. An hour later on a dark dirty street where a late fog was settling in, we had achieved all that except for the number itself. We had retrieved a personal email but that was all. We trudged to the nearby “Ibis Hotel” beside the train station where we found all rooms booked. What to do next!

“Can you recommend any other hotels?” I asked.
“Hotel Casablanca! Monsieur” the woman smiled back at me.
(Now why didn’t I think of that!)

Our trip there was eventful with 2 cab drivers fighting over who would take us. In the end, we got to the hotel and checked in after I insisted on looking at the state of the rooms. Cold and tired, we went to bed.

What to say. I missed home a lot that day.


Helping Hands

One of the things that really struck me was the help we got on the day of the sale. The number of people who showed up to help was, …. well, “great” seems so inadequate.

Family and friends were there. People we were related to and people who had known our family for three generations were all there. It was touching.

My Aunt Theresa called up early that morning and asked if we needed help. She lives nearly 2 hours away, outside the city of Toronto. When I answered the phone I must have sounded panicked but really it was more confusion than anything else.

“Um, ..help? Do we need help? Um, dunno, um……Let me ask my moth--…she’s not here. DAMN! Okay, listen, I’ll call you back and let you know.”

I found out later that after I hung up that she had gotten into her car immediately and started the drive down. I love her for that. Only family will do something that.

Theresa (left) and my mum (right)

My cousin Sara also came down. She is near me in age but she’s my father’s first cousin. Sara wanted to see the farm and give a bit of moral support. Really, though she never lived there or grew up there, the farm was part of her family history too. Sara was great because all day she walked around with me and just kept me laughing and supported me when I was lagging from exhaustion. Only family will do something like that too.

Me (left) and Sara (right)

At one point, when the auctioneers were getting ready to sell a tractor my grandfather had made from scratch, I was standing with my sister. My grandfather built that tractor with his bare hands and it had been his pride and joy for years. I really wanted to see that tractor bought by someone who would appreciate it. I could feel my heart swelling; I could hear tears in my sister’s voice.

“I’m not sure I can watch this”, she said.

Just then a hand pulled on her arm.

“Hi Bekki!!! Remember Me?!” It was her friend, Tracey, a woman she had known since high school. Tracey had come just for the auction sale, to see my sister. I will never be able to express how that made me feel. It was a moment of spontaneous love that the universe made happen. Just at a moment when my sister needed someone to lift her spirits, a friend arrived. That is something else really special about family.

BEK (left) and Tracey (right)

All the people in these pictures are family in one way or another because they did things for us that no one else could do on that day. They were simply there for us. Whether we asked them to be there or not (and in almost every case, not).

…and we will always be grateful to them for it.



Sigmar





Neele






Dave





Kevin and Bronwen


Ken

Lost in Translation: North Africa

For those of you still loyal enough to keep reading after such a long hiatus, do not be alarmed! It will be worth the wait.

I write this from Morocco where you find me lost and seemingly bound up in my own disbelief at having ended up in yet another scenario of not knowing how to call the street I live on, ask for juice at a local shop, or even make a phone call. “How many more times I can do this” I used to say to myself in Malaysia, “I do not know!” Apparently the answer is ‘at least once more’.

The reason I had not written after the auction sale was simple. I had literally no time. Once the auction sale was done we moved on to packing the house up and making a move to my parents’ rental property a few miles away. We worked through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and finally the day before we had to be off the property. In the end it was horrendous, in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. My uncle worked to take apart the banister that had been in the house since it had been built. We sorted clothes and looked for ways to clean out old spaces with long forgotten bits of long forgotten vacations all over America and Europe. There were spoons from Eastern Canada, postcards from the southern U.S., and tiny statues of birds or dolls in traditional dress from Scotland and Wales. And it all went in the same direction ---out! Regardless of where it ended up it all had to go out of the house.

By the time this was done I had 2 days to pack and get ready to leave for England.
This is the reason I have not written.

When I got to the UK, I found myself jetlagged and tired. I was emotionally drawn from the havoc of the previous month and a half and just wanting to stop and sleep for days.
This is also the reason I have not written.

Now, I am in Morocco and it is the week before I start my 6 week programme teaching Moroccan business students. And now, I fear that I may have lost my will to write about home. Home is gone. But at the same time I know that I need to make closure and propose closure of some kind to those people who have been loyal readers. So on that note, this is for you as much as for me.

Waves

I had so many plans of how I would tell this story, and it would be told in great detail. Now I think back and there is no purpose. The details don’t matter. The details will fade. The only thing that really matters is what struck me on that day, like an ocean wave of sadness that came when I did not expect it. It was seeing my sister cry.

I walked out to my grandfather’s shop, this place long hollow without his workings there to keep it alight. People milled inside and sifted through piles of tools. Beside the shop and set back in the yard by the ashen fire pile, my sister squatted on the ground. Before I even thought of approaching, I knew what she was doing. What she did on the outside, I was doing on the inside. I walked up to her and put a hand on her shoulder; she stood up and clutched me.

“I know” I said, “I feel it too. Don’t even try to stop it.”

“I love you so much” she cried.

“I feel like someone has stolen something from us”, I responded.

In the days that led up to the auction sale, we all got on each other’s nerves. Sometimes we snapped, once or twice we yelled. In the days that followed, we seemed to break down at various times.

My mother broke down when we had to give the keys to our home to someone we despised.

I saw my father nearly cry the day before I left when he said that he was so sorry we had not taken time to visited on a trip home that had been far too short.

I held back tears when I watched them walk away at the airport…again.

These are testaments to the emotional moments that hit us unexpectedly in our lives, like waves that nearly bowl us over and leave us clamouring for some foothold. We try to stand and find ourselves sinking or being dragged away.

The auction sale made enough money to pay off the debts it was supposed to, but in the end it left me empty. Dismantling our home was about stripping it down to bare things and making it into a series of objects that I didn’t even recognize anymore. I felt I had to help destroy things that I loved. I think in retrospect that that was why I loved the fire and burning those things so much. Because then I could let things go and be destroyed as they were, still in a form I recognised. They could turn from beauty to dust in minutes. Taking these things apart was like stripping naked a dead friend and in the end these things I loved were not turned to dust but merely naked bodies, anonymous and vulgar to me.

The three photographs are a triptych which to me represents the essence of the auction. They were taken within a 12 hour period: before, during and after the sale.
A friend of mine told me I should take them and frame them and have them in our home. My response: never. Doing that would bring back the hurt too much.