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.