The Benarba family is one of thousands of families who move from the countryside to urban Morocco each year. As in the usual pattern, Mehdi Benarba, the oldest son, preceded the rest of the family, asking them to join him more than 2 years after he got a job working as a waiter in a Marrakech restaurant. In this growing metropolis, once an oasis stopover on the Saharan caravan routes, and where the center of the medina has been continuously inhabited for centuries, new migrants from the mountainous (and mainly Berber-speaking) surrounding regions tend to drift into semiabandoned, dilapidated fonduks(literally horse stables), designed long ago for the animals and merchants of the caravans that made their way to do business in the great bazaars of Marrakech.

The Benarba family moved into one of these fonduks and there seems little chance of their leaving in the near future. Their two younger boys, age 6 and 9, have not gone to school, but are working as apprentices making small tambourines for the tourist trade. No one in the Benarba family has gone to a government school, though most of the men had some Quranic schooling in their youth. The Benarbas know others who have gone to school, but say that most of their fonduk neighbors complain that “nothing comes from schooling but laziness, bad attitudes, and lack of useful skills.”