Remember him?

 

He came into life under difficult circumstances.  He is Saeeda’s son (name changed for privacy).  Such a curious, funny, quick child.  Since his birth, his mother, who is unmarried, drew the veil of secrecy around herself and her child in order to protect them both from scrutiny.  With time however, she introduced him to her family as “the son of a woman who can’t take care of him”.  The family just adores him.  With time, many of them came to understand that he is in fact her son,   By that time, they all were in love with him already, they were able to come to terms with it in a palatable way.  The story is a still there “to save face” in front of others… neighbors, strangers.

It’s been almost two years since his birth, since that day when she was penniless and homeless and still weak from childbirth, and we were able to open our home to her for a few weeks.  Things have gotten so much better.  I have had the great pleasure of working closely with Saeeda over the last year in the context of our baking endeavor.  Often times she had her son on her back, and when he was older, scampering about with the pots and pans.  I can honestly say she is one of the best mother’s I’ve seen.  She talks softly and reassuringly to her son, a soothing narrative of what they are doing together.  She takes great care in preparing his special food, soups and baby bottles.  She keeps him clean and well-dressed although she has very little money.  She laughs at the 100 funny things he does, her own small rewards.  Her eyes just shine when she looks at him.  She doesn’t get impatient, she always gives him time.  Being around them both is very soothing and joyful.  Everything in her life has always come to her at great difficulty, even the circumstances around the birth of her son.  But even the burden of being a single mother in Morocco is nothing compared to the love she has for him and the joy he has brought her.   I can see that he is clearly her dearest treasure.

 

Moroccan Chicken Bastila: step-by-step recipe with photos

Bastila is a Moroccan dish made from chicken, eggs and almonds, layered and wrapped in phylo dough.  The word comes from Spanish “pastilla” which I am assuming refers to the thin crispy layers of dough.  Who knows if this dish still exists in Spain, but “history” (i.e. wikipedia) tells us that the Moors brought this dish with them when they were driven out of Spain in the late 1400’s.  Today it is served ubiquitously at special occasions, usually as an appetizer ahead of a meat dish.

I’ve been wracking my brains for ideas to help some of the struggling ladies I know, which is hard to do since my brain actually liquefied and oozed out of my ears a long time ago in this 110 degree heat.  But thankfullyI retained that 10 percent of our brains that we actually use.  So it dawned on me that knowing  how to make bastila is a potentially marketable skill.  In Morocco, women who know how to make it can get commissioned by their neighbors or by local catering companies.  It’s something they can do at home and at their own pace.  But for a large number of Moroccan women, there are two basic challenges when it comes to a home industry like making bastila.  One is illiteracy.  So they can’t read recipes, something most of us take for granted.  Another challenge is not being able to afford the ingredients in order to practice a few times.  These things pose such a huge mental block that women won’t even try.

I wanted to find a way to overcome both challenges.  The idea came to have  a series of cooking classes, free to the participants, funded by outside donations.  We held the first one last Sunday, at the school I work at CLC Morocco (www.clcmorocco.org).  When our school cook, Khadija, heard about the project, she immediately volunteered to teach the class.  Khadija is great cook, but more than that she has a fun-loving confident personality that puts even the shyest and most awkward among us at ease.  As for the participants, we started with a small group of 5 women, some of whom I’ve blogged about here, so if you’ve been reading, you have an idea of the challenges these women face.

As they worked, I took pictures in order to make a picture recipe book that the women can follow another time.  Seeing and participating in making the dish the first time would give them the initial confidence they would need to try it again.

First they prepared and laid out all the ingredients.  From left to right, top: powdered sugar and regular, 1 kg almonds, 1 kg onions, 2 chickens; middle row: 1 gram saffron threads, fake saffron food coloring, 3 cinnamon sticks, peppe, ginger, chopped coriander, smen (ghee), and 1 kg of the bastila sheets called warqa in Arabic; last row: Ras el Hanout spice mix, salt, 3-4 garlic cloves, oil, melted butter.  Missing from this picture are 15 eggs and orange blossom water.

I have to warn you, making bastila is a long process.  It’s a labor of love that I don’t actually expect you or myself to make.  But just for fun, here’s how it’s done.

First, the chicken is set to stew with lots of salt, pepper, ground ginger, ras el hanout (about 2 large spoons each, Moroccan cooks don’t give exact measurements).  There is also a good cup of oil, about a quarter cup of smen (gheen), the onions, garlic, saffron and coriander. Khadija told us that some people prefer to leave the coriander whole in a small bouquet, then fish it out at the end.  She prefers to add it chopped, but she said “you do it however you want”.  That is basically the philosophy behind Moroccan cooking, measurements are eyeballed, the dish is tasted at various intervals and tweeked, and no two cooks will make the same exact recipe.

Stir the chicken in the pot.  It’s going to smell really good really quick, but don’t start to falter, although your mouth may start to water, the end is *not* in sight.  

Good yellow chicken.  Moroccans will not tolerate white chicken.  While the chicken is cooking, you can work on the almonds, see bellow.

When it’s good and cooked, the chicken is removed from the sauce, left to cool and de-boned.  Stage one complete.

Next, skim off a small bowlful of the sauce, add it to the chicken to avoid dryness.  Now start the egg stage.  About 12 or so eggs will be broken straight into the sauce and stirred.

Keep stirring until they look like this.  Then transfer them to a colander and let all the excess water drain out.  Stage 2 complete.  

The almonds now.  These take a while so it’s best if you do this step the day before.  It’s tedious and depressing to do this alone, be warned, so call your friends and make it a bastila-making party.  In our cooking class, there were like 5 ladies plus Khadija plus me working, cleaning, laughing (in my case, snapping photos and running out for random ingredients that we ran out of) and it still took about 2-3 hours from start to finish.  The almonds need to be washed, boiled, skinned, dried, and fried.  If you know Moroccan cooking, then you know what I mean.  For the bastila, Khadija’s method was to take the now prepared almonds and add cinnamon (1 large spoon), regular sugar (a bowlful, to taste, personally I like mine good and sweet), a few tablespoons of orange blossom water.  Then the almonds are pulsed in a food processor until they are coarsely ground.  Then Khadija added a good half a cup or so of melted butter.  Mmm!

Stage 3 complete.  Now on to the great assembling of the bastila.  Here you have 2 things on hand, a bowlful of melted butter (check your diet at the door) and a bowl with 2 beaten eggs (remember the eggs are the glue that keeps the bastila sheets together).  In Morocco, we order bastila sheets at the local bakery the day before.

First butter the pan.  Lay the first sheet down, half hanging out of the pan.

Add four more overlapping sheet, brushing egg in between them, and brushing butter on top.
A fifth sheet is added in the center, egged and buttered.

Now take your chicken and eggs and mix them up (who cares which came first, hehe).  Lay them down for the first layer.  It should be a good 1.5 – 2.5 inches thick.  With the amounts we used, we had a good third left over (we made little bastilas out of the leftover filling).

Place a bastila sheet over that layer.  Not everyone does this, some prefer to just add the almonds directly.  

Now add the coarsely ground almonds.

Now add another bastila sheet smack dab in the middle, and start to fold all the flaps over. 

Always egg and butter.

At the very end, you add one last bastila sheet to cover the whole thing.  Tuck it in nicely all around and butter the top.

Put it in to cook, about 45 minutes, until the bastila is golden brown and crispy.  At this point I sort of dropped the ball on photos and did not get a PHOTO OF THE FINISHED BASTILA.  Doh!  At the end, you decorate it with powdered sugar and cinnamon.  It is so good, I’d place it among the top 5 best Moroccan dishes.  Oh yeah, and you can’t get it in restaurants, well, not really, unless you go to those swanky places that serve pigeon bastila at exorbitant prices.  Homemade is always better!

But you can sort of see it in this picture along with the apprentice cooks.

It was such an enjoyable day.  I think the ladies learned a lot from Khadija (she’s second from left here).  She has had lots of experience cooking for riads and for catering services, so she has the confidence it takes.  These women on the other hand, have worked mostly as maids, receiving orders, so maybe do not have that confidence.  The cost of the ingredients for this dish and the fruit tarts they made afterwards was about 300 dirhams (40 dollars).  It’s not a lot, but in Morocco it can be a week’s salary.  Someone had given me this money and said, do something for the ladies.  This turned out to be an awesome use of the money.   Khadija also insisted that we buy the ladies proper white uniforms, which made them feel like real students.   And these ladies who are so used to serving others, their employers and families, well on this day they were the guests of honor, since we all sat down and ate the bastila together.  For me, it was a perfect day combining several of my favorite things (things I have not yet figured out how to get paid for doing, lol): networking, planning, empowering women, photography, eating and finally breaking through the blogger’s block!

How you can help

Chaima, Khadija and mom pose for their first family picture ever.

So now what?  Thank you all for your overwhelming responses to Sa’eedah’s story, both by email and in the comments section.  I am blessed to have this little community of blog readers who take the time to really read and feel the stories.  And care!   It makes blogging a worthy use of my time.

A number of you out there asked how you could help.  As I see it, single mothers like Sa’eeda and Nezha need both a short-term relief plan as well as a long-term life-transformative plan. The short-term plan is about survival.  It’s about all the little things we take for granted.  Nezha calls me about once or twice a month.  Several times she’s mentioned that her feet get so cracked that she has a hard time walking.  Now, I get the same problem in summer, it’s a small thing that can become very painful.  I advised Nezha to rub olive oil on her feet and wear socks all the time.  Her response? I’ll save up for some socks. She did not own any.  You can be sure that the next time I saw her I took her three pairs of socks.

For Nezha and her kids, being poor means a diet that consists mainly of bread, olive oil and tea.  My family’s morning omelets would seem an extravagant indulgence in protein to Nezha, who uses eggs as a rotation in her main meals, along with beans and the occasional bite of meat.  Nezha buys food on a daily basis, just the amount needed for the day’s meals, a dirham(10 cents) of flour, 2 dirhams (20 cents) of sugar, a potato or two.  Hot water is poured over used tea leaves to squeeze another pot out of them.  There are no leftovers (nor any fridge to store them in).

Every now and then, donations will come in for Nezha.  It is such a pleasure to deliver the treasures to her: 10 kg bags of flour and pasta.  20 cans of tuna.  Yes, most American cats and dogs eat a much richer diet than this family.  What would Nezha think of the cat food section at Costco?  In my mind, it’s hard for me to accept that both realities exist at once.  That what Nezha and her children need in a day (for everything, not just food) is the same as what an average American might spend on a latte and blueberry muffin (and maybe not even finish the whole thing).  Ok, I know, it’s easy to pick on US consumer habits…so let me just look at my own life for a minute, because I’m as guilty as they come.  There are enough inconsistencies and hypocrisies in my own spending habits, outings with the kids where we pay to eat, pay to play, pay for cheapy plastic stuff that I hate.  Yes, it is only due to my amazing levels of cognitive dissonance that I am able to do this.  (I can only hope that as I become more aware of others, I can eliminate more and more frivolous spending).  It’s not about beating ourselves up for every cent we spend, but yeah, it’s about our shared responsibility on this earth.

We must never underestimate the power of giving, even if it is 10 cents, a dollar, 20 dollars.  Of course there is always the debate over “aid versus trade” and does welfare make people lazy and are they going to buy drugs with it.  The short answer, in the case of these single mothers, is no.  As my father always says “if you err on the side of kindness and generosity, you won’t be wrong”.  In fact we must see each opportunity to give as a blessing for ourselves…that is one less dollar that we might have wasted and now we’re relieved of the burden of spending it.  Islamic teachings say that a good deed is rewarded tenfold, and sometimes it’s uncanny to give something away, only to receive a totally unexpected gift a few days later.  Wealth does not decrease through charity.  Giving away a portion of ones wealth only blesses and purifies the rest of it.  Give freely, give from what you love, there is enough for us all.

More concretely, here are some of my ideas:

1-Short-term help for three single mothers (Nezha, Chaima’s mom and Sa’eeda).  I believe there are a lot of people out there who would like to help with the immediate needs of these mothers.  What an honor for me to be the medium that connects between you and these women.  If you live in the US, please email me at nora@clcmorocco.org and we can discuss how to make a bank transfer.  I have a US account which facilitates things a lot, because I can withdraw the money from an ATM here.  Even 5 dollars helps a lot.  What would be great would be monthly pledges of 5, 10 or more dollars.  Some amount that won’t really affect you, but WILL affect them in a huge way.  If you live in Europe, I think it’s also fairly easy to transfer to a US account, but I’ll  have to research this.  I’d love to be able to offer something to these mothers similar to those “sponsor a child” programs, where the mother can count on a monthly contribution of 30-50 dollars for each child.

2-I will research what resources are currently available for women and girls in Marrakesh.  I will be your eyes and ears on the ground and compile the information necessary to assess what is needed in terms of infrastructure.

3-For the long term, I am reaching out to all of you for your ideas, resources, connections, experience, dreams, prayers…anything that comes to you for our common vision.  This is the MOST IMPORTANT PART.  In this whole process, my motto is “start small, THINK BIG”.  Even as we help someone survive day to day, we have to use these super-educated brains of ours to think creatively about poverty.  Vision.  Then planning and execution.  Don’t be paralyzed by your fear of imperfection.  So let our vision quest begin.

Birth, Sa’eeda’s story

Sa’eeda had her baby! Those words were not uttered in celebration.  No, it was a frantic phone call, tinged with panic, defeat and heaviness.  This was not a joyous occasion.  There would be no forty days of pampering for the new mother, no naming party for the baby.  You see, Sa’eeda was not married and no one in her family knew of the baby.

There’s a problem, she can’t stay with the family she’s living with anymore. Sa’eeda was someone I knew only peripherally, but our lives were about to converge.  (This post is long, read it when you have a little space carved out for yourself).

Okay, she can stay with us for a few days, was my reply.  So Sa’eeda came and brought with her the most beautiful baby boy, 5 days old.  My daughter moved in with her brothers, so that the new mother and her son could have a space of their own.  Seeing her took me back to my own post-partum days, the shock, the euphoria, the pain of recovery, the shattered sleep, the steep learning curve.  The immediate and natural way that a new mother rises to the occasion 24 hours a day.

She stayed with us and kept herself very scarce.  Hardly a whimper was heard from the baby.  Every time I would go in with food, she’d have the biggest smile on her face.  She kept her sense of humor, didn’t take the baby too seriously.  Smiled in his face and laughingly told him to stop making such a fuss.  She had raised so many babies.  And now at 41 years old she finally had her own.  Not born under the best circumstances, to be sure.  But, nonetheless,  a soul delivered to her safekeeping, a companion, someone to love for always.

She recovered well.  The color came back to her cheeks.  One day she came into the kitchen, got out the big clay bowl and started making mesemn. Her expert hands had done this hundreds of times, when she worked at a cafe (making 35 dirhams or 4 dollars a day).  My children demanded to help, and she obliged, giving each of them their own lumps of dough to work with, always with her big smile and laugh.  She did not take them too seriously, she did not get stressed out.  I was beginning to sense she had a high thresh hold for stress.

And when she told me her story, I understood why. When I was 12, I went to work in Rabat for a family.  They had a baby that I raised for seven years.  When he was small I had him on my back.  He wouldn’t let me get any work done, I just had to take care of him all day.  At that time, people didn’t have washing machines like they do now.  When he’d go to sleep, I’d start on the laundry.  I really had a rough time (she says with the biggest smile on her face and no grudge that I can sense). But that’s when I got asthma, from the damp air in Rabat.  I went to the ER many times because I couldn’t breathe.

(how much were you paid?  I ask).  I got paid 300 dirhams a month (40 USD, 30 euros).  But I always sent it home to my family.  I ate and slept with the family I worked for, they gave me clothes, so I didn’t need the money for myself.  We were all working, all us girls went to work for families.  You know we were so poor and my father only had a small piece of land.  At that time, it wasn’t accepted by the people of my village for a girl to go to school.  They were simple people.  It’s not like now.  We always say to mother, why didn’t you send us to school?  Even for a year?  Just to learn how to read and write!  Mother says she wished she had, she wished she hadn’t cared what people would say, but she didn’t know any better.

When I was 19 I came back to Marrakesh.  I worked for another family.  I didn’t know Marrakesh very well.  They live out there near the military base.  One night, they sent me out to get something from another family’s house.  That’s when something really bad happened to me.  They were two men, drunk.  They grabbed me and held me down and each one raped me.  I ran back to the family’s house and told them what happened.  I begged the woman to come with me to the police, to tell them what happened, to get a certificate from a doctor, so that I could always have it as proof of what happened to me.  But the woman said that she wouldn’t take that responsibility, that the police would blame her for sending me out at that time of night.  I wish I had known how to do those things myself.  I will never forget that and I will never forgive her.

Sa’eeda is wistful but not sad…she has that quality of someone who is not broken, who can’t be broken, who doesn’t have the luxury to break.  My own words and projections for sure, but this is what I sensed.

After that I had different jobs.  Sometimes I worked in cafes, sometimes I found good jobs working as a maid.

As the story comes closer to the present, Sa’eeda gets quieter.  It is easier to talk about things that time has numbed.  Not so easy to speak of how this baby came into the world.  Conceived in secret, carried in secret and born in secret.

Here is a woman who has never, ever been supported.  She has been giving to others since she was 12.  At the time when she needed her mother the most, she was off in a strange city, already raising a child, still a child herself.  She was supporting her family financially.  She was living as a servant, at the mercy of her own illiteracy, of the low expectations everyone–including herself–had of her. So I do not blame Sa’eeda for getting pregnant.  Who ever told her how the human body works?  Who ever gave her a sense that she was valuable, that she was worth marrying?  Who ever gave her any religious instruction or spiritual guidance?  Who ever gave her a chance to marry, to start her own family?

After 15 days with us (we’d gotten quite used to her and the baby) a room was found.  It was 1,000 dirhams a month (about 120 USD) to be split with another girl.  So expensive, but a good situation for mother and baby.  The family that rented out the rooms was warm and kind.  The aging patriarch was loving and protective, he exuded a sense of stability and security, while the woman of the house seemed glad for the companionship, happy to have a baby to help raise.  The room mate was also happy to share the space and overnight turned into a helpful and loving aunty.  This is one of the qualities I love most about Moroccans, this effortless connection with others and ability to see what needs to be done and just do it.  From what I’ve seen, it’s especially true among the poorer people.  It’s “it takes a village” working in real life, not just a slogan.

When I think of Sa’eeda’s baby, he’s gonna need all the loving aunties he can get.  How will his future unfold?  We don’t know.  His mother is taking it as it comes.  When he is a little older, no doubt a story will be invented to explain his existence.  Her family and village people will prefer a “don’t ask, don’t tell” type of explanation, rather than be confronted with the truth.  In a traditional society where marriage is still a sacred rite and something that everyone across the board works for, hopes for and dreams about…it is very difficult for people to accept in their hearts when a baby comes into the world without that sacred container of a family.  Not judgement as one might expect, but a sadness that this baby is deprived of a father…not to mention that financially it’s a nearly impossible equation.

One thing I discovered via this experience, was that when I told people about Sa’eeda (the truth that is) they were immediately sympathetic.  There was not a moment of judgement or hesitation as donations came flooding in.  A few people gave large sums of zakat, the charity-tax that Muslims must pay on their accrued wealth.  Soon Sa’eeda had enough money to live for a few months before being confronted with the harsher possibilities of existence.  She bought a mattress, the first she’s ever owned, a few blankets, a gas bottle and a few pots and pans to cook with.  The minimum necessities of existence (there will be no Boppy pillows, no Graco swings or bassinets for this baby).  And I think what a difference a few thousand dirhams (a couple hundred dollars) has made in her life at this critical time.  At the time when she and the baby are most vulnerable.  And I think of all the orphanages in Marrakesh full of abandoned babies, not orphans!  And how much support their is for those babies, which I’m totally thankful for.  But there should be even more support for mothers to keep their babies!  Mothers should be supported at that critical time, given a place of respite to transition into this new life.  It can be done!

But even more so, whenever I see a single mother like this, I wish I could have gotten to her BEFORE this mistake was made.  We have to start educating our girls!  12 years old is the critical age.  That’s when they need the most teaching.  Girls need to know everything about how babies are made, and everything about birth control, aids and all that.  A girl needs to be told that she, and only she, is in control of her body.  A girl needs to hear that she is valuable, so precious, and that she should demand her full worth.  A girl needs a space where she can ask questions.  A girl needs to know that she is the mother of creation, that this is God’s gift to her, and with it comes great power, and also great responsibility.

I have a daughter, she is only eight, and we speak of these things.  Because I want her to hear them from me first.  Keep talking to your girls.  Don’t expect that they will learn these things through osmosis.

As for Sa’eeda, her life will not be easy.  But then again, it has never been easy.  Whenever I see her, she says alhamdulillah, praise and thanks be to God!  Her full trust is in God’s care.  Her trust and God’s subtle mercies, those are the wealth that never runs out.