July 18, 2008

Today has been the beginning of a sort of project in my site. Last weekend, I got together with two friends in the province to write the Training of Trainers grant. We still need to do the budget, but other than that, the project seems to be coming together well.

Today, however, started our girl’s morning camp. There are three volunteers in a nearby province who are going around and putting on fun camps in people sites, and I’m collaborating with them for one in Tamazitinu.

Unfortunately, no adults from my town really are interested in helping, so it’s just the four of us and, today, 50 girls. We started outside (in the shade) and played Simon Says, sang some songs, and tossed a Frisbee around. Then, they went inside and made nametags, and we split into two groups. I led a health lesson and game with one group, the other group made collages of their dreams for the future. The health lesson was over soon, so we also started learning a little English.

It was only three hours, but I really had a great time and can’t wait for tomorrow morning. I’m also beginning to wonder if this is something I could continue on a smaller scale on my own this summer once or twice a week.

July 23, 2008

Wow. Well, I’d say that the camp was a pretty resounding success for how last-minute it seemed to me.

The next three days went quite well. We started each day with “sports” that included games like Sharks and Minnows (“Big fish and little fish”), Ring around the Rosy, races, Duck, duck, goose (“chicken, chicken, cow”), and Frisbee, then went to songs.

I loved singing the songs with the kids. We did Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Tows, Row Your Boat, Frere Jacques (in three languages: French, English, and Dutch: two girls live in the Netherlands but are from here originally and are visiting for the summer), and a song I learned from French language immersion camp: “Ce n’est pas moi!” The kids all sang the National Anthem of Morocco at the end of singing, and a few were okay leading in traditional Tamazight songs. My favorite part about this is that now some of my neighbor kids will come to me on the street and sing these songs to me. “Katy, Katy, ‘hey sholds neesntoes, neesntoes!’”

We’d break up after songs and sports and I continued with the general hygiene game as well as a dental hygiene lesson, throwing in dances like the Macarena or random English lessons as needed. Some of the other PCVs did art projects. One day, we made friendship bracelets; another day we did a neighborhood trash pick up, and yet another I showed videos on the new family laws and had a discussion with some of the older girls about why staying in school was important.

I wish I had another summer so I could do the camp again, or go around to other nearby sites and collaborate with other PCVs to spread the day-camp love. Or, wait. Actually, summer is my least favorite time of year here. I love that the figs on my tree are ripening at the rate of about 3 figs a day, and I like the culture of sitting outside and “breezing” (“datrwHmt?”), but I really get frustrated with the people coming back from working abroad. The PCVs who came over kept commenting on people not wearing headscarves who were in their late teens, the plethora of cars (though the fact that they all had EU plates should have been a giveaway), and the few kids who came in speaking fluent French, Spanish, or Dutch; it seemed feeble when I told them “It’s just because it’s summer. Everyone’s here on ‘vacation’ visiting family.” My next-door neighbor, a man I never met, has spent the last 36 years in France and his teenaged children are French citizens.

I know it sounds whiny, but I really dislike the atmosphere right now in Tamazitinu with Ait l Kharij (the people from abroad) here in town. I know I’m more of an outsider than they are, but the cars, the fact that there are clumps of men “breezing” on every block who stare at me, and people trying to talk to me in French all the time, or wearing nicer clothes than I own at home really changes the entire feeling of my town.

At least it means wedding season is coming up!

July 1^st 2008

Well, today was somewhat of a momentous occasion, though, let me tell you, I’m not in a very good mood despite that.

After over a year of being in my site, I finally was able to go to a local association meeting. I’ve been trying to do so, unsuccessfully for a year. It finally happened today.

In some ways it was better than I expected, in some ways, worse. The association is putting together a cultural week, and I finagled my way into doing at least 3 health sessions during the week. The only other victory was that they asked my input for a slogan for the week. Better than nothing, I suppose.

However, I left the meeting early (though I sweated it out for 3.5 hours) because I thought I was going to pass out from the heat, I could only understand about 20-30% of the meeting, and, honestly, because I got angry about something I heard.

“Just men,” and then everyone agreed. I don’t know what they were talking about. I asked a teacher sitting next to me, and he joked around saying everything should be just for men because women are difficult, etc. but in joking about it, he didn’t answer the question. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I don’t know how much women were even included in this week. I felt like I really intruded on the meeting, being the only woman with over 20 men, and though they respected my opinion and included me, the uphill battle just made me want to cry.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that I had a conversation with some of the commune guys earlier today about sexual inequality in relationships, which led to some rather inappropriate but enlightening conversation. I need to look up what Islam says about things, because I heard some really interesting arguments to what I see as, well, to be gentle about it, unfair practices…

All in all, some of the association guys are good guys and I think would be good allies, but I’m really disheartened about a lot. They were already including some health lessons (though not as extensively), there are already health projects that don’t involve me going on in town… I sometimes really don’t know why I’m here in my site. At all.

I do know one thing: I’m going to do everything in my power, even more than I’ve been doing already, to give women and girls the most opportunities I can.

July 2, 2008

Today, my Carte de Sejour (like a green card) expires. It’s so strange being over halfway done. At least I have my receipt which shows that I’ve already applied for my new one, so I’m in-country legally. It’s always strange going to the gendarmes office to apply, get the receipt renewed, or talk to them about certain things. We have a new head gendarme now, one who speaks Tashelehit rather than just Arabic and French, which is nice, but my favorite thing about him is the calendar on his desk.

Many offices (my nurse and doctor, for example, as well as the commune guys and the gendarmes) and even the dashboards of some tobis’s have these large cardboard calendars that are distributed by gas stations or pharmacies. They’re for a whole year, with each month in a column, the Arabic calendar dates, days of the week, and solar calendar dates all listed one beneath the next. I love watching people circle dates on them, or doodle on them.

The head gendarme has one on his desk, and every corner of it is covered in doodles. The large letters on top have the closed areas colored in (eg: the two “bubbles” in a capitol “B,” or the inner circle of an “o”), days are circled, things are underlined, there are different colors, small drawings, lines, and, really, it’s just covered. I don’t know why it makes me giggle so much, but it makes the man in, what to most people here would be a rather intimidating position, seem so human. I know that’s exactly what mine would look like if I had one in my office.

Today was a better day. I did a load of laundry, which dries in a matter of hours in the heat, had watermelon, breakfast cereal I found in my souk town, and made gazpacho and homemade “cheese.” I also took a cold shower, which always makes life better these days.

This afternoon, I went to my host family’s house and played with my little host-sisters, and then my host-mom and I went to visit two newborn babies: one is 3 days old, one is 8 days. On my way back home, I sat on the ground and talked with some of my neighbors for awhile. This made me really happy: it felt really normal and right and I finally am feeling like I know the people around me instead of just my hostfamily neighborhood. Another woman, a neighbor, told me yesterday that she was sad that I had never came over and that she liked me and that I should come over to her house. The little things like that make life feel better.

I smell now like perfume and random herbs that I don’t know in English because of the “baby showers.” I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the typical celebratory “tray of goodies” at newborn baby visits, or sometimes before weddings or at sedaca parties.

While everyone sits around the baby, normally covered in a piece of lace and swaddled so it looks like a small mummy or a Glow-Worm doll, a female family member of the new mother keeps a pot of hot mint tea (or wormwood, spearmint, lemon vervein, or a combination of other herbs in the hot, sweet tea) going and passes around vanilla wafer cookies and peanuts.

When a woman walks in… yes, this is a women’s “celebration,” she greets everyone in the room and slips a bit of money to the new mother, who surreptitiously stores it somewhere among her palette on the floor. Her face is often covered in saffron: a watered-down version of the decorative face paint used during weddings.

After sitting and a cup or two of tea, the main table in the room normally has a tray with all sorts of smelly goodies on it; usually a combination of the following:

- Perfume (either a type from Taiwan, which is called simply “Taiwan,” one of a few other brands available in Morocco, or, if the family has immigrants in Europe, a French brand). This is sprayed rather liberally.

- Stronger perfumes or oils of scents like sandalwood, which come in tiny bottles and are applied with fingers rather than sprayed.

- Rose water, usually the bright pink variety in a spray bottle from Kelaat M’Gouna, a town in the Valley of the Roses.

- Mswayk; walnut bark or root, that is bitter after chewing for a few minutes. This turns the chewer’s tongue brown. As an aside, mswayk-flavored toothpaste is available here from Colgate brand. I think it’s really Colgate, though it could be a rip-off.

- “Henna” for the hair. This is not really henna or even from the same plant and has another official name, but it’s a mixture of a smelly (rather nice, sweet but earthy smell) brown herb powder mixed with water. Women will take off their headscarves and spoon the mixture on their hair. When the water evaporates, it glumps up in hair, but it comes out easily.

- Taghzolte: khol for the eyes (the powdered eyeliner that is actually applied inside the eyelid rather than outside).

- Green lipstick that turns pinkish when applied to lips.

- Saffron paste (saffron, water, sometimes sugar) applied with a Q-tip to temples, nose, corners of eyes, and sometimes right at the hairline in a line, sort of outlining the top of the face.

July 10, 2008

It’s been awhile.

We had a fantastic July 4^th party at a pool nearby. It was expensive to get in, but well worth the swim as well as the fun times later that night cooking dinner together and sleeping on a friends’ roof, under the stars.

I really miss being able to sleep outside. I have a tent, and spent a few minutes setting it up outside to be comfortable: ponjs, a thick mat I bought that’s rather comfortable, my pillow, my combination flashlight/short wave radio, water, etc, but it was hotter in the tent than in my house because it blocked the breeze. There are chickens and who knows what nasty bugs outside, so I don’t want to sleep on the ground outside my house, though there’s a cement ceiling of a new house they’re building in my courtyard. On my very long “to-do” list now is to make a ladder (or buy one) so I can sleep on that roof at night. Right now, my fan and surrounding myself with several bottles of water I’ve frozen in the freezer works to some extent, but I still wake up soaked with sweat. The roof on the 4^th was perfect and it makes me really want to do whatever I can to do that.

Other big news: I got a cat! He’s a cute little kitten: 3 or 4 months, I think, and he eats a lot. He likes to play and also will let me cuddle with him a little bit, but the best news is that I haven’t seen a mouse or any sign that I have any mice in the lat week. He’s a cutie, though I keep him out of where I keep my computer when I’m not there because he likes to bite wires. He’s also litterbox trained (thank God!) and really clean. People think it’s funny how much I feed him and how much we “love” our pets, but all in all, I think I’m glad to have him, so far. I named him Zika, after one of my CBT (training) hostfamily’s goats.

I’ve been somewhat busy trying to work on things in my site, but they’re slow. This weekend, we’re writing a grant for the Training of Trainers that will hopefully take place in November; we’re still working on incinerator things, though it’s a real pain to get logistics done. The biggest problems I’m having are with getting an association or organization to commit to paying for the butagaz as well as making sure people who said they’d help out really will. Cross your fingers for me.

I’m also working with some other volunteers to hopefully host a 4-day “camp” for some of the kids in my town. It’s going, but slow, though I’m really excited, and if it works out well, will maybe continue it on my own once or twice a week during the summer on my own.

What else? Right now, the big social time is after l3ssir (though I don’t know how to transliterate it); one of the calls to prayer that is happening at about 5:30 new time, 4:30 old time. I will explain that in a second; it’s a phenomenon that’s made life annoying recently. But I’ve forced myself almost every day over the last week and a half to get out and be social from about 5:30 to 8 or 9 at night, and it has made life feel much more enjoyable. I feel like I’ve finally re-integrated and like I do have friends at my site, it just took two weeks to re-establish myself in the community. I might not have a best friend here right now, but I have families I enjoy spending time with, and I’ve gotten to know some of my immediate neighbors a lot more.

Being out and about has inspired me to want to teach an English class for girls over 14 or so, so hopefully I will start that in the next week or so. I also, as I said, may try to do a 1-2x a week summer camp with play and health lessons, maybe some fun English or French classes to help pass the time in the heat. We’ll see.

I still haven’t talked to the association president about exactly what I’m doing for the cultural week, but I still have two weeks or so to prepare for that, so hopefully that will go well. Cross your fingers for me there too.

Oh, and new time versus old time. I don’t think I’ve talked about this yet. Morocco had its first “Daylight savings” time change this year. The cities seem to have mostly adjusted, however, in my town where things go by the sun and calls to prayer more than actual time, most people use “old time,” so I always have to double-check. I’ve missed my tobis to get into my souk town already once (though was able to flag one down that was passing through, lhamdullah!), and now have to wait to go home whenever I leave my site until 6:30 in the evening!

Wedding season is coming up soon. I can’t wait to get all dressed up, but I probably won’t go to as many this year as last. I honestly don’t enjoy sitting in a cramped room for hours unable to stretch out my legs while every muscle in my body falls asleep, sitting on the ground for long periods of time eating couscous with dirty spoons or drinking hot sticky sweet tea from unclean glasses. I’ll do the aheyduss (dance lines) but probably will end up avoiding the meals, though I do love the couscous!

Other momentous news: my site got internet. I’m disappointed that nobody’s capitalized on this and built a cyber, and am not willing to dish out the 6000/ryals a month (300 dirhams= $41) for the slow connection, but I checked email at a family’s house the other day and was stupefied. I also pulled up the site that had pictures from when my family came to Tamazitinu to visit and the girl who was in the room thought it was really cool. The connection was too spotty to do Skype, which is a big reason why I won’t get it, but it was absolutely insane to me. Of course, it shouldn’t be, as when my parents were here, my dad kept getting emails on his Blackberry and even sent a picture of my house to a friend of his from my site.

This, in comparison to the fact that one of my neighbors I’m just now getting to know well told me that she’s had 10 children but 5 died before the age of 2.

It’s been a year, and I’m still absolutely stunned at the rate some things but not others go through “development.”

I need to wash dishes, cook dinner, and pack for tomorrow but I feel lazy and just want to type. I hope Zika’s okay if I leave him alone for two days. I think he should be.