My favorite Ramadramedy: Aqba Lik

Television has been a constant presence since I got here, and Moroccans in the bled tend to watch an extraordinary amount of TV.  Or at least they have it on a lot.  The vast majority of houses in even the most remote locations are equipped with satellite receivers and get dozens or even hundreds of channels, mostly from the Arabic-speaking world but lots of other places too.  It's not that surprising, given that there isn't much else available for accessible, fun, and free entertainment.  I've mostly done my best to tune it out, or at least pay attention only when socially expedient.  Most Moroccan-produced TV shows are in Darija, the evening news is in French, but there is a body of Tashlheet programming, much of which of which is set in the bled and folkloric in nature.  Unfortunately, most of it is of extremely poor quality, and once the novelty of hearing Tash spoken on TV wears off, barely worth paying attention to, other than for the purposes of working on language.  And there are so many better ways to practice language.

For Ramadan, the networks have unleashed a slew of new programs that air every night for a month, presumably trying to capture the audience that's at home with family every evening breaking the fast.  One of these is called Aqba Lik, and I'm absolutely hooked on it.  It's a half hour comedy-drama about a single professional woman named Fatima-Zahra who works for a website (I think) called PUNISH! in Casablanca, and the colorful friends and co-workers she deals with as she looks for love, or whatever it is she's looking for.  I actually have no idea, because the show is in Arabic (with healthy dollop of French), but that hasn't stopped me from being thoroughly captivated every night.  There are obvious lifts from shows like The Office and Sex & The City, but the production values and quality/subtlety of the actors is unlike anything else I've seen on Moroccan TV.  It's fun to watch it with my host family, esp. my sisters, as the version of Moroccan life portrayed couldn't be more different from theirs if it took place in America, or on the moon.  Fatima-Zahra lives alone, doesn't cover her head, works outside the home, socializes freely with both sexes, goes on dates, drinks, you name it.  I know I'd be getting a lot more out of it if I understood more than 10% of the dialogue, so if anyone else has seen this show and can fill me in, I'd appreciate it.

I've found precious little about the show online, but there are some complete episodes available, like this one here: The 2nd episode.

The best part is the theme song, an irresistible jazzy, Motown-flavored thing that my sisters sing along with every night.

Ramadan, Day 1

13 August

Coming back to site from Agadir (short weekend after two weeks of PPST training in Ouarzazate), transportation was becoming difficult.  We traveled on Monday, Ramadan about to begin on Thursday, and already every stop the bus would make was like an incitement to riot.  Happy to be back in site before that madness peaked.

And then…not with a bang, but a whimper.  I stayed up very late on Wednesday hoping to sleep as late as possible into Thursday, knowing there wouldn’t be any breakfast or lunch.  (I’m still with my host family, by the way, of course the new house was not finished before Ramadan and probably next-to-nothing will happen with it over the next month now.  This was my biggest fear and was also completely inevitable.) Stepping out of my room into this strange new world that we’ve been preparing for since we first got here, all I could notice was how strangely quiet it was.  No kids playing in the street, no sound of work or activity coming from anywhere.  It felt like a bomb had gone off in the stratosphere—people were just lying on the ground wherever they happen the fall, conserving energy.  No work to be done and no fuel to do it with.  People shuffled around like zombies when they moved at all.

Around noon, my sister insisted on making me a light brunch of eggs and tea, despite my repeated insistence not too.  I didn’t plan to fast and my family knew this, but I certainly didn’t intend to have them cooking for me while they were fasting.  I had just received a big CARE package full snacks and goodies from my mom that would keep me from starving to death for a few weeks, and I was perfectly content to just nibble on that stuff ‘til dark.  Then again, if the young kids who normally live here (they’re away on summer visits right now) were around, they wouldn’t be fasting either and my sisters would be cooking for them, so I can justify it that way.

We broke fast around 7:45 with fresh local dates (from our own fields), askif (soup), and aghom n zit (a donut-like fried bread that you dip in honey—delicious), and got full to bursting just on those.  The usual dinner followed a couple hours later, but I was still completely full from “breakfast.”  The rest of my family woke up again around 3:30 in the morning to have another meal as close as possible to the start of the next fast.  It’s going to be an interesting month.

The Housing Crisis Hits Tata

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 2^nd-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! 

Checking In From The Land of No Rezo

25 May

Apologies for not having posted in a while.  Rezo (sp?) is local speak for wireless signal, which my computer also depends on to get connected to the internet. It’s been about three weeks since swearing-in and getting to site, and it’s been a strange mix of running around busy and confusingly idle.  Here is a small sample of what I’ve been doing:

-Today, Bjai and I visited the l-mdrassa (elementary school) in her douar to sit in.  We did this just so that this kids would see our faces and have some idea of who we are; we’re not at all ready yet to start giving lessons, and anyway school will be getting out for the summer very soon.  I sat in on a class of about thirty kids (co-ed, aged around 10) for a couple of hours.  For the first hour they were studying Arabic, and I was completely mystified.  The primary language of instruction in Moroccan schools is classical Arabic.  Then the class turned on a dime and switched to French.  Not only was the subject material in French, but all of the instructions from the teacher were as well.  The French was not nearly as advanced as the Arabic, so I was able to follow along a lot better.  The energy from the kids in a class like that is really infectious.  The stand up a sing a little song to any stanger who enters the classroom as if on cue.  Apparently the children pick their own seats, so the front rows were filled the anxious kids who loved to raise their hands and had most of the correct answers, and as you gradually move to the back rows you find the kids who are barely paying attention and trying not to fall asleep. It was funny to see how some things are the same the world over.  There were also a few special needs kids who were stuck in the back.  The teacher said there weren’t any special programs for them.

Visits like this are part of my overall task right now, which is Community Entry.  Put another way, it is to become known by as many people as possible in my douar, which you’d think wouldn’t be too difficult in a town of about 500 people.  But there’s no organized way to go about a task like that.  Having my host family is a great help, but as friendly as they are, they are not the most outgoing and social bunch.  We get visits from the same two or three neighbors mostly.  So I try to go on walks and meet people that way as well, but again, it’s a completely scattershot approach.

-This past weekend, a large group of us met up in Agadir, a touristy seaside town about six hours away.  This was allegedly for a consolidation exercise (in which we rehearse how we would all meet up if there were any kind of national emergency), but everyone also stayed to enjoy the rest of the weekend there.  Agadir is beautiful, but it didn’t feel like being in Morocco at all.  The city was mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 1961, and when it was rebuilt they decided to focus the economy on tourism.  (Some of the money to do this came from the States, which would explain why my hotel was located on Avenue John F. Kennedy.) There are large parks, street cafes on every corner that look like something you might find in any French city, and of course, the beach and all that usually comes with it.  No surprise then that the town is full of European, mostly French tourists.  It was a blast, but hard on the wallet of a poor PCV, and it did start to wear on me after a while.  Nice to know that such as escape is nearby if I ever need it, though.

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.

Just Wrapping Up Site Visit

20 April

Two full days into the site visit now I feel like I can start to give a few general impressions about the place.  Bjai and I arrived at our sites on Sunday afternoon, after having spent the night in the city of Tata.  All of us new Tata PCT’s (Alisa, Monica, Samantha, Bjai, and myself) rode on a direct bus from Ouarzazate to Tata, which for some reason left in the middle of the afternoon and so didn’t arrive in Tata until almost 9pm.  This meant that for the last couple of hours we weren’t able to see anything out the window about what our new province actually looks like, other than that there wasn’t much to see.  It started to get pretty funny; we were getting texts from our friends in other provinces who had been arriving throughout the day asking what it was like, and all we could say was “um, we’re still on the bus and it’s very, very dark.” 

When we finally arrived, almost all of the current PCV’s from Tata were waiting for us.  One of them happens to live right near where the bus comes in, and she had thoughtfully planned to have dinner waiting for us—homecooked Thai food which was incredible.  They were all extremely welcoming and reassuring.  Two of them are just about to COS (finish service) and so two from our group are their replacements.  There was obviously a pretty tight bond between all of the current PCV’s, despite their being from several different sectors and several hours apart, which was really nice to see.  I hope this new configuration of the group is able to keep that going.

The next morning, following the very well though-out plan that Peace Corps had put together for us, each of us was escorted to our new site by one of the current volunteers.  Since Bjai and I are sitemates at new sites, that meant that no one exactly knew how to get there, but we managed to figure it out.  Already, I can see that one of the biggest challenges for my site is going to be transportation.  Because my village is so small and remote, getting a taxi to there from Tata is difficult, expensive, or both.  Getting a taxi out and back to Tata, I’ll probably have head over to the souq town, which is about a 5km walk along a dirt road.  We’re supposed to be getting bikes as soon as we land here for good, and Rachid promised us that we would be the first to receive them since our site so desperately requires them.

I already knew what to expect about my new host family from the data sheet I received:  an older couple (60 and 56), two older daughters (33 and 28), and two younger sons (21  and 10).  I actually think the 10-year old boy is a grandson, but I haven’t been able to figure out who his parents are if so.  My host dad is Mohmed and I could tell within the first few minutes that we weren’t going to have any problems.  Some people, regardless of whatever linguistic or cultural barriers might exist, you can just tell by looking at them that they are trustworthy.  His demeanor is very much like what I remember best about my own father:  straightforward yet modest, with a gentle good humor to everything he does.  He’s taken me under his wing from the very start, and as long I stick with him I don’t think I’ll have any trouble integrating with the men in this community.  Last night we went to a prayer dinner at some kind of community hall.  40 days after someone dies, people gather again to read from the Qur’an and mark and end to the mourning period (I’m sure I’m getting some of these details wrong), so this was an event like that with maybe 50 men and me.  They couldn’t possibly have made me feel any more welcome, and it was a great way to show my face to a lot of the community for the first time.  Mohmed was clearly enjoying showing me off as his new prized possession.

Tata is not nearly as conservative (at least from what I can gather in 2 days) as I was led to believe it would be before I got here.  Women walk by themselves in the street, men and women sit together in most houses, and most women are not fully covered.  That, plus the extraordinary niceness of the people is going to help offset the fact that is really difficult country down here.  It’s not desert like the sand dunes we think of as the classic Sahara, but very stony and dry.  The only fields for agriculture are clustered around little oases, mostly of date-palms but some assorted traditional crops underneath.  Each village has its own little oasis, and they’re beautiful.  It makes me think of some Biblical village straight out of the old testament.  The architecture reinforces that as well, with stacked stone being the preferred building material.  New structures will have a cinderblock or cement frame inside.  Those materials do manage to keep the buildings pretty cool inside.  It’s only April, and it’s already hard to do anything outside from about 11am until 5pm.  I’m really afraid to think of what it’s going to be like over the summer…