Morocco: Coming Home - Beni Mellal, my hometown

by - Monday, October 08, 2018

Whenever people talk to me about Morocco, I always perk up. That can't be helped, especially when I called this country my home for two years and the actual Genesis of what the worldchump blog would look like for years to come. Too bad I couldn't start it then.

Nobody outside of Morocco has ever heard of Beni Mellal. Whenever you think about Morocco, you think Marrakesh, Fes, Casablanca, Rabat, maybe even Tangiers or Chefchaoen. Beni Mellal is a small city of around 200,000 people located beside the Middle Atlas Mountains, and if you tell Moroccans about it, the inevitable answer will be either:

1) Ain Asserdoun (the Berber Castle looming over the town along with its equally famous water park)

or:

2) sroooooouuuun. 

That's just one word. It is Arabic for 'hot'. As in 'shor sebaa' or ' shor timinya'. In other words, Month number seven or eight, July or August. That's when the weather will hit triple digits and then some. Here we are talking 45-50 degrees Celsius. And what do you do then? Answer: not much. You sleep a lot. You drink a lot of piping hot tea (to sink your body temperature), and you spend plenty of time at the Ain Asserdoun water park, a water source, to be more precisely.  

Beni Mellal is pretty much where the Arabs stop and the Berbers begin. In the year 2018, it is amazing how many people all of a sudden decide that it is NOT so cool to be Berber and speak Tashelheit or Tamazight, the two most prominent Berber dialects. Why on earth  not? I admit that the Berber script can be a bit of an eyesore when you're driving through Morocco, but other than that, I always considered the Berbers, or the Shl'ha, to be an enrichment for such a beautiful country. 16 years after my Peace Corps service ended, it seems there are fewer Berbers than ever, and more of them in the closet.

Aside from that, it doesn't change how I feel about Beni Mellal. Beni Mellal is one of three hometowns I have, the others being in California and Germany, of course. Beni Mellal revived me like no other place could have. Beni Mellal became my home

Beni Mellal is one of those 'blad' towns, which in Arabic means 'country' or 'in the sticks'. Fine, I always thought. There are so many buses traveling through Beni Mellal, especially those between Fes and Marrakesh, Morocco's two most famous cities. If you look at a map, Fes is northeast of Beni Mellal, maybe five hours with a souk bus (regular bus, lower than a Greyhound with half of its tires inflated and half as many comfortable seats). From Beni Mellal to Marrakesh, it's another four hours, although a more ambitious driver, especially during Ramadan, can make it in three. 

More than not, the bus will stop in Beni Mellal, the tourists (usually the British or French) will look out the window and think to themselves, "Oh, no. Not worth it." And Beni Mellal is just fine with the lack of tourism. Let's not waste our time here, the tourists say. On to Marrakesh. 

I remember the times I would try to board a bus for Marrakesh, usually some seedy old bus as described above. Some controller (usually some young dude with shorts, a tattered shirt, and sandals) would yell at the top of his lungs:

M'RAKSH! M'RAKSH! M'RAKSH! Moroccan for Marrakesh. And when ever there is still a passenger who wants to board at the last minute, you pound your hand against the side of the bus and yell:

BLETI! BLETI! BLETI! (which means WAIT)

 The passengers, among them yours truly, would have a good chuckle, wait until the last passenger has boarded, and then part for greener (or less grayer) pastures, and off the bus went. 

Too bad (or maybe not) that foreigners never saw Beni Mellal the way I did. Like a first love, I will always remember it. 

And now I am back to see it.

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