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 2nd-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!
No comments:
Post a Comment