One Mystery Solved

I've figured out what all the men and teenage boys do between breaking fast and midnight dinner - this was a big mystery to me the first week of Ramadan, when they'd all disappear to the mosque to pray the evening prayer and then not reappear until midnight or one o'clock. In the absence of coffee shops or cafes or any real place to hang out, the teenage boys all hang out outside one of the village's little hanuts (corner stores), I presume the one that sells cigarettes. The men at the same time drink coffee on the patio of the rich land owner's house and talk business and whatever's going on in the village. I stumbled into this the day I got invited there to break fast, and have wandered up there a few times since just to sit and listen. I'm probably the only woman who's ever attended these informal meetings, and I'm not sure if it's inappropriate for me to be there with all the men, but it's fascinating. Yesterday the topic was a truck load of something (I never figured out what) that somehow on its route from the village to Rabat "lost" sixty crates full of whatever it was transporting, worth several hundred dollars. And no one knows who stole it. I'd never really thought about the village as a place of business - to me it's just this happy place where everyone's nice to me and we eat and play soccer and celebrate holidays and drink tea. It also made me really wish my Arabic was better - I understood most of what was being discussed, but I could never participate in conversations like that - the few times one of them turned to me to make sure I was following I just felt like the dumb little kid that you have to speak to in small words. I have the feeling that when it's not Ramadan, these evenings include beer instead of coffee, which means I should probably not attend them. Unfortunate, really, since it's so much more interesting than sitting at home alone or watching TV with the women, and it gives great insight into village politics and social relationships and all kinds of things I still don't know about this place, even after almost a year.