shwiya b shwiya

le fin

2009-09-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

Obviously, I never ended this blog.

It has been a whirlwind of time, including leaving my community, my life, my home of two years, taking a trip to Tanzania and Kenya for 18 days, coming home, visiting friends and family, Alaska... and now I'm back in Morocco, ready to embark on a new journey that, if you so desire, you can follow at http://oudaya.blogspot.com . Apparently, I have not learned my lesson as far as easy-to-remember blog names!

There is no way to summarize or tie my experiences in the Peace Corps up in a tight complete bow: a pretty package, start to finish, so I will not and just say that the journey continues...

Peace!

2009-05-08T07:58:00.001-07:00

May 7, 2009

It's so strange to be leaving.

I have around 14 days left in my community, and I have to travel for
at least six of them to work at the Rose Festival, meet with the
Gendarmes, and go to meet with the Delegue in the provincial capitol
one last time.

Today, my fridge went away on a truck… sold. I'm taking a lot of
things to the festival to give away or sell. I've taken down my map of
Morocco, my pillow covers on the wall, moved my oven out from the
kitchen, and, little by little, am organizing and getting rid of
things; an entire household compacted down to one or two suitcases and
a backpack. It feels good to get rid of things, freeing. It's the
exact opposite feeling of what I felt when I cleared out my room at
home before going to Peace Corps: I still had an attachment to those
memories, those things that were attached to unique moments in my life
and childhood. I can't get rid of things fast enough here; I'm ready
to downsize, to become nomadic again and try to travel out of a
backpack. If I could not take anything with me but souvenirs, it'd be
perfect, but I feel like I must take some clothing so as to be able to
be clothed at home.

I don't know if my eagerness to downsize is because I've changed, as a
result of Peace Corps, if it's because I'm practical (better get it
done now so that you aren't scrambling around any more than you have
to at the last minute!), or if it's because a part of me really is
ready to move on and go home to the next great adventure, the next
steps in life.

I've become lulled into the inevitability that somehow, I will end up
burning bridges before I leave in my community: someone will be
jealous of a gift or angry by my lack of a gift, or that I didn't have
time to spend a meal with them before I left, and I'm comfortable
knowing that I will do my best, and any anger with me or jealousy will
be unintentional on my part, so I can leave in peace, despite that.

There is so much to do, my list grows rather than shrinks every day
even though I've been busier in my last week than I have been in my
first year in many ways.

My "replacement," though I hate the term that has permeated the Peace
Corps community lexicon; the term is unfair to both her and me—nobody
will exactly replicate my work and my service, and her role is her
own, not to become me— is here, which is nice and reinforces my
confidence with my community and makes me reflect on my first weeks
and months on a regular basis. We are in similarly lost and
stress-filled positions, integrating or preparing to re-integrate in a
new society when we are used to our roles and positions in a different
place. Her anxieties about being here mirror my anxieties about going
home: finding work, fitting in social situations, learning (or
re-learning appropriate) language, finding my role, adapting to
standing out or being lost in the crowd… I am confident she will do
well here and am impressed with her motivation. Part of me is jealous;
if I had two more years here, what could I do?

But that is the problem, and that is why I could not extend. It's not
about what I can do, it's about what the community can do on their own
or with a volunteer, and if that's my number one motivation for
staying, so I can feel better about my service (which, inevitably, it
would be), it is a selfish goal that is not the goal of Peace Corps or
the role of the volunteer. I appreciate having gone through the
process of debating extending my service. Now, when I'm at home,
trapped in my parents' basement slaving over cover letters and resumes
on wireless internet, I will feel nostalgic for Morocco and Tamazitinu
and my work and community and girls and "family" and Peace Corps
filterless friends who discuss nothing but politics, religion, sex,
work, race, gender, relationships, "the future," and bodily functions
(the only conversations worth having, in my warped mind), but I will
not regret coming home because it was my process and my choice.

I am in a bizarre place with lots to do, but I think I can make my
deadline. I don't have a choice, truth be told. I'm worried about
getting money for my trip (will have to make cash advances on a credit
card, which I'm not a fan of), worried about planning for a week alone
in Kenya, a job, getting into my dream grad school program because I
don't have a second choice in mind yet, deciding whether or not it is
the right program for me, taking care of all of these infernal
goodbyes, getting rid of trash, the politics of gift-giving and
selling… and the list goes on.

I'm not looking forward to this weekend: work (good!), party (eh?),
Delegue meeting, gendarmes, ministry of education, selling things
(hopefully), then coming back with literally just over a week to wrap
everything up.

I have not yet felt the full emotional impact of leaving. Like so many
people, the stress manifests itself in different, silly ways that are
easier to deal with than moving from a unique environment where every
day is a challenge, every day I am learning, where I am doing work
that I believe in, and where I have two communities: my town and
volunteers, who are in some ways two of the most accepting, warm, and
welcoming groups of people I've met. That's not to say that it's been
easy, but it's been amazing and often joy-filled. And this is
something we COS-ing (closing of service) volunteers can share: our
anxiety and nervous manifesting itself in strange and unimportant
ways. We understand each others' quirks and snappiness, lack of
energy, or fixations on frivolous or impractical things.

I look forward to seeing the new "green" "liberal" America under
Obama, where people are opening up about race and the environment,
where liberal is less of a bad word, where human rights are becoming
more important, and where it seems like more people think the way I do
than ever before in my lifetime. I think I'll be shell-shocked at some
things I see—in Ouarzazate the other day, I saw a purse-dog and I
couldn't stop staring, dropped jaw, at the lunacy of it. I'll stare,
I'll say awkward things, I'll judge how much skin people show, and
when people complain about things that have since not become a way of
thinking, I probably will have a hard time accepting it.

2009-05-04T02:07:00.001-07:00

April 27, 2009

I hate seeing the date these days. It reminds me of how little time I
have left. I don't know where to start blogging, so I'll start with
this: I decided not to extend and pulled my proposal about a month
ago. I think it was the best decision I could have made, though at
times I really do wish I was staying. That being said, the reasons I'd
stay were really pretty selfish when it comes down to it, and I think
I needed to go through the process of seriously considering it in
order to not regret it while I'm sitting at home and joining the
millions of Americans looking for jobs in this economy.

I hope I won't regret it, at least.

What I certainly don't regret is taking cash-in-lieu of a plane ticket
home and buying tickets to spend a week in Tanzania and Kenya. I feel
really unprepared, especially since after a day of studying, I can
only count, say "I don't understand," and several words that come
straight from Arabic (like Thursday, Friday, cold, hour, and good
night) in Swahili.

But the language geek in me is fascinated by the Arabic influence. For
example (and I'm talking Darija: Moroccan Arabic, not modern
standard):

Arabic Kiswahili
6- stta sita
7- sb3a saba
9- tsa3d tisa
20 ashrin ishrini
30 tletin thelathini
40 rb3in arobaini
50 khamsin hamsini
60 stin sitini
70 sba3in sabini
80 tmenin themanini
90 ts3ain tisini
100 miya mia
1000 alf elfu
Thursday lkhamis alhamsini
Friday ljum3a ljumaa
Cold brrd baridi
Good night Layla saida Lala salama

Etc…

In any case, it's been a very busy month. In short: Spring Camp in the
provincial capital, Training (or not) at the training site, COS (close
of service) medical exams in Rabat, site visit in a nearby site, and
this last week of being in-site and trying not to cry about having to
leave this incredible community.

Spring camp:

I went to the same place as last year for spring camp, hoping to see
some of the same students that had been there before. I was rewarded
with probably a fifth of the camp as repeat campers, and it was great
seeing them and hanging out with them. Unlike last year, I was able to
be there the whole time this year, which was great.

In short, there were nine American PCV counselors, five Moroccan
counselors, and 65 campers who spent a week in a sports and cultural
center for English classes and camp fun. I taught beginning English
with a new volunteer who I really like and got to know well, and led a
journalism club with another new volunteer. It was really less
stressful co-leading than it is teaching alone, and I feel like this
year we were a lot more involved in camp as an American staff than
last year.

There was the same city kid/country kid (also Arab/Berber) divide that
we found last year, but all in all it was a fantastic time with a few
hard moments.

Oh, our second or third day of camp was April Fool's, which was
interesting. Here's an article from the journalism club about it:

April fools
By Safae and Fatime Zahra (Team Freedom of Expression)
The first of April was an exceptional day because it is a holiday
called April Fool's. In our camp, we had many jokes happen. For
exemple we wished Amy happy birthday and it wasn't true. It was so
embarrassing to Amy because she didn't know it. then Moroccan
counselors told us that we're going to visit Ait Ben Haddou and maybe
some campers will participate in Moroccan movie produced by 2m. This
was another joke. We think that April fools is a great day because
there were a lot of funny events.

There were more jokes that the campers weren't aware of, like when one
of the male PCVs came in and stacked our beds 3-high, when we
retaliated by calling him and another PCV up in front of the whole
camp to sing "My Heart Will Go On," and when he then came back by
having a PC staff member call the camp coordinator, telling her that
she owed Peace Corps 9000 dirhams because of a problem with banking
($1050).

I love the article by Safae and Fatime Zahra though, because they are
the type of students that every teacher/counselor would want to have.
They picked the assignment of interviewing all the counselors, and, in
their free time, painstakingly interviewed all nine Americans, asking
them pretty insightful questions. One of them had only studied English
for a year. They wanted to spend lots of time outside club time
working on it, and at the end had become best friends, despite the
fact that one is Arab, one is Berber, one from the countryside and one
from the city.

I thought on the way back from Spring Camp that I'd spend the night in
Marrakech. Little did I know that a twelve-day transportation strike
was dawning. Luckily, there were a few of us who had to go in the next
few days from Marrakech to Azilal, so they sent a Peace Corps car out
for us and we rode in style, after waiting three hours in the
Marrakech bus station. The plan had been to present a workshop on
maternal and child health in Morocco to the trainees. Unfortunately,
after three nights in the hotel, the same hotel that I stayed at for
three months during training two years before, the transportation
strike prohibited everyone from coming to the site, so a friend and I
had come up to training essentially for no reason. That being said, it
was fun getting to know some of the other volunteers better, and
hanging around what was our old stomping ground for three months. I
also went on a wild-goose-chase to try to find some examples of
documentation that are used at clinics for pregnant women which was
rather entertaining, and tried (knowing it was futile, but worth a
shot) to buy an IUD at a pharmacy. Good times, especially singing
Juanes in the hotel room at the top of my lungs with someone else who
understands how much fun it is to belt out French and Spanish music.

I had a choice: get stuck in Azilal (a small cute mountain town, but
without much there) or Rabat, the capitol with western food and lots
of other PCVs, with a free ride. So, a few days early, I left for COS
medicals. This meant a rather entertaining ride up, and a couple days
to do the touristy things that I'd never done up there: a mausoleum,
the Chellah: old ruins with beautiful gardens and a stunning view,
several visits to the American club (my wallet felt that one, but
Mexican salads with bacon and Root Beer floats?!).

It also meant that, for the first time since I've been in-country, I
was able to go to church, on Easter, no less! It was fantastic and I
had shivers as we sang traditional Easter songs and West African
music… the church has a very diverse population. After the service, a
few of us had traditional Easter lunch at the American club: it cost a
fortune to me, but was well worth it: stuffing, cranberry sauce, ham
and turkey, iced tea, salad, fruit salad, mashed potatoes and gravy…
and coffee… for $8.

I was fortunate enough to get all my exams done the first day of
medicals and switched appointments with people who had been stuck
because of the still ongoing strike. Unfortunately, the strike made it
impossible

2009-03-13T12:46:00.001-07:00

March 12, 2009

Wow! So much to catch up on. (And a very belated happy birthday to my mother!)

As a quick update: still no answer whether or not I'm extending an extra six months or not. I haven't heard from Peace Corps, and I keep debating whether or not it's worth it, though I'm still leaning towards staying if the opportunity arises. We'll see!

Today was a crazy day, in a good way. My morning started the way many mornings start: watching movies and listening to podcasts while eating breakfast, which extends into early afternoon. I made myself go out of the house to visit my favorite family, since due to the nomad festival I went to this weekend and VSN training (read on), I haven't seen them
in two weeks.

They were as wonderful as always. Nothing warms my heart the way that Touda smiles and welcomes me with her warmth and expressions that show that she truly is happy to see me. I sometimes feel like most of the community still sees me as an oddity, or an outsider. They're
friendly, but it's not a true friendship. This is mostly my fault, as it's really difficult and energy draining to maintain a real friendship here but it makes what I have with Touda and Souad even
more special. I love being able to be myself, laughing, and whispering with them.

One of her twin daughters (and I hope nobody that knows Touda and speaks English happens upon this blog) confided to me that she has a text-message boyfriend crush (she's 14) and that I was a loyal friend for not telling anyone in town about it, which flattering and endearing. I also got Touda to accompany me to give my condolences to a family. I love that she's so willing to go with me to sibas (celebrations after births), sedacas ("charity" couscous parties), weddings, and to give condolences to families who have lost someone because if I don't know what to say, she'll whisper it in my ear, she'll make excuses for us to go when the timing is right, and she'll make sure I'm culturally appropriate. You'd think after two years in Morocco that I'd know by now, and I mostly do, but I love having her to guide me through it anyway.

The story of this death is tragic. It's ridiculous: there have been three very tragic deaths of Moroccans who I've known peripherally in the last few months. They've all been young and accidental. One of them is the brother of a teacher at a friends' site who I have worked
with a few times. Last November, when we covered her elementary school in a few hours doing toothbrushing lessons, he worked with me. In December or January, he drowned while swimming in the river. He was 17. The second death was a good friend of mine's best friend. She was 19, and essentially lived with my friend as a host sister and best friend for two years. Her dreams were far-reaching beyond her provincial town, and she had high hopes for the future, but died from a fast-acting flu after being sick three days.

The woman who died in my town was in her mid or late twenties and died while giving birth to her third child. Her oldest son is three, her second son is two. The girl, now nine days old, is living with her grandparents now. When we went to see the family so I could give my condolences, the oldest boy was playing around but it was obvious he still didn't get it. I don't know how she died, though I do know it was a home birth, but she did manage to get in the ambulance to go to the hospital in my souk town. Her husband is mourning, as they had a
really good relationship, and her children are motherless at an exceedingly young age.

I don't know how to react to these deaths; I haven't cried, but I do mourn for them in my own way. After expressing condolences to all of them and trying to play with the oldest son (unsuccessfully; peek-a-boo was okay, but he was still to wary to approach the "crazy foreigner") I went back to Touda's for awhile, then decided to go home.

I ran into my teacher friend, and decided, since several people today had already told me, "Congratulations! You look stronger!" (translation: "You look great, now that you've gained some weight!") that I'd walk the mile and a half to her house and back for the extra exercise (reason number 234 for staying an extra six months: I'm sure to lose weight in the heat of the summer!). I had coffee but no cake at her house, and decided to walk back right as the sun was going down.

About four minutes into the walk, I came upon some ladies walking in
the same direction. "Salaam u aleikum!" I greeted them. The younger
one asked if I was going to "ighrm" (my town) and I said yes. She then
proceeded to hand her elderly mother off to me and said, "great, go
with her!"

It's normal, especially at night, for people to walk each other
places. I was a bit apprehensive, as the woman looked pretty frail and
a little annoyed since I was trying to keep my heart rate up, but it
saved the younger woman a two-mile walk, so I agreed and took the
woman's hand.

She didn't know me, but had seen me around. I was amazed with this
woman, Luhou. She was "almost 70" but I barely had to slow my pace and
she kept up. She understood everything I said, which is rare even with
younger women, most people have to get used to "my version of
Tashelheit," and was very practical. I found out that she was going to
a family members' house because her niece was taking off the white
clothes that marked the mourning of her husband.

About half-way to where she was going, a car drove by. "Do you want me
to flag it down and see if they'll take you where you're going?"

"No, of course not," she responded, matter of factly, "We're almost there!"

I mentioned how beautiful the weather was. "I love spring," I said.

"Oh, spring," she responded, "you know, I love Rabat in spring. I was
just there visiting one of my sons and they took me around to see
everything. Everything! The park, the beach, the houses…"

"Do you like Rabat?" I asked her.

"Oh, yes. I have family there, what isn't there to like about it?"

She held my hand until she was at her family's house (which is
incidentally, where I pay my rent; her sister's son is married to my
landlord's daughter) and then I was on my way home… or so I thought.

Two women who looked familiar but who I didn't know stopped me and
asked if I'd "look at their brother who can't walk." I warned them I
wasn't a doctor but would see what I could do.

I got to their house, an old-style mud house that is less
modern-feeling than mine, walked through their soot-filled kitchen
with an indoor mud bread oven, and went to meet Ali.

I wish I knew what kind of illness he has: he's in his mid-twenties,
hasn't been able to walk since he was two (and his legs are locked up
and weak), is blind, and doesn't leave one room.

What was amazing was his smile, his ability to respond to some
questions, and the care that his sisters gave him. There are five
people living in the house, three sisters, Ali, and his brother who
also has medical problems and is on medicine for Parkinsons' disease.
They don't have regular work, but somehow manage with love and respect
for their siblings. I promised to try to do what I can to help, but I
don't know what can be done in the next two months.

Today was an interesting, energizing day, to say the least…

***

What else has been going on since I last blogged? A lot, I suppose:

- A few health lessons
- VSN training
- Nomad Festival

(Yes, all this in under a month)

I'll try to be brief. "Try" is the operative word.

Really, I suppose I've only done two health lessons recently. The day
after I last blogged, I was able to a lesson on pregnancy care for 33
women in town. I was really happy with how it went, especially since
women seemed to love the pictures of fetuses at various stages of
growth. They had never seen anything like that before. I also loved
being able to draw a uterus on the blackboard and explain things like
why women have a menstrual cycle. It's such an integral part of life
and sometimes I think many of us take for granted understanding why
women menstruate, what purpose it serves, and even how things like
ovulation and implantation work.

That next Saturday, however (2/21), the health lesson did not go as
well as I had planned. But for that, I have to back up a little.

I worked with a womens' association in my souk town a few weeks before
to do a general hygiene/cold lesson for 40 women in town. At the same
time, another association woman talked about intimate hygiene to the
women, such as how to wash, bathroom hygiene, what underwear is best,
how to prevent yeast infections, etc. The president's (of the
handicapped association where two of my Peace Corps friends work) wife
is a member of the women's association, and through a friend, asked me
to present what I thought was the other part of the lesson: the
feminine hygiene part. This would have made sense because the woman
who originally taught it only speaks Arabic, and the association women
speak mainly Tashelheit.

I put off the lesson plan until the night before because I really
don't want to talk about it and am not comfortable with the vocabulary
(there are no unshameful words for most intimate parts of female
anatomy) and I dreaded having to demonstrate or draw on the board how
to wipe from front to back rather than back to front. I added some
other important elements to the lesson plan, and presented it to 13
women and girls, with several faux pas.

When I finished, the association presidents' wife said, "Okay, now
talk about nutrition and hygiene and…" and she proceeded to list
everything in the lesson I had done before and was much more
comfortable with. A miscommunication! She hadn't asked me to do the
intimate hygiene lesson, but my favorite lesson which is much more
mellow and interactive and that I enjoy presenting. I was rather
shocked and embarrassed.

Luckily, my plan is to go into town tomorrow and do that lesson with
the girls and boys, men and women of the association. It should be
fun.

Dmi yadnin?

I spent almost a week preparing for and leading a VSN (Volunteer
Support Network) training in a friend's site a bit up north. I don't
know how much I've talked about VSN before, but it's a peer counseling
active listening program, and interested volunteers go through a
three-day training. This is the second one I have helped to facilitate
and they are a lot of fun, though, when it was all said and done, I
ended up being out of site almost a full week because of it.

Though the better part of me thought I should go back to site and stay
there, a part of me really wanted to go to the 6th annual Nomad
Festival down in M'hamid el Ghizlane, the other part of Morocco with
sand dunes. Eventually, I talked myself into going, and had less than
a day to pack after VSN before leaving on the long trek down south.

The festival was both awesome and disappointing. I realized I really
like Zagora province, even if it is hotter then lafa, I invested in
some Tuareg jewelry, stayed in a tent barely big enough to hold four
ponjs for a few nights, and had, all in all, a great time. The first
night, the music was in the baby-dunes.

It was majority Moroccan audience, and the acts included a rather
interesting new age/vaudevillian crazy French woman singing about "Oh,
les histoires, les histoires, les histoires, ah ha ha ha!" and
feinting fainting on top of her synthesizer (yes, I have a video), a
duet from Cameroon who was rather fantastic, and a little boy in the
audience who was the happiest, most energetic dancer that I've seen
since I've been in country. A guy from our campsite who we all quickly
befriended took us there in his 4x4 (though we all got out to push a
little white Fiat out of the sand on the way), and we came back to a
bowl of hot harrira.

The next morning, after exploring small M'Hamid, we spent a few hours
playing drums and making up Tam/Tash songs in our friends' shop, after
sleeping until 11 and walking down the sandy streets. It's amazing:
there are no real dunes in M'Hamid; the largest I saw might have been
20 feet high the night before, but it's literally a town built in sand
desert: small piles of sand surround some of the mud walls, and
everything of mine was covered in sand when I got home. It was a very
chill place—touristy, yet subdued. I bought a full-body wrap on a whim
because I loved the colors and patterns and wore it for the rest of
the day. A friend of mine bought a few Tuareg outfits, and we went
crazy dancing in the campsite.

That night, the concert was in the center of town. There was a
fantastic singer from Spain who is now living in Casa: the band was
Barbarita y su Bamboli. I met her afterwards and she invited us to
hang out in Casa sometime. Really cool music, really nice band.

Before the concert, our friend took some of us off-road to a sandy
campsite with a group of Belgian tourists who were about to go on a
5-day trek. It was very tempting to throw caution to the winds and go
with them. I couldn't imagine hiking out to the 300-meter dunes for
five days but it'd have been awesome. We had fun nibbling on the food,
drinking tea and "red tea," dancing, and eating Belgian chocolate.

The next day was rather interesting. We ate a late breakfast (see a
theme emerging?) and went to the "exchange with the nomads." This
ended up being driven out to a douar three kilometers outside of town
to a small village. We wandered around a bit, herded rather
energetically to our chagrin by some of the festival organizers. It
was bizarre at first, but at the end, all of the women separated from
the men and we went to the neddi: women's center and were greeted by
enthusiastic singing and dancing. I befriended some very little girls
(who spoke only Arabic… one liked to show off singing the Arabic
alphabet for me), and all in all had fun until the men came in and
announced thank-yous. About half of the women covered their faces
because of the men's cameras.

Though it was about a 10 hour trip each way, almost, all in all it was
great and a whole lot of fun.

All right! I have to get some things done for tomorrow. Take care!

2009-02-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

February 18, 2009

I'm busy.

It is a fantastic feeling. I have more opportunities for work than I
have time for, for the first time in my service. For once in my life,
I'm proud of myself for making the connections, for being persistent
in certain ways, and for collaborating in ways that I think are
important. It's taken a long time, but I'm the first person in my
site, so it's normal to take time to establish the mission of Peace
Corps and volunteers.

I'm also seven pages in on a list of "what I will miss about Morocco."
I'm a sentimental romantic; what can I say?

Last week was COS (Close of service) conference in Rabat, the capitol.
We were back in the fantastic four-star hotel where I spent my first
few nights in Morocco, March of 2007. I heard the same delightful call
to prayer from the mosque in the middle of downtown (the most
beautiful call to prayer I've heard in country), oohed and aahed over
the presence of a bathtub and bidet in the bathroom, and relished the
free myriad display of salads, fish every day for lunch, and cereal
and strong coffee in the mornings.

Getting there was difficult, as the Titchka (pass of death) was snowed
closed. The gate to the pass closed probably less than 20 minutes
before my bus pulled up, and we stayed on the road, blocked in by
other cars and busses for three hours. The bus's ceiling had a hole in
it and I was snowed on in the cold. The good news was that it kept
snowing once the road finally opened, so not only was the bus slow on
the hairpin turns, but I couldn't even see how high up we were or
whether or not the ice meant we were on the road! It was the easiest
(but probably most dangerous) trip over the Titchka so far, though I
was disappointed to be in Marrakech so late.

The next day, after the train up to Rabat, I roomed with a good
friend, and realized that I was on better terms with everyone from my
stage than I've ever felt. Everything came full circle as we wrote on
the pieces of poster paper around the room, answering questions such
as, "What I will miss the most about Morocco is…" or "When I
see/hear/taste/smell… it will remind me of Morocco." I wish I had
written some of the answers down for posterity. The sessions were
better than I anticipated.

People who had already visited home during their service gave
cautionary tales. "Don't stare at people when you go home, it makes
people uncomfortable." "Don't touch people unnecessarily, lean on
them, grab their knees, or hold hands with your friends the way we can
here." "Don't bring up not using toilet paper or the specifics of
gastrointestinal issues in polite conversation." "Don't feel like you
can talk to everyone on the street, bus, or grocery stores in the US."
"Don't forget to take your ID to a bar because they probably won't let
you in." "Don't wave back to catcalls." "Don't think that people
around won't understand English." "Don't eavesdrop on other
conversations and jump in." The sad thing is that I could see myself
doing any of these things.

Nights involved Lebanese food, Mexican food (a new restaurant in Agdal
where you can get a taco salad and frozen margarita with salt!
Phenomenal!), pizza and salad with bacon (!), and a night at Yacout
where we danced our hearts out to a live band playing a variety of
songs; Volare was the highlight of my night.

I had low expectations for the RPCV panel but found it was one of the
best parts of the conference. They had amazing jobs working with NGOs
or USAID, the US Embassy, other governmental organizations… but they
all came back from the Peace Corps and waited tables for awhile before
they got their feet on the ground. What I took away was that PC is
like a giant fraternity or sorority: incredible networking with some
amazing people, and even if I go home and struggle for awhile, that
doesn't mean that I can't do what I want in the future.

The last day, we had a reception and met with ministry officials,
embassy staff, and other partner NGOs and governmental organizations.
It went well, and I always enjoy myself in the island of green at the
office. I returned the next morning for a discussion with one of my
program staff members about possibly extending service and a check-up
with one of our doctors.

A friend and I traveled through Fez to get home, which meant that I
didn't have to take the Titchka, but I did end up increasing my travel
time by quite a bit and the ride from Fez to my souk town is
ridiculously long (12 hours… I had to break it up over two days
because of stomach bugs).

I found probably the best deal in Fez for a leather jacket, but prefer
what I've found in Marrakech, surprisingly. I love that about Morocco,
that people will sometimes even potentially lose a sale to help
someone find what they want. J and I headed to the famous large
tanneries in the morning, because things close early on Fridays. We
made it to one place (there is no way to see the tanneries without
walking through a leather shop to a terrace with a view from above of
the working tanneries), fought the "hard sale" by insisting at the
shop with the view of the tanneries that we only wanted to look and
not mint to smell or a tour (the tanneries do not smell as bad as
tourbooks imply!), and went up to look at the colored dyes and ancient
labyrinth of pits. I tried, using baby-talk Darija, to get the
salesmen at the shop to tell me whether or not I could have a jacket
made instead of one right off the shelf.

After realizing the search was futile, the amused salesman took me to
talk to first a Berber speaker to laugh at my talking to him, then to
a man who I later found out was the owner of the shop. He said he knew
Peace Corps, he flirted shamelessly in Arabic to the point that I was
embarrassed, then we left.

As J and I left the shop, he passed us, then in English with an almost
flawless American accent said, "well, I'm American too… I lived in New
Jersey for years…" We got rid of him, but a few blocks later in the
serpentine labyrinth of the Fez souks, I turned around and asked him
if he knew where I could have one made.

He took me through winding alleyways to a shop with women sitting over
sewing machines, telling me that I could get them for wholesale price
here. The more I saw, the more I didn't like, but I got his number and
told him I'd think about it and come back next time I was in Fez.

I love that: the owner of a leather shop taking me somewhere where I
could buy a jacket wholesale. I'm sure he'd get a cut, but still. God,
I love Morocco. (That being said, it's worth 300Dh more for me to get
what I want, if I'm going to spend the money).

I also made connections with an association in Fez that I'd work with
if I didn't live 13 hours away (and if I spoke Arabic), had a shop
owner remember me from when I was there with S from home back last
June, made a few purchases that were unplanned, and enjoyed a
different style of Moroccan escargot: still better than French!

Even when I had to stop and spend the night alone on the way home, I
met a new volunteer who was a lot of fun, and we cooked dinner at his
house. Nothing was ideal, travel-wise on this trip, but it always
ended up working out.

Now, my schedule is packed. And I love it!

Today, I finally broke into the school in my site. I don't want to get
into the details of how much of a frustration it was not to be able to
teach health lessons to my kids in my own site at the school, nor do I
want to get into how annoying it was that a certain teacher at the
school insisted I give the kids all toothbrushes (since a nearby
volunteer did) even though he had been the one blocking me doing
lessons for the last year and a half in the first place (I said I'd
try; he said don't try, DO it. I didn't scream. That took control. I
also didn't tell him that if he had let me do this in the first place,
maybe I could have enough time to find toothbrush donations for all
the students. Oh, no. I was good.).

Some of the teachers were amazing. Some were less than amazing. In
several classrooms, I cut the lessons short because of a latent
hostility that was emanating from where the teacher stood in the back,
arms crossed, glaring at me. The most shocking was a man I had never
seen before in my two years here: he had a beard, but I couldn't tell
you anything else about him, truth be told, because he was always
looking down around me.

I knew that he knew I was coming: I had seen the mudir (principal)
walk into his classroom and tell him. So I stepped up to the open
door. He didn't acknowledge my presence. I knocked. He, without
looking at me, walked to the back of the room, sat down at an empty
desk, and started writing.

The students all looked at me expectantly, so I stepped in and said
"salaam u aleikum." And, since the teacher made no move to walk to the
front of the class or stop me, I did my lesson. He never looked up
from what he was writing. Once, head still down, apparently reading
something, he elucidated on something I said in Arabic. When I was
done, I said goodbye, thanked the teacher and walked out the door.
Only then did I get a "lla y-awn"- a way to say goodbye, literally
"May God help you."

It confused me. I wasn't hurt or angry, but I wondered what I had done
to offend the man so gravely that he wouldn't even look at me. I
recharged during lunch break at my friend's house and asked her twin
daughters about him.

"Oh, he's asunni."

Apparently, his way of practicing Islam means that he doesn't look at,
touch, or talk to any woman except his wife. I told my friend I
thought maybe he didn't like me, or maybe he didn't like foreigners.
"He doesn't like women," was her response. I don't know if I interpret
it in that way, but the way she and a neighbor talked about it, it was
offensive to them. It's strange to me that it hurts my heart and soul
and dignity with practices like men eating before women, or men having
somewhere nicer to pray than women, but I almost felt like his
averting of his eyes and speaking only when necessary was a sign of
respect.

The afternoon was mainly younger students and friendlier teachers, and
I had a lot more fun with them. One teacher even called me back an
hour after finishing the lesson in his classroom and had me answer a
question that came up after I had left. The teacher of the class of
middle school-level students invited me to come back on Friday to talk
about nutrition (!), and some of the other teachers seemed open to me
coming back another time. So, despite a few challenges, all in all I
was happy with how it went (and my stamina to teach in 10 classrooms
in one day! I had planned to split up 12 classes over 3 days to keep
up my energy…).

I don't want to get into all the headaches to get me into the
schools, but the fact that today worked out so well was really thanks
to my nurse and doctor at the clinic who went to bat for me and
essentially manipulated me in. I didn't know my nurse was planning it
until this morning (he was "stupefied" with how much trouble I was
having), and when he told me his plan, I told him he was cheating.
"Yes," he said, "but I don't benefit from the cheating, and you don't
benefit from the cheating. The students are the ones who benefit, so
that's worth it." And it was handled in such an appropriate way that
really, it was all-around a positive day.

Tomorrow, enshallah, I'll teach a group of women in town about
pregnancy care. The next day, enshallah, I'll try to go to the
middle-school aged group and talk to them about nutrition, if it ends
up that it really works out. Saturday, I'll go to my souk town: I'm
"late" on two lessons at the Association des Amis des Handicappes
there, and I'll talk to two associations to see how the status is on
several projects. Next week I have a birthday party, at least one
lesson at an association in town; then I'm head trainer for a VSN
(Volunteer Support Network: peer counseling/active listening)
training… then only two weeks until I have to be back in Rabat for
medical exams, then spring camp a week after that if I'm assigned one
this year… then one month left of service…

Time flies. FLIES.

2009-01-30T05:33:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2009

I don't know what it is about this winter, but I seem to be sick a lot more than I was last year. I cannot wait for warm weather; at least the warmish weather that hits from March to May. It's strange thinking I won't really pass another one of those blazing hot summers here—it's a nice thought but a bizarre one.

As far as work goes, there are successes and frustrations. I'm annoyed at some of the differences in work styles between the association I've started working with in my souk town: they get things done (and we're hosting two women's health days in town this weekend and next weekend, inshallah) but they maneuver within the culture in different ways, which makes me wonder how much I'll be able to get done before I COS. In addition, I've said yes to being lead trainer for a Volunteer Support Network training late next month, I have COS (Close of Service) conference in about two weeks (with a potential weekend traveling to Fez or somewhere else fun on the way back), and will have to go up to Rabat for COS medicals again in March. If I choose to do Spring Camp again, that's another week out of my site.

Last Saturday, I went to a douar outside of my souk town to do a health session with the women there. It was potentially the most rewarding two hours I've spent in country. I met an association leader by accident when I was making photocopies for the World AIDS Day booth, and he told me I should go to his association to do a health lesson for the women there. I thought it would probably not happen, but said okay. It ends up it was something both of us wanted, and we were both very happy with the results.

I framed the lesson about how to not get the common cold, as that's something that it seems like a third of the population here has during the winter at any given time. Something that seems basic that I've learned: if you teach things that are pertinent to the people at the time that you teach it, people are much more involved and interested. That's why the pregnancy lessons for pregnant women at the clinic always go over so much better than diarrhea lessons for the general population.

In any case, I was proud of the lesson (it addressed how you get the cold: a virus; how to prevent virus transmission by healthy hygiene habits, and how to stay strong and healthy in order to fight off the virus in case it is transmitted, which all took about an hour and a half). It is a different tribe than that of Tamazitinu, so the language was a little different, but I still stood in front of the group and held my own.

I had information prepared from previous lessons on everything from dental hygiene to HIV/AIDS, birth control, and home births. Even though there were 75 women crammed into a small room for an hour and a half putting up with my lessons in broken Tam, when I told them I could answer questions on any of those topics, they told me that they wanted to hear it all; I should stay as long as I wasn't tired to talk about it. I think all in all I spoke (with demonstrations and visual aids, of course, and while trying to make it as participatory as possible) for about 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was exhausting but wonderful to have an audience who cared and who were interested (though apparently the word we use for "umbilical cord" ("tabot") means something dirty in their dialect, so everyone looked shocked at first and then giggled incessantly as I tried to explain that it's important to use a new razor or something that has been sterilized to cut the umbilical cord during home births.).

I hope this Saturday goes as well as least; I'm a bit more intimidated with the women who are coming, and the fact that I'm presenting with the association in my souk town. It's been frustrating but ultimately good working with them; the women are amazing, but they don't understand that I have to leave in May, and that I don't and cannot live in my souk town. In the culture here, it's normal to stay a few days at a time places and just stay with friends there. I can stay with the women from the association if I have to spend the night, so it makes sense that if we have to meet two days in a row, or two or three days in a week, that it wouldn't be a problem. For me, this is a problem, and I'm exhausted from waking up early, spending hours in town for a meeting with so little substance that it could be sent in a text, deciding ultimately to meet later on the next day…meaning I have to rush back home, spend the night, then wake up early to get back to town or spend the night at people's houses (which is always slightly awkward and very exhausting, entails having to go out and find an appropriate gift for the family, and feeling like I'm making them entertain me), or spend money to spend the night at the fantastic-for-the-price $6/night hotel.

For example, the other day, I thought we were meeting about this Saturday's project as well as other potential initiatives in the future. I ended up spending two hours running errands with the president, then reading something in French that she didn't understand and sitting around as she worked on other things. I tried several times to get back to what was at hand; she said she was busy and had to go cook lunch. I set a time to meet with her later in the day; this ended up being sitting in the clinic as she had a doctor translate the French to Arabic. I left, after a 5 minute conversation that I essentially forced about Saturday and the future.

January 28, 2009

I cannot believe that my COS (Close of Service) conference is in under two weeks. I'm excited to see everyone, and the spoiled, selfish part of me is very happy that we'll be staying in the same fantastic hotel that we stayed at our first few nights in Morocco: a 5-star (by Moroccan standards, not U.S./European), fantastic place with the roof that looks out over the mosque that I blogged about in March, 2007. I'm a sentimental person who likes ceremony and poetic openings and endings, so spending our COS conference there just weeks before our replacements come into country and begin their training seems to form a nice, neat circle. I'm surprised with all the budget cuts that we can still go there, but a bit excited about it nonetheless.

That being said, I have been able to work with "my ladies" in my souk town to do a hygiene lesson with 40 at-risk women in town. It was pretty awesome, to tell you the truth, though my frustrations continue, which puts a damper on things sometimes. Sunday, my best friend in Tamazitinu and I recruited 35 women for me to repeat the common cold lesson to, and it went over pretty well also. I was particularly excited that we recruited so many people at the last minute, and some of them asked me for more (!), which means that, FINALLY, after being here over a year and a half, I can do good education work in my site with adult women. I'm just frustrated that it's taken until now for reasons that have to do with me as well as the community. I'm tempted to stay another year now that I have the resources, language skills, and people to work with.

2009-01-07T02:50:00.001-08:00

December 6, 2008

I'm sick again and have stayed in the house for the last few days. I don't know if it's just a really nasty cold or something slightly more sinister, but hopefully liquid intake and rest will make it rather short-lived.

On Monday, which was December 1^st, I worked with a women's association in my souk town to do a HIV/AIDS awareness booth at souk, the weekly market. It was a lot of fun, and I'm only disappointed that I found out about the association so late in my service. On Sunday, I met with 8 women in the association who worked the booth with me and we went over how to educate people on HIV/AIDS, what the plan was, and what the message was that we were trying to get out. The tent was a problem we didn't get resolved until about 7 o'clock that night, but we got it set up. I ended up having to spend the night at a hotel in town, though I didn't mind staying online until 11 in the lobby, or the fact that I had a few hours over some hot chocolate to get to know the new volunteer in my souk town, who is awesome.

Monday morning, though not as early as I'd like, we set up and ended up getting information to 1200 people over the period of about 4 hours. People were receptive and asked good questions for the most part, and I was very impressed at the professionalism and openness of the women from the association to discuss things as "hashuma" as condom usage with the men. We also had a nurse from the clinic in town come by for the last two hours, and she yelled at the men to use condoms, but in a way that was direct without being accusatory. She was also great at explaining the effects of HIV/AIDS and some of the intricacies that are difficult for me in Tamazight; I end up describing the virus as a "sickness that is asleep for a few years so you don't know it's there until the sickness wakes up and turns into AIDS…" which works but isn't as precise as I'd like it.

(If you haven't gathered by now, Tamazight is difficult. I speak French and Spanish at least twice as well as Tam even though I've been living here almost two years and the most immersion I've had of French is a month; Spanish only two weeks.)

All in all, I was satisfied with how it went, and was eager to come home and sleep for a day to recover from the stress of doing a project such last minute.

What I didn't realize was that for the next week, I'd only leave the house three times because of being rather disgustingly sick. I know, at home, a cold isn't a big deal. But here, when you have a fever for 3 days, can't breathe through your nose, taste anything, or pop your ears for 4 days, it doesn't get hotter than 50 degrees anywhere, there's no pharmacy within an hour (or nasal spray… and I can't find my Sudafed!), and no appliances like a dishwasher or washing machine or bathtub, it can get really miserable fast. Worse, in some ways, than when I had strep or gastrointestinal things because those are so much more short-lived. The last week has been pretty nasty… and I've learned how interesting it is to literally not be able to taste anything at all. That's never happened to me before, believe it or not, and eating bread or peanut butter (thanks, Mom!), or chicken noodle soup without tasting it is bizarre.

December 9, 2008

Mbrook l'eid!

I'm still not better, though I'm regaining some small sense of smell and taste, which is nice. I forced myself to shower (bucket bath in the cold) today which actually did help me feel better emotionally even if it does maybe make things worse. My friends from home are coming in a few days, so I have a few goals before then that I have to do (pack, clean, some paperwork), but other than that, I'm taking it easy for awhile longer.

Except today, because today is the biggest holiday for Muslims and here in Morocco: L'eid kbir (the big eid). I skipped out on watching the outdoor prayer this morning to sleep in, but dragged myself out mid-morning to wish the neighbors a happy eid and go to seven houses to celebrate. This sounds like a lot, but compared to last year's 31, it's really a little pathetic and I have a feeling I'll be having to explain to people why I didn't go, "digi tawla, digi khamoosh, samhi bizzef, tHlit ghuri welayni uHlgh…"

I tried to be good though; I put on a smile, a jellaba and a hijab-headscarf partially because of the holiday and partially because of the cold. All in all, with lunch and dinner at my friends' house, it was a good day.

January 6, 2009

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (a bit belated!)

I guess it's been awhile since I've blogged. In the last month, some good friends from home came and visited, which entailed a trip to Ouarzazate, Agadir, Essa, and Marrakech. I've blogged about each of these places before, so I'll only stick to new and interesting happenings since last time I've traveled there.

It was great to see my friends; I really love being with them even if we've made a habit of only seeing each other every few years. Unfortunately, after their stay at a swanky riad (Dar Dallah, www.riad-dardallah.com, highly reccomended), the mountain pass, which I sometimes call the pass of death, was a bit too high too fast and I met them, not at the bus station, but at the hospital in Ouarzazate for four hours in the emergency room for altitude sickness. Everything ended up okay, but it was a scary few hours. Luckily (coincidence?), one of the doctors who I met at our Training of Trainers in November was on the bus with them; she also speaks English, so she took good care of them and lent them their phone to talk to me on the way. It also ended up having somewhat of silver lining, as the next day, we went to tea at another person's house nearby that they met on the bus.

Ait Benhaddou was really the only new part of the trip for me: it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an old preserved kasbah where films like Gladiator and Prince of Persia were filmed. After being in-country for almost two years, it was underwhelming, but I'm glad I finally saw it. I was also glad to be able to see the saffron-painting I had heard about: local artists mix tea and saffron and use it like watercolor paint. To bring out the richness of the sepia tones, the dry paper and paint are held over butagas flames. Note to anyone who wants to try this: be sure you use heavy watercolor paper because thin paper will just catch on fire (no, this is not from experience… … … um… yeah… convinced?).

We had fun at my site and souk town, where I showed them the handicap association there and gave my first tour. Two PCVs work there now, but neither were there. I really do love that association though. They also braved the hammam, which was the most crowded and dirty hammam I've been to, and we were treated to couscous and buttermilk at my best friend in town's friend's family.

Agadir, though a surprise stop in order to avoid the Titchka Pass, was fun, and I had a great conversation with my friend as we walked the beach, picking up shells, seaglass, and sea-polished rocks. It was a nice place to relax for a few days, and warmer than anywhere else I've been this winter! I saw (too many!) tourists in shorts and tank tops, we had delightful Indian chicken masala and light, crispy calamari for dinner.

Dramamine knocked me out on the way up the shore to Essa, which is a blessing; last time I made that trip with my parents, my stomach bothered me a little too much. Essa was sort of disappointing for me, as I was tired at this point, the guys at the fish stands at the harbor gave us a good deal but were annoying, and the power going out made it hard to find a simple cup of coffee. The last night of their trip, Christmas Eve, was a lot of fun in Marrakech. After delicious food on the square and spicy tea (paid for by a man from my souk town who heard me speaking Berber to the seller at stand 69—the friendliest spiced tea guy around and who found out that I was his neighbor), and, to my utter disbelief, a man at a random stall in the middle of souk remembering me and talking to me in Tam, we headed up to their fantastic riad for one last game of cards. Christmas morning came, and it was hard to say goodbye.

I thought of going home, but I had been traveling so much that I decided to stay another night in Marrakech to recuperate before the long trek back. Luckily, another PCV was around… which quickly turned into several. I finally made it to the Marrakech tanneries, and found a place that can make me a very good quality, knee-length red soft leather coat for $250 to measure. I still don't know if I can do better, but I am in love with the style, the fact that they will custom-make it for me, and the quality that I saw with the examples. They also said that they could do it in one or two days, which is very fast turn-around. We'll see what happens with my budget, but I'm in love with the coat! Only a month's living allowance here in Peace Corps! Plus the women I talked to were great; not at all like the typical hard-sell Marrakechis, but more like a friend of a friend in town. I trusted them, I guess I should say.

I also walked around the leather souk with a volunteer friend for a few hours, trying to see if I bought the leather separately if it would be cheaper. It wasn't meant to be, although I was very close to buying a beautiful small piece of olive green leather to be made into a handbag. If I had a budget like I did in the US, it would have ended differently, I can tell you that.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I love that I can have things made to my specifications here. Whether it's jewelry, plates, clothes, metalwork, or even just the way I want my grain to be ground, I can draw things out or commission them here and a few days later I have it for very reasonable prices. My friend from the States took advantage of that and, at a tailor in my souk town who is from Tamazitinu, designed on the spot a beautiful dress jacket to be made. I haven't picked it up yet; though it might be ready already. If it's nice, which it should be, I might go online and find some women's dress-suit designs for job interviews in the States. He's promised to make them for me at a fraction of the price for an off-the rack one at home. Now I need to find the designs and fabric that I want.

Enough about getting things hand-made, though my dream now is to build a 3 or 4 room addition to my best friend's family's house here in Tamazitinu (they tell me that for $1200, I can build a kitchen, living room, bedroom, and Western bathroom, and that if I needed to they would even help me rent it out), come back for a few weeks each year, stopping in Marrakech or Fez or Agadir, once life settles down. It's tempting, especially since I trust and love the family.

That night, Christmas night, I tried to convince people to come to Mass with me since I had already missed the Protestant church's service. Instead, everyone opted for a Marjane (think Super-Wall Mart… but because of living without much product variety, it is a small paradise! In my souk town, if I want cheese, I can have Edam or Laughing Cow. Marjane has a whole counter with dozens of varieties… and shampoos! And conditioners! And…and you get the point…) we went again to dinner on the square, but this time it was with a bunch of PCVs. I've started converting people into the love that is the escargot in spicy ginger broth at some of the stalls, and we've discovered that one of the stalls is far superior to the rest, though for the life of me I can't remember the number. There was a skinny, young man on the square that night wearing a pathetically large Santa suit, and I begged some of my friends to take a picture with him.

Somehow, I was talked into staying another night in Marrakech, despite my exhaustion and lack of money, and the next morning, bright and early, we were off to go skiing.

What, you ask, skiing in Morocco? There are two places with skiing, the one near Marrakech is a town called Okaimden. People rent ski equipment on the side of the road, and there are 6 slopes, though the one I stayed at, the easiest of them all, was quite icy. I didn't really know what I was doing, as I've only skied once before, probably 6 years ago for one afternoon, but I managed, after figuring out how to put the skis ON, to snowplow down the bunny slope all afternoon. The hardest part, harder than skiing itself, was the T-bar.

Now, there is a huge slope, a black diamond, that has the highest ski lift in North Africa, and that one was a normal ski lift, with seats. However, the bunny slope merited a strange sort of lift with a bar and a small disc the size of an average dinner plate at the end. You're supposed to hang on, balance with your skis on the ground as you're pulled up, leaning back into the disc. At the end, somehow you disengage and let go, gliding off gracefully…

Hypothetically, that is. The top of the slope had a huge pile of mud at the turn off point, so I saw many faceplants, and I started getting off early after the first two or three rounds when I somehow teetered and tottered off but saw other people hit the ground hard.

I had tried down at the bottom to ski, but I realized that I had to just DO it. There were teachers available for a ridiculously cheap price ($12 for an hour's private lesson for the certified instructors; $5-6 for the "illegal" ones), but I was stubborn and cheap, so I learned on the way down. It was a lot of fun, especially since it was something I just did on a whim and decided on the night before. I only fell once; it was my last time up, and I tried to get off early, but just as I was getting off and hanging onto the disc with my hands, the lift sped up, and it dragged me faster than my skis could handle it and I fell, face-first into the snow. It was actually probably pretty funny to watch.

I headed home the next morning, again, thanks to the Dramamine my friends left, sleeping quite well through most of the Titchka Pass. It's getting easier every time I go on it, (knock on wood). After a day or two of recovering at home, it was New Years, and a friend came over to celebrate. I thought we'd go for a walk in my town and I could show her around since it was her first time over, but we ended up sitting around and talking, literally for two days. I really appreciate friendships, especially new friendships like that, where you can sit and talk for hours and not get bored or cabin fever.

Since she went home, I have been lazy. I've had the girls over a few times, done henna on my hands and the girls', made them pizza, watched movies I picked up in Marrakech, gone out to two sibas (new baby parties), had lunch at my best friends' house, visited a family whose sick daughter I saw in the emergency room in Ouarzazate, visited the family where an old lady passed away, and somehow had an invitation to lunch at a new family's house I don't know very well. I guess that makes me sound busy, but I really haven't been.

That lunch invite was on Friday as my friend was leaving. I accepted, mainly because I was hungry and too lazy to cook lunch. It was fun talking to new people, though they all seemed to know a lot about me, and I didn't feel like an imposition at all because, as I later found out, there were 15 older ladies doing their Friday Qu'ran reading and recitation in their salon. I've run into this group a few times, and really like some of the women in it, like Raquia, my once-toothless but now dentured homestay next-door-neighbor, or Auntie Aicha, the eyeless woman whose appearance at first, I'm afraid to say rather frightened me, but who I now absolutely love and am still awed by how she moves around town and takes care of herself. After lunch, with, as seems to happen often in my town, young and not-so-young ladies asking me how to say vulgar things in English and teaching me, without my asking, dirty names for body parts in Tam, a few of us went in the salon where the old ladies had been praying.

They continued chanting, though I didn't understand it, I was pretty sure it was Berber songs about Islam, chanted in a call and response format, and I found out that the water that they had offered me in the communal cup earlier (that I accepted, at their insistence) was actually holy water that had been chanted upon. It was strange, because they know I am not Muslim, but they insisted on my having a sip as it was passed around after lunch anyway, only afterwards telling me that it was holy. "Water of the Qu'ran," they called it. In any case, I felt somewhat honored to be sitting in the room with them while they chanted, even though it wasn't really a somber moment, and some of the other women my age whispered through it or came and went.

And this all brings me to today. Tomorrow, I will run into town to talk about potential HIV/AIDS education in my souk town; I'll also try to set up a meeting with what the new volunteer in my souk town call "my ladies;" the association I worked with last month.

I can't believe how little time I have left. A part of me can't wait and is eager to take the next steps (namely finding a job), but a part of me is really reluctant to go.

2008-11-30T14:20:00.001-08:00

November 30, 2008

Happy Thanksgiving!

What's been happening since I last updated? Not too much and a lot, all at once. The bad news is that I was stood up almost every day this week by the mudir of the madrasa (principal of primary school), which means the project I've been trying to get off the ground for the last 4-5 months isn't going anywhere. He told me we could meet at a certain time, then was a no-show.

The good news is that tomorrow, which is World AIDS day, I will actually be doing a project in collaboration with an amazing women's association in my souk town. It's a bit intense. I've been wanting to do an AIDS education booth at souk for awhile, and figured World AIDS Day is as good of a day as any. I figured out what I had to do to get it off the ground, and randomly stopped at the hospital in my souk town to ask them a silly question (where is the Pacha's office?). They ended up getting me in touch with this women's association, and in collaboration, we totally re-vamped the project. After struggling for the last few days to find money and a tent (I found both… by 6 pm tonight!), we met today and it was awesome to see all the women learning and reviewing about HIV/AIDS to teach tomorrow at souk.

I'm just sad that I found an association willing and wanting to work with me so close to my end of service.

We'll see how tomorrow goes. I'm excited. J It should be fun and hopefully good.

2008-11-23T07:01:00.001-08:00

November 21, 2008

I believe last time I updated was just after the election; since then, I've actually been relatively busy, which is always good.

The weekend after the election, I went to my friend's site, which is only about 15 k away. She hosted a group of Americans (and one Canadian) during their gap year between high school and college on a Global Labs program. This was a lot of fun, and it's another great organization. I never thought that working with Peace Corps, I'd learn a lot about American organizations that I also believe in.

There were 9 young adults in the program, and they spent two days in her town. The first day, we met up with some English-speaking middle and high school students and had a very interesting cross-cultural conversation. Some tribal rivalries came up, which was something I didn't expect: my site is made up of only one tribe, not two tribes with an unfriendly history. After the activity where we discussed things like wedding traditions, the role of women, movies, music, tribes, the American dream, and education from both perspectives, they broke into two groups, mixed American and Moroccan, and planned out two murals that we would later paint as a group on the wall of the girl's boarding house.

After a group lunch at my friends' house, we all went to the local elementary school, where the volunteers and Moroccan students and a few PCVs broke into groups and did a toothbrushing and dental hygiene in every classroom. It was great seeing the Moroccan students take over after the first lesson or so, and I think the American volunteers had fun helping the children brush their teeth.

Night came, and the PCVs and Global Lab's fearless leader relaxed at home. I might add that cooking was also rather intense during this time: the night before everyone came, a friend of mine who was also there cooked fish Moroccan style… which meant that she sat in front of a bucket of bloody, bone-ridden water deboning and filleting large sardine-like fish for a few hours.

(They were delicious though, and I actually tried something similar tonight. When we bought the fish that first time, they said they would clean them for us, though we didn't do that. I asked them to do it today when I bought a single fish that was about ½ kg. I didn't know what kind of fish it was, but I figured they'd hand it to me in little filets. However, I was running short on time, so as the fish-seller was de-boning, I ran other errands, then came back and picked it up. When I got home, it was there, spine and head and all. Thank God Zika was willing to eat the parts I couldn't figure out how to debone. I ended up deep-frying a few strips, and rather than stuff it with the filling, I made it almost like a Moroccan salsa on top of the fried fish filet strips: minced cilantro and parsley, garlic, salt, diced onion, and lime juice. Fantastic. Really. I'll make it at home.)

Other food adventures included a rather easy sandwich lunch for 13 or 14, spaghetti for that many, and homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese. I will never again eat Campbells tomato soup when it is so easy and delicious to make it from scratch.

The next day we actually painted the murals, then continued the health education lessons. It all went much smoother than I could have hoped for, and I think overall my friend was happy with how it went.

The next week, it really started raining, I got a cold, and I want to say I did something else important, though I can't think of what it was. That Thursday, however, I was off to the provincial capitol for our province-wide training of medical professionals project.

In short, 24 nurses and doctors working in rural areas throughout the province attended a continuing education conference that we worked on with the Ministry of Health and Peace Corps. Education topics included: a session on Peace Corps and what we do, basic hygiene in various arenas and the role of the medical professional, information and discussion regarding how to provide health care for pregnant women in rural areas, STIs/HIV/AIDS, and how to be an effective communicator and educator. There were pluses and minuses, but all in all it was a success. If anyone ever asks me why I studied French in high school, I have to say if it was for nothing other than this weekend, it was worth it.

I've pretty much spent the last week recovering and collaborating on the final report, as well as trying to be social in my community. Today was a great but crazy day…

I started off by going to visit a woman who had given birth three days previously. Last night, I was coming back from visiting a friend (the electricity had gone out, so we sat around telling stories in the dark), a few women in town who I talk to occasionally told me I should go this morning and that if I came and knocked on one of their doors, they'd take me. Okay, no problem. We went, I had the obligatory perfume sprayed liberally all over my jacket, politely denied eating the bitter walnut bark and herbs for the hair, palmed the 5-dirham coin and slipped it to the new mother, oohed and ahhed over the baby… then was taken upstairs to eat taam and udi.

As soon as I think I "know" something, even as simple as traditions when a baby is born in my town, I'm proven wrong. Evidently, every time a baby is born, for a week when people come visit the mother, the family serves taam and udi every morning. Since I had never been in the morning and have always visited in the afternoon, this was new to me, and everyone laughed at my surprise. A few women I haven't seen since the election told me "Mbrook rais!"—congratulations on your new president! And then I headed out, because I've been trying to talk to the principal of the local elementary school for over a month now and we keep missing each other.

On my way, I stopped in the neddi and saw all the women weren't working on normal projects, but were spinning wool into yarn. I wish I had the time to stop and try; I'll have to go back another day soon. Just as I was about to enter the school walls, one of "my" girls came out with a paper for me. "My teacher told me to give this to you." I understood the paper—it was announcing a celebration to accompany the opening of a middle school in my town. The building isn't there yet, but students are meeting with new teachers in the neddi until the building is completed. This is fantastic, because until this year, anyone from my town who wanted their children to have an education past primary school had to send them to a boarding house or to live with family in a bigger town.

I ended up setting up a meeting for next week with the mudir (principal), and headed to a friend's house, who promptly invited me on a picnic/hike next week. Fantastic. Those are always fun, and with a small group of people I know and like, it should really be a great time, if cold. We went out to a sedaqa—a Friday tradition where families will occasionally give "charity" by cooking big plates of couscous for the neighbors. I don't know in my town how much is charity as much as it is just tradition to get together, but they're always fun, and certainly not just for poor people. After the sedaqa, we played soccer with the neighbor kids. I was pleasantly shocked that my friend—a 23-year old unmarried girl—played along.

At 2, I hopped on the afternoon bus into my souk town, hoping to talk to the Pacha's (mayor) office about doing a World AIDS day table at the weekly market next week. I had my letter printed out literally weeks ago, but I kept either running out of time, or showing up when the person I needed to talk to wasn't in. I decided, on a whim, to stop in the Centre de Sante (clinic/hospital) in my souk town to see if they had any suggestions. They did, they corrected my letter, and then put me in touch with a local women's association who might want to help participate, and we set up a joint meeting for all of us on Wednesday. Next week is looking ridiculously busy, which is, as I say, fantastic: meeting with mudir on Monday, hike/picnic on Tuesday, meeting in my souk town on Wednesday, and, if we are able to pull off the AIDS day booth for next Monday, I probably will have to travel back to the provincial capitol on Thursday or Friday to pick up brochures… of course, making it back to my friends' site for the weekend for Thanksgiving and a birthday celebration.

Back on the bus at 4:30, and now I'm at home, listening to podcasts, doing dishes, and cooking the delicious fish, dehydrating bread crumbs on the stove for stuffing, and packing for Thanksgiving #1 tomorrow night. I love days like today.

A few recent recipes:

Apple-Fennel Salad: (In season right now: apples, fennel, mandarin oranges)

4 small apples, preferably yellow or green

1 medium to large bulb of fennel

4 Tbsp olive oil

5 mandarin oranges

1 lemon or lime

pinch of fennel seed

pinch salt

Wash fennel and apples well. If good with a knife, slice apples and white and light green part of fennel in thin, uniform slices. If not, do what I do and dice them uniformly. Section three mandarin oranges and dice; juice remaining two mandarins and lemon, toss with salad, mixing in olive oil. Divide among four plates, sprinkle fennel seed and finely chopped fennel fronds on each plate. Garnish with one large fennel frond.

Orange-Fennel Pepper Stir-Fry

1 red bell pepper, cut in strips

1 yellow bell pepper, cut in strips

1 small to medium bulb fennel, cut in strips (slice in ovals, cut ovals in half)

1 medium red onion, cut in strips

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 mandarin oranges (3- juiced, 1- save skin, 1- separated into segments)

Vegetable oil for sautéing

2 tbs sesame oil

2 tbs soy sauce

1 tsp sesame seeds, toasted

1 tsp fennel seeds, toasted

1 tbs sugar

pinch salt

pinch ginger powder (or if available- pinch ginger powder and sliced fresh ginger)

Sliced green onions

Heat vegetable oil in wok, frying pan, or sautee pan. Add garlic, onion, and fennel, sautee until almost tender. Add pepper, juice of 3 mandarin oranges, sugar, salt, ginger powder, and peel of 1 mandarin orange. Sautee until pepper is crisp-tender, add sesame oil, soy sauce, mandarin segments, and sesame seeds, heat through, serve. Garnish with additional fennel seeds, sesame seeds, and sliced green onions.

Moroccan-Style White-Fish

(not my recipe)

Filets of small fish; can use sardine or fish bigger than sardines (I have no idea what kind of fish I used or that my friend used, to be honest)

Flour

Vegetable oil for frying

Salt

Filling/topping

1 bunch fresh cilantro

1 bunch fresh parsley

2 cloves garlic

Juice from 2 limes

Diced small red onion

Filling:

Finely mince garlic and fresh herbs, add to diced onion and mix with salt and lime juice. Set aside.

Fish:

If using small fish, each fish should have two equal-sized filets. Spread filling thinly on one side of filet; place other filet on top. Coat with flour; deep fry or pan fry until lightly browned. Serve with extra topping.

Seared Filet Mignon with Demi-glace

(What, you didn't believe that my pseudo-vegetarian self would ever cook and enjoy steak? When the U.S. economy is doing what it's doing and I can get filet mignon for under $3.50 a pound, you better believe I'll take advantage of it!)

½-1 kilo filet mignon*

Real butter, softened

4 cloves garlic

Salt and pepper

Rosemary

Small amount of crumbled bleu cheese

Rub raw garlic cloves on both sides of each filet. Slather each filet with softened butter on each side; not too much is needed. Lightly rub in salt, pepper, and rosemary. Slice garlic cloves and add a few thin slices on each side of filet.

Sear for about 2-3 minutes on each side on Teflon pan or grill for 2-3 minutes on each side until you reach the desired doneness. Just before taking off heat, sprinkle thin layer of bleu cheese on one side. Finish for a minute or two in oven on medium heat. Drizzle plate with demi-glace, place filet, and garnish with sprig of fresh rosemary.

Demi-glace:

This recipe makes more than needed, but demi-glace can be frozen for months. If you have a freezer, pour remaining demi-glace in ice cube trays, and pop them out as needed for soups, meats, or anything else that used demi-glace. I'm new to demi-glace, but "Sidi Google" will help with ideas.

4-8 cups of beef or lamb stock (or boullion/Knor cubes with water)

2 cups red wine

1 bay leaf

Tsp pepper

Tsp salt

Tsp sage or thyme or both

3 cloves garlic

As much butter as you dare to use, depending on desired fat content

Bring first 7 ingredients to a boil, then simmer until reduced to the point where it will coat a spoon. Just before serving, add butter to portion that is going to be used for the night's meal; freeze the rest for another day without the butter.

2008-11-05T05:42:00.001-08:00

October 20, 2008

It's been a busy last few weeks, which is good!

Two weeks ago, we had one of our quarterly delegue meetings with the provincial ministry of health representatives. It went well for the most part, though one of my friends and I have to go back on the 28^{th to meet and discuss the final steps for the Training of Trainers next month. I'm excited and hope it all goes well.}

On my way there, I stopped at my friend's association. He is a SBD—Small Business Development—volunteer and works at a handicapped association in my souk town. I think I blogged about the first time I visited the association. This time was no different: amazing. Not only did I get to spend time with incredible people, but I also was invited to try the pottery wheel and made a small cup that they told me they will fire for me. Awesome, and even more awesome that my teacher was a handicapped member of the association.

I also had my friend over the day before that; she's my teacher friend from around Marrakech who speaks pretty good English. She always has me over to her house, so I decided I had to have her over for lunch, and made what I considered to be fancy food for her: spaghetti with tomato sauce and filet mignion. Unfortunately, I don't think she liked either one of them. We did have fun chatting though.

I had some other friends from my town over to eat lunch last weekend, which was also fun and slightly crazy. We played cards, played music, ate, and just generally spent time together. For them, I made pasta with meat sauce, which, again, did not go over as well as I had hoped. Oh, well. I think it is all about what people are used to, and not a slight on my cooking ability.

However, from last Monday through Friday, I was able to participate in what is potentially one of the most effective and incredible charities I've ever seen in action: Operation Smile. If you have extra money sitting around (I know, not during this economy!) and you don't want to donate to any Peace Corps project grants (www.peacecorps.gov), I can tell you that from what I saw, Operation Smile would be a great place to donate: they do good work that really does make a difference, it seems to be working slowly but surely to become sustainable in the countries they go to, and the surgeries are life-changing for the children and adults.

We went thinking we would do health lessons, but I got conscripted almost immediately into translation the first two days for medical records. It reminded me of my old job, when I'd go through medical records with Spanish-speakers occasionally… but this time in Berber! It was slightly hectic, especially since there were no birthdates for many of the patients we screened, or trying to figure out how to get some of the people from very rural areas to give us the most complete address possible, but good to see so many people able to come out, and different associations that helped get people to the site.

After two days of screening and talking to the awesome volunteers with OpSmile, I stayed for two days of surgeries. The organization brought an incredible crew: nurses, medical records people, 5 plastic surgeons, 4 anesthesiologists, a child life therapist, dentist, pediatrician, and speech therapist, all of whom donated almost two weeks out of their busy schedules to volunteer. They came from all over the world, and were all very generous with us as well, something completely unexpected, letting us use their shower at their hotel (there were 10 volunteers sleeping on a local volunteer's floor!), or buying us a drink or two at night, or even just by showering us with leftover toothbrushes or American chocolate. Peanut butter cups have never tasted so delicious!

The surgery days were even more hectic, but surprisingly well-organized. The first morning of surgeries, I helped facilitate new patients: filling out medical records with them, and then finding the pediatrician, medical records photographers, surgeons, dentists, speech therapists, and nurses, who were spread around the hospital, translating for the patients. That afternoon, I spent most of my time in pre-op, talking and playing with the children who were waiting for surgeries, doing health lessons with them and their parents, and comforting the parents to the best of my ability. The kids were surprisingly well-behaved after, in some cases, 24 hours in the same room without being able to eat or drink.

The next day, Friday, I did the same thing, but was also able to do something I never imagined I would be able to do: I observed some of the surgeries in the OR. We scrubbed out, wearing shoecovers, masks, hair nets, and scrubs, and were able to watch four different surgeries at once—including my friend's baby girl, my tutor's cousin. There were four surgeries going on at a time, and one of the people who was photographing before and after pictures of the children explained what was going on at each step. It was a lot simpler of a procedure than I imagined.

I left a little early on Friday to go home, something that was hard but that I felt like I should do. Zika (my cat) had been home alone for 4 nights, and I was worried about having left a housekey with a neighbor. I was glad for two reasons to have come back when I did- Zika was stuck on the roof (!), and the next morning, I woke up with strep throat—definitely not something I wanted around children just coming out of surgery!

It was hard to leave because there was something almost magical about being able to participate, however peripherally, in Operation Smile. I don't know if it was just being surrounded with other people who believe in public health and volunteerism, if it was some of the encouragement that I received from them, or being able to share in something unique and wonderful as one of their missions. Whatever it was, it was hard to leave, and I hope to be able to be involved with them in some way after my Peace Corps service is over.

Now, I'm at home with strep throat, though I feel much better today than yesterday. I have to run into town this afternoon to get amoxicillin, and will hopefully have enough time to update the blog then!

Peace!

October 24, 2008

Evidently, I didn't get a chance to blog when I went into town last week. I was able to pick up this year's Carte de Sejour: like a green card, and I met my new gendarme commander of the brigade around my souk town. It was an interesting conversation, to say the least. This is the third or fourth new commander in the last year and a half, and he wanted to make sure he knew that our safety (our meaning the few foreign residents in the around 100,000 person area) was his number one priority even above citizens. This was a little uncomfortable, to tell the truth, because though I appreciate being safe, I hate the fact that we're treated differently, even if it's better. It's a privilege that I don't think I deserve. He was shocked that we chose to come to Morocco to work in the countryside and learned Berber (and set about translating three or four proverbs from Tassousite Berber into French for me), and said that we need to be careful because people here are thieves, which is the opposite of what I've experienced. It was an intense little conversation, but I'm glad that I have my carte and don't have to carry my passport around.

I spent the night at one of my friends' houses (the English-speaking teacher), which is always fun. We woke up in the morning and went jogging, and I was gleeful to be able to watch a few hours of CNN while she taught classes. I stayed at her house most of Wednesday because we thought the principal of the schools would come to drop something off and I wanted to talk to him. Instead, I stayed until three; he still hadn't shown up, so I went to the school instead and got conditional permission to teach lessons there. There's still a lot of red tape to go through, but I was excited nevertheless that he is on board with everything.

The next morning, bright and early, I got up to do another Equippe-Mobile run. It was amazing, even if I had to walk to the sbitar at 4:45 am to be there on time. The first two places were around where I spent a week last spring, so the two teachers at the school remembered me, and shockingly, so did the children. They answered correctly every question I posed about the toothbrushing lesson last April: how many times a day it's important to brush, what to use if you don't have toothpaste (salt), what foods are good and bad for dental health… even my name and what country I was from (!). Most of them were able to understand the basic hygiene lesson that I gave them, which was good.

The next stop was literally the small cluster of houses I stayed with for a week, and not only did they all remember me and ask me why I hadn't come back, but one family had prepared me a bag of almonds and pomegranates from their farm to bring back, and just the sincerity in their eyes as they made me promise to come back was really meaningful. It was rewarding as well, because they also answered some questions about past lessons correctly, and I got to see the six-month old baby girl that was due around when I was there. I remembered sitting with the mother and going over how to have a safe, clean home birth, and though I don't know how much she followed, her baby was beautiful and healthy.

I have to go back.

October 25, 2008

(continued from above)

The third big stop was at another school in the next village. I was able to do a toothbrushing lesson and give out 90 toothbrushes, one to each child, that some of the Operation Smile volunteers gave me before I left. Some of the women were interested and engaged in both the basic and dental hygiene lessons, though I spent most of the time there with the kids. At their insistence, I gave my phone number to a few of them and have already gotten a call from one of them today when they went to a place with "rizo" (phone reception).

The last stop was at what I think is one of the most interesting "bled" (countryside) mosques I've seen: instead of a minaret tower, they have a large pointed dome with a loudspeaker. It was really heartwarming there as well; a friend in my town is originally from there, and so many of them knew me from months ago or because of that connection; people I don't ever remember seeing in my life knew my name, where I lived in my town, and other things. They too begged me to come back and stay sometime. I'd like to… and they were all engaged and actually thanked me for lessons; something I've never had happen.

October 26, 2008

I can't believe how fast these months are going and how fast these days fly by!

Equippe-Mobile was, as always, fantastic. I don't even remember what I did on Friday, though yesterday was a little crazy. Touda, one of my favorite people in town… well… I'll back up. I mentioned to her daughter and some other friends when they came over to eat lunch last week that I loved a dish that is only eaten in my town when families have stale bread. It is a delicious dish with vegetables, lentils, broth, and spices, poured over torn stale bread. I mentioned that I loved it, and so Touda knocked on my door (a 20 minute walk from her house) at 7:30 that morning.

"You told me a few days ago you have lentils… if you give me some, I'll make that dish you like." No problem, so after tea and coffee, she left and invited me for lunch. I was bombarded by some of my girls who asked if they could spend the night. I was a little nervous about it, but reluctantly agreed, then headed to Touda's for lunch, conversation, and television watching. A neighbor woman my age came over almost as soon as I got home, and we looked at my pictures together, then as soon as she left, the three girls that are probably my favorites, came over.

It wasn't as crazy as I thought it'd be; they were asleep by 11, miraculously, and they did some pretty funny "plays" for me using my clothes as "dress-up." My favorites were when one of them dressed up like an old nomad shepard woman complete with staff and taheruyt, and another wore a tan Moroccan shirt of mine that is long on me and it fit her almost exactly like a man's jellaba. She used a scarf like old men do here and was convincing. We also did face masks, which was really something novel for them.

They enjoyed the "risotto" (pretty much everything I had left in my house thrown in a pressure cooker: rice, lentils, random vegetables, bullion, spices, and, their favorite, a few wedges of Laughing Cow cheese) and while I washed dishes, they "set up" the tea room (salon): lighting all my candles and cleaning up. Right before bed, we had cookies, hot milk with sugar, and pomegranate by candlelight. I suppose it was a successful sleepover for them, and it was fun regressing back to the times of my own sleepovers, though they didn't quite pick up on the idea of a pillow fight.

Today, they got angry when I kicked them out at ten; I had been with people from my town for over 24 hours nonstop and it was draining, especially since I've become so accustomed to having alone time. Other kids came over later (I felt guilty because they were too young and wild for me to let them spend the night), and I was followed around when I ran to the store to buy food.

I'm off again early tomorrow morning because I have another meeting on Tuesday morning in the provincial capital.

My parents called me tonight to wish me a happy early birthday. Apparently, right before they called, some Obama campaigners came to their house looking for me. They asked if I was home; my parents said I was in Morocco. "Oh, she won't be voting then," they said. They corrected them and said I had voted absentee weeks ago. They asked who I supported, my father answered in a way that didn't tell them directly but made it quite clear. Strange, that North Carolina might be a swing state this election. I love the fact that most PCVs I know here vote absentee if they get their ballot in time, and that we can have good conversations about politics, though someone who chooses not to get involved in the discussions say that we "fight over things we agree on," which is somewhat true, at least among people I see often in my province.

Next time I update, most likely we'll know the outcome of the election. Crazy. I'm going to try to spend the night of the 4th at my friends' house who has a television, and see if I can bribe her to let me watch all morning on the 5th. There is a 4 hour time difference, so we might not know anything until 8 am anyway. Or it could be the 2000 election again where that's really wishful thinking. Adig rbi str.

Okay. I must pack for two nights. Take care!

November 4, 2008

Election day! I hope all you at home are voting or already have!

The other delegue meeting went wonderfully, as did a little birthday get-together I had (where I cooked filet mignion seared with butter, garlic, and rosemary, plated with demi-glace (a wine-herb-stock-butter reduction sauce), coated with crumbled blue cheese. Price per plate of ingredients? Under $2. A friend made potato skins and then woke up and made a fantastic breakfast the next day) and a crazy Halloween get-together where I dressed as Sarah Palin. I now have bangs and don't know what to do with them.

I'm off, just wanted to update before another 2 or 3 months go by!

November 5, 2008

I have never been prouder of being an American than today.

2008-09-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

September 24, 2008

First of all, apologies for taking so long to blog. There's no way I
can catch up, so instead, I will sort of give a more categorical
update according to themes. It's not very fluid or organic, but given
how much ground there is to cover, it's the best I can do.

Here's what I hope to cover from the last two months: work, play,
faith, struggles, and hopes.

Work:

Ever the American, of course, work comes first. In short, there hasn't
been much. I spent most of July preparing for what I thought was going
to be one of the best and biggest things I've done in my site so far,
something that I rested a lot of hopes on: the health component of the
Tamazitinu Cultural Week. For more on that, go to "Struggles." (I like
this categorizing; I can put negative things off).

I have, however, had the girls come over quite a bit while school was
out for the summer, which is fun but exhausting. There was a lot of
play and some work involved, but we did things like made dinner
together, including a proud moment when one of the girls looked at the
lentils and said, "Oh, that's a protein!" There were more showers at
my house too, which quickly depleted my shampoo supply, but kept the
girls happy and clean. And, when, as a health volunteer, your girls
group tells you that their parents don't want them using water to
shower more than once a week in 110 degree weather, and they know that
it's healthier for them to shower, it's hard to say no.

I've been doing a lot of planning for after Ramadan, including a lot
of lesson plans and letters in French begging asking if I can work in
the schools.

This summer has also marked something that I've been needing to do but
putting off for months: officially (to Peace Corps and myself, at
least) canceling the incinerator project. I've known from the
beginning it was something that I was pushing and not something
community-initiated but I kept hoping that it would catch on. It was
down to the wire: I had helped write the joint grant, do the budget,
make structural changes to the plans, and was invested in the project
completely… but that was the problem. I was the only one really
invested in it. The provincial government wasn't willing to commit to
$12 or $24 a year for their part because of budgetary constraints and
prior project success rates, and, more importantly, my community
wasn't really excited about it or invested in it. Would it have worked
out well despite that? Possibly. But it's against the Peace Corps
development work position to do a physical project and write a grant
without community participation and involvement, and it felt like I
was pulling teeth every step of the way.

In other words, it's better that I not impose my priorities and values
on the community. Plain and simple. So the other two people in the
province who are doing the project in their communities sent in the
grant without my community. Maybe, if I get replaced when I leave, my
talking about it will have sparked some interest later on.
The Training of Trainers project is coming along, with roadblocks, but
pretty well, I'd say. We'll see how it goes in November (!) which is
coming up fast.

Another pseudo-work project was that I served as a trainer for a VSN
(Volunteer Support Network) training with two others. That was a lot
of fun and helped me remember how much I do love being in front of
people and teaching or performing. It was great to get to know some of
the new health and environment volunteers, and it was a good review
for me as far as how to be a good active listener and support people
who are going through hard times. I think there's a saying that the
best way to test someone's comprehension of something is to get them
to teach someone else. I'd agree with that wholeheartedly.

Play:

I've had a lot of time to play between updates, since life stands
still almost during the summer here. It's too hot to leave the house
except mornings and evenings in mid-summer, and my counterpart, the
nurse at my sbitar, was gone for a month, essentially emptying out the
sbitar. Nobody goes to the neddi to learn how to sew or do crafts, and
life really starts socially after the call to prayer that here we call
"l3assr:" at 5:30 pm.

If that doesn't create an indolent PCV, then once Ramadan started at
the beginning of the month, life stands even more still, with people
fasting from sunup to sundown (4:30 am until about 6:30 right now).
Working hours are cut drastically, and some people, like my
hostmother, don't even really leave the house. I ate lftor (the
breaking of the fast meal) at her house the other day (day 20 of
Ramadan), and she counted the number of times she left the house on
one hand.

So… what better time than to have a friend come visit from home? And,
really, what a bizarre time as well, with cities shutting down for
30-40 minutes at sunset…

I had a blast cavorting around the country. As with when a different
friend came in June, I made her take the train alone to meet me in
Marrakech to save myself a precious vacation day, and she was a good
sport about it. I really love Kech these days, and little things like
getting in the Palais Bahia for free because the guard asked if I was
a resident after my 30 seconds of broken Arabic and waved me in, or
the fact that the DVD guys let me change out bootlegs that don't work
without question even make it better.

I'm beginning to "get" Kech; learning how to walk everywhere or
finding nishan taxi drivers who are quick to turn on their meters when
asked faster than before, or how to get one of those overattentive
shopkeepers in the souks to leave you alone (just ask them to do you a
favor and the harassment stops. "Do you know where there's a CD
store?" "What song is playing in your shop; I want it?" "Can you tell
me which way to Jamaa Al-fna?" In general, they answer, then are
silent…) The cheap hotel hustlers recognize me and call out in Berber;
I know where the best 10-dirham dinner is now, and which juice guys
and tea stalls will give free refills. My knowledge about argan-nut
harvesting impresses the shopkeeper, and I'm beginning to find good,
cheap English-language books at the used stalls near the bus station.
And even the bus station is a friendlier place, once you get past the
"Essaouira" hustlers.

I'm not saying this to sound arrogant or brag about my knowledge of
the city: I've only spent, maybe, 10 nights there, total, in the last
year and a half, mostly just passing through on my way up to Rabat or
Casa. I'm saying it because my first few impressions were of an
overwhelming, dirty, big, ugly city full of sketchy touristy kitsch
and people out to fleece foreigners, and now I've come to find it
charming and vibrant.

(Though I would say to avoid eating at the chwarma place that is on
the main large pedestrian walkway up to Jamaa Al-Fna on the left. I
don't know what it's called, but it's on your left if you're walking
towards the square, just before you come to the alleyway on the right
that has arrows with "Hotel." It's two stories, with a low-ceilinged
upstairs eating area you can't see well from the street, and the
chwarma and counter you order at is on your left when you walk in.
Sketchy people; mediocre food. Stay away; they're really good at
ripping people off. There is a great, cheaper, friendlier place with
an outdoor seating area on the right, a few shops before Ice Legend.)

Marrakech was fun, especially eating at the seafood stand on the
square, and watching people push out the carts to set up, or wandering
around near the Mellah, or just catching up on 4 years of life from
atop the Café du Glace's roof terrace.

From Kech came the pass of death down to Ouarzazate. The CTM bus was
particularly terrible, for some reason. In Oz, I tried taking my
friend to see the Taourirt Kasbah, an old mud fort near the center of
town, but we very nearly walked into Sir Ben Kingsley's stunt double
as they shot what looked like a funeral procession in a small strip in
front of the Kasbah. The movie is called "Prince of Persia," and
filming the probably 2 second shot of the back of Kingsley's character
riding down near a "village" with mourners wailing and a black
carriage following was more fun than it should have been. We thought
it was Sir Ben himself, and looked rather foolish, but had fun trying
to take pictures as my little security friend pointed out people who
had cameras out and then his friend, nicknamed "The Beef" walked over
threateningly at them and pretended like he was going to tear them
limb to limb.

A tour bus pulled through and stopped right in front of the Kasbah (we
sat on stadium-like steps across the street) and they all had cameras
and were taking pictures, so we cheered them on, clapping and
screaming; other spectators around us first were confused, then joined
in.

I made friends with the little baby security man, who spoke
Tashelheit, but he told me he couldn't run any notes to the other side
of the street. I'd have invited them to Tamazitinu, but, eh… a lost
opportunity. I guess I won't be making tagine for Sir Ben or Jake
Gyllenhaal any time soon. Or their stunt doubles.

After Oz, we tried for my site but got stuck in my souk town, and had
coffee with a silver jewelry shop owner friend in town. We also
explored the old Glaoui Kasbah, something I hadn't done even though
I'm in town almost every week. It made up for not being able to go in
the Oz kasbah, with intriguing graffiti, beautiful crumbling
archways, an abandoned, caved in staircase with a secret passage that
used to go to the center of town, probably 1.5 kilometers away, and
room after room after room. It makes me sad that it's in such a state
of disarray, but a friend of mine told me it's because the Glaoui
regime in the area was a repressive one and the locals want little to
do with the restoration of its former glory.

On to Merzouga, the sand dunes, and a rather exciting adventure out
there in a tobis. We got there and drank tea, chilling in a nice
auberge before heading out on camels to the middle of the dunes. Our
travel mates were our guide and four people from France. It had been
raining, so an eerie sort of grey dust covered parts of the dunes:
remnants of salt from the rain, possibly, and the wetness obliterated
some of the beautiful wind marks that are typically so picturesque.
But, all in all, it was a beautiful time, complete with lightning from
somewhere towards Erfoud or Rissani.

By the time we got to the campsite, we could all tell that a storm was
brewing, and after dancing in the dark to drums in the center of the
tents, we all ended up eating inside the one weather-proof tent with
interesting multi-lingual conversation (Spanish: one of the women from
France was actually from where my friend studied abroad: Guyaquil,
Ecuador, French, English, and Tash.), a fantastic tagine seasoned,
unfortunately, with sand, and we were all in the same tent that night,
wind ripping at the plastic with such force that it would have been
difficult to sleep had I not been so exhausted.

From Merzouga, we were supposed to take a tobis to Rissani or Erfoud;
however, we missed it and ended up getting a ride in a Land Rover from
the French tourists. That ride saved us at least 100 Dh each and a
good 2-3 hours travel time at the least. I went to pick up Zika from
my friend who was watching him, but she wanted to keep him longer, and
I happily agreed and ended up back in my souk town.

It was the second night of Ramadan then, and among numerous
invitations to eat lftor with complete strangers, we walked to the
Mellah, the old Jewish part of town. I knew that my souk town had a
Mellah, but didn't know where it was, since any remnants of the
Judaism there had been lost.

However, it is potentially one of my favorite places in Morocco: a
whole other world. Three or four story mud houses with passageways
over the winding alleyways are crammed together in a maze of something
that felt like what I would have imagined an old Moroccan city to be
like. People still get their water from communal fountains, girls and
women filling old oil containers from spigets, and people, once they
greet me and heard me greet back in Berber, grabbing my hands and
insisting we break fast with them. One of them is a man who works at
the hotel I stay at when I get stuck in town, and I literally had to
go in his house and meet his family, apologizing profusely that we
couldn't break fast with them. On the way to his house, the old man
gave us a tour of the Mellah, showing where the marriage windows were,
or what houses belonged to large, rich families; who had left and gone
to Israel, which Muslim families had stayed.

To think: I had been walking up and down literally a quarter of a
block away from this old part of town for over a year and never knew
it. It's amazing, the things you discover, and how little I know about
my souk town, or some of the other areas around me.

From there we went to Tamazitinu, and wandering around with lHems,
watching the children grab our hands and giggle over my friend's
tongue ring, industrial piercing, and tattoo. I've never seen them so
curious about something before; they kept asking me to have her stick
out her tongue, or asking her to talk, to see if she sounds funny, or
kids lifting up her shirt in the back to see the tattoo. They still
ask me about it. We went to my friend Touda's house (who told me that
my friend's "strange" appearance wasn't bad, she just looked like an
Arab, referring that in the more Arab-populated north of the country,
fashion and modesty is less homogeneous), and my host-family's, and
the Neddi, and the fields. It was a quick visit, but fun nevertheless.

From there, back up to Kech for my 3rd out of 4 trips on the Titchka
pass in the period of two weeks. Again, the bus driver seemed to enjoy
going as fast as he could around every hairpin curve on that
nausea-inducing road. I didn't even get to say hello to my buddies in
Taddart, the typical stop-over for most busses on the pass, though on
the way back, they remembered me and told me that there was still no
soup available. I swear, the Café Barce in Taddart has the best
2-dirham soup I've had yet in country, though I forget if it's Taddart
1 or 2. They're a few kilometers apart, the Taddarts, and some buses
stop in one, some in the other. It's probably the same town but
there's literally nothing in between them but curvy road and mountain.

And from Kech, something new for me: El Jadida (which, incidentally,
means "New"). We had been thinking of doing Essa, or adding something
else to the trip, but my friend and I had already traveled about 1600
k over the last week or so (about 1000 miles) not including the flight
to Morocco, so Jadida made the most sense, as it's close to Casa,
where she was flying from.

I'd wanted to do Jadida for awhile, since a friend of mine went and
loved it, and the old Portuguese city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
so we, with open minds, went, though for the week and a half before,
had been getting mixed reviews from people.

Jadida is an easy 3 hours and change bus ride from Kech, with a really
beautiful but bizarre beach. It's the flattest beach I think I've ever
been to, with a narrow strip of sand at high tide, and a huge,
flatly-packed area at low, dotted with stone outcroppings full of
tidal pools with fish, anemones, and the occasional little crab.

I've never been much of a beach person, but those three days really
did feel like vacation, though trying to find food was difficult with
most places closed during the day for Ramadan.

Our first night, after passing more soccer games on the beach than I
could count, we came upon an army truck with a rocket launcher that
pulled up to the boardwalk. After being afraid to for the first few
minutes, I took a picture, and talked to some of the soldiers. Right
at Tinwuchi (what people in Tamazitinu call the prayer right at
sundown, marking the end of fasting for the day), they lit the rocket
and it shot into the ocean, temporarily deafening me, as we were
literally maybe 15 feet away. In Marrakech, to mark sundown, they turn
on what sound like air raid sirens, though in Tamazitinu, there's only
the prayer itself, supplemented with television sets, tuned to the
call to prayer at the Cabba in Mecca.

The Portuguese city, which I called the pirate town, was eerie at
sunset. We walked there right after the rocket was shot, and everyone
was in their houses eating lftor. Something about the dim, yellow
lights and the shadows with the old church at Place Kan-Issa (Church
Plaza), next to the mosque tower next door, with archways, and the old
cobblestone streets, the sea breeze, and the cannons over the ramparts
really made me feel like I stepped back in time or onto a movie set,
but that it was all mine, because the streets were silent.

And then, after three blissful days in what I found to be the perfect
place for a vacation in Morocco, it was time to take the train up to
Casa. We stayed at Hotel Foucauld, an old place that is cheap for
Casa, with a fantastic old gated elevator surrounded by a winding
staircase. It's obvious that 50 or 60 years ago, it was a very posh
place, but now it's old and run-down. However, we couldn't beat the
price, and it was within walking distance of Casa Port station, and
the man at the desk not only spoke my Tashelheit, but actually came
from a town about two hours away and he knew the volunteer my friend
replaced.

I'd never been to the Hassan II Mosque, so we took a taxi out there
and wandered along the huge outdoor courtyards until just before
tinwuchi. Even Casa dies at sunset during Ramadan: we crossed the main
intersection downtown by the clock tower without a single car driving
by in any direction! Casa with a friend is much better than Casa
alone, and it was bittersweet saying goodbye the next morning at the
train station: she on her way to the airport, me on my way back down
to Kech.

My timing was terrible, so I ended up staying not one, but two nights
with a friend near Ouarzazate before heading up to VSN training. I had
a great time with her, and was glad to get to decompress a bit and
relax, as well as reconnect with some volunteer friends, but my timing
was terrible, and I wished I could have had the time to go home and
rest a bit and do laundry before the training…

Now that I'm back in site, it's hard to think of anything here as play
right now, but with breaking fast at the three families I'm closest
to, three nights in a row has helped me feel more re-integrated. Which
actually brings me into the next category of…

Faith:

Ramadan is a hard time for a lot of volunteers. Last year, I fasted 12
days, but came to the conclusion that it isn't really the best thing
for me to do, since I don't have the convictions of it being a part of
my religion.

I'm not an Islamic scholar, nor am I Muslim, so I fear my explanation
of Ramadan is probably severely lacking: I'm sure there are many
resources online that can give a full description and the history and
spirituality behind it, but my understanding is this: Ramadan is a
month in the Islamic calendar of fasting from sunrise to sunset.
Fasting includes no food, drink, water, smoking, swearing, sexual
activity, or letting anything pass through your lips. The reason for
this, people tell me, is to have people understand what it's like to
be hungry and encourage people to give alms to the poor, as well as
being a testimony of faith. Women do not fast the first 40 days after
giving birth, and menstruating women do not fast, nor do the sick,
though, at least with menstruating women, they are supposed to make up
the days.

Ramadan came early this year; the dates change in our calendar because
it is tied to the lunar calendar; so right now, sun up to sun down is
4 am until about 6:20 pm. Many people get up at 3:30 to eat a meal
called sHor. SHor can be anything from bread and butter or oil for the
poorer families, to tagine (stew) and soda for richer families.

The break fast meal is called lftor. Lftor is different depending on
location and culture, but in Tamazitinu, it generally consists of
dates, water, coffee with milk and sugar, aghrom n taguri (bread
stuffed with lard, cumin, hot pepper, oil, green onions, salt, pepper,
and other spices; ground beef in rich families), some other sort of
bread, such as misamin (an oily, flaky pancake), bagharir (a spongy
pancake, often served with udi- a rancid butter cooked with paprika
and green onions), or svenj (doughnuts), mskota (a type of cake),
hard-boiled egg with salt and cumin, some kind of juice or yogurt
drink, and harrira, a soup.

Last night, my old woman friend Touda told me that there were two
types of harrira: Berber and Arab. In Tamazitinu, we drink the Berber
harrira (aharrir), which is a thick, brownish soup with turnip,
cilantro, chickpeas, lentils, tomato, and beans, which is thickened
with a mixture of flour, ground corn flour, and sometimes bean flour.
The "Arab" harrira, which is more common in restaurants all over and
up north, is a red, thinner soup which doesn't have turnip, has a
tomato base, and sometimes has meat, noodles, and other things in it.
In Berber, the word for "to eat soup" literally translates to "to
drink soup," and people make fun of me if I slip up and say "to eat,"
asking if I'll eat it with a fork. We drink it without a spoon,
swirling around the hot soup to cool it down before sipping from the
edge of the bowl.

Other differences in an "Arab" or, the way I see it, a "City" lftor
and a "country" lftor are things like shebekiya, a honey-soaked
cookie, smmeta (a ground sweet eaten with small spoons that looks like
brown sugar clumps or even ground beef, but that is flour, sugar,
peanut, walnut, sesame seed, oil, and other nuts ground into a coarse
powder), juices, yogurt, and generally more variety than what we have.

I love breaking fast with people, and, though sometimes I feel guilty
if I haven't fasted, usually people are more than happy to invite me
over, though I always bring something to share like juice or yogurts.

After lftor, an hour or two later comes tea, and then an hour or so
after that, dinner. Many people eat three meals at night even if
they're fasting during the day. In between, there are a lot of special
Ramadan television shows, including one that I've seen three or four
episodes of that I cannot stand… I don't understand much of what's
going on in it, but I know that there's a young woman in it whose
father locks her up in a stable, ties her hands above her head and
hangs the rope from a tree all day, dehydrating her, then teasing her
with water and spilling it all over… at one point, she gets her
revenge and stabs him in the eye with a knife… In any case, it's
disturbing, though I think it's supposed to be somewhat slapstick. The
other Ramadan shows are a bit more to my liking.

I wondered if it would be hard not fasting at all this year, but most
people in my town have seemed to accept it with no problem, though a
few times a day, I get told that I have to fast to go to heaven. While
traveling, however, I got it more than I expected up north, even from
people who didn't speak Tashelheit. Among the most common places of
attempted conversion are taxis. I had several taxi drivers, all in
Arabic, tell me that I have to fast and become Muslim and why. It was
strange, because of the fact that I don't even speak Arabic, and could
only piece together bits and pieces of what they were saying.

A few of my friends here have been really nice about it and told me to
tell them all, "It's none of your business!" if they try to force it,
though usually a "It's not my religion; I follow the religion of my
parents," and if they insist, "If you moved to America, would you
become Christian and not fast and take off your headscarf? I feel the
same way about my religion," works well enough.

I do have to say that I love several things about Ramadan though, and
I'm not talking about the delicious but heartburn-inducing food. I
love the fact that so many people fast, and that all over Morocco,
just as all over the world, millions of people break fast together
with a date, or a sip of water or coffee, or a piece of bread. I love
the fact that the Koran television shows: the stations that play the
chanting of the Koran all day, subtitle in English sometimes during
Ramadan, so I can follow along and see what it is that the man in the
house absentmindedly chants along with the television, so I can feel a
little bit more understanding than I would otherwise. I love the fact
that a city of millions can come to almost a standstill, and that a
beach full of life can empty as far as the eye can see, except a
middle-aged couple, sitting on a bench, eating a picnic lftor, looking
out at the sunset over the sea.

Struggles:

I alluded to there being a disappointment back when I was talking
about the Cultural Week. I haven't written about it anywhere, but I
guess it's good to let it out and vent about it.

There are two associations in Tamazitinu. One of them, the water
association, doesn't do anything really except maintain running water
in town and collect payments; my first month in-site, the president of
that association asked me if I was a virgin, and so because of that,
and because it's not really an active association, I don't have that
much of a reason to work with them.

The other association is slightly more active and has accomplished
some incredible projects in the last six or eight years. Since my
first month or two in site, I've been trying to meet with them and
work with them, but it's never happened. Nobody tells me when the
meetings are, no matter who I ask, nobody can tell me who the
president is (I've been told three different people), but the members
say they want to work with me.

In June, I finally, after a year in site, got to sit down and have a
meeting with them, though it was mainly because some of the men who
work for the Commune (local government) helped me maneuver.

I didn't know what the purpose of the meeting was until the day
before; I thought it was maybe just a general meeting and came
prepared with a small presentation, copies of the project framework
(the goals of the Community Health in Rural Morocco Peace Corps
program), excited and ready to finally work with someone and open the
door for further collaboration.

It ends up that the meeting was specifically to work on a project they
had coming up: a Cultural Week. While listening to them talk, I came
up with some suggestions for ways to work womens' health in without
them having to do any work, as well as some ideas that would involve
them heavily if they were interested. I gathered up my strength and
courage and explained that I was open to helping with whatever needed
help, and threw out my ideas.

The idea to work with kids to have events for them one day, which was
the idea that would mean that I'd have to have help from them, was
shot down, but they seemed open to me having a health table out the
whole week. Fantastic. I proposed a list of five topics that were
approved, and set up times for the table to be open for women to drop
by at. Fantastic.

The date was still soft, so I kept checking with the adjunct president
(don't ask), over the next few weeks. I recruited some fellow PCVs to
come help work the table, and got together materials. Almost
immediately, I got bad news.

"We only want your table for 3 days." Fine. The date changed. Fine.
The date changed again… and again… I felt bad for all the PCVs I
recruited, so I prepared to do it alone.

Then, more bad news. "We want you to do just one lesson, one day for
the women, okay?"

At least I was on the official schedule. I worked to come up with the
most interesting and informative presentation I could come up with on
pregnancy care, touching on home births and birth control.

Three days before, I called the adjunct president. He said all was
good. I heard nothing over the weekend from him, so, an hour before
the presentation on Monday, I was at the Neddi, ready to go.

However, the Neddi director knew nothing about it. I went to the
association. "We don't think anyone will come, but we'll set up anyway
for it."

I offered to go recruit people into coming anyway; they said not to.
We set up chairs. Three men from the association came in. "No women
are coming. Just men."

My mind raced. I could do a lesson for men; it might be even better
since they hold a lot of power in family dynamics. It wouldn't be as
well prepared, but it'd be better than nothing. I offered. They turned
me down.

"Why weren't you here earlier? There were lots of men earlier, maybe
50 or 60. Why didn't you do it then?" Nobody had told me that. It
wasn't on the schedule. You better believe I'd have been there if I
had known.

Twenty minutes before the lesson was supposed to happen, I stepped
outside to call a friend to vent my frustrations and focus myself
before the lesson. When I came back, the chairs were in a different
position, and the association men were in the other room. One of the
teachers came out, after they all turned to look at me and talk
quietly to one another.

"Ummm… nobody is going to come, so we're just going to have a meeting
for men. Sorry. Maybe you can do your lesson at the clinic or
something."

My dad called as I was leaving, walking through the fields with all my
things so nobody would see how flushed I was.

Frustration. Anger. Hurt. I know that there's no reason for me to take
it personally, that's how things fly sometimes, but I had worked hard
on this and was excited to finally be able to work with the
association, hoping this would be the event that would open the door
to a successful Peace Corps-style collaboration. But I had been shot
down, and it hurt and I was upset.

I thought about asking for a site change: to move to another town for
the remainder of my service. The schools don't want to work with me
when I tried to take that avenue. There are no associations to work
with. The sbitar is great, but nobody goes to the clinic to learn;
they go because they're sick or they take their young children to get
vaccinations and have a million things on their mind… the last thing
that they want is to be forced into a health lesson. The most
successful lessons are the 2 or 3- on one pregnancy discussions I have
with pregnant women, but that's because it's relevant to them at that
point in time, and the small groups make it easier for me to
facilitate information that is specific to them.

Rather than stay bitter at my town, I hiked to a close douar that I
haven't spent much time with. It literally entailed me walking up to
men and asking "Do you have an association? Can I meet with the
president, please?" and within ten minutes, six men were in a room
with me in someones house, coffee and tea on the table, talking to me
about their wishes and hopes for their douar, which, incidentally,
include several things in my project framework. Great! The reality is
that the association is not very well organized, and my nurse said
that working with them could prove very tricky and problematic, but I
know that after Ramadan, I can possibly see if they might be willing
to collaborate, specifically on a project that would be a dream of
mine if we could complete it.

Which brings me to my last category….

Hopes:

This douar's association has done some amazing things. They've built a
clinic of their own accord, but unfortunately, there's nobody
available to come serve as a nurse there, and since they built it
alone, it's not built to ministry specifications, so it's sitting
there empty. They've also started work on a Neddi—a women's center—but
don't have the money to complete it. This is something I'd love to be
able to work on with them, but since projects of mine have to relate
to health, it'd be finishing the women's center with a twist. I won't
go into it now, because I know better than to get my hopes up, but I'm
crossing my fingers.

When I told some of my buddies at the Commune what happened with the
association in town and how frustrated I was, they told me I was being
silly and not casting a wide enough net. In an amazing gesture, they
told me that if I typed up something in French about potential
collaborations, why I was here, and what my organization was about,
that they would translate it to Arabic for me and help get a meeting
with the associations in douars in the surrounding areas. Amazing.
Unfortunately, these men from the commune are on vacation for Ramadan,
and I, again, know better than to get my hopes too high, but I'm
encouraged at the potential here.

I've also typed up a proposal for weekly school lessons, which, if
approved, will be quite a large commitment. There are 4 primary
schools within 1.5 hours walk of my house; the biggest school has 400
students (16-ish classes), the smallest maybe around 100 (4 classes).
My nurse and I have been talking about this, and I've finally created
the curriculum for it, but my goal is to go to one of the four schools
once a week, visit each of the classes, and do a health lesson. Even
if it's just once a week, it's still a very full day especially when
you include 3 hours of hiking for some of them, and teaching lessons
in a non-native language, especially Berber, is exhausting for me. I'm
a bit nervous about getting approved, but I know if I run into
problems, my nurse will fight for me, and, though it may take a month
to get it, I'm confident I can get the Ministry of Education to give
me a letter of permission, which might help as well. Keep your fingers
crossed for me on this one; if it goes well, maybe we can organize an
educational field day at the end of the school year before I go home.

I'm also trying to push for doing a booth at souk (weekly market) once
a month on HIV/AIDS education, however, that's something that I need
help with. I've drafted a permission letter, but I need to meet with
nearby volunteers to see if they're onboard or not.

There are my hopes for the future; for the next nine months. I can't
believe my Peace Corps gestation is that of a child. It's going to fly
by.

…..

So, there's the blog entry for those of you who were asking for it,
specifically that person who I like to call Mom. Yes, Mom. I updated
this just for you. And, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you are
the only one who goes through the entire thing. If you did,
TbarkAllah.

2008-08-24T08:25:00.001-07:00

August 9, 2008

I've been in the throes of wedding season. I thought this year I
wouldn't go to as many as I did last year (around 15), but it's not
even halfway through August and I've been to… seven, so it looks like
I'll be making the target while trying not to.

Now, this is what happens every time I leave the house right now.
Someone I know well (or, in several cases, someone I don't know well
or even know their names) will grab me and drag me to a wedding. In
one case, a few nights ago, I kept politely declining, walking towards
my house and away from the throng of people going to three different
weddings and the fifth time I said no to someone, I realized it'd be
easier to go for awhile than to keep trying to go home.

When I say "go to a wedding," it never means the full 3-4 days, but at
least one event one day for an hour or four or five. The first two,
that I went to at the end of last month, I was dragged to by
neighbors. The first one, happened on a quite annoying day. There were
10 weddings going on at the time, and all ten brides dressed up in the
typical "abroq" outfit: a white kaftan with colored wraps, a white
painted face with saffron painted on in a design and rhinestones glued
on the brides' cheeks, bright lipstick, khol eyeliner, hennaed hands,
and the abroq: a head dress including a shiny red patterned scarf, a
silver chain with charms dangling from it, a green or red bundle of
yarn tied together at intervals with metal sequins sewn where the
bundles are gathered, and the equivalent of Christmas tree tinsel of
varying colors. The abroq is handmade and there is a small cylindrical
cushion sitting horizontally under the top layer.

I set off at about 6 to see the procession of brides, but a neighbor
said it wouldn't happen for about two hours. I went home and set off
at 7:30, but when I got there, it ends up I missed the whole thing,
but as I set off to go home, the neighbor found me and took me to her
friend's wedding.

This night was the first night she spent in his house (and everything
you would think that entails, though my particular tribe does not
require the dance around a white sheet with a bloodspot, lhamdullah),
so I didn't see the bride or the groom. Instead, a neighbor I have
talked to a few times took me in and sat me down. I explained to a few
people who are Ait lkharij in France who I was, danced for a few
minutes with literally every single eye on me (the joys of being a
foreigner), ate dinner, and sat with three groups of people, each of
which I had a friend in. All in all it was fun and I was invited to
the rest of the festivities for the next few days but didn't go.

That weekend, one of my friends had a little get together dinner,
which was, as always, a great time.

The second wedding I've been to this season happened on the day where
the bride wears the abroq, and her aheyduss dance includes a large
pole with palm fronds and, in her case, an Amazigh "Z" symbol in
Christmas tree tinsel.

Another neighbor encouraged me to go to the house which I call the
"Castle on the Hill"- one of 7 large two story cement houses in my
immediate neighborhood that is empty 11 months out of the year but is
full of people in August: an immigrant family's summer house. This
house is huge and I've always been curious.

It was a fairly relaxed wedding, and some girls (aged 14-24) called me
over and we talked and giggled through the tea, basta (vanilla wafer
cookies), peanuts, couscous, meat tagine with olives, and fruit. I met
some girls who study in my friend's site: Tamazitinu doesn't have a
middle school or high school, so the girls board during the year,
coming home only for l'Eid and the summer. A few even knew passable
English. There was also a girl who "lives" in the castle on the hill:
she was 24 years old, Moroccan but born in France, summering in
Tamazitinu her whole life.

The third wedding was a random lunch I was dragged to; I still don't
know who the bride even was, but I literally couldn't refuse, and was
embarrassed as I had my bike and camel pack (water holding) backpack
and was sweaty and gross in non-wedding clothes.

The fourth was exciting but long: I didn't stay for all the
festivities even, but I went with some friends and stayed from about
10 at night until 3:30 am. There was aheyduss, talking to family
members from France, the bride changed clothes three times (all more
"modern" than the Abroq: a white Kaftan with a plastic silver crown, a
red jabador (two piece outfit) with a red scarf in her hair, which was
let down and free for this night, and a white wedding dress while the
groom wore a black tuxedo), and finally, right before we left, the
bride and groom fed each other milk, dates, and exchanged rings. They
were sitting on two layers of ponjs, with the traditional yellow
hand-decorated with metal sequins backdrop, something in Arabic
spelled out on it in Christmas tree tinsel, random Christmas lights
and light ropes in the background, and a large blinking starburst of
lights. There was also a fake aquarium that lit up with pictures of
fish swimming inside.

The next wedding was just an aheyduss dance: typical, and I didn't
stay for dinner.

The last two were tonight: one was what I think is the most "western"
family in town: they have a flatscreen television and spotlights with
black leather couches in the living room and three showers, including
one with a huge, oversized bathtub. The bride was from a place called
Kelaa M'Gouna, and she brought her own aheyduss dancers; 7 women and 7
men that dressed in their tradition and circled around each other,
singing and almost running in star formations, lines, circles, and
arcs. It was exciting to see a different tradition, and it feels like
half of the town came out to watch.

I had planned on staying for dinner, but a friend who is at her
engagement step had her ceremony. I didn't make it even to dinner: I
left at 11:30 and it hadn't started. I was just exhausted. I was
excited to be taken under the wing of one of her friends though. I
wish I could be here for her actual wedding; the family is black and
they have different wedding traditions, including something that I
don't quite understand that involves putting a bowl on the bride's
head. I was one of maybe five white people there, and it was strange
how nobody mentioned that the other wedding had hundreds of people
there and this one had maybe sixty. There is blatant racism in my
community, so every opportunity to show people that I am friends with
women of all ages and all races makes me happy.

Other than weddings, I spent most of last Thursday at my nearest
volunteer friend's site and am going back tomorrow to help her with a
project. We heard an aheyduss outside her house, but then heard other
music that sounded more sub-Saharan African.

We went outside to look, and it was a group of men and boys from
Erfoud, wearing all white with red accent and red knitted or crochet
caps with cowry shells on them. The men's origins were sub-Saharan,
and they used a different sort of large drum with two drumsticks: one
crooked and one straight, as well as sets of cymbals that were barbell
shaped. They were traveling around and performing for money. I really
enjoyed their music, as did a man across the street from her who was
more into it, dancing and clapping and smiling more than I've ever
seen anyone get into the music here.

My little girls who come over, especially the core 4 or 5 of them,
have been coming over a lot recently. Their new favorite thing to do
is to shower at my house. I don't mind; it's kind of fun combing their
hair afterwards, and they told me they like to do it at my house
because at their houses, they only shower once a week whereas they'd
shower every day at my house if they could. As long as it doesn't fill
my septic pit, I'm fine with it.

2008-07-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-11T02:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-06-30T08:58:00.001-07:00

June 28, 2008

The worst part about traveling is coming back to my community and feeling like I have to re-integrate. Other than an occasional weekend out with friends, I'm going to make a point to stay in site as much as possible for the next few months…

That being said, my voyages up north with the Smurph, visiting my CBT (training homestay) family in Azilal, and the mid-service medical exams in Rabat, then the Delegue meeting in the provincial capital were fun. However, being out of my community for so long really makes me feel terrible and like I have to re-integrate, get to know people, and somehow try to reassure people (including, maybe, myself) that I am really here to get things done and work with the community. I have a lot of energy for potential projects, but it's actually leaving my house in the heat to get them done that is the most difficult thing, and it doesn't help when I feel like every time I leave, I have to make excuses (or when I come back, finding dead mice and camel spiders in my house, or that the electricity was out for two weeks and everything in my fridge had 2 inches of mold on it).

On the job side of things… I have some ideas that I want to get going. The Association (finally!) said they'd meet with me, which is fantastic. I also really want to get some sort of summer program started. I'll do it on my own on a very small scale, but I'd prefer to have some community help or find out what THEY want to do.

I've had some encouragement from unlikely sources: a French development worker told me that she wasn't surprised that I hadn't done any projects in just a year, and that she felt that integration and acceptance was the first step; this, she said, can take a few days. "If you had done a project by now, most likely, it would fail." It's a depressing message, but it made me feel better and slightly validated. I also am in the midst of reading Three Cups of Tea about Greg Mortenson, who has built over 50 schools and womens' centers, bridges, etc. in Pakistan. I can't quite find the quote that was the most comforting to me, but it took him at least 1-2 years to build his first school, and he was constantly having to learn from the people in his community. They came to him. It's not something that's happened for me yet, but I suppose I need to be patient still, and get over the mentality of "get it done now, be productive, have hard, concrete results."

I did have my girls over yesterday though. I was still cleaning the house when they came over an hour earlier than expected, so they helped me clean up, which was a most welcome surprise. We talked about vitamins a little, did art, and danced to Fnaire.

Oh, Fnaire. This is a strange, tragic situation. Fnaire is my favorite Moroccan band. They sing in Arabic, so I don't understand it, but my two favorite songs of theirs are Lalla Manana and Yid el Henna. The former is about treating women right, the latter about how wonderful and unique Morocco is. It's essentially socially conscious Moroccan hip-hop. I love it.

In Fez, with Sarah, we happened to be there during the World Sacred Music Festival. It was a great situation: we randomly found a better place to stay than I had anticipated: a homestay of sorts. One of the brothers, with two Pakistani men and a Canadian who were also staying there, took us to a free concert at 11 pm the first night we were in Fez. The second day, randomly, at an ice cream parlor, Smurphy and I ran into some Fullbright students; we talked some, then they asked if we were going to see Fnaire.

"Fnaire!? Here?! When? How much?"

It ends up, we were a five minute walk and ten minutes away from the start of them, free, live. Awesome. We had to move back from where we were, quite near the front, because some men were being men, but it was great to hear them sing live, even if I didn't understand. They played all my favorites, and I was on a high for the rest of the day.

A few weeks later, at the Delegue meeting, I was talking about it, and someone said, "Oh, one of them died." What?

I went online. We had seen them on the 13^thin Fez. Hicham, the DJ, died on the way from Fez back to Marrakech in a car accident on the 16^th. He was 23. YouTube has the 2M report (again, in Darija) that showed clips from the concert we were at, then cutting to the place of the accident and the wreckage of the car.

It feels so strange, so tragic… even though I'm not Moroccan, so really can't feel the same pride in their music and their message (especially considering I don't understand most of the words), the fact that a young, hip band was huge here, but with messages about things like HIV/AIDS awareness and Moroccan pride, with music that definitely has elements of uniqueness, that moves you and makes you want to dance… the fact that the difficult roads here killed one member really touches my heart.

…

What else? It's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit already at night, which is miserable, and will only get worse.

The trip was fantastic, though long. My homestay family visit was remarkably smooth; our bus stopped for two hours at our training seminar site, and it was strange to see how it had changed in a year. My hanut man Aziz, the barbershop owner next door to the hotel we took over, and the cyber guy on the other side all remembered me and asked about how life was going. The town got a new beautiful fountain, and it was really interesting to be able to actually talk to people.

In our small homestay village, again, life was comfortable, though they told me, when I described my house, that there were most likely snakes in the rafters, especially since I have mice. Great. I realized that Hayat, my 21-year old host-sister, speaks baby-talk to me sometimes to make things easier and that some of my mistakes in Berber I picked up from trying to imitate her, especially in regards to structure. It was great actually being able to understand and communicate more, and to find out all the town gossip of people I knew before… and of course, skipping stones on that magical lake made me wish I lived there instead of Tamazitinu.

Mid-service medical exams were okay, but they had us running all over town: the x-ray place, the dentists' office, the Peace Corps Office (every day for 3 days, when it was all said and done), hand-delivering a stool sample six or eight blocks in a little Styrofoam container to the laboratory, back to the x-ray place for another diagnostic exam to make sure everything was okay… combine that with eating delicious Pizza/Salad plates at the Goethe institute, falafel, crazy 3-flavor sandwiches, coffee with Mhmmoudi, and picking up Smurphy from the train station (or just outside it) made for a very full three days in Rabat! I really do love that city though.

First stop for the Smurph and I after Rabat was Fez; I highly recommend it. The tanneries don't smell as bad as all the literature says, though we never made it to the large ones, as our day was sort of hijacked by a Namibian woman named Rita who, well, didn't really flow with our travel style. I will say that the small tannery we went to was amazing because they let us actually get in and walk right on top of the dye pits, though I was terrified of slipping on the goo (including many liquified animal body parts) and falling in one of the pits. The man who showed us around was helpful, but as he only spoke Arabic, I heard… "This………..color……..shoe……..leather….." I'd explain "This is a dye pit for shoe leather." Then "This…. (mimes washing)…..good…. quality (French)…" So I'd say, "This is where they wash the good quality of leather."

Unfortunately, my being able to piece together maybe 20% of what he was telling us meant our Namibian friend wanted me to translate everything and got mad when I didn't understand. "Why don't you explain it to us?"

After Fez, we headed up north to Al Hoceima in a rather long (8 hour, no AC) bus ride. Smurphy's a trooper. Anyway, it is a beautiful beach town that really didn't feel touristy at all. We went to the two beaches nearby: Playa Quemado and Playa Cala Bonita, and swam in the crystal-clear coves, surrounded by steep cliffs. They were amazing.

It also had such a strange feel up north: Spanish was the second language after Arabic (well, third; there's also Tarifit Berber; I understand more Arabic than Tarifit), and it felt like a strange hybrid of familiar Morocco, a hint of Spain, and a very laid-back feeling. Maybe it was because of all of the kif fields we passed by.

Oh, the kif. First of all, I don't smoke and I didn't smoke, but the Rif mountains in the north of Morocco are the etymology for the term "reefer." And though marijuana is illegal in Morocco, the main road from Ketama to Al Hocema was full of field after field of bright green marijuana plants. It was planted right up to the road in half-acre, acre, two or three acre plots. It was so ubiquitous that I didn't even notice at first because, really, who would expect to see that?

We met up with some of my friends in Al Hoceima who asked how we could have missed it, and so on the way to Chefchaoen, I was stupefied.

When we pulled into Chaoen, after another grueling 6 hour bus ride, I was worried. It just looked like a boring town. I knew the main attraction was the medina, but it just looked boring.

Though it was quite touristy, the medina was beautiful. White and blue walls all over… cheap restaurants with tortilla Espanola, paella, and a delightful shrimp "tagine," fresh goat cheese at every meal, and more winding, blue alleyways to get lost in really made Chaoen stand out as a unique medina, though Pension Mauritania, where we stayed, had bed mattresses about as comfortable as when I slept outside on cobblestones during homestay last summer.

Tangier, on the other hand, was not cute or picturesque at all. In fact, it was gritty, probably the grittiest place I've been in Morocco. It makes me feel even more than I expected that the tourists who come for one day on the ferry from Spain and only see Tangier really know absolutely nothing about Morocco, and, really, it's probably the last place I'd choose for someone to see if they were only going to spend 8 hours in the country.

The American Legation museum was interesting; I think most interesting is how different it feels as soon as you walk inside and see the deck that goes over the alleyway in a sort of pedestrian bridge, and the delightful gardens. I also love some of the old documents, including the one where the consul general wrote a letter saying that they were flying the American flag at half-mast after Lincoln's assassination, or seeing the document from the sultan (?) that was the first time in writing another country recognized the US's sovereignty. The Kasbah museum was also impressive; it had glass bottles from the 1^st century, and clay pots from over 1000 BC, and was by far the best presented museum I've seen in Morocco so far.

All good things come to an end, and for us, that happened in Casa, though we stayed long enough in Tangier in the morning to not get to explore town a lot. That's okay; there's NOTHING in Casa except the great mosque, which I will go see someday.

After two nights at home (which I spent sleeping and watching movies; I was exhausted!), I was off to the provincial capital to go to the Delegue meeting, which was a bit of an ordeal, having to crash a training and sit in a sweltering room and translate the entire meeting from French into English with another PCV. It was a productive meeting, though some things made me angry, but I think they were pleased, because they invited us for lunch and we had a 3-course meal at a nice restaurant we'd never been to before.

Plus, we've recently discovered an iced-coffee milkshake place in town, which, combined with the swimming pool at our cheap hotel, going to a tapas bar (well, the free tapas are olives, salad, and little tiny skewers of chicken), then actually clubbing made me feel like I was at home for a night… and my provincial capital is only 4 hours away!

Now, I'm home and have to come up with a game plan for Operation: Survive and Thrive Summer. I say I relish a challenge. This will certainly put that to the test, especially since, barring a friends' birthday party and an overnight camping hiking trip I'm planning to take in a few weeks in a cooler area, I'm forcing myself to stay in my site as much as possible. I need to re-establish credibility. I think that's one of the most frustrating things about being in the Peace Corps: the balance of being in site and out of site.

From “like home” to the Peace Corps I expected… to “home” in Morocco…

2008-05-31T02:41:00.000-07:00

April 26, 2008

I’ve had an incredible week. Just incredible, and very non-Peace Corps.

I had to go up to Rabat for something. Now, I had been to Rabat for three days when we first got in-country, but we didn’t get to see much of the city. Instead, we saw a lot of the conference room of a very nice hotel. In the three days we were there, I think we might have had a total of 4 hours to explore. I remembered walking past a large mosque to get to the medina, but that was about all.

Though I had a legitimate reason to be up there that wasn’t just for vacation, I felt like it was a much-needed break from life in Southern Morocco.

The first day, I only made it as far as Marrakech, over what I call the “pass of death.” It wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered and I was able to almost enjoy the beautiful views and small picturesque villages. It helped that I was on a large bus, next to a good friend whose parents were flying in that night.

Once there, I had a lot of the afternoon to eat (McDonalds!), wander the souks, find a fantastic riad for my parents and I to stay at during their visit, and load up on bootleg DVDs. At night, I met up with my friend and her parents took me out for dinner and a stroll through the souks and crazy stalls. I loved meeting them and hanging out. All in all, it was a good and much more interesting day than I had anticipated, and I have decided that I like Marrakech a lot more than I thought.

The next morning, I took a train up to Rabat. Speaking Tam helped pave the way to get a youth discount card (my train was at 9 am, but the “discount card” person wouldn’t get in until 11 am… so the guy at the window snuck in the other room and made one up for me because I spoke Tam and he did too) and had an entire compartment to myself for the first 3 hours, up to Casa. It filled up from Casa to Rabat.

When I stepped out of the gare (train station), I was a bit overwhelmed by the urbanity. At first, I had no idea where I was and how to find the hotel, but then it hit me and I realized I had walked by the gare two or three times a year previous. I asked a man for directions and he, too, miraculously, spoke Tam. “If you need anything, come find me. People here aren’t the same way they are in Berber areas, so if you need something, come let me know,” the patisserie man told me, showing me the way to the hotel.

Even the hotel was a nice surprise and better than I had anticipated. But after dropping off my things, another quick meal at McDonalds (for only the third time in over a year), I headed over to PC headquarters.

Another surprise: the office is beautiful. It’s amazing, with gardens, wood-carved ceilings, Western toilets complete with toilet paper and soap, and a Volunteer lounge with internet, books for trading, large ponjs, and free printing. It’s the little things…

I had a lovely visit and even a short tour before heading back to the hotel for awhile. I hadn’t seen anyone else I knew, and I had called the two people I know living in Rabat who I wanted to make up with but hadn’t gotten any positive responses yet, so I resigned myself to eat dinner on my own at a place I had heard about at the German institute in town. Ironically, as soon as I got in the hotel elevator, another PCV stepped in after me and was also planning on going there, alone, for dinner. After a very satisfying half-pizza half-salad meal and profiteroles with coffee for dessert, I thought it would be a good time to go back to the hotel and go to bed.

Until I got a phone call as I left from one of my friends in town: a 19-year old camper from the spring camp who I became close with. I told her we could meet up tomorrow, but she insisted I go to her house that night, so her mother pulled up in their car (!) and picked me up from the hotel, taking me to a swanky coffee shop in Agdal (the ritzy district). Staring at traffic and boutiques, the three of us drank tea or hot chocolate and discussed life in French, our only mutual language. They then took me to their house and insisted I spend the night, after watching the world go by from their roof and meeting the rest of her family. It was a somewhat sleepless night because I was in a new place and in someone’s home, but it was a lot of fun, and after breakfast, the next morning they dropped me off at the hotel to pick up my things to go to a meeting, of sorts.

It was a good meeting, and I left for lunch halfway at the American Club and had some work to do while also overhearing interesting conversation from foreign service officers from the American Embassy. Afterwards, I walked from the embassy area to the center of town, asking for directions along the way in broken Arabic. Finally, I met up, as planned, with the other person I wanted to see in Rabat: a former PC Morocco employee who we all love and miss but who has a fantastic new job as country director for a cultural exchange project. Myself, another volunteer, he, and another former PC LCF (language teacher) sat for 3 or 4 hours and laughed over coffee.

At 9 pm, we all realized we hadn’t eaten, but he went home while the other volunteer and I went to…TGI Fridays! Yes, there is a TGIF in Rabat. I was surprised, and even moreso at the magician who came and performed at our table, the obvious effort our waitress was making to be as authentic as possible, (even coming and introducing herself, pointing to her nametag, and telling us to let her know if we need anything: a definite first in Morocco for me, and a real effort on her part, as we saw her practicing it under her breath as she walked up to us). The manager, an ex-NFL player who has only been here since the opening in November, came and spent a lot of time at our table, talking to us about his perceptions of Morocco, the process he had hiring waiters and waitresses, his beautiful beachside condo, and how he’s gone from not knowing what continent Morocco was on 6 months ago to not wanting to move back home ever. He also brought us over a large brownie sundae to split at the end of the meal.

I thought we’d never get a taxi back, but we did and the next morning, headed to the office one last time. I wanted to go back to go to the library, which hadn’t been open the two other days, and to check email briefly. The library was another little slice of paradise and I probably spent over an hour looking through all the sections and seeing what resources might be useful over the coming months.

We barely made it to the train station to get back to Marrakech, but we did, and we were able to hit the souks up once more. If you’ve never been to the Marrakech souks, they’re a bit intense and difficult to describe. I’m sure there is a poetic and delightful description in some guidebooks, and some complaints and gripes on some others, but they’re, to put it one way, intense. On one level, you have the harassment and catcalling, the “Hello fish and chips” or “Australia! You Australia? Kangaroo kangaroo, come to my shop!” on another, there’s the whole dodging mopeds as they weave in and out among the pedestrians, the olfactory overload with all the goodies being baked or cooked and the occasional rancid odor or the musk or spices from herb shops, the sights of any sort of souvenir imaginable, the clothes and clothes, the woodcarvings, pottery, jewelry, leather, metalwork… and then on the main square, Jamaa Alfna, there are the requisite snake-charmers, cheap fresh squeezed orange juice (or expensive grapefruit juice you can talk down to half price in Tam!), the snails steaming in large pots, the women trying to pull you over to do henna, the Gnawa dancers, storytellers, water sellers in gaudy frilled hats, and, oh, the tourists!
In any case, after perusing the herbal shops and looking for gazelle horn cookies among the bakers, we eventually found the Chinese restaurant some of my friends had told me about: China Quick. It’s in Gueliz, the new part of town, and isn’t in the least bit touristy: the first 3 taxi drivers had never heard of it and refused to take us there, not even knowing what street it was on. However, we eventually got there and I had a wonderful fish in ginger sauce with bamboo shoots and mushrooms. Three or four people came in while we were there picking up takeout in little white boxes. It felt like home and was really reasonably priced. I definitely plan on going back next time I am in Marrakech. We were able to walk back as well, though it took a good half hour or so.

To top off the night, we went to one of the tea stands on the square. At night, dozens of restaurant stands pop up complete with tables and utensils and sell anything from organ meat and sheep or goat head to a basic tagine, soup, or salads. Some are purely designated for a black, spiced tea that is more intense even than the “normal” mint tea. It was almost like a drug, the stuff is so potent: sweet, hot, and so spicy with cloves and ginsing, ginger, and cinnamon, that it burns as it goes down.

The ride back to site from Marrakech was also much easier than I had anticipated, and I made it to my souk town with enough time to shop, check email, and check my mail before going home in my afternoon transit.

All of this has been such a welcome change from my life in the rural south; it was really difficult for me to go back to site. I fell in love with Rabat and realized if I got a job there after Peace Corps, I feel like I could live there for 2-3 years quite easily and comfortably. It’s a great city full of wonderful people and I love the feel of either the center of town or Agdal.

May 1, 2008

Happy Labor Day! At least it is labor day everywhere in the world except the US. Oh, the remnants of McCarthyism…

In any case, wow. Life is crazy. I can’t believe that a week ago I was in Rabat, living it up at TGI Fridays and Agdal, and now I’ve come from an experience that is what I expected Peace Corps to be like.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago, I was talking with my nurse about what some of the community needs are, and we discussed me going out to the outer douars and spending some time there. I was really excited about the idea, but never knew if it would actually happen. Most of those communities don’t have regular transportation, no cell phone reception, landlines, or anything like that, so logistically, setting up going there without a car is a nightmare.

However, my nurse found a man who was willing to let me stay with his family in a douar that I’ll call Toughmas (tooth in Tamazight; sounds a lot like the douar itself). I met him once in the sbitar: an old man missing some teeth with a bright yellow sash wrapped around his head. It’s not all that uncommon in my area to see men with a yellow or white scarf wrapped around their heads, almost like a turban. The white ones remind me of Oaxacan cheese. But I digress. I got the number for the transit driver that sometimes goes to Toughmas from my souk town, and thanked him for the invitation. This was probably February.

With being out of site so much, I haven’t had the chance to go until now. I tentatively planned to go there the 28th-1st and asked my nurse to make sure that was okay when he went on Equippe-Mobile.

However, with the Rabat trip, I haven’t seen my nurse since Equippe-Mobile and our phones aren’t working with one anothers for some reason. I emailed him, but never got a response. Tried calling. Nothing. The morning I was supposed to leave, I finally got a hold of him, and he told me he was still in my souk town, but that he had “gave them the message that I’d be there” those days. Then, my phone went dead (out of money) and by the time I recharged, I couldn’t get back in touch with him.

Dilemma: should I stay or should I go? I knew nothing about the family, nothing really about what they had been told, and I knew that if I left on the transit, I’d have to spend the night somewhere no matter what. What if they didn’t know or what if they forgot? Would I be stuck outside somewhere, sleeping on the ground, health books stacked at my feet?

But I bit the bullet. Why not. I waved down the passing transit from the edge of Tamazitinu, and got in, asking to be taken to the house I’d never been to before. People on the transit were friendly, at least. Maybe, worst case scenario, I could stay with them.

We drove through douars I hadn’t visited since last June, including one with a really cool but small domed mosque. I’m not used to those: most mosques here have the tower, not a pointed dome. Eventually we pulled up to Toughmas. “Do you know which house it is?” the driver taunted me. He knew, but he also knew I had no idea and wanted to make fun of me.

When we pulled up, the old man smiled at least, and remembered me, and the rest of the 13 people living in the house welcomed me warmly. Hamdullah. It was a gamble, but I made the right move.

I was shocked at how nice the house was: there’s no running water or electricity in the douar, but they had a “taqa:” a solar panel on the roof. This provided enough electricity to watch 2-3 hours of television a day and have some lights on at night. There was also a faucet that I thought might be from a local water chateau, providing “tap” water to houses, but I later found out it came straight from the “small well” with a motor. When it was all said and done, living there for a few days was no different in regards to amenities than my homestay.

That first day, Monday, I just spent time with the family, went to their fields and tried to help harvesting alfalfa and wheat but just getting in the way, and, at night, we had taam (large plain couscous) with udi and went to bed, sharing floor space with 8 other unmarried girls ranging in age from 5 to 30. The husband had married twice and I could never figure out how many kids he had from each marriage, but met a 1 year old, 3 year old and 12 year old boy, as well as 5, 8, 10, 19, 23, 25, and 30 year old daughters, and a 20-year old daughter in law. That night, I talked to the older women informally about the things I planned on talking about: safe home pregnancies, infant care, pregnancy care, oral rehydration salts, basic hygiene information, and dental hygiene. I also realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to gather all the women together to talk to them about health and would have to play everything by ear.

No problem.

The next morning, they woke me up at 6 and said they’d be in the fields all morning. The kids, however, had a 45-minute walk to school that was mostly uphill and was in the next douar over. I decided to go with them and bring my school toothbrushing lesson. The teachers welcomed me with open arms and a stuffed iguana. Really. They didn’t give me the stuffed iguana but they tried to scare me with it. I was able to do the toothbrushing/dental hygiene lesson with the morning classes, and then a girl came to show me around town and help me meet with the women in that douar.
Unfortunately, I was only really able to talk to 4 women and it was as one of them was weaving a large woolen carpet. They promised to share the information with others in the area, and so I went to meet up with the kids at the madrasa and walk home with them.

We got back at around two, and though all I wanted was to take a nap, Aicha, the oldest daughter, said that it would be the best time to go around to peoples’ houses.

Okay. So, we did. We’d go up to a house, she’d knock on the door and say hello, then we’d go in, talk for about an hour, drink tea and eat bread or dates or cookies or fresh butter and buttermilk, then go to the next one.

Over the next two days, we went to 9 houses. It was rather exhausting, but I think it was useful: talking about how to treat their well water, what is needed for the safest home births possible, when to wash hands, and how to make oral rehydration drink. Some houses were much nicer than others: from a two-room mud floored house with a well and nothing else to a house with solar panels, a powered well with a faucet, satellite television, and a bathroom.

The second night there, the three year old named after my nurse screamed and pointed. It was night, but we used a flashlight and saw a huge insect. I got close and stared to it. It was intriguing in its disgustingness and was about the size of my rather large hand. They tried to kill it but it got away and I asked what it was called.

“Brrdilghrm”

Oh, no. A camel spider. Right by the window over where I had slept the previous night. Needless to say I didn’t get too much sleep that night.

The third night, a neighbor came and grabbed me. “The nurse said you could say at our house too and we want you to.” Again, I went with the flow and went over and had a fantastic time with the family. There were three girls (9, 20, 27) (many more children living elsewhere) and the parents, and we had great conversation, they gave me a fantastic dinner (salad, beet salad, bread with sardines, and even Coke!). They fed me so well I thought they had to be rather well off, but when I asked for the bathroom, they told me that everyone just went outside. No bathroom. Wow.

This morning I was off at 5 am and at my house by 6:30 am. I wanted to sleep but couldn’t, so did something for most likely the first time in my life: watched a movie from 6:30 to 8:30 am. It was strange, but rather fun.

Today, I’m off to Kelaa M’Gouna later in the afternoon to do a HIV/AIDS booth at the Rose festival. It should be fun.

May 6, 2008

Kelaa was fantastic! Friday and Saturday we saw over 2000 people in our booth and either taught or gave out information on HIV/AIDS prevention. Saturday morning, ALCS (a HIV/AIDS prevention NGO here) came with free testing, and people were engaged and asking questions. We had a few peer educators (nurses, a high school student, an Association member, etc) helping us out, so we ended up educating in Arabic, Tamazight, Tashelheit, English, and French.

It was great and worthwhile and a lot of fun, especially Saturday night, but I’m really feeling badly for being out of my site so much. After my parents visit, I think I have to “ground” myself and keep in site as much as possible, only leaving for Mid-Service Medicals. It’s great to be busy and have work, but it feels like the year I have left isn’t nearly enough to get done what I want to do.

On a side-note, if any of you are interested in being able to send me free text messages on my phone from the internet, drop me an email and I’ll try to see if it works out! I wouldn’t be able to respond, but it’d be great to hear any news every once in awhile on my cell phone and I think it’s possible through Maroc Telecom.

May 28, 2008

Wow, has it EVER been awhile.

On the 6th, the last day I updated, a friend came to visit for the night, and the next morning, we headed up to a local tourist site: a stunning gorge. We had fun goofing off, my feet freezing in the river, and me doing my best impersonation of a tourist: nalgene bottle in hand, sunglasses on, floppy hat, and camera around my neck. Despite the cliché, we had fun and I even bought a piece of antique jewelry that was typical wedding adornments even 10-15 years ago. In some places, older women still wear them always, in areas like Imilchil in the Atlas Mountains.

From there, it was goodbye to my friend and hello to others in my province as I spent the night near the provincial capital to go to a meeting the next morning about the training of trainers we’re working on for nurses in October. For some reason, the meeting didn’t end up happening, and I spent the next day killing time, waiting for my parents to fly in.

And late Saturday night (the 10th), after me hanging in our fantastic, nice hotel room for a change for a day, I was at the airport at midnight to welcome my tired but excited parents to Morocco.

What a whirlwind two weeks!

The first day, we went to Ouarzazate and had breakfast by the pool, mint tea with someone I work with from Peace Corps, visited a Kasbah (old fort/house), had a delicious French lunch, and went to a small fair that happened to be going on in town. I loved that my parents got to witness the friendliness and integrity of a lot of people here: I lost my wallet and cell phone (it fell out as I got out of a taxi), but when I called my cell phone 4 hours later, the person who found it met me at the Kasbah and gave me everything back untouched. The sad thing was that I wasn’t all that surprised. I’m getting too used to this sort of thing, because I can’t think of another town the size of Ouarzazate where that would happen anywhere in the world.

The next day, we went to my site and just relaxed in my house. Thank God there were no mice, scorpions, or really, any nasty looking pests that my parents saw in their two-night stay. They bravely conquered the Turkish toilet, went two days without a shower, and put up with my dragging them all over town for tea and coffee, kids chasing us all the way. I had a great (but exhausting!) time and had fun cooking with them at night.

The next morning, I called a taxi to pick us up instead of the Becker bus—a real luxury for me!—and we were off to my souk town and the gorges. Some of my friends were in town, so they got to meet some fellow volunteers and we had a, well, rather, interesting dinner with a view of, well… it was fun, but definitely not what I had in mind. The restaurant was dangerously close to the prostitute district, and there was a pool hall downstairs in the back that we didn’t see as we came in. Our balcony view was of a nice mud pit that men were using as a bathroom. It was pretty hilarious, to tell the truth.

Then a travel day; I forced my parents to travel about 12 hours in taxis and busses to Taghazoute, a small beach town north of Agadir. The apartment we rented was not to any of our liking (one of my parents nicknamed it a vulgar version of the word “latrine,”) so the next day we went to Agadir for two nights at a much nicer apartment with a view of the “God, Country, King” in lights on the nearby hill and crescent-shaped beach. Agadir was a nice place to just sort of chill out, and it was the little things, like the heavenly deep fried calamari or 5-dirham miniature zoo that made it a nice respite from the more conservative desert of the south.

Next, we went up to Essaouira on a nausea-inducing Supratours bus. Maybe it was the fact that Essa has been built up for me over the past year, but I think we were all disappointed in how touristy the medina was. People described Essa as their favorite place in Morocco, a place where you can sit and chill for 3-4 days without even thinking about it. I loved the harbor and the ramparts, and, of course, the Mexican/British restaurant La Cantina, but all in all, was underwhelmed with the UNESCO World Heritage Site. I feel like if I had gone 4-5 years ago, it would have been different (read: less commercial) and better, but don’t really care if I end up going back.

It was summed up as I was trying to follow directions to the famous La Cantina restaurant (famous among Volunteers and ex-pats, at least) and stood at the top of one of the alleyways, seeing if that’s where I should go. A nice, older British man came up to me, patted my shoulder, and said, “It’s all the same, love.” It cracked me up, but was true.

From Essa we took a taxi through the sprawling Argan tree farms (one of which did have goats in it, though they were planted there for tourists) to the insanity of Marrakech.

I was worried about the whole Riad experience there: it was a long, twisting walk to the riad through Jamaa Alfna (the main square) and we were all tired. However, the walk through the medina’s souks and eventually eating dinner at the famous stalls on the square with the Gnawa dancers, Henna-painting ladies, storytellers, traditional medicine men, and copper tins of steaming spicy tea lifted all our spirits. The next day we went to a palace and some famous gardens and we took a horse-drawn carriage back through the walled city. My parents were gracious enough to let me eat Chinese food there for lunch (as well as Indian food in Agadir, though that was the place with the heavenly calamari, so it wasn’t too much of a sacrifice, I think), and for all the craziness of Marrakech, I think we did really well. The second night of stall-food on the square wasn’t as delicious as anticipated, but it was still a great time.

My parents were flying out of Casa, so we took a train ride up there from Kech and found our hotel, which was disappointing compared to the review in Lonely Planet. I really don’t like Casa, but most people don’t. The medina is a joke (and was a terrible introduction to Morocco for my parents. I was impressed that they maneuvered the trains to get there during their long layover before flying to meet me though), restaurants are expensive and underwhelming, and the people were some of the least friendly I’ve met in Morocco. Well, except for the Berber speakers who were easier to find than I thought, but when most people can speak to me in Berber, they’re immediately friendly and ready to invite me over for tea or to stay over at their houses.

It was interesting seeing Morocco through someone else’s eyes, and fun to see what was the most entertaining to them or the most annoying. I never realized that me bargaining taxis in Tamazight (which happens often) or the kids in my town banging on my window wanting to come in would be funny or endearing, or that a dirty hotel or apartment, Turkish toilets, or unhelpful taxi drivers would be such an annoyance. I was really proud of my parents: the toilets, the transportation, the bargaining and medinas, their success in packing light, their generosity towards me and people in my community, and even just how relatively stress-free it all was, as well as just really happy that I can now talk about things here that they understand more since they’ve seen it and experienced it.

Now, I wish I could just stay in my site and not leave for the next three months, however, this isn’t meant to be. I have more meetings for joint projects, medical appointments out of town, and, excitingly enough, another friend from home coming to visit in June! I don’t think I’m going to have enough vacation time for everyone to come visit who I’d like; if you don’t have tickets and are thinking about coming, the best time would be after I end my service next June! I just don’t have the time off, unless you want to fly in and travel to my site one weekend, spend all week at my site, and fly out the next weekend and do no other traveling around with me!

Wow. Life is good but frustrating and tiring right now. I want to focus on my site but really don’t have the time to between all these other things going on, which makes me sad. I love that people are coming to visit, seeing people at medicals, and that there are projects involving other volunteers, but, really, I don’t think I’ll be able to do everything I want to here in Tamazitinu. We’ll see. I’m going to meet with the Commune tomorrow, hopefully to discuss the possibility of another project- building bathrooms in some schools which have nothing right now. Literally, the children just leave and go around the corner behind the classrooms. This is a project that, if it does happen, we’ll most likely write a grant to get contributions from people in the U.S. in a few months, so stay tuned!

As an aside, I’m quite glad that my parents didn’t experience any beasties in my site. However, I wish I could say the same for me!

The day I came back after two full weeks of traveling, I was sitting on one of my ponjs and a bit of mud from the roof fell onto my other ponj. It’s a mud house. I don’t think much about the walls falling in a little.
However, right after this, I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I screamed.

It was a camel spider.

Now, I’ve seen them before, a few weeks ago, when I was in Toughmas, and it was big and ugly, but only the size of my hand.

This one was huge. I’m not one to exaggerate for a good story, but I promise, including all its legs, from one side to the other was at least as long as my forearm. What’s that, over a foot? It was huge. Its body has a glistening orange part that just looks horrendous, and they BITE. I was terrified, I’m not going to lie. Spiders don’t scare me, nor do little scorpions, but when poisonous insects get large, I freak out. So I screamed and it moved FAST behind my ponjs before I could kill it. I poked around with my broom and squeegee but couldn’t summon enough courage to move my ponjs to get it. So it may still be there, I don’t know, but I did sleep with the lights on for the next two days. I wish I had killed it and then gotten a picture. It’s a monster. You know how kids at home are afraid of monsters in the closet or under the bed? If they lived here, I don’t think it would be due to an overactive imagination. I was terrified. And it could still be in the same room I’m sitting in.

Language Note:

I haven’t done one of these lately, but it’s time. I learned a cool thing the other day:

Ait lqbilt.

I’ve always heard “Ait lqbilt” as people living down a certain road to the south and then the west of Tamazitinu. When transits pass by and I ask where they’re going, people will say, “Ait lqbilt,” or someone living in one of a few towns in that general area will say, “I’m from Ait lqbilt, in such-and-such town.”

The area seemed like a distinct small region to me, so that was my assumption: Ait lqbilt means “the people of a geographic area with xyz as the borders.”

Until I had a conversation with someone in my souk town.

Her: “Where are you from?”

Me: “Tamazitinu.”

“Oh, Ait lqbilt.”

“What? Ait lqbilt? But I thought XXXX, XXX, and XXX were Ait lqbilt.”

“They are too. But we also call Tamazitinu Ait lqbilt.”

“But… should I call Tamazitinu Ait lqbilt?”

“Not if you’re there.”

I looked up the words for south and west (not words I use a lot in Tam, apparently). Nope.

So I finally asked a friend’s ex-tutor.

“Oh! Good question.” Apparently, “qbilt” means “in the direction of Mecca” or “in the path of from where I am currently to Mecca.” From Tamazitinu, the towns down that specific road are in the pathway to Mecca, as are places in other countries and Saudi Arabia. From parts of the US, Morocco would be Ait lqbilt. From Beijing, China, for example, if a Berber speaker (though “qbilt” might exist in Arabic as well) talked about Ait lqbilt, it’d include parts of India, Pakistan, Iran, Quatar, and parts of Saudi Arabia.

Fascinating, and even more fascinating that it’d be a part of every day conversation in regards to communities down a road from us when it also refers to millions of people in other countries, thousands of miles away.

I'm alive and well!

2008-05-09T11:39:00.001-07:00

Hello, all!

I am alive and well, and I'm in the middle of writing a long update, including:

A fantastic trip to Rabat, the European-like capital, and living it up there in a very non-Peace Corps week.

A four-day trip to an outer douar without electricity or running water to do door-to-door health lessons.

Participating in SIDA (HIV/AIDS) education booth at the Rose festival.

Getting ready to travel around the country with my parents, who are flying in tomorrow!

Life is good; crazy, but good.

More to come.

The last month and a half... part one!

2008-04-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

Field Day, Field Trip, Spring Camp, and Training

March 20, 2008

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 noon. Crazy. I was excited: it was just as fast to get up to her site as it is to get to some of my outer douars!

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 Morocco, but many are thicker, hand-woven wool.

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.

April 7, 2008

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 Morocco, from Rabat to small towns near the provincial capital come to learn English and have fun at camp during their spring break. I got to live out my childhood dream of being an overnight camp counselor for the first time at age 24, not knowing the language of most of the kids (the vast majority spoke either only Darija, or Darija and a different Berber dialect).

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 Rabat were quite snotty about it, bringing their own food, or refusing to eat soup off a plate or refusing to eat lentils. The kids from smaller towns had no problems polishing it off (nor did we), though I strongly disagreed with the usage of communal cups.

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 America, and have a discussion and reading about American and Moroccan holidays.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Nutrition Lessons in "The Big Cities"

2008-03-11T02:38:00.001-07:00

March 7, 2008

I’ve had the most amazing three days ever, and I’ve been productive as well!
Wednesday, I headed over to my smaller "big town" near my site. It’s just as close as my souk town but isn’t quite as big and I don’t have regular transportation, so in my nine months in site, I’ve never really spent time there.

I chose a Wednesday because it’s that town’s souk day, so I do have transportation straight there, opposed to backtracking and making a 40k trip into an 80 k trip. The Small Business Development volunteer there asked me to come do a nutrition lesson, so I spent the morning getting to know her and walking around that town. It’s more peaceful than my souk town, and I might make it over there more often now.

The co-op she works with was welcoming and I think they understood most of the lesson. It went well, and they asked some good questions. It’s an interesting association: a co-op where women come and sell their wares to tourists and other people in town.

We went straight from there to a new English class she was teaching, then headed to her house to cook a tagine and cinnamon rolls with a Youth Development volunteer in that town. I had a really good time and have more in common with her than I thought. I was also inspired to buy a tagine pot to try to make tagine. I did buy a small incense burner and am going to try to learn how to burn the "incense rocks" that are common in these areas.

We both are intrigued by all the spices available in Morocco, so on my way to the bus station to get to my souk town yesterday, we went to her favorite spice and traditional medicine man. I don’t think I’ve described these stores before: they are quite curious to me. Dead chameleons, different muds, incense made out of compressed herbs into light stone-like material, beauty products, beads, animal antlers and gazelle or leopard skins, and jars, barrels, or sacks of herbs and spices adorn these usually dark and small stores. An old man sits behind a desk. This was no exception, and white-bearded, spectacled man spoke a curious mélange of Tashelheit, French, and Arabic in an incomprehensible but passionate stream of knowledge about traditional medicine.

According to what we could decipher, he told us traditional medicine was related to blood types and each blood type referred to one of the four elements. He told me I was water, a very desirable element because water-elements desire peace and hate conflict, sometimes sacrificing to prevent problems, they are intuitive, and hate lies and dishonesty.

He went on, but mainly in Arabic, so we left, somewhat reluctantly, but I’m tempted to find someone to translate and find out some of the theory behind it so that I can understand some things people in my community might be doing in secret.

Late morning, I took a bus over to my souk town, passing the road to my site. After a quiet lunch at my normal café, I headed over to my SBD volunteer friend’s association: the handicapped association.

It’s an amazing place. Volunteers and people who have mental or physical handicaps come in and have a social network and familial atmosphere, free healthy lunches, and classes to develop artisan skills. There are classes in pottery, candle-making, soldering, traditional dagger-making, beadwork, embroidery and cross-stitch, and many other crafts. I was immediately welcomed by a room full of women that my friend spends time in every day.

At first, it seemed a little disorganized and I got the impression that the director wasn’t particularly excited for me to talk about nutrition to the women. I thought about backing out, but after hanging out and getting a small tour, we gathered the women in a classroom and I started.

It went very well. People were laughing, they were able to come up with healthy menus, and they helped each other to understand. I didn’t know at first how many people were able, or what the scope of that was, but leaders in the group helped transfer the information, and I was really happy with how it went.

Afterwards, I spent some more time in a room with 8 or 9 women and girls, aged 8 to mid-fifties. I felt like I wanted to pack my bags and move in with them; they were so welcoming, kind, joking around, and it just felt like I was welcomed into a family. There was none of the stress of language or behaving properly. People were just open, themselves, and love abounded. It sounds trite or cheesy, but really, it was an uplifting place.

A few of the girls taught me some Tashelheit sign language, something that I’m sure is only regionally used and I don’t think is recognized as an official language anywhere. One girl was probably about ten and deaf and taught me the colors using plastic toys as a guide. Two other deaf women and I communicated with a combination of lip reading, motions, and a lot of laughter. One woman in particular, a 21-year old, really enveloped me in welcoming love and insisted I come back sometime.

Another thing that was really shocking was the fact that the volunteer, who is male, was able to be physically affectionate without it causing problems or being shameful. He’d swing the ten-year olds over his head, or hug women, calling them "sister." It was as if all the taboos and things that you "have to do" outside the walls in my rough-ish souk town disappeared in the association and it was a family.

I bought two candles, forgoing the daggers for now. I might have one made for me before I leave with my own design or my name in the Tifinagh Alphabet. The director came out and started talking to me, then pulled out a piece of paper he had just written down.

It was the menu for the free lunches that the association provides for all their volunteers and members, written out. "Is this good? Can we make this better?" he asked me.

I was shocked, and though I’m not a nutritionist, I could tell that the meals were very good: salads most days, fruit every day, milk often, vegetables every day, carbohydrates, and every day but one had a very good source of protein. The only suggestion I had was to add eggs to the protein-free day, and he said that they’d do it and thanked me for my help.

Since I had tagine the night before and was thinking of buying a tagine pot, I asked about them, since they weren’t enameled the way I’m accustomed to. I had fallen in love with the association and wanted to support them more than a random tagine-seller in town. He described in detail the difference between enameled and non-enameled tagines and described what I’d have to do in order to cook with them well. When I asked the price of a small one, he waved his hand. "It’s a gift from the association," he said, and proceeded to wrap a tagine made by one of the women I had just befriended, went into the solder room and quickly attached two pieces of iron to make a safe cooking surface between bare flames and the tagine pot, and wrapped up a clay burner (so you can make one tank of butagaz into a burner for pots, pans, kettles, and tagines. I tried to pay, but he was insistent that I take them to the point that it would be rude to decline. Overwhelmed, I left with my friend to his host family’s house, mind and heart reeling.

It was the first time in Morocco that being different meant that I was the same as everyone else.
It didn’t matter that my language was bad: many of the people were deaf and have trouble communicating most of the time anyway. It didn’t matter that I was American or a woman or not wearing a headscarf. Everyone is there because they are different, so my difference made me the same as everyone else there: an outsider in normal Moroccan society. We were all there, just people… whether we were able or disabled, whether we speak or not, whether we can function independently or not, and the few hours I was there might have been some of the most love-filled and genuine in my life.

March 8, 2008

I think I’m supposed to move.

My friend, Khalti (nickname; it means aunt) is one of my favorite older women in town. Her sister is my absolute favorite but she’s a close second and catching up fast.

I went to her house today for tea and she invited me over for lunch the next day. She also gave me an incense burner, which I tried to refuse but couldn’t. I’m bringing over yogurt fruit and a scarf I brought from the US for her tomorrow.

She brought up, not for the first time, that a house has recently become "rentable;" a house that I’ve been to a few times and actually has a crazy memory associated with it: a dinner with five teachers and the Rais my first week in site. One teacher was renting it until the beginning of fall until he left and now it’s vacant and beckoning.

It’s cement, which is less romantic than an adobe mud house, but more practical, though hotter. It has a few rooms and is in better shape than my house now, but the reason I’m tempted more than any other is location, location, location!

It’s next door to Khalti’s sister: my favorite old woman, and my friend who makes the trek to my house now every once in awhile… one of my closest friends here. It’s two doors down from my homestay family. The tobis pulls right up to the front door, and it cuts a good 15 minutes off the time it takes me to walk to the sbitar. My other next-door neighbors (it’s split because the road widens so I have 3 next-door neighbors) are a family who I love but don’t know very well who has goats and pigeons and a daughter who, whenever she sees me, tries to drag me over for tea, and a single woman who is very nice, though questionably trustworthy.

I also have a teleboutique in the front yard that is soon getting a fax machine, the super-hanut, the neddi is right across the street so I’d be more likely to hop over if I’m bored, and the school.
In other words, the location is perfect. Friends, work venues, proximity to stores… it’s all there.

I want to move.

The problem is that I’ll have to not only get Peace Corps approval (which I’m hoping will be easy since it’ll cut my rent down by almost half), but will also need to buy a bed and at least one or two tables or storage things. The house is completely empty. I own two ponjs, one agrtil (plastic carpet), one plastic table, and some cookware, but I’d probably have to dip into my own money to get a bed, tables, and some more spoons/plates/knives. Khalti told me that I might be able to borrow a desk or table from the school or neddi. That’d save some money… and I can sleep on a ponj for awhile, but sooner or later, I’d need a bed.

We’ll see what happens. I just wish I could call Peace Corps now to see if they’ll let me move!
I’m cooking my second tagine in two days. It’s a fun, easy way to cook a meal. I think I might be addicted.

… and my tagine pot cracked, spilling oil and spices everywhere! Oh, well. It was still delicious, if a mess.

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

2008-02-24T04:41:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-14T07:09:00.001-08:00

February 4, 2008

I am exceedingly happy today.

It's hard to think why or how, considering less than 24 hours ago, I could barely swallow, was soaked in sweat in my sleeping bag, continuing a fever that started 24 hours previous with tonsils the size of golf balls… while the Super Bowl, commentary in French with NONE of the fantastic commercials was playing in the next room over. I did get to hear snippets of Tom Petty while making a bathroom stop at about 2 am though. Fortunately, the antibiotics finally kicked in this morning and, lHamdullah, I'm operating now at about 95% health and am safe and sound back at my house.

It's been a remarkably productive weekend. Thursday was at my house, taddartinu, and really set things off and rolling. Let me back up. Myself and two of my volunteer friends in the province were all set up to do what we called our "sbitar incinerator tour." This entails going to each of our sites, checking out our sbitars, talking to our staff, and any communes or associations to get the ball rolling for building medical waste incinerators for the clinics.

We started at my site, and so I was off early Thursday to meet my friends so I could save them seats and we could grocery shop together for what ended up being the beginning of a weekend feast. We got back to my site at about noon, and I called my nurse, and in Tashelheit, invited him to lunch at my house, then we'd go look at the incinerator and talk to the president of the commune (Rais, like the mayor).

Or at least that's what I thought I said. One o'clock came around and we had a fantastic American lunch: pasta with meat sauce with delicious Italian spices, a salad with a balsamic vinaigrette, and brownies I had made the night before for dessert. He said he'd be by at one… and we were starving! He wasn't there at 1:15…1:30… and so finally when I tried calling for the third time at 1:45, the conversation was confusing. I figured it out right after hanging up: we had a miscommunication… and he had been waiting at the sbitar with the Rais since one.

I was a little nervous, having made them wait for almost an hour with no explanation, so we shoveled food down and boogied down to the sbitar. They were both gracious and understood the miscommunication, to my relief, and didn't even come close to giving me a hard time about it. Again, lhamdullah. The meeting went swimmingly: not only was the Rais all for it but he had absolutely no hesitation for the commune providing 25% of the costs and actually wanted me to hurry and push the grant through. I hope my timeline (the one we're forced to follow, with all the steps before the grant application, then waiting for that to go through) will be acceptable.

We had orange juice and bread with honey and fruit at his house and, after some very strange conversation and actions, we headed to my house to watch movies and just relax. We were all surprised at how easy it was to get the Rais onboard and how willing he was to work with us.

Our luck carried through to the next day. We went to my friend J's site. His site is one of my favorites: it's in a river valley and is covered with rosebushes, rapids, and literally dozens of falling-apart old Kasbahs. In the distance are the snow-covered tops of the High Atlas mountains, and the people are just as friendly and welcoming as they are at my site. There are also a few cave houses: houses built right outside the entrance to a cave with cool, damp cave rooms that are used a lot during summer. He also has consistent transportation to his souk town about every 10-15 minutes during the day. It's fantastic and has a great vibe. I can't help but admit that I am a bit jealous, though not necessarily of the fact that he has 5-6 small hotels/guesthouses.

His nurse was happy to help suggest a location for the incinerator, and at our request, accompanied us to his Commune. His Rais also agreed to help contribute the 25%, right off the bat. Easy as pie.

After business, we went on a hike through the center of his town, then along the riverbed, through a douar built entirely of 3-4 story mud Kasbah-like houses. It was stunning. We happened on a group of women who were washing clothes in the river ("Come and help!" they joked), and finally, a very precise looking set of bright white tents.

I asked a man who was sitting on a nearby about the tents and he invited us to have a look. It's a setup done by a nearby guest house for foreigners. It was quite luxurious looking as far as tents go: clean white linens, beds elevated from the tent floor, a hammam tent (water heater with buckets of water and a heater to make the tent really hot), a restaurant tent… the works. If it weren't 500 Dh a night, I'd be tempted to take people there when they came to visit. If it sounds appealing… he invited us for tea with fresh sheeba inside, and we sat on the bank of the river in comfortable easy chairs, watching the women washing clothes, boys climbing rocks on the opposite side of the river, and making conversation with this man in Tasheheit.

We headed over to another friend's site (only 20 min away) for the night and made tacos and watched more…entertainment… on J's laptop. I think I got paid the highest compliment since starting service that night. We were discussing the future and what we saw people doing, and someone brought me up. J said, after a moment's thought, "I can't think of just one job that is perfect or just right for Katy, but I do know that she'll be the type of person who you want to invite to a dinner party so she can tell the best stories that start off like, 'Oh, well, when I was doing xyz in Botswana,' or 'when I was working with this non-profit in Bangladesh…'" I really respect J a lot: he's one of the most brilliant people I know, and to hear him say that was really empowering because it's exactly what I want to be doing. (http://radicaljosh.blogspot.com) I still believe that no matter what I do, the only calling I know I have is to be a servant for social justice, directed (but not doing anything remotely missionary or religious) by God.

The next morning is when everything started to go downhill. We had gone to A's site for the express purpose of watching an incinerator burn, and getting answers to important questions: what do you see as the design flaws of the incinerator, what would make your life easier… etc. However, after sitting outside the sbitar for a good hour and a half from the time A's nurse had promised to come, and several text messages, we gave up and headed back to J's site where we had planned a working weekend: starting the grant proposal, etc. Of course, about six hours later, we get a text message from the nurse with a brief "I'm in the provincial capital, so I won't be in today."

This is when things really started to go downhill, fast. We got a lot done that day… but I started to feel weak. In the morning, I woke up with a 38-degree fever (C, not F), and unable to really talk. Strep throat. For the next 30 hours, I left one of J's ponjs (low spongey chairs/mattresses) only to go to the bathroom. Thank God my friend S was willing to run into town to pick up the antibiotics I needed and some food that could slither past my monstrous tonsils, and, J, of course, has the most extensive library of any PCV whose house I've seen, so I was well-taken care of….and was at least able to eat the pasta alfredo, and leftover soup from the night before.

Sunday evening, I had cabin fever and really didn't want to stay at J's another night, so I followed our game plan and spent the night in his souk town so we could get to S's early in the morning. We had a small Superbowl get-together with Pepperoni Pizza (turkey hot dogs from the provincial capital!), veggies and dip: the whole works. Unfortunately, kickoff was at 11:30 pm, and I only made it to nine and had a rather miserable night, as I described at the beginning of the blog. By morning, my fever broke, and I can swallow without any pain now, so the antibiotics are working. I was beginning to wonder if they were doing anything at all.

And now, I'm home, after a positive experience in my souk town (minimal harassment, lots of people remembering my name, people helping me with my purchases… my super-hanut man giving me a free handful of walnuts, and my veggie guy showing me his spinach with pride (spinach!) and, when I tried to buy two bunches, telling me to just take them). I bought cross-stitch materials so I can maybe learn some of the traditional patterns that are all the rage among the people in my area at the Neddi rather than crochet, which I'm not as excited about. I also got two new pillows for my friends who are coming in two weeks to my Anti-Valentine's party.

I'm making plans for my nearest volunteer friend and her tutor to come next week so we can help design some curriculum for my "mini-trips" to the outer douars that will, someday, come to fruition. I'm excited about this: my nurse is helping me find families who will host me and I'm trying to design 3-4 hours worth of education for two "workshops" at night for women in the douars, and a few lessons for the kids at the madrasas in the morning. My nurse has also promised to help me teach weekly lessons at the madrasas: there are 4 that are somewhat nearby, so I only need to design one lesson a month and then go to one a week. Fantastic.

I can start teaching English soon, and am exchanging Spanish lessons for Modern Standard Arabic lessons with a teacher friend of mine, starting ASAP…. I've started the ball rolling for three cultural exchange things, though two I might have to pay for entirely out-of-pocket. It's worth it, if it works out. I have my World Wise Schools class who I am corresponding with and having a ball with, and I'm trying to do the photo exchange. I've also signed up my girl's group up with a global art exchange program: we create a piece of art and send it to the place where we've been matched, and they send us a piece of art. It might not be the U.S., but any way to introduce the girls I work with to something outside their own realities is a good opportunity in my mind. I also think I'm going to try to make it a regular, once-a-week thing: every Friday, one group in the morning, one in the afternoon.

And… this weekend we finally got the ball rolling for a future Training of Trainers: a continuing education workshop for our sbitar staff on pertinent topics to help their effectiveness as health care providers…. AND, if that's not enough, we are going to try to do a short, (health-related but with other topics) summer camp for empowering girls in July or August.

I also really want to do the women's health curriculum for some women in my site. I don't know how practical it is, but I really, really want to figure it out.

I'm so happy because I feel like I'm working. Finally. I'm so ready to give back to the people here who have given me so much that it's just a relief to feel productive. Really, a relief. In some ways, I've almost felt like a freeloader for the last eight months, and that's not a good feeling. I didn't sign up for a 2-year long vacation. I would love to have a 40-hour workweek here… it's not practical, but it'd be wonderful. Well, okay. Maybe a 30-hour work week. J

February 8, 2008

I'm exhausted… and I have no time to rest. On a whim, my friend and her Moroccan friend are coming this weekend, so I have to go to bed so I can clean up more tomorrow morning.

It's been a fantastic and terrible day. Let me start with yesterday. I stayed in for awhile, then decided to go be social. My first stop was a friend's house where I had tea and she invited me to go somewhere with her today. I finally figured out it was one of my outer douars: one I haven't been to since June. I've been wanting to go back, and the way she described it, it sounded like it'd be another picnic'y day with fun and aheyduss and a nice view.

I went to a few other houses and helped one family who I like make couscous from scratch. There's something gratifying about the process of using your hands to grind water and flour into small balls that are then sifted and dried. I was shocked to hear that one of my friend's sister died. She lives in Khenifra, nowhere near me, but she was only 20 or 21 and died in childbirth. My friend seemed okay talking about it. I didn't know what to do so I gave her a hug. Apparently that's not what people do here to show empathy or sympathy, but it wasn't too awkward of a moment. I miss hugs. I hug my American friends when I see them, but it's not much of a socially acceptable thing among women here as far as I've noticed. What do you say to that situation? She was my sisters' age. I can't imagine losing my sister. I just can't imagine it… let alone smiling and laughing a few days later while people make couscous at your house. I worry about that though, with people here who I know who are pregnant. The question that always flashes in my mind when I find out someone else is pregnant is, "Oh, God… if she gives birth at home, will she be okay?"

I kept telling people where I was going to go today and people asked, "Oh, do you want to get married?" I didn't quite understand it, but the idea of a small wedding festival was exciting.

I finally, after stopping by a group of women sitting on the hill and feeling welcomed into their circle, though they're all about my mother's age, got home. As soon as I was there, the friend who invited me out came and said I should spend the night at her house so that it wouldn't be a hassle to get up so early in the morning. I find it incredibly ironic and slightly annoying that these women, though illiterate and mono-lingual Tashelheit speakers, have televisions and know more about what's happening in the U.S. Primaries than I do, even though I'm faithfully flipping through my short-wave radio every night to find the best BBC connection. "That woman and the black man from Africa are tied right now," they tell me.

At this point, it was dark, and I really had no choice. She helped me pack, telling me that in that douar, I had to wear a headscarf, so I grabbed it, confused, but to placate her. I was annoyed when she asked if I'd pay for her (or else she couldn't go) but there was no way out without one of us losing face. Fine. But I'm putting a stop to this now. I felt used and manipulated, but at that point, everyone expected us to go and it'd have been more problematic for me to say no than for me to just be taken advantage of slightly and say yes.

The night was stressful but also pleasant: I was on the floor with four women within 5 years of my age and a 2-year old girl who kept waking up crying. The matriarch, who is one of my favorite people in town, my "adoptive host-mother," made sure I had the best blanket that's extra soft and double-thick. "It's from France. It's a very good blanket. Very good. Look! It's double!"

In the morning, we headed out to the tobis. There was drama over the seats, but eventually, 18 women and the bus driver were off towards my farthest outer douars- about 60 k away. I was amazed on the way by the progress on paving some of the roads since June, as well as the fact that one of the douars that we passed seems to have implemented a community-wide solar power system. We didn't stop, but there was a solar power station and power wires coming from there to all over the douar; the school also had solar cells on the roof of one of the buildings. I was impressed.

After about 3 hours and dancing in the back of the tobis, lots of joking, singing, and carsickness as well as some truly terrifying forays over the "dirt road" that sometimes is just a dry riverbed and other times has huge rocks that cause the tobis to literally lurch from side to side, inducing murmured prayers from all sides, we got there. The ride was one of my favorite parts of the day though; we passed through nomad-land with tents, fields with white flowering almond trees, and even just seeing things from a new perspective 8 months after that equippe-mobile run was really enlightening.

When we stopped, I was surprised. I was expecting some sort of a park or creek with fields or some nice picnic area. We stopped in the middle of nowhere with two houses, a falling down building, a well, and a one-room building.

It all made sense a few minutes later.

They weren't telling me the name of a douar, they were telling me the name of a man who is an Ait Atta (the supertribe in the area) saint. Once a year, women rent out the big monster yellow tobis (not my normal one) to go and pray at the saint's tomb. My headscarf was so I could enter the tomb; the questions about marriage is because most of the women who go from my town on this pilgrimage go pray for a husband.

Of course, nobody explained any of this to me yesterday. And it's not that they explained and I didn't understand. I had no idea until I got there.

I was able to enter the tomb. I don't know if I was supposed to or not, but everyone there, including the male tobis driver, told me to go in, so I did; at first I didn't even know what it was. I took off my shoes and walked around the actual tomb itself on the dirt floor. At first, I had no idea what was in the center of the room; it looked like a raised platform draped in lace. I realized later that it was the actual body itself, buried, then covered in cement painted with some sort of green pattern or words that I couldn't see. The rituals that the women performed included incense; then, when I went in later, raising and lowering a big stick into a groove in the cement area while in a position similar to child's pose in yoga. They tried to get me to convert right then and there, "so you can go straight to heaven when you die, and so you can pray for a husband right now," but, obviously, I declined and left the tomb.

There were a few local kids. My friend told me to put a dirham in a hole in the ground and I did. Immediately, the kids grabbed for it. I don't understand the significance of that either… was it an offering? I made sure that in my own way, I let God know that my intentions were pure and if I did anything offensive either in Islam or Christianity, it was only in my naiveté and not disrespect.

After everyone who wanted to had alone time in the tomb, and we had a lunch of sardines and bread, we headed back.

In one of the douars on the way, we stopped outside a house and asked for water. I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but in at least my part of Morocco, water is considered a shared commodity. What this means is no matter where you are or who you are, if someone asks you for water, you're obligated to give it to them. This is great on a lot of levels, except when you're on a bus in the middle of summer with a Nalgene bottle and the stranger who has been coughing and sneezing next to you with a sick kid in her lap asks you for a sip of your water, which is a health educator's nightmare and reality.

She brought out water for us, then invited me to spend the night at her house. "We'll make sure you get to the big town tomorrow morning so you can be back home by tomorrow afternoon." If I didn't have people coming over tomorrow, I would have been sorely tempted, but she said I was welcome back any time and she'd help me go around and talk to women about health issues. Fantastic.

By the time we left, I was exhausted. Utterly exhausted. I took a few pictures of the douars as I we drove by, but we ran into a snag when the dirt road was blocked by another transit bus, as well as when we got lost on one of the dirt road networks by a larger town. It still boggles my mind the way my site is defined: I can go to any of my outer douars without permission from Peace Corps, including these douars that I went to today… but to get there, I had to travel 60 k each way and drive through a larger town that's not quite the size of my souk town but probably has 20,000 people. To go to my souk town, however, I have to have the day of the week approved by Peace Corps and if on another day, call and get permission.

We were almost back and I was relieved. It was a stressful day; a good day, but a stressful one. I felt taken advantage of by my friend by some of her other actions, felt pressured about conversion by pretty much everyone there, and also felt like I had to be on the defensive about not wanting to marry yet or marry a Moroccan and convert to Islam and live in Morocco for the rest of my life. One woman even said, "If you don't want to stay for the rest of your life, go home!" She was kidding, but I'm not sure how much. It sounds bad; it's not that bad. In general everyone was kind and welcoming and wonderful. It's just that sometimes things build and some days I can handle it well and others I can't. I had been surrounded by people literally for the last 30+ hours and just needed some alone time and rest.

We stopped at a café that I have seen every time I've been on Equippe-Mobile. It's this tiny stop on the side of the road, again, in the middle of nowhere. I've been really curious about it and wanted to stop. We did, and I was excited… until the tobis driver pulled about 200 feet past the café and stopped. We all got out and broke out bread, tea, and mandarin oranges on large boulders. He turned around and drove back to the café.

"Why aren't we going to the café?" I asked.

"If we go, all the men will look at us, so we can't go."

This was too much for me. I get this a lot; I know women don't generally go to cafes here unless they want the reputation of a prostitute, but I also know that groups of women from my town can go together in my souk town and it's not a problem. I figured a group of eighteen women would probably be safe, especially after just coming back from a small pilgrimage. I was wrong, and that was the straw on the "stressed out and culturally exhausted" camel's back.

It doesn't help that I'm reading The Feminine Mystique right now and that all Freidan's critiques of 1950s America are doubled when applied to the culture here. It's really hard for me, being such a feminist, to see women defined by motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood. It's hard for me to explain to people that my frustration with the "Ca va, gazelle?" comes from the fact that I reject being a sexual symbol to men here who I don't know, and doubly reject the idea that I'd be flattered or pleased with being boxed in by nature of my gender. To spend the day with a group of people who travel three hours each way to pray for a husband, be told by them that I should marry a Moroccan man and live their lives, be pressured to convert, and then be told that I can't do something as simple as order a coffee from a café was so impactful to me because I'm at a loss: what is my role?

I can't try to change culture, or say that our culture is superior. I can understand their embarrassment around women in Western culture who parade around in bikinis or walk the runway in little more than underwear and the societal pressures to dress provocatively. My goal here is to do development and cross-cultural work, not destroy or change tradition. But how can I empower women here to establish more of a sense of self or self-worth by nature of being human instead of just their role in the family? Or should I? I know what I want to do, but I don't know my place, and that is difficult.

I don't know the line between human rights and tradition. Take, for example, the part of my job that encourages women to give birth in a clinic rather than at home alone; it is a source of pride for women here to give birth at home, "Just me and God." Is it my place to discourage this practice? I think it is, but where does that end?

Many questions and no answers… or lots of answers. I don't expect to ever have a perfect answer, but the struggle… its's hard. Important, but hard.

February 12, 2008

It never fails: just when I get to the point where I'm unhappy here, socially in my town, as well as with work, things start to swing upward.

Yesterday was a hard day for me. I stayed in a lot, but when I left, I felt like I was intruding with the people who I visited. The blow came as I was walking home with groceries. I fell flat on my bottom in front of about 30 women, which was fine. I can laugh at myself. But then, as I was walking towards one group, I saw one of my neighbors with a baby tied to her back.

It was her 2-week old. She lives just a few houses away, and I had no idea that she had even given birth. It really made me consider how much I don't know my neighbors, and how though in some ways, I have friends… the language barrier is so hard that I don't know if I'll ever have true friends here.

Today, I went to the sbitar to get some information from my nurse, and we set up something that will make me much more likely to teach there on a regular basis: a room for me to do lessons in. I also set up, finally, my first advanced English class for tomorrow (!). Hopefully, that'll go well. There are some young women here who want me to teach English to them as well, so I'll start that in the next few weeks. I set up, today, another lesson at the pre-school, and so I feel much better about actually doing something.

I also felt welcomed places today; on the way back from the sbitar, I ended up having a few conversations with people who I like but don't know well, getting an invite for lunch tomorrow at my host family's house, had tea with two families I like but don't know very well, and ate young alfalfa with garlic, onion, and tomato at a friends' house. I felt much better about my social life here today than I have in awhile.

I'm going to see the new "multimedia center" in the Neddi this afternoon; the commune apparently set up a room there with a few computers, DVD player, and a projection system.

… I'm back, and wow. The multimedia center is like a dream conference room in a university library. 4 brand-new flat-screen computers and a laptop, a whiteboard, a projector, a digital video camera, a digital camera, probably 300 or so books on new bookshelves in Arabic and French, huge speakers, microphones at a large wood conference table, a DVD player, a sound system including a sound board and large speakers. In all honesty, I don't know how much these things will be used here, but I'm impressed. Shocked.

It's like going to the home where I had bread and tea today and seeing a marble countertop in the kitchen that they told me (without my asking) cost $5000. This is the same house, during the summer, every room is covered in flies. Covered. "Development" confuses me sometimes. There's no more than a primary school in my town, and it was off a dirt road until last July, women don't get pap smears because they're ashamed, 17-year olds have babies on a regular basis, most women give birth at home and most women over 20-ish are illiterate… but a kitchen has a $5000 marble countertop and we now have a multimedia center with a projector and soundboard.

A friend (my nearest volunteer) and her tutor came to Tamazitinu this weekend, which was fun, though uneventful.

As an aside, a few weeks ago, on my "tobis," there was an old man who kept telling me to get off, that they didn't want me in Tamazitinu, that I should just stay in my souk town or go back to where I came from.

I was a bit shocked, and wasn't sure whether or not he was serious, but didn't let it get to me because it was just one old man.

The other day, he was there again. "Go!" he said. "Get off the bus!"

"Why, do you not like foreigners? Are foreigners bad?" I asked him.

"Just go. Stay here. Don't come to our town," but he started smiling.

"Tell me, are foreigners bad? Do you not like me?" He smiled harder.

"Do you not like Muslims?" He asked.

"Of course I like Muslims! I live in Morocco! I have friends in Tamazitinu. I have the same God, so I think Muslims are like my brothers."

He studied me. "Well… okay. Then you can stay on. We like you foreigners too. But do you know how to bake bread? You must know how to bake bread."

I told him about the follies of my bread baking.

"Can you make couscous?"

"I have twice," I told him, truthfully. "But it hurts your hands because the couscous is really hot when you have to fluff it so I don't like to cook it."

He laughed. "You know!"

I nodded and smiled. He turned to the person next to him. "Look, look, she knows Tashelheit," he told the man next to him, "Check this out," (loose translation), "Hey, girl (not rude), do you know how to make couscous?"

"Check this out!" I echoed, mock indignant that I was the newest form of entertainment so blatantly, "Check this out? He knows I speak some Tashelheit…" and so it went.

So, no. He wasn't serious. He was just a funny old man.

And it's hard to let things like being the newest forms of entertainment get to you. In fact, it's interesting the things that people point out that you have to just take with a grain of salt or be miserable:

"You're too old to not be married! If you don't get married soon, you'll never find a husband!"

"You're big. You should exercise more." Or "Oh, good, you know how to eat!"

"You don't go to the sbitar much."

"You don't speak Tashelheit."

"You don't know anything."

"You should be a Muslim so you don't go to hell."*

"You're sunburned."

"Your clothes have a (tear/bleach spot/stain/dirt) on them!"

"That's a man's (hat/pair of pants/shirt/pair of shoes)."

"Are your parents still alive? Really? And you still get along with them?"**

"You don't know how to wash clothes."

"You don't know how to cook."

"You don't know how to clean."

"This health education thing you are telling me is crazy: you don't know what you're talking about."

"Why do you keep moving your legs? Are you tired?"***

"Why haven't you come to my house!"

"Why don't you remember my name?"

"Are you sad?"

* I don't believe it's actually in the Koran that non-Muslims go to hell; my understanding is that Christians are considered People of the Book who, as long as they love God and do good works, can get into heaven come judgment day.

** The implication is that no parents who love their daughters could bear to see them go to another country alone for two years (or trust them or the men around them to not get in trouble). People ask me at least once or twice a day, "How are your parents? How is "ait ghurum?" (the people of your place: family).

*** This is true at weddings or any other occasion where we sit on the ground for more than, say, ten minutes. My legs fall asleep easily or sitting on the ground with no support hurts my back, so I'm constantly changing positions. Most people here, however, have grown up sitting on rugs or carpets on the floor the majority of the time and have no problem sitting still.

2008-01-31T09:39:00.001-08:00

Convenience, Materialism

January 19, 2008

Life is strange these days. Three people in-country have left the Peace Corps in the last three weeks, which has been somewhat jarring. Even though I wasn’t particularly close to any of them, I have met and interacted to them all and really admire their good work. Your presence and examples will be missed, and I have a great deal of respect that one of you is going back to your community to finish up your work on your own.

Another way life has been bizarre is these random flashes I have occasionally to things at home; I’ll be cooking lunch and think randomly about Joe’s coffee house in Atlanta, or I’ll pull on a pair of long underwear and flash on the clothing aisles in Target; I’ll grind peanuts and think of row after row of peanut butter in a grocery store. My last care package had some DVDs of TV shows with commercials still in them, and when a commercial for Walgreens came on “Get whatever you want, whenever you want at a quick stop at your neighborhood Walgreens: convenient, close, and with everything you need!” I almost threw something at my computer. I had a dream about Walgreens once; that there was one in my souk town and how excited I was to be able to get so many things at one place.

I’m not saying that I don’t like the sort of home-grown feel of things here. I love the fresh vegetables: all organic, mostly pesticide-free, seasonal, and in many cases, from a five minute walk from my house. I love going to souk and wandering among the rows of spice vendors, vegetable vendors, poking into the used clothes stalls, and munching on popcorn or spiced chickpeas from the vendors as I shop. I even enjoy going to my regulars in my souk town: my vegetable guy who always throws in a few free pieces of fruit, the bakery where they still don’t know my name but are also still delighted with my Tashelheit, the hanut man who has decided that my Berber name is Znu who is my popcorn and flour guy, and the over-priced but well stocked place with goodies like ice cream powder mix, expensive canned mushrooms, and vermicelli noodles who always gives me a handful of dates as an apology for such high prices.

I even like wandering the women’s clothing souk, even though I can’t really afford to go clothes shopping that often, ducking in and out from under hanging clothes, peeking into alleys to see if they have stores or are just residential areas, staring at dried chameleons and oodles of different types of incense rocks and dried herbs at the traditional medicine stalls, hearing people who recognize the taromit who wanders through once a month tap their friends on their shoulders and whisper “there’s the foreigner who speaks Tashelheit,” trying to find the funniest or most inappropriate English slogans on clothing items (I won’t mention the most inappropriate here because it’s really bad, but some of my favorites are “Cocaine Nation” and “Cucchi,”) seeing the craziest colors of tracksuits or the funkiest mid-thigh length sweater-shirts, wanting to buy brightly colored glass beads or bolts of fabric or shades of yarn from the craftier stalls, and fingering dusty antiques from a more touristy place.

I love it. I wouldn’t give it up for Walgreens or Starbucks or Joe’s coffee shop or Target, not for anything, but sometimes I miss the convenience. Sometimes I’m shocked at what I can find in my town though: today at my favorite hanut, the buHanut was selling real threads of saffron.

I’ve been lazy today; I stayed in until about three, then went to a neighbor’s house and watched Dr. Phil and had tea and tabadirt. Tabidirt is one of my favorite winter foods: it’s cornbread stuffed with fat (but it melts and just tastes like butter or oil), scallions, hot pepper, cumin, and another spice called isufir (I forgot what it is in English!). It’s spicy and filling and absolutely delicious. If I can bring myself to actually buy fat, I may try to make some, though I bet it’d be similar and healthier with olive oil.

I’m trying to save money because I haven’t been budgeting as well as I should be, but it all slipped away when I went into a store in my souk town my nearest volunteer friend told me about. “It has beautiful things,” she told me.

And it does. It’s definitely a tourist shop and the prices reflect this, but the silver jewelry is, in my mind, exquisite. I especially love all the traditional things from the area. The owner of the shop travels to buy from the artisans and he gets a lot from nomads. He kept showing me pieces that were beautiful but not traditional and I told him that the things that had real meaning were what I was interested in, especially things from Ait Atta, the tribe that encompasses my site.

He showed me a pair of bracelets made of brass that he bought from his aunt: an older woman who grew up and is still a nomad in a region covered by Ait Atta. They are heavy, large, and almost crudely made, lacking some of the intricacies of the silversmithing. “She was running low on money so she sold them to me,” he told me. They were her wedding bracelets, and she wore them for years as they went with their animals to let them graze, staying often in tents.

I didn’t want to buy them because it seems like they are something that should go to her daughter, but when I held them, for some reason, it moved me. The weight of them, the way they felt in my hand (they are too small for my wrists), the idea of them being worn for the first time on this woman’s wedding night, the idea of her wearing them for years… I don’t know. They almost felt alive in my hands.

I paid too much for them. I didn’t want to buy them, but I knew that I’d keep thinking about it if I didn’t. The story called me. I tried to buy them both and give one back to him to give to his aunt so she could give it to her daughter, but he said that she would probably end up selling it again anyway, so I kept them both, and I haven’t been able to put them down ever since. I may see if I can get a smith somewhere to turn them into bracelets that open so I can wear them, though they’re too big and heavy and crude to wear at home.

My budgeting and supposed lack of materialism went out the window; they’re completely not utilitarian. Oh, well.
I’ve started being more honest about some of the differences between here and home with people. I’ve never denied drinking alcohol, but I’ve sort of made it seem like I’ve never drank; recently, I’ve explained, when asked, about wine and how my “prophet,” turned water into wine, so it’s not forbidden and even some clergy drink alcohol in moderation. Prophet isn’t the best word, but it’s the only thing that I can convey clearly in Tashelheit. I’ve also explained a lot about having male friends that are “just like a brother,” so it’s not shameful or looked down on to be alone with a man if you’re not married because many times women at home have male friends that are like brothers. I don’t know if it’s going to be bad that I’ve admitted to drinking at home and said that I’ve been alone with men before, but if part of my job is to do cross-cultural education, it’s better than being dishonest.

Here, unmarried women are never alone in a room with an unmarried man that is not in her family. Never. (Note: I’m talking about my particular community, not Morocco in general, or even rural Morocco or Amazigh people). The implication is that there will be some sort of hanky panky going on as a given. Even married women are seldom alone in a room with another man outside her family. It’s stressful to me trying to navigate the circumstances. Some people tell me to say hi to men on the street in my town even if I don’t know them. Some women tell me not to talk to them unless I have a reason to. I tend to take a conservative leaning middle ground: I’m friendly with my hanut guys, association people, men who are over 50, the commune staff, the sbitar staff, and teachers: all people I have an excuse to work with and be friendly towards. I’ll also say hi if other men who I know or recognize address me first in a respectful way, but other than that I pretty much ignore many of the men in my site out on the street. In their house, if there is another woman around, I’m friendly. I say hi to every woman I see in my site though.

I vacillate between feeling very lonely and feeling very integrated here. On Monday or Tuesday, six of my friends showed up at my house (with three kids under two!) and (thank God I had just baked!) had coffee and warm zucchini bread. The idea of having squash in a sweet bread was a bit foreign to them, but most of the women enjoyed it. Sometimes it’s more difficult than I anticipated though, not feeling like I have friends in my town I can relate to as well as I’d like. People are the same everywhere, in their hearts and souls, but the linguistic and cultural differences can be very daunting sometimes.

I’m still also frustrated at work, or the lack thereof. There is a fantastic curriculum for a women’s health class, but it’s only in English, French, and Arabic: not Tashelheit. I’m trying to find an Arabic-speaking woman who would be willing to help lead the classes, but I’m running into dead ends. I am working to get an incinerator built, but it feels more of something I’m imposing than a community-generated project. My girl’s group is going well, but it’s quite informal, and I missed another Equippe-Mobile run over Christmas, which is very disappointing to me. It’s not enough to make me want to go home, but the lack of work and the fact that there aren’t any organizations here who really want to work with me as far as health is concerned is disappointing.

I am happy with my World Wise Schools exchange: earlier this month I got my first batch of letters from a 10th grade social studies class in West Virginia. The questions were insightful and I love talking about my life and experiences here. I sent off a reply yesterday and am looking forward to their responses. If any other groups want to do any sort of exchange, let me know. I might even be able to hook up a group with an English class at my friend’s site nearby if Moroccan pen pals seem interesting. I signed up online to be matched with a group somewhere in the world for an art exchange with some of my neighbor girls, which is really exciting to me. Most likely, I’ll have to pay out of pocket, but it’s worth it.

January 21, 2008

Maybe I’m being too harsh in only letting little girls come over for my girls group. This morning, a new girl came to my doorstep. She looked familiar but I never saw her before. She looked young to be wearing a full headscarf, but I’ve seen younger.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Khadija!” she giggled, blushed, and looked away.

“No, what’s your real name?”

“Zahra!”

“Her name is Aisha Mbark Ait Ihiya!” said a friend, also giggling.

I looked closer. It was a little neighbor boy trying to come in. Wearing a headscarf.

I wish I had taken a picture. It was priceless.

January 22, 2008

Another potential project: building bathrooms for several schools. I didn’t realize that at least two if not more schools have no bathroom facilities at all for the students or teachers. We’ll see if this happens, but it seems like a real possibility.

January 28, 2008

It’s been a busy few days.

Qe had a quarterly meeting with the Delegation of the Ministry of Health at the provincial level on Friday, which meant that I spent both Thursday and Friday nights at one of my friend’s houses. Thursday morning, I helped my nearest friend do a birth control lesson at her sbitar, and was shocked, again, to see the differences between sites. Every time I visit someone, it makes me realize how unique my experience is because of linguistic, tribal, size, amenities, weather, transportation, landscape, quality of counterpart, friendliness of people, presence of good associations or communes to work with… and the list goes on. My friend who lives in a mountain town has to lug her water from a public fountain and has no cell phone reception and just got electricity this summer. Some volunteers have internet and satellite television in their houses.

Even though my friend’s site is only 8 or 10 k away as the crow flies, our experiences are night and day, which was clear when I helped her with her lesson. The two of us traveled to another friends’ site an hour and a half from the provincial capital so we could make it to the meeting in the morning. Budget cuts mean that we no longer get reimbursed for hotel stays, but, in all honesty, other than the lack of a hot shower and western toilet, it was just as comfortable at her site.

I was up all night Thursday with food poisoning, so I wasn’t in top shape for the meeting and it took a few minutes before I could get out a word of French. The Delegue representative was very complementary towards us, and it was the smoothest (and quickest!) meeting so far, which I appreciated, because in the past, I’ve felt like our group was disorganized and unprepared.

Because I only had about three hours of sleep the day before and was running a low-grade fever, I fell asleep at nine on Saturday and missed out on the bulk of the Democratic primary debates that one of my friends had on his computer. I woke up a few times to hear my friends talking about issues and really wanted to participate, but my body just shut down. I’ve been fine since then, lHamdullah… it’s just every two months or so I get a terrible case of food poisoning that keeps me up all night, and in the last two weeks, it’s happened three times.

Sunday, I had a few of my regular girls over for henna and syringe discussion again. I was impressed: when I asked them why the henna syringe is okay to use, but the syringe from the sbitar is very dangerous, they were all able to accurately articulate what I had taught them in December. I was psyched. There was no need to review it, but we had fun doing henna in any case.

Jan 31

I'm typing this at the cyber now... it's been a fantastic few days working on the incinerator project. I've been promised the 25% community contribution for the project and both my counterpart and president of the commune are on board and supportive. Now, it's just coming up with the budget, finding a specialist to build it, and getting it done (and more funding for the other two sites in my province: 3 of us are working together).

Fantastic. Will elaborate more next time, enshallah. :)

From before...
I’ve been remembering my dreams a lot recently. I’ve been typing them up sporadically over the past few months, but the last three days, I’ve remembered and been able to type up multiple dream scenes, if that makes any sense.

I never have had a recurring dream, but I have had recurring themes. The worst are the nightmares that involve tidal waves or airplane or helicopter rides and either accidents or near-accidents and, over the past two years, forgetting that I’m signed up for a biology class and failing out of school because I’ve missed too many classes/assignments (mostly this is a high school freshman biology class even though that was over ten years ago).

In the last three or four months, there have been a lot of recurring themes that are relatively new:

Shopping malls/new clothes
People popping up from high school
A video rental store popping up in Tamazitinu
Visiting home but forgetting to tell Peace Corps and getting kicked out

Other random people who have popped up in my dreams recently:

My sister (but she went back in time and was reborn as a girl named Bethany)
Robin Williams (as a sleezy, sloppy cop)
2 of my 9th grade teachers
A nurse from my old job (turned flight attendant) (M?)
Someone who was “channeling” the spirit of my college choral director
A bus named Marie
A tidal-wave causing giant
President Bush
Chris Martin from Coldplay (singing the Pirates of the Caribbean song)
People employed by Google that sail a magic Google boat that goes on water and on sand (their newest project)
CIA agents that turn into mops and assault me in an elevator
An owl-cat with Mickey Mouse markings that sings along to Disney songs

I rather enjoy this remembering dreams business, except when I wake up convinced I’ve been kicked out of the Peace Corps.

Books I’ve read since May 23, 2007:
*** - Fantastic
**- Good
* - Probably a tolerable fluff read
:( - Terrible!

The Alchemist *
Kingston by Starlight (Christopher John Farley) **
East Is East (T. Coraghessan Boyle) ***
A is for Alibi (Sue Grafton) L
The Sum of All Fears (Michael Grisham) :( :( :(
Where There Is No Doctor (David Werner) * (good as a reference, not as light reading)
Slave to Fashion (Rebecca Campbell) :(
A book that was so mediocre I forgot the title: from early 1900s, two books in one about a girl growing up :(
Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley) ***
A novel about a woman imprisoned in Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution **
Love Medicine (Louise Erdrich) :(
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling)***
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hussaini?) **
Mountains Beyond Mountains ***
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) **
My Sister’s Keeper (Jodi Picault) **
The Glass Castle **
Running with Scissors **
This I Know Is True (or maybe I Know This Much Is True) ***
The Kiss of the Spider Woman **
Peace Pilgrim **
Eat, Pray, Love ***
The Namesake**
Dadda Atta and His 40 Grandsons (David Hart) **
Life of Pi ***
Girl With a Pearl Earring **
Rule of Four **
Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham) ***
The River King (Alice Hoffman) *
Christianity and World Religions (Adam Hamilton) :( (simplistic)
God in the Alley (Greg Paul) :( (contrived)
Tender at the Bone (Ruth Reichl) *
Resistance (Anita Shreve) *
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Fatima Mernissi) *
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers) **
The Space Between Us**
Dance Dance Dance (Haruki Murakami) ***
Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami) ***
Small Island (Andrea Levy) *
The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields) *
Long Way Gone (Ishmael Beah) ***
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) ***

2008-01-17T11:08:00.001-08:00

Hello!

My computer is dead. Well, more likely, my computer charger is acting up, but for all intents and purposes, my computer isn't usable right now, so my blogs will be shorter and less coherent.

It has been an interesting week or so though: a friend came over, I've started baking in my brand new butagaz oven (bagels, zucchini bread, baguettes, bananna bread, and a disasterous chocolate pie...), and even hosting six of my friends from my town as they randomly showed up at my house.

I'm also looking for a teacher, maybe 5th or 6th grade, who is interesting in doing a photo exchange with an elementry class in my town. My idea is to give disposable cameras to some of the children and tell them to take pictures of what is important to them, get the pictures printed, and then exchanging so that the other class can learn about life in the other town.

All right! I've gotta run. Have a fantastic week :)

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

2008-01-06T13:54:00.000-08:00

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).

2008-01-03T05:42:00.000-08:00

I had a fantastic update all typed out, talking about Christmas, New Year's and a festival I went to... but it won't read my USB drive for some reason. Be prepared for a long nosy update. Soon. I promise.

:)

L'eid Kbir

2007-12-24T02:30:00.000-08:00

December 21, 2007

Mbrook l’Eid!

Today is quite possibly one of the best days I’ve spent in Tamazitinu, and is if not the best day I’ve had so far in Morocco, it’s in the top three.

Today is l’Eid Kbir, one of the most important holidays in Islam. I’m not a Islamic scholar, so I can’t really tell you what it’s about, but I can certainly tell you what I’ve been doing for the last ten hours.

My next door neighbor told me to get up early so that I could watch people pray outside at 7:30. A few other people said that the prayer was at eight, so I figured if I got to the place by 7:45, I should be fine. I dressed in my kaftan and sparkly asinsi (square headscarf) with fringe, and left the house at 7:30. I hiked up the hill by my house, hoping to get a good view of the prayer courtyard on the other side.

It was quite anti-climactic. I reached the summit of the hill and the white courtyard came into view absolutely empty. Maybe I missed it, I thought. My heart fell. I should have gotten there at 7:30. I decided to walk to the public oven to buy some bread in case people came over, but it was closed. Some people were out but not many, and all the women were just wearing their normal clothes. I felt overdressed and like I didn’t really know what was going on.

I finally asked someone what time people prayed. “Eight-thirty.” A few other people said the same thing, so I started walking towards my house to get something to eat. On the way, I was stopped by a neighbor girl I really like who sews at the neddi who asked me if I wanted to walk with her to the prayer site. Happy for some company, I agreed, and we ended up stopping at six houses on the way to say, “Mbrook l’eid!” “Lla y bark fik!” “Happy holiday!” “Happy holiday to you too!” I enjoyed seeing the inside of houses I’d only seen from the outside and meeting everyone, kissing the women’s hands, and seeing everyone’s “ihrruyn ujdid,” or new clothes.

We got to the prayer place and I sat with a bunch of younger women and girls, as well as a few around my age or older and we watched the men, dressed mostly in white jellabas, file into the cement courtyard, and the women, mainly older and covered in the black taharuyt wraps, walk to the dirt courtyard behind the cement one. At this point in time, I’ll admit, I didn’t think it was the best day because the American feminist in me was livid about the situation. How dare people tell me that the culture here doesn’t discriminate against women when the men have a nice, cement courtyard while the women are not only separate, but not even equal? I had to step back. This is not a fight I have any business taking on or why I’m here. I certainly want to work with women and help them empower themselves, but today is not the day to fight these battles.

A man sitting in a wooden chair read some of the Hadiths and they prayed, white jellabas in front in unison, black taharuyts splashed with color in the back.

It was really nice to watch, but it wasn’t as powerful as I thought it would be. I did like sitting in the long line of girls and having other women walk by and greet all of us, kissing our hands, us kissing theirs, people commenting on henna or my kaftan.

When it was over, I found a friend and we were talking. One of my favorite people in town, an older woman who was my next-door neighbor in homestay, happened to be her sister, and another friend (also a sister) came up and dragged me with them to some of their families’ houses. Part of what people do in Tamazitinu for l’Eid Kbir is go from house to house, and that’s what the rest of my day looked like.

We went to their parents’ house and I had some Taam with Udi: a grain like large couscous with a type of melted bitter butter on top, eaten with spoons. At one point, everyone started crying. I felt almost pressured into crying myself, because I was the only one in the room not crying, but at the same time, it would have been very insincere because I didn’t know what people were crying for. I need to figure out this group crying business and see what the expectations are for it.

We left, after the first two of at least 17 glasses of tea I’ve had today, and headed for three more houses I’ve never been to before. Two looked really large from the outside and I’ve been dying to go in ever since coming to Tamazitinu but weren’t as impressive inside, and a smaller house was the opposite. After more tea and being pressed into eating the first of the probably 16 cookies I was pressured into eating today, I split off from the triumvirate of wonderful sisters to visit the mother of one of my closest “friends,” here.

However, nobody was home, so I decided to go visit some people I knew I should see. I went to said friend’s house and greeted some women in her husband’s family, but she was nowhere to be found. “Stay for lunch!” they told me, the first of probably fifteen lunch invitations (do you see a pattern here?).

I went to my host-mother’s extended family for tea and saw two of her sister-in-laws and two of her nieces: one is just over a month old, the other about six months. I really disliked going to their house during homestay, but now, they’re one of my favorite places to visit. The women are really friendly and laid back, and the kids are cute as a button.

At this point, they said that they were slaughtering the lamb, and I went outside to watch. It had already been slaughtered, and they were in the midst of butchering the meat. There was another family that was bringing their own sheep to be slaughtered and they asked if I wanted to take pictures. Of course I did, so I took some and videoed them slitting the sheep’s throat. It was rather graphic: I guess the knife wasn’t as sharp as it could have been, so it took longer than it usually does. It didn’t gross me out though.

After watching and taking a few pictures, (“God bless your parents!” I told them, for indulging my fascination), I headed towards Ihndar, my homestay neighborhood. There were quite a few people there I wanted to visit, so I started walking.

“Katy!” I heard called across the Ihndar “plaza.” It was one of my other favorite people in town (I have a few favorites, especially depending on the month). “Were you coming to see me?” I was indeed, but rather than go to her house, she took me with her on a whirlwind tour of Ihndar’s houses, most of which I’d never been to before. “This is my aunt’s house,” (stay for lunch!); “this is my uncle’s house” (it’s the foreigner that speaks Tashelheit!), “this is my friend’s house” (stay for tea!)… I think we went to four or five houses before settling outside where three families were slaughtering their sheep at the same time.

One old blind woman wanted me to take a picture of her by her dead sheep so she could send it to her family in Spain. I better remember to get it printed. I spoke some with my hostmother’s husband’s sister, who is one of the friendliest people in town, and greeted a slew of other people. One thing I haven’t mentioned is that whenever I walk, anyone, and everyone was out and about today, greeted each other, kissed hands, said “Mbrook l’Eid…” I had to have kissed over 100 hands today and don’t even want to think of how sick I might become in the next few days.

After maybe an hour or two with said friend, I told her I really had to go to my host-family’s house. I did, and she invited me to go to the neighborhood of Bozit with her to greet her family. And thus commenced another whirlwind tea and cookies tour of that neighborhood: her brother’s family who I know, and three houses that were completely knew. I finally met her niece’s husband who is a guide in Agadir and speaks fluent English and got him to promise me a copy of his thesis: an English paper about local legends and stories. I hope he’s true to his word. I met his wife this past summer and immediately liked her and seeing her again, I remember why. Good people. The only downside is that while kissing some of the hands, I could smell the raw meat on them. Such is life.

After Bozit, I went around Ihndar with her and we went to another four or five houses, each of which included at least one cookie and a cup or two of tea, people asking about my henna and if I bought a sheep to slaughter.

The day slowed down a bit when I went to my host-mother’s house to eat lunch. I played with the girls some, and took pictures of the sheep head, which at first, just sat on a short stoop by the garden, but was moved to the ground-level branches of a date tree (palm tree) and just looked funny, growing from its’ shoots.

I made up my mind, as they started barbecuing the organ meat, that today begins my time to try to get over my fear of meat. The more I see how good the meat is here: fresh, organic, raised in relatively humane ways, the more I realize how stupid my fear of eating meat really is. In the U.S., sure, the meat is terrible: packed full of hormones, raised in atrocious conditions… but here, every part of the animal is used, from the organs to the skin, and the food is all natural. There’s no reason for me not to eat it or be open to eating meat in general or organ meat.

As they were cooking, organs floating in a small pool of blood in a big basin, my hostmother reached in and pulled out a small piece of raw stomach lining and ate it.

“You eat that? Raw?” I asked. She smiled and nodded. Her husband did the same thing a few minutes later. Well. There’s no better way to start “getting over” a fear of meat than to eat raw stomach lining, so I asked for a little piece.

It was disgusting, but edible. I’ve eaten worse. But now, since I ate raw stomach lining, I told myself that no matter what they ate today, I had to have at least one small piece. So I did: a piece of lung, cooked stomach lining, kidney, two pieces of fat-wrapped liver (actually kind of good), heart, and another unidentified organ. I won’t lie: it wasn’t pleasant, but once I forced myself to get over the initial gag-reflex and relaxed, it was all edible and I was happy to have been able to convince myself to try it. It’s all in my head, I know that, and it was a good challenge to overcome. The strangest part is that some of it’s good: liver, lung, and heart really don’t taste that bad at all. The worst is the stomach lining: not the honey-comb like texture, but some sort of bitter aftertaste it leaves in your mouth.

Lunch took a long time, and I promised the fun family in the nearest outer douar I’d visit them for l’Eid. Okay, maybe I was guilted into it. I went to their house about two weeks ago and my friend said, “If you don’t come to our house for l’Eid, we can’t be friends anymore.” I know she was kidding, but I took it as an invitation, so I walked 30 minutes over to their house.

They were surprised but happy to see me. I stayed for maybe 45 minutes and they insisted I spend the night. Obviously, I refused, but they did invite me for lunch tomorrow, which I’ll try my hardest to do. They were all dolled up with bright pink sparkly lipstick which I tried on but wiped off as I walked towards Tamazitinu center. I really like those women. They laugh all the time, which is so comforting and relaxing that it’s certainly worth the walk over.

I stopped at my young friend’s house on the way back: this is the friend who moved from her father’s house to her aunt’s house and for 4 months, lived with only her cousin and her cousin’s baby (so there was a 17-year old, a 18-year old, and a 1-year old) and who I blogged about coming over and praying in my house. However, it was only her cousin and her cousin’s son at home, so I stayed for a few minutes and continued on towards home.

There was one family in Ihndar in particular whose house I missed earlier in the day. I knew the family a bit during homestay: the woman would always haul heavy crops on her back through my homestay family’s alleyway and would have a big smile on her face and talk about how heavy it was, good-naturedly. Separately, I knew her young daughter as the friendly young girl who would often accompany me and one of the women next-door to homestay on walks and who wanted to entertain me even on her own. The father is as friendly in a harmless way as any man in Tamazitinu, and they live in one of the most humble but welcoming houses in town. While there, I met some of their extended family from my souk town and really liked one of their daughters.

And then, it was time to go home. I got home, after walking with the woman whose house was empty this morning, at 5:30, having left the house at 7:30 this morning. It was the best pick-me-up I could ask for. I’ve been feeling like I have no friends in town, which is my own fault for staying in my house, shy, playing on my computer or playing games. I realized that the people who I like are forgiving of my shyness and I can and need to go see them on a more regular basis. There are 8 houses that I feel comfortable that I can go to anytime, and another probably 8 or 10 that they’d welcome me genuinely but I’m not comfortable with. I need to do something to force myself to be more social, because today, I felt on top of the world, accepted, and a real part of the community. Maybe I’m just on a sugar and caffeine high (I most definitely am), but, all in all, it was a beautiful day. In fact, there are three houses that I meant to go to but didn’t get a chance.

Tomorrow, I’ll go, enshallah. Tomorrow, there’s an aheyduss in each douar, and I think people still go around visiting. Two of my favorite people (okay, I’ll be more specific: two of my favorite five people in town) I haven’t even seen today. I won’t be as social or crazy as I was today, but I’m hoping it’ll be another amazing day.

Today in Numbers:

Sheep I’ve seen in the process of being slaughtered: 7

Glasses of tea: 17

Cookies: 16 (lHamdullah they’re small)

People who have grabbed me and taken me around with them: 4 individuals or groups

Bites of meat eaten: 10

Pieces of organ meat eaten: 8

Distinct parts of sheep eaten: 8

Houses entered: 31

Houses entered today for the first time: 16

Number of people greeted: At least 150 if not 200 or more.

Postscript: I’m updating twice today, so make sure to read the other entry too, if you are so inclined.

Invasion of the Tichiratin and Mice

2007-12-24T02:29:00.001-08:00

December 14, 2007

Today has been a, well, rather interesting day.

This morning, as I was making grilled cheese with roasted red peppers (a splurge) for breakfast, my doorbell rang.

It was a few neighbor girls. It was 9 am; I had told them to come over at ten if they wanted. Word has gotten out around town that I have toothbrushes, so some of the kids in town want some. I’ve decided I have no problem giving more away if they can demonstrate that they can use it, learn how often, and do the “which foods are healthy for your teeth” activity.

As I didn’t have enough cheese or red peppers to go around, I told them to come back at ten. They came back at 9:20. Close enough.

We did the activity at my house and I gave them cut up green pepper, carrots, and Ranch dressing. They didn’t like it. After 40 minutes, they started to get annoying, so I told them to go, new toothbrushes in hand.

Peace and quiet. I settled down with my book, and started cooking some soup for lunch in a few hours.

COO COO COO COO COO COO! (Have I ever mentioned that my doorbell sounds like a cooing bird?)

Five more kids; these were some of my favorites. We had already done the toothbrushing activity, but I repeated it (and they got it all right!) and talked about henna and syringes from the clinic transmitting disease. We colored (which they love) and they stayed around for a few hours. I don’t mind. These girls are usually polite, well-behaved, and respectful but also fun to be with. They saw my Santa hat, and so I explained very briefly about Christmas and wore the hat the entire time they were over.

Eventually, I kicked them out. It was 2:00 and I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I offered them some cabbage soup, and though they were intrigued by cabbage and ate as much of it as I’d give them raw, they were a bit disgusted with it in the soup.

After lunch, a big steaming pot of hot chocolate, and a few games of solitaire on the computer, I settled down with my book again, looking forward to a peaceful afternoon.

COO COO COO COO COO COO COO!

Four new girls. I’ve never seen them before. And now, they’re sitting in my salon, coloring. They’re a little more shy, and I’m exhausted, so we’re not having quite as much fun, but hopefully if they come back…and as soon as I stopped typing and started drawing with them, two more came over. It’s beginning to be ridiculous, but I’m happy nevertheless.

December 17, 2007

I’ve been lazy the last few days. It’s been a lot of me sitting on my ponjs, watching movies and TV shows on my laptop, though I’ve also done a load of laundry and started typing out lesson plans for my English class, whenever that gets off the ground. It’s an advanced class, and so far there are only three students: my nurse, and two men from the Commune (local government), so it’s not really a community-building, empowerment project the way I wanted it to be, but it is a way to get to know some local leaders who I may end up working with over the next year and a half.

I did, however, go to a friend’s house yesterday, which was fun. Even though I’ve been in my site six months now (I can’t believe it!), I’m still not sure how to handle some social situations here. For example, people say to just stop by at any time, it doesn’t matter when. I went in the mid-morning, and it seemed like I might have been interrupting chores. I only stayed for about an hour, and it wasn’t a big deal and, of course, she insisted it was fine and a good time, but I couldn’t help but notice that everyone else was busy doing something.

Today, I was out for awhile, and ran into a friend after going to two other houses. I asked her when a good time to come over to her house was and she finally said 3:00 pm was the best time.

I also never know when invitations are really genuine. Sometimes, I know they’re not, but sometimes I’m not sure. This evening, I was at said friend’s father’s house and they invited me to stay for dinner. The problem was that it was 5 pm and dinner, I know, wouldn’t be served until 8 at the earliest. I had already been at their house since 4, and even though it’s my friend’s father’s house, the rest of the family were complete strangers, and the idea of sitting in their house for four more hours was a bit, well, daunting, to say the least, so I made an excuse and didn’t stay. When I tried to leave, though, I realized by the way that it seemed that they really wanted me to stay, that the invitation was truly genuine. I could have stayed. Coming back to my empty house with hennaed hands made me realize it would have been an easier night if I had stayed.

Yes, my hands are hennaed for l’Eid Kbir (ikhatr). Last week, my hostmother invited me to come over today to get all hennaed up, so I came over after lunch, played with my host sister, and had the henna smear put on my hands. I may have mentioned the distinction this summer, but what most people in the U.S. think of as henna is what we call “zuaq” henna. The closest definition that I can come up with is “design;” it’s one of those words that I know how to use in different contexts but have never had translated. Zuaq is done using a syringe and finely ground henna and is usually done in some sort of floral design. There are special syringes sold in stores for this type of henna, but, as I know I’ve mentioned, girls do go to the burn pit behind the clinic to find used syringes for henna or squirt guns.

However, it’s more Amazigh, or so I’ve been told, to do “taromidt” (spelling?) henna, or what I’ve termed “smear” henna. For this, the dried henna leaves aren’t ground as finely as for zuaq, and it’s spread solidly on the palm of the hand, either in a line just above the wrist, or down to the wrist, and wraps around the fingertips, including the fingernails. After application, hands (or feet) are wrapped in a plastic bag, and left for a few hours or overnight.

There is a third variation that is between smear and zuaq henna: “skotch” (coming for the generic word for tape, which, yes, comes from the brand name Scotch Tape). This is a type of tape with designs cut out that is sold in stores. It’s easy to use and you do end up with a design, but it’s apparent that the design isn’t from a syringe. The tape is placed on the hand or foot and henna is “smeared” over the tape. The henna dyes the skin wherever the holes are in the tape.

In any case, I’m not as much of a fan of the “skotch,” and “zuaq” takes time and it’s hard to find people who are really talented. I tend to stick to the “smear” henna, which is, from what I’ve observed, most common in my site.

With my hands swaddled in plastic bags, my hostmother and I set out for her next door neighbor’s house, one of my favorite families in town. The mother of the household’s husband had just come in from France. I’d never met him before. We didn’t talk more than “hello,” but I sat with the daughters, who are all about my age, and drank tea.

They all cried a little bit. Even my host-mother cried a little bit. It was surreal, because I didn’t know what to do: it reminded me of the funeral I went to a few months ago. People don’t cry openly here, at least not that I’ve seen, except in special circumstances, and I suppose the return of a family member after a certain period of time qualifies. The thing is that while they were crying, they weren’t surrounding him or hugging him or even talking to him. They just cried, silently, while sitting in the salon, and then carried on regular conversation. It was touching, and it made me miss my family, but it also made me uncomfortable. I’m not used to seeing people cry and not being able to try to comfort them or say something. I just sat there, silently, not knowing quite what to do, hands wrapped in black plastic bags.

I left when my host-mother left, despite the mother and a few sisters saying “Stay! Stay!” and started walking home. That’s when I saw my friend who was going to her father’s house and I went over there for a few hours.

The mice have gotten worse in my house. I think it’s because it’s getting cold and they want to be somewhere warm. I caught one today in a trap, and I hear another one in my kitchen pantry right now. I want to cook dinner, but I’m afraid to go in there because I don’t know how to deal with the mouse. I think I need to just bite the bullet and buy an inordinate amount of plastic containers, because it’s getting to the point where not only am I keeping all my fruits and vegetables in the fridge, but also sugar, flour, cornstarch, and even peanuts. Still, this isn’t helping. It makes me want to just say “forget this,” and move to a cement house, but the hassle of moving, getting Peace Corps to inspect a second house, and the things I’d need to buy (a bed, a table or two, a desk, lots of shelves, a kitchen counter possibly…) really make me question if it’s worthwhile. It’s just one thing after another and I don’t know which is worst: the scorpions in the summer, pinchy bugs in the fall, and now mice in the winter.

…

Wow. I feel like I’ve hit a new low. I finally ventured into the kitchen to get some food and decided to cook lentils, one of my favorites. It’s simple: sautee garlic, onion, tomato, and pepper in some olive oil, then add some rinsed lentils, water, a lamb knoor (bullion cube), cumin, ginger, salt, and pepper, then just simmer for about an hour.

I was in the middle of sautéing my vegetables when my butagaz ran out. This means nothing cooked or hot until tomorrow when I get up and go get my tank refilled. It also means, that when I scour my kitchen, I can have fruit, a rather pathetic salad, or nothing for dinner. I really should have stayed for couscous. My dinner now consists of lukewarm half-sautéed pepper, tomato, onion, and garlic doused in barbecue sauce and a cold protein powder drink. Delicious, let me tell you. (Yes. That was sarcastic).

And, to add injury to insult, as I was walking into the salon to eat and type this, I saw a mouse scurrying under my door to leave. It’s one thing to hear them, it’s a whole other thing to see them. They give me the creeps, they really do, and the fact that this is the third that I have physically seen today is really irksome.

My to-do list now has two rather urgent additions:

Buy Rat Poison
Buy Butagaz tank

At least now, I know that one large buta tank lasts me almost exactly 4.5 months. I almost feel like it’s a momentous occasion. I’ve lived here long enough to go through an entire tank. All in all, it’s pretty cheap, I suppose: about $11 US a refill, or just over $2 a month to power my stove, including boiling water for tea, all hot meals, and boiling water to bathe with. When you take into account that the most expensive my water bill has been is about $1.50 a month, it’s not that bad… until you get to the $10 or so a month for electricity in the winter (in the summer but before I got my fridge it was only $4).

Okay, enough whining for one night.

On a different note, yesterday, I was invited into one of the huge houses that I’ve never seen before. I think it has to be nicer than any other I’ve seen in Tamazitinu. Four showers with water heaters. Four! And black leather couches, four big-screen TVs, at least by standards here, and, no kidding, a bathroom with a western toilet, bidet, twin sinks, and a bathtub that’s about three times the size of a normal one. I get so shocked when I see these houses coupled with the fact that most everyone gives birth at home and the woman of the house, even in this case, is completely illiterate.

December 18, 2007

And today, life is back to normal. I dug up some mouse poison and woke up to another dead mouse, but haven’t heard anything since. I’m crossing my fingers on this one.

I also was able to get a butagaz tank quite easily: just asked neighbors if they had a wheelbarrow (birueda… the word for tire and wheel in Tashelheit is “rueda,” just like in Spanish), got the nice taHanut man to put the regulator on, which saved me needing to find a wrench that fit, and hauled it back to my house. It was lighter and much easier than I expected, and the same lentils I was trying to make last night are now bubbling on my stove.

My hands are now a pleasant shade of brown-red, and I think if I use duct-tape to keep the edges straight, I can do my feet tonight or tomorrow night.

And if I’m updating today, which is the plan, it means I’ve run into my souk town to check mail and email and buy a couple vegetables. I am absolutely obsessed with eating cabbage, and if I remember to buy the right groceries, my dinner plans include a grilled cheese and roasted red pepper sandwich and homemade tomato soup: a delightful splurge for a moderately cold winter night.

Though it’s gotten warmer. I’m not wearing long underwear today and seem to be doing just fine.

And l’Eid kbir (ixatr) is Friday. L’Eid and Ramadan are the two biggest Muslim holidays and I’ve been hearing the “Big Eid” since I’ve gotten to Morocco. Everyone here in Tamazitinu tells me the same things when I ask about it: every family kills a sheep and eats it for a solid week. Every part. At eight in the morning, everyone goes and prays outside and they want me to take pictures,which is strange because photographs are so sensitive here that you’d think with something like prayer, it’d be even more forbidden. Women put henna on their hands, people buy new clothes (iheruyn ujdid), and people wear kaftans and tqshetas (a two-layered kaftan) and go to other people’s houses to say “Mbrook l’eid!”

It’s an oversimplified version of events, I’m sure, but that’s the same speech I get, no matter who I ask.

And, of course, the Equippe-Mobile run that was supposed to happen last week but was rescheduled for this week is rescheduled again for “After l’Eid.”

December 19, 2007

I went into town yesterday, but didn’t upload my blog. I was literally in town just enough time to grab some vegetables and groceries, check my email, and check my post office box: about an hour and fifteen minutes. Because none of the transportation to or from my site runs tomorrow (Thursday) through Sunday or Monday for l’Eid, it was a nightmare. I had to have seen at least 40 or 50 people from my site bustling about, and even though I didn’t have a seat saved on the bus, a nice man insisted I take his seat. I tried to say no, that I’d have no problem standing, but he ended up squeezing in next to someone else and I was pretty comfortable. There goes that “chivalry” again. I’m still trying to figure it out: why, on one hand, it’s expected to give up a seat for a woman on some forms of transportation, but men still eat before the women in many homes.

I’ve spent part of the afternoon putting zuaq henna on my hands. I did my right hand left-handed and I think I’ve smeared some of it, but it’s a design I’ve wanted to do for ages, and I think it’d be hard to find someone here to do it for me because it’s not exactly traditional.

December 20, 2007

Happy Eid Eve! I woke up and decided to take a walk to see if I could find a sheep being slaughtered. I know, sort of masochistic for this pseudo-vegetarian, but I didn’t think I could say I celebrated l’Eid without seeing this phenomenon.

I didn’t have far to go. Right outside my salon window, my next door neighbors were in the midst of it as soon as I stepped outside. I walked over and saw the animal, still moving on the ground, throat slit, blood pouring from the cut. At this point, my neighbor slit a hole in the leg and blew up the sheep like a balloon. Kids started beating on the stomach like a drum. It was fascinating to watch.

They proceeded to skin the sheep’s legs, then tie them to a beam sticking out of my courtyard wall so that it was hanging upside down. They skinned it from legs down to the head and it came off neatly and cleanly. The head came off and was carried inside, then the white carcass was split open and the organs removed. About this time, they said “If you want to take pictures, you should go get your camera,” so I have a few pictures of him pulling out the small intestines, pouring water into the large intestines and blowing them up, and squeezing unmentionables out of the intestines.

For some reason, none of this even came close to grossing me out. I wonder if this means I could actually eat organ meat.

The best part was that it started snowing, small flurries. Nothing stuck, the sun was shining, and the weather was pleasant, but the little snowflakes were almost magical.

Reflections on Prayer, Equippe-Mobile Round Two: Bigger and Better

2007-12-13T03:45:00.000-08:00

December 10, 2007

There’s a girl in my bathroom, doing the ritual cleansing to get ready to pray.

I came home, and she had walked 45 minutes to see me, so I let her in my pretty messy house. She told me since we were like sisters, not to be embarrassed, so I tried not to be. At least it was all work-related things: books, cut-outs of food, and cut cardboard to paste on the back of my drawings.

She’s praying right now, about three feet away from me, on a blanket I’ve laid on the agrtil. I’ve never had anyone do one of the traditional Islamic prayers in my house with me right there before, and I have to say, it’s comforting.

Watching people pray is certainly interesting to me. I assumed, like I’m sure many Americans would, that at the call to prayer, life stopped in Morocco, and people all rushed to the mosque or threw out their prayer rugs on the street and life was put on pause as people prayed.

Of course, anyone who’s been to Morocco can tell you that’s not the case. Some people go to the mosque, especially on Fridays, but life pretty much carries on as normal, and people pray, mainly in private, at the five prescribed times, but it’s not always exactly the same time as when the call to prayer echoes from the loudspeakers from the mosque.

In fact, I wondered if people prayed at all the first week and a half I was in Morocco. We were constantly in contact with Moroccan staff, but none of them prayed in front of us. It came up in a tea talk; I think I was the one who asked the question about the logistics of prayer in Morocco and I was shocked to find out that most of our staff did pray five times a day, they just did it in the privacy of their hotel rooms. They warned us, that as foreigners, we might be here two years and never see anyone pray in front of us.

That, as I found out just a few days later, was not to be the case. During Field Trip, which was our second week of training after the first few days in Rabat, I had a one-night homestay, which was one of the highlights of the week. They offered me my own room to sleep in, or sleep in a room with one of them, so I slept in a room with a woman about my age, on piled blankets on the floor. Right before bed, she started to pray.

“Oh! Maybe I should leave!” I thought, so I started to get up and in sign language ask if I should go.

“Qim!” she said, pointing to the edge of the pallet of blankets. “Qim” was one of the words I learned that day. “Sit!” or “Stay!” I wasn’t quite sure which one at the time (it can mean both), but, no matter the case, her smile and insistence on my “qim-ing” made it obvious that she wanted me to stay and watch.

She murmured the words of the prayer and stood, bowed, prostrated, knelt, and repeated the cycle and I watched, feeling privileged to be able to glimpse this private moment.

The only other time I saw anyone pray during training was in my homestay family; occasionally, I’d see the mother sneak into the “clothes room” to pray. I saw hints that other people were doing it; for example, my LCF (language and culture teacher) carrying a bucket of hot water from the showers to perform the pre-prayer ablutions, but it remained behind closed doors.

However, it was when I came to Tamazitinu that I became so accustomed seeing people pray that I hardly give it a second thought now. It doesn’t seem like anyone has a problem praying in front of me here. In homestay, I saw it all the time, sometimes inside the tea room, sometimes outside in the courtyard. It was especially peaceful to see at night, under the stars. Sometimes my little one-year old host-sister would run into her mother’s arms during the prayer, and my hostmother would either set her aside or hold her while finishing. Even today, when I ate lunch with one of my favorite families in town, the mother prayed in the room we ate lunch in, with the equivalent of MTV blaring in the background.

And it’s not only in my small town. On the roof of my favorite café in my souk town, one day, I walked up and the owner of the restaurant was praying on the roof, facing East. When I went to an association president in my souk town’s house for lunch, we had to wait for them to all pray before we could go back to the town center, and they got me a little bucket of warm water in case I wanted to pray too.

Even on Equippe-Mobile, when I’d be out with doctors and nurses and technicians, all male, for 12 or 13 hours at a time, they would pray when we stopped at people’s houses for tea, right in front of me. The naturalness of a regional hospital director kneeling on the ground and touching his head to the floor in a mud house really was moving for me to see. How many regional hospital directors in the United States do you see on their knees in submission to God in a way that’s natural and unabashed?

It’s really interesting to see the five pillars of Islam played out in daily life here. I’m not an expert on Islam, so please forgive my brief explanation, but the five pillars are proclaiming that there is One God (statement of faith), prayer, giving charity to the poor, fasting for the month of Ramadan, and making the Hajj if you are physically and financially able (pilgrimage to Mecca and the Ka’bah in Saudi Arabia).

There are not many people I know who have gone on Hajj, mainly because of finances, but the rest of these are visible to me, so visible I almost don’t even think about them. Ramadan was apparent to me and made an impact on my life for the entire month, even though I only fasted 12 days. Prayer, as I have mentioned, is visible on almost a daily basis when I go to people’s houses during those times of the day. Many people give beggars money, and I’ve gotten in the habit of giving the ones who really can’t work food when I have some. My first month in site, an old man took myself and a beggar woman out for tea, and he acted so kindly and respectfully towards her that for the first half of the conversation, I thought she was in his family. And at least once a week, somebody tries to convert me by having me say the proclamation of faith.

Of course, it’s not utopia; I still see beer cans on the ground in Tamazitinu, STDs are quite prevalent at our clinic, and though this will be a controversial statement… let’s just say that the treatment of women that I’ve seen doesn’t quite match up with the parts of the Qu’ran I’ve read (in translation) about women. It’s unrealistic to think that any person or society could be a “perfect” anything. But it is affirming and beautiful to see the people in the town that I have come to care about and who take such good care of me live, to the best of their abilities, what they believe in. The results are also beautiful: a place where 70 families have welcomed me in their homes for a meal or tea, where a young, bright woman says that I’m like her sister and is patient with my messy house and messier language skills, where a complete stranger hands me a handful of dates, and where, rather than judge me for not wearing a headscarf, instead, they shower me with complements when I do don one or any element of their traditional clothing.

December 12, 2007

Today has been an absolutely fantastic day.

I went on Equippe-Mobile to two of my closer outer douars. I’ll call them Tourdouar, and Itsybitsy, just because I can’t write down what they’re really called on my blog for security reasons. Itsybitsy really is quite small (and it sounds like the real name), and Tourdouar sounds a tiny bit like the name and it embodies what was the most striking about the landscape: beautiful desert trees that don’t exist 16 kilometers north in Tamazitinu.

The day started off a little rocky: I was told we were packing up at 7:30 and leaving at 8, but we didn’t pull out of Tamazitinu until 10:30. However, the morning itself was worth the wait. I watched my nurse burn the medical waste in a huge pit behind the sbitar. He threw in a cardboard box of empty vaccine beakers, used syringes, gauze, and medicine boxes, lit a piece of paper on fire, threw it in, and then walked, rather quickly, a good 50 or 100 feet away. After a few minutes, the fire was roaring and the old vaccine flacon were exploding.

Who walks out of the doctor’s house at that moment but two of the men from the commune. They are friendly people, and want me to teach them English. I’ve agreed and we’re finding a place soon. They watched and had a discussion about this waste disposal not being ideal, but being the best with the means that are available.

This, of course, meant that it was the perfect, absolute perfect time for me to bring up an incinerator project. I think that it may be a possibility for Tamazitinu, and my nurse looked at me and said, “you aren’t going to pay for it yourself, are you?” in a very concerned tone. It was touching that he was worried about that, and he seemed relieved at my answer.

We’ve talked about medical waste before, and he’s told me, and told me again, that I’ve made him think about it and what happens with syringes. Consequently, when I asked him what we were doing with the syringes this Equippe-Mobile run, he said he had already decided to bring the plastic garbage bin because of my energy and passion and insistence. “We get complacent about it, and don’t think about it. You care about it and it makes me want to care about it.” I almost wanted to cry. My nurse is fantastic. He’s teaching women in town French: illiterate, mono-lingual Tashelheit speakers, but when I asked him about it he said “I’m doing it as a way to get the women together, and I’m going to use it as a venue for health education.” Sneaky, but effective and not altogether bad. He does education in the schools, and he really is a fantastic nurse who the entire community adores. For him to say that I’ve helped him increase awareness is a very high complement indeed coming from someone who is such a community leader and gives so much of his own time and energy to help the health and awareness of people here. In fact, last week, he showed me a PowerPoint presentation that he is making to show the community: STD awareness with very, VERY graphic pictures. I was shocked, and have no idea how the community will react.

Anyway, we finally got on the road, and the trip that took over an hour on the unpaved road took about 25 or 30 minutes (from Tamazitinu to Tourdouar is about 16 k; I clocked it on the little ambulance from the 1980s that we took. When I walked with the women to the place where we had the day-long picnic party in late October, we walked along this road 6 k each way (plus another 3-4 k to get to the road from the picnic spot and to get to the road from my house)).

There was a little bit of an issue with the ambulance. It sounds like a minute detail, but it was important to me for several reasons. The ambulance is really one of the “stubby cars” I talk about. There are two seats up front and then the back is barely big enough for someone to lay down in. It fits maybe three people, but quite uncomfortably, and there’s not enough room to stand. In this particular ambulance, there was a bench, a chair, and a “table” for the patient to lie on, but it was squished in and not very comfortable at all.

My nurse didn’t want me to have to sit in the back. “I wouldn’t want my sister to sit in the back of the ambulance because it’s not good, so I don’t want you to either.” There was debate about whether or not I could go because the ambulance was so small, though I protested vehemently and said I didn’t mind. I wouldn’t have minded at all, honestly. But there seems to be with some Moroccan men, a lot of them actually, some sort of chivalry that’s virtually unknown in the US. I can’t decide whether it’s unfeminist and insulting or very sweet. It’s definitely in opposition to the experiences I have where men and women eat separately and the men eat first.

But, no matter the origins or intentions behind this, for lack of a better word, chivalry, the doctor ended up sitting in the back and I was up front. I had no choice in the matter, but to me it was a big deal because it meant that they wanted me to be there, and that the doctor, who I don’t even know that well, was willing to sit in the back so I could have the front.

We got to Tourdouar and headed to the Madrasa. There, we waited for the women in the teachers’ house. I met two of the teachers who were fantastic. I was the only woman in the group of two, then three, then four teachers, my nurse, and my doctor, but my presence didn’t keep them all from joking around in a physical, laid back, casual way. It’s still shocking to me every time I see it: physical horseplay among grown men, them touching each others arms or heads or faces, leaning up against each other. It’s nice, really nice to see it, but it still shocks me, especially amongst grown men with respected positions in the community.

Two of the teachers in particular were incredible: I felt comfortable around them at once, and we talked most of the day in my mix of French and Tashelheit, though one of them spoke really reasonable English. One of the men in the group remarked about my wearing a headscarf.

It was interesting. People in town, men and women alike, all love it when I wear it. They know I’m not Muslim, but it’s traditional here and they thank me and shower me with praise to encourage me to keep wearing it. I’m still not sure if it’s okay, and I asked my nurse this morning. He echoed my thoughts and the thoughts of my townspeople. “It’s traditional, and a sign of respect that you wear it sometimes.” He encouraged it.

However, one of the other men in the group didn’t agree. I point-blank asked him if it offended him, and he said no, but I could tell he didn’t understand why I wore it. I think it might have offended him. “It’s a religious symbol.” “No, it’s a traditional symbol.” All of the men got into it and it was a fascinating debate. One of them said since I wore it the Amazigh way (like a very large do-rag; not covering my ears and neck), it was okay. Another said that there was no difference. Everyone ended up saying it was okay and not offensive that I wore it, but it was fascinating and good if not hard to see that sometimes my concerns are shared. I stress out about things being offensive, and sometimes it’s good that I do, and even better if I spark a debate, as long as it’s done in a non-confrontational way.

Later, I got in a conversation that was similar about what is “hshuma,” or shameful. It was an interesting group: everyone was an outsider, from out-of-town. Teachers, doctors, and nurses are all assigned where they work, so none of these men were from either Tamazitinu or Tourdouar originally. One of them said that although he was from Casablanca and had only been in Tamazitinu for 8 or 9 months, he didn’t consider himself an outsider. Everyone else did consider themselves outsiders, but said that the community didn’t see them that way. They said the same for me. “You are the only one who thinks that you are so different. Everyone else sees you as the same as them.” I don’t know if I believe it, but it was mindboggling for me to hear. On one level, of course I’m the same. We have the same heart, the same human experience. But on another level, of course I’m different from all the women in Tamazitinu: religiously, with our life goals and aspirations (for the most part), life experience, and our frame of referencing the world. To deny that would be lying. It’s just strange, this duality of sameness and difference.
This led to a discussion about “hshuma.” I said that one of my biggest fears is doing something hshuma and not knowing it. I know I’ve done that before. I did it just the other day with the word “welda” and “wlda.” One means “uterus,” the other is a slang term for a male body part. Of course, it was okay, but if I had been with a different group of women, it could have been problematic.

One of the teachers, a man who I was instantly attracted to, on an emotional level, defined “hshuma” in another way. “Hshuma is relative,” he said. (I’m paraphrasing) “You are only hshuma when you are different from the rest of a group or society. There is no action that in itself is hshuma, it is only in relation to what the people around you are doing.” Truth. Painfully obvious truth, but I had never thought of it in these terms before. When combined with the duality of being like and different from the women here, it makes things even more complicated. As an outsider, does that mean everything I do is hshuma? Am I immune? Or does it mean I have to be doubly careful because, being like people here, I’m held to those standards?

(And can I mention that I am ecstatic that I speak enough French to have conversations like these? It’s made life so much… not easier here, but more enriching, to say the least.)

I’m not living my life by these conversations or anything, but I love being challenged and being able to have these debates and stretch my mind. It happens so rarely when I can’t articulate myself well in Tashelheit that I really relish these opportunities.

Well, we had been in Tourdouar about an hour and nobody had shown up yet for vaccinations, so, half-joking, I brought up doing a lesson for the kids in the Madrasa. “You can do it,” one of the teachers said. “Why not?” I thought they had forgotten and it was said with a sort of “enshallah” tone, so I didn’t know if he was serious, until later, one of the teachers pointed to a classroom. “That’s my class. Do you want to go do a lesson?”

Did I want to do a lesson? Of course! I went armed with my dental hygiene lesson, the same one I did at the preschool, and walked in the classroom (The teacher stayed with the other teachers in their house). As soon as I walked in, all the students stood. “SALAAM U ALEIKUM!” they chanted in unison.

“Wa aleikum s-salam.” I did the lesson and about halfway through, the doctor and the teacher of the class came in and sat down. It only took about 15 or 20 minutes, but the kids, after an initial shyness were talking and pointing and seemed to catch on and understand. My doctor said it was a good lesson, and the teacher said, “Okay, want to go to the next class?”

All in all, one right after another, I went into 7 classes and did the lesson for 120 kids. The older kids were a little difficult and laughed at my Tashelheit, but all in all I think it went pretty well. Everyone I talked to (maybe 10 or 15 kids) afterwards individually was able to name how many times to brush teeth each day, and which foods were good and bad for your teeth. I was just excited to be able to do it, and the teachers, I think, were entertained by the whole situation. My favorite was the youngest group. The teacher that introduced me said, “They are all afraid of you. They don’t know any foreigners, and they know that when the ambulance comes, it means they’re going to get stuck with a needle, so they think that’s why you’re here.” Great.

The first 3 or 4 minutes, nobody spoke. I’d ask a kid their name. Silence. Nothing. I’d ask a question. Nothing. Eventually, though, they were up out of their seats, pointing, answering questions, and participating. I really miss being up in front of little kids. I forgot how much I liked it until now. As a child and young teenager, my sister and I performed magic, and often, we’d do shows for kids around this age. This felt like the same thing: trying to get them to participate, trying to get them to laugh.

In any case, after the lessons, women started coming it for vaccines and medical consultations. We had been in Tourdouar for three or four hours at this point. I was already tired after entertaining (teaching, I mean) seven classes in Tashelheit (though I did it in French some with two groups). But I did the toothbrushing lesson for some of the women, and talked informally with the others most of the time: don’t drink water in the irrigation ditches! Wash your hands with soap! Make your own toothbrush if you can’t afford one!

One woman started asking me about birth control pills! All the other women crowded around. “Katy, I have 4 kids and my husband doesn’t want anymore, and I don’t want anymore. Four is enough! But the pills make me sick!” We talked about Depo and IUDs, and the other women were all asking questions and interested. I finally felt like I was able to talk about things I really know something about, and it was great to see her relief that there were other options. I brought up condoms, and the woman leaned in.

“Are you a woman or a girl?” This question has a double meaning. Technically speaking, a “tarbet,” (girl; plural: tichiratin), means someone who is not married. A “tamtut,” (woman; plural: tieutmin), means someone who is married. However, the connotation is a question that is much more taboo to ask someone you don’t know very well in the States, but a lot more appropriate here, because it is assumed that women don’t have sexual relations until you’re married.

“I’m a girl,” I said.

“Well! You wouldn’t know then, but, neither me NOR my husband likes to wear a condom. It’s not… well. You don’t know yet. You’ll see.” This was said rather endearingly, as if she were conferring a huge secret to me. Some of the other women giggled.

I also talked to the women about spacing out births and waiting until you’re at least 20 to have your first child. In Tamazitinu center, this isn’t as big of a deal, but in douars like Tourdouar and Itsybitsy, people are still wanting to have 10 or more children and getting married at thirteen.

We ate lunch at the teachers’ house, where everyone had a very animated debate in Arabic that I didn’t understand, with one man taking a knife and stabbing orange peels and cutting them, decisively into thin slices on the bare table to emphasize his points. It was difficult for me not to laugh out loud, not because I understood, but just with the energy that was all-consuming, and, yes, the orange-peel massacre.

After getting about a half-dozen invites to stay the night at various peoples’ houses, we finally headed over to Itsybitsy. It was 4:30. We had gotten there at about 11. After a quick stop at one man’s house, where I sat with his wife and was barely able to drink half a cup of tea before I was summoned back to the ambulance, we were rolling down a dirt road to Itsybitsy’s madrasa.

On the way, I asked my nurse if the trees we kept passing were “Tamazitinu” trees. The real name of my town comes from a type of tree that used to fill the valley, but in the last 50 years, have been decimated to be used for firewood. I want to know what kind of trees my town was named for.

“Is this a ‘Tamazitinu’ tree?”

“No, it’s not a Tamazitinu, it’s a Tourdouar.” He said the name of the douar we were leaving.

“I know we’re not in Tamazitinu, but what’s the name of that tree?”

“Tourdouar.”

I was getting impatient. “I know we’re in Tourdouar, but what…”

“Katy, the name of the tree is Tourdouar. The town is called Tourdouar because of all the trees.”

Oh. It threw me off that both my town and this town were named after the trees that populated them. Interesting.

We got to Itsybitsy, and the Madrasa was empty. Nobody was there. After a few minutes, a handful of men and women came. We talked about coming back in the morning, as it was starting to look like darkness was imminent, when the loudspeaker on the stone, towerless mosque turned on.

“Bismillah.” (In the name of God). I thought it was the call to prayer.

“Attention! Attention! Women, bring your children to the Madrasa to get their vaccinations!” “…..tieutmin…ichiran…Madrasa… tismi… adbib… ichiran… Madrasa… tismi…”

Even the man making the announcement laughed a little before turning off the loudspeaker. I was doing everything I could to keep from rolling on the ground, it tickled me so much.

“I thought it was tinwuchi (sunset prayer) for a minute!” The women laughed.

Soon enough, people started gathering, and the nurse and doctor started in on the vaccinations and exams.

I ended up gathering a bunch of kids and a few young women and did the activity on the outside wall of the Madrasa. The kids got into it, which made me happy. At one point, when I was trying to explain not to share toothbrushes, I was obviously struggling with the language.

“Do you want me to translate?” It was a teacher from that madrasa. He did, and after I finished the lesson he came over.

“Do you speak French?” We talked for a few minutes. “I like your pedagogy,” he said. “They understood, and they participated. It was very effective. Is that what school is like in the US?” So we had a discussion about interactive, experiential learning. “In what you describe, the students do 80% of the work themselves. That’s wonderful.” Again, this was a very encouraging conversation for me, especially with how down I’ve been on my “work” (or lack thereof) recently. He invited me to come do lessons anytime, which is an offer I’d love to take him up on.

Some of the local teenage girls in Tourdouar, attached themselves to me (following me around, holding my hand, leaning against me), but some of the younger girls in Itsybitsy ended up not only following me around, but also trying as hard as they could to convert me. First, they wanted me to spend the night at their house, then “oh, just eat dinner with us then,” and then “repeat the statement of faith (in Islam) after us.” They were so insistent that I almost wanted to say it just to let them feel better. “Why don’t you want to be Muslim? We want you to go to Heaven. Don’t you want to go to Heaven? Just say it, just say it once, and you’ll go to Heaven. We want you to go to Heaven.” I tried saying my parents didn’t want me to convert, thinking that’d do the trick.

It brought out a round of whispers. “Just say it once, and don’t tell your parents. They won’t know. Please, Katy, just say it. Just say it.” It tore my heart to hear them because their intent was so good, so pure, so touching. They were really worried about the fate of my soul and it was heartbreaking to keep refusing because they were so sad and concerned.

Finally, we packed up and headed home. “Home, sweet home,” I said, in English as we pulled off the paved road onto my town’s dirt road.

“Do you know what home is?” I asked my nurse.

“Home. Maison. Taddart.”

I smiled. “That’s ‘house.’ Home is more like chez moi. My place. A place where you live, where your heart is, where you are comfortable. My real home is in the US, but now, I feel like we just got to my home. Tamazitinu is my home for two years.”

And, for better or for worse, it is.