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.

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