I feel very up and down about my experience. There are some days when I wonder what in the world I’m doing here, and wonder if there will even be any real projects I can feel like justified my time, the US tax dollars, and all the training, airfare, living allowance, medical coverage, and readjustment allowance. It’s not an ego thing, it’s not wanting to waste this opportunity. I want to be able to do something that justifies all that and that will be sustainable. I’m reading “Helping Health Workers Learn” online right now because the best thing I can come up with so far is creating a lay health worker program for women here. It’d be a sort of a discussion learning group about hygiene, sanitation, disease transmission, waste disposal, prenatal care and child health, and any other needs. However, this hasn’t really been done before in PC Morocco, so those of you public health types out there, if you have any resources, I’m eager to know about them.

I think I’ve picked out my house. I only had four choices, but out of the four, only two are really workable, and neither is ideal.

One of the two, the one I don’t think I want, is in town. A few houses away from a tahanut, nearby a mosque, so I’d be able to hear the call to prayer every day, and with delightful neighbors, the location is ideal. It’s a block away from the fields, so I have an excuse to go every day. However, other than location, the house doesn’t feel right to me. It’s cement, which looks nice and keeps out bugs, but is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There is no garden, just a cement “courtyard” that is white. White inner walls stretch two stories up even though it’s just a one-story house, so there isn’t much breeze or sky visible. It feels sterile and claustrophobic. There is a salon, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom; then sort of a unfinished storage area. Plenty of space, but only three windows. Every room is separated by the courtyard. The bathroom is a Turkish toilet, with the possibility if I bought a hot water heater, for a hot water tap.

It’s livable, but it just doesn’t feel right. It feels urban and claustrophobic when one of my favorite parts of Tamazitinu is the sky, the mountains, the fields, and the breeze. There is no green space, no homey, comfortable feel.

The other house is the one that I’m falling in like with. It’s a little mud house with a beautiful garden. There are four rooms and a kitchen (though one room would probably be storage for the landlord and I wouldn’t use it); one of the rooms is small and perfect for a little library/office/workroom, the other makes a nice small salon, and the other is a bedroom that comes with a little separate wardrobe. The kitchen has a window and is a good size. Thought the house is mud, the inner walls are covered in cement, and there’s water and electricity.

The garden is perfect. Mud, with an outdoor faucet, there’s a little bamboo “tunnel” with grape plants making it shady (and a nice place to hang a mosquito net when I sleep outside), there’s a pomegranate tree and a fig tree and a rosemary plant and mint growing for tea. There’s also two sheep: we’ll see what happens. I don’t mind them. There’s privacy and a nice view of the small mountains surrounding town.

The two drawbacks are location and the bathroom. The bathroom is essentially an outhouse with running water: a Turkish toilet with an outdoor faucet in a shack. I can live with it, but it’s outside in the yard. I think I can make do. The other thing is the location; while I love privacy and quiet when I’m trying to sleep, there aren’t a lot of neighbors and I’m wondering if that’ll be a hindrance for community integration. In any case, I want that house. Peace Corps has to check it, but I think I really want to live there. It just feels right.

In other news, other than things that are annoying but (enshallah) will disappear once I get my own place to live, things have been going better the last week. On Monday, I met with my nurse and one of the association presidents. For various reasons, I wasn’t comfortable meeting with the association president on my own, if for no other reason, communication barriers. I didn’t even have to ask my nurse to come with; when I told him I had questions for the president, he offered to come and to help set up the meeting. Though fragmented and not absolutely ideal, I got the answers to my questions and we sat around and drank two liters of soda afterwards. It helps that the association president is also the owner of the biggest hanut in town.

Which brings me to this: I have the greatest counterpart (nurse) ever. He left on Wednesday for a month’s vacation and I’m already missing him. He’s been in Tamazitinu for seven years and everyone loves him and tells me how wonderful he is. Since day one, he’s been helpful, he’s pushed me to do things I didn’t think I was ready to do, he’s explained painstakingly in Tam, French, and sometimes English different situations, and even writes out lesson plans for health talks in Tamazight for me. My nurse is the pinnacle of positivity—almost too much! But he lifts my spirits, and helped me try to find a house. He set up the association meeting and translated and facilitated, and when I thanked him for all this, his response was “No need to thank me. We’re here for the same reason: to serve the people. Anything I can do to help you do that is my job too.”

When I told him thanks again and that he’s helped me in this crazy time of transition, he said that he thinks of me as a sister: not a friend, but a sister. Wow. Sometimes it feels like a lot of the men in this country are hard to get close to because I don’t want them to get the wrong idea. But he’s a family man: he has a beautiful family, and now I know that we can be “close” without it being strange. It felt so warm, and like such a compliment to hear him say that. Really, I didn’t know how to respond.

The food situation isn’t really getting any better, but I’ve found something that’s going to make getting protein a lot easier at least for the next two weeks: Monaish. Oh, I’m getting hungry just thinking of it. Monaish is a plastic bag filled with a liquid fruity yogurt. It sounds terrible, but it’s really delicious. Not only that, but one of the taHanuts nearby sells it frozen which is even more incredible. Since the weather is constantly over 100 degrees and I don’t have access to ice, there’s nothing more heavenly than biting into a brick of frozen strawberry yogurt. Cold, wet, sweet protein. It’s relatively cheap too: only 12 cents for the frozen Monaish (half a package) and 25 cents for the bagged kind. I can totally see myself stocking up and having the liquid for breakfast in the winter and the frozen stuff in summer for a nice snack.

Sitting on the ground all the time is really taking a toll on my legs and back. I never thought about taking for granted living in a culture that believes in chairs and couches all the time, but it’s something I’ve come to appreciate about home. A lot.

Last night, I saw the camel nomads again and got all excited. It’s amazing how silly something like a…what do you call a group of camels? A pack? A herd? A gaggle? Well, they make me giddy. I finally at least talked to a nomad, though I didn’t know at the time. It was a few minutes ago: I was walking home alone from a wedding lunch (my hostmom was staying out and I was exhausted) and I saw a woman leading a donkey that had a little boy on it. They didn’t look familiar, but I don’t pretend to know everyone in town. Something seemed different: their clothes, maybe, or the face structure. In any case, I said “Salamaleikum” the way I always do to women on the street and she responded.

“Wa aleikum assalam. Is ….(uncomprehensible)… mani illa afran?” Hi. Do you know where the public oven is? She smiled. There was an aura of friendliness, and her speaking seemed different, for some reason.

I gestured to it.

“Is illa digs miden?” Or something like that. I understood it to mean “Are there people working there?”

I told her I didn’t know and walked away. Then it hit me. Why would anyone ask ME where the oven was? I’m the crazy American. Granted, since I was coming back from a wedding, I was wearing a headscarf (for the fourth time in site, only), was wearing my hostmother’s kaftan, and had on tarzoulte (a type of eyeliner). I guess if you didn’t know Tamazitinu, maybe I did look Moroccan. Who knows. But the men sitting around who watched this conversation were amazed that I understood her and I was amazed that I had a short conversation with a nomad without even realizing it. I wanted to turn around and talk to her more and ask about what they do about health problems or what they ate or how they got their water or if they treated it or what they did with women when they were pregnant, but I was too shy to turn around in front of all the men.

In some ways, I’m a bit embarrassed to be so enamored with nomads. They’re just people, same as the people in my town. I feel somewhat like a crazy tourist, seeing people as “exotic” or “Othering” them, but, really, I’m curious about that lifestyle. Do they have houses elsewhere? How many months out of a year do they travel? How many are in their party? What do they do with the animals? What is the travel route? But enough about nomads.

Yesterday, I was invited to dinner somewhere. I never know what to do with these invites, especially when my hostmom isn’t invited. I accepted because they insisted, and ended up at a probably 60-70 person dinner that lasted until midnight.

I’ve been to these before, and actually went to something similar today with a wedding luncheon, but it’s interesting how these “formal” dinners actually occur.

First, and, okay, this comes only from a month and a half experience, so it may not be a universal thing in Morocco or amongst Berbers or even in my town, but it’s what I’ve seen. Usually the men and women are separated, either in two separate rooms, or, in the case of last night, on two different sides of the roof. Usually, it happens in a big open space covered in agotil (portable plastic mat carpeting) that has blankets or carpets laying on top of it. People sit against the wall and talk for hours. There are people that are “working” the party; usually I think it’s family members but I think sometimes it’s neighbors and friends too.

These “workers” start off with tea and peanuts (or almonds), and wafer cookies called basta. They walk around several times, offering it to everyone. This lasts at least an hour, and they make at least four or five rounds, taking dirty teacups, offering more cookies. If it’s a really nice party, they then go to brochettes: skewers of meat. The same people (though more often than not, it’s women who offer the cookies and tea and men who offer the brochettes) walk around and everyone takes two pieces at a time off the skewers and eats them. These smell delicious. I don’t eat them, because I don’t want to look like a hypocrite (I’m a vegetarian here), but they smell really good. I thought about breaking with my vegetarianism for good once, but at that moment, the brochette held a piece of what I think was either tendon or stomach lining. I took that as an omen.

This usually lasts at least one or two hours. Then, someone makes the round with a basin and a kettle full of water (sometimes with soap) and a towel so everyone can wash their hands. Generally, people wash their hands with just water before the meal, water and soap after. I’m trying to work on that, little by little, but don’t want to be too pushy. Right now, I’m modeling it myself more than anything else.

Then comes the first “meal” course- usually couscous, eaten with spoons. Eight to ten people crowd around a table probably two feet off the ground and eat from the same communal dish. After that, there’s usually a meat course: sometimes chicken, sometimes goat, sometimes lamb, eaten with bread and hands. This is how most meals at my house are eaten: big rounds of bread are torn into smaller portions, then everyone breaks off small pieces and uses it to eat the meal out of the large dish. It takes a certain amount of getting used to, and is killer if you’re on Atkins. In fact, it’d be pretty difficult to live in a family in my town on Atkins. People are gracious and would go out of their way to help and come up with a solution, but, really, it’s quite an anomaly to not eat a lot of bread.

After these courses come big platters of seasonal fruit: right now, watermelon and a melon called lemnun seem to be the most common, though grapes and pomegranates are coming soon. I can’t wait, and then, finally, the basin again. Sometime during the meat courses, small teacups full of soda are passed out. I’ve never seen anyone ask what kind of soda people want, you pretty much just get what’s handed to you. Most common seem to be a fruit punch called Hawaii, an apple soda called Poms, and orange Fanta, though I’ve had Coke and sparkling water.

By this time, several hours have passed, sitting on blankets on plastic on the ground. I’m usually utterly exhausted, legs asleep, and ready to go home and rest. But people are gracious. When they see I’m restless and I apologetically explain that I’m not accustomed, they toss me a pillow. They tell me to lay down. They’re a lot of fun, these “parties” but I always feel bad for the people working them: they work so hard.

It was like when my hostmom’s husband’s family came into town. My hostmom went all out. She has never served coffee before (and when I mentioned liking it, she told me if I bought the stuff for it, she’d make it. Not to be rude, but right now Peace Corps is giving her a lot more money than they’re giving me for these two months. I can’t afford to buy food when she’s getting paid to feed me. This sounds terrible, but it’s my reality: the last month I’ve had to change $100 from home and I absolutely can NOT get in the habit of doing that! I didn’t join Peace Corps to get rich, but I didn’t join to burn through my savings either), but she went out, made coffee, made couscous, bought soda, made a kind of cake that, again, she had told me she’d make me if I bought the ingredients, made tea, and was constantly going back and forth as well as two neighbors. I offered to help but was shooed out of the kitchen. They were here probably an hour and a half, and that whole time, she probably spent fifteen or twenty minutes with them. Difficult. What’s the point of having people over if you can’t enjoy their company?

So I don’t know how much I’ll be having people over. I know I can’t do all that on my own and be able to be a good hostess by Moroccan, or at least Tamazitinu standards. I know most PCVs only have their host family over to their house and, as a rule, nobody else, but there are people that I feel closer to than my hostmom and who I’d probably rather have come over.

I actually like sleeping outside, even when I get woken up by having a one-year old with a stinky diaper smack me in the face at three am. There’s something peaceful about it, and I’ve gotten over the bugs, I think. The little sleeping bag liner I got from REI before coming has been a lifesaver though in my plight against bugs outside. Psychosomatically, I can convince myself that no insects can penetrate it, and so I’m able to sleep, and sometimes, I lay the one-year old on my chest and tell her to grab the stars. We reach and try to grab them together. I love the word star: itri. Ee-trree. Stars: Itran. Ee-trr-ah-n. Beautiful.