I have booked five nights in a hostel in Tangier and I make an agreement to extend these to seven. By this time I know all the staff at the hostel and I receive a discount when I explain that I actually don’t really have the money to pay for accommodation, but that I really want to stay in Tangier. One of my friends at the reception puts me in touch with another friend of his, and just like that I have secured for myself a place to volunteer at another hostel in the Medina; a bed to sleep in exchange for some hours of work every day.

I have made some friends among the other guests at the hostel: a kind man from Germany who has quit his job and is traveling by motorbike. He arrived a day after me and is also staying for the week. Another friend is a calm American-Moroccan woman who is spending her second week here, visiting her mother. She is also already friends with all the staff and we do yoga and move together on the rooftop. With these friends I make small trips, explore the night markets and the forest. Most of the other guests stay only for one or two days. I find many interesting conversations and connections, but pretty soon the fast interchanging faces tire me and I notice that I don’t seek company as often from the other guests. My heart longs for continuity.

I focus more on the friends I make on the streets as I take my daily walks and pass by the same places. In one of the cafes I get to know a group of Senegalese men and they invite me to sit with them. We chat, we eat sticky sweet tangerines, we practice languages. I sit with them some evenings. One night an imam, a friend of theirs, passionately lectures me and my German friend in the Muslim ways, intensely staring into our eyes. He sings to us, not breaking eye contact. It is amusing, intense and a little bizarre. In yet another small cafe I befriend another Senegalese man and he waits patiently as I slowly form my French sentences. He speaks Arabic, Wolof and English besides his French and he is sensitive to my careful steps as my tongue makes new shapes and my conjugations fly all over the place.

One of the days I have been told that my Senegalese friends will be playing the djembe at one of the terraces and me and my German friend spend a good hour trying to find them following the directions which were basically a wave of an arm in a direction. Finally after an hour of searching, we do, but it is not my friend playing. Instead it’s two African musicians I haven’t met before. Regardless, I am so happy to hear familiar rhythms that I immediately throw myself into the joy of it. I dance, finally, and they invite me to play. After first protesting, I decide to give it a go, fingers flimsy and insecure, nervous but my heart beaming with joy. This turns out to be the start of the friendship I have been longing for.
After the show on the terrace (my German friend has dropped off) I walk with one of the musicians through the Medina and he tells me stories about his life and how he came to be where he is. He is from Cameroon and he has spent seven years in Morocco already. He is part of a group of musicians and artists, many of whom I come to meet, one by one, over the following weeks. His way of speaking is animated and with his body and energy he paints in the spaces left by the words that are lacking in English. His name is Joël, or Majesté Kuongou.

We walk to his home, a small room in the Kasbah and he leaves his instruments. Then we walk to my hostel where I get my jacket as it is pretty chilly, then we walk back up and he invites me to meet his friend and have dinner with them.

We coincidentally meet Jonas on the street and I remember well the pink flowers behind him and the outline of his thin shoulders and big arrangement of dreadlocks on the top of his head before he turns around and we face each other for the first time. There is no surprise in his eyes to see a stranger walking with his friend and he greets me with a calm kindness that instantly makes me feel welcome.

We enter Jonas’ small room and sit around the table. He serves us fish stew in tomatoes along with what I could only describe as dough, a substitute food supposed to replace something from his home country for which he can’t find ingredients here. I don’t fully understand. We eat with our hands.

I learn that Jonas has been in Morocco for thirteen years and that both him and Joël are stuck here as they don’t have the proper papers to legally be in Morocco or cross any borders. They are migrants. Piece by piece I am invited to see the story of their lives. Piece by piece I share mine. I show them videos with my family in Mozambique: videos of me trying to carry water on my head, of me learning to cook the traditional food, my beautiful Mozambican mother holding a chicken and dancing, my family clapping and celebrating and eating together.
“This feels like in my home village,” Jonas says quietly while watching, moved.
I don’t know him yet, but between the words I glimpse at the endless sense and longing, a feeling I recognize in myself: a feeling born from being far away from the places and people that ground you. It is beyond sadness, more vast than words, growing out from the heart as a limb like any other.

Besides the curiosity, I can sense a sort of quiet joy from my friends as I show them the videos, and so I continue. I tell them that I dream of discovering and learning about African cultures, and maybe the videos are a sort of proof to illustrate that this is truly my intention, that I really long to tie the threads of my life to the ways of African people.

The next day I write to my Mozambican brother and friend who was the one insisting on filming me (I normally feel more comfortable behind the camera then in front of it), and I tell him about the happiness that the videos brought to my new friends; a reminder of the home country that they themselves can not visit. I thank him deeply.

Joël and Jonas become my close friends during my time in Tangier. They teach me to make the traditional Moroccan lentil soup (bayzzara) as well as traditional Cameroonian meals. They bring me to cheap restaurants with friendly chefs, through the Medina labyrinths and they tease me as I get lost every time. We walk all over the city and we spend many nights sitting around the small table in Jonas’ room. They never tire of telling me about Cameroon: the food, the people, the history, their villages, the traditions and rituals. In the stories I can hear a sense of pride, as well as a deep, almost painful longing to reconnect with the land and their roots, or rather, to have the freedom to move as they wish; the same freedom I have with my European passport. And I hear this from all of their friends, everyone who comes to visit and who sits around the table in Jonas’ small room. Mostly they too are artists and musicians who treat me with the same curiosity and share their stories with equal generosity. Our languages are patchworks sewn together with threads we picked up on our travels: patience, generosity, kindness. It is far from free of friction, but we practice giving and taking space. I learn how upset emotions are allowed to rise and fall in the relations, and that they don’t have to mean that we can not share space.

…

(This story told in pictures.)