Not Dark Yet

Reports of the death of my blog are greatly exaggerated.  It is merely in hibernation; look for updates and changes soon, I promise.  Inch'allah.

In the meantime, I want to hear about your favorite non-traditional, non-standard, non-classic, or otherwise offbeat Christmas movies (which can be any movie set during the holidays).  These three jump out for me:

-Gremlins
-2046
-Eyes Wide Shut

Any more?

My favorite Ramadramedy: Aqba Lik

Television has been a constant presence since I got here, and Moroccans in the bled tend to watch an extraordinary amount of TV.  Or at least they have it on a lot.  The vast majority of houses in even the most remote locations are equipped with satellite receivers and get dozens or even hundreds of channels, mostly from the Arabic-speaking world but lots of other places too.  It's not that surprising, given that there isn't much else available for accessible, fun, and free entertainment.  I've mostly done my best to tune it out, or at least pay attention only when socially expedient.  Most Moroccan-produced TV shows are in Darija, the evening news is in French, but there is a body of Tashlheet programming, much of which of which is set in the bled and folkloric in nature.  Unfortunately, most of it is of extremely poor quality, and once the novelty of hearing Tash spoken on TV wears off, barely worth paying attention to, other than for the purposes of working on language.  And there are so many better ways to practice language.

For Ramadan, the networks have unleashed a slew of new programs that air every night for a month, presumably trying to capture the audience that's at home with family every evening breaking the fast.  One of these is called Aqba Lik, and I'm absolutely hooked on it.  It's a half hour comedy-drama about a single professional woman named Fatima-Zahra who works for a website (I think) called PUNISH! in Casablanca, and the colorful friends and co-workers she deals with as she looks for love, or whatever it is she's looking for.  I actually have no idea, because the show is in Arabic (with healthy dollop of French), but that hasn't stopped me from being thoroughly captivated every night.  There are obvious lifts from shows like The Office and Sex & The City, but the production values and quality/subtlety of the actors is unlike anything else I've seen on Moroccan TV.  It's fun to watch it with my host family, esp. my sisters, as the version of Moroccan life portrayed couldn't be more different from theirs if it took place in America, or on the moon.  Fatima-Zahra lives alone, doesn't cover her head, works outside the home, socializes freely with both sexes, goes on dates, drinks, you name it.  I know I'd be getting a lot more out of it if I understood more than 10% of the dialogue, so if anyone else has seen this show and can fill me in, I'd appreciate it.

I've found precious little about the show online, but there are some complete episodes available, like this one here: The 2nd episode.

The best part is the theme song, an irresistible jazzy, Motown-flavored thing that my sisters sing along with every night.

Ramadan, Day 1

13 August

Coming back to site from Agadir (short weekend after two weeks of PPST training in Ouarzazate), transportation was becoming difficult.  We traveled on Monday, Ramadan about to begin on Thursday, and already every stop the bus would make was like an incitement to riot.  Happy to be back in site before that madness peaked.

And then…not with a bang, but a whimper.  I stayed up very late on Wednesday hoping to sleep as late as possible into Thursday, knowing there wouldn’t be any breakfast or lunch.  (I’m still with my host family, by the way, of course the new house was not finished before Ramadan and probably next-to-nothing will happen with it over the next month now.  This was my biggest fear and was also completely inevitable.) Stepping out of my room into this strange new world that we’ve been preparing for since we first got here, all I could notice was how strangely quiet it was.  No kids playing in the street, no sound of work or activity coming from anywhere.  It felt like a bomb had gone off in the stratosphere—people were just lying on the ground wherever they happen the fall, conserving energy.  No work to be done and no fuel to do it with.  People shuffled around like zombies when they moved at all.

Around noon, my sister insisted on making me a light brunch of eggs and tea, despite my repeated insistence not too.  I didn’t plan to fast and my family knew this, but I certainly didn’t intend to have them cooking for me while they were fasting.  I had just received a big CARE package full snacks and goodies from my mom that would keep me from starving to death for a few weeks, and I was perfectly content to just nibble on that stuff ‘til dark.  Then again, if the young kids who normally live here (they’re away on summer visits right now) were around, they wouldn’t be fasting either and my sisters would be cooking for them, so I can justify it that way.

We broke fast around 7:45 with fresh local dates (from our own fields), askif (soup), and aghom n zit (a donut-like fried bread that you dip in honey—delicious), and got full to bursting just on those.  The usual dinner followed a couple hours later, but I was still completely full from “breakfast.”  The rest of my family woke up again around 3:30 in the morning to have another meal as close as possible to the start of the next fast.  It’s going to be an interesting month.

The Housing Crisis Hits Tata

For the last two plus weeks, I’ve been preoccupied with one thing and thing only: finding housing.  When we first get to our permanent sites, we live with a new host family for about two months, and then we’re expected to find our own permanent housing.  It makes sense to do it this way; having a host family provides a point of entry into our new community (in theory these families are chosen because of their good reputation and suitability for guests), frees us from having to worry about cooking and cleaning and a million other little things at the beginning and focus on integration.  However, after already having been through two months of homestay during PST, most people are chomping at the bit to get out on their own as soon as possible.  It’s technically possible to stay with the host family for the whole two years, if everyone is agreeable to it, but just from what I’ve heard this happens only in rare cases.  And you get a severely reduced living allowance because it’s assumed that you’ll be getting most of your basic needs met by the family.

For the first month, I took a very laissez-faire approach to the house-hunting endeavor.  I figured this is a douar (village) of roughly 500 people, there are maybe 5 dozens structures, all I have to do is be present, make it known that I need a house when I talk to people, and sooner or later the right place will just fall into my lap.  Surprise! It didn’t work that way.  (Bjai, my sitemate in a douar 2km away, found her place within the first week without even looking, and it’s a great house. So I had some precedent for thinking it could work out like that.)  The official end of the homestay period is July 1, and even though that’s not a firm deadline, I was starting to get really anxious with it coming up and I hadn’t even so much as heard about a house.  On top of that, the structure of homestay life was/is starting to get a little oppressive.  I love my homestay family, but living with six people who eat all their meals together (and another 2 or 3 tea times a day) and expect me to be there, plus being trapped inside by the heat of the summer from roughly 11-5 each day—you can see how it would get suffocating after a while. I could handle it when I knew I only had to be patient for so long, but with no housing prospects, it was starting to get me down.

The biggest problem is this:  the houses in my douar don’t have bathrooms.  I’m not saying they lack fancy western flush toilets, they don’t even have the most basic in-ground Turkish toilets.  The reasons for this have to do with (from what I can gather with my Tashlheet) the stony ground which is difficult—and more importantly, expensive—to dig in, and because the water table is very close to the surface, it’s hard to go very deep. (Which does explain why, even though we are in a desert, there is an abundance of private wells in the douar from which the people get their water.)  Peace Corps requires us to have any housing that we consider renting to be inspected by either staff or a 2^nd-year volunteer according to a checklist of must-haves.  We aren’t required to have electricity or running water, because local conditions might not always make that possible, but we are required to have a bit l-ma (bathroom) for reasons of basic sanitation.  So basically any housing that might be available in town would not pass inspection.  This is where I found myself.  What do to?

Hopefully, you are asking yourself “if there are no bit l-ma’s in the houses, what do the people do?”  This is one of the most carefully guarded secrets in town, and there’s not one single answer.  People who live close enough to the igran (fields) do most of their business out there.  On our side of town, away from the igran, you find a lot of dried poop in the stony vacant lots or in the yards of vacant houses.  Because the sun is so powerful out here, and the ground and air so dry, any business done out in the open pretty much bakes and dries out very quickly, so smell and contamination is not a big problem as far as I can tell.  And the population is small enough for the amount of land that is used that the waste is biodegrading as fast as it is being replaced.  Yes, it’s gross, and far from ideal, but if I want to find a house here, it is what it is.

So how have I been using the bathroom for the past two months?  That question leads right back into the housing issue.  I am lucky enough that my host family has the only house I know of that has a true bit l-ma in the douar, which I know now was not coincidental in why they were selected to be my host family.  But it’s more complicated than that.  The bathroom I’ve been using is not in our house proper, but in the guest house next door.  This guest house is its own independent entity, with its own courtyard, roof, kitchen, rooms, entrance, etc.  It’s actually a lot bigger and nicer than the main house, with tiled rooms, even an A/C unit in the kitchen (though I question whether it works or has ever been turned on). It just happens to be attached to one side of our house.  Though it’s owned by my host dad, it’s set aside for his brother who lives in Spain and visits once a year for a week or two with his family.  Part of the reason why I never got too worked up about really looking for housing was that in the back of my mind I was assuming that if all else failed, I could always rent the guest house from my host dad.  For complex  reasons involving family politics and other subtleties that can’t be perceived with my limited language skills and Moroccan’s favored Indirect Communication, it turns out this not possible.  My educated guess is that the brother is a source of income for my host dad, and many Moroccans who move overseas for work and send money back home often will keep a residence maintained for them, perhaps as a sort of status symbol or point of pride. (This economic model is crucial to understanding the structural problems of the region and should be the subject of a later post.) All of which again leaves me getting closer to the deadline with no housing.

Another contributing factor to the housing situation was that I think my host family never really took it seriously that I wanted to live on my own.  My host dad would say things like “Why do you want to live by yourself?  Who will cook for you?  Clean for you? etc, etc.”  Living alone is not really something that is done in rural Morocco.  This is also one of the challenges of being in a new site; because these folks have never had a PCV around before, they aren’t used to seeing our often strange habits and way of life.  (Part of my “job” being the first volunteer here, if this is to remain a functioning site in the future, is simply to get people used to the idea of my/our presence.)  It took many weeks of subtle persistence, and constant reminders that the Peace Corps rules said I HAVE to live by myself if I’m going to stay here before I really think he got it.  And then, perfectly timed to help things along, my assistant program manager scheduled a visit to the site, just to check up on me.  I was able to leverage this impending visit to great advantage.  “Oh, my mudir  (principal/boss) is coming in a week to look at my new house.  If I don’t have something to show him that meets his requirements, I’ll be in trouble and he might have to move me.”  Having an outside authority that you can blame for your difficult needs is always helpful.  Within a day we had looked at two places.

I wish I had taken my camera along for the two house visits, so you could see what I’m talking about.  I knew going in that neither place was going to have a bit l-ma, so it was kind of pointless anyway, but I wanted to at least be able to say I had done due diligence and looked at what was available.  The first place was literally an in-use chicken coop.  It was two rooms, not connected, the larger of which was currently filled floor-to-ceiling with straw and chickens.  (They did look pretty comfortable and happy.)  The second room was maybe large enough for me to lie down in.  It had no electricity and water only in the yard.  The second house was a little bit closer to the average living standards of the community, had no livestock currently occupying it, but still no water or kitchen, and it was filled with so much debris  that it would take a month to get it cleared out.  And the funniest part was the landlord wouldn’t even tell me the rent—not that it mattered, but just out of curiosity I asked. He said “tell me if you want it and then I’ll tell you the price.” A highly irritating and ineffective new bargaining tactic. This is when I really started to get discouraged, and after speaking to staff about it, they suggested I check out neighboring douars.  But if I did that, I would feel like I was abandoning my community, and it isn’t exactly easy to go house-hunting in a neighboring douar where I don’t know anyone, when all of this kind of business happens based on personal relationships.  That was to be an absolute last resort.

It’s too late to make this long story short, but skip ahead to now and I have a solution, though it came out of left field at the last minute.  My host dad is going to build a new house and rent it to me for the next two years!  It sounds like a crazy idea, and it is, but apparently it’s been done with other PCV’s before.  I didn’t believe him when he first proposed the idea, and then I never thought that staff would approve, but when Rachid came for the site visit, saw the situation and spoke to my host dad, they worked out a deal that everyone is happy with.  There is a large parcel of land on the one side our house, and there he will build a completely self-contained new dwelling with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, courtyard and accessible roof.  Mohammed says he can do it in a month, which I don’t think anyone in their right mind actually believes, but Rachid said one to two months is reasonable.  There are obviously downsides to this arrangement:  I’ll have to stay in homestay for the meantime until the new house is done, and this being Morocco (actually, what am I saying, do new houses in any country ever get finished on time?) there are bound to be frustrations and delays during the construction process.  Ramadan starts in about six weeks, for starters. But I get to stay in my douar, and I’ll get to have a zwin (nice) new house that I should be able to help customize along the way.

I’m really just overwhelmed by Mohammed’s generosity at offering to do this.  Once he understood that there was probably no way for me to stay in town unless I had suitable housing, he took it upon himself to make sure that such housing could happen.  I had no idea that my presence was that important to him.  At first he was assuming that Peace Corps would be able to advance him some of the future rent to cover the cost of construction, but after he learned that it was not possible he didn’t retract the offer.  I have no idea how he will get the money to build the house, and in fact there was some tension between him and Aziz (my host brother) over this, but he was not to be swayed.  In the long run, it could prove to be a good source of income for him, as future volunteers or teachers at the school (who get assigned here from other places) can also rent it.  I hope it works out for everyone, and I’m even more motivated now to contribute something of value to the people of this community after they’ve shown me how important it is to them for me to be here.

I plan to document the construction process extensively and hopefully get my hands dirty helping out with it as well.  Lots more to come, Insha’Allah! 

Checking In From The Land of No Rezo

25 May

Apologies for not having posted in a while.  Rezo (sp?) is local speak for wireless signal, which my computer also depends on to get connected to the internet. It’s been about three weeks since swearing-in and getting to site, and it’s been a strange mix of running around busy and confusingly idle.  Here is a small sample of what I’ve been doing:

-Today, Bjai and I visited the l-mdrassa (elementary school) in her douar to sit in.  We did this just so that this kids would see our faces and have some idea of who we are; we’re not at all ready yet to start giving lessons, and anyway school will be getting out for the summer very soon.  I sat in on a class of about thirty kids (co-ed, aged around 10) for a couple of hours.  For the first hour they were studying Arabic, and I was completely mystified.  The primary language of instruction in Moroccan schools is classical Arabic.  Then the class turned on a dime and switched to French.  Not only was the subject material in French, but all of the instructions from the teacher were as well.  The French was not nearly as advanced as the Arabic, so I was able to follow along a lot better.  The energy from the kids in a class like that is really infectious.  The stand up a sing a little song to any stanger who enters the classroom as if on cue.  Apparently the children pick their own seats, so the front rows were filled the anxious kids who loved to raise their hands and had most of the correct answers, and as you gradually move to the back rows you find the kids who are barely paying attention and trying not to fall asleep. It was funny to see how some things are the same the world over.  There were also a few special needs kids who were stuck in the back.  The teacher said there weren’t any special programs for them.

Visits like this are part of my overall task right now, which is Community Entry.  Put another way, it is to become known by as many people as possible in my douar, which you’d think wouldn’t be too difficult in a town of about 500 people.  But there’s no organized way to go about a task like that.  Having my host family is a great help, but as friendly as they are, they are not the most outgoing and social bunch.  We get visits from the same two or three neighbors mostly.  So I try to go on walks and meet people that way as well, but again, it’s a completely scattershot approach.

-This past weekend, a large group of us met up in Agadir, a touristy seaside town about six hours away.  This was allegedly for a consolidation exercise (in which we rehearse how we would all meet up if there were any kind of national emergency), but everyone also stayed to enjoy the rest of the weekend there.  Agadir is beautiful, but it didn’t feel like being in Morocco at all.  The city was mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 1961, and when it was rebuilt they decided to focus the economy on tourism.  (Some of the money to do this came from the States, which would explain why my hotel was located on Avenue John F. Kennedy.) There are large parks, street cafes on every corner that look like something you might find in any French city, and of course, the beach and all that usually comes with it.  No surprise then that the town is full of European, mostly French tourists.  It was a blast, but hard on the wallet of a poor PCV, and it did start to wear on me after a while.  Nice to know that such as escape is nearby if I ever need it, though.

Anywhere I Lay My Head

25 April

The rest of the site visit to Tata went fine.  I know I’ll be giving a lot more information about my site and what it has/doesn’t have and all that in the coming weeks and months, so I won’t bore you with any more of my half-baked impressions now.  I’m thinking more about what a strange experience this has been.  Back in my CBT village now, I really can’t remember where I’m supposed to be anymore.  Something has definitely caught up with me in the week since site announcement.  You could call it two months of accumulated homesickness, but it’s not exactly that either, because I’m not really homesick.  (I didn’t even have a home for months before coming here and I don’t miss the States.) It’s more that I’m feeling like a displaced person.  I had just settled into the routine of CBT, and then the site visit threw all that off.  I started to feel a little bit settled at my site for a week, and I’m yanked out of there.  I’m tired of living out of a suitcase.  I’m excited to get to site for real, I think I’m going to love my new host family, but I’m ready to have my own place again.  

Moments Out Of Time: Site Visit Edition

24 April

[A new, hopefully recurring segment for the blog.  Just brief, mostly uneditorialized incidents and observations of life in Morocco that don’t require or would suffer from further explanation.  Some of my old friends will recognize where I stole the idea from.]

-Ten in the evening after another unbearably hot day.  At last it’s cool enough to sit comfortably outside.  A group of young people chats quietly outside our front door, sitting on stones and sacks of grain.  The sky glows with inky blue.  Our blind neighbor, Zeina, stares thoughtfully at the moon.

-After the festival in Imin’tatl, my host father Mohmed and I sitting in the front seat and waiting for the camion to fill up so we can pull out and drive the 2+ hours back home on a dirt road, both of us bone tired.  A young Moroccan man strolls by and, recognizing me as a foreigner, insists on talking.  Mohmed is too tired this time to tell him that I don’t understand anything and anyway he’s speaking English. “Are you Hindi [Indian]?  Moroccan and Hindi people are kif-kif [the same]. Have you read Tagore?  What do you plan to do here in Morocco?”  I explain that I’m an American Peace Corps volunteer working to improve public health.  “Yes, that is all fine but really you are here to spread American ideas.  The only problem here is poverty.”

-Shopping for overpriced foreign groceries at the supermarché, just back in Ouarzazate.  This is after having forgotten my iPod back at CBT, and suffered every night for it.  The song that’s been stuck in my head for the last week, on endless repeat in my brain, somehow starts playing over the store’s loudspeakers:  “Kids” by MGMT.  French tourists proceed to browse, oblivious to this little miracle.  Music can take me out of here when I need it to, or it can snap me right back.

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.

From the Doorway To The Desert

9 March 2010

Yesterday marks exactly one week since staging, but it already feels like a month.  For the first few days of that we were kept too busy to make much use of the internet that we were surprised to have, other than to pop on and send quick “I made it, I miss you, Morocco is great!” messages to loved ones.  It wasn’t uncommon to see a couple dozen trainees splayed out across a lobby, all trying to Skype with someone at the same time, all eating into each others’ bandwidth.  Yes, Peace Corps has changed a lot in 50 years, but then so has the rest of the world.  I don’t feel so spoiled for having a cell phone here now when my host family in a village of 1000 has two, and we get 5-bar reception courtesy of Maroc Telecom pretty much everywhere.

Now that things have slowed down just enough and we’re no longer a wild bunch of 71, there’s no internet out where I am, so this will have to be posted after the fact.  It’s a good time to give a rundown of everything that’s happened so far.

-One day staging in Philadelphia.  I’ll admit, I had a pretty bad case of the nerves going into this thing. Instead of going out to breakfast with the few trainees I had met the night before, I went to the hotel gym to try and sweat it out.  But within half an hour of meeting everyone, I was hugely relieved.  Everyone is amazing.  Everyone.  We have two married couples, one of which is retired and from good old Andover, Mass.  There are also a handful of over-thirties, which makes me feel good.  We have people who have lived abroad and traveled quite a bit, and some barely at all.  There’s really no one common thread, other than that we’re all smart, curious, brave, and somehow related like family by having been put in this same boat together.  After a year or more of basically doing this process in the dark, it was a revelation to realize that there were so many others who understood exactly what it had been like and had the same hopes and fears.

-Flight out and first night in Marrakech.  I did not bring, as I had feared, way more stuff than everybody else.  I’d say I fell into the “more than average” category, and I’m already regretting half of it. I did have to pay $50 to Royal Air Maroc for being slightly overweight, but that seems pretty cheap compared to what I was prepared for.  On the flight I sat next to two of the most interesting people I have ever met on an airplane.  One was a guy about my age from Niger, who had been living in North Carolina for the last 12 years, going back home for the first time.  The other was Mustafa, a native of Marrakech who has lived in the States with his family for quite a while, but goes back to Morocco frequently with them for visits.  He knew all about Peace Corps, and he had an infectious enthusiasm for his native land that just reconfirmed that I was doing the right thing.  We all shared some of the Moroccan wine they were serving (comes from Meknes, not bad) and had a great time.  It was enough to make me forget that I was crammed into a middle seat and desperately wanted to sleep.  I paid for it the next/same day, as we landed in Rabat and got right on the buses for Marrakech.  The flat parts of Morocco, between the Atlantic and the mountains, were lush green and reminded me so much of northern California.  When we got to Marrakech, we discovered we were staying in a little off-season resort, with cute little bungalows and a big swimming pool.  It was much cushier than anyone had expected, but they told us not to get used to it.  Here we met the Country Director and some of the lead staff, but the stay was so short; it was mostly just to break up the journey and we didn’t get to see anything of the city.

-Bus trip to Ouarzazate and three days of sessions.  The city of Ouarzazte will be our group’s “training hub” for the next 8 weeks.  Apparently it’s a big location for foreign film shoots and has its own studio and even a Museum of Cinema. To get there we went over the Haute Atlas on some hairpin windy curves (Moroccan roads are good, but this was still fairly treacherous at times) and were able to stop and get some great pictures along the way.  I hope I can post these soon.  We put in at a hotel right on the main square and got right to it, from crash-course sessions in Moroccan Arabic (Darija), safety and security, common diseases (for us, not the Moroccans we’ll be serving), and so on.  The group cohesion and bonding continued during all of this.  I was happy to see that, for the most part, we didn’t break down into cliques right away, and everyone, even the most anti-social (like me) made an effort to keep meeting everyone else.  A few current PCVs trickled in from around the country and made us feel quite welcome, and several of the LCFs (language and cross-cultural facilitators) took groups out to help us buy cell phones.  Of course what everyone was dying to know the whole time was A) Where will I be doing my CBT (community-based training), and B) What language will I be learning?, and C) Who will be in my group?  Most of this was cleverly saved until the very end.  Long story short: I am learning the Berber dialect of Tashlheet, and training in a village in Ouarzazate province about half an hour away with a group of four others.

-CBT, first two days.  This is the real start of training, and I see why they eased us into it as much as possible.  Right now I’m in the home of my host family in the village, in “my room” which is actually the sitting room of the house—the biggest and nicest room, by far.  I didn’t feel right taking it, but they insisted, and according to the rules for homestay, they are required to provide a private room with a locking door and no other room in the house worked. My family is a widowed mother, Mehjouba, and her three boys, age 18, 16, and 12.  From what I can gather with my nonexistent Tashlheet, the father was in the Moroccan army and died a couple of years ago.  The oldest son I haven’t met and so I presume is away somewhere working to support the family.  The middle son goes to a school one or two villages away and so doesn’t sleep at home during the week.  That leaves the youngest son and the mom to take care of me and hang out with, and they do so without any of the smothering hospitality I was led to expect from our training sessions.  I suspect that without a father in the household, there is a something of a lack of the traditional family structure going on, and I’m sure that needing the money was a factor in their agreeing to host me.  I’m also fairly certain they think I’m a complete idiot who can’t do or say anything, and from their perspective, they’re not wrong.  The possibility for bonding is definitely there but we both need to get a little more comfortable first.

I should probably explain how CBT works.  The is one of the real jewels of the Peace Corps Morocco program.  Other Peace Corps programs may use CBT for a short period of time, but in Morocco it makes up almost all of the training period.  As I said, there are five of us trainees in this village, all staying with different families.  There’s also an LCF, Tayeb, with his own house that doubles as our classroom.  Tayeb isn’t actually from here, it’s just part of his job to stay here with us and be our teacher/community liason while we use this village as our point of community entry into Morocco.  The rationale for doing it this way is that they want us to train, learn the language and culture, in a setting very much like the community we will eventually be placed in—but not that community itself, since we’re going to make a lot of stupid mistakes at first and we don’t want those to be remembered. It’s like those cleaning products that tell you to test on an inconspicuous area before using in case it ruins everything.  Well, this lucky village is the inconspicuous area of Morocco that gets to test our ability to become Moroccan/Berber/speakers of Tashlheet.  This is probably a good time to say a word or two about the Peace Corps Morocco staff.  With the exception of the Country Director, all of the staff we have worked with are native Moroccans, which I was not at all expecting but actually makes sense now that I think about it, and they are to a person 100% stone cold awesome and amazing.  They all speak like 5 languages, and are just so extraordinarily patient, knowledgeable, resourceful, funny, and kind that it almost makes me wonder why they need to bother with us clueless volunteers in the first place.

The majority of CBT consists of language lessons at the LCF’s house—today we went from 8am to 5:30pm.  Maybe I’ve just been out of school for a while, but this stuff is intense and I am intimidated in a major way. It’s amazing how many dozens of times you can hear a word or phrase and still not remember it 5 minutes later.  By the end of the day, the stuff you learned in the morning feels like last semester, but Tayeb tries his best to keep us motivated. When we first got here, our host families all gave us new Moroccan names, which is kind of fun and makes it easier for them to remember and pronounce.  Thus I am now Tariq (which I’m told means “mountain” in Arabic), Anna is now Hannan, Samantha is Samarra (which gets around the unfortunate Sex & The City connection—it’s one of the best-known American shows here), Bjai is Njet, and Tiffany became Tiffout. 

I’ll write more later about what the village and the people in it are like as I get to know them and Tashlheet better.  It’s just been so exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

Pre-stage

I arrived in Philadelphia last night, already met quite a few other trainees at the hotel just wandering around (pretty easy for us to spot each other with our giant backpacks and such).  Just wanted to drop a quick note to everyone who has emailed or otherwise contacted me in the last couple weeks.  I really appreciate all your good wishes and I'm so sorry I have not had the time to write the individual replies that each of you deserve.  It has just been such a mad whirlwind of moving, packing, moving again, and trying to get my mom somewhat settled in the new house, I've barely had time to breathe, let alone absorb all this change.  It's only going to get worse from here on out, so I apologize in advance if I seem unresponsive.  I couldn't be doing this without the support of my wonderful friends and family, many of whom I had been out of contact with for way too long.

Indignant rant alert

I moved out of my apartment back in mid-December, probably a bit earlier than most of the folks who are staging in March, because I wanted to be free to help my mom with her own move to TN (then expected to happen in late Jan.) and spend my last few weeks with her before Morocco.  Here's something I didn't count on:  that I would still be paying for that stupid apartment until the end of May as it sits there empty!  What a tremendous waste.  Here's why:

My lease isn't up until the end of May 2010.  The contract is written in such a way that says the tenant assumes the responsibility of covering the rent until the end of the lease period, regardless of whether or not he/she is living there, or until the management company finds a new tenant to sign a new lease.  (Big corporate out-of-state management co.--first indicator that this isn't going to end well.)  I gave the building managers two whole months notice that I was going to be moving out, and for a month of that time I was gone to India, so they could show the apartment at any time with no problem.  This is in a student neighborhood near a major university in an upscale renovated building.  It never even occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to find somebody else before that two months was up.  So when I did finally move out and that was the case, I had to pay the next month's rent and cross my fingers that they'd rent the place real quick and I get most of it refunded.  Guess what?  Didn't happen.

After two months of increasingly frantic calls to the manager explaining that I was leaving for Africa soon and that I didn't have the money, means, or inclination to keep paying for this boondoggle, and that some kind of alternate arrangement had to be made, the on-site manager suggested I write to the corporate office explaining the situation and that maybe they would let me out of the lease.  So I did my specialty: a long, well-reasoned yet impassioned letter describing that I was leaving for the Peace Corps, which is unpaid national service, and that I had no control over the timing of when I had to move, that I had been a model tenant who hadn't complained about their terrible building security, that I would forfeit my security deposit, and thanking them profusely for their consideration.  A week later I get a call saying, essentially, "Well, they thought you might have qualified under the Military Exception, but it turns out not. Sorry, bye!"   My head just about exploded.

Basically, what they're saying is this:  If I were going over to Iraq or Afghanistan to kill some people, they be cool with that.  They'd cut me all the slack the law forces them to.  But since I'm only going overseas to help people and hopefully improve the quality of their lives, tough luck.  Never mind the inverted moral calculus of this that is enough to make my blood boil, but it doesn't even make sense from a practical standpoint.  Last I checked, we still had an all-volunteer army who made just as much of a voluntary decision to join up as I did to join PC, so how do I not deserve the same leeway?

And when I think about how much money that I'm wasting on this I want to cry.  Just pouring it down the drain to do nothing for no one.  If I don't find some other way to wrangle free, I will have paid over $4500 rent on an empty apartment by the end of May.  The average per capita income for citizens of Morocco is $3950/year.  Think of the impact that money could have had in someone's life.  Think of that lovely apartment sitting empty for almost half a year that could have housed someone who has no roof over their head.  All because some greedy corporation has my signature on a piece of paper and cares more about what they can get away with than how their actions affect anyone else.

So I'm left with two options:  I can do what I feel like doing and just not pay anymore, and probably come home in 2.5 years to a pile of collection notices and seriously damaged credit.  Or I can give up, submit, and hate myself in the morning.  Of course you already know which it will be.  Like somebody said on The Wire, "the game stay the game."

Thinking others' thoughts

It's a time of great upheaval for me, of anticipation and a more than a little trepidation.  Such times call for the wisdom of cherry-picked quotations.  These have been running through my head lately:

You always got to be prepared but you never know for what.        -Bob Dylan

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.                -James Joyce

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.               -Franz Kafka

This last was used by Bowles in Sheltering Sky.  I can't decide if that book should be required reading for every American thinking of going to north Africa, or be absolutely forbidden.