Just Wrapping Up Site Visit

20 April

Two full days into the site visit now I feel like I can start to give a few general impressions about the place.  Bjai and I arrived at our sites on Sunday afternoon, after having spent the night in the city of Tata.  All of us new Tata PCT’s (Alisa, Monica, Samantha, Bjai, and myself) rode on a direct bus from Ouarzazate to Tata, which for some reason left in the middle of the afternoon and so didn’t arrive in Tata until almost 9pm.  This meant that for the last couple of hours we weren’t able to see anything out the window about what our new province actually looks like, other than that there wasn’t much to see.  It started to get pretty funny; we were getting texts from our friends in other provinces who had been arriving throughout the day asking what it was like, and all we could say was “um, we’re still on the bus and it’s very, very dark.” 

When we finally arrived, almost all of the current PCV’s from Tata were waiting for us.  One of them happens to live right near where the bus comes in, and she had thoughtfully planned to have dinner waiting for us—homecooked Thai food which was incredible.  They were all extremely welcoming and reassuring.  Two of them are just about to COS (finish service) and so two from our group are their replacements.  There was obviously a pretty tight bond between all of the current PCV’s, despite their being from several different sectors and several hours apart, which was really nice to see.  I hope this new configuration of the group is able to keep that going.

The next morning, following the very well though-out plan that Peace Corps had put together for us, each of us was escorted to our new site by one of the current volunteers.  Since Bjai and I are sitemates at new sites, that meant that no one exactly knew how to get there, but we managed to figure it out.  Already, I can see that one of the biggest challenges for my site is going to be transportation.  Because my village is so small and remote, getting a taxi to there from Tata is difficult, expensive, or both.  Getting a taxi out and back to Tata, I’ll probably have head over to the souq town, which is about a 5km walk along a dirt road.  We’re supposed to be getting bikes as soon as we land here for good, and Rachid promised us that we would be the first to receive them since our site so desperately requires them.

I already knew what to expect about my new host family from the data sheet I received:  an older couple (60 and 56), two older daughters (33 and 28), and two younger sons (21  and 10).  I actually think the 10-year old boy is a grandson, but I haven’t been able to figure out who his parents are if so.  My host dad is Mohmed and I could tell within the first few minutes that we weren’t going to have any problems.  Some people, regardless of whatever linguistic or cultural barriers might exist, you can just tell by looking at them that they are trustworthy.  His demeanor is very much like what I remember best about my own father:  straightforward yet modest, with a gentle good humor to everything he does.  He’s taken me under his wing from the very start, and as long I stick with him I don’t think I’ll have any trouble integrating with the men in this community.  Last night we went to a prayer dinner at some kind of community hall.  40 days after someone dies, people gather again to read from the Qur’an and mark and end to the mourning period (I’m sure I’m getting some of these details wrong), so this was an event like that with maybe 50 men and me.  They couldn’t possibly have made me feel any more welcome, and it was a great way to show my face to a lot of the community for the first time.  Mohmed was clearly enjoying showing me off as his new prized possession.

Tata is not nearly as conservative (at least from what I can gather in 2 days) as I was led to believe it would be before I got here.  Women walk by themselves in the street, men and women sit together in most houses, and most women are not fully covered.  That, plus the extraordinary niceness of the people is going to help offset the fact that is really difficult country down here.  It’s not desert like the sand dunes we think of as the classic Sahara, but very stony and dry.  The only fields for agriculture are clustered around little oases, mostly of date-palms but some assorted traditional crops underneath.  Each village has its own little oasis, and they’re beautiful.  It makes me think of some Biblical village straight out of the old testament.  The architecture reinforces that as well, with stacked stone being the preferred building material.  New structures will have a cinderblock or cement frame inside.  Those materials do manage to keep the buildings pretty cool inside.  It’s only April, and it’s already hard to do anything outside from about 11am until 5pm.  I’m really afraid to think of what it’s going to be like over the summer…

On Why I Joined The Peace Corps at 32 (Pt. 2)

"We forget that there is no hope of joy except in human relations.  If I summon up those memories that have left with me an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me.  True riches cannot be bought.  One cannot buy the friendship of a Mermoz, of a companion to whom one is bound forever by ordeals suffered in common.  There is no buying the night flight with its hundred thousand stars, its serenity, its few hours of sovereignty.  It is not money that can procure for us that new vision of the world won through hardship—those trees, flowers, women, those treasures made fresh by the dew and color of life which the dawn restores to us, this concert of little things that sustain us and constitute our compensation."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

[Morocco, and North Africa generally, is Saint-Exupéry country. In Ouarzazate we have a restaurant named after him.]

The Big News

Yesterday I learned where I'm going to spend the next two years:  in a village in the province of Tata, in the very south of Morocco not far from the Algerian border on the Sahara plain.  No rolling sand dunes there, but they're not far.  Tata was what I had been expecting, but it was still far from anti-climactic.  My village has, according to the data sheet that I got which may or not be up-to-date, 541 people, and it's about an hour north-ish from the city of Tata, which has about 45,000 people.  What's good:  I'll have a site mate in the sister village next door (only 1km away), and it's Bjai (Najat) from my CBT who is going to be an absolutely stellar volunteer and that I get along great with.  What's a challenge:  both Najat and I have new sites in a pretty remote area, so people aren't going to be familiar with Peace Corps and what we do.  That doesn't mean they won't be receptive, it just adds another step to the whole process.  The nearest cyber cafe and souq (weekly market) is a town 8km away that's only accessible by walking/biking.  What's strange:  apparently, they do not usually send male volunteers at all to the Tata province.  I will be the only male PCV in Tata, among about a dozen female PCVs.  I haven't really been able to get a straight answer as to why this is, but I'm sure I'll have more to report on it as I learn more.

Site visit begins in about twelve hours, with any luck I may be able to post from there over the next week.

Short Digest

12 April

Back to work after a great weekend off.  I should note that a “weekend” during PST means as much as you can squeeze in between the end of Saturday class (12:30 pm) and sundown on Sunday (one of our most strictly enforced rules for Morocco—not just during PST—is that we’re not allowed to travel between cities after dark).  So maybe 18 hours, but you can get a lot done in that amount of time if you’re desperate for any kind of new entertainment.  Tiffawt, Hanan, and I skipped lunch on Saturday and took a series of taxis to Kalaa Mgouna, about 90 km. east of Ouarzazate.  It’s called the City of Roses; they grow them all around that region and produce a lot of rosewater and other rose-scented beauty products.  Every other shop in town is a gaudy pink tourist trap selling that stuff, and it probably wouldn’t have been worth traveling that far except that just about every other CBT group was converging on the same place, so of course it turned into a PCT convention.  The trainees in that region learn Tamazight, but I seemed to get by alright with Tashlheet.  The subtleties of the difference between those languages--who speaks which and who doesn’t and why—is something I still don’t understand well, and no one has bothered to explain it.

It was great to hang out with some of the trainees I haven’t gotten to know as well and see them in a setting other than Ourzazate.  A bunch of us had dinner in the home of a current Volunteer from the Small Business Development sector.  The SBD folks tend to be placed in bigger towns and even a few cities, and live in proper apartments with all the amenities, so his place was not at all representative of what I expect my eventual place to look like, which is unfortunate.  He had a lot of space (more than my last apartment in the States), nice furniture, a second bedroom he had converted into a painting studio, and easy access to all kinds shops, restaurants, and cybercafes. 

Of course all anyone could talk about was our impending site placement announcements and the interviews that had taken place over the last week.  There’s a lot of nail-biting going on over that, with nothing but the tiniest scraps of non-information to base it on.  I’ll be glad to have this ordeal over with on Thursday afternoon.  Even then, all we’ll really find out is probably just the name of some village and the province that it’s in; we won’t know whether it’s good news, bad news, or somewhere in the middle until we get there and check it out.  Which we actually will do starting Saturday.  We have site visits scheduled from the 17^th to the 23^th.  This is the real thing:  I’ll go alone, to what will eventually be my site, and spend a few days living with the family that will be my next host family.  I’ll have no PC staff or other trainees around.  I have no idea how much or little this family and their community will know about me and what I’m coming there to do (in part depends on if I’m replacing another volunteer), but I have to assume it’s next to nothing.  Everything we’ve done so far in training has been leading up to this encounter.  I’m thinking of what Michelle supposedly said to Barack backstage at the DNC in Boston 2004 just before he went out and gave the keynote speech that changed everything: “Don’t blow it, buddy.”

7 April

Site placement interview today with Rachid, the Assistant Program Manager for the Health Sector.  What a nerve-wracking and suspenseful process this is.  The general consensus among trainees, which Rachid confirmed for us, is that they already have likely sites picked out and the interview is mostly to feel us out about them.  Of course, all the information is travelling one-way; we won’t learn a thing about where we’re going until the sites are officially announced on the 15^th.  He asked me questions like “Are you okay with walking long distances?” and when he asked about my ideal site and I said it was within half an hour of a big city, he gave a hearty laugh.  So I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty remote.  There are six possible provinces for Tashlheet speakers:  Ouarzazate, Azilal, Essaouria, Tiznit, Taroudant, and Tata.  All except Azilal are south of Marrakech, and since he confirmed with me that I preferred hot to cold and Azilal is in the mountains, I think I can rule that one out.  Tata is the furthest south, the most in the desert, and farthest from other cities, so I’m preparing myself for that.  I may be preaching to the rocks and the Sahara Vipers about toothbrushing and nutrition for two years.

As this second month of PST is now well underway and seems set to fly by, the fact that we’re all going to be all alone at our sites and scattered to the four winds very soon is starting to sink in, and it’s kind of scary and a little sad.  Before coming, whenever I imagined myself in the Peace Corps, I always skipped ahead to the part where I was on my own, doing my own work on my own schedule and living among host country nationals.  That’s the environment I pictured because that’s the way I like to work—independently.  It never occurred to me that I would get so attached to a group of other volunteers, and so it never occurred to me that being separated from them would be hard.  But it is going to be.  We’ll all get together every few months after service starts for additional trainings and conferences, and we’ll be able to visit each other individually and in groups, but distance will make that hard.  And the volunteers around each province will probably wind up forming small groups of their own not unlike our current CBT’s.  But it’s not ever going to be quite the same as it is now.  Soon we get thrown into the deep end of the pool, and we get to see who learned how to swim. 

Weekly Digest

31 March

Just some assorted notes on the eve of another hub session in Ouarzazate:

-Today marks the end of Phase I of our training.  This hub visit is kind of like “midterms”; we have a language progress assessment and some evaluations.  By the time I post this, it will be one month since we staged.  I can say with little hyperbole that it’s been the longest month of my life, but it feels good to reach a little milestone.

-Though I think I’m on track to meet the minimum expected language requirements to be sworn in as a Volunteer, I’m realizing how insufficient that’s going to be.  There is so much to absorb, and there’s a big difference in what I can learn in class and what I learn out of class.  Obviously, you can’t get fluent in a language from 6 hours of classroom time 6 days a week over 2 months, but at least in that setting there is a teacher who speaks English who can answer questions, a white board and notebooks to write on, and a textbook to refer to.  I feel like I’m absorbing, retaining, and using that material.  But you can only cover so much in class, and what people speak out in the world can be very different.  In real-world settings, you can’t always write everything down or ask people to repeat themselves a hundred times, and for the stuff I’m learning that way, I’m not happy with the speed I’m absorbing it.  There is no way I’ll be fluent enough in Tashlheet to do my job (which starts in 5 weeks) as well as I would like to in the time remaining.  Today we had a session about how to describe the Peace Corps, its mission, goals, and our work in the Health sector in Tash, and the chasm between the language required to do that effectively and what I have right now was daunting.  And that’s going to be my job, essentially, to talk to people about their health.  I know this is normal and this is the process and I’m trying not to get frustrated, but it’s hard.  I’ve made more progress than I thought would be possible in the time frame, but the expectations keep rising.

-I haven’t yet taken any pictures inside my host family’s house, but I still plan to.  I didn’t during the first week because I wanted to give them a little time to get used to me before I just whipped out my camera and photographed their most private spaces.  Now I think the trust is there to do that without any issue, but I just haven’t had the chance.  It’s always dark when I get home from l-mdrassa, and (like all houses in the village) our house is very poorly lit inside, with just one low-wattage bulb per room.  So I have to wait until the weekend when I’m actually home during daylight hours if I want to be able to take any pics that will actually let you see the place well.

-The kids are just awesome here.  My youngest host brother, Khalil, is so handsome that all the girls in my CBT group have a crush on him. (He’s 12.)  Every single kid in the whole village seems to know all of our names, even the ones we haven’t met.  They seem to be in a perpetual good mood, are easily entertained by the simplest games and activities, and probably teach us as much as the adults.  I’ve never seen any kid here be bratty or give his/her parents a hard time about anything.  (I’m sure it happens, but not in public, anyway.)  It’s just impossible to be in a bad mood when there’s a group of kids around.  Tiffawt’s little sister is adorable and obviously very smart.  She’s also about 12 and apparently no longer in school, which is heartbreaking but a pretty common story around here.

28 March

Another terrific new experience today, right out of the Peace Corps textbook: I washed my clothes in the river.  I don’t actually have to do it this way; my family has a washing machine at home and my host mom has very generously been doing my laundry for me.  It’s about a quarter of the size of the machines in the States and it’s kept in the kitchen.  I haven’t yet seen in action, but it seems to do a decent job, and of course we still have to line-dry everything, which leaves clothes pretty stiff and wrinkly.  (Something I’ve used all my life and never appreciated what it actually does until now: fabric softener.)  But the other day, Mehjouba asked me at breakfast about whether I do housework in the States, and I took this as an indirect statement that I need to be doing more around the house to earn my keep. We’ve been learning in training about the direct/indirect styles of communication that distinguish the U.S. and Morocco, and I had already been starting to feel that I should do more.  It’s just been so hard with 10 hours of school each day, and more studying expected after that, I’ve barely had time for anything else.  Anyway, Njat had done her laundry in the river a couple weeks ago and was planning to go again on Sunday, so I said I’d join in as well, just to see what it’s like.

Our house is about a 10 minute walk to the river.  I had to carry all the clothes I planned to wash, plus a bucket, a large washing tub, and a wooden scrubbing surface.  It was a tough haul, and I only took a few clothes—many of the women carry all the rugs from their house back and forth, tied on their backs.  Mehjouba thought it was hilarious that I was doing this, and kept mock-offering me her rugs and her clothes as well.  And well she should; it was probably a major event in her life when she got that washing machine and didn’t have to do that anymore.  The river on a Sunday afternoon was pretty hopping.  There were maybe 25 or 30 women, all of whom also thought it was hilarious that I was washing my clothes there.  Needless to say, I was the only adult male present, and I wondered if it was culturally appropriate for me to be there at all.  Most of the women had their bottoms rolled up their legs for wading in the river,  and were generally a lot less conservatively dressed than when I see them elsewhere.  But they didn’t seem to mind me, and several actually helped show me how it’s done, and I even had to step in and take my clothes back more than once to keep them for washing them for me.  It was the middle of the day and starting to get really hot, so if you had to be outside I could think of worse ways to pass the time than wading around and splashing in a cool river.  The mood was really light and fun—everyone was joking with each other and it didn’t feel like drudgery at all.

To dry, we delicately stretch the clothes over some bushes nearby, and the sun bakes them within half an hour.  The problem is, it’s so dusty and windy in our area that the big gusts of wind deposit sand and dirt in the clothes while they’re drying.  I think a lot my stuff probably came back dirtier than it went out.  But it didn’t matter, I’m glad I did it anyway.  I think I earned some credibility, and it was a great way to meet people in an informal setting.  I’m definitely going to try this again, esp. when I get to my final site.

27 March

Perhaps I have a tendency to romanticize my own experiences even while they’re happening, but I can’t read this below without getting a little misty.  From President Kennedy’s statement regarding the creation of the Peace Corps, 1 March 1961 (to be read aloud with your best inner JFK voice):

The initial reactions to the Peace Corps proposal are convincing proof that we have, in this country, an immense reservoir of such men and women—anxious to sacrifice their energies and time and toil to the cause of world peace and human progress. 

We will only send abroad Americans who are wanted by the host country—who have a real job to do—and who are qualified to do that job.  Programs will be developed with care, and after full negotiation, in order to make sure that the Peace Corps is wanted and will contribute to the welfare of other people.  Our Peace Corps is not designed as an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict.  It is designed to permit our people to exercise more fully their responsibilities in the great common cause of world development.

Life in the Peace Corps will not be easy... Men and women will be expected to work and live alongside the nationals in the country in which they are stationed—doing the same work, eating the same food, and talking the same language.

But if the life will not be easy, it will be rich and satisfying.  For every young American who participates in the Peace Corps—who works in a foreign land—will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace.

26 March

Back yesterday from a 2-day hub session in Ouarzazate.  The presentation of our community assessment project went pretty well, even if was pretty much the same as everyone else’s.  Send 9 groups of about 5 people into various villages around the province with the same set of instructions and—surprise—you wind up with 9 pretty similar PowerPoint presentations.  But it was good, a useful exercise.  It will be harder when I have to do the same thing by myself at my final site, though my Tashlheet should be a lot better by then.  Of course, I’ll also have three months to do it as opposed to twelve days.  I’m starting to understand what they tell us about the period of initial community entry really being the make-or-break period for our service.  If you don’t establish credibility and start to build strong relationships in your community from the start, it’s very hard to have an effective 1.75 years after that.  I have learned the lesson; the question is, can I now apply it?

It’s always nice to get away to Ouarzazate, see the whole group and socialize like a bunch of high school kids on lunch break (and shower, did I mention shower?) but it’s also very disruptive to the acclamation process.  After a day and a half, no one really feels like going back.   There’s a pretty somber mood in the air as those grand taxis pull up to take us all back to our villages.  And from a language standpoint, going almost two days without practicing or even listening to Tashlheet (being yanked out of total immersion) is murder.  It makes me realize just how weak these new mental muscles are and how much I have to be constantly working them just to retain what little I’ve learned so far.  I would say it’s taken the last 24 hours to get back to where I was before the hub.  Again, I get the point:  immersion and practice, practice, practice are the only way to get this done.  It’s just so mentally exhausting, and there’s so much temptation to find little spaces where you can escape, but ultimately that’s just holding you back.

On the lighter side, we have a rabbit in our LCF house at the moment.  Unfortunately, he’s supposed to be lunch tomorrow.  I guess with some of the smaller animals that you can buy to eat around here (like chickens) it’s not uncommon to keep them at home for a little while before eating them, even for households that don’t keep livestock.  You can take it to the butcher and he’ll do the deed for you in the proper halal fashion (facing Mecca, Qur’an verses read, jugular slit in one motion, etc.) for a fee, and on certain major holidays people even do it themselves at home.  The problem is, it’s pretty easy to get attached to a cute fuzzy bunny, so I’m trying to stay away from it. (The even named it Tariq after me.)  We also have one vegetarian in our group, and even though she’s very cool with our meat consumption, she has the same unease about this situation that I do.  I realize that the meat situation here in Morocco is a million times better than in the States.  Animals are, for the most part, raised humanely, fed appropriate food, given an appropriate amount of land to roam on, not given drugs or other nasty things, and basically allowed to live a decent life up until the moment they are killed.  I like all that.  The hard part is, you also are faced with the reality that you have to look your dinner in the eye before (and sometimes while) you eat it.  As Americans we’re used to sentimentalizing the experience of animals because most of us only ever see them as pets, and all that other stuff is intentionally hidden from us.  The people here just see animals in a different way.  They’re property, assets, food, resources—something to be respected and treated with care, definitely, but not something you get attached to or worry about its feelings.  That’s going to take some getting used to.

One of the questions I get asked the most by people is what do Health Educators actually do?  I haven’t had much of a detailed answer because I haven’t really understood myself.  So far, almost all of our training has focused on language and culture acquisition without anything very specific to the Health Sector, but that’s starting to change.  We learned a bit about the project goals for our whole Sector over the next 2+ years, and in the next few weeks we’ll really get into it.  I’ll piece it out over time because it’s long.  Here are some of the objectives for educating community members (keep in mind this is all happening in rural and often remote small communities like the one I’m currently in):

-By December 2012, educate 40,000 men and women of childbearing age about the importance of prenatal care…and as a result, 2,000 pregnant women will complete 3 standard pre-natal checkups at the local health clinic before giving birth.

-Educate 30,000 students (boys and girls 5-14) regarding nutrition and personal hygiene.

-Provide STI and HIV/AIDS education sessions for 30,00 people and organize life skills training for 2,500 community youth.  As a result 20,000 individuals will demonstrate increased knowledge about transmission modes and prevention of HIV/AIDS and 1500 youth will declare their intent to adopt at least one preventative measure to reduce their risk of contracting HIV.

News Flash

A real day off, in Ouarzazate with no adult supervision for the night.  It's nice to catch up on email and blog posts, but it's driving me crazy that the connections here are too slow to upload photos.  Flickr just isn't cooperating at all, Facebook seems to be working but it's really sloooow.  Please check there for some lo-res photos (maybe), apologies to those of you who don't have Facebook.

Another Catch-Up Post

18 March

So Nadia, the JICA volunteer I met yesterday, did come by l-mdrassa today and spoke to us a little about her work in the community.  I guess her English was not as good as I had remembered, but she was able to speak Tashlheet and Tayeb translated most of it for us.  It was good, if a little awkward, and she stayed for lunch.  One of the best things about CBT is that we pool our individual food allowances and hire a cook who makes us an amazing lunch everyday.  There’s no fridge, so the meat has to be purchased every morning from the butcher. It’s all killed either that morning (chicken) or the day before (beef).  I can’t believe that I’ve been in Morocco as long as I have and still haven’t eaten lamb or goat, but the butchers in this village don’t seem to have those regularly.  Unexpectedly, though, it’s really easy to find turkey.  At the souq this week a guy was chopping up a huge one (it’s called “bibi” in Tashlheet, speakers of Hindi will chuckle at that)—it had to have been 30 lbs easily.  And the raw meat was reddish-pink, it looked nothing at all like the turkeys I’m used to seeing.  I’m already dreaming about getting a whole bird at Thanksgiving and finding a way to roast it over hot coals in the backyard.  I have many months to figure this out…

17 March

We’ve been in country two weeks as of today.  Every morning my alarm goes off and I think “I really would like to sleep for 5 more hours.  Can I really do this for another day?”  And somehow, every day so far, I manage to drag myself out of bed and stumble down the hill to l-mdrassa.  And every day so far, something wonderful happens that makes me glad I got out of bed and happy to be in Morocco.

Today I discovered that our little village is not quite as insular as I had thought.  We have a volunteer living here from the Japanese equivalent of the Peace Corps:  The Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA).  In fact, she’s our neighbor.  We had heard rumors to this effect when we first got to town, and we even saw her getting out of a grand taxi on the first or second day, but with everything else that’s going on and being so busy and tired all the time, I don’t think any of us gave it another thought.  Tonight, she turned up at Mehjouba’s for a visit just as I was getting home, so I got to talk to her for a long time.  Her Moroccan name is Nadia and she’s six months into a two year assignment.  Her job has to do with the women’s associations in the area.  My ears perked up when I heard this, since we had been needing to talk to one of the women’s groups as part of our community assessment and hadn’t been able to so far.  Rather than interview her on the spot I invited her to our class for lunch tomorrow.  We’ll see if she actually turns up.  She spoke decent English, but it was pretty cool to hear Tashlheet spoken with a Japanese accent.  We mainly chatted about travels, food, missing home and the like.  I know that making her acquaintance is not nearly as important as integrating myself into this community and learning the language, but it’s still pretty irresistible to compare notes with someone doing almost the exact same thing from somewhere completely different.

14 March

A much needed day off.  Actually, in pre-service training, there are no “days off”, only opportunities for Self-Directed Learning.  I tried my best to sleep in, but my body alarm clock is already set to get me up at 7am, which is really annoying.  Morocco may yet turn me into a morning person out of necessity—morning is definitely the most beautiful time of day around here—but I’ll still resent it.  The first thing we did was take a long walk out to through the igran (fields) and up towards the nearby cliffs with the cell phone towers.  This was with the older two of my host brothers, Moad and Wissam.  They’re both home from their respective schools for the weekend, and having them around makes the house a lot more lively.  Moad even speaks a little English; not enough for me to use a crutch, but enough to be helpful when we just can’t figure out any other way to understand each other.  We were joined by a couple of their friends and a younger uncle (I think), making for a pretty rowdy roving bunch of young men.  As you might expect, there was a lot of horseplay and verbal sparring (not that I could understand it), and I think there were happy to see that I wasn’t uptight about any of this.  The girls in my CBT group have been having a lot of women-only get-togethers with each other and their families, so I was glad to finally have something similar.  We climbed up the side of one of the cliffs to where there are some mini caves, and I couldn’t keep up with these kids wearing rubber bathroom flip-flops even in my fancy overpriced hiking shoes.  In fact, their flip-flops proved smarter, as we had to wade through the river to get back.  It’s all runoff composed of melting snow from the nearby Atlas (mid-March and things are starting to warm up), so it was freezing cold; my feet were totally numb by the other side.  When we got back to town, we met up with even more of their friends in the downtown and wound up all loudly playing foosball (or “bill-yards” [billiards] as they called it) for a long time.  From the looks of some of the older men who hang out in the square, I think we were not exactly a welcome presence.  I don’t know if my being seen like that with a group of young men who might be perceived as borderline delinquent by the more conservative in the community is good for my reputation or not.  It’s something I’ll have to watch out for in the future and at my final site, but today it was a welcome relief.

When we got home I had another big experience waiting for me.  Our house is equipped with its very own hammam, and Mehjouba had it fired up for us and ready to go.  A hammam is a Moroccan steam bath, and just about the only place in the Mgrib where you can get a decent supply of hot water for bathing outside of a big city hotel.  They’re usually public facilities, either dedicated for one sex or the other or on alternating days of the week.  Before you start to think that our house is luxurious for having its own, you should see this thing.  It’s basically a 5x8 outdoor room made of mud with a maybe 5 foot ceiling (I can’t stand up all the way), with a space to build a big fire underneath it and a drain in the floor.  There are a dozen or more buckets and old recycled plastic jars  inside that are filled with water, and they heat up as the room does.  It’s definitely kind of skuzzy, but the prospect of taking a nice hot bath and actually feeling clean for a few hours makes it worth it.  I had read that in the public hammams, you’re supposed to wear swim trunks and not take them off, but I wondered if that would be the case at home as well.  The answer is yes.  Unfortunately, my swim trunks are in one of my big suitcases being stored in Ouarzazate during PST, so that meant I had to bathe in my cotton boxers.  Moad, Wissam, and I all went at the same, which I guess is the brotherly way of doing things here.  It was actually a really good bath, and hanging out in the sauna helped my chest a lot (I’ve had a lingering cough after a little cold last week).  I do wish there was some way I could get to go in by myself and thus actually bathe in the nude—it kind of defeats the purpose of bathing if you can’t even get to some of the dirtiest parts of your body, but I guess it is a lot of effort to heat this thing up so they can only do it once a week.  After half an hour or so, I was like a prune and thought it was time to get out, but my brothers wound up staying a lot longer.  When you bathe once a week, you have to make the most of it.

12 March

Just thinking about Sean today… Can’t concentrate on studying anything.

11 March

We got back from our hub visit to Ouarzazate today, where we had received a huge assignment for the next two weeks.  We were all tired and cranky going home after enjoying the whole Health sector’s company for a day and a half, in a nice hotel with hot showers and western toilets.  We had only been split up for three days, but it felt like a family reunion.  The last thing I felt like doing was going back to the village and into the home stay house, where every thought in my head and word out of my mouth would have to be work.  But the sunset was pretty as my youngest brother walked me home (all the little kids come to fetch us and walk us home as if they were our parents), so right after dropping off my stuff, I pulled out my big camera and said I was going to go shoot a few pictures outside.  Aunty (Xalti) Mehjouba made him follow along, and we walked up the hill were I got a few nice shots of the whole village, and even got Aunty to pose for one.  So far I have not seen any of the hostility towards the camera that I was prepped to expect from the people of Morocco, but I have been very good about clearing any photos of people first.  Anyway, we just started spontaneously wandering around the village and caught the staff of the local sbitar (health clinic) heading out, and so I tried to introduce myself and I think I was able to answer almost decently a few basic questions in Tashlheet.  I’m already surprising myself with how easy it is walk up to total strangers and do that in a strange language, but that’s pre-service training in a nutshell.  All of a sudden I started feeling good, and it was about that time of the evening when all the men and boys are out hanging around or taking a stroll, so I met a number of other new people as well.  Even though no one in this village has ever been anything less than totally welcoming, for the first I felt like I was an active participant and not just a friendly observer.  It was one of those little victories they told us to savor back during staging, and I carried that positive feeling home and had the best night yet with my family. 

I was able to learn quite a bit more about their family situation.  I found out there are actually four sons; there’s an even older one I hadn’t known about before and he’s away working in Casablanca, probably sending money back to support the family.  The other absent son is just in nearby Ouarzazate going to university, so hopefully I’ll get to meet him at some point.  I also found out that Mehjouba can read, which I don’t think any of the other host moms in the village can do.  I found her going through my Tashlheet textbook (which has everything in both Roman and Arabic script—Tash can be written in either, and also has its own unique script which we do not learn) and reading stuff out loud.  So tonight she really got into going through the book with me and teaching me some pronunciation.  And the youngest son is incredible; at 12 years old, he is fluent in Darija, Tashlheet, and French, and probably all of his classmates are as well.  They may go on to university and good jobs or spend their whole lives in this village, but it really makes me think about our extremely narrow definition of what constitutes an “educated” person.