borogove

serge here. we spent the weekend (well, saturday night) back in the sahara, this time with the de la Russi Ibrahim (all spellings of names approximate) family in their "village", which consists of 3 bedouin families living in tents and a bunch of sheep and goats. also 2 hens and a rooster. oh, and lots of mice, as sabrina discovered to her dismay. as our more dedicated readers will remember, we met the oldest son, Abdel Majid, last week and he invited us to meet his parents, who live in the sahara during the summer, apparently.

the village is 25 km from a very small town, so it is very much in the middle of nowhere. we arrived in late afternoon, and sabrina was instantly offered a full mug of fresh goat milk--she wouldn't let me taste it, but she says it tasted like goat cheese. as fate would have it, our arrival coincided with the arrival of another saharan windstorm, so we spent most of our time in the family tent. it's about 10 x 10 and maybe 5 feet tall at its highest point. the floor is sand and there is a courtyard designated by a stack of wood that was also the source of all of our firewood, so i guess the courtyard gets rebuilt fairly regularly. attached to the yard is a little pen that is the fairly easily breached corral for the goats and sheep, who seemed to take it in turns escaping and nibbling on the fence. the chickens live in the tent, but wander pretty freely around the place. it was, obviously, about as far removed from NYC as we could be.

our evening was uneventful in many ways, but we certainly had some singular weather--in the middle of the sahara, it started to rain. it rained on and off for a few hours, sometimes fairly hard. you can imagine our surprise. apparently this sort of thing happens with some regularity--the family has some way to collect the rainwater, which is stored in a goatskin that has been sewn shut except for one leg, which is the spout (the hair is still on the skin, so at first we thought it might be our dinner).

after a dinner of desert bread and bean soup (this time, sabrina was allowed to assist in the preparation), washed down with some water from the dead goat, some of the family went visiting to the neighbors, but we stayed around the fire and talked and sang songs until bedtime, when all 10 of us just lay down on the blankets thrown on the sand. i was near the door, so i got covered with sand during the night, but i was luckier than sabrina, who was sleeping near the wheat and therefore spent the night with mice running across her pillow. not quite the ritz, but a fun time. fun, that is, until the rooster started crowing at 4:45 am. we got out of bed after daybreak and had desert bread with fresh goat milk and sugar, then basically just milled around and yelled at the sheep until it was time to go at around noon.

we didn't add much to the equation, useless as we are in the desert as well as unable to speak more than a few words of arabic. we were, however, able to share our medical wonders with the family. various pains were made to vanish with the aspirin we had, and our lotion was just the ticket for mom's dry skin. the best, though was dad's vague malady that appeared to be sun-related. sabrina rubbed aloe vera and tiger balm on his head and he said it felt better. he must have enjoyed her ministrations, because when he went out visiting for the evening, dressed in his desert finery, he was also covered with the strong smell of tiger balm. we also left them with a few small gifts, but we're not sure if we'll be able to take them up on their invitation to become equal partners in buying a new house for the animals (if indeed we understood them correctly).