Exceptions To The Rule

One of the first things you learn when you come to Morocco is how to haggle. After nine months, I am by no means an expert, but I do have a grasp of bartering basics.

So now I'm constantly on the lookout for Moroccans who want to cheat me out of a dirham or two...or five or a hundred. And there are many of those Moroccans. In some restaurants, the prices fluctuate mysteriously depending on the customer or the waiter. In other situations, a quoted price often isn't the paid price unless you remember it and hold the Moroccan to it.

It's tempting to say that as a rule Moroccans are always looking to make a buck off of you.

However, this isn't always the case, as two recent events have revealed.

Item number one
A month or so ago, I started standard Arabic (Fusha) lessons with a new tutor. Although he has no experience teaching or tutoring, he was highly recommended by a Moroccan friend who studied English with him in college.

"One time when we got our papers back in class, I read his, and it was just like a newspaper editorial. The style was amazing."

On top of this, he does something few Moroccans do: "He has even read novels in Arabic."

So now I have a Moroccan tutor who speaks fluent English, writes eloquent Arabic prose, and has even read novels in Arabic. But since he has no experience tutoring, he was hesitant to set a price for our sessions. He said he was happy just to help me. I pressed four, five, six times. He wouldn't even give me a range of prices.

Finally I just set a range of prices. He picked a number towards the upper end, but not the maximum amount I said I would pay him.

I think it's a good deal, but I don't really know. I've never done bartering that way before.

Item number two
In another case of Arabic lessons, a French woman I know is also looking for an Arabic tutor, but for a Darija (dialect) tutor. She is working with the regional administration as part of an exchange between Meknes-Tafilat and the Centre region in France, but hasn't found anyone willing to tutor her for a reasonable price with regular meetings.

So I asked one of the brightest students in my classes if she wanted to tutor this French woman. I explained the situation, and I asked how her French was. She hesitated at first, but finally she told me that she always had the highest grades in her Arabic-French translation class. But then she laughed, in a strange gesture that was meant to deflate any hint of pride that might have come across in the sharing of such information.

The big concern for the French woman was money. So I asked my student how much she would charge.

She replied, "Oh, I don't need the money. I'll just do it for free."

"But couldn't you use a little extra money on the side? What if you want to buy something special? A computer or something?"

"I already have a computer."

"But for anything else?"

"My parents give me enough money for what I need."

My student is so isolated from the rest of Moroccan society that she can give away a valuable service, something that many people would pay a great deal of money for. She just wanted to meet first to make sure she was good enough. Such a humble, financially-disinterested mindset blew me mind.

This isn't just about money, though. In the first case, my tutor is a college graduate who is currently unemployed. He does not have a great deal of money. But my student comes from a wealthy and influential family in Meknes.

Both show a disregard for financial gain that is, at once, typically Moroccan in its hospitality and unusually oblivious to the time-honored Moroccan custom of bartering for monetary gain.