Part 8 between the Mediterranean and the Atlas, there is another mountain range called the Rif the people there have white skin and curly hair their ancestors are called the Numidian and were very powerful 200 years before our era when Hannibal fought against the Roman Empire, he hired them as horsemen in the 7th century of our era, the Arabs came and the Numidian fled into the mountains because they couldn’t stop the Arabs although I have been there very often, I do not know very much about their language because everybody there spoke either English or French, even if mostly very badly x there was a man there in the mountains whom I met very often, he was around 25 his wife was 16, and they had already been married for 3 years, which means he had married her at the age of 13 the English knowledge of this man was not very good but his wife spoke fluent German therefore, always when he didn’t understand what I told him, I wrote it on a piece of paper in German, he gave it to his wife and she translated it to him in their local language Now, one would ask me how it was possible that this girl in the middle of the mountains spoke German x she was either born in Germany or taken to Germany at a very young age she went to school in Germany and probably had a the life of a normal German girl her father a Moroccan had got work there unfortunately, he did not really understand, or better, he did not want to understand the European world or maybe, he didn’t want to have problems with young girls when they begin to be interested in young boys he just took her back to his home country and married her to the man I would later meet I don’t know whether the girl cried when she was taken back but I can imagine that it was a big shock for her and probably took her a long time to cope with it x there in the mountains, there was only one road of 250 km with around 2000 curves the houses didn’t have neither running water nor electricity, therefore, the women went up the mountains at 9 in the morning to collect firewood and came back at 3 in the afternoon with 30 kilos of wood on their back however, this girl from Germany was still very lucky because the man she had married bought a gas bottle to cook and heat the house x this man was not only one of the wealthiest but most influential in that small valley so he had many visitors and they sat all in front of his house in the garden on their goatskins and discussed I couldn’t understand what they were talking about because I didn’t speak their language and they hardly spoke any European language so I felt bored a bit and asked this man whether he had a ball. He looked at me in astonishment and questioned what I wanted a ball for. I answered that we could as well play soccer a bit instead of just sitting there and doing nothing. The women were just coming down the mountains with a heavy load of wood on their backs. Then, he nearly got angry and replied: ‘Listen! Soccer is for children or for men who have nothing else to do!’ x a relative of the man, a boy at age of around 15 didn’t go to school, because his father needed his workforce, therefore, his knowledge of foreign languages was very poor and he always wanted to teach me his mother tongue one day, we went for an excursion in the mountains and saw some prints of a rabbit in the snow he put is upper teeth over his lower lip and both his hands behind his head to imitate a rabbit, then he told the name of the animal in his language this inspired him to use this method for other words as well so he put his hand in the snow and told me the word, then his foot and told me the word at a point, I sat in the snow and stood up again, then I told him in my language that this was my behind he never went on excursions with me again probably, he couldn’t understand my humour x one day a young boy came up to me and kissed my hand, I didn’t know how to react suitably, and wanted to withdraw it quickly, because I did not feel like one of those 19th century lords or 20th German tourist coming to an African country behaving like a god in winter with snow everywhere, the children drove the goats out to pasture but they had no shoes older inhabitants told me that the mountains were secure because they killed the last mountain lion in 1848 x if anybody was old, disabled or had any other kind of physical or mental deficiency, this person would have been forced out of the community this sounds very cruel but life and the struggle for survival there in the mountains was so hard that the community just couldn’t permit herself to feed such a person for a someone like me having grown up in a welfare state of Europe, of course, this was a shock but when I studied literature and history, I found that it had been just the same in Europe, when Europe was still very poor a long time ago Part 9 Back to list!