I can finally say I’m ur isula and not be lying!

February 18, 2008

I feel incredibly busy right now, which makes me very happy.

My first English class, an advanced class, was last Wednesday, and it was fantastic. I have six students with varying levels and experience (some have studied 10 years, some can barely introduce themselves), which is challenging, but I had fun and it was much easier than I anticipated. I spent this morning coming up with the new lesson plan for this Wednesday and am having fun with it, assigning them to watch English television, or writing worksheets with vocabulary relating to Tamazitinu.

I didn’t end up having a get-together at my place but instead headed over to nearby Peace Corps Alley (2-3 hours away; 9 volunteers have the same souk town and it’s literally driving through one site after another to get there) and had a lot of fun working on grant materials for the incinerator project and getting the training of trainers off the ground.

My buta ran out… the oven burns through it fast… so I ended up hauling another butagaz container around yesterday in a borrowed wheelbarrow.

February 19, 2008

I guess I didn’t want to write much yesterday. Today has been a good day. It started out rough: I had been planning with my nurse to do lessons all morning at the sbitar, but when I got there, he wasn’t there, so I didn’t do them. I was so frustrated I didn’t even poke in my head to say hi to the doctor, something I really regret now.

I found out about an hour ago that this morning, a woman gave birth in the clinic. This may sound routine, but it’s not; the nearest birthing room is in my souk town and people don’t regularly give birth in the clinic itself in Tamazitinu. I don’t know if it was all over by 9 am when I got there, but if I missed out on watching, I’m a little disappointed, though apparently it was very intense and messy.

A bit disappointed about the morning, I decided to go home, but ended up not being back until 2 pm; I stopped at four houses for bread and tea and had at least six or eight lunch invites, but I’m still full from the all fatbread.*

I have a friend in town who I only hang out with once every month in a half or two months, but she’s one of my favorite people. I don’t know her husbands’ family well enough to be comfortable just going to her house, so our interactions are limited to when I see her outside and she invites me in or we walk around together, but I’ve eaten three or four meals at her place.

I saw her today and immediately thought she looked pregnant. “Impossible,” I thought, “she just had a son this summer.” She grabbed my hand, and looked me in the eyes, dark bags under hers. “I’m sick,” she told me. “I’m pregnant. Again. It’s terrible, my son is so little.”
It hurt my heart… and it’s strange to think that even though I’m only in town for two years, I’ll see her right after she gives birth twice, enshallah. Her husband knows but his family (where she lives) doesn’t, so she went to the store and bought some high-energy high-nutrient foods and hid them in my bag so that she could hide them in the house and sneak bites when nobody was looking.

Ironically, the lesson I wanted to do at the sbitar today was about birth control options.

We sat and I showed her a book in my bag about stages of development and pregnancy steps and she asked good questions and seemed to learn something about what was going on with her body, which was heartening.

I really want to move to the neighborhood where my homestay family is because that’s where most of my friends live. I get so happy every time I’m over there and I feel like I belong there so much more than in my part of town that it would, I think, improve my social life a lot. There’s even an empty house, but I don’t know if it’s worth it. I’d have to buy a bed and some kitchen things, and there’s no running water in the house, just in the bathroom, so I’d have to use water containers in the kitchen. It’s cement, which has benefits and drawbacks, but really, I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle.

February 22, 2008

The fact that I haven’t blogged for three days is fantastic. It doesn’t mean that I have nothing to talk about; it means I’m busy. I finally feel like I have a purpose in being here and that I’m starting to feel like I have a job. It’s sad in some ways, but good in others, that it’s taken this long. It’s encouraging to know that I still have over a year to do the work that is now happening.

I’m stressed out, which is bliss after months of trying to figure out how to do my time. I remember during homestay, I’d look forward to Fridays or Saturdays because those were the days I’d let myself do laundry, and this took up a few hours where I could feel productive. Now, I’m trying to schedule grant meetings with people on weekends, have a lot of lesson plans to translate for health lessons, am choosing not only not to take my out-of-site weekends but not even taking all my souk days in town, and making lesson plans for things. It’s so refreshing, I don’t know what to do with myself, though I still have time to watch the same DVDs over and over, with the directors cut, in Spanish or French…

In any case, Wednesday night I had my second advanced English class. I’ve come to the realization I have no idea how to teach ESOL, and am literally one step ahead of the students in that matter. It was a bit too lecture-like for me, but people in my class weren’t eager to participate, so I’ll have to create a seminar-like atmosphere little by little. The levels are also drastically different, so two people know all the answers while the rest struggle, which is a big challenge. Kids are still asking me when I will teach them English (young girls), so I need to decide how to handle this. I would look at it more as an English club, where we learn some vocabulary and basic information but also have fun and do things that are empowering, but I know it will be challenging to develop that curriculum on a weekly basis.

Thursday (yesterday, I skipped my souk day and went, instead, to the sbitar to do a lesson for pregnant women. It wasn’t crowded, and I ended up doing it for groups of three for about twelve women. It wasn’t a structured lesson, but went over basic things: eat more protein, try to give birth in the clinic, if you have to give birth at home, boil the scissors for the umbilical cord, use clean cloths, bathe them every two days, don’t have anyone push on your stomach from the outside during labor to help it go faster, don’t put henna on the umbilical cord or eyeliner on the newborn’s eyes, etc. It was a condensed version of what I want to do eventually in a few weeks’ worth of classes, but it went well. They could at least repeat back things and I think, in most cases, understand why (which, of course, is the most important thing).

I went yesterday to my teacher friend’s house in the next douar over at about three and, thinking I’d be back at seven that day, came home 24 hours later. It was fantastic. I sat in on an hour of her classes: she teaches two levels of French at once! It seemed to be challenging to teach two lesson plans at once, but she handled it well. Then, we just spent time at her house, me teaching her Spanish, her teaching me some Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). She’s very fast with Spanish because she’s fluent in French, but MSA is very slow. We went through the entire Spanish alphabet and she can spell pretty much any word I can throw at her; I’ve barely made it through a third of the Arabic alphabet and can’t spell worth anything. It’s fun though.

I also found out yesterday that I will be a camp counselor in a nearby city for a 4-day English language Spring camp in early April. This is immensely exciting for me: I’ve always wanted to be an overnight camp counselor, but I never thought this would come true in Morocco! Along with other lessons and projects, I now need to come up with camp health materials, and maybe some magic tricks that are easy to teach.




*Fatbread: aghrom n taguri. A homemade bread stuffed with “taguri:” chopped green onion, fat, cumin, salt, hot pepper, tumeric, and a few other spices. Delicious, but a heart attack waiting to happen. If you’re really lucky it’ll have ground beef inside.