The Poor will welcome you but the Rich will ignore you until they find you useful ..
Khalid is a Marrakshi, tall and with an urban berber look to him, as he is not an Arab. Most people in Morocco are not Arab, they are the native berber who were conquered by coloniser from the east and oppressed to this day. They are collectively referred .. Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian..as coming from Maghreb, in Arabic, the West.
But what does Marrakesh actually mean? Well, this is still under debate, some say it comes from the amazigh words: words amur (n) akush (ⴰⵎⵓⵔ ⵏ ⴰⴽⵓⵛ), which means “Land of God”. In a manuscript from Fez from the 11th century the city was documented as the “country of the sons of Kush”.
Kush was a kingdom in the present day Nubia and even in the 11th century the Arabs had felt superior to the Berbers of Marrakech.
Khalid is apprenticing under his uncle AbdelLatif, an artisan wood carver.
On this visit, I had brought him natural remedies for the problems he had been suffering for a long time and imagine my happiness when he told me that the natural remedy is working. I am certain he was happy too. When I entered their small work place the uncle and nephew were chewing on some fried sea food, which they had bought at a local fishmonger’s store, where you ask for 20 or 30 dirhams worth of fish and shrimp and squid and you are given a package and some tomato puree to dip it in . They offered me a stool and shared with me the meal . The fish were delicious and I realised what he had said the day before . In Morocco, whether you are a Jew or a Moslem, if you are in the area where poor people live, they will share whatever they have. It is the rich people who would ignore you until they find you useful for something they need.
I thought of my work in various poorer countries, and there was some truth to what Khalid said. You need the rich people of the country for assisting poor people with a clinic or medications. But it is always dependent on your usefulness to them, as a fountain of knowledge or medical expertise.
That would never stop me from sharing my medical knowledge with deserving people, regardless of their country or religion .. I am in Morocco now.
