Making Maqdous

I woke up to screaming and crying. I thought someone had died.

Instead, three of Joe’s sisters were being told, I mean forced, to go to the village that day and spend the weekend stuffing eggplants.

It was August 25—the end of the summer when their mom spends about a month full-time in the village making Moonie. Moonie refers to canned and preserved goods, such as jams (apricot, fig with sesame, eggplant, apple, pumpkin), tomato sauce, and all sorts of pickled items. People from Baalback are famous for certain specialties: maqdous and kishik.

Today was the day to make maqdous, and the girls were screaming their heads off and arguing with each other. “Why do I have to go? Why does she get to stay?”

Ehssan works six days a week at a lingerie/jewelry store in Hamra. She couldn’t stand to spend her one day off taking the 1 ½ hour trip to the village to sit on the kitchen floor stuffing mini-eggplants. Nahla had already planned to go to her fiance’s village to celebrate his birthday. Fatima happily had work at the flower shop in Beirut. (But did she have work on Sunday? I don’t know. But somehow she managed to get out of it; she always does.) Kawsar was already with their mom in the village.

Their parents weren’t there forcing them to go. But mom had called one of the girls on her cell phone. Ehssan and Nahla, however, knew they were supposed to be there. They had a sense of obligation and commitment—but they cried and whined anyways.

Since I had been living in their house for about two months at that point, not really having been responsible for any of the housework, I pitched in. I told Nahla I would take her place and go, even though I had been planning to go with her to her fiance’s village in the South (which I still have not visited.)

When we arrived, Joe’s dad was sitting in a corner at the back of the house with a huge barrel of walnuts. He was squatting with a hammer and some large stones, breaking open the walnuts and putting the good pieces in a box. Their dad’s second job was tending the fire where the barrels of mini-eggplants were being boiled. Joe sat next to him and helped. I did, too, for a while. But then I felt like I was eating more walnuts than producing good ones for the stuffing, so I switched jobs.

Mom and Kawsar were sitting in the back alley where the cars pass by, throwing huge plastic tubs of boiling mini-eggplants into tubs of cold water, and then pulling off their big stems and cutting them in the middle with a knife. They then threw these in other plastic tubs. I helped them, shucking off the big stem and cutting them down the middle.

After about a million mini-eggplants had been cut, maybe three hours later, we began the next phase of operations. We lathered the outside of the eggplants with salt and stuffed salt in the slit, and then placed them in very neat rows in plastic crates. We did this for the next three hours, until it got dark. Mom sent me to the house next door where they were doing construction to get some huge, heavy rocks. She put a big, clear plastic tarp over each crate, and then stacked the stones on top of them. This is maqdous—which means “squished” in Arabic. The mini-eggplants had to spend the night being squished so all the water would come out of them.

After eating dinner, we worked on the stuffing. My job was to peel garlic. Yeah!!! I actually volunteered for that job. Even though they thought my method of peeling garlic was slow and inefficient, I still stuck to my ways. I felt a sense of comfort peeling garlic. I have many years experience peeling garlic. So I spent the next two hours peeling garlic, while they sliced and took the insides out of pretty red bell peppers.

The next morning before I woke up, mom put the pepper/garlic/walnut mix into the blender, and filled about four plastic tubs with the stuffing.

After breakfast, we started stuffing the eggplants and placing them in the big glass jars that they would be kept and sold in. Mom and all the sisters were sitting on the floor. I did that for a while, but my back started killing me. I had to get up and stretch. Then I would sit back down, maybe work for another 40 minutes, and get up and stretch.

They didn’t move. I asked them, “Don’t you need to get up and stretch? Doesn’t your back hurt?”

They replied that they wouldn’t get up or move until all the work was finished. And looking at the full tubs and the number of glass jars, there was easily at least six hours ahead of them.

Making Maqdoos
Originally uploaded by Jane Rubio

So then in my American teacher, pedantic sort of way, I tried to inform them about the benefits of breaks—not just in making work more efficient, but in protecting their backs and bodies. Joe’s mom is 52 with the body of a 70-year-old. Having given birth 14 times and sitting for hours on end on the floor and lifting heavy objects without bending her knees, her body has been spent. And, yet, of course, she keeps working.

Then they started making fun of me. Not in a mean way. Or maybe I just interpreted it as such.

“You’ve never worked this hard in your life. Have you?”

They knew I was confused by all the crying the day before. They knew that I didn’t know what I was committing myself to.

Later Joe made fun of me, saying I would “work” for 15 minutes, then get up and “stretch” for 30 minutes (which of course wasn’t the case).

I felt judged.

I felt lazy.

Growing up in Girl Scouts or later on church mission trips, I had participated in various “service” activities. I spent many Thanksgivings slopping mashed potatoes onto plates. I had organized and hauled many bags of food donations in food pantries. One summer, I spent four weeks digging up sand, making bricks, and laying them to make a house in the Dominican Republic. I had climbed up 2000 meters in one day in the Andes Mountains on the second leg of the Inca Trail, with all my stuff on my back. But all these “activities” could not have prepared me for anything the likes of this.

And this wasn’t even factory work. This was just one weekend.

They were right. I had never worked seven-hour days at a monotonous, literally “back-breaking” task. Physically it was hard, and mentally it was hard. Even though we were talking to each other, the monotony was wearing. The monotony and the quantity. It was a never-ending amount.
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When encountering different cultures, one is always confronted with the positive and negative. It's easy to romanticize. It's easy to criticize. But how does one really understand why people do things the way they do? This is the hardest task of all; trying to wade through all our preconceptions and understandings and see things from another's point of view. I do this a lot, which is probably why I sleep so much.

Have I reached a new plane of understanding? Am I able to love everyone as I love myself? Not quite. But I'm grateful for the opportunity.