Field Day, Field Trip, Spring Camp, and Training
Last Friday, I embarked on what was to become a rather fun adventure: my friend’s field day.
She lives a good 8 hours away from me, or so I thought. The plan was to travel to the half-way point on Friday, continue up a mountain pass on Saturday and have a meeting with the other 9 Volunteers who were coming up, then have the field day on Sunday.
However, I figured out that every other day, I have a direct transit (15-passenger van) from my souk town up to a nearby town. Therefore, meeting up with a nearby Volunteer in the morning, we were in her souk town a little after
She wasn’t ready for us to come, so I saw a small town, and noticed that I had driven by one of my friends from my stage’s site. She was one of my roommates during training, and probably the site I most wanted to visit from all of them in my group. She didn’t know I’d be so close (and neither did I!) so she invited me over.
It was amazing. Her site is a small, very rural mountain town. She gets feet of snow in the winter, and the people are very poor. There’s no running water, though there are “public fountains;” taps scattered throughout town where people “pull” water every day for use. She’s also done amazing things and started a Neddi, or women’s center at her site. And, lucky for me, Friday happened to be a Neddi Party, so I was able to meet 20 or 30 of her “girls” and hang out.
The first thing that struck me was their wraps. I’ve talked a bit about our wraps, the “taheruyt”—a black, embroidered sheet. These wraps are thick, woolen capes almost, completely hand-made, and absolutely beautiful. The girls (unmarried) have off-white capes with periodic rows of fringe, embroidered stripes, and, some of them have metal sequin-like circles hanging off for decoration. There is a thick cord that fastens around their neck. They are amazing.
Married women wear a black woven wrap that almost looks like a small carpet, with blue, red, and green stripes. They are held together by a chain across their shoulders. Married women also wear a different type of head-wrap than I’ve ever seen: a thicker cloth tied with a lump where their hair is tied in a bun, then wrapped in two or three circles with a contrasting, small ribbon of cloth.
Many men in this area also wear the same jellabas (tjellabit) that we have in Tamazitinu and throughout
But I digress. The girls were sitting in a room, making cake for the party. At first I thought they weren’t going to warm up to me. Was I ever wrong. After a few minutes and a comparison of our different dialects of Tashelheit (kif-kif vs- cheef-cheef; kao-kao vs. chao-chao, tiglint vs tijelin) my friend started playing music and we tried to teach the Macarena.
Hilarity ensued, including several girls insisting on my dancing with them… which, inevitably turned into their talking about how there are certain features of my body which they like. In some of the countryside, being a little bigger is seen as something beautiful, and apparently, all the girls wanted to look like me. They even stuffed their clothes in, shall I say, orchestra and balcony (from the musical A Chorus Line), and danced like I did, telling me to trade body parts with them, and even going so far as to… shall I say... touching my balcony trying to get me to shake them in a way that I really don’t know how. It sounds somewhat traumatic, but I’m actually used to girls or women, meaning nothing by it, resting their hands or scrubbing other women’s chests in the Hammam. It’s seen as being “hshuma” in the US, but at least in the bled (countryside) culture that I’ve observed, if an older woman is talking to you and rests her hand there for a brief moment or touches it emphatically saying, “you,” or girls try to shake them while you’re dancing and there are no men around, it’s not problematic, if a bit shocking. It’s a cultural thing, and perfectly legitimate and not at all creepy or inappropriate if it’s someone from the same gender.
The party was over too soon, and I left really impressed with my friend’s good work and ability to live in such a cold environment with a less-than-ideal water situation.
The next day, we headed over to my other friends’ site and met up with a large group of PCVs. Though it’s only 20 or 30 k away, the infrastructure is much better. We met with her Commune members and teachers to assign tasks for the field day. I was assigned a health activity that involved about 10 or 12 mini-activities and then a game; there were also trash pick-up relays, toothbrushing relays, no smoking activities, fishing trash out of the river, a dance/yoga station, an empowerment art station, a “be nice to the dogs” activity, a “throw your trash in the trash cans” stop, and a few team-building exercises.
I had a great time and the children were very well behaved (probably because of the presence of the teachers). All in all, I was quite impressed with how the field day went, and the children, especially the older ones, were able to say why it’s important to wash hands with soap, how often it’s good to shower, and why it’s bad to litter. I also got all the boys to promise me one by one that they won’t smoke; probably not going to follow through with all of them, but even if that promise helps one or two, it was worthwhile.
After Field Day, it was time to go back home… for a few days. I was back in the provincial capital a scant two days or so later to meet with the Country Director for a focus group. It was a really good discussion and a productive use of time, and I feel like all of us who participated got answers to questions.
Back home… for less than a week. I had to “re-integrate” because I had been gone so long, and I spent a lot of time getting ready for Spring camp and presenting during training for the new stage.
I had to prepare for field trippers, so I spent the next few days “re-integrating” and going around my community. It’s amazing how hard it is when I have been traveling.
When I got to my souk town to pick them up, I went with a volunteer there to a festival in a douar 20 minutes away. The music sounded almost sub-Saharan and the dancing was something I’d never seen. We only stayed an hour, but I was glad to have gone.
After meeting my three field-trippers, we shopped for the next three days, and set out on my transit to Tamazitinu. I love playing field trip and pointing places out on the way to my house. We cancelled my English class because everyone was so tired, and just spent the night decompressing from their travel day and making dinner.
The next morning, we went bright and early to the sbitar and I taught some pregnancy lessons and let them observe. We went to the commune, neddi, Khalti’s house, stopped by my homestay family’s house, and came home for lunch. That afternoon, we walked through the fields and went to my teacher friends’ house for cake and coffee.
The next day, we had my girls group over and showed them how to treat water and talked about flies…My water was out, so I made one of the men go with a wheelbarrow to get a big container of water. We had falafel for lunch… then we climbed Taftshfasht and came back to eat tacos.
It was fun… jam-packed, but fun. I was already exhausted as I traveled with them to the provincial capital to go, a day late, to Spring camp planning.
Spring camp was crazy; I feel like I could write pages about it. We had around 70 kids from all over
All of us American counselors had a room to ourselves, so we weren’t with the kids at night, but we shared camp bathrooms. There were 8 American staff and about 10 Moroccan staff; they were more of the counselors than we were as far as camp songs and activity planning. Our main responsibilities were English classes, leading a club, and one evening activity.
One of my favorite parts was the morning: all the kids lined up and sang camp songs, mostly in Arabic. Some were so beautiful, I thought they must be some sort of traditional folk songs, but when I got the translation to one, it was something like, “I like camp, la la la, it is a fine day, la la la…” or “They said night would never come, night came, it is now time to go to sleep.” They ended with the Moroccan National Anthem, which I enjoyed because of the “God, Country, King!” chant at the end.
Camp food was mediocre, and some of the kids from
The mornings started with English classes. My class was advanced, and we did things like listen to songs and try to fill in the blank, write letters to high school students in
TO BE CONTINUED!
