Written in 2006 in Meknes, Morocco, soon after we had arrived
I do believe we have bought the worst fan on the planet. You can feel almost no air moving when standing anywhere in its path. This would not be so bad if it were not a fan. But it is. Its entire goal in life is to move air and it does not seem to care. I decided yesterday it was because the blades must be in backwards, so I stood behind the fan. No wind there either. How can a fan exist that doesn’t blow air?
Tonight is the hottest night since we bought the fan. Away it goes on high – and my hair is not even fluttering when I stand one foot away. I wake up sweating in the middle of the night and Gerald is not in bed. I roam around the house and find him lying under an open but airless window in the living room. “Is it any better in here?” I ask. “No.” He replies. We hear someone calling us and I am halfway to the girls’ room before I realize it’s actually a lamb bleating.
I suggest we go back to our room and sleep with our heads at the foot of the bed, closer to the fan. There, at least, with lots of positive thoughts, we can imagine the air is moving. We lie there a few minutes and I start giggling. It’s just no use. Gerald gets up and marches the offending piece of equipment to the living room. The bedroom actually gets hotter. The “fan” must have been doing something. I wander into the living room, unable to sleep. Gerald fusses with the fan and goes on a hunt for a screwdriver. Apparently he finds “50,000” screws and not one screwdriver. He finally locates one in one of our huge bags which we hadn’t unpacked yet. He takes the blades off again and discovers the fan says “Loosen” and “Ighten.”
I wander into the kitchen and am happy that it is much cooler because of the cross-wind created by the placement of the windows. I excitedly suggest we sleep in the kitchen. Gerald reminds me we have a king-sized mattress and that the floor in the kitchen seems permanently dirty no matter how many times we wash it. This shall not defeat me. I find a smaller “frosh” (couch/bed) mattress and triumphantly lay it down on the kitchen floor. Ahh… Happy am I until I hear the dog incessantly barking out that particular window, and until I remember all the huge cockroaches ("oil-eaters" in Arabic) I’ve met in this room. I pick up my mattress and wander around again. This time I end up in the girls’ room. Lying beside Katrina I can feel the oscillating fan every ten seconds. I close my eyes, unwind, and sleep. The next morning I find out Gerald ended up back in bed after the discovery that the fan actually works better on medium. The blades are so flimsy they flatten out when going any faster.
The irony? Many Moroccans don't like a fan blowing directly on them. I guess we’re not Moroccan yet.