CBT....

I’m writing this during lunch break on Monday, the last full day of CBT phase three: the long phase. We’ve been here about a week now and are going back tomorrow or Wednesday. It doesn’t feel like this should be a long stage at all, in fact, though I’m excited to go back and go to the Hammam, I feel like I could easily stay here another week or even until the end of training.

Earlier in the week, we had our site placement interviews. This was a time to sit one-on-one with the person who is in charge of matching us all to where we’re going to be living for the last two years. All in all it was a good, informal interview and it was interesting to sort of process everything for the last almost two months and essentially try to let go of any expectations I have. I may be in the mountains, I may be in the desert. I may be with electricity and running water, I may not. I may be in a rural center, I may be in a town of 15-30,000 people. Who knows. It’s out of my control. I stated my preferences while admitting that I don’t know what’s best for me and that I trust others’ judgment. Difficult, but true. I’ll find out on the 27th where exactly I’ll be, and then next week we go to site visits so I will actually see where I will be living. Daunting but exciting, though I’m nowhere near ready.

One of my CBTmates just came into the classroom where I’m sitting on the computer and said that Buta was scrounging around in our trash. We’ve sort of adopted two dogs in our CBT group. There’s Barnabus, who used to be called Boots who belongs to Tandrout’s hostfamily but has adopted Tandrout as his master. Barnabus walks him to school every day, waits by the road for him to come back, visits during lunch, and then walks him home at night. There’ve been several near-fights with Barnabus encroaching on other dogs’ territory, especially Buta’s mother, but all in all, he’s a regal-looking but meskin dog with beautiful yellow eyes. Buta, short for Butagas (some people carried him in a souk bak lika a butagas container) is a puppy that two of the other women in my CBT are constantly de-fleaing. Poor little guy. He follows us all everywhere and gets excited because we give him leftovers and attention, something that dogs don’t often get in this small CBT town.

This is a bit fragmented, but these are little things that I wanted to talk about in my blog. Apologies for the incohesiveness. I love sleeping here; we all sleep on ponjs which are low to the ground, the way my bed was at home, and there are these wonderful heavy blankets that just smother you when you sleep. I love the weight of them: they’re so substantial that it’s comforting. These blankets are pretty colorful with weird geometric designs and each household seems to have a never-ending supply of them. When it’s cold outside, I’ll come home from school and my family will cover me while we eat bread and drink tea and spiced coffee and watch Berber music videos or crazy television shows on their black-and-white satellite tv. Sometimes the girls and I dance, sometimes we talk, sometimes I listen to them or study, but all the action happens in that room and when it’s cold I’m smothered in wonderfully heavy blankets.

Yesterday was Sunday (remember, I’m writing this on Monday during lunch break), and our day off, or self-directed-learning. I learned about henna by experiencing it. My 20-year old sister here struggled with the syringe to put the henna on, and it was mixed with something that made my wrists and the back of my hand sting, but it’s lovely and brown. Every other henna I’ve had in the US has ended up bright orange, but after sleeping without washing my hands, it’s beautifully brown… aqhwi. I also got them to put the henna on my nails so for the next month they’ll be part-white, part orangey-yellow. In some ways it’s unattractive, and I’d never do it at home, but here I wanted to have my nails dyed as a way to mark the passage of time. Even when the henna on my hands has faded, I’ll be able to look down and see how long it’s been since I sat in my CBT family and had henna.

About an hour after the henna application, we ate bread and jam and butter and oil and olives and drank coffee. My 30-year old sister offered to feed me but when I refused, she came at my hand with a knife. I though she was kidding about cutting off a finger until she pressed the knife to my hand. I freaked out… then learned that you can scrape off dried henna with a knife. Talk about a cross-cultural misunderstanding!

My family here is magical though. Last night, we walked to the assif (lake) and skipped rocks, and there must have been something in the air, because every rock we found was perfectly flat, and my sisters were consistently skipping a rock eight or ten times before it’d fall in the lake. Even I, and I’ve never been able to skip a stone, was skipping them four or five times. With the sunset and the hill called something that sounds like migraine bright red in the shadows, and vestiges of stark white rock peeking through the red dirt, it was a moment that I have often here: is this really my life? Is this picture-perfect lake that I live on, even just for a few weeks, really my life?

I think in my family here I’m closest to my 30-year old sister. She’s single, liberal (for our small town, that is), and just really warm and a lot of fun, and she goes out of her way to make sure I’m comfortable. As an example, we were eating and I tend to spill on my lap sometimes when I eat with my hands. She put a towel on my lap a few nights ago and it made me rather embarrassed. Rather than ignore my embarrassment, she walked over, got a towel and put it on her own lap too. Small gestures like that really are just heartwarming. We also have rather interesting conversations in our sort of pseudo-language: some Tamazight, a lot of gestures. We talk about skin color: they think that the paler you are, the more attractive, and so many women here use bleach creams to make their skin lighter. She also wants to be heavier, which is to some extent considered to be more attractive than being really thin. We always joke about trading bodies, but it seems to be universal that most women are not happy with how they look. It is new for me to be somewhere that my body shape is considered almost desirable, but in some ways makes me uncomfortable as well. I can’t articulate it, but it’s an interesting interaction.

There’ve been some intense and unexpected moments so far during training. One cross-cultural session on holidays and celebrations, we started talking, as we often do in our CBT group, about religion, specifically Christianity and Islam. Our LCF asked us, individually, if we believed in Judgment Day. I was taken aback. I mean, I could have not answered, and some in our group didn’t, but I realized that it was the first time anyone had come out and asked me if I believed in something so specific and so intangible about religion. Do I, personally, believe in the Judgment Day, and if so, what does it look like? Suddenly, I was thrust into this sort of state of questioning myself and my religion and my religious beliefs and journey. Do I think that Judgment Day will happen the way it says in the Bible? And if I do or do not, what does it say about me? It’s such an innocent question but I was faced with my questions and doubts and whether or not I can really call myself a Christian. Interesting day, interesting moment. Unexpected, but beautiful.

So, yes, CBT is intense but wonderful. Our LCF is amazing… we had an unofficial LCF appreciation day this week where we gave her some silly gifts and decorated the room in posters for her. Rather, erm, interesting posters with caricatures of all of us. Erm. Yeah. You’d have to be there to get it but it’s hilarious. We also had a sleepover one night and made fajitas (with AMAZING guacamole!) and had Cokes and it was a lot of fun camping out in the classroom, using the headlamp to go to the bathroom on the roof, cleaning the LCF house because we always track in mud… it was another fun night that was just sort of a “is this my life?” moment. Amazing.
We also had time this CBT to go to souk for the first time since being in Morocco! We piled into a taxi and went the 6k to the nearest bigger town. Our group met up with another group there and ate at their LCF house and wandered around souk (weekly regional market). Afterwards, we went to the local sbitar (clinic) and met with the doctors. Let’s just say it was an eye-opening experience and leave it at that. We have our work cut out for us, but there are so many challenges as well when working with people… in some ways it made me question whether or not I can actually have any sort of an impact, but I have to come to terms with the fact that if I help even just a handful of people, it’s better than nothing. I’m not talking about low expectations, but more of a shwiya b shwiya approach than I’ve had in my mind. I cannot change the world or even one community, but maybe I can set the groundwork, or get ideas in people’s minds. Even that would be a triumph.

Outside the sbitar, the security director (I forget all the official titles) and PC person in charge of all the training in Morocco came to visit our CBT and we had an informal chat, just to see how things were going. I really feel like we’re a part of a crazy Peace Corps family here and it was almost like having uncles come to visit and check in, or something. I can’t describe it, but I felt really taken care of. The funniest part was probably when they brought me a piece of mail. Right now, mail goes to the PC office in Rabat and is eventually given to us whenever people from Rabat come visit during training. So, this card went from my parent’s house all the way to Rabat, went through customs, to the PC office, to the two people who visited us’s car, all the way to the souk town… and what did the card say? Five words on an Easter card! So much work to get to me for five words! It was a bit anticlimactic, but really funny.

Yes, so now I’m writing from coming back to the seminar site. It’s Tuesday. Funny. I don’t really want to be back here. Yesterday, after class, I was in a grumpy mood, and I think the reason is because I haven’t cried in over three months. I’ve had a few little tears once or twice, but I haven’t had a breakdown about any of it: about leaving home, about being here, about being stressed, about being sick sometimes… I haven’t been able to release any of the pent up emotions that are buried deep down inside somewhere. It’s true: I’m at peace more now than I have been in years, but at the same time I think some sort of a release would be beneficial. On my way home from school yesterday, four of us were walking and I finally actually tripped and fell and wiped out. My knee was bleeding and my hands were sore and dirty and I screamed out that my hands hurt and my knee hurt and I was grumpy, really grumpy. But going home to the family where we all act like children and I play clapping games with the youngest girl and they all laugh with me over my skinned knee and we just play and sit close to each other and eat and have fun really was uplifting. So I’m here in town now, today, and I don’t really want to be here or think about site placement or think about the presentation I have to work on for tomorrow or whether my Arabic script of Tamazight relating to birth control pills are worth it, or whether my moon chart on my pamphlet makes sense; I don’t want to worry about buying a carte de recharge for my phone because it’s out of minutes, or pick up my jellaba-shirt I had made. I just want to go back to my CBT site to my house under the rizo tower and skip rocks in the magical assif… but such is life. Our seminar site is great and I love the group and the humor that goes with our trainings and workshops. But there’s something so peaceful about the village by the lake that makes me think no matter where I end up for the next two years, if there are people as good and welcoming and understanding as my family, I’ll be set.