Meriem 40 years old,
pottery maker
In another harsher rural environment, in an oasis, lives Meriem, 40 years old, mother of a child, divorced, her husband repudiated her, she lives with her mother’s family, she must be accountable to everyone when she goes out into town or to run errands. Meriem tries to negotiate her movements somehow, she is often stigmatized by the women of the village. She takes care of her small piece of family land of 10 m² with a simple spade, and lives in precarious conditions, her clay house, is old and is falling apart. Meriem was trained in an association and built a small clay oven, in order to carry out her pottery production, of which she is very proud. She was supposed to do an exhibition in Algiers but she was prevented for several reasons. She specifies:
“no one wants to keep my son; the goats and the chickens have to be fed, I subsist on the eggs of the chickens and the milk of the goats, how could I leave all that and go”.
