Post PST-Crisis

November 19, 2007

I’m having a small crisis here.

Before you read this and worry about me, know that not only did I expect this type of a crisis, but I’d be worried about myself if I didn’t feel this way or question what I’m doing here in this way: it’s a common feeling among PCVs, and I feel that working through it will make me a better Volunteer.

I don’t know what I’m doing here. To be more specific, I don’t know what to do at my site, now that we’ve passed the In-Service-Training mark.

Shwiya b shwiya: I knew I had to follow this mantra from before I even came here, but didn’t realize how shwiya b shwiya I actually had to be.

I think I had the expectation that by IST (six-month in-site conference with additional training), I’d have a few grant proposals written and be able to come back to Tamazitinu with a PROJECT, and, within a few months or a year, the PROJECT would be finished and self-sustaining and wonderful and in my own head I’d be a hero. I feel like a lazy Volunteer with nothing on my plate and I often wonder what I have to offer the people here: what can I do that wouldn’t come naturally or that is not already in plans?

At the end of my obnoxiously long Community Diagnosis, I had a list of potential projects. I’ll post them at the end of this blog, just for your reference. The problem is that these projects all come from my own observations and are things that fit in with the goals and objectives of our project framework: a long range plan developed with the Ministry of Health and Peace Corps to focus the work of health volunteers in the next few years. They are not, any of them, anything that community members in Tamazitinu came up with.

So I’m torn. I know I could do things like do a TBA (Traditional Birth Attendant) training, convince the current sbitar staff to use an incinerator, and do lessons that may or not make any impact, but in two or three or five or ten years, what will still be working? The TBAs already in my town are not, for the most part, used because of pride that women have in home births without any help but family members. Nobody is convinced that an incinerator is an ideal solution (and I don’t know how convinced even I am, myself). Lessons tend to be in lecture format and I don’t think I have the ability to do, in Tamazight, interactive, discussion-based lessons. Not yet.

And that’s another issue I’m having, as a part of this crisis: how much is the truth about my site, and how much is me doubting my own abilities? Sure, I tested at a reasonably high level at my IST language test, but that doesn’t mean I can lead discussion groups, does it? I do have a tendency to be insecure about my own self-worth (as do most people; I just admit it to others) and what I have to offer people.

But how much of that is also me worrying about becoming the white, American, educated, independent and “liberated” woman coming in and destroying culture and dictating change? How much of my fears are about my own abilities versus coming in and being culturally imperialistic?

I have no answers. It’s hard because, as I said, and I mean no harm to Volunteers who do this, I know I could do a few PROJECTS from the project ideas and have something that will look good on a resume and be easy to explain to people. I can be like a BUILDING or a BRIDGE or a WELL Volunteer. “Look at MY TBA training!” “Look at MY INCINERATOR!” “Look at MY LATRINES!” “Look at MY MURALS!” At the end of two years, I have tangible evidence of my work (MY work) and can sleep easily for the rest of my life knowing that I can be proud of MY PROJECTS. People at home will be impressed with MY PROJECTS.

But, that’s not my goal. I hate “MY PROJECTS.” That’s not the goal. Community development, sustainability, becoming a co-facilitator, a co-leader, a trainer of trainers, a co-trainer of trainers, doing something grassroots that the people and the community wants and that can continue… that is MY goal: to not have any “MY PROJECTS” but have “their projects” or possibly “our projects.” If I can get through these two years without writing a single grant proposal, I think I’d be all the happier, though it’s one less thing to write on a resume, because, really, after I leave, will people in Tamazitinu be writing Peace Corps grants?

However, to do this more grass-roots work, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know if I have enough time in Tamazitinu even though I still have 18 months here. And I don’t know if I will be able to get over my own ego or my own insecurities to do the things I feel like I need to do in order to do this. Get a group of women together and facilitate a discussion about their community, their needs. I’ve gotten to know a lot of these women and they are wonderful for the most part. But what if I fail? What if I get a group of people together and they don’t want to draw a community map or talk about their hopes or dreams? What if I get nothing out in my shwiya Tamazight? What if it is just the biggest disaster and nothing comes from it and people respect me less because of the big fiasco and I am just the crazy taromit (foreigner) who tried to host a meeting and it fell apart at the seems?

And then there’s the ego part of me. I didn’t come to Peace Corps to have something on my resume (and at times, despite my best efforts, I judge people who have that as their ultimate goal): I’ve wanted this since I was fifteen because of my commitment to the three overall goals, but I am afraid to come home and have people not understand what I did during my two years, when the reality is that most people won’t understand regardless of whether I did build a bridge or well or latrines or murals.

What I need right now is an action plan: maybe the best thing is to do a dry run of a preliminary meeting with girls. Get them to draw community maps, daily schedules, talk about their hopes and dreams, their favorite parts of the community… children are much more forgiving in many cases, and maybe that’d build my confidence enough to do it with older women.

I just feel in some ways like I’ve wasted my first six months in site, and I want to blame something for that: blame training, blame my language, blame myself, blame people in my site or the nature of my site, but what’s the point? Shwiya b shwiya, imiq s imiq. Volubilis wasn’t built in a day. The expectations for end results for a Volunteer in a new site are much lower than I have for myself. Shwiya b shwiya.

***

To go in a different direction, the last few weeks have been a whirlwind and I’ve slept the last two days trying to recover. Okay, the truth is that I’ve slept and watched a season and a half of Lost on DVD I bought from the beach city where we had IST, but I’ll get up and around tomorrow.

IST was a week at, as I mentioned, a beautiful beach city. There was a lot of drama and debate whether we’d have the conference in a smaller city (my provincial capital: somewhere I go about once every two months for one reason or another) or this huge beach city with Marjane, nightclubs, an amazing beach, and high-rise hotels. I didn’t care that much, but when the announcement was made that we would be in the city, I was excited, I won’t lie.

On the way, six of us from my province spent the night in a town about two hours from the beach with a large, ancient wall around a lot of the city. The food was cheap and good, and the market was large enough to get lost in but small enough to feel comfortable in. We met a friend from the area and his counterpart for breakfast, and headed into town early on the first day of the conference so we had enough time to actually enjoy the beach for a few hours.

Now, as we pulled into the city, I went through what I call “bled shell-shock.” It’s not the most politically correct of terms, but I really felt like a country girl coming into a big city. Right on the beach were a Pizza Hut and McDonalds, and we passed by several Wal-Mart-like superstores that are still overwhelming after months in a mud house. My clothes, well-worn from hand-washing, felt scruffy and I realized I didn’t even have anything cute to wear when we went out to karaoke at night.

The beach was perfect: the water was cold but warm enough to be comfortable, and even though it was early November, the temperature during the day was in the mid-70s to 80s, so swimming was definitely something I had to do that day. I felt like I was in another world, but realized that within the period of three weeks, I buried my feet in both the sand of the beach and the dunes of Merzouga.

The food, which was on our own for dinner, opposed to the hotel buffet breakfast and lunch, was also absolutely luxurious. Pizza Hut, McDonalds’ Flurries (that the workers would mix multiple toppings in because we spoke Tamazight), grilled calamari on the boardwalk, tomato and mozzarella salads, tuna melts and (!) a coffee with Baileys (that cost as much as a week’s worth of fruits and vegetables) and even a reasonable version of Indian food (samosas and vegetable curry have never been so delicious) were definitely among my splurges that were well worth every centime. (Yes, you can get alcohol in Morocco though it’s technically illegal. No, I don’t really drink here: I can count the number of “beverages” I’ve had in-country on one hand and three of those were during IST).

A few of us that are able to get together a few times a month because of proximity had discussed our fear of the large group dynamic after these five months of relative isolation. It’s an intense dichotomy: three months of living and training and learning with the same 35 people without ever really getting away from them; then five months at site… then one week of living and working and training and learning together again.

However, that first morning, with 33 of us (two of our group have gone home for varying reasons) sitting in a U-shape in our conference room felt like coming home. Though I don’t necessarily love everyone in the group, I felt such warmth towards each person. It was almost as if nothing had changed, and I even found myself comparing where we were sitting with where we would have been sitting in our PST site; against the window, on the big green ponj, in the sets of four chairs that are stuck together… At breakfast, my Program Manager and Program Assistant both welcomed me with big hugs, and it wasn’t the fierce competition that a lot of us had been anticipating.

We had one night that was the same as some that we had during PST: a bunch of us in a hotel room singing classic Americana songs with two guys on the guitar. Amazing. I forgot how much I missed that from training.

The sessions…well… I have mixed feelings about them. Some of the group dynamic (imagine 25 out of 33 people as type-A always wanting to contribute and say things and respond to people and who are very convicted in what they have to say and you have our group) was intense and at times got ugly, and some of the sessions were more useful than others, but what I’ve realized is how easy it is to criticize. From the sessions, I developed a “to-do/to-consider” list which I think is very helpful, and if that’s what I got out of it, that’s enough. I was also very encouraged by the attitude of some of the administrative staff members: the tone seemed to be 180 degrees different than during training and the emphasis on working together and being open, honest, and flexible restored some of my faith in our staff.

I think that one of the most helpful moments was when I had a discussion with my Program Assistant about my struggles and, though I didn’t go into as much detail as I did earlier in this blog, I think that some of the expectations and suggestions were useful, and one of the things on my “to do” list is “Keep in better touch with PC staff with my struggles and attitudes.” One of my character flaws is a constant seeking out of affirmation, so I’ve tried as much as possible to not seek out approval, and, as a result, really haven’t used Peace Corps as a resource for me often. I think that’s been too extreme and I’m trying to keep in better touch because that’s what they are there for.

Attitude. That’s another hurdle for me that I really became more cognizant of: I still have a bad attitude about my site because it’s richer and more organized than I expected. I’m working on it, but at least I can admit that it’s not my site but my own frame of mind.

It’s hard, actually. Being alone and isolated a lot means that I’m forced to process things alone. At home, I have several very close friends who I love and I feel at home with and I can admit anything to them and they’ll not only help me process, but will love me despite it and not really judge me for it. Though I have close friends here, they’re not as close and I’m not at “home” with them, so it’s been difficult processing things alone.

For example, I was a part of something during IST that was just being caught up in the moment and that I really regret doing now. It’s not a big deal, really, but I don’t feel like there are people here who understand how hard it is for me to get over it, and my processing how to work through it. More than the actual action, I hate that I fell into the reasons I did for participating: going with the flow, trying to get attention, pushing the boundaries… Unclear, I’m sure, but this was a big deal for me during IST: doing something stupid and feeling like even just taking responsibility for it wasn’t enough; realizing that I still have a lot of growing up to do and that sometime if I keep doing stupid things like that, it will get me into trouble. I went home and wrote a letter to myself telling me to wake up and grow up.

On a different note, we also said goodbye to one of everyone’s favorite staff members who is leaving to become Country Director of a non-profit. I think we’re all happy for him to have this opportunity, but I know that for one, I’ll really miss him. Every time I think of him leaving, I think back to the one time during CBT during training where he and the Training Director came to where we went to souk, just to check on all of us and chat for a few minutes to touch base and see how we were doing. It felt, and I think I even blogged about this, like two nice uncles coming to see us. He also came to my site to check my house and helped me negotiate the price and brought medication from a nearby city so that I didn’t have to come into town with strep throat for the antibiotics. Our card and cake we got for him I don’t think conveys enough how most of us feel about his impact even though the actual amount of time we’ve interacted has been comparatively small. Best of luck to him.

All too soon, IST was over and I was on a souk bus (a particularly hot and slow souk bus) back towards home. I ended up having some very good conversations on the way back with people I haven’t really spent that much time with and I feel that they have a really good perspective on my aforementioned struggles.

I was exhausted but at least able to spend some time with a friend who is about to COS (close of service: go home at the end of the two years) who lives in my souk town. I’m actually really going to miss her even though we’ve probably only hung out 5 or 6 times.

I ended up only spending about 18 hours at home before I turned around to go help a friend with her murals. I thought that I’d be able to go directly to her house after IST, but because she had to get her flu shot in the provincial capital, I had two nights between travel back and travel to her place. Since I missed my transit, I spent a night in my souk town, and only one night in my site before traveling 200k backwards and another 100k to her site.

At home, I was hoping to come back quietly and wash clothes and leave in the morning without attracting much attention to myself: I had told most people I would be gone for about two weeks, not that I’d be back. However, one of my neighbors who I don’t know very well saw me and sent her daughter over with a pot of tea and a slab of the stuffed aghrom n taguri that was made with cornbread. Have I mentioned how welcoming and friendly my community is?

So, to my friend’s place. I’ve been there three times now, which is kind of ridiculous: it’s in the middle of nowhere and a good 13 hours travel-time from my site. I got approved for work-related leave to help her do some murals on her sbitar wall and learned a lot about the process. We did two that related to water: one that shows how to treat it, and another that encourages drinking a lot of water. They look really good, but that’s a testament to her artistic ability, not mine. I feel like I could probably do them at my site now, but I don’t know where a good place to do them would be. I may talk to my nurse to see how he feels about on the sbitar walls here.

It’s getting colder in my site now. I bought two blankets off my COSing friend, which is nice, and I’ve been wrapped in one of them all day. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it when it gets even colder. Apparently, I’ll walk around wearing multiple pair of long underwear and sweaters and shirts and pants and skirts and socks and sleep in a sleeping bag with two or three blankets. I also hear that many Volunteers only shower once every two weeks or so during the winter. I’ve definitely cut down to once or twice a week now, but can’t imagine going two weeks. We’ll see what happens. The good news is that I haven’t seen a scorpion in my house since August and that I think (knock on wood) that the pinchy bugs are now hibernating. The bad news is that the mice are still out in full-force, but at least I don’t have to worry as much about getting pinched or stung in the middle of the night.

Such is life. Good, hard, and a struggle. At least I’m home now.

Language note (I haven’t done one of these in a long time!):

Well, this is more of a story than a note. I was sitting with my counterpart (nurse) a few weeks ago and he was taking an earwax plug out of someone’s ear. We were talking about how to say ear wax in English and French and Tamazight when this exchange happened. You have to understand this: my nurse speaks reasonable English, but nothing too advanced and he doesn’t understand very well.

Him: How do you say ear wax in English?
Me: “Ear wax.”
Him: Eeawass?
Me: No, “Eeer Waaks”
Him: Oh, like “Air bahgz?”
Me: What!? What’s “air bahgz?”
Him: You know. Air bahgz.
Me: What is that?!
Him: Like in a car. When it hits something. They are protection. Air bags.
Me: Air bags?! You know the word for air bags?

He doesn’t know how to say something as simple as “The cup of coffee is on the table” in English but he knows how to say “air bags.”

Okay, I need a better language note. Here’s one; I don’t know if I’ve already shared this or not. I’m copy/pasting it from an email I sent a friend. If you’ve already read it, sorry:

I was having a conversation with a 12 year old from Rabat in shr tmnya… um.. August… and I was talking about having Googled Tamazitinu. I said:

“Kigh lcyber afad ad-saulgh ghif ma d ba d lig kighd, googlgh Tamazitinu… d ur illi waloo.”

“Tgooglt Tamazitinu?”

“Eyeh… bleti… tfhmt ‘googlgh?’”

“Eyeh, fhmgh.”

We laughed.

“Googlgh! Tgooglt! Is tgooglt Tamazitinu?”

Ha. Well. Loose translation:

Me: I went to the cyber to talk to my parents and when I was there, I googled Tamazitinu… and nothing came up.

Him: You googled Tamazitinu?

Me: Yeah… wait… you understand “I googled”?

Him: Yeah, I understand.

We laughed.

Him: I googled! You googled! Did you google Tamazitinu?

So… if “to Google” doesn’t exist in Berber, it does now. It’s funny, the way things are conjugated in Berber though. For example, even for the present tense, we use the past tense. It only changes for present continuous, or future. Strange.

But here are the conjugations. If the verb is. I’ll do “fhm” (to undersand) and “google.” “gh” is pronounced like the French “r.”

I: fhmgh/ googlegh _____gh
You: tfhmt/ tgooglet t_____t
He: ifhm/ igoogle i_____
She: tfhm / tgoogle t_____
We: nfhm/ ngoogle n_____
Y’all (f): tfhmmt /tgooglemt t________mt
Y’all (m) tfhmm/ tgooglem t_______m
They (f): fhmnt/ googlent _________nt
They (m): fhmn/ googlen __________n




As promised, my list of potential projects in my Community Diagnosis (the Goals and numbers refer to the project framework for health volunteers):

Goal 1.1

• The implementation of classes for married women with an emphasis on pre and post-natal care, breastfeeding, nutrition, family planning, hygiene, and disease prevention. Optimally, this would be a joint-program led by the volunteer and either an established, respected TBA or a young, educated woman lay health worker in order to be sure that they are held in an effective way and to increase the chances of sustainability.
• Holding health lessons and learning activities during Equippe-Mobile trips to outer douars on topics such as dental hygiene, disease prevention and general hygiene, nutrition, and family planning; taking extended trips to some of these areas to gain credibility and work closely to promote education in some of the more remote areas.
• Continuing to do informal lessons on some vaccination days at the clinic in Tamazitinu on topics regarding all aspects of public health.

Goal 1.2

• Creating a small “Girl’s Group” to help empower them in self-esteem issues, as well as having basic lessons on nutrition, hygiene, and other health issues.
• Painting a mural in the school’s bathrooms promoting hygienic practices.

Goal 1.3

• Create a mural by the “tarugua” irrigation ditches encouraging people working in the fields not to drink untreated spring water.
• Working with Water Associations in some of the outer douars to assist in adding education to the scope of their projects.
• Working to help construct pour-flush latrines for households in outer douars where this is a major health concern.
• Work towards building a pour-flush latrine outside the clinic in Tamazitinu to address the problem of people being embarrassed to use the one inside when the clinic is full; or at least addressing this in some way through education.

Goal 2.2

• Evaluating the effectiveness of the previous TBA training, learning from its strengths and weaknesses, and providing follow-up trainings on additional topics, such as reviewing what was previously learned, going through what has worked and what hasn’t worked for each individual TBA, and adding elements such as Family Planning, SIDA education, breastfeeding, nutrition, and other related topics.

Goal 3.1

• Helping to recruit and train one or several lay women health workers, hopefully with the help of a local association to help teach lessons and to serve as examples and role models in the community in regards to health practices.

Goal 3.2

• Working with the commune or another organization to raise the funds to hire a janitor for the clinic.
• To come up with a viable, safe system for medical waste disposal at the clinic.
• To work with the Commune to develop a system for solid waste disposal, such as a landfill; combining this with several “trash pick-up” days.


***

November 1, 2007

Wow.

I went into my souk town today, after stopping on the way at a friends’ site and picking up what she says is one of two copies of a book in existence in the country: Dadda ‘Atta and his Forty Grandsons by David Hart.

It’s not too much of a security risk (which, if you’ve been with me since the beginning of the blog, you’ll remember is why I can’t tell names of places) to say that my people are that of Ait Atta; it’s a huge tribe that covers a few provinces. They’ve seemed to have some sort of Ait Atta pride, but I’ve always wanted to know more.

David Hart was an American anthropologist who lived in the region for 4 years in the early 1960s and wrote this book as a history of the people, focusing on the socio-political organization of this “super-tribe.” Ironically, the book is in English, and is most likely the most detailed written account of the people in my area. My tribe, so to speak. And, yes. For these two years, I do consider them my people.

So, after literally spending an hour in my transit to my souk town, 30 minutes in town, 25 minutes backtracking to her site, 20 minutes picking up the book and saying hi to my Dar Teliba kids (the girls in middle school who live in a girl’s boarding house in my friend’s larger site so they can go to school: my site doesn’t have a middle school. Yet.), and then another 25 minutes in a transit back to my souk town, I had the book in my hot little hands. Falling apart, literally held together by scotch tape, notes in the margins, my friend told me several times to “be careful with it because people might want to get their hands on it.”

I ran to a copy store.

“Hi. How are you? Is everything good? Everything fine? How is your family? Everything is great, peaceful, praise be to God… Um, do you photocopy books? Whole books? 250-page books?”

It was, well, an interesting interaction to say the least, but they promised me two copies (one for me, one for my friend) by 1:30 today.

After coffee with another friend, a few hours at the cyber, the post office (when I walked in, the nice man who gives me my packages greeted me by name and said I had two to pick up), I went to pick it up.

Two gleaming piles of photocopied old book. Beautiful.

As soon as I got home, after a side trip to Mashi-Kif-Kif and an invite from my tobis driver (I love his wife!) to spend the night at his house, which I consider a huge triumph and wish I had nothing to do tomorrow morning so I could have taken him up on it, I started in on it. I’m about 80 pages in and find it absolutely positively fascinating. In fact, my friend (who is also reading it right now) and I keep texting each other. “Look! On page 34, there’s a note that says that he had at least one informant in my town!” “Wow, the capital was within hiking distance of one of my douars! We should make a pilgrimage there!” “Did you realize that our CBT host families might have also been a part of Ait Atta even though it’s a good 11 or 12 hour drive up there?”

I’ve learned that my people practiced what Hart calls “transhumance:” in short, they were nomadic for a good portion of the year, but also had fixed houses with fields for farming. Though the people in Tamazitinu were some of the first to settle down “for good,” there are still outer douars that practice this; these are the “nomads” that I describe so much.

I got shivers when studying the chart that described the clans of the subtribe that encompasses Tamazitinu: I know probably 1/3 of the people in my time by the clans that are listed in the book; their last names are the same, and people refer to them or their house collectively as, for example, Ait Bahalu. I don’t know why it was so impactful to see, but I have faces and memories and experiences and future experiences with them, and to see it spelled out as part of tribal society was just really fascinating.

But what really struck me that made me want to write about this is this paragraph, talking about initiating new “presidents” (they are elected!) of the supertribe:

“… The new chief sat down and then his predecessor or the holy man placed either a single blade or a tuft of grass in his turban, to symbolize the hope that his year would be a bountiful one, that the harvest would be good and the sheep would wax fat. The agurram now gave the new chief some milk to drink, and, while he was drinking, pushed up the jug so that the milk spilled all over his face and shirt. This act, which symbolized his frailty in office, the fragility of his power, and the fact that he was no better than anyone else, his peers or his electors, also underscores the Ait ‘Atta (and general Berber) love of horseplay: for the chief was just another notable risen from the tribal ranks. Then the agurram gave him some dates to eat, for the combination of milk and dates given to all important guests is still symbolic of Moroccan hospitality generally…” (p 78).

In some ways, this embodies so much of my experience here; right down to the one family in town that literally always gives me dates and buttermilk every time I go to their house. People, especially in single-gender groups, are very playful, from watching a teacher literally hug and lift up his male friend while waiting for the tobis to leave, to some jokes that border on vulgar even by American standards that I have been subject to in the fields while harvesting tiflflt, or while at my friend’s house (usually these conversations focus around anatomy). And though I wouldn’t say everyone in power doesn’t abuse it, and there are definite gender roles and, one could argue, hierarchy, I see mentally challenged people treated with respect and care, I see the new weird foreign girl invited to tea and to spend the night at houses, every day now, I see people giving away vegetables or fruits from their fields, and hanuts letting people pay with credit without even writing it down.

Okay. I’m dying to get back to my reading. I’ve always liked anthropology, but I’ve never been this interested. I guess it’s because I’ve never really lived in a place that was a part of an anthropological study, at least one that I know of or had access to.