A recounting of all the weddings I’ve gone to this season:
1. Ifrane: Wedding season got off to a great start with this unexpected and super fun wedding. My friend Kristen and I showed up in her training village hoping to interview her host family for a movie we’re making, only to find that half of the village was missing, gone to a wedding in Ifrane. So of course, because we had to get these interviews in, we went too. After the sheep-and-gift parade around the streets, we spent the whole evening and night dancing and eating the best Moroccan food I’ve had so far (excepting my association’s couscous, of course).
2. “Tabbie” village: I found out about this wedding around 5pm the day of, when my neighbors told me I should come along with them later, even though I didn’t know the couple or really anyone in that village. “Not a problem,” they said, “we’re just going to watch.” So I went over to my neighbors’ house, dressed and ready to go at 10pm, then we ate dinner and all fell asleep until 1am until someone received word that things were getting going. Nothing super exciting happened, since I guess if you’re not invited to the wedding it’s okay to sit and watch, but not to actually dance. Came home around 4am.
3. “Tabbie” village again: This one I should have seen coming and run for my life in the opposite direction. It was the women-only part of the wedding, and I’d been told we’d go and eat lunch, so I was pretty hungry from the beginning. Then we sat with about 60 women in a little, extremely hot room. The five minutes I got up and danced with my neighbor did not justify the four hours of my life I spent in that room, dripping sweat and waiting for the sun to set so it would all be over. I swore I’d never go to another women-only wedding “lunch” again.
4. “Debbie” village: I had a group of other Peace Corps Volunteers visiting me one weekend, and we all got invited to a wedding of yet another person I didn’t know. But I knew the family a little, and everyone I knew was going, and I got about fifteen separate pleading invitations to go, so I figured I should stop by. I thought I’d be clever, though, and use the new trick I’d learned the week before – if you wait until the middle of the night to show up, you don’t have to sit in the super hot room waiting for a dinner you don’t really want to eat. So four of us walked out around 1:30am, sure we’d missed dinner and could just join in the music and dancing. But our plan was foiled, as dinner wasn’t served until about 2:30am and we were forced to eat it. The worst part was the two guy volunteers (who didn’t know a single person in town) had to eat with the men while Kristen and I ate with the women in a completely different house. The men always get served first at weddings, so they finished eating around 2am and then had to wait around an hour outside waiting for the women to finish. By then everyone was exhausted and they all had to leave on the 6am sheep van, so we danced for a few minutes and walked home to catch an hour or two of sleep.
5. Some village I can never remember the name of: I’d been told this wedding was for someone in my neighbors’ family and that we’d go for the whole day to help them prepare, so I waited in my house all day, ready to go, until around 5 when we finally left. The village is an hour away by foot, and turned out to be not too fun at all, since I didn’t know anyone except my neighbors, and most of the festivities centered around the “haydous” (men in a line beating drums and chanting things I don’t understand, for hours). I discovered, though, that every wedding has a couple of sleeping rooms, where people can go to nap if they get tired. Mostly it’s children and old people, but I snuck in a few hours of sleep and woke up again around 4:30 am to catch the end of the wedding. No one seemed to notice and the haydous was still going on, so I don’t think I missed anything. The party broke up as soon as it began to get light out, and we made the long trek home at sunrise. I don’t think I’ll ever get over how beautiful my village is at sunrise, with all the plateaus and random people on donkeys. That walk home (after which I collapsed and didn’t wake up until the middle of the afternoon) made the whole long boring wedding worth it. Turns out everyone went back the next day too for either another wedding in the same place, or just another day of the same wedding. I hear it was way more fun, but I needed a day off from weddings.
6. My village, finally: Ever since I arrived here in November, my host family has been talking about their neighbors’ (and cousins’) plans for a huge wedding this summer. Originally it was supposed to be a joint wedding for a brother and sister, but the sister decided at the last minute a couple of weeks ago that she didn’t want to get married after all, so it was just a big wedding for her brother. I went the women-only lunch reluctantly, remembering how miserable the last one I went to had been, but I guess I was at the fun table this time, because it turned out to be a blast, and I couldn’t believe that when most people got up to leave, I didn’t run for the door, but rather stayed and danced more and hung out until we got kicked out of the room at sunset.
7. My village again: The wedding itself was two days later, and I decided this time there was no way I was getting caught in a room full of women waiting to be served dinner. So I showed up in the middle of the afternoon with an apron on, and planted myself in the garage (converted into kitchen for all the food preparation) and refused to leave. Plucked and cleaned and seasoned and cooked 32 chickens, guarded all the food against flies for a couple of hours, piled into a sheep van with the whole family to go to the town 10km away to bring the bride, and when the wedding finally started, ran dishes back and forth to the various rooms, washed tray after tray of tea glasses, and reported back to the garage every few minutes the eating status of all the different rooms. The work finally ended around 1am and the dancing began. I decided since this was probably the last big wedding of the season, and certainly the one where I knew the most people, I wasn’t going to waste it sitting and watching with all the women who were too shy to get up and dance. So I hung out in the back with the group of guys my age that I play soccer with; I still don’t know whether that was really inappropriate. But it was really fun. At dawn my neighbor and I went back to the house, changed out of our wedding clothes and headed out to the tomato fields, fully intending to put in a good morning’s work weeding. It only took about an hour to realize we were pretty useless having had no sleep, and gave up until afternoon.
8. Reprise: Bzou: I stopped by a good friend’s site on my way to Marrakech and discovered that the evening agenda included a big wedding at her host family’s neighbor’s house. I was pretty sad that wedding season was coming to an end so I happily donned a borrowed sparkly pink dress, learned the wedding chant that I’ve been meaning to learn for almost a year now but never had - “slah slem la rasu llah. Ila jayna ja sidna Mohammed, allah ma ja la-ali” (and then a lot of ululating). We left early, around 2 or 2:30, which I felt a little bad about considering I was pretty sure that this time it was the end of wedding season, but the previous month of wedding-related poor sleeping habits had taken its toll. All in all, a pretty good wedding season. I hear that there’s another month of wedding season after Ramadan ends; I think we all need this month-long break.
