Will You Marry Me?

I was happy to attend Mass at the Catholic church in Marrakech this past weekend. On the vast majority of the days I've spent here in Morocco, I haven't knowingly interacted with other Christians. Consequently here in Morocco I often crave spiritual community and fellowship with other Christians. Given my usual lack of interaction with other Christians, I'm grateful whenever I get to worship in a church.

In addition to getting to worship in a church, I was also happy to hear the choir there in that church. Although I'd attended Mass at the Catholic church in Marrakech before this past weekend, I'd never heard the choir there. I so enjoyed hearing them sing, since they sounded so light and free, so joyous and celebratory. After the Sunday morning service, I asked about the origins of the music. They had been singing songs from a variety of locations, including the Congo.

After the service, the priest said that there were a couple of announcements. Then a Frenchman who was in one of the front pews walked up to the lectern. He spoke for a short time in French, and when he stopped speaking, I heard some of the female choir members up in the balcony gasp. He had just asked his girlfriend to marry him. The choir erupted briefly into apparently spontaneous song. Once they had finished singing, she walked up to the altar and the priest blessed their engagement.

When I had been in the church the previous day for the Saturday evening service, in the back of the church, I had seen photos of European couples getting married there in that church. When I arrived for Mass on Sunday morning, I saw rice scattered on the ground outside the church. I suppose I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to hear his marriage proposal to her!

Wait For It...

How ironic... the young woman who gave me the idea to write this blog post just walked into this cyber where I am typing, greeted me, and shook my hand. OK, perhaps it's not that ironic or unexpected, since she is the same one who had essentially made a marriage proposal to me earlier this year (see my February 2011 blog post on that particular encounter with her).

Anyway, not to be distracted any further from the subject of the blog post which I have sat down here to write today... yesterday where I live down here in the Sahara, I crossed paths with this same young woman who I just mentioned. I was walking through the crowded area across the street from two schools here in my town. Given that sessions of classes had just let out, such that many students were mingling on and near the block on which I was walking, I didn't realize that I had passed her. I then heard a soft, female voice say, from behind me, "Abdu..."

Ah, but now I must digress again, to explain that name. Moroccans seem to expect PCVs to use Moroccan names rather than their English names. As far as I know, there is no direct translation of my name in English into Darija, that is, into Moroccan Arabic. I figured that "Abdullah" was the closest I could get. Invariably either Moroccans or I shorten it to "Abdu."

Anyhow, I thought, "Did I just hear someone say 'Abdu'?" I turned around to try to see someone who might have called my name. I saw the young woman in question, smiling ever so slightly at me.

I walked back to her, asking her in Darija, "Bihxir?" and "Labas?" both of which mean, "Are you fine?" She responded that she was fine. As I approached her, I waited to see if she would extend her hand to me for a handshake. She put out her hand, so we shook hands. Moroccan women might not feel comfortable shaking hands with men, so it's important, as a man, when greeting a Moroccan woman, to wait to see whether or not she extends her hand for a handshake.

However, when I speak with Moroccan men, other than when either of us is passing by without stopping, I always try to remember to shake their hands. It's an expected part of greetings between men in Morocco.

When men shake hands here in Morocco, if they know each other, and are glad to see each other, they might firmly and vigorously shake hands with each other. However, when a Moroccan woman shakes a man's hand, she does so always briefly, and, even more unsurprisingly, much less firmly than men shake hands. Indeed, often a Moroccan woman will merely touch her palm against the man's palm, without actually grasping his hand.

As if to provide this very type of comparison with its attendant contrast, the next person with whom I shook hands was a man. I had left my brief interaction with the young woman and walked to the community center here in town. I had gone there to inquire about the status of paperwork which must be completed before I can teach an English class for adults there. When I entered the office of the community center, the fellow there in the office shook my hand quite firmly, and for a significant duration (at least compared with the usual length of handshakes in the US). In fact, he used the handshake to guide me to sit down before I started talking with him, continuing to grasp my hand until I was sitting down.

Moroccan men also use handshakes as a way of making sure you don't get away from them before they're done talking with you. I've had conversations with Moroccan men where they've maintained the handshake throughout the entire conversation. Unnerving though it was at first, I have come to recognize why Moroccan men do so. And, I've realized that often one must wait in relation to handshakes with both Moroccan women as well as Moroccan men: with the women, for them to initiate the handshakes, and for the men sometimes to end the handshakes.

Proposals

So over the last couple of months, I've had a couple of Moroccan girls (yes, as best as I can tell, they were girls, meaning under the age of 18) essentially ask me to marry them. To get more specific:

So at the end of December, before I had started teaching English classes, I had started answering random, sporadic questions about English in what largely resembled tutoring. On one of those days in late December, some teenage girls asked me to speak with them, so we stepped into a classroom together. I assumed that they had some questions about learning English. But there weren't any questions about English. There was some small talk going on in the room, all in Arabic. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the following exchange occurred, all in Darija:

Moroccan girl: How long will you be living in Morocco?
Me: Two years.
Same Moroccan girl: When you return to America, will I be going with you?

Since I've been asked how I replied, I'll add here that I gave the diplomatic response, "I don't know." She seemed irritated at my evasiveness, adding at that point, "You don't know much." I just let the conversation dissipate, since it was not a dialogue which I was particularly interested in having!

Then, last month, in January, I was sitting in a classroom, actually about to start tutoring some Moroccan girls in English, when another Moroccan girl walked into the classroom, and asked me in Darija if she and I were going to get married. Right after she left the classroom, when I turned back to the girls there for tutoring, one of them said to me in Darija, referring to the girl who asked me about getting married, "She's a little crazy."

Some comparative commentary here: while my experiences with discussions of marriage, or insinuations thereof, have tended toward the humorous, many female PCVs in Morocco have had very different experiences. Notably, many female PCVs in Morocco have experienced unwanted attention which has made them uncomfortable. And, some female PCVs have received actual marriage proposals, and some female PCVs have received many of them. One female PCV in Morocco in the 1990s received 60!