vsn, Ramadan, life...

9.13.07

VSN training was fantastic. I felt that it was a good group of people, and I’m glad to be able to work as a support person for other volunteers. A lot of the training was similar to things I’d done as a resident assistant, or at my previous job, but it was good to get together and sometimes vent about our own struggles in-country. And the food! We had a phenomenal hostess whose house is incredible: it has not only a western toilet and shower but also a bathtub; and her menus for us were close to gourmet: pumpkin cream sauce pastas, chicken Caesar salad, oatmeal raisin cookies, carrot cake, quiche… It really felt like a training workshop at home, even if just for a few days.

The problem with that, and any other time I get together with Americans for any longer than a few hours, is that it’s an adjustment to get back. I stayed at home last night and watched a movie… then part of another movie, and a few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in French. I had every intention of getting up early and going out to see people today, but most likely, I’ll only go visit one friend at three and spend the morning finishing Grey’s Anatomy and doing laundry and cooking because it’s the last day before Ramadan.

One of the movies I watched partially last night was Babel. Every time a big group of PCVs get together, we bring movies and books to give away and circulate around country. I made out like a bandit this time.

The copy of Babel was pretty terrible; obviously a hand-held camera in a theater. I only watched the Morocco scenes. I remember before coming, watching those scenes were slightly foreboding. It seemed so empty, so lifeless, so quiet, so desolated, so remote, and just very depressing.

Watching a second time, after being here six months in a place that looks a lot like Babel, especially in my outer douars, it had a completely different feel. It felt familiar, warm, inviting, and, in some strange way, like home. The most disappointing part is that everything is actually in Darija (Moroccan Arabic), not Berber, but I was able to understand a few words of it. The other funny thing is that Tazarine, the city that they took Kate Blanchett’s character to in order to wait for transportation to a hospital, actually has a sbitar and a doctor. I haven’t been yet, but I know I will go sometime, because it’s only about 3 hours away from my house. It’s also funny because even though they didn’t mention the dunes Marzouga or M’hmed, that has to be where they were coming from, because there’s no other reason for a tourist to be down that way.

August 16, 2007

I can’t believe that half of August is gone already. It’s insane how fast the weeks go by, but how slowly some of the days creep on.

Ramadan is, well, interesting. Challenging. Today, I haven’t cheated yet and am not planning on it. It was easy today, because a friend came over and spent a lot of time at my house, distracting me. When I’m alone at home, the refrigerator calls me, so I cheated yesterday.

I was a bit afraid to tell people I cheated yesterday, but most people just laughed. They’d ask, “Are you fasting?” and I’d say, “Look… I’m trying to fast. I fasted yesterday. I’m fasting tomorrow. But today… I ate. I feel badly.” Most people laugh and say, “Oh, thanks for fasting…” and usually try to convert me.

Only my next door neighbor seemed a bit disappointed. “What did you eat?” I told her a cucumber. It was true. Of course, I ate a bit more than that, but a cucumber was the first thing I ate…doused in peanut-ginger-garlic dressing. “Katy, it’s good to fast, and it’s good to pray (pray, in this context, means praying their prescribed way, facing Mecca, five times a day). Do you know why? Because if you do that, you’ll go to heaven. And heaven is GOOD. There are lots of flowers there. And cucumber. You can eat as much cucumber as you want in heaven.”

It made me want to cry. I don’t know what particularly made me want to cry; maybe it was the fact that I had cheated and wasn’t doing what I set out to do, maybe it was the good intentions she had in trying to convert me because she wants me to go to heaven, or maybe it was the simplicity of the promise of a place with lots of flowers and as much tempting food as I wanted. I feebly tried to explain that the Qu’ran recognizes Christianity and Judaism as well, but gave up a few words into the sentence.

I am eating lftor at her house most days though, and I am going to try to fast through the month. I like her a lot. It’s just her and her two children, a girl and a boy. Lftor, or the meal to break the fast after sundown, is not really what I expected; everyone had been talking it up for months, but, it was magical, especially the first night.

Traditionally, people break the fast with dates. She can’t afford them though, though I’ll pick some up next time I’m in my souk town. Instead, I broke my first fast with water, then coffee with milk, mskota (a simple cake), misimin (a thin, oily bread), a boiled potato with salt and cumin. The meal was finished with a bowl of thick harira, a soup that my neighbor makes with eggplant, bullion, a type of squash called “slawi,” and chickpeas. Everyone makes harira differently, but I really like hers. Later into Ramadan, I think people start to add beans, azizao (a collard green), and some put pasta, or wheat, or flour, or tomatoes, or I suppose any number of other ingredients. In the Jamaa Alfna, the big square in Marrakesh, the harrira is bright red and thin, whereas hers is a deep brown and thick.

Last night, lftor was a bit different, with eggs replacing the potatoes, and aghrom n taguri (the spicy stuffed fatbread) replacing the misimin.

Waking up at four am and eating, then sleeping in and taking a nap in the afternoon does weird things to my head, and my dreams have been more bizarre than most. I need to start waking up and writing them down, because all that I’m left with right now are strange sensations or feelings, and snapshots of different parts of the dreams: going to my post office box and finding two-10 dirham coins, then two gold coins from Turkey- a hint in some sort of murder mystery; a scrapbook of everything a professor found relevant to history, including a picture of a lot of my “high school teachers” in bathing suits; some sort of a secret underground place with coffee; a Blockbuster video in Morocco that looked more like a SAMs club and with a “rent one movie, get two for free” card (yes, that’s when I knew I was dreaming), and a host of other crazy images.

Okay, I deleted an entire paragraph dedicated to some of the recurrent themes of dreams. Enough on that tangent. Where was I going with this, besides the lack of food and water can cause me to lose focus and commit a “seven-three?”* Well, I’ve been having, or at least remembering, stranger and stranger dreams with the eating lots of food and then sleeping and with afternoon naps. I suppose they’ll just get worse; it should be interesting.

What should be very interesting is how I will manage during Ramadan. Most people stay at home. I’m already dying of boredom. This morning, I woke up with some sort of inspired things I wanted to blog about, but, since I’ve not had anything to eat or drink for 12 hours and it’s probably 90 degrees out, I’ve become slower and less inspired. Lesson learned. Anything I want to do right now, get it done in the mornings. Or night. Maybe after lftor, I’ll be less fuddled.

*To “commit a seven-three” is, according to Tracey Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, what Paul Farmer and other members of Partners in Health, call it when “to use seven words where three would do.” I think I am the queen of the “seven-three.” And if you haven’t read Mountains Beyond Mountains, you should.


September 18

Ramadan is difficult. I’ve cheated on fasting more than I’d like to admit, in fact, I don’t know if I should even pretend anymore or try rather than just give it up. I do well when I’m not home alone, but when I am home alone, I give in, first with water, then fruit… and then it cascades into an actual meal.

Yesterday, however, was fantastic. I was home alone, eating, and feeling generally down about not being able to do much work during Ramadan. I know, shwiya b shwiya, but it’s difficult. I still feel like people wonder what I’m doing here, and what my job is. I want to do work… but I want to do it on my terms, not feeling pressured to do something that I find not sustainable by someone else. In any case, since VSN training, I’ve really not left the house much or done any work. I’ll visit people, and my young married friend came and spent all day on Sunday. I taught her some Spanish, so that when she goes to live in Barcelona with her husband, a laborer there, she’ll know a little. Despite this, since a lot of people sleep a lot of the day and are tired and, frankly, grumpy with fasting, I’ve stayed in, and yesterday, it was getting to me. I was wondering why I was even here myself.

I texted my teacher friend in the douar over to see how she was, as I hadn’t seen her for probably two weeks. She, as I halfway hoped, invited me to eat lftor with her. I walked the 45 minutes over to her house and had the most amazing lftor yet, sort of a combination of a city or Arab lftor and a bled Berber meal. We started with dates, and they were soft and sticky and sweet: perfect. Then, there was the aghrom n taguri with different spices than my neighbors, hard-boiled egg with cumin and salt, hot milk with a little coffee (literally), olives, and some new food. My favorite dessert/snack was this delicious powdered sweet rich stuff. It’s difficult to describe, but I think it’s just ground peanuts, almonds, walnuts, sugar, and sesame seeds. No wonder it’s delicious. In addition, there were three types of “cookie” desserts: the traditional shebekya, and two other almond-stuffed honey-soaked bite-sized sweets.

I was shocked that we didn’t have harira, but we did later, as well as the mskota cake but this was covered with real melted chocolate. I have never, ever had real chocolate at a Moroccans’ house before.

Before eating lftor, we had the table set, and the call to prayer had not yet sounded from the nearby mosque, so she sat and read from the Qu’ran out loud. It was beautiful. I’ve heard the Qu’ran on the television, and I’ve heard the call to prayer, but I’ve never actually heard it read out loud, live. It’s really magical; half sung, half spoken. I didn’t understand any of it, obviously, since it’s Fusha, but it was really special, with the table set, knowing that everyone all over the country was about to eat the same thing at the same time, and that this is repeated all over the world at sunset for an entire month. Even though I’m not Muslim, in some ways, I wish that I were a part of a faith that has such a universal experience. My neighbor says that during Ramadan, she goes to the mosque for the prayer after lftor, and that the mosque is just full of thirty or forty women who stay for an hour and pray together. Maybe it’s just that I feel disconnected from my faith and from my life at home, but it made me want to go, just to feel a part of something sacred and beautiful and bigger than myself.

I’m not thinking of converting, if that’s what pops into your mind when you read that last paragraph. Some of the same things that I find so beautiful are also things that make me think I could never become Muslim: the prescribed prayer, the idea that you have to do certain prescribed actions, and the gender separation during prayer. At the same time, I still do feel the beauty of Islam and a sense of brotherhood with this faith that shares the same God.

After lftor, some of her friends came over. I had met them all before and had fun, but last night was amazing. They’re such jokers! Some of the talk turned very, well, hshuma, and hilarious. At one point, I joked about climbing the small mountain that is right behind her house, and found myself running in the darkness with a fifty-year old woman pretending we were going to climb it. My Chacos were so full of thorns I had to sit today and pluck out at least fifty with my multitool. Ha. But we sat, discussing features of various parts of human anatomy, the six of us, in the darkness, laughing, and joking around. As some of them left, we even did something that I won’t write here (not really a big deal in the US) but that really shocked me. I love it when people are laid-back.
I spent the night because, honestly, that’s what we do here, and because nobody wanted me to walk 45 minutes alone at night back to my house. I slept on the floor, though I had the choice of a ponj or a bed. The floor is actually quite a comfortable option once you get used to it. I don’t mind it at all as long as there aren’t bugs and there’s at least a blanket or two that I can sleep on.

We woke up at 4 am to eat before sunrise, and it was the first time I’ve done that at someone elses’ house. There was soda, duaz (tagine) with bread, dates, and milk.

After some crazy dreams, some involving helicopter rides, rubber stamps, the current president of the United States, and pistachio ice cream, I woke up and left around ten. My friend lent me seasons two and three of Grey’s Anatomy, and season three is actually in English! On the list of “things I never thought I’d do,” other than, oh, having more people want me to teach Spanish than English here, or having a sixty-five year old woman trying to convince me to hitchhike, or fall in love with Goya Sazon seasoning packets, I really never pictured sitting in my house in the Peace Corps and watching the entire first two seasons of an American television show all in French. It’s getting better though; I probably understand 70% of it.

When I end up posting this, most likely I’ll be in town, trying to work with two other volunteers on a TBA (traditional birth attendant) survey. Yes! Work! Exciting! I have a huge shopping list though, and I haven’t checked email for awhile. I hope I can get everything done. I’m also coming up with a “Sbitar survey.” I knew that it was a possibility before, but since people accuse me of being a spy, I wanted to at least be here a bit before walking around with a notebook or pen and paper asking questions and writing down answers. I think that, even if there aren’t a lot of people during Ramadan, I’ll start going to the sbitar a lot with the survey for a few weeks.
I think I’ve realized what I can’t really articulate. I’m disappointed in my placement because the people in my site aren’t really poor. One of my friends who isn’t as well off lives off about $4300 a year for her family of four. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s not really that bad. It’s more than I make a year, here. I think my knowledge and skills would be put to better use in a less organized, poorer community. That may be a little sick of me to think that way, but it’s true.