The little girl – maybe three years old, curly brown locks scattered across a doll's perfect face, stands close to her mother alongside the rushing mountain stream.
Clothing in a profusion of color is stretched out over sandstone boulders. It's laundry day in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
We tourists tramp along the pavement on the other side of the river, cameras aimed at the village ladies bent over their baskets or squatting by the water, their hair covered in scarves.
Most turn their backs or shield their faces from the cameras. They are used to tourists and their cameras. A few yell Arabic phrases, angry.
The little girl's young mother smiles shyly, and bends to whisper to the girl. A tiny brown hand is raised in greeting. The cameras snap furiously. The little hand drops, turns upright. Give me … it says. Give me.
And we would. If she wasn't on the other side of the river. We would. And do. Again and again. As have thousands of tourists to Morocco over the years.
At every stop on the narrow mountain and desert roads through southern Morocco it happens. Children – usually boys – explode from quiet mud brick hovels and rock strewn wastes and converge on the bus. Some have trinkets or dates for sale.
Many have nothing – just long faces and out-stretched hands. Women trudge by, their donkeys laden with brush. They shield their faces behind veils and scarves. Sometimes they smile and accept a photographer's polite request to take a portrait. Often the hand comes out. Give me …
The tourists are prepared. They carry pens, little toys, candy, and coins – a stash of items eagerly snatched from their hands. I do it, too. The dates I bought in the oasis from one young roadside opportunist – dates I didn't want – I offer to the teen with a baby in her arms in a desolate mountain moonscape a few hours later. The baby's hair is blond. I wonder about that.
She takes it and scans the crowd for another offering. The driver addresses her kindly. She spares me a moment, a "merci," and scans the crowd again. Pictures snap. She's been paid the tourists think. They can snap away happily. No guilt now.
We drive off and I look back as the girl hands the box of precious sweets to the two older women, several children half-hidden in their skirts, as they slowly emerge from the small stone hovel a steep climb up the dusty trail from the road.
We see so many children in these villages. So many. Boys follow us; they speak English, French, and German. They try to sell something, make a connection, touch another life.
"What will you do?" I ask one young man who has attached himself to me during a tour of a date grove. His French is excellent, better than mine.
"Marrakech?" I ask.
"No," he answers. "You pay for housing there. And food. It's too much. You can't make enough money."
"And girls," I ask. "Are you married?"
"No, I'm looking." An explanation follows. I don't understand it all. "I want to go to United States ," he says as we near the end of the tour.
I smile. "You have to work there too, you know. Life is expensive there, too."
I buy his box of dates. I give him much more than he asked for. I wonder what will become of him and the many other boys and young men who follow us.
We visit affluent towns, too. Tourist havens with wide roads lined with modern apartments, the paint crisp and clean, the doors solid and brightly colored, the shutters firmly sealed. They are ghost towns.
The Moroccans who own them live and work elsewhere – in the big cities, in Europe, in America . They maintain their little palaces back home and return for Ramadan or a wedding or a funeral.
Their neighbors, the ones who didn't escape, make shoes or crafts for the tourists in tiny windowless dirt-packed rooms that open onto the streets in the shadow of the shuttered mansions.
A hammer pounds all night. The tourists will want shoes in the morning, the old man says. His sons will work through the night. I buy a pair – all leather, soft and warm, made by young hands in a dark corner on a late winter morning. I pay less than $10. Two more pairs are sold to my fellow travelers. We leave.
"Ah, but they are content." Habib, the tour guide tells us. Moments later, he points to a remote mansion nestled on a rock outcrop, silent like the others. "Moroccans, some of them," he grumbles, "They all want more … more money … more …"
Content? I think of the children, the many children … the rocks and desert … the women by the stream … the boys handing hotmail addresses to foreign women … the self-satisfied tourist with his bagful of penny candy and his thousand dollar camera.
I think of the wide expanse of this country and the many others to the south and the many more children and hovels. And I worry. And understand. A little. About terrorism. And hate. And I'm sad.
Photo Credits: Woman in door by © Posztós János | Dreamstime.com. Village kids by Karen Kindler. Moroccan palace by © Socrates | Dreamstime.com
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