Moved in!

7.3.07

Tonight is my third night in my own home. It’s also the second night that my next-door neighbor (who, for some reason, I can never understand) walked over a plate of leftover couscous. It’s normal in this town to bring leftovers to neighbors and it’s nice to be included in that, even if she scared the absolute living daylights by knocking on my bedroom window at 12:15 at night.

I love the way my house is turning out. Today, I pretty much stayed in all day and worked on it. I put down agrtil (plastic carpeting) in the salon and rearranged the ponjs. Yesterday, in my souk town, I bought screen and I cut one for a window today but after nailing in two nails, I realized I need smaller nails or even thumbtacks.

My “office” is probably my favorite room as of right now because I got it all together today. There were some spare pieces of lumber in the courtyard and two bricks, so I made a makeshift bookshelf that’s really low to the ground. The house came with a desk and a plastic chair, so after cleaning them off, I unpacked and then hung up health posters and a felt human body diagram on the walls. I’m hoping that the health education atmosphere will get me in a working mood and will inspire me to do good things.

My room is still in progress and I’m still unpacking, but I’m hoping to decorate it with pictures. The sort of idea I’m going for is to have everything in the salon be like a traditional house in my town: ponjs, Berber carpets if I can afford them, eventually, maybe turn scarves into curtains, and eventually, a table for entertaining if I get daring enough to have people over for tea. The office, as I said, is the health room, and my bedroom is going to be as much like my bedroom at home as possible, but dorm-room style with pictures, cheap artwork, colorful scarves, and things dangling from the ceiling beams. To complete the “dorm room” atmosphere, I bought a blanket that is zebra striped. It’s the same tactic I used with my first car: when things are falling apart, there’s nothing like a little zebra stripes to jazz it up in a tacky but fun way.

The bathroom, if I haven’t mentioned it already, is definitely just a room with a faucet and a Turkish toilet. I scavenged a shack in the courtyard and found an old wooden drawer that I’m hanging from the window to use as a shelf temporarily. It actually looks kind of interesting. Rustic. I also scavenged an old wooden bowl that is now sitting on my desk holding a few balls of yarn, knitting needles, seeds, and tissues. Don’t ask.

Yesterday, I bought spices and a butagaz tank. My next-door neighbor volunteered her son to push it in a wheelbarrow for me. I didn’t know what to make of that, but it was nice not having to haul it the half-mile or so to my house from the buta taHanut, so I gave him some candy afterwards. My landlady said I didn’t need to pay him, and if I ever needed more butagas or vegetables, all I’d have to do is get him and he’d run errands for me. Interesting. She also said if I need azigzao for couscous, mint for tea, or figs (my tree is small), the neighbors will give me some. It’s a very sharing-oriented community; I just need to figure out what the implications are for me and what expectations people have for me to reciprocate.

I’m struggling not having a fridge, and today was a bigger challenge because the water was out from about nine this morning until nine at night. On top of that, I realized belatedly that I hadn’t bought any pots and pans yet, so cooking was a challenge to say the least.

The lack of a fridge is tough, though doable (though hopefully my tutor will help me get one cheaply). Yesterday, I bought some yogurt in my souk town and had to figure out how to do a makeshift fridge. There are instructions in a book I have here, but I didn’t have the material for the real thing. It was time to improvise. I wrapped the yogurt and a bag of olives in wet fabric from a torn shirt, set it on top of a few tuna cans in a small bucket of water, and made sure the fabric was setting in the water but not the food. The water evaporates off the cloth and cools the food, and by having the fabric sit in water, it keeps the cloth surrounding the food relatively wet.

The lack of water today was annoying. Luckily, I had a bucket of water in the bathroom that I boiled and filtered with a piece of gauze from my medical kit, so I had (hot) drinking water. Everyone here in Tamazitinu keeps large containers of water in what people call a Berber cooler: the bottle is wrapped in cloth and the cloth is kept wet, keeping the water cool with the same principle as the makeshift fridge. I wrapped my Nalgene and two smaller water bottles and it worked pretty well for drinking water. I had to wait to wash dishes until later at night, and wasn’t able to shower (bucket bath) as I had planned. Oh, well. There’s always tomorrow. Or tonight, for that matter. In the afternoon, I found out a neighbor has a well and I can use that water if there’s an outage again. Good to know.

Water is also considered a shared commodity here, for better or for worse. This means if I need to use someone’s faucet or well, it’s not a problem, but it also means if you’re on a crowded bus with a bunch of strangers and you have a water bottle, it’s expected that you’ll pass it around. As a foreigner, I have a bit more leeway with that, but people have asked. If it’s hot water, or not at least relatively cold, people usually don’t want it, so I’ve taken to drinking hot water to keep from getting people sick or from getting sick myself. By using a Nalgene bottle, it also means people are less likely to ask than if I have a bottle of water from the store or a bottle wrapped in wet cloth.

Since I don’t have everything I’d like to in order to cook, and I didn’t get as many ingredients as I’d like, my diet has been, well, interesting the last few days. On Wednesday, I didn’t eat dinner at home because I wasn’t hungry and was too stressed out about moving, and Thursday I ate breakfast and lunch in my souk town. When I got back, again, I didn’t have any pots and pans, though I’m sure I could borrow from a neighbor, so I made a shake I had been planning on: yogurt, vanilla sugar, fresh figs, dates, and almonds. Heavenly. It took me a good ten minutes to figure out my blender, but it works really well, lHamdullah.

This morning, I went outside to the fig tree and picked a few. I cannot wait to eat pomegranates from my garden, but they won’t be ready for another month or two. In any case, I had dates, then tuna in tomato sauce (they sell it canned that way here) with Laughing Cow cheese as a sort of mid-morning snack. I call the tuna with cheese my protein-bomb and, let me tell you, it’s an amazing breakfast, though I don’t know how often I’ll be able to get tuna. It’s a lot more expensive than sardines or other canned fish. I finally used the beautiful French press mug that my mother sent me in a care package and had delicious spiced coffee. It took me a good ten minutes again to figure out how to use the grinder that came with the blender, but it was worth it for freshly ground coffee.

I was so busy working on unpacking and decorating and arranging things that I forgot about lunch and ate a cucumber and some dates and almonds as a snack. I love dates. In the late afternoon, I ran out to the nearest taHanut and got a Monaish (delicious, as always), a few vegetables, and the cheapest pot available in town. I’ll get a pressure cooker sometime in the next few weeks, so this little simple pot will work for now. I made Chinese eggplant with onion, garlic, green pepper, ginger, and soy sauce and rice vinegar I got from the provincial capital last time I was there. It wasn’t the best eggplant I’ve ever cooked, but it wasn’t bad either, considering it was the first time I’ve cooked alone with butagaz. I got hungry a few hours later, so I made what was supposed to be Raita but ended up being more like a spicy vegetable juice: yogurt, garlic, paprika, tHmira, salt, pepper, tomato, cucumber. Now, I’m intermittently munching on my neighbor’s leftover couscous between paragraphs.

My house is in a different part of town than my hostfamily’s house and it almost feels like I’m in a new site. I go to different taHanuts, and my neighbors are different. Most people I know live in my host mothers’ neighborhood, so it’ll be interesting to see how it works out getting to know my new neighbors. There’s certainly a different vibe in this part of town: quieter, for one. Now, Tamazitinu has between 2,000-4,000 people living here, depending on who you ask, so it’s not really that drastically different, but it seems just surreal to be here. Good, but surreal.

That being said, my house is not perfect. I saw my first scorpion in Morocco on the wall of the hallway today. It doesn’t bother me, because we had them all the time when I lived in Texas, but it was the first I’ve seen since I’ve been in Morocco. There are also lots of different insects in the house. Ants in the kitchen, no matter how clean I keep it, flies, though not as many as some places, crickety things (locusts, maybe?), spiders, mosquitoes, and other unidentifiable critters. My hostfamily house often had lizards in the bathroom and I had one tonight. I’m hoping once I nail in the screens that will help, but I’m not confident it will.

The other frustration is keeping clean. Now, I know those of you who have lived with me will probably be surprised that I’m trying to keep clean, as I tend to be messy. I don’t mind mess, but I hate dirt and grime. No matter how many times I wipe down the kitchen counter, it’s always dirty. There was so much dirt on the floor of the salon this afternoon that there were visible orange streaks, and I had just swept in the morning.

Oh, well. This is the Peace Corps, after all, and the trade-off is that it is much cooler than a cement house. I’m not sweating right now, whereas at my hostfamily’s house, if I had been doing the same thing, I’d be soaked. I can sleep inside, in a bed instead of outside now. I didn’t mind sleeping under the stars, but I like having the option. I’m in love with the house, despite my critter companions and the fact that if I walk around barefoot, my feet get really dirty. It feels like my space already. I’ll try to take pictures. In any case, good night and take care.

7.4.07

I still need to go get my bike from my hostfamily’s house, but it’s noonish now and I don’t want a lunch invitation. I also have beans cooking on the stove, so I need to keep an eye on the buta.

The little boy from next door who pushed my buta tank in the wheelbarrow for me came over this morning. First, he brought some sort of seed that people eat here and asked for “soda” mix (fruit punch powder). Later, he brought over a hardboiled egg. They’re taking care of me here, for sure, but he wouldn’t leave me alone and after looking at my stuff and exploring my house for an hour, I finally had to kick him out so I could take a shower. Both him and his mother are impossible to understand. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn to understand them soon. It’s strange that some people are really easy to understand and some are tougher. When I went to buy the butatank, the butHanut was impossible to understand because he’s old and slurs his words together. A nice man who was helping me out looked at him and said “No, you have to enunciate around her and speak clearly.” I don’t know the word for enunciate, but I got the jist of what he was saying. He then offered me buttermilk whenever I wanted it; just bring an empty bottle to his house and they’d fill it up for me. Some of the richer people in town have their own cows.

I pulled out my mp3 player, and it wouldn’t turn on. Even when I plugged it in, it didn’t work. Finally, I got it to turn on but it scared me. It has my music collection for the last ten years on it, and since uploading them, I’ve lost or broken some CDs, I don’t have any other music in-country, and I don’t know where a lot of the other music is. I spent all morning copying all the music that’s important to me over onto my computer. All in all it was only 2GB, but I’m glad to have it on my computer. There’s a lot on my .mp3 player I don’t ever listen to on a regular basis.

There’s dirt in the water coming out of the tap right now. I don’t know why; it probably has to do with the fact that the water was out yesterday. I’m not sure if it’s treated right now, so I’m filtering (through gauze) and boiling everything I’m drinking. It sounds like a pain, but it’s not that bad: boil a huge kettle in the morning, then fill up the bottles, maybe boil more in the afternoon. It’s a good habit to get into in any case.

My friend who’s getting married on Tuesday just came over to say hi. It means a lot to me that she came, even if she just stayed a bit. I’m nervous about having people over though, because it means I have to feed them something, even if it’s just bread and tea or peanuts and tea. Right now, I have the excuse of not having a teapot yet, but I need to get one soon because I can’t use that excuse forever.

It is now officially wedding season in Tamazitinu, if not all of the region. Everyone kept telling me about how shr tminya (August) is full of weddings, and let me tell you, it’s the truth. On the first, the day I moved into my house, there were five weddings going on. There were aheydusses in every part of town and people wandered from one to the next. I bought a kaftan in my souk town so that I can be dressed appropriately, and it was cheaper than my jellaba, surprisingly. I figure it’s a good investment and I’ll wear it a lot this month. I’ll have to take a picture of me in it. Hopefully at my friends’ wedding on Tuesday, I’ll be allowed to take pictures. It’s a double-wedding, and I’m friends, if you can call it that after two months and a language barrier, with both brides and am friendly with the grooms. When one came over today, I asked where and what time the wedding was on Tuesday and she said she’d come get me. I’ve skipped out on weddings the last two nights because I’ve been exhausted and just ready to be unpacked.

I still need a lot for the house: towels and cleaning supplies (!), some storage containers, pillows for the couch, a hose for the bathroom so I can make a makeshift shower from the faucet, Tide, a teapot, frying pan, pressure cooker, oven, fridge, and maybe a table for the salon. I can’t believe how lucky I am that my house came with a wardrobe, bed, table, plastic chair, and two sort-of comfortable armchairs. I spent a lot of money on the two ponjs, but I got them from my landlady and they’re a lot nicer than what I would have gotten elsewhere. They also have wooden stands, so they are at a nice height and not low to the ground. I also didn’t have to worry about transportation (from the shop to my tobis, on top of my tobis from my souk town to Tamazitinu, then from where the tobis stops to my house. Difficult.). If you take into account all I get to use for free with the house, it’s not that much at all, and they’re worth it. If you come visit, most likely you’ll be sleeping on one of the ponjs. Bring a pillow.

Someone else came over just now. I love it: every time someone knocks on the door and I ask who it is, they say, “Nkkin!” “Me!” Thanks. That’s helpful. It cracks me up, but it’s going to help me learn names, because when I ask “Who is ‘nkkin?’” they tell me their names. It was my friend’s mother making sure I knew when the wedding is on Monday night and Tuesday. She said she’ll come get me. It makes more sense for her to get me than her daughter.

My beans aren’t cooking. I don’t understand. I soaked them overnight and now it’s been about an hour and a half. I’ll figure it out eventually, trial by error. It’ll be faster once I get the pressure cooker.




It’s now a few hours later and I’m eating the beans. Not bad. They’re not nice and thick the way I like them, but as a soup, the flavor’s pretty good. It’d be better with onions. I think after lunch and cleaning the kitchen, I’ll venture out and go to see my hostfamily, if they’re there. My hostdad should be there by now. He works in big cities most of the year, but comes back for August and a few weeks around New Year, so even though I lived in his house for two months and am in love with his two darling daughters, I’ve never met him. It should be interesting to see how the dynamic changes when he’s there.

I’m reading through resources right now and trying to come up with potential projects. One that will be fairly easy and cheap, which means I probably won’t have to apply for any grants, is to hold pre-natal lessons for pregnant women. When my nurse gets back from being on vacation, I’ll discuss it with him. I’d love to have the one qabla (TBA= Traditional Birth Assistant) in town help cofacilitate them. I’m also thinking about getting some kids together and teaching health lessons to them; maybe a girls group that meets at my house. There are lots of fun activities and it’d be a fun way to include younger women. All right. Off to do dishes, and then hopefully, to visit hostfamily. Take care!

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I just got back from visiting my hostfamily. My hostmom’s husband was there on his vacation from work in Tanja (Tangiers) so I finally got to meet him. He seems like a nice enough guy, laid back and fun. He’s trying to get a visa to go work in Barcelona. I wish him luck. I felt a bit badly when the one year old was all over me and wouldn’t go near him, but she’s probably only seen him twice in her life: once when she was just a month old for one month, and then once at six months for a few weeks. I didn’t realize until today that I’ve been present for more of her short life than her father has. I like my hostmom a lot better when I’m not living with her.

I turned down a few invitations for tea at other places. It’s just too hot. I’m also learning the hard way that vegetables are only really available at my site certain days of the week. I need to learn when and stock up, which, again, will be easier when I have a fridge. Instead, I bought a frozen Monaish and blended it with almonds and figs. Interesting flavor: figs, strawberry yogurt, and almonds, but not bad and the first ice-cold food I’ve had since my last frozen Monaish about a week ago. The blender cost almost as much as the stove, but I’m beginning to think it was a really good investment for summer: juices, grinding spices, grinding coffee beans, salad dressings, and cold soups.

So, there you have it. I was afraid that I would get really lonely living alone, but I’ve had three visitors today to my house, plus the woman who shares the garden who invited me to go to another neighborhood with her, and when I went for a walk, I had four tea invitations. I’ll probably go to an aheyduss later tonight (wedding outside dance party), so I think it’ll be easy to have time to myself when I want it, but also be able to be social when I want as well.

I don’t know what’s going on with Tamazitinu recently though. Yesterday, the water pump broke at the water chateau that provides robini (tap water) to the whole town, so there was no running water. Today, after about ten in the morning, the rizo (cell phone coverage) went out, so there is no cell phone reception right now. Next thing you know I’ll have no electricity for awhile.

Back for the night. I’m not sure why I’m in the mood to write a lot. I think it’s because there’s been a big change with moving and it’s almost as if everything is new again. So far, the transition has been much easier than I had expected.

My seventeen year old friend who gets married on Tuesday came by again and grabbed me to go to the aheyduss. I threw on a headscarf and the black embroidered wrap that many women here wear and headed on out. I stayed with her, but 20 or 30 people either came up to me or I came up to them and said hi. I didn’t really realize how many people I know. I don’t know everyone’s name, but have at least had some sort of conversation with them and they know me. It felt really good to go out and realize I am getting to know people here and that’s a good thing. Everyone complemented my headscarf (asinsi) and wrap (taharuyt) and if they hadn’t seen my henna, that as well with a “bssHHa!” Even the Rais, who stood watching from the top of a hill (his sister was one of the brides) smiled and pointed to my clothes and gave me a thumbs-up.

We walked with the huge group of Tamazitinu residents, probably at least 500 from near the public oven to the taragua (irrigation ditches/spring) in the fields and there were four brides tonight. I don’t have any pictures of brides yet, but I have a promise from the women getting married on Tuesday I can take pictures of (and hopefully with) them. I like that two of my “friends” here are getting married to brothers on the same day. It should be fun and I’ll really feel like I should be there. Tonight, all four brides had the more traditional dress on. I’ll tell you the truth: I don’t think I’ve ever even paid attention to the clothes because I’m too busy looking at the…headdress. I think that’s the best word for it. It’s amazing. I don’t know what exactly it is composed of, but it has at least several scarves, some dangly sparkly metal coin-like large sequins, and several colors of what we use as Christmas tree tinsel. The brides usually have a design of some sort painted on their cheeks and sometimes saffron. It’s a really intensely colorful and bright sight. I can’t wait to see my friends like that. One day of the wedding, the bride has a more modern outfit, but tonight was traditional dress night for all four brides, and as the procession walked the kilometer or so, some of their family members carried tall stalks of bamboo that towered over the crowd.

From the taragua, the groups split up to go to the three weddings (one was a double-wedding) and I followed my friend towards the wedding near her house and not too far from mine. We stopped by her house and drank buttermilk and ate watermelon and grapes from her fridge, then went to the wedding. I was a bit tired, so I left early. My landlady’s sister, who lives next door on the opposite side from the boy who stopped by, stopped me and invited me in for dinner. She’s baking me a loaf of bread for tomorrow. It’s funny, everyone in my town eats a lot of bread and they know I don’t eat a lot. She asked when the last time I had bread was and when I told her two days ago, she was in shock. “Weird. That’s weird.” I’m glad I learned the word for weird last weekend, or else I would have thought she was commanding me to “Like it! Like it!” It’s incomprehensible to most people that I don’t know how to bake bread and that I don’t eat it all the time, or how I can bear to drink tea without sugar. “It’s bitter!”

In the tradition of several of my other blog entries, here is a Tamazight language note: Ait.

Ait is a strange word. It literally means “tribe,” and is a very common word in town names. Tamazitinu is actually an “Ait” town (if you haven’t been following long, “Tamazitinu” literally means “my town” or “my place” or “my home” in Tam; I don’t use the real name of my town for security reasons.) There is also an Ait that refers to a few towns in my region that speak the same dialect and migrated from the mountains at the same time.

However, it is also used for family names. Depending on who you ask, there are 5-8 big families in my town, and sometimes they’ll refer to people’s houses that way, or even people. “There’s a wedding at Ait Lanshir” or “That’s Fadma Hussein from Ait Moha.” That makes sense to me: if “ait” means “tribe,” referring to families like that makes good sense.

There’s also “Ait Lxarij,” which refers to anyone who leaves Morocco (at least in my region) and goes abroad to work, coming back for a month in summer and the biggest holiday around January. There’re a lot of cars because of Ait Lxarij,” or “That house is of Ait Lxarij.”I’ve spelled it a few different ways in my blog, but it’s used a lot in my region. And who cares about spelling, anyway, when the Ministry of Health spells the name of my souk town differently than the post office? In addition, they refer to people as "Ait Fransa" or "Ait Sbeliul" or "Ait Iroland"(from France, Spain, the Netherlands, respectively).

The strangest usage that I’ve heard though came from my hostsister a few weeks ago. We were sitting outside, chatting and I, as usual, had participated in the first five or ten minutes and then lost the ability to communicate well and started to tune things out. They were talking about the house that originally people wanted me to rent and my little sister said something about “Ait Abrid.” Abrid means paved road. Apparently, you can make up your own Aits here, because “Ait Abrid” referred to the men who were in town renting the house as they worked on the road.

I’ve now made up my own Ait. Sometimes I refer to myself as being “Ait Taromit Tamadurt.” I’m from the tribe of crazy foreigners. They usually love it. I’m thinking of putting up a sign that says “Ait Taromit Tamadurt” in Arabic script and Tifinagh on the door to my house. We’ll see.