Wait. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before I start with what I was going to write, I have to tell you about right now. Right now I'm sitting in a plaza. There is a little brass band with a following of maybe 30 people, mostly older and all wearing Basque scarves, making their way around the plaza. They stop at each bar and the band plays a song, the old people dance, and then they hang out for a while and have a drink before moving the 20 meters or so to the next bar. I guess you know what I'm thinking now.
Anyway, before that little slice of Basque delight trumpeted through my day, I was going to talk about my Spanish class. Well, kind of. The other students, myself included, are mostly a bunch of priveleged-enough westerners. A teacher from Italy came to Bilbao to go to a concert this weekend and decided to stay for a few weeks and study Spanish. A Brazilian graphic designer-type who interned at Disney Animation Studios took off most of this week to run with the bulls in Pamplona. A lot of them are college students with free time. And then there are the Western Saharans.
Western Sahara is a disputed territory currently under Moroccan control. To overgeneralize (it's what I do), it's the same basic story that it always is. The Western Saharans feel culturally and idiomatically different from the rest of Morocco and want autonomy; the king of Morocco says "No way, that land is mine." Plus, Western Sahara may have oil off its coast. Protests are violently repressed which leads to more politicization and then more protests and repression. Repeat. The Western Saharans in my Spanish class are a group of human rights activists. They've all been jailed, some for years. During a break from class the air was suddenly filled with what sounded a lot like gunshots, followed by some sirens. (No cause for alarm, it's just always some kind of fiesta in the Basque country.) I noticed that none of them flinched and, after the first round of shots subsided, one of them asked, with no humor, irony, surprise, or real concern, "Guerra o fiesta?" Anyway, they're staying here with a Spanish human rights lawyer and their school is being paid for by some Human Rights Watch-type organization. They're not sure if they have quite enough money for all their meals here, which they cook at home, but they invited me over for lunch. The horrible neighborhood that my landlord/roommate says is full of drugs and prostitutes has a halal market where we stopped so they could get ingredients for lunch, and where I got free samples of the desserts that I asked about. I tried really hard to pay for them but it didn't work. They wouldn't let me do anything, not help pay or clean up; they even insisted on paying for my metro ticket. It's stuff like that that makes me want to run away and join the Peace Corps.
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