Christmas, a Festival, and New Year’s a la Rural Morocco; a quandary about living arrangements

December 28, 2007

Merry Christmas!

Christmas in Morocco was fantastic; again, a group of us got together a centrally located (for us) apartment whose owner was generous enough to let us use his internet, satellite television, and space while he was back home for the holidays. I was going to go to Marrakech for New Year’s, but decided against it because it would mean taking a dizzying mountain pass in a big bus on a potentially icy road. Instead, I’m staying in-site, though nobody does anything to celebrate. Maybe I’ll have some young friend over and we’ll party until midnight. Most likely, I won’t.

But Christmas was a lot of fun. We ended up doing the same thing that we did for Thanksgiving: tried to recreate as authentic of a Christmas meal as possible. I was in charge of the stuffing, which wasn’t all that great, but was a lot of fun to cook and prepare for and was such a comfort food that I made it for breakfast the next day. I’ll put my “Peace Corps” stuffing recipe at the end of this update, just for fun.

As most of us had been in and out of the apartment all day, taking showers at the public shower downstairs or going to the supermarche for things, eating lunch at the local Peace Corps hangout: “the patisserie;” nobody went with me to get the stuffing ingredients. It ended up being quite an adventure trying to get stale bread. I probably went to eight or ten hanuts before I procured the two stale rounds of bread.

Me: Hi, how are you?
buHanut: Fine how are you?
Me: Great, thanks, do you have bread?
buHanut: You speak Tashelheit!
Me: A little. Do you have bread?
buHanut: No, but the guy down the street does. Where are you from? France?
Me: No, I’m American.
buHanut: Do you know _____? Or ____? They speak Tashelheit too.
Me: Yes, I work with them. May God protect you.
buHanut: Amen.

Until I find a place with bread. Repeat conversation up to the part where I ask for bread:

buHanut: Yes, we have bread, how many do you want?
Me: Well, do you have any bread from yesterday?
buHanut: *blank stare*
Me: Bread that was cooked yesterday… is there any?
buHanut: We get fresh bread every day. They cooked it yesterday, they cooked it today, they’ll make some tomorrow.
Me: Yes, but I want bread that’s not new (I was having a forgetful day and forgot the word for “old”). Bread from yesterday but I want it today. *I pantomimed breaking it and it being hard and stale.*
buHanut: No.
Me: Okay, thanks.
buHanut: Wait. Why do you want old bread?
Me: It’s a holiday in America today and I’m making special American food with old bread. It has onions and carrots and old bread and bullion and butter.
buHanut: Oh. Okay. *blank look* No, I don’t but you might be able to get some over there.
Me: God bless your parents.
buHanut: My parents and your parents.

I finally got two stale rounds of bread. One guy offered me four-day old bread that would have been perfect if it wasn’t from a cardboard box sitting out on the street. I was tempted though, that’s how much my mindset has changed. Another man ran a few blocks away to a bakery and brought me one back. That sort of thing is common here. So, after probably half an hour of bread procurement, I was able to make my stuffing.

Before eating dinner (which was really at around dinnertime, not early like in the States), earlier in the morning, we had a White Elephant gift exchange. I brought a “Night at the movies:” two DVDs that are going around the PCV network, a mug, a small jar of my Mexican Hot Chocolate mix (chocolate powder, milk powder, sugar, hot pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves), a serving or two of unpopped popcorn, and a Twix bar from the supermarket in town. I received a large American Flag tray and a package of ramen noodles. I know it sounds like a kind of pathetic Christmas present, but I’ve been needing a tray for two months now and just don’t want to lug it around or spend the money on it, so it was perfect. I actually fought people off for it.

The sad part was that it came from a member of our group, from my stage, who is ETing (Early Termination: going home). Given the circumstances, it makes sense for him to go, but I had really just started to get to know him at the Thanksgiving and Christmas parties and really enjoyed his company and spirit. We were exact opposites, which intrigued me, and he was just a lot of fun to be around. I was glad to get to see him and say goodbye, at least, instead of just hearing through the grapevine that he left, but it was a sad day.

We had Christmas music (the only thing that made it feel remotely like Christmas), and at night, had a pseudo-dance party with glow sticks someone got in a package from home. Four of us took a night-walk in the dark on the road up to one of my friends’ sites. Other than the howling of dogs that were a bit intimidating, it was a fantastic walk.

All the days are melding together in my head: I got there the 23rd and left on the 27th, so my apologies for getting things out of order a bit, but the day after Christmas, a group of us went on the same walk that we did at night, but we went further. There’s a touristy place that we were going to stop at for tea, but instead, walked down by a river for a few minutes, and then explored an old Kasbah that still had families who lived there. It was glorious: perfect weather in the sun, beautiful wooded fields, a small river, and the crumbling mud walls of the Kasbah.

I got a second shower in the morning that I left, and had more time to kill in my souk town than I wanted to in the afternoon. This meant that I had the opportunity to download some podcasts from NPR and I relished listening to them last night. Sometimes, I think about buying a satellite TV just to keep up on news. I have no idea what’s going on in the world, or at home. I get Newsweek on a semi-regular basis, but it’s the Global version, which, normally, I’d love, but part of me just wants to know what’s going on at home. The podcasts were very narrow in scope: one was an interview with a movie director, one talked about kids in Iowa translating Dr. Seuss books into Arabic for kids in Iraq, one was on the history of Champagne and Alton Brown talking about egg nog, and another on alternative energies. The only thing that really talked about news was about the campaign trail. It should be interesting to see what happens in these primaries. I must make a habit of downloading these, as it helps pass the time when I cook, clean, and get ready for bed.

December 29, 2007

It’s amazing to me how important water is to life, and how little we think about it.

Since coming back, the water has been off more than it’s been on in Tamazitinu. They’re in the middle of re-piping the tap water here, so it’s to be expected, but to say it’s annoying would be an understatement.
Yesterday, I lived off of only the water that was in my kettle. I was able to cook some and stay hydrated, but not wash anything or flush my toilet. Now, if the water had been out for longer, I could always bring buckets from the irrigation ditches which are probably half a mile away, and boil them, but I’d rather not lug water that far, and it came on this morning with no problem. But it made me think about it. I lived for a day off of less water than one toilet flush in the U.S., most likely.

***

Something I’ve learned today: how much people love printed photographs.

During l’Eid, I went around and, with permission, took some pictures. In my souk town, I got some printed out and gave them to my host family. I also had a few of neighbors, so I took some of them around and they loved them. I’ve never seen anyone get so excited about pictures before. It’s a nice way for me to give back, I guess.

And speaking of giving back, I’m not sure if I’ve made a mistake or not. There’s a festival in my friend’s site right now: three days and tomorrow is the last day. My friend is in a big city for New Year’s, and I really don’t want to go by myself. I walked around today, hoping someone would invite me to go with them, but a lot of the women don’t go because it costs 15 Dh round-trip. This is $2.

While my hostmother was baking bread in the mud oven, her next-door neighbor (and my good friend) was there too and I asked if they were going. “We don’t have the money,” but it seemed like they wanted to go.

I offered to pay for them if they’d come with me tomorrow. It’s only $4, and these people have fed me multiple times, and my hostmother had me live in her house for two months. Not a big deal, I thought, paying for them to come with. It means I’ll get to go and have company, and they’ll get to go when they wouldn’t have been able to before.

They acted like it was a lot of money, so I said that family had just sent me money for our “eid,” (holiday). I don’t know how I feel about doing this. I wanted to go, and I can go by myself, I know, but it’s so much better to go with people… I just hope the town doesn’t talk about it or get the wrong (or right) impression: that I’m made of money and willing to give money to people or buy people things because I’m a rich foreigner.

I think it’ll be okay: I bought this other friend of mine a 10 Dh phone card one day because she has a secret boyfriend she hadn’t talked to in a long time and if she didn’t recharge her phone, she’d lose her phone number. I asked her not to spread that around, and nobody has mentioned it to me. And, as I said, I’ve had more lunches and dinners and tea and bread over at peoples’ houses without knowing how best to reciprocate.

I like the idea of reciprocating with family photographs though. It makes me happy because it’s easy and inexpensive for me but not something that a lot of people can do easily on their own, and it’s something that people will keep for a long time and be able to show people and look back on. Watching my host mother flip through the pictures of her daughters and giggle and smile, laughing and pointing, “Look at her hair!” “Look at her smile!” really made me happy.

My friends next-door to her house really want me to make them pizza someday. I don’t know if they’ll like it, but if I buy an oven, I’ll do it. I’ll even make meatballs with it, because kefta (ground beef) is only available in my souk town, so it’d make it even more special.

I just got a text message saying that my monthly living allowance is in the bank. We just got bank accounts, and this is the first time we’re getting money that way. I hope it works out. It’s ironic to me that I didn’t get text messages at home when I made deposits in my account, but here, in my waterless mud house, I do.

It’s been a good morning. It’s cold, so I finished the Murakami book Dance Dance Dance while still curled up in my sleeping bag. He has to be one of my favorite authors ever (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a book that I read in a very Murakami-esque way, and then I was able to read Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Universe and Kafka on the Shore before leaving for Morocco), and at the Christmas party I got hold of Dance Dance Dance and Norwegian Wood. It’s strange: I feel like every Murakami book I read is the same, but they are so gripping and intriguing that it makes me want to read all of his works. They’re not the same, but there’s something unique about the style, the magic realism, and the attitudes and intrigues of the characters that make them feel familiar and unsurprising, no matter if there is a plot twist (KP!)… You’d have to read one to understand (I’d recommend starting with Wind-Up Bird), but all of the unexpected, surreal things are just as normal and expected for me as they are for the characters: the single solitary male character, the intriguing but attractive and dark females, the places that aren’t real, the shadow, the attitudes towards work, relationships with young girls who are wise beyond their years, the attention paid towards food…


January 1, 2008

Happy New Year!

Wow, what a crazy few days it’s been.

Two days ago, I went to the festival that I was talking about. As agreed, at 9 am, I headed over to my friends’ house. It ends up my host mother wasn’t allowed to go. Her husband said she couldn’t because he needed to eat lunch and if she was gone all morning, he wouldn’t have lunch.

Sometimes, I’ve become used to the gender relations here. There are situations that would anger me at home that I’ve just accepted here, like people wanting me to wear a veil, or people turning away from the television when people kiss, or saying that premarital relations are bad. I’ve even, to some extent, become okay with not having close male friends here.

But when I heard that about my host-mother, a grown 27-year old mother of two, it hit hard. It also hit hard that my 30-year old unmarried friend had to ask her father for permission to go.

It was just going to be said 30-year old friend and I then, and we started walking towards where the vans went to and from the festival. It’s at my friend’s site which is about 15 or 20 k away, and vans were coming and going all day. On the way, my friend’s aunt greeted us and my friend asked if she could come with us instead because “she knows the festival.” Sure. I like this woman a lot; she’s one of the people who took me around with her for l’Eid and she’s very warm and genuine.

Before a van came, my newly married friends’ father-in-law (the man with two wives) came by in an empty car, so we all rode with him through my friends’ site to an outer neighborhood. The gendarmes greeted the man with a salute. I had no idea he was so well-connected (have I ever mentioned that there are police/gendarme checkpoints at least once or twice each time I go to my souk town? They’re not scary or a big deal, just interesting.).

The festival was fun: at first, it just looked like vendors, and indeed, that was the bulk of the activities. We stopped at several “Dirham” tables where everything was a dirham and my friends said I should buy my mother a dirham plastic ring as a gift. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that my mother most likely wouldn’t be caught dead walking around in a pink metallic cheap painted ring, so I bought a necklace and said it was for my sister.

The older friend (probably in her mid to late 40s) showed me where all the deals were and I went a little nuts. It was good that I had friends with me because if not, I might have spent even more money. I bought two small ponjs that can’t really even be described as ponjs but almost like very thin floor pads. It’ll be good for when the neighborhood girls come to color and they were only 30 Dh each ($4). I also bought a 2-serving tanut (which, to everyone’s amusement, I persist on calling a taHanut: store): a two-piece couscous cooking pan with a large soup-pot like bottom and a shallower dish for steaming the couscous on top with holes. I haven’t made couscous yet, but the pot is great for soups (25 Dh). I bought a large tye-dyed scarf for a whopping 3 dirhams and would have bought more if I hadn’t felt bad spending money in front of my friends, and a beautiful but slightly gaudy turquoise stone necklace for 20 dh. If I re-string it with real silver beads in between, it could be a really nice chunky piece of jewelry.

At the edge of all the vendors was a ferris wheel and a tilt-o-whirl. I really wanted to ride on the ferris wheel but my friends were afraid to and I didn’t want them to wait for me.

We had to wait two hours for a van to take us back. After dropping my purchases off with an old woman from “ighrm” (town) who was going to just sit in the shade until the van came, the three of us went to a tent for tea. There was a non-Moroccan woman wearing a fleece jacket who was working at the tea tent. Strange. At my friends’ prompting, I said “Salaam u aleikum” to her. She didn’t seem to want to talk, so I just followed my friends and a man from Tamazitinu bought us lunch and tea.

I was really curious, watching this woman wiping down tables and washing dishes, then sitting in the sun. “Talk to her!” everyone urged me. I finally did.

“Vous parlez francais? Espanol? English?” I asked her.
It ends up she spoke English and was from the Netherlands, had fallen in love and was engaged to the son of the restaurant-tent owner. She lived maybe 30 k away and didn’t have a job or speak Tashelheit very well. “How do you speak such good Berber?” she asked. I might see if I can copy some information for her or something and help her out. She seemed really nice, but it was random to see a Dutch woman working at the festival. Probably just as random as it was for her to see me walk in the tent speaking Berber to my friends. I forget how strange my life is sometimes. Beautiful, but strange.

We finally ran to the van, cutting it off before it got to the waiting area, and four of us (me, my two friends, and a younger girl) piled into the front two seats. We took a back dirt road to my site and I saw some beautiful villages. I took a few pictures from the window, but I love seeing new places here, especially so close to home.

When I got back, I had a message from my teacher friend from Marrakech who speaks English. She invited me to spend the night on New Year’s. My heart soared. I was psyched.

New Year’s Eve came around and I headed over, bringing over ingredients for a celebratory “Mocktail.” She had baked a cake that had “everything” in it: coffee, orange, chocolate, eggs, vanilla… and frosted it with an “08” and even melted chocolate and let it cool in strips to decorate the edge of the cake. We hung a tangled light strand over the window in a big festive clump, and had little teacups full of pink “flan.”

It was a subdued night for the two of us and a friend of hers, except when we danced unabashedly to Enrique Iglesias, she sang along with a televised New Year’s concert, and I sang my heart out to a jazz version of “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” that she played as background music. The nurse came over and shared cake and fruit salad with us—the first time I’ve been somewhere where a male came over with unmarried females! My friend dresses less conservatively than I do, never wears a headscarf, and I guess has men over and it’s not a problem. I still don’t know if I’d do that, but she doesn’t behave “badly” by any stretch of the imagination.

I thoroughly enjoyed counting down in Arabic with the television: “Ashra! Sa3ood! Tmnya! Sb3a! Sta! Khamsa! Rb3a! Tleta! Juj! Wahad! Happy New Year!” And there you have it. A much better New Year than I anticipated.

Icing on the cake: I showed her a curriculum I want to teach in both Tamazitinu and her neighborhood and she said she’d help me with it and even seemed excited. We’re going to try to find a place, and then, maybe, we can teach this class together. It’s amazing curriculum for women; it talks about menstruation, the science of pregnancy, how to take care of yourself during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and basic nutrition and health information with visuals in a very scientific way. I’ll really feel like I’m doing work if we get this off the ground.

The most flattering was yet to come. I’m confused as to how I should proceed, so please send me good thoughts for guidance in this decision. My friend and I are both somewhat lonely here. We do well, but I know I end up sitting at home alone a lot, typing long blog entries or watching DVDs on my laptop… or… horror of horrors… playing the games on my computer (I’d never beat advanced level on Minesweeper in my life until last month). She also has friends in her neighborhood (45 min walk from my house), but women here don’t generally talk about politics or philosophy or things outside our town. She invited me to move in with her, and I have to tell you, I’m really tempted. If she was in my douar, I’d move in tomorrow, but it’s really far from most people I’ve gotten to know over the months here, and I know I’d also speak more English than I do now. She’s an outsider too, so it’s not as if I’d be moving back in with a family, but I really like that area and I like her a lot.

I may try to move in with her and pay half-rent with my own money (it’s really, REALLY cheap… like disgustingly cheap), but keep the house in town just in case it doesn’t work out and just see how things go. It’s almost bizarre being with her though; we have a lot in common, but she’s a lot less “rural Morocco” than I’ve become. She has a blow-dryer, a computer, and walks on the dirt roads in town with corduroy pants and high-heeled boots.

Okay. I have some of my little girls coming over tomorrow, so I have to come up with a lesson of some sort and clean some. I have to do laundry like nobody’s business. Time for me to get to work and stop celebrating… but Happy New Year!

January 2, 2008

I’ve now had about six or eight sessions with this girl’s group, which is composed of about 16 girls who don’t all come at the same time. I’ve never had a problem until today.

Well, that’s not entirely true. One of the kids told me that another girl stole some of my colored pencils last time, so this time I only brought out crayons and was on guard. Or so I thought. I counted 26 crayons beforehand. It didn’t look like any were missing after the first group of six girls, but later in the afternoon, two others came in that I didn’t know as well.

They gave me funny feelings, like they didn’t want to be here, but they wanted me to let them in and talk to them, so I did. I asked their names again. Melika and Nedia, they said, though later, I could have sworn I heard one call the other another name. When I asked, they said they were talking about someone else.

Before they left, they asked if they could each have a crayon. I said no, because I have to share with the other girls who come in to color and have short health lessons. They seemed to accept this….

Until about ten minutes after they left, when I looked at my crayon cup. It looked emptier. I counted. 18 crayons. The brightest colors were gone.

I was livid. I couldn’t prove anything, because I didn’t count after the first group of girls, but I was almost positive it was these two. I sat and stewed. It hurt. I know I shouldn’t let something stupid like this hurt, but I really enjoy being with these girls in this atmosphere: having them come over, trying to get them to taste new healthy snacks… but adults in town warned me that the kids might steal things. They don’t sell crayons in Morocco, not that I’ve found anywhere near me at least. I didn’t want to punish every little girl by not letting them come over and color, but I need them to make visual aids too. And, really. If they want to color something, they can just come over and use them.

So, after ten minutes, I decided to go confront the kids. I walked out and found them playing maybe a 5 minute walk away and asked Nedia and Melika.

They said they didn’t take them, and to ask one of the other girls who came over earlier because they thought it was her.

Furious, but not believing them, I walked back. My neighbors (including the mother of the girl who the others accused of stealing the crayons) were out and they asked where I had gone.

I explained the situation. She said she thought it was the two girls this afternoon, and called them by other names.

“No, it was Nedia and Melika who came over this afternoon.”

I knew then that they were the culprits. They gave me false names. I was even more livid that not only had they stolen them and played dumb, but blamed someone else, a little girl who I am quite fond of but isn’t as rich and gets picked on some. People here tend to call the poorer kids dishonest. To add on, my neighbor said she saw them putting something under their sweaters and giggling on the way out.

I stormed over to them.

“What is your name?” I asked one. “Nedia,” she insisted. I asked some of the nearby kids what her name was and they all seemed to not want to get involved.

“My neighbor saw you take them. I want my crayons.” Women were starting to look around. I asked one what the girls names were. They weren’t “Nedia” or “Melika.”

I went over to tell the women the situation, hoping one of them was a mother of one of the kids, and one of the girls disappeared. I finally approached the other one.

“I want my crayons. I need my crayons. I know you have them, people saw you with them.”

She fished four out of her pocket. “My friend has the rest.”

I did my best to make her understand that I was angry because it was depriving other people of coloring and that she tried to blame someone else, and tried to find the other girl. A woman pointed me out to her house.

I went in the wall and knocked on the door. My anger made it so that I didn’t feel strange knocking on the door of a complete strangers’ house.

Nobody was home. Someone pointed up on the hill and there were ten women staring at me. Neighbors that I didn’t know.

I explained the situation; the mother promised me to get me my crayons back, and I tried to explain that I wasn’t angry and didn’t want the girl to get in trouble, I just wanted to be able to have the other kids color some. It ended up being good because I got to know ten of my neighbors better, and they all seemed really sweet.

So, in some ways, I think it was a blessing in disguise. I got to know the one mother and the ten other people better and they said that I’m welcome to join them on their discussions on the hill any time. Fantastic. They didn’t think I was out of line at all for being upset.

But in some ways, I feel like I was out of line. Kids will be kids. Crayons are just cheap pieces of wax. In the long run, 8 crayons are a funny thing to get a 24- year old woman bent out of shape for. I understand the kids’ logic: here’s a funny rich foreigner who can always go out and buy more because she’s rich, and we don’t have any. But it hurt, for some reason. I was almost in tears. I felt so taken advantage of by these kids (11 years old!) who obviously knew better and who went so far as to lie about their names. It wasn’t my intent to get them in trouble, in fact, I gave them two opportunities before I told one of their mothers, which I didn’t want to do. I didn’t tell the other girl’s parents, the one who finally gave me “her” crayons, because she gave them to me. Fair enough. It was so sneaky though, so underhanded.



Stuffing a la Peace Corps:

A big chunk of butter or margarine (no measuring cups here!)
Two carrots, peeled and diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
Medium onion, diced
2 large or 3-4 small chicken bullion cubes
Probably between 1-2 cups of water
Two large rounds of bread, stale if possible, torn to bits
Thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, fresh rosemary to taste

Heat oven. The only oven settings on these butagaz ovens are “big flame” and “little flame,” so put it on little flame. Bake torn bread until crispy but not burned.

At the same time, melt oven and sautee onion, carrots, garlic, and spices. When onions are translucent, add water and bullion and bring to a boil.

If you time it right, the bread will be ready as soon as the brothy stuff is boiling. Take off heat, add bread, toss through, and cover for five minutes. It should be ready to eat; if it’s too dry, add a bit more chicken broth.


And, just because I want to, a very simple and unhealthy Moroccan Recipe:

Udi (a type of butter)

Melt a hunk (at least a stick) butter over a stove, and add chopped green onions. Sautee until onions are crisp but not burned. Remove from heat, stir in salt and ½ tsp cayenne pepper.

Drizzle melted over (unsweetened) crepes, or pour in with boiled Jerusalem couscous (a large sort of couscous).