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In Tozeur

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On a dusty hot afternoon, we took a louage from Gabes to Tozeur. Actually, we took two louages, since this journey across the chott (the salt lake regions between the northern part of Tunisia and its Saharan south) required a stop in some small town along the way. As I remember it, the first part of the journey took more than a couple of hours, an uncomfortable couple of hours stuffed into one of the old, un-air conditioned Peugeots with no fewer than three passengers shoulder to shoulder in both of the back seats, and two more with the driver in the front seat. It was less uncomfortable for me than it might have been; in the other back seat was a woman dressed head to toe in black wool cloth, with only a small strip of translucent black cloth at eye level, a version of the southern Tunisian woman\'s ubiquitous wear. She didn\'t speak one word during our long trip across the dry dry landscape, though she may just have been napping. The town we stopped in had a little convenience store near the louage station. While we waited for another few passengers to fill up the car before our driver would depart, Tony and I went to get sandwiches from the store. As we were poorer than any other tourists in the country, we had been nearly living off of these vegetable and egg filled baguettes smeared on top with hot hot-pepper harrissa sauce. They were, thankfully, delicious, and cheap, ringing in at something like fifty cents (USD) each. We took our sandwiches and went to wait back by our louage. Another passenger had been rustled up for the next part of the journey, a young German man sitting on a curb by the car reading a book. I sat down next to him and unwrapped my sandwich. "Hello." I said to him. "Wie geht es Ihnen?" "Danke, gut," he replied. He looked relieved and launched into very quick speech. "I\'m sorry," I finally said to him after I\'d swallowed my bite, "My German is minimal." He looked at me with horror and I blushed. I offered him a bit of my sandwich. "Oh, no," he said, waving his hands in front of him. "I brought all my own food." He opened up his pack to show me his supplies, which included dried fruit and what appeared to be an enormous quantity of wrapped jerky. I said to him, "You know, the food here is really good. And not expensive. Do you want some of the sandwich?" He seemed physically to recoil at the suggestion. "I don\'t eat any vegetable food here," he said. I had to ask why not, and he told me that he\'d rather not say. Naturally, I insisted that he tell me why he wouldn\'t eat Tunisian food when he was in Tunisia, particularly such inexpensive and tasty food. He asked me, "Are you sure you want to know?" I was. "OK, he said. "I do not eat vegetable food here because... Because. You know, for fertilizer?" I nodded. "For fertilizer, they use human. Em, I don\'t know the word in English. Human scheisse. Do you know scheisse?" "Shit," I muttered. I looked down at my half-eaten sandwich. "Yes," he said. He pronounced the word delicately and precisely with an over-emphasized "i" sound. "Shit. It causes hepatitis." I asked him if he was sure. He said he was; he had read it in his guide book. In the three weeks he had been in Tunisia, he hadn\'t eaten anything grown in ground or on stalk for fear of hepatitis. For three weeks I had eaten nearly nothing but vegetables, and hadn\'t gotten so much as diarrhea. I finished the sandwich while the German looked on, consternation in his eyes. When I was done he pulled out some jerky and asked if I wanted any. "No, thanks," I said. "I\'m a vegetarian." It was my turn to look disgusted. He unwrapped his dried meat, carefully folding the plastic wrapper and placing it in a satchel of similarly folded plastic wrappers. "Interesting," he said. Tony came to collect us; we had filled the louage, and it was time to drive on to Tozeur. I think I slept through that part of the journey; I don\'t remember it at all. In any event, we got in the louage, filled to the brim, and got out some time later at a louage station in Tozeur. Tony and the German traveller (I am sorry to say that I don\'t remember his name today) had gotten friendly during the drive, and he was coming with us to look for a cheap place to stay. We hauled our packs on the road toward town, passing a sweets cart along the way. I stopped to buy a small dry cake. Tony said, "That looks good," as I crumbled it into my mouth. Our companion clicked, "tkkk tkkkt tkkk." He waggled his finger and when I asked him what was wrong he said, "Eggs." I wondered if what he enjoyed best about foreign travel was the chance it gave him to be gladder about the sanitation conditions in Germany. The three of us stood on a corner in the middle of town. We were comparing guide book recommendations when we were approached by a small, round man in a suit. "Hello," he said in English. "Are you looking for a hotel?" We told him that we were, but that we had very little money. He suggested that we follow him, and led us through some ordinary streets, lined with tailors, grocers, carpet shops, cafes, around the corner of a smaller street to a plain looking building; he led us slowly, as he had a walking stick and a limp. "This is a hotel," the man said. He went inside to talk with the proprietor, and came back out looking dejected. "It is not cheap," he said. "Twenty dinar for a room indoors, and fifteen to sleep on the roof." The exchange rate then was approximately one dinar to one dollar; the hotel really was too expensive for me and Tony, which made us sad as this was certainly the cleanest looking building we would have slept in for weeks. He took us for another walk through another set of ordinary streets, this one ending up at a more corroded building which we knew straight away would be our home in Tozeur. It cost approximately five dinar per night for a room with a broken bed and a spare chair, with an above-ground toilet down the hall. Guests were expected to provide their own toilet paper, but we were relieved to relieve in a receptacle more complicated than a literal hole in the ground. Showers there cost one dinar each, which meant, for us, more time living dirtily, assuming that we wanted to eat. Our German friend asked directions back to the first hotel. Our Guide offered to take him, and made plans with us to have lunch at a local restaurant. He introduced himself as Mohamed before leaving, looking quite proud for the first time as he told us his name. When we arrived at the eatery, the German was sitting with a plate of salad and omelet in front of him. He was taking small bites and looking helpless while the older man chatted away, looking very business-like. When we sat down, some discussion commenced between Mohamed and the teenaged server, and two more plates with salad and eggs were swiftly brought out. We ate and listened as the discussion continued, in German. I gathered that Mohamed had lived for some time in Germany, but couldn\'t pick up much more than that. I asked in English what was his story. "I had a wife," he said. He took a photo from his wallet and passed it around. The woman was very small and pretty, and she was holding three small kids. "And I had papers to live in Germany." He removed some documents from his wallet, and put them back without unfolding them. "I was there for many years." "Why are you here?" Tony asked. The man looked down at his leg. "I don\'t know how to say it in English," he said. He lifted his knee above the table and said something in German. "His knee is hurt," the German said. "He is here because the steam baths are good for him. He goes to the bath every day." We both nodded, and Mohamed touched his knee again. We sympathized; our own experiences with the communal baths in Tunisia had not been a particularly pleasant. At the time it did not occur to us that his story was even sadder than that, though it surely was. The rest of our meal was spent in German lessons, Mohamed and our friend teaching us such useful words as "flying squirrel" (eishunchen,

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