If you shower on the first day of your period, you will
become very sick or die. Aissa’s grandma and cousin’s wife (who had cancer)
died because of this.
Berber olive oil is the cure for every health problem. If
you have sore throat, drink one spoonful. If you have a cold, put it up your
nose. If you cut yourself, pour some olive oil on the cut.
Berbers are very careful to preserve surfaces. They leave
the factory plastic protective layer on tvs, cell phones, and computer screens,
laptop keyboards, and car mirrors. They buy ugly slip covers for their
beautiful leather furniture, cover tables with plastic tablecloths, have
steering wheel covers and either cover their car seats with plastic bags or buy
special seat covers so they don’t damage the original seat fabric.
Algerian style dictates that you don’t mix colors. For
example, if you have red pants, you wear a red shirt and red or nude shoes.
What this means is that my style of combining accessories and clothing using
two or more colors is weird and not ok here. I was told that a teal skirt could
absolutely not be worn with a grey or black shirt – it had to be white or teal,
even if not exactly the same shade/hue. Also, black flats could not be worn
with a sea foam green dress, so I had to buy teal sandals, even though to my
eye they didn’t match.
You cannot eat spicy food if you are taking medication – the
spiciness causes the medicine to be ineffective.
Colds are caused by the draft from open windows. If you have wet hair and are in a room with an open window, you will get sick. Older Berbers have a similar aversion to drafts that Austrians do. I often sat in 40 degree C weather in blazing sunlight in a car with all the windows closed, because it was ‘cold’ with them open.
You see a doctor for every ailment, no matter how small.
There aren’t over-the-counter remedies like we have – if you want any kind of
medicine, you see a doctor for a few dollars, get a prescription, and go to a
pharmacy for inexpensive, effective medication.
Clothes are quite expensive in Algeria, especially given
that the quality is often terrible. It costs more than $20 for a dress very
cheaply made in China, with uneven hems and visible serged stitches.
Berber food is made almost solely of zucchini, onions,
garlic, carrots, olive oil, tomato paste, bouillon cubes, and potatoes. These
are chopped in different sizes or added in different orders, but they are
cooked for a minimum of 2 hours and make some sort of soup or sauce that can be
eaten alone or paired with couscous, spaghetti, or some other variety of pasta.
They sometimes add in other things, like various spices, herbs, eggplant,
olives, lentils, or beans. The main dish is almost always accompanied with
Berber peppers- hot green peppers fried or roasted, peeled, blended, and mixed
with tomatoes, salt, and olive oil to make a warm salsa, served with
store-bought French bread/baguette or home-made tamtunt, Berber semolina bread.
Berbers believe that they can eat in a certain way to
guarantee that they will have one gender of baby.
Berbers don’t seem very concerned with germs. They usually
put only 2 or 3 glasses on the table, even if 6 or 7 people are eating a meal.
Those people all share those few glasses.
They don’t drink very much during a meal, eating the entire meal
before having anything to drink. They drink water, soda, or very sugary
bottled juice.
Berbers eat with their hands and
don’t mind dripping food on the table or the floor. Algerian meals are not social
occasions like in America. A family of 4 or 5 will eat in shifts, even if they
have a table large enough to seat everyone. Only when guests come will they set
enough for each person, and even then, food is eaten quickly, rather than enjoyed
over a longer period of time with a lot of conversation.
Houses are tiled, including tile baseboards, with very few area rugs, and Berbers sweep with a broom, mop with a wet towel thrown over the end of a squeegee, or wet sweep almost every day. Wet sweeping means they pour soapy water all over the floors, scrub it with the broom, wipe it clean with a squeegee, and then repeat two times more until clean.
Trash is everywhere. No matter where you go, you will always
find litter on the side of the road, on the beach, in the river, or in the
forest. Even at tourist resorts, you see hundreds of empty bottles and bags of
trash. People generally view littering as a normal thing, and you see people
throwing bags of garbage out the windows of their cars. Berber men drink
alcohol in the cars on the sides of the road, and leave behind the bottles.
There are certain places where you see broken bottles many inches thick, or
piles of unbroken bottles. The beer of choice seems to be Heineken.
Batteries are fake and very weak – I bought “Sony extra
strength” batteries made in South Korea and they were not powerful enough to even
turn on my camera.
There are no window screens and houses fill with fruit and especially house flies, which are
basically ignored and never swatted or fly papered or anything. They do have
plug-in mosquito repellers, which do work in my experience, but we didn’t have
one here at our house and I received more bites than I ever have in my life.
The bugs that bit were invisible and silent, and the bites itched for days and
days, and then scabbed and still itched, and I still see the white scab marks
even though the bites were over a month ago
Berbers generally don’t use toilet paper, though it is
available here. Instead, they have a hose by the toilet or a bucket of water
with a scoop. Most toilets are squat toilets, but you can find sit-down
toilets, many with the seat removed.
Berbers eat bread with every meal, either French bread
that they buy fresh every day, or Berber bread, with yeast or without, that
they make at home. Bread with soup, bread with pasta, bread with potatoes, but
never ever bread with couscous. They only like the crunchy part of the French
bread – they take out the soft center part and just throw it away. They believe
that the center of bread will make you fat.
Seatbelts are required by law only in the front seats of cars,
and Berbers prefer to only put the seatbelt on when they know they are
approaching a police/military checkpoint. Otherwise, no one wears a seatbelt
and I was repeatedly made fun of by Aissa’s family when I put on my seatbelt
immediately after getting in the car. Back seats often don’t even have
seatbelts because they’ve been hidden by the seat coverings mentioned earlier.
Babies/children do not sit in car seats, and instead are held in the back by
someone, or left alone if there are only front passengers. There don’t seem to
be worries about safety, even though I’ve been told that Algeria has the
highest number of car accidents in the whole world.
Berbers generally are good drivers, even though they drive aggressively to the American eye.
Without stoplights, if you don’t learn to just go, you will never leave an
intersection. In all my time here, I have seen only 2 intersections with
stoplights. In one of the two cases, the light was always blinking yellow and
therefore had no purpose. All other intersections are either roundabouts, where
the cars entering have the right of way rather than the cars already in the
roundabout, or regular 3-4-5 way intersections without stop lights or stop
signs. Most roads are just two lanes and full of many tractors and semi trucks,
so everyone is used to passing into oncoming traffic. I have seen a few close
calls, but Berbers know how to use their lights and horns to communicate with
other drivers.
Berbers believe that drinking refrigerated liquids leads
to a sore throat. Children are not allowed to drink water or juice that has
been in the fridge – it must be room temperature. Also, too much ice cream also
leads to sore throats or tonsil problems.
Kabylia is a much freer and more liberal place than the rest
of Algeria, and many other Muslim countries. Girls are free to dress how they
like, with knees and shoulders often visible in summer, and are free to have
boyfriends and be friends with men, depending on how conservative their fathers
are. However, it is expected that after getting married, friendships with these
men will cease. There are Christians in Kabylia, and many people who are Muslim
only by tradition – they fast for Ramadan because everyone else does, and they
believe in a god, but that is the extent of their religion. However, there are
also extremely religious Berbers, with men who have the full beard of Islam
and women who cover their hair or even their faces. These people seem to all
live together peacefully, and may all exist within one family.
There is much more gender segregation here than I’ve ever
experienced before. Men hang out with men, and women hang out with women. Men
sit with men and women with women. Men eat outside with the other men, and
women inside with the other women. Boys play outside in the street, while girls
play inside.
Women generally stay in the house all day, unless they are
employed or a student, doing housework. Men, even if unemployed or retired,
leave the house early in the morning after eating breakfast, returning in the
early afternoon for lunch, and then leaving again until evening. These men do
nothing even remotely though of as housework – they leave their dishes on the
table directly, and I have never seen a Berber man (except Aissa) do any type of cleaning.
If they come home at a non-mealtime, a woman in the family will cook something
for them. Girls cook for their fathers and brothers, and women cook for their
husbands.
The life of a Berber woman goes like this. She wakes up at 7
or earlier to make breakfast. This means she puts the espresso machine on the
stove to cook coffee, boils milk in a pot, and puts out cookies or bread with
marmalade. Once everyone has eaten, she cleans up. Around 8:30 or 9:00, she
begins to make lunch. While doing this, she also sweeps and mops the house.
Lunch is served by 12:00. After the lunch dishes are done and the food put
away, she has some time to rest. She either naps in the living room or watches
TV. Around 2:00 or 3:00, it’s back to work to make tea and coffee for the
afternoon snack. To make tea, she puts loose leaves in a pot and fills it with
water. Once it boils, she strains out the leaves and adds 5 large spoonfuls of
sugar to the tea, which is mixes in by pouring the tea back and forth 5 times
from the pot to the tea pitcher. She cuts up fruit, or gets out cookies, or
makes some rolls to serve. After this, she begins to make dinner while also
following an evening TV show, which seems to always be a Turkish drama dubbed
into Arabic. Dinner is served around the sunset prayer time, meaning that in
summer, dinner is much later than in winter. After cleaning up dinner, she cuts
up fruit or serves yogurt for the after-dinner meal. Then, by 10:00, it’s
bedtime. Repeat every day for the rest of her life.
Girls live at home until they get married, when traditionally
they went to live in their husband’s home with his family. Nowadays, it’s more
common that married couples can get a house of their own together, but houses
are still mostly built to imagine that eventually it will be full of multiple
families. There are family compounds, where the parents have one part of the
house or apartment within the house, and the sons and their wives have another.
Only men can inherit, so there are also multiple generations together – sons
and fathers and grandfathers together. Aging parents are taken care of by their
sons.
Algeria’s rich supplies of natural gas and oil have made it
able to develop very quickly after difficult times in the 1990s. Gas is 23
dinars (less than 20 cents) per liter, and this price never changes. University
students receive free meals and a monthly stipend as incentive to continue
their studies. People get stimulus money of $18,000 to build homes. Satellite
television is free, and water is free in villages with mountain sources. People
seem to be very happy with the current president Abdulaziz Bouteflika for
bringing the country out of war and making smart decisions with Algeria’s oil
and gas money to help his people, in addition to supporting the Berber people
rather than oppressing them, like the previous president did. His ailing health
has people wondering what will happen when the next person takes office.
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