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.