Chawki
Tonight, I was invited to have iftar (breakfast) at the house of Chawki, one of the EP buddies and always present at the Dar Shebab. We went through the small streets of the block on a scooter. For me, the area was like a big maze, but Chawki had been living in this neighborhood for all his life.
When I entered the house, I was received kindly by the father and grandmother of Chawki. The mother was still praying in the kitchen. The communication went in French, but it cost me a bit of effort, since I had been writing my thesis in Spanish all day. While we shared a laugh and a tear, little by little the conversation became a bit smoother. The grandmother did not understand a thing of what was actually happening, and Chawki's brother started to make fun of her.
The communication was further disrupted because the television was turned on during the dinner. My attention was caught by a show in which celebrity Tunisians have to sing, while they are being electrocuted though cables that are attached to their body. This seemed completely ridiculous to me, but only then I remembered how in the Netherlands they have made 'celebrities' suffer by letting them jump in the water from heights, or even break their knee's while trying to do ski-jumping.
So the ridiculousness of the TV-world came back into my life for a couple of minutes. “I never watch television” - I said. “I find it stupefying and a waste of time.” “You should do like him” - said Chawki's mother to her son, in reply to my statement. “I haven't been watching TV since I'm involved with AIESEC” - Replied Chawki.
After eating the brickies, the soup, some small pizza's, and some fruits, it was time to chill in the garden. The whole garden seemed to be made out of concrete, but within it's walls there was a piece of green too. Some big, solid stairs led to the two blocks of houses that were being constructed on top of the original house.
The father sat down in his chair, beneath a little parasol, and lit up a cigarette... He offered me a smoke, but I already got one of myself. I offered Chawki one, but he refused. The mother just came walking into the garden with some coffee and cookies, and I wondered whether she would be interested in a cigarette, in order to not exclude her on the base of false assumptions. My assumption were correct, however, and the whole family, including the mother, laughed in the face of my untypical offering.
So the father and I smoked a cigarette, while talking about his adventures in a little village in the Netherlands, just across the border with Belgium, of which he had forgotten the name, but remembered the image. Red roofs, a lot of bicycles, not a single hill... and very calm.
After the father had gone, Chawki took his place under the parasol. He asked me for a smoke. I asked him why he did not smoke in the presence of his father. What Chawki explained to me for him personally, is what I later came to see as a commonly upheld, unwritten, rule amongst Tunisian men of all ages: you don't smoke in front of you father.
In the days of it's origins, smoking was something only rich people could afford, and was thus seen as a form of showing off. Apart from the present-day knowledge about the unhealthy side-effects of smoking, this is the main reason why fathers do not smoke in front of grandfathers, and sons will only light up a smoke when their father is not around.
Chawki said: “This is my favorite spot. I like to sit here and just think of how everything is going. This spot is really my favorite spot.” “Yeah, plus you have a parasol against the sun.” “haha yup. My father usually always sits here when he gets back from work, after we eat. How do you like our garden?” “Well, there's a lot of concrete. I've never seen a garden with so much concrete in my life. Then again, the stairs are immense.” “Yes, we are building two more plants on top of the house.. This one is for my brother, and this one is for me. But look at the green.”
I looked to the green part of the garden. It was indeed pretty green. I saw that the plant next to Chawki was actually a grape, and the black hole next to him revealed a little pathway trough the plants. Just then I realized that for this country, the garden was indeed very green. “Before, when I was still in high school, this garden used to be one big mess.” - Chawki started his story.
“After I finished the 1st year of my baccalaureate, I started to hang out with some bad friends. We started drinking and smoking weed, and my notes for school dropped immensely, so I failed the second year. When the second year had begun, and I had to go into school again after the summer, my father started working in the garden. Little by little he was cleaning up the mess, and turning the garden into something worthy of that name.
After I had failed my baccalaureate, we sat down here in the garden. My father told me “Chawki, do you remember when you started studying this year, that I started working on the garden?” I remembered that indeed he had begun to work on the garden, but the changes were so little every time, that I barely noticed what he was doing. “Do you remember the mess that we used to have in the garden?” “yes, I do.” “And now look at it, it has become a beautiful green garden with fruits and vegetables, a beautiful place to sit.
If you would have been working every day like I did, your work would have been like this garden. But you have not been working at all.” Then Chawki had to cry. He cried loudly for he knew that he had been doing the wrong things.” - “And that is how I was motivated to succeed the second time. In that moment I decided to work every day, and to make something beautiful out of my life.”
Chawki lit up another cigarette. “You should try the cookies, they're really good. My mother has made them.” I tried some of the cookies and the typical coffee with a load of sand on the bottom, as they are used to take it here. I asked Chawki for a guitar, and he still had one above his bed that he never used. We took it off the wall, I tuned it, and so we had an instrument which would prove its use during the last two weeks of the Beyond Limits 2.0 project.
Before going back to Dar Sebab, Chawki wanted to change his cloths. I walked into the living room, where the grandmother was still sitting in front of the television, watching a broadcast from a big mosque somewhere else in the world. The subtitles made clear what the sound tried to say: Allah (God) is the greatest. Allah (God) is the greatest...