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.