One morning last week, I awoke inspired to bake a cake. After spending a lengthy amount of time attempting to sift through flour with a plastic strainer to get all the little black termites and larvae out, I turned on the oven to realize it was leaking a lot of gas. It seemed as though the regulator knob on the oven was faulty. Since the whole gas-operated oven business and the image of minor flame explosions makes me uneasy, I gave up baking and at 11 headed to Malika’s house to practice Tashlheet. She was sitting at her little boutique, hoping to sell clothes and accessories with the Eid el Kbir coming up. We chatted a while and I told her about my oven. She said she’d come take a look at it later to see what the deal was. As we were talking about the Eid and other miscellaneous things, she brought up the word “Takèt”, which I didn’t understand. I’d heard it before but forgot the meaning, like half the Tashlheet vocabulary. She said I absolutely needed to know what it was and took me to her sister in law’s house next door to see one. It turns out it’s a traditional mud stove, just like the ones I saw used in Benin.

I’d met the sister in law before, Larbi’s brother’s wife. She’s the one that had sat in their living room one day looking at Larbi’s sickly body and said “look at you, you’re just waiting for death”. She was surprised and very excited to have me in her house. Malika ushered me into the traditional kitchen, while the woman and her teenage daughter Raja started a fire in the Takèt to demonstrate. As smoke billowed all around us in the tiny room, they put a big clay pot on the mud stove and brought out already cooked bread to show me how they prepared it. Then they gave me a complete tour of the house, concluding in the modern kitchen where I examined their gas oven to see if I could figure out a difference between theirs and mine. I couldn’t. The sister in law wanted to give me a gift for coming to visit. Malika and I refused tea because we’d left the boutique unattended but she insisted on giving me a big white plate decorated with painted blue birds. She then went to her bedroom to fetch a container of almonds and poured fistfuls into my hands. I didn’t know where to put the nuts, so Malika had me stuff my pant pockets with them as we hurried out the door before the woman could give us anything more.

Later on, Malika and I walked to my house to look at my oven. She was just as stumped as I was about the problem so we decided to take the whole thing to the welder. We disconnected the hose from the butagaz bottle and awkwardly walked across the village with the oven. The welder took one look at it and said “your hose is dead”. We’d failed to see there was a big gash in it, hence the leaking. I’d been sold a bad hose at souk. He replaced it with some high quality stuff he uses on his welding machines and even screwed in a makeshift knob on my oven door since the original had fallen off within a week of purchase. He just charged me for the hose, 10dh, and as I fished it out of my pockets, a slew of almonds poured out onto the ground. The welder grinned at me and said “so you like almonds?”.

We transported the oven back to my house, where the welder’s assistant safely reconnected it to the butagaz and I was back in business. I went on a cooking frenzy the rest of the afternoon. I baked chocolate cake, a tarte a la moutarde, and made carrot ginger soup. Luckily I had fellow PCVs Sami and Dave coming to visit for the night to share the feast.