Weekly Digest

31 March

Just some assorted notes on the eve of another hub session in Ouarzazate:

-Today marks the end of Phase I of our training.  This hub visit is kind of like “midterms”; we have a language progress assessment and some evaluations.  By the time I post this, it will be one month since we staged.  I can say with little hyperbole that it’s been the longest month of my life, but it feels good to reach a little milestone.

-Though I think I’m on track to meet the minimum expected language requirements to be sworn in as a Volunteer, I’m realizing how insufficient that’s going to be.  There is so much to absorb, and there’s a big difference in what I can learn in class and what I learn out of class.  Obviously, you can’t get fluent in a language from 6 hours of classroom time 6 days a week over 2 months, but at least in that setting there is a teacher who speaks English who can answer questions, a white board and notebooks to write on, and a textbook to refer to.  I feel like I’m absorbing, retaining, and using that material.  But you can only cover so much in class, and what people speak out in the world can be very different.  In real-world settings, you can’t always write everything down or ask people to repeat themselves a hundred times, and for the stuff I’m learning that way, I’m not happy with the speed I’m absorbing it.  There is no way I’ll be fluent enough in Tashlheet to do my job (which starts in 5 weeks) as well as I would like to in the time remaining.  Today we had a session about how to describe the Peace Corps, its mission, goals, and our work in the Health sector in Tash, and the chasm between the language required to do that effectively and what I have right now was daunting.  And that’s going to be my job, essentially, to talk to people about their health.  I know this is normal and this is the process and I’m trying not to get frustrated, but it’s hard.  I’ve made more progress than I thought would be possible in the time frame, but the expectations keep rising.

-I haven’t yet taken any pictures inside my host family’s house, but I still plan to.  I didn’t during the first week because I wanted to give them a little time to get used to me before I just whipped out my camera and photographed their most private spaces.  Now I think the trust is there to do that without any issue, but I just haven’t had the chance.  It’s always dark when I get home from l-mdrassa, and (like all houses in the village) our house is very poorly lit inside, with just one low-wattage bulb per room.  So I have to wait until the weekend when I’m actually home during daylight hours if I want to be able to take any pics that will actually let you see the place well.

-The kids are just awesome here.  My youngest host brother, Khalil, is so handsome that all the girls in my CBT group have a crush on him. (He’s 12.)  Every single kid in the whole village seems to know all of our names, even the ones we haven’t met.  They seem to be in a perpetual good mood, are easily entertained by the simplest games and activities, and probably teach us as much as the adults.  I’ve never seen any kid here be bratty or give his/her parents a hard time about anything.  (I’m sure it happens, but not in public, anyway.)  It’s just impossible to be in a bad mood when there’s a group of kids around.  Tiffawt’s little sister is adorable and obviously very smart.  She’s also about 12 and apparently no longer in school, which is heartbreaking but a pretty common story around here.

28 March

Another terrific new experience today, right out of the Peace Corps textbook: I washed my clothes in the river.  I don’t actually have to do it this way; my family has a washing machine at home and my host mom has very generously been doing my laundry for me.  It’s about a quarter of the size of the machines in the States and it’s kept in the kitchen.  I haven’t yet seen in action, but it seems to do a decent job, and of course we still have to line-dry everything, which leaves clothes pretty stiff and wrinkly.  (Something I’ve used all my life and never appreciated what it actually does until now: fabric softener.)  But the other day, Mehjouba asked me at breakfast about whether I do housework in the States, and I took this as an indirect statement that I need to be doing more around the house to earn my keep. We’ve been learning in training about the direct/indirect styles of communication that distinguish the U.S. and Morocco, and I had already been starting to feel that I should do more.  It’s just been so hard with 10 hours of school each day, and more studying expected after that, I’ve barely had time for anything else.  Anyway, Njat had done her laundry in the river a couple weeks ago and was planning to go again on Sunday, so I said I’d join in as well, just to see what it’s like.

Our house is about a 10 minute walk to the river.  I had to carry all the clothes I planned to wash, plus a bucket, a large washing tub, and a wooden scrubbing surface.  It was a tough haul, and I only took a few clothes—many of the women carry all the rugs from their house back and forth, tied on their backs.  Mehjouba thought it was hilarious that I was doing this, and kept mock-offering me her rugs and her clothes as well.  And well she should; it was probably a major event in her life when she got that washing machine and didn’t have to do that anymore.  The river on a Sunday afternoon was pretty hopping.  There were maybe 25 or 30 women, all of whom also thought it was hilarious that I was washing my clothes there.  Needless to say, I was the only adult male present, and I wondered if it was culturally appropriate for me to be there at all.  Most of the women had their bottoms rolled up their legs for wading in the river,  and were generally a lot less conservatively dressed than when I see them elsewhere.  But they didn’t seem to mind me, and several actually helped show me how it’s done, and I even had to step in and take my clothes back more than once to keep them for washing them for me.  It was the middle of the day and starting to get really hot, so if you had to be outside I could think of worse ways to pass the time than wading around and splashing in a cool river.  The mood was really light and fun—everyone was joking with each other and it didn’t feel like drudgery at all.

To dry, we delicately stretch the clothes over some bushes nearby, and the sun bakes them within half an hour.  The problem is, it’s so dusty and windy in our area that the big gusts of wind deposit sand and dirt in the clothes while they’re drying.  I think a lot my stuff probably came back dirtier than it went out.  But it didn’t matter, I’m glad I did it anyway.  I think I earned some credibility, and it was a great way to meet people in an informal setting.  I’m definitely going to try this again, esp. when I get to my final site.

27 March

Perhaps I have a tendency to romanticize my own experiences even while they’re happening, but I can’t read this below without getting a little misty.  From President Kennedy’s statement regarding the creation of the Peace Corps, 1 March 1961 (to be read aloud with your best inner JFK voice):

The initial reactions to the Peace Corps proposal are convincing proof that we have, in this country, an immense reservoir of such men and women—anxious to sacrifice their energies and time and toil to the cause of world peace and human progress. 

We will only send abroad Americans who are wanted by the host country—who have a real job to do—and who are qualified to do that job.  Programs will be developed with care, and after full negotiation, in order to make sure that the Peace Corps is wanted and will contribute to the welfare of other people.  Our Peace Corps is not designed as an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict.  It is designed to permit our people to exercise more fully their responsibilities in the great common cause of world development.

Life in the Peace Corps will not be easy... Men and women will be expected to work and live alongside the nationals in the country in which they are stationed—doing the same work, eating the same food, and talking the same language.

But if the life will not be easy, it will be rich and satisfying.  For every young American who participates in the Peace Corps—who works in a foreign land—will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace.

26 March

Back yesterday from a 2-day hub session in Ouarzazate.  The presentation of our community assessment project went pretty well, even if was pretty much the same as everyone else’s.  Send 9 groups of about 5 people into various villages around the province with the same set of instructions and—surprise—you wind up with 9 pretty similar PowerPoint presentations.  But it was good, a useful exercise.  It will be harder when I have to do the same thing by myself at my final site, though my Tashlheet should be a lot better by then.  Of course, I’ll also have three months to do it as opposed to twelve days.  I’m starting to understand what they tell us about the period of initial community entry really being the make-or-break period for our service.  If you don’t establish credibility and start to build strong relationships in your community from the start, it’s very hard to have an effective 1.75 years after that.  I have learned the lesson; the question is, can I now apply it?

It’s always nice to get away to Ouarzazate, see the whole group and socialize like a bunch of high school kids on lunch break (and shower, did I mention shower?) but it’s also very disruptive to the acclamation process.  After a day and a half, no one really feels like going back.   There’s a pretty somber mood in the air as those grand taxis pull up to take us all back to our villages.  And from a language standpoint, going almost two days without practicing or even listening to Tashlheet (being yanked out of total immersion) is murder.  It makes me realize just how weak these new mental muscles are and how much I have to be constantly working them just to retain what little I’ve learned so far.  I would say it’s taken the last 24 hours to get back to where I was before the hub.  Again, I get the point:  immersion and practice, practice, practice are the only way to get this done.  It’s just so mentally exhausting, and there’s so much temptation to find little spaces where you can escape, but ultimately that’s just holding you back.

On the lighter side, we have a rabbit in our LCF house at the moment.  Unfortunately, he’s supposed to be lunch tomorrow.  I guess with some of the smaller animals that you can buy to eat around here (like chickens) it’s not uncommon to keep them at home for a little while before eating them, even for households that don’t keep livestock.  You can take it to the butcher and he’ll do the deed for you in the proper halal fashion (facing Mecca, Qur’an verses read, jugular slit in one motion, etc.) for a fee, and on certain major holidays people even do it themselves at home.  The problem is, it’s pretty easy to get attached to a cute fuzzy bunny, so I’m trying to stay away from it. (The even named it Tariq after me.)  We also have one vegetarian in our group, and even though she’s very cool with our meat consumption, she has the same unease about this situation that I do.  I realize that the meat situation here in Morocco is a million times better than in the States.  Animals are, for the most part, raised humanely, fed appropriate food, given an appropriate amount of land to roam on, not given drugs or other nasty things, and basically allowed to live a decent life up until the moment they are killed.  I like all that.  The hard part is, you also are faced with the reality that you have to look your dinner in the eye before (and sometimes while) you eat it.  As Americans we’re used to sentimentalizing the experience of animals because most of us only ever see them as pets, and all that other stuff is intentionally hidden from us.  The people here just see animals in a different way.  They’re property, assets, food, resources—something to be respected and treated with care, definitely, but not something you get attached to or worry about its feelings.  That’s going to take some getting used to.

One of the questions I get asked the most by people is what do Health Educators actually do?  I haven’t had much of a detailed answer because I haven’t really understood myself.  So far, almost all of our training has focused on language and culture acquisition without anything very specific to the Health Sector, but that’s starting to change.  We learned a bit about the project goals for our whole Sector over the next 2+ years, and in the next few weeks we’ll really get into it.  I’ll piece it out over time because it’s long.  Here are some of the objectives for educating community members (keep in mind this is all happening in rural and often remote small communities like the one I’m currently in):

-By December 2012, educate 40,000 men and women of childbearing age about the importance of prenatal care…and as a result, 2,000 pregnant women will complete 3 standard pre-natal checkups at the local health clinic before giving birth.

-Educate 30,000 students (boys and girls 5-14) regarding nutrition and personal hygiene.

-Provide STI and HIV/AIDS education sessions for 30,00 people and organize life skills training for 2,500 community youth.  As a result 20,000 individuals will demonstrate increased knowledge about transmission modes and prevention of HIV/AIDS and 1500 youth will declare their intent to adopt at least one preventative measure to reduce their risk of contracting HIV.

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.

Indignant rant alert

I moved out of my apartment back in mid-December, probably a bit earlier than most of the folks who are staging in March, because I wanted to be free to help my mom with her own move to TN (then expected to happen in late Jan.) and spend my last few weeks with her before Morocco.  Here's something I didn't count on:  that I would still be paying for that stupid apartment until the end of May as it sits there empty!  What a tremendous waste.  Here's why:

My lease isn't up until the end of May 2010.  The contract is written in such a way that says the tenant assumes the responsibility of covering the rent until the end of the lease period, regardless of whether or not he/she is living there, or until the management company finds a new tenant to sign a new lease.  (Big corporate out-of-state management co.--first indicator that this isn't going to end well.)  I gave the building managers two whole months notice that I was going to be moving out, and for a month of that time I was gone to India, so they could show the apartment at any time with no problem.  This is in a student neighborhood near a major university in an upscale renovated building.  It never even occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to find somebody else before that two months was up.  So when I did finally move out and that was the case, I had to pay the next month's rent and cross my fingers that they'd rent the place real quick and I get most of it refunded.  Guess what?  Didn't happen.

After two months of increasingly frantic calls to the manager explaining that I was leaving for Africa soon and that I didn't have the money, means, or inclination to keep paying for this boondoggle, and that some kind of alternate arrangement had to be made, the on-site manager suggested I write to the corporate office explaining the situation and that maybe they would let me out of the lease.  So I did my specialty: a long, well-reasoned yet impassioned letter describing that I was leaving for the Peace Corps, which is unpaid national service, and that I had no control over the timing of when I had to move, that I had been a model tenant who hadn't complained about their terrible building security, that I would forfeit my security deposit, and thanking them profusely for their consideration.  A week later I get a call saying, essentially, "Well, they thought you might have qualified under the Military Exception, but it turns out not. Sorry, bye!"   My head just about exploded.

Basically, what they're saying is this:  If I were going over to Iraq or Afghanistan to kill some people, they be cool with that.  They'd cut me all the slack the law forces them to.  But since I'm only going overseas to help people and hopefully improve the quality of their lives, tough luck.  Never mind the inverted moral calculus of this that is enough to make my blood boil, but it doesn't even make sense from a practical standpoint.  Last I checked, we still had an all-volunteer army who made just as much of a voluntary decision to join up as I did to join PC, so how do I not deserve the same leeway?

And when I think about how much money that I'm wasting on this I want to cry.  Just pouring it down the drain to do nothing for no one.  If I don't find some other way to wrangle free, I will have paid over $4500 rent on an empty apartment by the end of May.  The average per capita income for citizens of Morocco is $3950/year.  Think of the impact that money could have had in someone's life.  Think of that lovely apartment sitting empty for almost half a year that could have housed someone who has no roof over their head.  All because some greedy corporation has my signature on a piece of paper and cares more about what they can get away with than how their actions affect anyone else.

So I'm left with two options:  I can do what I feel like doing and just not pay anymore, and probably come home in 2.5 years to a pile of collection notices and seriously damaged credit.  Or I can give up, submit, and hate myself in the morning.  Of course you already know which it will be.  Like somebody said on The Wire, "the game stay the game."

Thinking others' thoughts

It's a time of great upheaval for me, of anticipation and a more than a little trepidation.  Such times call for the wisdom of cherry-picked quotations.  These have been running through my head lately:

You always got to be prepared but you never know for what.        -Bob Dylan

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.                -James Joyce

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.               -Franz Kafka

This last was used by Bowles in Sheltering Sky.  I can't decide if that book should be required reading for every American thinking of going to north Africa, or be absolutely forbidden.