One Friday we spend a cold evening at a Moroccan-themed bar in Zafra with two American girls (one from our very own Midwest) and a crowd of Spanish college students home for the holidays. It’s not clear how this group has spontaneously formed, but it’s a good collection of people. I’m sitting next to Alva, a model of Spanish hipness in her tights, denim shorts, and high-top sneakers. Her black hair is carefully styled into a tall pouf and her eyelashes extend for miles. She tells me it’s her life’s dream to go to New York City, that as soon as she finishes her studies and finds a job, it’s the first thing she’ll do. I ask her what she’s studying. ‘Medicine,’ she answers, taking a long drag of her cigarette.
On my left, Levi is talking to Manu, a self-proclaimed club kid with a beefy build and quite a lot of gel in his hair. He’s playing techno songs on his cell phone, raving about the power of that music. ‘I love all music,’ he says, ‘but this’….he rubs his forearm. ‘This makes my hair stand on end.’ He shows us a video of a concert he recently saw with Alva; strobe lights pulse through the crowd as naked women dance onstage. ‘Porno party,’ Alva says in English, giving a wide-eyed nod from behind her beer. Manu tells us a story about stumbling home one night to find a half dozen strangers watching tv in his living room. ‘This is my apartment…’ he says. ‘What’s up man?’ one responds. He just sighs in resignation and goes to bed, hoping to find them gone in the morning.
Rosa, a few years older than the rest, is a student of one of our American friends, and she speaks better English than she likes to reveal. She says she’s embarrassed by her errors so she avoids speaking altogether. I force a few phrases out of her, and she agrees to have some English-only conversations before her next exam. She corrects my Spanish grammar as I speak. The Argentines I knew were always quick to do this, and I’ve missed it in Spain; I think the people here tend to see it as impolite. It’s by far the most useful language-learning tool though, and it’s refreshing to encounter it here.
Amanda, who is more American in her dress than any of us Americans, tells us she’s always wanted to learn English but it’s just too damn hard. ‘My name is Amanda, hello,’ she laughs, insisting that this is all she knows. She excitedly shows us her Hot Topic-style SpongeBob shirt. ‘Bob Esponja!’ she says, pointing. ‘Y Patricio!’ She’s one of these nonstop smilers and the mood is contagious. We’re all laughing all night.
•••••
Christmas Eve here turns out to be the botellón, an early-evening drunken disaster on the Plaza. Someone’s car speakers are repeatedly blasting the techno song that took over Europe this summer. Bottles smash, shots lined up on the benches, there’s a guy puking under our balcony and someone pissing outside the hotel. The party has cleared out by 10pm, and the city sleeps in on Christmas morning.
•••••
On Christmas Day, Levi and I drink the Guinness we gifted ourselves and watch the rain through the French doors.
•••••
We get locked out of our apartment tonight, conveniently also without a cell phone. We bang on the door for a while, but our neighbor’s out of town. We walk to the home of a friend of our landlord to try to get a hold of him, but she’s out of town. So we track down a phone book at the police station and call the landlord from a payphone, but the listing is bad. Running out of ideas, I ask the Italian guy who runs the pizzeria for his phone to give the number one more try. No dice, but the owner’s son, a big hairy guy covered in flour and olive oil, grabs a menu and heads to our door. He unsuccessfully tries to jimmy the lock with the laminated paper for a while, then finally sighs, shrugs, and kicks the door in.
•••••
Monday, December 27, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
vantage
There’s a road that begins at a small, gray plaza just beyond the boundaries of the old city wall. A gritty little watering hole called Bar Taxi sits at the northwest corner of this square; it’s the kind of place where you can expect to encounter drunken retirees by noon every day of the week. Just beyond the bar the road loses all marks of the urban as the pavement gives way to dust and dirt and the sidewalks narrow until the street is flush against the doorsteps. The row of dingy white stucco structures terminates in a house whose strange swaths of color add confusion rather than cheer to the dreary block. The place was gutted but the project went no further; the rusted padlock on the splintering front door hasn’t been touched in years.
A tangled mess of telephone wires droops near the house’s eaves, casting its angular shadows on the low, mossy stone wall of the neighboring pasture. Here on the ragged edges of urban life a distinct world reveals itself. Modernity once briefly took hold here, but the signs of its indifferent destruction lie everywhere. The twenty or so sheep grazing in the pasture munch grass from overgrown concrete patios and fallen metal fence posts. A porcelain bathtub propped against its only remaining foot and draped to its rim in weeds serves as a trough. The farmhouse itself, long abandoned for a cozier spot within Zafra’s limits, has lost most of its southern wall and an enterprising oak has taken notice, extending a spiny arm deep into the building. A vine later wrapped itself around that branch, climbed to the second story, burst out through a window, and forked in two. One prong now reaches back around through the gap in the wall and the other, having punched through the glass panes of the front door, creeps over countertops and around banisters.
Beyond the house lies a mile of similarly crumbling structures. Stone walls cut the hilly pastures into the odd geometric innovations land disputes will inspire. Rotting trash accumulates in clumps that stick on the protruding rocks of little streams.
A highway breaks up the countryside at the foot of the Castellar—it’s all uphill after this road. The bottom half of the mountain is organized into tidy little farms. Aging but well-preserved houses, barns, and pig compounds line the narrow dirt road that zigzags lazily from one end of the hill to the other, edging toward its peaks. The breeze smells of swine and wet earth. Rows of olive trees extend for acres, their boughs forming grayish green scribbles against the cliffs.
Around the halfway point the grass thins and the soil gives way to rocky sand and small boulders that have lodged themselves in place. A few intrepid farmers have given the place a go but eventually retreated to lower ground. The places they left behind are in absolute ruin and at first glance appear intriguingly ancient. Closer inspection invariably reveals modern drywall, nails and bricks; neglect in these harsh elements destroys a structure in a few short years. The results are eerie. One house near the summit, now little more than a vaguely quadrilateral pile of rocks, sits at an uncomfortable slant and seems to lean down the hill. It’s surrounded by the mangled remains of a barbed-wire fence whose makeshift scrapmetal posts have been entirely encompassed in rust. Impaled on one of these stakes is the filthy head of a plastic doll, presumably intended to scare off thieving birds. Its long, sun-whitened hair has fallen away in clumps. The bleached bones of a sheep or goat are strewn across the yard, scattered by vultures.
Higher up the grass disappears altogether and the hiker meet with the bases of the tall stone slabs of the Castellar. The only traces of the fortress are imbedded in the highest rocks, just a couple barely identifiable walls and one underground room now missing its roof. The wayward sheep who wander this far stand little chance, and their bones lie at every rocky level to the very crests. So hot is the sun and so numerous the vultures that the bones have been stripped of their meat and bleached perfectly white before the wool has had time to rot or blow away; it lies in sad, ragged piles on the rocks, bloodstained and muddy.
Zafra is a messy terra cotta cluster from here. The wind rushing in from Portugal silences the bells.
A tangled mess of telephone wires droops near the house’s eaves, casting its angular shadows on the low, mossy stone wall of the neighboring pasture. Here on the ragged edges of urban life a distinct world reveals itself. Modernity once briefly took hold here, but the signs of its indifferent destruction lie everywhere. The twenty or so sheep grazing in the pasture munch grass from overgrown concrete patios and fallen metal fence posts. A porcelain bathtub propped against its only remaining foot and draped to its rim in weeds serves as a trough. The farmhouse itself, long abandoned for a cozier spot within Zafra’s limits, has lost most of its southern wall and an enterprising oak has taken notice, extending a spiny arm deep into the building. A vine later wrapped itself around that branch, climbed to the second story, burst out through a window, and forked in two. One prong now reaches back around through the gap in the wall and the other, having punched through the glass panes of the front door, creeps over countertops and around banisters.
Beyond the house lies a mile of similarly crumbling structures. Stone walls cut the hilly pastures into the odd geometric innovations land disputes will inspire. Rotting trash accumulates in clumps that stick on the protruding rocks of little streams.
A highway breaks up the countryside at the foot of the Castellar—it’s all uphill after this road. The bottom half of the mountain is organized into tidy little farms. Aging but well-preserved houses, barns, and pig compounds line the narrow dirt road that zigzags lazily from one end of the hill to the other, edging toward its peaks. The breeze smells of swine and wet earth. Rows of olive trees extend for acres, their boughs forming grayish green scribbles against the cliffs.
Around the halfway point the grass thins and the soil gives way to rocky sand and small boulders that have lodged themselves in place. A few intrepid farmers have given the place a go but eventually retreated to lower ground. The places they left behind are in absolute ruin and at first glance appear intriguingly ancient. Closer inspection invariably reveals modern drywall, nails and bricks; neglect in these harsh elements destroys a structure in a few short years. The results are eerie. One house near the summit, now little more than a vaguely quadrilateral pile of rocks, sits at an uncomfortable slant and seems to lean down the hill. It’s surrounded by the mangled remains of a barbed-wire fence whose makeshift scrapmetal posts have been entirely encompassed in rust. Impaled on one of these stakes is the filthy head of a plastic doll, presumably intended to scare off thieving birds. Its long, sun-whitened hair has fallen away in clumps. The bleached bones of a sheep or goat are strewn across the yard, scattered by vultures.
Higher up the grass disappears altogether and the hiker meet with the bases of the tall stone slabs of the Castellar. The only traces of the fortress are imbedded in the highest rocks, just a couple barely identifiable walls and one underground room now missing its roof. The wayward sheep who wander this far stand little chance, and their bones lie at every rocky level to the very crests. So hot is the sun and so numerous the vultures that the bones have been stripped of their meat and bleached perfectly white before the wool has had time to rot or blow away; it lies in sad, ragged piles on the rocks, bloodstained and muddy.
Zafra is a messy terra cotta cluster from here. The wind rushing in from Portugal silences the bells.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Empieza la Navidad
The second week of every Spanish December is the Puente (Bridge), the three-day stretch that kicks off the holiday season. Monday is Constitution Day, Tuesday is the regular workday that forms the crown of the metaphorical bridge, and Wednesday is the Day of the Immaculate Conception (a federal holiday, no church-state qualms here), the coasting bit that ushers the country into Christmastime.
By Thursday the decorations are hung, the lights are lit, and the shopping frenzy begins. Stores are open on Sunday now and Calle Sevilla is nonstop commercial mayhem. A neon carousel has appeared on the Plaza de España, belting out carnivalesque Christmas songs. A three-story inflatable SpongeBob stands beside it, crawling with pea coat-clad toddlers who climb its plastic rungs and come bouncing down its puffy slide. Glittering bells, snowmen, angels, and stars hang above the downtown streets and poinsettias and garland adorn the balconies on the Plaza Grande.
Levi and I had intended to use the Puente and the six-day weekend it afforded me (I LOVE my job) to spend some time in Madrid. He recently discovered he has dual citizenship thanks to his Quebecois father and is applying for a Canadian passport. This will allow him to leave the EU every ninety days upon the expiration of his tourist visa and return to Spain with a different passport, getting a new tourist visa and remaining legal. This means we can travel outside of Spain without fear of immigration issues, a far superior option to the hide-out-in-Zafra plan we had previously worked out. So we planned a visit to the Canadian Embassy and some exploration of the capital city.
On Thursday, the day of our scheduled departure, the crucial documents Levi’s parents had UPSed to him had yet to arrive. I called the Spanish office of this disastrous company and was told that the driver had come to our house and no one was home and now the package wouldn’t come till Tuesday. I put up the best fight I could manage in Spanish and was eventually connected to the driver himself, who screamed at me that this was my fault because no one answered when he rang the doorbell. When I informed him that we don’t have a doorbell, I could practically hear him throwing his hands up. He told me he’d call me on Tuesday and I could come meet him in the Plaza because he simply couldn’t find my house. So we cancelled our trip and spent the weekend in Zafra, putting together a little Christmas tree and hiding out from the endless rain.
On Tuesday, a long conversation with the UPS office revealed that the documents had been delivered to a place where we don’t live and signed for by a person we don’t know. I tracked them down at the knife shop around the corner and Levi took a midnight bus to Madrid. He came home exhausted at six the next evening, having been turned away by a self-important bureaucrat for being short a form.
On Thursday night poor Levi got back on the midnight bus. I tagged along this time. We stumbled into the cold morning at 5:30 and found an all-night café, where we chugged some coffee and listened to the angry ramblings of a group of drunk thirty-somethings on the tail end of a dramatic evening. When the sun finally came up, we found a Starbucks (oh, how I’ve missed that chai) and waited for the embassy to open. Levi’s meeting went smoothly this time, and we celebrated with a soon-regretted Burger King binge (the fries suck in Europe, too). Back on the bus by 3:30pm, passed out in an uncomfortable vertical contortion by four.
Maybe if we had stayed longer or been in better spirits I would have come to a different conclusion, but from what I observed in those brief hours, Madrid sorta…sucks. It’s Chicago without the culture, Barcelona without the architecture, Buenos Aires without the charm; there’s nothing unique or surprising there. It just felt like a huge, dirty city. I was happy to be back in friendly little Zafra.
As the school year has gone on, I’ve realized more and more that I am a point of real interest to my littler kids. I catch wind of strangely specific rumors about myself and my life; some of these are surprisingly accurate and others are truly baffling. There seems to be a hilariously intense curiosity about Levi. He’s at the school fairly frequently giving private lessons, so all the kids know I have a novio. Last week, a few of my bilingual first-year girls (my favorite students) swarmed me with questions about him—is he American? Does he speak Spanish? How long have you known each other? Do your parents know you have a boyfriend?? They giggled uncontrollably at every response. One of them went on to inform me that I should have two boyfriends, because the actor from the new Narnia movie is really cute and about my age and speaks English so of course we should be dating.
I have one little boy, about eleven or twelve, who sits in the front row of all my lessons and raises his hand every time I ask a question, even though he hardly ever knows the answer. His teacher tells me he asks about me every day I’m not there, and one of his greatest concerns is whether I still have that damn boyfriend.
I’ve generally stuck to the little white lie that I speak no Spanish; I feared that if all the kids knew I understood their language, they wouldn’t bother to speak English to me. When I ran into a bunch of my students at the Spanish-dubbed Harry Potter movie, I knew I would be found out. Sure enough, the following Monday, all of my students refused to speak English, and one of my first-years informed that word had spread and I could fool them no longer.
In a Monday class, a first-year boy caught a glimpse of the tattoo on my shoulder. I’ve kept the thing carefully hidden since I’ve never seen a single tattoo in Zafra and figured it would be a bit of a scandal in this conservative place. He wouldn’t let it go, of course, and the class’s interest in my vocabulary lesson was pretty quickly replaced with a shocked fascination with my little bird. I kept my coat on the rest of the day but the damage was done. In an unstructured Art lesson on Thursday, two of my favorite little girls invited me to paint with them, and I soon found myself trapped in a barrage of questions (all in Spanish, sigh) about the tattoo they’d heard I had. Of course I refused to show it to them, and after getting past their disappointment they spent the rest of the class speculating on what it might look like.
In that same class I discovered another strange rumor. In their investigation into my personal life, one of the little girls asked what I did for a living. After a very confused exchange, I realized that these kids all think I teach for free.
They have also somehow figured out exactly where I live. This really is a small town.
On an unrelated note, what the hell is going on over there? Machines snapping photos of travelers through their clothes, the so-called liberal president calling inconvenient journalism “deplorable” as corporations cut off all its resources, and now Congress is denying health care to ailing 9/11 responders while cutting taxes for Bill Gates? I didn’t realize I was fleeing fascism. Doesn’t exactly make a return to the US very tempting.
By Thursday the decorations are hung, the lights are lit, and the shopping frenzy begins. Stores are open on Sunday now and Calle Sevilla is nonstop commercial mayhem. A neon carousel has appeared on the Plaza de España, belting out carnivalesque Christmas songs. A three-story inflatable SpongeBob stands beside it, crawling with pea coat-clad toddlers who climb its plastic rungs and come bouncing down its puffy slide. Glittering bells, snowmen, angels, and stars hang above the downtown streets and poinsettias and garland adorn the balconies on the Plaza Grande. 
Levi and I had intended to use the Puente and the six-day weekend it afforded me (I LOVE my job) to spend some time in Madrid. He recently discovered he has dual citizenship thanks to his Quebecois father and is applying for a Canadian passport. This will allow him to leave the EU every ninety days upon the expiration of his tourist visa and return to Spain with a different passport, getting a new tourist visa and remaining legal. This means we can travel outside of Spain without fear of immigration issues, a far superior option to the hide-out-in-Zafra plan we had previously worked out. So we planned a visit to the Canadian Embassy and some exploration of the capital city.
On Thursday, the day of our scheduled departure, the crucial documents Levi’s parents had UPSed to him had yet to arrive. I called the Spanish office of this disastrous company and was told that the driver had come to our house and no one was home and now the package wouldn’t come till Tuesday. I put up the best fight I could manage in Spanish and was eventually connected to the driver himself, who screamed at me that this was my fault because no one answered when he rang the doorbell. When I informed him that we don’t have a doorbell, I could practically hear him throwing his hands up. He told me he’d call me on Tuesday and I could come meet him in the Plaza because he simply couldn’t find my house. So we cancelled our trip and spent the weekend in Zafra, putting together a little Christmas tree and hiding out from the endless rain.On Tuesday, a long conversation with the UPS office revealed that the documents had been delivered to a place where we don’t live and signed for by a person we don’t know. I tracked them down at the knife shop around the corner and Levi took a midnight bus to Madrid. He came home exhausted at six the next evening, having been turned away by a self-important bureaucrat for being short a form.
On Thursday night poor Levi got back on the midnight bus. I tagged along this time. We stumbled into the cold morning at 5:30 and found an all-night café, where we chugged some coffee and listened to the angry ramblings of a group of drunk thirty-somethings on the tail end of a dramatic evening. When the sun finally came up, we found a Starbucks (oh, how I’ve missed that chai) and waited for the embassy to open. Levi’s meeting went smoothly this time, and we celebrated with a soon-regretted Burger King binge (the fries suck in Europe, too). Back on the bus by 3:30pm, passed out in an uncomfortable vertical contortion by four.
Maybe if we had stayed longer or been in better spirits I would have come to a different conclusion, but from what I observed in those brief hours, Madrid sorta…sucks. It’s Chicago without the culture, Barcelona without the architecture, Buenos Aires without the charm; there’s nothing unique or surprising there. It just felt like a huge, dirty city. I was happy to be back in friendly little Zafra.
As the school year has gone on, I’ve realized more and more that I am a point of real interest to my littler kids. I catch wind of strangely specific rumors about myself and my life; some of these are surprisingly accurate and others are truly baffling. There seems to be a hilariously intense curiosity about Levi. He’s at the school fairly frequently giving private lessons, so all the kids know I have a novio. Last week, a few of my bilingual first-year girls (my favorite students) swarmed me with questions about him—is he American? Does he speak Spanish? How long have you known each other? Do your parents know you have a boyfriend?? They giggled uncontrollably at every response. One of them went on to inform me that I should have two boyfriends, because the actor from the new Narnia movie is really cute and about my age and speaks English so of course we should be dating.I have one little boy, about eleven or twelve, who sits in the front row of all my lessons and raises his hand every time I ask a question, even though he hardly ever knows the answer. His teacher tells me he asks about me every day I’m not there, and one of his greatest concerns is whether I still have that damn boyfriend.
I’ve generally stuck to the little white lie that I speak no Spanish; I feared that if all the kids knew I understood their language, they wouldn’t bother to speak English to me. When I ran into a bunch of my students at the Spanish-dubbed Harry Potter movie, I knew I would be found out. Sure enough, the following Monday, all of my students refused to speak English, and one of my first-years informed that word had spread and I could fool them no longer.
In a Monday class, a first-year boy caught a glimpse of the tattoo on my shoulder. I’ve kept the thing carefully hidden since I’ve never seen a single tattoo in Zafra and figured it would be a bit of a scandal in this conservative place. He wouldn’t let it go, of course, and the class’s interest in my vocabulary lesson was pretty quickly replaced with a shocked fascination with my little bird. I kept my coat on the rest of the day but the damage was done. In an unstructured Art lesson on Thursday, two of my favorite little girls invited me to paint with them, and I soon found myself trapped in a barrage of questions (all in Spanish, sigh) about the tattoo they’d heard I had. Of course I refused to show it to them, and after getting past their disappointment they spent the rest of the class speculating on what it might look like.In that same class I discovered another strange rumor. In their investigation into my personal life, one of the little girls asked what I did for a living. After a very confused exchange, I realized that these kids all think I teach for free.
They have also somehow figured out exactly where I live. This really is a small town.
On an unrelated note, what the hell is going on over there? Machines snapping photos of travelers through their clothes, the so-called liberal president calling inconvenient journalism “deplorable” as corporations cut off all its resources, and now Congress is denying health care to ailing 9/11 responders while cutting taxes for Bill Gates? I didn’t realize I was fleeing fascism. Doesn’t exactly make a return to the US very tempting.
Friday, December 3, 2010
La vida extremeña
Zafra sits on a rocky, dusty stretch of dehesa (pronounced ‘day-ay-suh), the not-quite-desert landscape peculiar to southern Spain. The people here say that word with love, rolling their tongues through the vowels in a way that always leaves me longing for the low, fog-laden mountains and grayish-green olive groves that lie just outside of town. The centerpiece of these craggy hills is the Castellar, a broad, flat pile of rocks and scrubby farms rising about 2,000 feet from the road and crowned by a series of strange column-like rocks, into which are carved the disintegrated ruins of an ancient fortress. Levi and I spent an afternoon hiking up this strange little mountain, and it was only after a long picnic at their very foundations that we became aware of these ruins, so deteriorated and overgrown are they.
During Moorish rule, Zafra sat on the border between two Arab kingdoms, and it was from this castle that frequent and bloody wars were waged against the neighboring territory. They called it Sajra, the Arabic for “castle on the rock,” which became Safra, Çafra, and eventually Zafra.
The town was seized from Muslim rule in 1229, but only began to come back to life in 1426, when the Spanish king gifted the place to a duke. The man promptly and predictably began the perfectly medieval tasks of building a huge defensive wall, a convent, and a castle. These old city walls have largely been lost, but the original arched entryway still stands, marking for those who walk under it their passage from the modern world into Old Zafra, which I now call home.
The area is a maze of white stucco and crumbling stone where nothing can help but own up to its nearly six centuries of existence. At the center stands a gorgeous (albeit slightly frightening) Gothic cathedral whose bell tower has been steadfastly ringing out the hour since the place was first ornamented with Cortez’s gold. The castle, now a swanky hotel, still presides over a trapezoidal plaza where odd terraces and stairways compensated for the medieval inability to easily level rough terrain. The sisters of the convent still walk the narrow sidewalks in pairs, the only wanderers able to resist the lure of the glowing shop windows of Calle Sevilla. When afternoon siesta clears the cars from the roads, there’s only the hum of café TVs to recall the century.
Living in this place is as peaceful and pleasant an existence as I can imagine. There’s a low but constant buzz here—children playing in the streets as their parents clink glasses in the bars, the click of high heels on the brick roads, the throaty laughter of the retirees as they wander from café to café in their daily wading through coffee and wine. This part of town developed the lively spirit of a big city but forgot to be stressed or chaotic or impersonal. There’s no hurry here, just slow, happy meandering peppered with greetings to every passer-by. Even when the Sisters ring out their fifteen-minute-solid monotone bell solo at 7 o’clock, a nightly event that had me tugging at my hair for weeks, the sense of ease and calm persists. Pot smoke drifts from groups of peaceful teenagers through the plaza and the park even as police wander about in smiling pairs, concerned only with greeting friends and sticking an occasional parking ticket on a tourist’s car. At two in the morning small children play soccer outside the bars, so secure are their parents in this safe little world. It’s idyllic, the kind of place I thought had disappeared, or had only existed in twin-bed fifties sitcoms. 
Through my work at the high school, however, I’ve started to see some problems in this sort of peaceful, sheltered existence. Most of my students come from happy, traditional families, all of whose members were born and raised in this area and, having seen little reason to peek outside such a paradise, have never traveled, learned a foreign language, and who rarely read anything of international news. But Spain sits at Africa’s door to Europe and has deep cultural ties to the impoverished nations of the Americas, and as is clear with a mere glance at my first-year classes, it’s impossible to shut out this reality, try as they might.
Last week they were learning family vocabulary and the verb construction of “I have got” (it’s all British here), so the teacher had me do an activity with the kids where we went around the room and everyone said, “I have got a sister name Laura, I have got a cousin named Juan” etc. I get to Sid Ahmed Mohammed, and instead of describing his family like the rest of the class, he bursts into tears. He’s so beside himself he can’t speak. He buries his head in his sweater and sobs silently on his desk until, completely baffled, I move on to the next student. After class I ask the teacher about it and learn that Sid Ahmed isn’t from here; he grew up in the war-torn Sahara region of Morocco and, unable to ensure a safe future for him, his parents sent him to Spain, where a refugee program placed him with a host family. He doesn’t even know if his family is alive. I was horrified. Why the hell, with this information, would this teacher let me do an activity like this? The teacher shrugged. “It’s fine, he’s just sensitive.” In the next lesson, I insisted on talking about the Simpsons family instead of the students’ families to avoid further traumatizing this poor kid, and the teacher was annoyed and confused.
In another class, I have a little girl who came to Zafra from the Dominican Republic a year ago. The other students tease her for her accent (ironically, I understand her perfectly while struggling to understand them) and her teachers allow her to entirely check out in class. Since she’s a little behind in skills, coming from a different education system, and a little slower at understanding classroom discussion because of the accent hurdle, no expectations are placed on her and she fades into the background and is completely ignored. She’s so sweet; one day Levi and I were eating lunch in the cafeteria and she came to sit with us and told us all about herself and her move from Santo Domingo to Zafra. She disappeared for a couple minutes and came back to give us some candy she had bought us. She doesn’t talk to anyone at school—she tends to hide out in the classroom with a book at lunch and recess—and I think she was thrilled to meet another outsider. She’s clearly highly intelligent, and because she a foreigner she’s being left behind by her teachers and classmates.
Obviously, xenophobia and ignorance are not unique to Zafra, and I mean this in no way to be a condemnation of the place. It’s generally a very hospitable and welcoming town, and maybe the wonderful peace here is due in part to this resistance to the outside world. It’s just been very revealing to get to know these kids who don’t quite fit into the perfection of this town and to see the kind of consequences that has.
On a lighter note, we recently had another Couchsurf couple, this one from the Czech Republic. They were on a bike trip through Spain and planned to only stay one night, but heavy rains came through town and they ended up staying for four days. We ate Czech food (potato salad, fried pork tenderloin, and strawberry dumplings) and drank so, so much beer. Apparently the Czechs drink more beer than anyone in the world, and our new friends are pretty solid evidence of that. They also brought a homemade pear-based spirit called slivovice and, horrified at our lack of shot glasses, bought us a set so we could all have a few tries of it. We had a great time, really good people.
Winter break is approaching and Levi and I are planning a couple weeks in Morocco. Flights are bafflingly cheap (€12 per person round trip) and complicated immigration issues require us to briefly leave the EU, so we decided Christmas in Fez sounded pretty good. I really want to ride a camel.
Check out my facebook and Levi's Flickr page for more photos
During Moorish rule, Zafra sat on the border between two Arab kingdoms, and it was from this castle that frequent and bloody wars were waged against the neighboring territory. They called it Sajra, the Arabic for “castle on the rock,” which became Safra, Çafra, and eventually Zafra.
The town was seized from Muslim rule in 1229, but only began to come back to life in 1426, when the Spanish king gifted the place to a duke. The man promptly and predictably began the perfectly medieval tasks of building a huge defensive wall, a convent, and a castle. These old city walls have largely been lost, but the original arched entryway still stands, marking for those who walk under it their passage from the modern world into Old Zafra, which I now call home. 
The area is a maze of white stucco and crumbling stone where nothing can help but own up to its nearly six centuries of existence. At the center stands a gorgeous (albeit slightly frightening) Gothic cathedral whose bell tower has been steadfastly ringing out the hour since the place was first ornamented with Cortez’s gold. The castle, now a swanky hotel, still presides over a trapezoidal plaza where odd terraces and stairways compensated for the medieval inability to easily level rough terrain. The sisters of the convent still walk the narrow sidewalks in pairs, the only wanderers able to resist the lure of the glowing shop windows of Calle Sevilla. When afternoon siesta clears the cars from the roads, there’s only the hum of café TVs to recall the century.
Living in this place is as peaceful and pleasant an existence as I can imagine. There’s a low but constant buzz here—children playing in the streets as their parents clink glasses in the bars, the click of high heels on the brick roads, the throaty laughter of the retirees as they wander from café to café in their daily wading through coffee and wine. This part of town developed the lively spirit of a big city but forgot to be stressed or chaotic or impersonal. There’s no hurry here, just slow, happy meandering peppered with greetings to every passer-by. Even when the Sisters ring out their fifteen-minute-solid monotone bell solo at 7 o’clock, a nightly event that had me tugging at my hair for weeks, the sense of ease and calm persists. Pot smoke drifts from groups of peaceful teenagers through the plaza and the park even as police wander about in smiling pairs, concerned only with greeting friends and sticking an occasional parking ticket on a tourist’s car. At two in the morning small children play soccer outside the bars, so secure are their parents in this safe little world. It’s idyllic, the kind of place I thought had disappeared, or had only existed in twin-bed fifties sitcoms. 
Through my work at the high school, however, I’ve started to see some problems in this sort of peaceful, sheltered existence. Most of my students come from happy, traditional families, all of whose members were born and raised in this area and, having seen little reason to peek outside such a paradise, have never traveled, learned a foreign language, and who rarely read anything of international news. But Spain sits at Africa’s door to Europe and has deep cultural ties to the impoverished nations of the Americas, and as is clear with a mere glance at my first-year classes, it’s impossible to shut out this reality, try as they might.Last week they were learning family vocabulary and the verb construction of “I have got” (it’s all British here), so the teacher had me do an activity with the kids where we went around the room and everyone said, “I have got a sister name Laura, I have got a cousin named Juan” etc. I get to Sid Ahmed Mohammed, and instead of describing his family like the rest of the class, he bursts into tears. He’s so beside himself he can’t speak. He buries his head in his sweater and sobs silently on his desk until, completely baffled, I move on to the next student. After class I ask the teacher about it and learn that Sid Ahmed isn’t from here; he grew up in the war-torn Sahara region of Morocco and, unable to ensure a safe future for him, his parents sent him to Spain, where a refugee program placed him with a host family. He doesn’t even know if his family is alive. I was horrified. Why the hell, with this information, would this teacher let me do an activity like this? The teacher shrugged. “It’s fine, he’s just sensitive.” In the next lesson, I insisted on talking about the Simpsons family instead of the students’ families to avoid further traumatizing this poor kid, and the teacher was annoyed and confused.
In another class, I have a little girl who came to Zafra from the Dominican Republic a year ago. The other students tease her for her accent (ironically, I understand her perfectly while struggling to understand them) and her teachers allow her to entirely check out in class. Since she’s a little behind in skills, coming from a different education system, and a little slower at understanding classroom discussion because of the accent hurdle, no expectations are placed on her and she fades into the background and is completely ignored. She’s so sweet; one day Levi and I were eating lunch in the cafeteria and she came to sit with us and told us all about herself and her move from Santo Domingo to Zafra. She disappeared for a couple minutes and came back to give us some candy she had bought us. She doesn’t talk to anyone at school—she tends to hide out in the classroom with a book at lunch and recess—and I think she was thrilled to meet another outsider. She’s clearly highly intelligent, and because she a foreigner she’s being left behind by her teachers and classmates.
Obviously, xenophobia and ignorance are not unique to Zafra, and I mean this in no way to be a condemnation of the place. It’s generally a very hospitable and welcoming town, and maybe the wonderful peace here is due in part to this resistance to the outside world. It’s just been very revealing to get to know these kids who don’t quite fit into the perfection of this town and to see the kind of consequences that has.
On a lighter note, we recently had another Couchsurf couple, this one from the Czech Republic. They were on a bike trip through Spain and planned to only stay one night, but heavy rains came through town and they ended up staying for four days. We ate Czech food (potato salad, fried pork tenderloin, and strawberry dumplings) and drank so, so much beer. Apparently the Czechs drink more beer than anyone in the world, and our new friends are pretty solid evidence of that. They also brought a homemade pear-based spirit called slivovice and, horrified at our lack of shot glasses, bought us a set so we could all have a few tries of it. We had a great time, really good people.
Winter break is approaching and Levi and I are planning a couple weeks in Morocco. Flights are bafflingly cheap (€12 per person round trip) and complicated immigration issues require us to briefly leave the EU, so we decided Christmas in Fez sounded pretty good. I really want to ride a camel.Check out my facebook and Levi's Flickr page for more photos
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