Giving feedback in Essaouria

A FISHY TALE

On the third day in Morocco, we left for Essaouria, a seaside town that I’ve visited a few times, always wanting to spend longer there.  The brick road outside our Marrakech Riad was complete, the egg pattie seller waved au revoir, the bag snatching kid was harassing someone else.We left a bag in the Riad loaded with winter clothes that we'd collect on our way back, and set off for the seaside, for great food and heap big silver purchases. Driss, the owner of the company from whom we'd hired a car, suggested we skip Rabat where we had two nights booked, and instead spend four in Meknes, part of Morocco's Imperial triangle of Rabat and Fez.  We took his advice.  All was set for a fab 14 days on the road: sun, scenery, silver and great food ...  

Brahim was our appointed driver: a smart, funny, approachable Moroccan. He loaded our bags into his 4x4 and we headed for the highway.  171km from the heat of Marrakech, via the argan oil orchards,  we stopped to photograph goats in the trees – and had to work out dirhams for the privilege to the goatkeeper's who appeared from nowhere at the sound of a purring car.   We stopped to buy some argon oil at a co-op where women sat on the floor in concrete bunkers. The work is highly labour intensive because it’s the way the women of the area are able to earn an income.  Our credit card wouldn’t work even after a woman stood in the middle of the road to try to get a signal.  It’s goat and maize country; where men still ride donkeys laden with huge grass baskets and men shelter against rocks from the blistering sun while their sheep graze.  The countryside is bleak and barren but spectacularly beautiful.

Reno sat back and enjoyed the ride and the countryside. I was thrilled we’d decided to have a driver instead of negotiating the left hand driving, and risking a brand new marriage to collapse in the heat and dust of a missed directions and diverse interests.

Having grown up in Africa, this is all normal for me.  The rickety cars that are normal here,  would be pulled off Australian roads. The belching fumes, the cattle on the road, the rocks and dust and rolling valleys are part of my early footprints.  We passed a few small frontier towns where market day was in progress: men sold just slaughtered meat that hung from huge hooks, a feast for flies ready to lay eggs if not sold quickly.  Women carrying bunches of carrots by their tops;  eggs in baskets, televisions on bicycles.   We elaborated on the “you set the world your way (the big picture), I see it in small pieces” discovery that had been going on since we began travelling together.  I told Reno I loved this way of life:  you can see the whole process of eating from start to finish;  the bare soil, the women planting and harvesting, the animals grazing, the animals to market, the live markets, the shopping, men harvesting reeds to weave baskets to carry the food.  There’s an order to this life, a respect for its hardships that I have osmosed into my system and that Reno is now allowing to percolate slowly into his. Mud bricks for mud houses; rubble walls and thousands of metres of prickly pear fences, tattered washing hanging on lines.  No television to interrupt the days:  life is work and work, life.   It's hard, and unending, but so far every person we’ve met has been utterly charming and sincere. No matter how rough their lot, they’re happy to oblige, give directions, have a chat, shake a hand.

We arrived late afternoon into the wild winds of Essaouria on Morocco's west coast, the little blue port where everyone earns their daily bread fishing or selling carpets in the clean, wide souk.  It’s long been a haven for dropouts and hippies, many of whom still hang around wearing Bob Marley t-shirts; where expat Brits bake scones and make chilli con carne for tourists tired of fish. Bongo drums, tie died fabrics, carpets, henna hands, brass pots, coloured lamps, scarves, leather pouffes, soft yellow slippers ... ah, what fun we'd have shopping.

We checked into the Riad Malaika, a mediocre place – compared to the web photos - in the middle of the souk, down a crumbly lane where cats stretched, men sold ironwork and wove carpets, but sold Chinese rubbish scarves, and women bore big baskets of steaming warm round breads on their heads.  Cats slept curled on the stones at the entrance; inside a small mosaic fountain burbled.  Our room was tiny - there wasn't even space to put our case. The bathroom was painted and tiled black,  and so small we couldn’t both fit in at the same time.  We opened the window expecting views of the vast sea, which I’d so wanted to impress Reno with, but closed it quickly after a big stink of fish assailed us.  We’d arranged for Brahim to collect us later to take us to a fish restaurant he’d suggested: I wanted to eat along the shore,  where I'd had fab fish on my two previous visit, but Brahim suggested the fish was better away from the beach, in a restaurant.

We walked along the old fort wall, watching the mist roll in from the windy Atlantic, to the fishing area, where sting rays, sardines, slimy egg yellow eels, moray eels, flat heads, calamari, prawns, sea bream lay in straw baskets, sold by veiled women. Innards were strewn on the ground where motorbikes and cars pushed past.  Reno had an attack of his Italian “air”, and needed to walk back to the Riad covering his chest because he thought he was coming down with something foreign, and an icy wind was blowing in, determined to prove him correct.  Then Brahim drove us a few hundred metres along the beach road, to Fanatik restaurant.   “I don’t want to go there,” said, clutching Reno’s arm.  “I don’t like the look of it. Let’s go back to the medina, and eat at the stalls where the food is fab and fresh.”  Reno said Brahim would be upset if we ignored his recommendation – so we ate fish and salad on the promenade, watching dogs and pedestrians.  Mine was awful – mushy and a ripe smell.  I fed most of my mush to the scrawny cat that rubbed itself against my legs under the table. We left after the first course.

Four am and all was definitely not well.  My dinner time fish was swimming around my oesophagus, gurgling and thrashing for a way out.  I started vomiting. I vomited in that black bathroom while holding onto the black towel rail and the black sink. I vomited everywhere, without stopping, until it came out of my nose. A rooster started crowing at dawn, and still I vomited.  Reno called the manager who took me shaking, damp and almost passing out, in a taxi to the local hospital mid morning. It was a new looking starkly clean building, with few patients that we could see,  everything painted blue to match the sea, the flag, the furniture, the curtains, the caftans, the doctor's uniform, the chairs, the lamps.

The doctor, a fabulous fellow with a laugh that woke the dead, was head of medicine and owner of the hospital.  He was lean and fit, dressed in a natty blue operating coat.  He spoke only French Arabic and one and a half words of English. We of course spoke only English.  I was wheeled into his white and blue clinic and placed on his examination table.  It didn’t take much translating for him to understand my ordeal. Hands can be very expressive.   He asked me if I had any “dairy” that morning.  Of course not, I replied, clutching my bucket, breakfast was not on my agenda.

I don’t even have an oesophageal or stomach lining, never mind having an inclination for breakfast, I replied indignantly.  “Breakfast?” He said in French. You ate breakfast ?  No, I’ve been vomiting – aaarghrrr, aaarrghrrrrrr …agr argr argr AAAAARGHRRRR. Ah!, ‘cest bon! He felt my clammy head and stroked my soaked hair.  In French, he asked if I had hot flushes.  No, I said, I had a hysterectomy years ago! No, no, no, he laughed like crazy, hugging his arms and miming shivering and sweating, shivering and sweating.   Instead of trying to interpret my dazed replies, he turned on the ultrasound, slopped my stomach with cold goo, and  began some hilarious story of unknown origin that made the theatre sister, the triage nurse, the admitting nurse and the woman bringing mint tea into the room, all of whom had come to witness the white woman having a near death experience, convulse with laughter. He pointed to the writhing anacondas, octopuses and minnows frolicking in my eviscerated cavern of a stomach on ultrasound and patted pale Reno on the back.

How old you? Monsieur le dottore asked.   (always in French/Arabic) Reno counted upwards in French, hovering between mid century and octogenarian.  No, No, how old?  Reno showed his fingers again.  Non, non, he protested, not how many times you aaaargh aagh agh aarggg, but how many years! Reno showed fingers for the third time. The doctor laughed like a crazy person, squeezed my withered arms, and pinched my skin that was so dehydrated it stood up like the soft peaks of a meringue before baking.  He wiped his cool hands over my clammy forehead, pulled my ears, and asked about my workout routine.

You windsurf, oui? He asked.  You run? You marathon, oui?  You very strong! In our country, when you 70 you dead. He squeezed my boobs and rubbed my shoulders, rolled my damp shirt up and my panties down to my hysterectomy scar.  Your neck is sore, oui?  I said my back and ribs were. He pulled the lobes of my ears, ran his finger along my appendix scar, and called the cleaning lady, standing on her broom with a floppy mop with a rag, and her water bucket with Jeyes Fluid,  to have a look. Oui, oui,  very much more sore dimanche from the aaargh aarhghgh arrrGHRRRRRR. He doubled up laughing again.

In case you are wondering how we knew what he was saying, we had the united nations in the room, a conglomerate of languages, including Reno’s school French. Everyone had their fair share of translating.  He conversed with a bevy of nurses. One came in with a blue kidney dish and a hypodermic needle.  Another came in with a blood pressure cuff and a metre of plastic tubing.  The cleaning lady mopped.  The doctor shrieked and guffawed into his mobile phone. I thought I was going to faint or vomit, whichever came first, so I asked for a blood test.  The nurse who stabbed my finger (on a 6, when I do it at 1.5)  thought she was whittling argan wood, known since the beginning of time to be the hardest wood of all, impossible for even the best craftsmen to carved.  GROSSO! She shouted to the doctor. Sanguine GROSSO!  My finger bled piteously into the large swab she smacked onto it.

The doctor mimed vomiting and poo-ing, sweating and shivering, holding 3 fingers up. He pointed to the skies. I was going to be dead in three days?  Why didn’t I just die last night, curled up against that black toilet bowl?  Why did I have to endure the dawn, and the rooster that crowed his heart out, and the muezzin wailing about my abdominal fate?  Three days?  I hadn’t even bought any silver!

The wheelchair returned.  I was helped into it and wheeled to the lift, with the cleaning lady, the triage nurse, Reno, and a woman carrying a clipboard who kept smiling and patting my shoulder (was she a chaplain for the infidels?).

I’m being admitted! I hoarse whispered to Reno (I hadn’t had a voice since 6 am from the vocal trauma of vomiting. ) To a Moroccan hospital! I gasped in a godfather voice. With a riad booked in a souk for two days!  I was wheeled into the resuscitation room, as a drip was being hooked up. A new nurse arrived with a new blanket, still in its cellophane bag.  Crisp new sheets were placed on my bed, and soft white pillows fluffed up to rest my soaking head. A man in a grubby brown parka arrived, clasping his hands behind his back.  Conversations in Arabic and French. He watched as the nurse stabbed my hand and collapsed the vein. Found another place and stabbed again.  Taped me up, tied me down. The man scratched his groin and sniffed loudly … he was the anaesthetist, come to inspect the new recruit.  Saline was in.  Out came more needles: Stemetil, antispasmodic, painkillers.

No sooner had the drip started, lunch arrived on a tray: an apple, a banana, a kilo of mashed potato with melted cheese on top, and a pot of yoghurt.   Whoops!  again.  Who wouldn’t.  So out came the vomitorious cocktail and in it’s place a drip of antibiotics, which I watched drip by drip for the rest of the day, sweating and shivering under my new nylon blanket.  The lunch stayed where it was. The window cleaner came in to inspect me. So did the floor washer. The potscrubber. The lift maintenance man and his wife.  The woman who bakes the bread.  Nurses, a dirham a dozen. You get the point.  The drips ended as the day faded. I could finally endure the light through the blue curtains.  I could be discharged.  Reno and Brahim came to fetch me, Brahim white at the gills because he felt responsible. And guess what? Whoops again. Right into the bowl that Brahim was holding while he mopped my brow.   None of us dared tell the staff.

A driver acting way beyond his call of duty deserves a lot of respect.  So does a husband who didn’t bat an eyelid when we considered my level of care, and realised we would probably be the benefactors of a new hospital wing.

I was wheeled downstairs for another pantomime with the doctor and his comedy crew.  Another ultrasound and the mangled Arabic diagnosis that the anacondas had settled to crabs and butterflies in my stomach, and my insides were so bruised from the food poisoning, said the doctor, and turning to Reno, while winking at me and the nurses, instructed that that I was banned from sex for six months.   Reno had to be resuscitated with sugar water until he saw the others laughing.   Words that sounded like translations of apples, rice, fish, orange juice leapt from nurse to doctor and back again.  He told us the patient before him had just discovered she was pregnant (we passed her ashen face and pale husband on the way in) and he showed us her ultrasound. He unlocked his private room to show us a painting of him windsurfing.  We left with promises of the whole crew trying to come to the Marrakech wedding, a clutch of Facebook photos of some of my medical attendants, and not the faintest idea of what my post close-encounter-with-death diet consisted of.  When we returned to the Riad, we’d been moved to a much larger room, away from the rooster, who had been bought by the manager, for dinner.  The staff had baked a five layer pink and chocolate cake covered in sticky marzipan roses to herald my return.

Whoops!

Somehow, I had to get body and soul together to buy silver.   I'd waited three years to return to Essaouria.  And now I had half a day to search, rescue and evacuate.   I mean shop.