The house with the blue door… or “l-dar ma’a l-bab zraq” in Arabic… It sounds like a bad horror film, like maybe “bad” in the good way… starring Paris Hilton for the first 15 minutes before she does something predictably stupid and dies. But it’s not. It’s the proverbial snake to my current mongoose… or perhaps the small-town politics surrounding it are. I have to say, with more than a bit of wary skepticism, that I am SUPPOSED to move into it over the next week and a half, and should this actually come to pass within some general time-frame simmilar to that, I can be found a week from now in this house, prostrated on hands and knees, quoting Mel Gibson from Braveheart with, I dare say it, MORE passion:

“FREEEEEEEEEDDDDDOMMMM!!!!!!!!”  Eat your heart out, Mel…

Let’s take this back about a week and a half ago. I’m sitting in my neighbor’s house, where I’ve been invited for “kass-kroot” (afternoon snack time). My neighbor’s utterly lovable, yet aggressively hospitable, wife is perched across from me on the other side of the small table, which is  heavily laden with every kind of fried and honey-encrusted snack treat imaginable. She is shouting (no, not “insisting”, shouting) at me in about 3 minute intervals to “eat… EAT! EAT!”… often as I am literally placing food INTO my mouth… whilst simultaneously pouring me glass after glass of saccarine green tea. This is all pretty normal though, not really the point of my story… so I should move on. Where my housing situation comes up in this scene is during the conversation I was simultaneously having with her husband….

It had just become common knowledge in town that I was actually serious about moving out on my own in July (and that no, there were not still two months left before July, guys…. though the insinuation that this escaped your collective notice because having me around is so fun that time is just FLYING was appreciated…. awww shucks) and I had taken the recent initiative to try and discover any available properties, as I was looking at either extended homestay after July, or homelessness.

Now, the hospitality of Moroccans is legendary, and for good reason, but I have to say that coming from a life of relative independence for my last five years, into four months of consecutive, rural, conservative, family homestay was, to say the least, a culture SHOCK. A very good one, but as the proverb goes… this baby bird is ready to spread her wings, leave the nest, and take a shot at flying on her own (how many burned attempts at meals and pathetic leftover college-style breakfasts this manifests itself as, my town will NEVER find out… they already think that I’m incapable of brewing a pot of tea). These are truly the most welcoming and warm people, but I’m cravin’ a little independence here, and if i’m going to keep my wits about me (or keep any of them at all, to be honest) as I try to dive into work in the coming months, a home sanctuary where i can *GASP* walk around in shorts or wear a tank top to the bathroom in the middle of the night might be a very important perk.

Anyway, the house with the blue door, it turns out, is the ONLY available property in town, and very unfortunately, is not owned by a member of the local men’s association. You see, there is a group of men in town who collect dues and put the money towards very progressive, impressive projects, a majority of which are dedicated to improving the lives and opportunities for their wives and daughters. What’s not to like about that? Obbbbbbviously I would prefer to rent a house from this association, so that my rent money will contribute to this fund, allow for them to tackle bigger projects (hopefully with my help!), and be all kinds of sustainable! There is a glitch though, the association doesn’t HAVE a house… and hasnt started building one. The money (and men) in town has been tied up in a mosque-expansion project (expanding it, that is, so it has a women’s side…. once again, a great project!) that is not necessarily what i’d call ”close” to being finished.  July is fast approaching…. Freedom looms, and at the same time taunts me…. what’s a girl to do?

Not to help this internal battle I’m facing on my own, out comes the sentence during my talk with the snack-lady’s husband that I was to hear ad-nauseum over the next two weeks of back-and-forth decision making and confrontations:

 ”Are you… or are you NOT… going to be a friend of the association?”

Ummm…. what does THIS mean?  Immediately what came to mind was the image of the association men kindly “escorting” me from the blue door of my decidedly un-friendly non-association house, outifitting me with a nice pair of cinderblock shoes, and dropping me in the nearby river to swim with the fishes (the fact that the river is only 1 foot deep doesn’t make this situation any less likely, as my previous experiences being warned by the locals about it’s danger have made clear that they consider it a legitimate threat… I’m honestly not sure if there are any fish in it though).

Now, looking back on this entire week of difficult discussions (both due to pressure and to subject matter, complicated by a substantial language barrier), it is clear to me that this Mafioso image of these nice men trying to procure funds to buy their daughters a school bus was a bit of an over-reaction. It seems that our Moroccan Arabic textbooks from training had the “real estate negotiation” and “small town politics navigation techniques” section in the BACK…. didn’t quite get to those ones…. so in the end, by relying on some help from my health clinic counterpart (he doesn’t speak english, but he has a very sympathetic ear to my accent, and tends to understand my ramblings the best), communication gaps were bridged, misunderstandings were clarified, and a compromise was arrived at with only a minimal number of tears of frustration (on my part, that is, not the grown men… which is unfortunate as it really would have added an element of comic relief at the time):

I will live in the house with the blue door (shameful as it is) ONLY for the amount of time it will take the association men to fund and build a new association house for me.

So simple. So direct. So…. what I’ve been trying to say for the last month and a half. But all’s well that end’s well, right? And it’s nice to not be entering discussions with the movers and shakers in town expecting to hear that oh-so-familiar, oh-so-close-to-a-veiled-threat-once-translated phrase, that really turns out to have been a simple, direct question: “Don’t you want to benefit our association?”

Yes I do, boys…. yes I do. But for now, house with the blue door it is… though I’ll believe it, completely,  only when I’m standing in it a week from now, keys in hand, brainstorming which paint chips I’ll be sampling.

Following this, I’ve already planned my next big independence triumph: proving to the ladies in town, one-by-one if necessary, that I CAN feed myself…. it’s going to take a lot of baked goods carted around town to get that message across….. but you know what they say, fight fire with fire…. the ladies better be ready for my onslaught of “eat… EAT! EAT!”… suckers won’t know what hit ‘em!

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