An Important Message

Dearest Readers of this Neglected Blog,

Greetings during the holy month of Ramadan.  As you know, for the past year and a half I've been serving in Morocco as a Volunteer with the Peace Corps.  I live and work in a small desert village of 500 people in the remote deep south of the country where my official job title is that of a Community Health Educator.  That means I work in a local health clinic and local schools, speaking the native Berber dialect, where I teach about important health topics like pre- and post-natal care for women, childhood vaccinations, sanitation and hygiene, clean water, and a host of other things that we in the highly developed world often take for granted.  But my activities here are not at all limited to the health field.

There's another project that I've been working on for quite a while, which is now ready to be shared with the world and could really use your help.  One of the most important development issues in the community I serve is that of economic opportunity--namely, the lack of economic opportunity available, especially for women.  In my region, and in rural Morocco generally, it's common for young adult men to move away to distant parts of the country, or immigrate overseas, to seek employment because there simply are are no jobs available locally.  This is not the result of a temporary economic downturn but a permanent state of affairs.  Nearly all families are wholly or partly dependent on remittances sent home from male family members who move away like this, and most families barely manage to scrape by between that and the subsistence farming that is the most common occupation here. This economic arrangement is especially hard on women, as the males return infrequently, if at all, leaving the women in charge of families and households, usually without the ability to generate income for themselves.  (In Morocco, the Muslim culture makes it impossible for most women to work outside the home because it would require them to publicly interact with men in an unacceptable way.)

Working together with my community Association, we've developed a project to help local community women (like widows, divorcees, and unmarried women) generate income for themselves, to empower women and promote economic independence and self-sufficiency. We call it "Goats For Gals," and it's modeled on many successful projects in Morocco and other developing countries.  By giving targeted women in the community dairy goats, we will allow them to create their own small businesses selling goat milk.  The women will also receive comprehensive training in dairy goat care and management.  Livestock ownership, like dairy goats, is an especially suitable form of business enterprise for women in rural Morocco, because the goats can be managed from home and will eat just about anything you put in front of them.  Goat milk is always highly in demand, and can also be used to create value-added products like cheese. The project is all mapped out and ready to go; all that is lacking is the capital to buy the goats.  We need to raise about $4500 to be able to purchase the target of nine high-yield Alpine dairy goats.  That's where you come in. 

The Peace Corps Partnership Program (PCPP) is a way for Peace Corps Volunteers to fund crucial projects in the communities we serve by raising capital from the private sector in the United States.  Individuals, companies, or any type of organization can contribute and become a part of the Peace Corps mission of promoting world peace & friendship--and sustainable development--one community at a time. 100% of contributions go directly to the specified project in the community served.  The money does not pass through government hands, there's no overhead or middle-men, etc etc.

Once the project gets fully funded, I plan to track its progress on this blog with stories, photos, and videos, so you will be able to directly see the impact of your contributions.  You can read an additional summary of my project and contribute directly online with a credit card in a few easy steps simply by clicking here.  You can contribute in any amount, and no contribution is too small (or too large).  All donations are 100% tax-deductible.

If you'd like some more information about the project, or anything to do with the Peace Corps or Morocco, I'd be happy to respond to you. Thanks in advance for your support.

Click here to contribute. It's fast and easy!

Some Scripture for Father's Day

"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning.

Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring prophesies:

Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent in their instructions:

Such as found out musical tunes, and recited verses in writing:

Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations:

All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times.

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.

And some there be which have no memorial; who perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.

With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance, and their children are within the covenant.

Their seed standeth fast, and their children for their sakes. Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.

Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore."

Ecclesiasticus 44, KJV (Italics mine)

Reported Without Comment

Seeing she’d made no impression on me, my mother was incensed.  “In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or even have a conversation, there’s no such thing as love,” she vehemently declared.  “By any chance do you know why?”  I’ll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don’t even bother with whether she’s good or wicked, beautiful or ugly—they just pounce on her like starving animals.  This is simply their conditioning.  And then they think they’re in love.  Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this?  Take care!  Don’t deceive yourself.”

-The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

[set in 1970's Istanbul]

Not Dark Yet

Reports of the death of my blog are greatly exaggerated.  It is merely in hibernation; look for updates and changes soon, I promise.  Inch'allah.

In the meantime, I want to hear about your favorite non-traditional, non-standard, non-classic, or otherwise offbeat Christmas movies (which can be any movie set during the holidays).  These three jump out for me:

-Gremlins
-2046
-Eyes Wide Shut

Any more?

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!