The Universal Language of Deafness
Not sure how many readers I have after yesterday, but here goes. I'm sort of cheating with this post, cause it's part of the travel journal I wrote while we were in Malta and Tunisia, but I think it's a good story (you have to ignore the style, it was written in my journal after all). So if you don't like cheating, don't read it.
First a little introduction to get you into the setting. We are staying in Tozeur, which is a town of around 5000 which is on the edge of the Sahara desert. It is an oasis town and attached to a large palmarie, they clam there are 200,000 date palms growing in it. It is supposedly fed by 200 springs, and produces the finest of dates, the finger of light. Anyway, we had spent all day walking through the palmarie and were now tired and thirsty. One problem with Tunisia (being muslim and all) is that it can be hard to get a drink. We asked our hotel manager and he pointed us to the Hotel Conninental. It turns out to be a fateful choice.
So we go there and there we meet the bar tender who is deaf. It takes us a while to figure this out. There is a skipping CD playing and when we ask him to fix it he instead turns the volume up. It is then that one of the other patrons informs us that he is deaf. Jenny, being a SLP, is fascinated and goes up to talk with him for a while to see how he communicates. She comes back to tell us that he has invited us to a hammam tomorrow. After a quick discussion we decide to go for it, as the opportunity of the experience out weigh the risks. We go to dinner, I order the couscous with camel, though I’m not sure if it was. It tasted very much like the lamb that Eliza ordered. We spend the rest of the night discussing whether we are getting ourselves into trouble by agreeing to go to a hammam with an unknown man. There are definitely images of our bodies being dumped in the desert running through my head.
We get up, eat and go get some coffee and then go to meet our new friend. His name is Wajdi. We are still somewhat frightened, and he told us not to bring any valuables, so we end up going with nothing more then a towel and a few dinars. He takes us to the louage station and we still do not know where we are going. He communicates very well with pantomime and grunts, but some things are just difficult to explain. The louage takes us outside of Tozeur to a small little town. We follow him around not having much idea as to what is going on. He finds someone, who at first seems like a stranger but is becomes clear that the new guy is Wajdi’s friend. His name is Soli. Wajdi wants to find a woman to act as escort to the three ladies. He pressures Soli into calling his sister, but she has gone into Tozeur for the day and is unavailable, so no escort for them.
Off to the hammam, the girls go to their side and the boys (Wajdi, Soli, and I) go to our side. Wajdi has Soli ask a girl to watch out for the ladies. Inside is a steamy tile room with a door to the left and a dirty wet stairwell leading down. My glasses fog instantly, but after a few wipes they are clear again. Down we go. At the bottom there are “shower” stalls to the right. To the left is the entrance to the bath. Straight ahead is a door to another small room. We go through that one into the changing room. We doff our clothes, except for boxer shorts. We hand everything to Soli who takes them upstairs, as there is no room to store them down here, it being full of other peoples' belongings.
Wajdi leads me into the bath room. It is full of nearly naked men and boys. A pool fills most of the room with cloudy hot water and a slight mineral odor. The air is filled with heavy steam. We get in and I follow Wajdi’s lead as best as is possible. We exchange quick shoulder rubs and soak in the water for a time. He then leads me over to the side of the pool and we sit upon the ledge. He puts on a scrubbing mitt, called something like scupa, and proceeds to scrub all of my exposed skin vigorously. I offer to return the favor but he declines pointing to a large scar on his shoulder and signing something involving the number eight.
I go back into the pool to wash off the exfoliated skin and then he directs me to the spigot where the water is entering the pool and douses me under it. All in all a very weird experience, looking around you see men scrubbing and massaging each other. They are leaning on each other, talking and laughing and generally making a type of contact with each other that you would not see back in the states. It’s not sexual, just very intimate. It occurs to me as I’m watching this that the sexual harassment that men reported experiencing in the hammams in the Lonely Planet were probably just misunderstandings by westerners unused to such intimate contact with other men.
Out of the pool and Wajdi soaps me up and helps me rinse off under a shower which is really nothing more then water pouring out of an exposed pipe at about waist height. We head upstairs to get dressed. Wajdi calls to Soli (really more of a high grunt) who’s been waiting for us the whole time. Dressed, Wajdi style my hair with some soap. The whole experience leaves me wondering if he is making a sexual advance or if that’s just how things are in Tunisian hammam. Another thing I will never know.
Outside we wait while Soli has some girls head in to get the ladies. We rejoin and it turns out that their experience was just as bizarre as mine. The Tunisian women laughed at them, made them chew a root that looked like a clump of hair and that Eliza was certain they had taken from the pool. The root tasted gross but was supposed to clean their teeth. It left a bit of a yellow stain on their lips that Soli said would fade in the sun. Apparently their bath was full of topless women and floating clumps of hair. But they made many good friends inside.
After the hammam we follow Wajdi and Soli back to Soli’s family’s house. It is not too far from the hammam and consists of an adobe brick building with a courtyard. Soli’s sister, little brother, aunt, and little cousin greet us warmly. They direct us through the courtyard in which a date palm grows and into a sitting room. We are seated and the serve us some food. First they served bread, olives, and spicy macaroni and then Fanta and wafer cookies. We chat with the family for a while and then are shown their sheep. There are two of them, in a small pen, one of which is a lamb. The mother stomps her hooves, not happy to be disturbed by us. We exchange addresses and then they lead us out, as Wajdi needs to get to work. They flag down a bus and we ride back to Tozeur.
Back in Tozeur Wajdi asks who cut my hair as they did a shitty job. Jenny tells him that I did it myself and everyone laughs. We follow him to a barbershop, in which he may or may not work about which we are never sure. He directs me into the barber’s chair, which I somewhat apprehensively take, and he proceeds to trim my hair to his liking. He also plucks the stray hairs around my eyebrows using a strange string technique in which the raveling and unraveling of a string twisted between his hands and mouth pull out the hairs. I’ve never seen such a thing before. It stings, having my hairs pulled. He finishes by styling my hair with gel. He then trims and styles the three ladies hairs.
After this he wants us to meet his family. But this will make him late to work, so he runs to work and gets more time off. We pack into a taxi and drive to the first village in the oasis (one of the ones we walked through the previous day). He brings us inside where we meet something like twelve different women, varying in age from his sisters who are in their twenties to his grandma who must be in her seventies. His cousin is there as well, and she has just given birth to a baby girl only a few days prior. We are served a cup of coffee and some cookies, but we must drink quickly so as Wajdi is now late for work. One last quick stop to see his families sheep, they have seven or eight, and then a quick walk back to Tozeur.
We part ways at the edge of the oasis and head back to our hotel. We promised to visit him at 6:00PM, and so we do. He is happy to see us and chats with us while he can between customers. We drink our beers. We give him a copy of the group photograph from our wedding and a couple of chocolate bars, which makes him happy. We leave for dinner at the Restaurant Tozeurous. As we are looking at the menu outside Wajdi comes running up to return my towel from the hammam. It turns out that he is a friend with the man who runs the restaurant, who had come out to reel us in. He treats us like friends as well, as we are friends of his friend. He explains in detail his family history and the history of Tozeur, including the marabou. This is a small blue and white building with the dome that we can see from our hotel window at the edge of the oasis. It was the site where a woman waited for her lover who ended up dieing. It is now a shrine where people leave candles to ask for wishes.
For dinner we share a Berber pizza, which consists of two flat breads with onions and spicy sauce between them. I also ordered the camel kabobs as I was determined to actually eat a camel. And I believe I did, as it tasted much different then the previous night. We finished our dinner and returned to our hotel, exhausted by our long day.
posted by Moon Tramp @ 2:13 PM
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