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.