Caterpillars, Friends and Adventures

2011-11-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

School. I am back in school! So much so that I haven't had time to think of my blog, nor write in it, nor indeed read anyone else's. In fact, I should not be typing this now.

But, a short update.

I'm a Masters student, candidate, in Conservation Medicine, at a school in my new city-of-residence in Massachusetts. My first time ever living inside the US and outside of the Midwest. Yes, there is a different culture out here. For example, driving feels like a video game with very high stakes. Secondly, people are literally surprised when I wish them a good day after a transaction. Apparently these niceties aren't observed here.

I have mostly adjusted. By some miracle, I still speak Tamazight. I called my friends for L3id--Eid AlFtur. And we talked. And it was good. Always they ask me when I'm coming back. I tell them "isul lHal", because the time for a visit it DEFINITELY not now...

I miss my mountains. I MISS them. Their craggy heights, their cliffs of gold and orange and grey, and the small patches of green marking the irrigated areas. I miss the tiny, brave oak trees that yet hang on to existence on the edges of the mountains, like hair on a monks head in days of old. I miss dancing across the river on rocks with polished edges, grateful for the yoga that made my ankles strong enough for such difficult terrain.

I miss speaking in other languages. I'm trying to remember spanish, talking to L and P, the girls in my program who are bilingual.

I also miss my piano at my parents' house. Beautiful brown baby grand, with the perfect touch to the keys, and that lovely resonance... I can't believe I didn't play it every single day for hours. I played it most days, but how could I have not??? It's hard to find a practice room free, or the time to get to one.

So, I escaped the city to New Hampshire, and climbed one and a half of the White Mountains with a friend. Quiet. Fresh air. Pine trees frosted in snow. I can SEE for more than a mile. God, thank you thank you thank you thank you for wild spaces that yet exist. I should have brought my guitar, but didn't think of it.

I feel absurdly lucky to be in this program. Which is one of the reasons I'm working so hard in it. I will explain it in another posting, but for now... if you want an example of cultural readjustment, see this link to my friend's blog: http://innocentablogged.blogspot.com/2011/10/101211-on-public-display-of.html

I've had similar sticky situations with friends who have babies. I just want to hang with them while they take care of their little one, and appreciate them as a mother as fully as possible. After all, what could be more miraculous than feeding ones baby from ones own body? And yet the taboo... Sad.

The 3rd and 4th months back

2011-06-14T17:11:00.001-07:00

I look back on March and April, and the colors that come to mind are grey, black and white, brown. March is perhaps the hardest month because it is cold and starting to be humid. Except when April is the same only rainy instead of sleet.

I look back on the middle of the semester, and it was a long, hard pull. Constant, compiling knowledge to be gained. Assignments to be completed, tests to study for and take. Friends and boyfriend far, and no one coming to visit any time soon. Work exciting in it's developments but overwhelming in it's demands. Every hurdle you clear is followed by another either already in view or waiting sneakily around a bend. So you set your jaw, rally your discipline, buy a bar of chocolate and just go.

I have infinitely more respect for the people who pull off a full time job and an education at the same time now. Infinitely. They are amazing.

I look back on March in Morocco and longed for the early green of the winter wheat and the unashamed beauty of the almond trees blooming. I remember how it was distinctly warmer, and I began to wear only 4 layers instead of 7. Which, of course, makes me appreciate central heating, real woodstoves and the wonder that is modern insulation and plumbing. :)

So, yeah, there were bright spots scattered around. A friend from Peace Corps randomly shows up on my doorstep. A skype date with my family in Morocco is arranged, and wonder of wonders I can still hold a conversation. Of course, extra women show up. Even my cat makes an appearance! Oh, how I have missed you, Trouble. This week, I'm sleeping on the floor again, in a folded sheet, and you are not here to crawl in beside me along my side. Share your warmth and your dirt with me. I didn't care. Not even when I got ring worm (besides, I got my revenge when I rubbed fungicidal cream on you twice a day every day). I miss you much like I miss most of my life in Morocco, without having yet forgotten the bad spots. They were mostly only annoying then, and now, they seem like vinegar in lentils; bringing out the flavor.

It's been just over a year since I finished my service, and became an RPCV. Many things have changed in Morocco since I left. The very program I worked for has been discontinued, in the face of bureaucracy and misfortune. My village will not get another volunteer after my replacement leaves next year. This is hard to accept, because it is unlikely that the associations will be ready to fly on their own by that time. They will have to try. The government is much the same. I hear reports of the protests and I am hopeful and nervous at the same time. I hope the king and his government look at their neighbors and think carefully as to how to maintain the peace. I hope the people look carefully at their neighbors as they decide how to push for growth and change. I hope no more bombs go off in cafes anywhere in the country.

I look back on this year since I left Morocco, and one thing is sure: it's been quite the ride... life goes on, but it seems to only grow in complexity. Simplify, many Americans put on their walls, their bumpers, their shirts. I'd like to, but... speed allows for greater complexity. And we hurtle on, we Americans, multi-tasking and scheduling and flying and driving and typing... I am doing my best to keep up!

First Two months back, long overdue

2011-05-04T14:52:00.001-07:00

Well, I was hoping to write faithfully about what reentry is like, since it seems to be just as hard as going away and far sneakier. Alas, I have not done so. Regardless, I will try to write a bit on what it's been like thus far.

To clarify, this is about reverse culture-shock from an American perspective.

Month one: Disorientation. Thank goodness I've been traveling for 5 months, successfully getting used to being disoriented. How can it take only 30 minutes to travel 30 miles? How can I just choose the time I leave, and go? How come we don't all carpool everywhere? Why are the roads so clean, so wide, so smooth? And, I cannot believe, CANNOT BELIEVE how much stuff I have. How much stuff everyone has. I begin going through my room, something I haven't properly done since high school. I set a goal to clean out my whole room, and my whole closet (holy terror...), and get rid of as close to half of this stuff as I can. The flip side is that I am enjoying rediscovering my clothes. It's like going shopping for free, and I like everything!

After two weeks of being home, restlessness is already setting in. Not that I want to move on again, no, I just want to DO something useful! I've been traveling and vacationing for months (well, we worked where we could, and I feel a few months off after 27 months straight on is only fair). Regardless of the rationalization in the parentheses, I reallyreallyreally want to do something useful with myself!! Get a job... take classes... volunteer... something. I'm also overwhelmed by living with people, and lonely because I can't just walk up to a neighbor and join them for tea. I'm wishing for my own home and missing having a community at the same time. Weird.

I go to wedding number one, and enjoy Portland greatly! I see many, many Macalester alumnus. So good to see old friends, catching up, and (best of all) seeing my closest neighbor in Morocco in her new, delightful apartment. We reminisce, and eat Moroccan food, and talk about finding a job and getting used to the US. She (now back in the states for some 6 months, reminds me of the best thing I can do for myself: give myself the gift of patience. I just need to wait and let myself adjust slowly. As always, I find her practical sanity grounding.

When I get home I make a few phone calls... a few emails... and an interview... and get a job on contract... hooray!!! Sadly, my paycheck is not forthcoming for several weeks. This is both my fault and theirs. I buy a computer with the very, very last of my money from Peace Corps and my savings from the summer after college. It's fast. My old computer was over 10 yrs old, and still going strong... at a slow, slow pace. I say a prayer in hopes that my new computer lasts so long! I start in on work, and quickly quickly learn something: I HAVE to get my life organized in some type of planner or calendar. No longer will the "list of to do's for the week" suffice. I need to micro-manage my time again. I've not done this since... three years ago. It's frustrating and hard to do. I want to rebel, and just live and let live like I used to, but that means letting opportunities slip by. And seizing opportunity is one of the most valuable lessons I learned in Peace Corps. So I open Google Calendar, and start in on it.

Month 2: New Years, and the Bachelorette Party, and a I get used to driving long distances alone again. It used to be empowering, and it is again. The party is amazing, and even better is seeing my housemates again! L I saw in Morocco. A I haven't seen since I left, though, and she's the one getting married. I meet J, her fiance. One of the... 4 friends who has met someone and gotten engaged while I've been away. I approve of him. I have (so far) approved of all of my friends choices. :) Smart chicas! I bring my friend L home with me, and we relax a bit talk A LOT, waiting to return to KC for the actual wedding. During that week my first paycheck arrives! L heads north to catch up with family, and I head south to see my boyfriend. It's warmish and rainy, but it's lovely to see him after months apart. He's been traveling through some of the dangerous parts of Africa, alone. Good thing he's good at blending in and being creative and making do, and having fun while at it! I'm glad he's back, all the same. I know a little of how my mother must feel now.

A's wedding is awesome. More Macalester people, and I get to meet another's friend's chosen. Another winner. My boyfriend comes, and I'm so, so, SO glad I went to see him before this. I'm absorbed in making the wedding happen, and in maximizing friend time. I know I'm neglecting him, but hope he understands. These girls are heart friends, my souls helpers, the lights that point me to the real Light. I can't give them less than my best. When we go our separate ways, I'm crying in his arms trying to convince myself that life without my girlfriends will still be full of laughter. I think I'm a sap, but the next day one of them sends us all an Excel spreadsheet detailing why we need to live closer to each other. Guess I'm not the only one.

I drop off my boyfriend at the airport, and start another long drive.

Classes start. I switch out of Econ 101 to 111 because it's too slow for me, and because I want to get the most out of this spring. I'm behind before I begin, am late for the first class, and my phone goes off in the second. I knuckle down, and (as always) pull through, though slowly. Work is grinding on... I'm learning Excel and Word like I never have before. Winter is cold, cold, cold, but I'm loving the snow. Blizzards! Our driveway covered in 4 foot drifts! So beautiful, so otherworldly. Especially to me, and my Africa-thin blood. I'm used to wearing Islam-appropriate garb in 100+ heat, or tramping through Dar es Salaam humidity with a heavy pack. Now it's -20 Farenheit and I need a fleece blanket, 3 quilts and a down comforter to sleep comfortably. And I still wear a sweatshirt to bed.

But I love the snow. Cross-country skiing every day, either in our backyard or at the park. The air is crisp, sharp, clean. The snow makes everything new every time it falls. It makes me want to dance, just like it always did when I was a child.

After some time, life finds a rhythm. I discover I'm more of a fighter than I used to be, that I'm less willing to roll over when someone wants to walk on me. This leads to some unpleasantness, especially paired with the self-centeredness that can only come with living by oneself in a village where you are a rockstar of sorts for two years. I'm working on it. Present tense. My family shuffles, cracks, shifts, apologizes, and we keep going.

reentry

2011-01-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

Reentry. That word stared me down right from the beginning of Peace Corps. I think most volunteers assume that the transition back to homelife will be easy, but I have experienced it before, and easy it is NOT!

After a mere 5.5 months in Tanzania (study abroad, Associated Colleges of the Midwest) I was knocked completely off balance, and it took months for me to settle in again. It doesn't help that, after such times abroad, everyone you know has inevitably moved on with their lives. That first time, my support network that had got me through the ups and downs of sophomore and junior year had... graduated. Mostly, that is. Those that were still there had made some decisions that were good for them and their mental health, and ended up being not so great for mine. I hold no grudges, for they are not my keepers, but I now recognize that I ended up in a vulnerable position. It's a struggle.

No change. It's a struggle. You depend on friends, and they are away, married, mothers, at school, self-absorbed, sympathetic, distant, but... not there like you are used to. Like the 10 Moroccan mothers I had, the 15 sisters, the handful of real friends. You depend on family, but they expect much of you, and you dare not disappoint. You depend on yourself, but who is that, in this new place where people do not look up to you automatically, where you do not know your next pay check, or next schooling, or path... I don't even know for sure my dream to follow.

I have many dreams.

So I'm taking classes, readjusting, soaking up the good food and the good company (whenever I'm lucky enough to have it!), and the good family (it's AWESOME to be close to them again).

And the language muddles, and I miss the mountains like I missed the lakes and the trees, and I miss the tajine and the couscous, so I try to cook it and miraculously it tastes good! I miss friends from home who were my lifelines abroad, and I miss the travels afterwards.

I'm at a home though. It is a quiet place, and thus is worth quite a bit.

From Here on Out

2010-11-25T19:15:00.000-08:00

I'm back Stateside. I actually arrived a while ago (Nov. 13) but I went to visit family in the Denver area for a few days first, and then home to Wisconsin. The transition from the Far East to the Midwest's time zone is difficult. First off, it's 13 hours ahead, or 11 hours behind only actually tomorrow... and it's just as good at bending your inner time as it is at bending your mind. I had done it in relatively small jumps--except for the South Korea to Denver jump--over a 2 week period, but it was still affecting me only a week ago. I just now feel like time makes sense to me again.

Except for how dark it gets, and how early! After the lovely monotony of tropical days (sun up at about 6, down at about 6, give or take an bit, 365 days per year) the sunset at 4:30 pm gets me. And the dark at 7 pm might be 11 at night for all I can tell.

Anyway. What I really am writing this about is: what I will write about from Here on Out. I have some stories I haven't told, some thoughts I have been meaning to share yet from both Peace Corps and from my "COS trip" afterwards (that's right, you still haven't escaped the acronyms!!). Spaced in with those will be my daily life here in the US, and probably my adjustment to it.

It looks like I'll be here for a while, Figuring Things Out. Things include jobs, further schooling, location of said jobs, schooling and therefore self... etc.

It also looks like I'll be living through my third winter in a row (albeit interspersed with a delightful but cruelly short visit to Wisconsin summer and a much longer travel through the warmth/heat of Southern and East Africa... but still... three in a row??? Two of which did not involve central heating...). Sigh.

The end, for now!

Arusha, Old friends, and Expats

2010-10-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

I spent a lot of my time in Arusha staying at the house of a dear friend of mine from college, Eli. He is one of those third-culture kids, parents from different places and raised in a third. They are always interesting ones, having had somewhat unusual life experiences, and having been born to wider worldview than the most of us ever achieve.

One never really gets to know someone without stepping onto their home turf. I gained a much greater understanding of two other college friends by traveling to North Dakota and Kansas City. And one friend once remarked that "meeting your parents, Jeannie, well, it explains a lot about you." In this case, it was amusing, sometimes hilarious to watch four quiet, reserved men living together. They care deeply for each other. Anyway, I really enjoyed my time relaxing at Eli's house, even though the majority of the time he wasn't even there--he has always had a powerful work ethic, and was working. What time we did get to spend together was very nice, just catching up.

Just as interesting in a totally different way, was seeing the firmly entrenched expat culture of Northern Tanzania. For many, many years now (probably approaching 50 years) the world's NGOs have descended up on Tanzania. Poor, destitute Tanzania with it's amazing natural beauty and animal life is a charismatic place. You can't hardly go there and not feel the tug of the land, and the people. They are a very hospitable, kind people generally, and those that are more pushy, the Maasai, are flat out fascinating to most travelers. These NGO workers stayed, befriended and married the ex-Europeans who owned coffee and tea plantations, and made their home there. And what a home! Often leaning towards the luxurious, with domestic workers, gardeners, tenants... and beautiful, always beautiful.

Now, the younger generations move to the cities, renting apartments and frequenting the bars and night clubs. And also, often doing brilliant work with the NGOs they work for. More young, motivated, smart, resourceful people get pulled into the web of the expat community all the time. Oddly, or perhaps not so odd, is that very few of the "native" Tanzanians (how to say... ethnically African Tanzanians might be the most P.C.) have joined into this culture-within-a-culture. The expat community in Morocco tends to be more of a mix, but then it's also been there for a lot longer, and in a different way. The French started out completely insulated, but over time there has been enough inter-marriage, and migration back and forth between Morocco and France that bunches of half-and-half children have sprung up. I wish there were more of a mix between Tanzanians and the expats who are there to serve them, and usually end up being served by them. I think it would be much healthier, and help the cultures to understand each other in a more nuanced way.

Altitude

2010-10-20T06:12:00.000-07:00

The air is thin up there. I have always loved the taste and feel of mountain air in my mouth and lungs. When I was a child I used to look forward to visiting the "Denver cousins" with great anticipation. I remember jumping out of a car on the heights of the rockies and bounding about like a young horse; like a distracted puppy.

My first time up high was Pike's Peak. I don't remember it much, but I've seen pictures of me in a borrowed sweatshirt that went down past my knees. My second was a little known fourteener in southern Colorado called Mt. San Luis. It was also my first encounter with and altitude headache.

The past three weeks have seen me on two volcanoes, high in a mountain range, and well over 18,000 amsl. I didn't ever think I would ever go that high into the atmosphere. Actually, it was really easy, right up until it was really hard.

We had been at sea level for two weeks, the four of us (Ants, LTool, Al, and I). And below sea level, actually, scuba diving. So, in the run up to Kili, we planned to increase elevation gradually. Actually, I just wanted to go the Usambara Mountains to see the butterflies and the rainforests, and to climb Mount Meru because it is a lovely and beguiling mountain. It so happened that if we did those in that order before Kili, we would give ourselves plenty of time to adjust to the height needed.

Most people climb Kili, and maybe see Mt. Meru as a largish peak poking out above the cloud layer, keeping the peaks of the "big one" company. They are missing out. Meru is gorgeous! A half-destroyed rim of a steep and high volcano, it rises gently at first on one side, then steeply to where the ash cone declares the volcanic life below, then by enormous sheer cliffs to the summit high above. The other side drops steeply down, down, down, down all the way back to those gentle, forested slopes surrounding the base. When I first saw Meru peek demurely out from the mists and clouds, I was struck by the jagged rock and precipice of the peak, and it's contrast with the green forest below. It called my name, and 4 years later I was excited to answer!

The rest of my group was willing to trek along with me, but Ants and Al were both itching to get on top of Kili. Just to do it, but also, I think, to test themselves against the altitude. Before you do it, there is no real way to know how your body will react. Some people feel barely a headache, some cannot pass 5000 m without life-threatening consequences. Cerebral and pulmonary altitude sickness take lives around the world every year. So, we prepared as best we could.

Meru was fantastic. The views, amazing. The mountain full of character, the forests full of life, the weather, perfect. It wasn't easy, but it was quick, and the altitude gave me nary a problem. I loved it.

Kili was a challenge. A 4-day trek to summit base camp up and down and up and down at necessarily slow paces. Much less scenery to exalt, but when the peak did show itself, it humbled me to think I might stand atop it. Barranco Wall and the cliffs atop it to the glaciers melting down in gigantic icicles stopped me in my tracks. The final bid for the summit wasn't so steep, or rocky, or anything, but it took us up and up and up... Al was the first to feel the altitude. It slowed him down. Waaaaaayyyy down. If he weren't a person of great mental strength he wouldn't have made it. Once I got to the top, I hurt. Headache, nausea, fatigue were all present. But we made it. Which was satisfying, except for the overwhelming desire to descend. And DOWN I went, as quickly as I could. Past the beautiful view of Mawenzi Peak, past the glaciers I came to see, past the spot Al almost gave up, down down down. And all was well.

I still love mountain air. But it's hard to breathe enough of it.

big mountains...

2010-10-15T02:15:00.000-07:00

Mount Meru is still the most beautiful single mountain I have ever climbed or hiked on.

Kilimajaro is awesome in it's size and massive-ness.

Mount Mulanje is special in it's self-contained wilderness and beauty.

Oldoinyo Lengai is completely otherworldly, full of dust, ash, sulphur and lava flows.

I wasn't planning on making this mountain climbing thing a habit, but it seems to be becoming one. Ah well!
:)

Changing of the travelers

2010-09-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow afternoon, my brother is going to fly out of Dar to Vietnam. Three days ago, a young Englishwoman (Lz) arrived. In theory, they are switching places, although I'm beginning to think that we may end up splitting up a bit more now that it's two couples, instead of me, my boyfriend, my brother and a friend from Peace Corps. Before, we didn't split up for side trips hardly ever. Not since South Africa and the reconvening after the departure of Whit have we been apart for more than a few hours. Until Tz.

A. and I went to visit a friend of his, Jn, and her husband in a small town called Isangati. My brother and Al. went to Dar to start on embassies, visas, and to meet up with Lz. The village was delightful! How wonderful to spend time with people who have no designs upon your money and/or posessions. Who are rather happily living their lives as farmers, fix-it men, cobblers, or all three. It was nice to sleep in a bed that belongs to someone instead of a hotel. It was wonderful to help our hosts with their garden, and go on a walk. We found and ate wild bananas. They are bright orange. They are full of large, black seeds. They taste more like bland papayas than bananas. They are called ndizi pori here, and the kids love them. I learned that banana trees are full of water, and are not actually trees but plants.

Meanwhile, Dar is still Dar, and the bureaucracy continues to be unpenetrable. Thus, I try very hard to be productive... hence the blogging. I'm a bit behind. :)

I'll miss my brother. I'm so glad he came! It was wonderful hanging out a bunch, and awesome to go to the World Cup with him. It's been fun to be there to see him become aquainted with Africa, and it's ways. I hope he values it, like I do.

And now, onward. And northward.

Dar es Salaam, 5 years later

2010-09-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are in Tanzania!
If anything, the traffic is worse in Dar than it was last time. It takes quite a while to get much of anywhere, it seems.
Crime on the street also seems worse than I remember. Three attempted pickpocketings, and one mugging that I know of amongst my friends.
The heat is nice, the rain is lovely, and there are many things to do here. If only they were accessible online! I need to get a visa for my next country, but I cannot find where the embassy is on googlemaps. Neither is the embassy listed in my guide book, since it's an English language guidebook, I guess they decided there is no reason anyone would want to know where the Asian embassies are.This will make it difficult for me to figure out how to get there. I suppose I could just take a cab.
Tanzania has been fine so far, outside of the bus stations and transport hubs. The country is full of lizards, though (our name for the touts and crooks and scumbags who hang around looking for the first opportunity to take advantage of the momentary disorientation all travelers have to deal with when they arrive somewhere new). They are clever, friendly, and speak English in a country that doesn't really speak English. They must make a fair living, since there are so many of them. I dont' remember Tz being this way quite so much before, but I was also sheltered by the program I was with. Thank God I speak Swahili, it helps a bit. If only I had a magic button to evaporate them all... Malawi was full of them, too... all the minibus guys were always trying to rip us off.
I'm tired of meeting all the scum of the earth.
Where did all the good people go?

2010-09-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

You may have heard of african minibuses? The general transport for the masses, they stop frequently and fill up to far, far beyond capacity. Cramped, hot, cheap.

We took a "minibus" ferry. It was from the south end of Lake Malawi, up to about a third from the top. It started out not so terribly crowded, but oy it was PACKED by the time we got off. Not that there wasn't room for more; there is always room for more. Lake Malawi is gorgeous, blue like Lake Superior, and clear in places like it too. It's inhabited by the endemic ciclid (chiclid? sp?), which are lovely electric blue and black fish. We snorkeled around and watched them nibbling on algae off of rocks. Unfortunately, one of the cargo I saw on the boat was definitely fish headed for 1st World fish tanks. I hope but doubt they were harvested properly...

We camped out on the top deck, which was supposedly first class, but that's the lamest first class I've ever heard of. They charged us extra for mats, didn't provide bedding, food, tea, or even hot water. This after paying over 70 USD for the tickets. Rip off, if you look at it that way. Economy would have been the cheap way to go, and is by far the most popular with locals. In any event, it was nice to be up top, with enough room to lie down and strech your legs without worrying about theft too terribly much.

I had fun on the Ilala Ferry, especially in the winds and swells, but it turned out to be a minibus after all. :)

Why Peace Corps Made Travel Better and Worse

2010-08-17T03:22:00.000-07:00

Language, language, language!

I so terribly miss being able to speak to people in their native tongue! I was spoiled in Morocco. By the end of my time there, I could converse fluently in a random dialect of Tamazight, and make myself understood in Moroccan Arabic. It was heavenly, being able to ask questions, overhear people talking about me, and just not feel adrift and idiotic. Here, everyone speaks English, except when they don't want me to understand. Then they use Shona, Zulu, Ndebele, Setswana, Sesotho, Afrikaaner...
I still know when people are talking about me though. A nod of the head, a certain tone of voice. I miss the days when I could play dumb and then hop into a conversation with the knowledge of what people really thought of me already in place. Now I just have to guess.

On the other hand, my body language skills are vastly improved since I came from teh US. I can speak without language.

And, if I don't want them to understand me, all I have to do is pick a Moroccan language, and they haven't a clue. :)

S.Africa => Zim

2010-08-17T02:57:00.000-07:00

Around the 5th of August, we left South Africa for places further north. We had just finished a really cool 3 day hike through the Blyde River Canyon. It's an absolutely gorgeous part of a lovely and diversely geograph-ied country. It's only four of us now, as Whit has stayed in Mozambique, so as to become a Divemaster. She's got a sweet internship near the breeding grounds of whale sharks. I think she'll have a lot of fun. JmC and Al. accompanied Whit up to her new diving playground/training spot. Meanwhile, AWS. and I went to Joburg to meet with his family. Reuniting in Nelspruit, we proceeded to hitchhike up to Bourke's Luck Potholes (odd name, eh? gotta love Afrikaaner names... and that's not the half of it). We were then dropped in the middle of nowhere by a surprisingly ghetto "hiking info"center. Broken windows, shredded insulation, no doors. We had no map thanks to a miscommunication between park staff, but knew to look for yellow footprints. We had at least three days worth of food, sleeping bags, no tents, and about an hour and a half left of daylight. After semi frantic searching, we found the yellow footprints and launched into the hike. Upon the due course of the hike we found our huts, and many a beautiful waterfall, and many an attractive boulder to boulder. We jumped of a cliff into deep, cold, blue water. We successfully protected our food from the depredations of baboons. We finished the hike and headed for Zimbabwe.

The biggest difference? Worse infrastructure, slightly higher prices, and way less racial crap. It's inescapable in S.A. You WILL run into it at least once a day. Not between white foreigners and black S.Africans. No, between Afrikaaners and black S.Africans. A marked lack of trust, and not a bit of of hateful fear displayed from the former towards the later. We made it through just fine on the "black" transport, but many were the times an Afrikaaner laughed us off for crazy, lectured us as stupid, or just shook their head at us. Fortunately we met some wonderful Afrikaaner's too, which gave us hope. After all, it's still only 15 years or so since apartheid, and honestly, they've come a good way in that short time. May they continue down such a path!!!

Zimbabwe has surpassed expectations. People have been helpful, friendly, kind, and practical. If something goes wrong, you find a way to fix it. Since things often go wrong, people are adept at fixing them. Hitching is easy--many, many people do it. The landscape is really lovely, and the country is home to what must be the greatest concentration of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in any one country. I feel like I can't move for bumping into another!
We went to Great Zimbabwe. UNESCO, of course, and wow, how cool!!! Probably the coolest archeological site I've ever visited. Really pretty landscape, too. Then to Matobo National Park by Bulawayo, which is wild and stunning, with bunches and bunches of cave paintings.
And then Al. got malaria. So we stayed with our (wonderful) host until he got better. Thus, we have had opportunity to check out Bulwayo's art scene pretty thoroughly. Beaten down, but not destoryed, and our (wonderful) host is working to restore it. There has been lots of good cooking. It's been nice to pause after moving on and on so frequently.
Thanks again to our (wonderful!!) hostess.

Today we hope to move on.

Trail of Campsites

2010-07-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

Bethlehem to Clarens, where we stayed two nights. Clarens to Amphitheatre Backpackers, otherwise known as the Thenadier Establishment (seen/read Les Miz? Remember the crooked innkeepers? the manager/owner of this place reminded me strongly of Mssr. Thenadier. Don't stay there.). The Thenadier Establishment to Richard's Bay, via Durban, where we stayed with a very kind and hospitable Afrikaneer family we knew through a friend of the group. It was so relaxing and wonderful to be staying in a home for a while! They took us surfing and to a game reserve and we cooked them Moroccan, Mexican and American food as repayment (and paid for gas for those days trips). From Richard's Bay we went to Sodwana Bay, and camped outside a dive resort there for a week as A. got his Open Water Dive certification. We were harassed by monkeys but greatly enjoyed the peace and quiet of a campsite in a National Wetland Reserve. And the waffles that one could buy at the resort. They were topped with ice cream. We went diving, and I saw a Manta Ray!!! they are HUGE. HUUUGGGEEE. We also saw a sea turtle, maybe a Loggerhead, but we aren't sure, not having had the presence of mind to count the number of paired scales on his shell. Then, on to Swaziland where we camped one night, but only passed through on our way to Maputo, Mozambique, where we are now, attempting to make our way north. We will drop off W. at her dive internship up north, and then return and continue on our way...
My only real complaint thus far is the lack of volunteering opportunities we have been able to find. Hopefully we can fix this as we continue on our path. :)

Bethlehem

2010-07-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

No, not the Holy Land. It's near Lesotho, a small city with a neat little campsite/bunkhouse place we discovered in a book. It's cool, but the owner ran over his puppy just as we got there. She's an adorable Border Collie named Lucy. Still in kind of tough shape, but hopefully pulling through. We're on our way back south, headed for the Drakensberg Mountains. Hopefully, we'll be in Durban for the World Cup final.
The last week has been a wrap up of our time in Pretoria. Our host, John, was truly awesome. He put up with us for a whole week, and then took us out on the town the last night. I drove home (DD), which was interesting. I've never driven on the left side of the road before. It's not too bad, except for shifting gears with my left hand is WIERD. We went to three games, I saw Ghana lose a heart-breaking game to Uruguay due to a cheapshot handball that blocked the final goal. Then Ghana missed the penalty kick by all of 2 inches, it was the saddest ever. Besides that, we hung out, stiched up torn clothing and tents (durn baboons... I wasn't there, but they broke into the tent in the middle of the night and stole food), and did some sight seeing in the Johannesburg area. I went to the Apartheid Museum. It was amazing. It's as well done a museum as I've seen. A good attempt to face up to a difficult and sometimes ugly history withoutg dwelling unhealthily on the bad. It actually left me feeling hopeful. If South Africa can get from there to here, where can they go from here? Truly amazing what a few good leaders and the will of a determined people can accomplish. Also cool to learn was that Nelson Mandela's Nobel Peace Prize was jointly given with the then president of apartheid South Africa, NK something (curse my poor memory for names!). The thing is, the fact that they worked together is what made a mostly peaceful transition possible. All you have to do to see what happens when people don't work together is take a stroll through the history of Zimbabwe, the DRC, or Liberia. The difference is monumental.

Met a really awesome kid named Tshepo on a bus, who took us around the city, into his home, and into his church. People really showing real love to wanderers like us, it's inspiring. And it was a great time, too. Thanks Tshepo!!

Gauteng

2010-06-29T02:17:00.000-07:00

So, the region surrounding Johannesburg and Pretoria is known as Gauteng. I have only 4 minutes left on my credit for internet, so here's some flashes:

Soweto = the most well developed, affluent township/ex-slum I've ever seen.
Museum for June 16th, the day the world began to notice apartheid, disturbing but excellently rendered.
Rasty's graffiti = amazing, huge, full of color and reflective of life. It's like the music here, only visually.
Race dynamics are intense here. Walking around with our (black) African friend Tshepo earned us a lot of wierd looks from black and white Africans alike.
Johannesburg is HUGE. Ridiculously so.
Rich suburbs have a

Weddings

2010-06-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

One of the last things I did in my site in Morocco was attend a wedding. One of the first things I did in the US was... attend a wedding.

They were very different.

They were also similar. The brides both wore white. The grooms both wore white, too. I think the grooms also wore jeans for part of both ceremonies... I dressed up for both of them, and wore way more eye make-up than I usually do. They were both stressful occasions and very happy occasions. The weather was perfect for both. The food was delicious (but different) at both. I stayed up super late on account of both weddings. The both involved music. They both involved dancing. They were both community affairs, conducted in the homes of friends and family. They were both religious.

But beyond that... well. The Moroccan wedding proceeded as usual. The brides family prepared her for the big day, with her dowry, and the intricate flowers and patterns of henna covering her hands and feet. The groom's family cooked huge amounts of food, mostly the typical goat/lamb and prunes and sweet onion sauce with bread dish (it's good, trust me!). They served lunch to the close family and got ready to bring the bride over. Then, they carried their gifts to the bride across town on mules, singing and dancing and chanting and playing drums the whole way to the brides house. Once they got there, the brides family dress the bride under cover of a sheet held over their heads. (Aside: I always think of the forts my brother and I used to make as kids when they do this...) Then, they brought the bride back to the groom's house on a other mule, singing and dancing and ululating and playing drums the whole way. A short break ensued while people drank coffee and sweet mint tea and ate bread to regain their strength. By this time it's getting dark. Once dinner time rolls around people usually start showing up, and this time was no different. I put on my white-with-green-trim tkoboot/tjellabit, wrapped a head-scarf around my hair, and put ridiculous amounts of eye-liner on before I headed over. The rest of the night is just hanging out in gender specific rooms, clapping and singing and dancing. And eating. The men eat first, and then the women. I ate at about 1am. Pretty standard for a women's room. My replacement got stuck in the last room and didn't eat till 3 am. That was a bummer. Then, I went home. The party went on, though, it lasts untill dawn, when the do the donation ceremony. People give money, and for each donation two boys stand up and hit swords against each other and speak a blessing over the donor and the newlyweds. Then, everyone goes home and sleeps. The bride's family gets up to make lunch, and everyone comes over to eat. More singing, dancing, clapping, ululating, blessing, etc. The third day the mother of the groom brushes the brides hair to welcome her into the family. At some point in all this, the newlyweds are supposed to consumate the marriage. Assuming both partners are satisfied with the results (ie. the bride is proven a virgin and groom successfully does the deed), the wedding is culturally official, and the paperwork is deemed valid.
This wedding was strange for me. People kept coming up to me and saying: "You're leaving tomorrow?! Oh no, well, we wil miss you and we are very fond of you and you must come back. Bring your husband and we will do a wedding for you. Bring your children and show them. Get married soon so you can do this!!! Come back, thank you for your work, I hope the new volunteer is as good as you (I squirm uncomfortably), blessings on your future life, say hi to your family, bring your family, visit us soon!!!!!!!!"
One woman even went so far as to sing a song for me. I was very touched, but also extremely embarassed... I felt like I was distracting people from the wedding.
The next morning I got up early and figured out transport to Rabat (which was, of course, more complicated than it originally had seemed). At least I didn't have the transport leave without me, but with all my stuff already on it, like happened to my friend B.

The wedding here was great! It was very community cerntered, which is rare here, but which I really really liked. Having just come from Morocco, where the hwhole community helpes with the whole things, it felt very natural. It also allowed me to get to know the other bridesmaids (all friends of my friend), which made it feel more natural as well. It was the most beautiful wedding I have yet been to. I hope when I get married I can have such a lovely ceremony, with friends and family and outside, classy but not too formal, with good food and good feeling all around.

Culture shock? Oh yeah. I kept reminding myself that it was OK for me to be wearing spghetti straps, or shorts, or a knee-length skirt, or a tight shirt, or my hair down... I missed friends, boyfriend, and the quiet life. On the other hand, throwing myself into wedding preparations gave me a way to push past the "outsider" feelings I was experiencing. I felt so different and so similar to everyone, it was weird and difficult. One day, I wore a Moroccan house dress, because wearing American clothes felt dishonest to how strange I felt inside. It allowed me to give myself permission to feel different, reminded me of my (good) reasons for feeling different, which seemed to be enough to just let go of the related insecurity. That time. It helped that everyone has actually be very understanding and supportive. Thank God for my friend E. who took time and energy out of her wedding prep to listen to me, look at my pictures, and laugh at my funny cross-cultural stories. It helped. A lot.

And that, is most of the story of two weddings. :)

On the Flip Side

2010-05-25T18:15:00.001-07:00

And I'm not in Morocco anymore. I am, instead, sitting in my parent's home in Wisconsin. The hills are rolling, the forests are flush with newly grown leaves, the birds are riotous... in general, the land is in high gear for summer, and you can feel it. The air is humid, and it smells of chlorophyll, damp soil and plant sex. For the first time in about two years my hands are healing. They have been plagued by chronic eczema all this time, forcing me to wear rubber gloves for all washing, and obsessively applying lotion, all to no avail. Now, in the blessed humidity, they heal on their own.

This is quite the adjustment. Morocco is... I wanted to say a world away, but it isn't. I feel like it's a world away but it's actually part of this world, just a distant part. Me, I'm a child of forest and field, at home amongst cows (I love to let calves suck on my fingers), a lover of cheese, a wanderer of hidden leafy glades. I got used to the rock and cliff and medicinal herbs of Morocco. I loved my mountains of spices, forever smelling of rosemary. I mourned the floods that carried away the remaining topsoil. I was AT HOME there. More comfortable there than I am here now. I know I will get used to short sleeves, tank tops, shorts, hair let down, tight clothes, humidity, the color green, the availability of fancy stuff, driving my car EVERYwhere, and more... but part of me doesn't even want to. I don't want to take this for granted. I want to remember how priviledged we are to have topsoil. How decadent it is to be able to travel 50 miles round trip just for lunch with a friend--in a personal vehicle, by myself, and spend only 90 minutes on the road.

I like appreciating these things. I like knowing that I'm absurdly lucky. It makes me feel a little bit smaller. It makes me thankful. I wish the rest of my fellow countrymen and women understood. I think we would be happier with our lot in life if they really understood. I think they might choose to use what we have more wisely, that it might continue to be there in times to come. I hope these things despite the knowledge that people are greedy just as often as they are generous. Stubbornly hopeful in the face of reality, because that is something I learned in Morocco as well.

From late April, actually

2010-05-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

Of Money, generally

“Globalization: the development of something, so as to make it’s influence felt all around the world.” Which often leads to the homogenization of peoples and cultures due to increased travel, trade, and communication. There have been and are many cultures on our planet, some of which had/have really great environmental ethics. Some examples are, traditional cultures in East Africa, including the Maasai, and most of Kenya’s old traditions. Native American cultures also often had respect for the other inhabitants of the planet built into their culture.

Our current generalized global culture doesn’t do so well. Money talks, and it talks a whole lot louder than the various ‘Loraxes’ out there. Success—as measured usually by possessions, acclaim, fame, beauty, and comfort—that’s the most important thing. So, people climb the social ladder, cutting corners if it saves them money, thinking only of the immediate future. So we figure, well, if I cut down that entire forest and sell the wood, it’ll grow back. Eventually. I think it will, anyway… sure it will! I need the money, I need it bad. Besides, if I don’t do it, someone else will. So I might as well get the benefit… better me than someone else, right? Never mind how steep the slopes are, never mind the animals and plants that depend on those trees, never mind that the sheep will eat anything new and green that grows, never mind the people who need that wood to heat their houses in the winter. They can buy wood from somewhere else. Or heat with gas. The money is more important.

So, having and aquiring these markers of success has become a main goal in life. We all strive for it on some level, and thus we justify it to ourselves: everyone’s doing it. And heaven forbid anyone should imply that the having or the getting of these things might not be as ethical as one might wish. It’s my right to take the opportunities I see! And my right to enjoy what I’ve got! After all, if you got it, flaunt it, right? Sometimes I find myself cynically thinking of all this as socially sanctified greed. I know it’s not quite that. I know, but it’s too close to that.

The thing is, the more we trumpet to ourselves that we have the right to acquire, the right to keep what we get to ourselves, the right to enjoy our hard-earned spoils in comfort… the less frequently we find ourselves content. Content. That means actually relaxing in the present, enjoying what is around us for what it is; happy where and who we are.

I see it happening around me. People see someone else with something, and they think: I want that, too! Of course, that’s human nature. People see it on TV, especially. Over and over they see these values, the supremacy of money promoted, and eventually, they buy it. The drink the Koolaid. They adopt those values, and become less and less satisfied, less content, with their own lives. It’s all about perspective. If everyone else’s life is as hard as yours, it doesn’t seem so bad. But let you see someone else living in rich comfort while you struggle with floods and cold and difficult terrain just to feed your family… and it suddenly seems unfair and awful and intolerable. It is unfair. And it is awful sometimes. And there are intolerable inequalities in our world. But is the answer really to try to attain the same fool’s gold of “success?” I think not.

The Story of Red

2010-05-25T18:12:00.000-07:00

The Story of Red

It started, about 3 months ago, with a conversation I had with my friends N. and A. It wasn’t the first time we had had this conversation. It started, as it usually did, with A’s turkeys. He is very, very proud of them. All 14 or so, including a huge and magnificent male named “Charlie.” I mentioned how it would be cool to have a chicken. A hen, to lay eggs for me, and to cluck around my doorstep. It’d be kind of like being the farmer’s wife I have always felt an affinity for. Both of my friends pointed out that there would be an animal market in three days time. I declined to attend, telling them I needed to think my chicken aspirations over more carefully. Usually, this was the end of the conversation. This time, though, A. made a threat: “If you don’t buy that chicken, I am buying one for you!” I thought he was joking.

Three days later, I received a text: “You have a feathered friend coming ur way on the rainbow nukl! Be there to pick her up!” I still thought he was joking, so I texted back asking for 3m of chicken wire as well. He cheerfully said he had made the purchase and all was now on our way. I realized he might not be joking. At 4 o’clock, when I was having a meeting with the women’s association, my friend’s son Yussef comes up to my door, carrying a box and a roll of chicken wire. I am shocked. This is really happening. I go get my chicken, peek in at her, and set her down. She is still in the box. I do not know what to do with her. I go up to my women and beg for their help. The come downstairs into the barn part of the house, look around, and immediately set to work setting up a chicken coop for me. Only they call it a “chicken house.” I am assigned the task of making a water dish for her by cutting the bottom of a plastic jug. I do this without cutting myself, and proudly bring it down to find… a rather well set up wire fence, with bamboo pole and rocks holding the bottom down, and a largish red-brown hen looking rather ruffled and disoriented standing inside it. I give her water. She starts gulping it down. We give her corn and barley bits. She enthusiastically eats them. We finish our meeting. The women leave.
I have a chicken.

Days pass and Red (the name I eventually settled on) get used to each other. I give her crushed barley, bread bits, and veggie scraps. She attempts to escape twice and gives it up as a bad job. She picks a roosting spot on some large branches in the chicken house. I was a little disappointed, I thought she would want a nest, which I had made for her out of straw.

Weeks go by, and she seems settled. But she isn’t laying eggs! A. and N. both told me she was supposed to be a great layer. I ask my host mother, who suggests letting her outside. It’s been a while, and so I do. That is, I tie a string to her leg, and the other end to my leg, and take her for a walk. She hates it! Spends 80% of her time just tugging on the string, 10% looking around worriedly, and only 10% eating like I want her to. She is courted by a handsome blonde rooster, but she runs away. After two days of a stressed out chicken tied to my leg, I’m done with this strategy. Besides, the villagers are giving me really funny looks, and my sitemate is outright laughing at me. So I let her go. And wonder of wonders, she doesn’t run away! She instead proves to me she likes her chicken house by trying to get back into it quickly. So, I start letting her out every day.

The blonde rooster came back. And a black rooster showed up. I’ll call him Torpedo. The blondie I’ll call Mr. Rooster. Torpedo has a one track mind. He saw my hen, happily eating dandelion leaves like they’re going out of style, and thought: “Perfect, I’m gettin’ lucky today!” And he dive-bombed her. No, seriously! I saw motion out of the corner my eye, heard a squawking sound, and there was my chicken pinned to the ground by the amorous Torpedo. Business taken care of, he runs off. Presumably in search of other innocent hens. Red looks a little traumatized, so I let her go back inside. The next day I watched the much more courtly Mr. Rooster attempt to convince Red to join his harem of hens. It works, and I have to go retrieve her.

Two or three weeks after all this, it happens. I walk downstairs to the bathroom early one morning, and there it is. A small, cream-brown egg lying in the corner of Red’s house. I am so excited! I have an egg! For free! Well, not free, but it just appeared there!! From that time on, Red laid an egg every other day for weeks. I was lovin’ it!

I came back from a trip to find Red sitting in the corner where she usually lays eggs. She looks all flat. Like she’s trying to spread herself out. I give her food and she doesn’t move. Now I’m a little concerned, because she is usually all about food. (Like chicken like owner?) So I climb into her house and poke at her. She burbles warily at me. I have never heard her make that noise. I pick her up and try to put her on her feet. She plumps back down as though drawn by magnetic force. I decide to leave her be.

She’s still there the next morning, but the food is gone. So, at least she’s eating. I decide to put her outside. She rouses herself to this; cleans her feathers, cleans her beak, and starts pecking at the ground. This is good! But after only 5 minutes she is back inside trying to get back in the cage. I put her back in and she settles herself down on her little nest in the corner… and I have a realization. She looks just like a robin on her nest. All fluffed up and smushed flat and with a look her eye that says, “Stay back, buster!” I have a new theory: she’s feeling broody. Cool.

Well, sort of. No more eggs, for one. And she’s not brooding anything but rocks. I figure she’ll get over her broody feeling fairly soon.

She doesn’t. Three weeks go by and she is still sitting there. I tell my host mother about this, and she tells me that she wants to give my chicken some eggs. You know, to sit on. Will she take them? I want to know. My host mother seems to think so, so I give her the go ahead. I come downstairs to find my host mother in my barn (she has keys to the outer part of my house), and my chicken with the fanciest nest I’ve ever seen. Three feet wide and approaching a foot deep of straw, I can barely see her in it. She looks very content. I go and lift her up, she’s got about 14 eggs under her, all warm. I poke some stragglers back towards the middle and put her back down. She burbles happily. I bet she will be a great mother. I wish I could get to see the chicks hatch!! I think I want to have chickens again.

A Day Off

2010-03-31T08:14:00.000-07:00

13 March 2010

A Day Off

It’s Saturday, one of the days I technically have “off.” As a ‘cultural exchange agent’ I don’t really get time off as long as I am in People-of-Ali, my site. It’s actually Aixht Ali Yussef in Tashelheit and something else entirely on the map, but that’s the translation into English. So, I woke up at about 8:30 am this morning, and wiggled out of my sleeping bag—a bit of a task for a still-fuzzy-headed person. I have been doing laundry every day for 4 days and I still have laundry to do, and since I could already see the sun coming in through the window, I was anxious to get started. This week was cold, rainy, foggy, drizzly, damp; in other words, truly terrible laundry weather. For the weeks before that I have been traveling a lot, and that means laundry piles up. When you run out of underclothes, you are forced to wash something, but things dry poorly when you hang them up in weather that is raining one second and sunny the next. My suqmate E told me that my mountains look like the Misty Mountains (Lord of the Rings if you didn’t know!). I agree. They certainly felt misty!

So, this morning I washed dishes so that I could fill up the bucket for the rinses of the laundry, so that I could get the laundry out on the line so that the big bucket would be free for me to take a bucket-shower. No, I don’t have very many buckets. It’s actually kind of relaxing, sitting down in my doorstep with the sun on my back, listening to the noises of the village and scrubbing my clothing piece by piece. It’s also rather satisfying to hang it up on the line and see it waving brightly in the wind. I love how laundry on a line looks… it says, “someone lives here, someone is cleaning and keeping up with life, someone has done something today: this, at least!” And you can see if there are babies, or kids, or young women, or old women, stylish women or any of those same things for men. It tells a bit of the story of that household.

After laundry I took the bucket shower, which means I heated up two kettles of water, and carried my towel, my big bucket, and my heater into my bathroom that’s outside downstairs in the animal “barn” section of the house. I can’t walk to my shower wrapped in a towel because people can see onto my balcony. People routinely tell me “I saw your laundry out today,” or when it’s hot weather, “I saw you wearing a tank top on your roof. But it’s OK because it’s your house.” Needless to say, an appearance wrapped in only a towel would be occasion for comment! So I strip inside and put on a long apron and my fleece jacket and flip flops for the trip to the bathroom.

I ate lunch on my stairs to let my hair dry, and to enjoy the sun on my back and to read a book. A novel, just for fun! I’ve been reading a book of recent Arab history called “The Arab Predicament,” and while I am thoroughly enjoying it, it feels more like work than fun.

I took my chicken out to eat the grass and plants growing outside my door—all that rain means I have a lawn of sorts! There are two roosters who are courting her. Actually, one is courting her, and the other makes a mad dive-bombing dash for her whenever he sees her. The courtly one visited today, making a very impressive show as he made a beeline for us. She watched him coyly, eating daintily and keeping watch surreptitiously. He strutted, flapped, crowed, and flew as he came toward us, and then made the circling motion with one wing dragging against his legs making a sharp thwacking noise. Well, t least I was impressed. She’s still shy from the other rooster, the dive-bombing one, and Mr. Courtly wisely backed off when she shied away. He retreated to his little harem of hens, but I swear he sent them after her to gather her into the fold, as it were. They came over and tried to lure her away. Succeeded, too; I had to go chase her back to my house.

Such a lovely day just cried out for a walk. There’s a path that follows the river downstream. You can see it from the road in and out of town, and I have been curious about since I first saw it a year and a half ago. I told myself, today is the day I explore it! Anyway, it is my day off, and so I went for a walk! I brought my camera, and kept snapping pictures of the scenery. The path starts from the far side of Ait Ahendor, across town from me. Then it plunges down into the ravine where the little river is, and climbs up through “Mars.” I call it Mars because there’s a spot where the ground goes from orange to grey to teal to red to purple all in the space of a couple hundred feet. Then it tops this ridge and there are the last three houses of People-of-Ali. No way to avoid an invitation for coffee, but I told them I would stop by on the way back. Not that I don’t want to visit, but visiting is cultural exchange, and kind of work. The trail then drops precipitously down toward the river in a zig-zag, and follows the river from a safe distance. There is vicious erosion down there: deep channels cut through the earth, and there are big ravines and canyons. I found a little spring trickling down one. In some places the path runs along the top of a small cliff, in some places you find yourself scrambling over the rocky lip of a ravine and then up the other side. The mules here are pretty badass to carry heavy loads over these paths.
The rocks look like someone took them and turned them on their sides, creating long stripes running up and down the mountains. As if God took a comb and ran it through the rocky ground. The river goes from sort of meandering the sort of wide valley by the village to rushing headlong through shallow canyons by this path, and twisting between the feet of the mountains that push it this way and that. The view exposes new terrain behind each turn, and it was lovely. The wind was whistling around the corners, and pulling my hair out of my braid, freezing my nose and ears and fingers, and making my eyes water like tears. I loved it! I called my boyfriend and told him how cool it was. So often I am walking around here and I wish, I wish, I could show it to you all! It’s so beautiful, yet so stark. See what happens when you remove all the trees and let erosion play unhindered. See what this really cool geology looks like, see how rugged terrain is completely normal for the people here. I have realized over and over what a soft land I come from. The sun dipped behind the huge peaks across the valley, and the temperature dipped with it. I turned around. On the way back, I did stop for coffee.

I think I will make Cream of Vegetable Soup, from cauliflower, carrots and parsnips/turnips. And maybe pumpkin bread for desert. I may watch Lord of the Rings, too, since I can’t seem to stop thinking about those “Misty Mountains.” Or maybe, I will just wiggle back into my sleeping back and read some more of that novel!

Carding Party

2010-02-23T07:19:00.001-08:00

Yesterday my imma (host mother) told me to come over and help with making lunch, because she was having women over to “karshnt,” or card and spin wool. It occurs to me that stuff like this doesn’t often happen any more in the States. That is, have a community gathering to make light work of a tedious and difficult but necessary job that must be done. We do this type of thing often here.

Today at 9 am I walked into my imma’s kitchen, a long and wide room on the top level with three wood posts holding up the roof. The cement floor is half covered with rugs and mats surrounded by low wooden seats. Today 8 women have already taken seats on those mats. They have been at work for a while: there is a huge pile of fluffy white wool on the floor in between them, but there are also many stacks of carded wool next to each women. A couple women have begun the process of spinning. They use a hand-spindle, and turn the carded wool into loosely spun yarn. It’s sits piled next to them, a huge, long discarded snake skin of wool. The raw wool look like a tiny patch of fog took up residence on the floor in between them. I have to repress an irrational urge to jump into it like a child jumping into a pile of leaves. I go around the room and greet each woman personally, as is expected. I opt for the shaking hands variety because kissing people’s cheeks is tedious when they are all sitting cross-legged on the floor.

A few minutes later I’m sitting on a short stool, with about 2 kg of fool in front of me. Ever had fool? It’s tasty. Big long green-beans with soft foam-like skin, seeds the size of a largish fingernail and tough strings running down either side. Each bean-seed has to be checked for damage from bugs, and the strings come off, too. After that, it’s the carrots, then the potatoes. My imma likes the carrots de-cored. I don’t particularly like de-coring carrots, but I can do it now. I realize my wrist is going to be sore after all this veggie prep!

Ever watch carding and spinning by hand? Each person has their own rhythm, their hands never staying still… the wool going from little fog-patch to snagged on the carding paddles, then scrrratch—scrrrratch it is combed and pulled into line and turned and returned until it’s smooth and in little rectangles. Piles of the rectangles grow and are taken to the women spinning. They take two, catch the edge of them on the spindle and give it a few twists, then tug and twist, tug-tug-tug-tug and twist again until the wool stretches out, growing and twisting as it falls by their sides in tangley looking piles. Then they wrap it around arms and pull it through into a big knot with a twist of the wrist.

To pass the time the women start singing. They’re clever, making up songs about life on the spot, and they teach them to each other in a call-and-response style. Thus, the leader who made up the song teaches everyone else a refrain and then puts in little verses once they’ve got it. It’s cool. The tune is usually the same, and it’s as twisty and turny as the wool. Middling high pitched, it’s sweet and they love it. They sing until their voices get scratchy. The carding makes a low, rough counterpoint, and I add the soft popping noise of fool being broken into halves and quarters and eighths as I prep it. They sing about marriage, about cooking and what fuel they cook with, and then my host mother decides to sing about me to embarrass me. They laugh and we keep going. I wish I could sing with them but I can just barely catch the meaning… the words flow by to quickly for me to raise my voice. I finish before they do, and help set up the mid-morning snack. They put a little round table over the fog-patch of wool and eat up. Then they get back to it. Scrrrrrratch—scrrrrrrratch!

Herding Nomads

2010-02-23T07:18:00.001-08:00

The trouble with working with semi-nomadic herders is that they are, well, semi-nomadic. Families often keep a house here, and a tent or a stone house in the mountains as a base for the herders to come back to each night. The family is divided between the two places, and the family members switch back and forth and back and forth. Usually a pattern emerges, though.
For example, the president of the herders’ association here has his family divided up as follows. Like his father, he keeps the main family house here. His oldest daughter keeps house, with his youngest son who is still going to school here. His wife runs the mountain base camp, a tent in the summer and a rock house in the winter. Except when the winter is so hard that the rock house is covered in snow. Then they take the tent down to the foothills. His second oldest daughter is married and lives in Sefrou. His two youngest daughters are attending middle school/high school in Haj City, our market town. They are staying with family members. The president is slowly building a house in Haj City. When it is finished, he will move his oldest daughter and youngest son there, and his youngest daughters will move in until they are married or go elsewhere. The old family home will be abandoned, I guess. His wife will, I suppose, run the tent until she is too old to do so anymore. At which point he will also be old, and perhaps he will sell his 350 odd sheep and goats and live out as good a life as he can in Haj City. I wonder if his grandchildren will learn the language he learned first at all. Many children of Imazighen heritage are completely ignorant of the language and stories of their fathers. Why bother when Arabic is so much more universal anyway? His is not an unusual story: many families are planning their escape this way. The life of the nomadic herder, semi- or no, is a hard one.
Back to the original comment… in trying to help people improve their life, one has to hold many meetings. Meetings are hard to hold if half of the people who need to be there are always gone, and which half is missing is continually changing. Any meeting or work that needs doing takes careful planning, and good luck as well. The worst is when the herds are moving between summer and winter pastures. Everyone is in constant motion, because moving the herds means moving the tents, with all of the furnishings and accessories. Vans, trucks, and endless mule and donkey trains can be seen moving up and down roads and mountains paths for weeks. I give up organizing until those weeks pass.
The nice part about working with semi-nomadic herders is that you get to go hang out in the tents with them in the summer. High altitude grazing grounds are always cool and breezy. The mountains are beautiful, and stark. They are almost entirely bereft of trees, but lightly covered with tough bunch grasses, herbs, bushes and the occasional blades of new grasses making a break for some sunlight between the rocks. Thus, the colors of the rocks show through, with a soft haze of yellow green overlaying them. Except for the patches of forest, deep green and sparse. Those forest bits are small and shrinking, like patches of hair on a balding man’s head. They hang down in lower altitudes, too, much like said male pattern balding. I use them to teach about erosion. “See those trees? See those huge gullies cut into the mountains by the rains last year? See how they are hardly ever in the same place? That’s why trees are important!” Unfortunately, I only get to tell so many people because I work closely with only a few. They are the ones who really organize. They use their superior networking powers to contact and bring in the semi-nomadic herders. It works pretty well for the meetings, but not for the informal education.

what we eat is what eats us

2010-01-15T07:13:00.001-08:00

We talk a lot about food here in PC Morocco. Perhaps this is because we spend a lot of time devising ways to cook our favorite comfort foods in an unfamiliar environment. Or maybe it’s because so many of us see the environmental degredation around us and worry that this will become bad enough to hurt food production in our area. Or maybe it’s because of the plethora of people out there trying to raise awareness about the precarious situation of our global food system. We read a lot in our spare time. Or all those things.

There are little to no reserves stored for future famines. Some food is produced at artificially lowered prices and used to fuel the system of mass food production that so much of the developed world lives on. That has global ramifications once you start selling that un-naturally cheap food abroad. It undercuts the local food sellers and hamstrings local food production systems. Those systems falter under that pressure, becoming dependent on the same cheap food that undercut the system in the first place. This last year, 2009, there was a bumper crop of corn and wheat in the United States. One of the highest on record, I believe. **Please forgive the lack of references… it’s very hard to research ones references when one does not have the internet or a library at one’s disposal.** Yet many, many people still starve, or suffer from malnutrition for lack of good food. There are many complicated reasons for this. MANY. There are equal numbers of proposed solutions to this problem. One thing that some claim would fix the problem is if people stopped eating meat. Be a world of vegetarians. Why? Well, it’s about the efficiency of energy transfer.

This is ecology. This is also chemistry. It’s pretty simple: life needs energy to sustain it. Plants get it (most ingeniously!) from the sun, direct. They take the sun’s energy and store it-this is the most efficient method. Animals don’t do the photosynthesis thing (we’re not that cool), so many do the next best thing: they eat the plants and steal all that stored energy, unlocking the storage units in the plant (sugars, mostly) and use it for their own purpose-this is the second most efficient method. Other animals don’t eat plants, they eat other animals, stealing that stored energy and using it for their own purposes-this is not as efficient as the previous two. So you, as an organism, can get your energy from the sun (direct, primary), from plants (indirect, secondary), or from other animals (double indirect, tertiary).

Humans are omnivores, so we get to eat just about whatever we want (but not sunlight, again, just not that cool). Pretty nice situation for us, actually. We have it set up so that we have all kinds of plants gathering energy for us (corn, wheat, carrots, potatoes, oranges…) and all kinds of animals eating those plants and converting it into tasty energy packed meat (chickens, pigs, cows…). Being omnivores, we enjoy the variety, and it keeps us healthy to boot. We are set up to run off of a variety of foods. But that means that some of our foods are efficient secondary energy (cereals, veggies, fruits) and some are less efficient tertiary energy (meats, dairy, eggs). We use a lot of the secondary food (corn, grass, etc.) to feed the tertiary food (cows, ducks, etc.). It takes a lot more energy to feed a cow until it reaches slaughter weight than it does to just eat that energy ourselves in the form of veggies and bread. So, when you eat beef, for example, you have just used all that energy it took to feed that cow, plus all the energy it took to grow the cow’s food, plus all the energy you used to get that beef from the cow to your stomach. When you eat a piece of bread, you used only the energy it took to grow the wheat, plus what it took to get the wheat to your stomach in the form of bread. Thus, beef takes up a lot more energy than bread does.

The idea then, is that if we all stopped using all that secondary food to feed our food animals, we could instead send it to those starving people and feed them. It’s not a bad idea. The math works out. So then we would stop using up land to grow secondary food for our tertiary food animals, and instead just grow that secondary food for people. To put it another way, on a lot of the land that we currently use to grow animal-feed we could be growing high quality people-feed. In light of the “starving children of Africa” (and everywhere else), this is probably something we should try to do. Hence the idea that we should be all be vegetarians. This is probably not a welcome thought to many. Many others, though, say it’s our moral responsibility.

Wait! There’s a catch. Not all land is equal. There’s a lot of land on this planet that is simply unfit for cultivation. If you plant wheat, or veggies in arid, dry land, you have a high risk of causing a lot of environmental degredation. This happens mainly through using up what little water there is in such a dry place, or through breaking up the soil. Breaking up the soil creates opportunities for erosion, especially in dry climates. Erosion means that that soil will sooner or later no longer be there at all. A better way to use such arid land for our food purposes is through well-managed grazing of food animals. Over-grazing is another good way to cause environmental degredation, but well-managed grazing can actually augument the health of an environment. So, we could use the good land for secondary food production, and the not-so-good land for tertiary food production. Maybe we don’t have to be vegetarians after all?

Well… there’s another catch, though. Grazing animals, as opposed to the current method of feeding our food animals our secondary food, means that they take longer to reach slaughter weight. Which means you can produce fewer of them per year. We, of the priviledged developed nations crowd, have gotten used to having vast quantities of meat (inefficient tertiary food) at our disposal. By manipulating the price of certain plant foods, we have made it a lot cheaper to raise up all of those tasty meat animals than it probably should be. So we get our meat, and we get it cheap. And we like it. It is tasty, and nutritious, after all. And it’s a sign of prestige to us, too. Having meat on the table has always been an indicator of wealth, because it takes so much more energy (inefficient tertiary food!) and energy will always cost money, or time, or wealth of some sort. So, if we change our system to use less land to feed the food animals, we would have less, more expensive meat. So, maybe we don’t have to be vegetarians, but that doesn’t mean we can still get our cheap meat… We might have to become a little more omnivorous than we currently are. A little bit more veggies, a little bit less meat.

**Note: there are many reasons to become a vegetarian. I didn’t touch on them all, I know. This is less about the merits of vegetarianism than it is about our general food system. Peace.

Bus Ride

2009-12-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

We were sitting
Not moving, again.
For a long time
My impatience
Swelling, sweltering as still air
sun beating down.
I watched the man
Moving boxes and bags
And satchels and suitcase,
His whole life maybe,
In a grey peacoat
Against the nonexistent cold.

I woke to the rumble
Fading as the engine switches
In gear it doesn’t shake so bad-
The bus sways
Lumbering: a pregnant camel
Darting mouselike in traffic.
Soft whisper breeze!
The top is open, the air
sidles in
Caressing sweat-beaded skin.
I can breathe, and patience
Whisks in with my friend
Wind.

We are moving fast now.
Past endless rows of eucalyptus trees
Dusty green leaves, blood red trunks spindly
Rooted in the pale earth,
reaching skinnily for the pale sky.
Scant shade hunches under the branches
Herds cluster there in tight sheep scrums
But how can they breathe all smushed?
The breeze brings
Outside smells in
Hot pavement, hot dust, hot treebark
Pungent, fresh, medicinal.

The girl, she was next to me.
The one with the pristine white towel.
She is carsick.
See it in her haste, the way
she holds her cheeks?
She is vomiting,
Quietly, quietly.
No smell, no sound.
Only the mika betrays her
Rustling.
She will wipe her mouth with the towel
Tie up the bag and go to sleep.

Will I betray myself?
When I see him
Maybe I will give him a hug
Smile in his eyes
And hope no one I know
Was on this bus
To carry tales of the hidden forbidden
Back to where they matter
Maybe-
I will just take his hand
And we will slip away
Hiding in the city,
Wind crouching behind the leaves,
Among the trees
Slipping slowly by my window.

Arabic Lessons

2009-12-02T05:58:00.002-08:00

It finally happened! As fate, or God, or luck would have it, I had pretty much nothing to do with it. I don’t care, it’s still AWESOME!! 30 some odd women, adult women, are now taking Arabic lessons! They have committed to trying to reduce illiteracy in our little village by becoming literate themselves. For many, this means they are stepping into the classroom for the first time in their 50 some years of life. For others it means picking up the chalk and pencil after a much extended break.

The reasons women in my village stop going to school are many. These days, it’s mostly because they have finished all the schooling that is readily available for them. Most families are not comfortable sending their pubescent and pre-pubescent daughters away to school, so once they finish the 6th form, they are done, for good. Those who really care about and are lucky enough to have family somewhere where the girls can safely stay while they study may choose to allow their daughters to continue. However, many don’t have that option. A few families still choose to pull their daughters even earlier. They may need help around the house, or help running the semi-nomadic tents out in the grazing grounds. This is still a vast improvement over days not so very long gone by. It used to be a family would choose maybe one or two kids out of the 6-10 they had to go to school at all. My tutor was one of the only children his parents sent to school. He has shared his literacy with both his younger sister and his wife. He is also a school-teacher here, passing on the gift to some hundreds of kids.

Last week, after months of suspense, the women’s literacy classes started. They started with the generosity of an association from Boulmane, a nearby city. The local preschool teacher got in contact with them (on her own!!!!), and then beat the dirt paths (on her own, between the classes she already teaches!!!!!!!) gathering women’s names and ID numbers so the association in Boulmane could be confident of interest levels. This association then called in the regional Ministry of Agriculture, and together they put up some money. I watched as they handed out the goods so the women could get started. Slates, chalk, pens, pencils and THREE books for each woman! Level 1, Level 2 and an educational reader about agriculture and agricultural science. It was so much fun to see them take the books, and then to come to their first class two days later… bright, excited eyes. Books carried carefully. The odd baby strapped to a back, while it’s mother shifted endlessly from foot to foot to calm it, pen in hand ready to learn. Shy and a bit self-conscious, they didn’t know what to do when the teacher wrote the first letter of the Arabic alphabet on the board. “Aleef! Ah!” she said and turned around to awkward silence. “What… do we… do?” muttered one voice, and the entire room burst into laughter. She hastened to explain, and off they went (like a herd of turtles…). I learned a bit myself, but soon found that I could be of more help guiding hands unused to writing into the proper way to make a circle with a tail on it (“Wa-oh! Oww!).

Just a couple days ago I dropped in on a family that I like to hang out with. They are very, very kind, insisting that I am like another daughter to them, and point blank refusing to let me leave the house without some form of sustenance either in my hands or my belly. Friendly, full of laughter, and out-spoken; they are a good antidote to the unfamiliar families who are still quiet and modest around me. The mother of the family is one of the women studying Arabic for the first time. She was one who had a very difficult time forming the letters that first day. I hadn’t been back for a while, but while we sat by the fire warming our hands, she said “Wait!” jumped up and disappeared. She returned with a sheet of paper completely covered with the number 8 drawn over and over and over and over and over… You could see on it the progression of 8’s. They started out huge, lop-sided, scratchy and barely recognizable. They ended neat, small and quite clearly “8”! She was so proud of herself, yet still self-effacing. She started working on the number 9 while I was sitting there, and her 10-year-old son watched her, giving helpful criticism respectfully and proudly. He too, is happy to see his mother studying. This is one family where the older children have gone on to high school if they wanted, girls and boys. Now, finally, their mother is joining them in the ranks of the educated. I am so happy for them I could shine!

10 November 2009

2009-12-02T05:58:00.001-08:00

Autum ambles to the ending…

It’s late fall, the harvests are almost all in. Only the olive trees still wait for gathering. The people are feeding tree clippings to their animals. They do this before all the leaves fall off, so as to more efficiently use the produce of the trees. This doesn’t allow the soil to be enriched by as many decomposing leaves, but most of the soil in farm fields here in my site is carefully husbanded, so it seems to work out anyway.
I helped with the corn harvest again this year. Not nearly the ordeal it was last year… Last year the corn harvest was done in the rain (it started raining in September and I swear it didn’t stop until December last year). So, the river was at flood and we had to go the really long way around to the bridge (tack on 12+ km roundtrip), and all the paths were slippery with mud. The fields were deep mud, too. The mules sunk in up to their hocks and knees. I remember I slipped and fell on a steep path and the mule I had charge of almost ran me over before I could get a hold of a strong enough tree branch to pull myself up.
This year it was a gorgeous, sunny fall day (we have had many of those this year!). I started helping late, so mostly I just carried a mid-morning snack to the workers who had been there all morning. Then, we finished pulling the corncobs of the stalks (by hand… corn leaves give the best paper cuts you have ever seen), loaded up the mules with bags of cobs, and a few stalks for quick fodder for the cows and sheep, cleaned up from the snack, and hauled it all back to the house. The system of harvest is: the men cut the stalks with short hand-scythes, and lay them on the ground in loose bundles. Then the women follow pulling the corncobs off the stalks, stuffing them into bags and carrying them to the mules. Everyone loads the mules up, and a couple men take the mules from field to house over and over until the corn is all gathered in. The corn is then all piled up somewhere, and whoever has spare time (old men, women of all ages, girls, kids) shuck the corn by hand. The shucked cobs are carried up to the roofs in bags by the able-bodied women, and piled in narrow, long, thin piles to dry in the sun. In my host family’s house this is a communal task completed mostly by extended family. My host father is too busy with his other work (he’s town sheikh, and traditional healer for the region), and my host mother is not able-bodied. They use me when they can, when I remember to offer. I’m sturdy, and not afraid of big, hairy, smelly (but generally very gentle) mules. Besides, I kind of like helping out with harvests. Even in the states I’ll help drive a tractor chopping corn if I get the chance. The smells of corn, corns stalks, and mud all remind me forcibly of Wisconsin in the fall. It’s like a little gulp of home.
Corn in general, actually… in the summer I’ve been known to go sit in a corn field for half an hour just to hear the whisper and rustle of corn leaves growing in a light breeze and full sunlight. It smells good, and sounds better.
It’s getting cold now. After a long, mild fall, it is finally getting chilly. For three days we had powerful winds blowing through. Winter winds. They call it “atho”. The “th” is a soft, emphatic “t”—a sound we don’t really have in English. It’s an apt name though, strong and hard. Atho is unpleasant… it cuts through the thickest of layers, picks up grit and dust and throws it everywhere. If you don’t shut up the house, a fine layer of it coats everything quickly. Today we are granted a reprieve: warm sunlight and a soft breeze again.
I did my laundry and hung it to dry maybe two hours ago. Most of it is already dry! It’s amazing how quickly things will dry here… in the summer my bandanas are dry within 10 minutes of being hung up. My skin is dry, too… fingers peeling and cracking. It’s not gonna get any better with the cold winter months. I apply lotion multiple times daily, and try to protect my hands from harsh soap by wearing gloves for laundry and dishes, but… Well, thus far the dryness just comes and goes, comes and goes. I remember my doctor in the states—2 and a half years ago—looking at my hands, giving me hydrocortisone, and saying “Use that three times daily, and we’ll hope it doesn’t become chronic.” Chronic, that would definitely be the word!Nonetheless, I generally like this weather. Warm and fuzzy clothing is comfortable again! I huddle under warm blankets, relish steaming tea, and contemplate purchasing a better gas space heater. I enjoy the warmth of my computer on my lap! I go to the hammam and sit in the steamy heat and soak it in, not worrying about heat exhaustion like I would in the summer. Fall is a good season. And here it is, almost over. Farewell, fall!

Walking the Streets

2009-08-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

Why is it that I can expect to be ogled and catcalled and spoken of in slippery or even sleazy terms on almost every single street I walk down in a city/large town here? This is a question that I have been turning over and over and over in my mind, like a worry stone, since I got here. Never, in any other place (not Tanzania, not Ecuador, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, England, Scotland, France, Italy, nor Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Portland, San Francisco, Boston nor Naples) have I ever experienced the level and frequency of not-really-comfortable attention on the streets that I have here. In cities, large or small, it happens. Understand, as a fair-complexioned person one gets a substantial amount of attention on the streets in, say Latin America or in Tanzania or in Italy. It’s not the same though. It doesn’t feel the same on my skin, or in my head. That is a second question that I might write about some other time.

I have been hesitating to write about this phenomenon in detail for some time, because I wanted to think it over, and to puzzle out a few of the whys and wherefores before I put my opinion to anything. This is a complex issue, running the gamut of culture, politics, history, and religion. Thus, particularly as a Peace Corps Volunteer blogging about such things, I have to be very careful.

What do I think about this? Culture clash, globalization and adaptation, that’s what I think in five words or less. Morocco has been subject to the influence of many factors over recent and less-recent history. If you go back (way back) and boil it down to generalizations, there were Berbers, and then the Romans came (yes, the Romans of Pax Romana, way back when. They left cool ruins here.), and the Berbers and the Romans figured out how to live together. The next conquerors were the Arabs, (who melded in very nicely after the military take over) and then the Spanish and then the French, though in different ways (who might not have melded so much). And then came globalization and the influence of the US/Western culture through media, economics, and technology sharing. The details are important, but I’m not going there. This isn’t a senior thesis, these are just a few thoughts. Anyway, those are the major players. Over and over, the people of Morocco have been influenced to one degree or another by invaders, Protectorates, movies, and political revolutions. And each new change has created shockwaves, adaptations, and subtly changed the culture of Morocco itself. Thus, the Berbers were over time driven into the mountains, where they still stay, continuing their culture through language, dance, etc., but they have long since been Muslims, every mother’s son and daughter of them. The plains are a mix of Berber, Arab, French, African heritage and culture. Nowadays, the mountains and the plains are full of exchange and trade with each other, all filtered through the lens of religion and cumulative culture. Then add to that the influence of mass media layered over top of it all. Perhaps you can see why I’ve been biding my time trying to figure this out?

Well, I’m not so sure I’ve figured it out, but I have a few observations. Firstly, the Islamic faith is the base upon which much of this culture clash and adaptation occurs. Most every Moroccan at least claims to be Muslim. I have heard a variety of opinions about the sincerity of faith concerning the general population, but the point is that every single Moroccan, whatever their sincerity of faith, is very much under the influence of Islamic morals, rules, and boundaries.
Secondly, those boundaries affect everything. There is a distinct boundary between men and women. This was my first realization, upon an encounter with a deeply religious man who would not even look at me or converse with me, not even when we were working on a project together. I had to let men talk with him for me. This encounter made the divide between men and women real for me. There is room for behavior like his in this culture. It is seen as extreme, but he is respected for his convictions. I will hazard a guess that any man who chooses to completely ignore the presence of a woman for any reason (particularly in a profession setting) in the US would be subject to some form of censure, either from their peers or the woman in question.

There is another boundary between the public and the private. It is a part of the boundary between men and women as well, and I don’t pretend to fully understand it. Here’s what I do get to some degree. Women, in particular, usually change between what they wear at home and what they wear in the streets (or to answer the door) quite a bit. And that doesn’t mean they get prettied up, no, it means they get covered up. For most women here that means covered from neck to wrist and ankle in loose clothing, plus a headscarf that covers at least the hair and probably the neck as well. Interestingly, this difference is mostly in degree. Even in the states I would probably cover up a revealing undershirt to go answer the door, depending upon whom I spied through the window. Of course, that might mean putting on a t-shirt, not a moo-moo. This changing is commonplace, but it was clarified for me when I observed a close friend wearing flattering, western style clothing in her house (to please her husband) and then covering up to go outside in the familiar loose clothing. I asked her about it and she went so far as to say, “I don’t care what I look like outside, I want/need to look beautiful while I am in the house!” I could only blink… surely this is the opposite of what most women in the States think? To us, going out means you ought to look good, if not spectacular, depending on where you are going. The home is where you relax, where you can stop worrying about appearances, because that is where the people who love you are, who will love you even if you look like a sloppy college student half the time. Again, to a degree, this is common ground. Here in Morocco, too, home is where you can relax, but not for the same reasons. Home is where a woman can relax because she doesn’t have to guard her appearance from the men (as much) because they are her close relatives, her protectors, and (of course) her loved ones. In other words, these men can be trusted. Their roles are defined, be it protector, lover, or provider.

Also, the private is what you care for; it is your place, your sanctuary, your little kingdom, and your responsibility. It ends outside your door, and the public is not anyone’s place, nor is it precisely anyone’s responsibility. Technically it is everyone’s but that doesn’t seem to stop many people from instead treating it as though it is no one’s. Thus, the home and its traditions are set and guarded, and much of the culture clash and its reverberations occur on the streets, where no watchful eye gazes.

The streets! Anything could happen in the streets. Freedom from the house, you can go where you choose (no walls), you can look at other people (strangers, even), you may talk to other people, no one is looking over your shoulder, no one is protecting you but you; it is not “safe.” A young man who is just coming up against the feelings puberty is shoving through his veins to his brain can explore what the reaction of a young woman might be to certain comment he would never dare make in earshot of his parents. A young woman dealing with similar hormonal changes can cast eyes at people and enjoy their effects. She would not stop to talk to someone she doesn’t know well, though. That might raise too many eyebrows, and she wants to maintain her honor. Who knows, her future husband may see her and be attracted enough to approach her parents, but only if she is seen as respectable. A married woman must guard herself if she is alone, for her honor and her family’s is in her hands and could be assaulted by one of those young men, maybe. She does not wear very flattering clothes or cast eyes about. Attention is not her aim. A married man can look at all manner of people, man and woman, and wonder. After all, for him, looking is free.

Enough about boundaries, there are more, but enough for now. Now throw into the mix a foreigner, a young woman, who sees her freedom on the streets as well. But maybe not exactly the same kind of freedom. She goes to the streets to be seen and to meet people, quite possibly, but she doesn’t think of seeing and meeting in the same way. She goes to explore, for she has been taught that the world is her playground, same as anyone’s. That being seen or talking to a stranger should affect her honor is a foreign concept. Her choice of clothing is not based on the same parameters that are in effect here. What she sees as perfectly reasonable summer wear looks like the bottom layer of undergarments to most men here. Which has a predictable effect: when they look at her they think immediately of one thing. Sex. And if they can get that, then maybe they can get a passport, too, or maybe money. They try to get her attention any way they can think of, because they know this might be their only chance to meet her. They know the boundaries she lives by (and we do have boundaries, though I’m not sure I would have applied that word before I came here… maybe I would have said bounds, or social mores instead) are different, and more flexible than the boundaries used here. They don’t know them, though, beyond what they see on the not-very-good American movies shown on the movie channels. You and I both know that movies don’t necessarily paint an accurate picture of social values and mores either. Movies exaggerate and focus on the strange or extraordinary for entertainment’s sake. So they yell a phrase they memorized from the subtitled movies, maybe “Kiss me, beautiful!” Or maybe something else.

Which leaves said young foreign woman in a bit of a bind. Any effort to talk to the young man may be seen as a type of flirting (even if the words are along the lines of “Shut up and go back to you mother!”), any glance or glare is sure to be seen the same way (for haven’t the movies shown that Western women are prickly and sassy?), and any gestures that might express frustration are sure to escalate the situation in a bad way. Strategy number one is that of the previously mentioned married women: prevention (don’t dress attractively, and don’t cast your eyes about/don’t look at anyone) and then pretend it didn’t happen if it does happen. It’s just words anyway, and as they say, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.’ Well, they might be irritating, the 14th or 40th time in a row they are heard… and they might be insulting (American women do have honor… and we don’t like it when it’s impinged upon any more than any one else does) but surely they are no more than water rolling of a duck’s back. So long as one keeps one’s back well oiled. J

Fascinating, right? I think so too. The question and it’s associated thoughts are sure to continue to fascinate me as I turn them over and over and over, like a worry stone in my pocket.

P.S. In pursuit of an understanding of some of the subjects touched on, I have begun reading some of the works of Fatima Mernissi, a noted scholar from Morocco. Her book, Beyond the Veil, is a fascinating scholarly work that has cleared a lot of things up for me, as well as raising a lot of excellent questions. I recommend it, and also (for a lighter read) her memoir Dreams of Trespass. Happy reading!

I Got Steam Heat!

2009-08-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

How many of you own and frequently use pressure cookers? I thought so, not very many. If my grandmother is reading this, she at least would point out that, while she may not use her pressure cooker frequently any more, it certainly saw heavy use in her days manning the kitchen. I remember, as a small child, sitting on a stool as I played with the left over pie dough on the yellowy-green of the counter running the length of her very narrow and long kitchen, and listening to the intermittent hisses and spits and clicks of her large pressure cooker as it did its duty on the scalloped potatoes. The smells of beef or pork or fish escaping the oven, the heat of the steam shooting out the pressure valve on the pressure cooker, and the delicate strawberries embroidered along the scalloped edges on her perfectly white kitchen curtains. I must have asked her what that thing making all the noise was, because she explained to me what that large pot so furiously spounting steam was. And then proceeded to sing it’s praises, how it saves time, money, and made things tender and sweet in the process.

I have learned the art of the kukut (pressure cooker) here in Morocco. And now, I’m following in Grandma’s footsteps: kukuts rule, other pots drool! Well, there are many uses for the typical pot, perhaps I should not belittle them in my quest to praise the almighty kukut. But in all seriousness, it’s AWESOME. It saves time, tenderizes beans, and makes my butagaz tank last a lot longer than it otherwise would. Lentils take a good hour to cook to softness in a pot (or more, depending on how soft you want it), but a kukut does the same job in under 20 minutes (including the time it takes it come to pressure). Less time is less gas burned for the flame, meaning more gas for later, which means fewer trips up and down my steep and uneven stairs lugging a 3 foot tall almost 2 feet in diameter tank. Much appreciated! Less time cooking also means less time between hungry and not-hungry-anymore-thank-you! Plus, no matter how long you soak a bean, it’s hard to get it properly tender without the help of that added pressure inside the kukut.

So, basically, I’m a fan. Keep that steam shooting out of the pressure valve, let the music of the top piece dancing and skittering and spitting announce to my neighbor’s I am cooking, because I’ve got steam heat taking me all the way to the dinner table, and it’s one thing I will definitely be taking back with me to the States. No kitchen should be without a kukut.

22/07/09

2009-07-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

I really enjoy hiking. So, I guess I’m lucky that it’s part of my job here! Didn’t stop me from dreading leaving last Saturday for the 20+ km hike ahead of me… I was mostly dreading it because of the time of day we ended up leaving: 2pm, the hottest part of the day. I pack two small water bottles of water, but that doesn’t last long in the heat of the day when you are hiking over the steep and dusty land. The air here is so dry! 40% humidity is considered rather high.
The hike itself is one I’ve already made a few times. The valley I was heading for is part of the SIBE (or Site of Ecological Importance… only in French with something that ‘B’ stands for…) that is a focus of my placement here. Environmental volunteers are supposed to help with the preservation/conservation/elucidation of purpose for these SIBE’s. So I know this path. I know the first sharp climb, the slow rise of the plateau to the gulley that cuts steeply through the bowl of high mountains and providing a steep and exposed path up to the high face of the mountain. I know the turn around the shoulder of the mountain, and the three scalloped valleys the path cuts across, and I know the long descent through the sparse forest into the grazing grounds on the other side. Really it’s only 10 km away, as the crow flies, and I know that’s really not that far. I also knew I wasn’t in quite as good a shape as one might hope if one was trying to keep up with your sheepherder escort… in the heat of the day.
He set a very reasonable pace for me though. And we stopped to rest at the water cistern at the top of the plateau, and wonder of wonders, there was a mule coming up the path behind us. We gratefully threw our backpacks into its carry-basket and joined the two girls who had been riding it. They got off for the passage of the gully. It’s steep and exposed, yes, but also the footing is bad. All sliding rocks and gravel and dust and sharp turns in tricky spots. If your mule goes down (and they do sometimes) it’s best not to be on them if they slide of the path and down the mountain a bit. We made the passage uneventfully, and I began my arguments with my sheepherder guide. He wanted me to ride the mule, and was unwilling to take the place of the two young girls who were having a harder time keeping up with him than I. I did give in for a bit, but that was (in that moment anyway) less about being tired and more about enjoying riding something vaguely horselike.
We made the decent through the trees, and left the girls and their mule at their families tent, and made our way across the valley. I was practically running to keep up with my shepherd. And then we turned with the path. Up. Straight up, for a final mile and a half (a couple of km) at about a 25% to 30% grade. It felt like 45%, I swear! After 4 hours of hiking, riding, and trying to keep up I was TIRED. For some reason, my hip flexors seemed to be taking the entirety of the load, because the rest of my legs were only mildly tired. It hurt to lift my legs, though, and so I just kept on, step by step. Counting the boulders as we passed them till we finally came to our destination: the tent of the president of an association I work. There I dropped my bag on the floor and collapsed, exhausted. It was all I could do not to lie down right there, but I knew that would inspire worried words… as it was they were exhorting me not to die. Which I was nowhere near doing, for the record. I have had a much harder time breathing after many a track sprint workout, thank you!
On the way back, GPS information gathered, I made the hike by myself. I enjoyed it, stopping in the shade, looking about me to really enjoy the sweeping vistas obscured only by the summer heat haze, and even taking pictures like a tourist! I veered off the path to look at a big cap of rock and enjoy the view. And I still made the hike in just over 4 1/2 hours. Which was about how much time it had taken me and the shepherd the day before. This time, though, I wasn’t exhausted. I even had enough energy to dance at the final stage of my neighbor’s wedding!

poof

2009-07-24T05:06:00.000-07:00

Poof!
This is what I used to always say upon turning around and finding that a close friend of mine had disappeared into thin air. “She poofed!” I would exclaim. Well, the month of June just poofed. Between an end-of-May early June trip to Meknes with Anthony, mid-service medicals in conjunction with the Rabat Jazz Festival, and site visit (when my Program Manager or his assistant come to my site to give everyone a kick in the butt), June just about evaporated!
It was fun, though. There are volumes I could write about each; so many interesting places, great music, epic wild goose chases, and even a couple opportunities to see people really inspired.
A synopsis:
Meknes is great, it’s like Fez only chilled out. Fez is big, and full to overflowing with tourists this time of year. Meknes is smaller, has fewer tourists and feels a little more affluent for some reason… but you can find perfectly affordable hotels there nonetheless. Even on a Peace Corps budget. J Nearby are the city of Moulay Idris and the Roman ruins called Volubilis. Moulay Idris is one of the most holy cities in Morocco, and Moroccans and Arabs from other places alike take pilgrimages there. I happened to be wearing a headscarf to hide from the sun, and Anthony happened to be sporting a beard, and we had a very difficult time convincing a man that we weren’t Muslims, and therefore could not go into the mosque there. It’s truly lovely, perched on a hill with cliffs on one side of it. Volubilis is… well to paraphrase a friend “AWESOOMMMEEE!!!!!” No, seriously, it’s cool. It’s an extensive set of ruins that have been partially rebuilt but are largely open to wandering around. With nothing but a guidebook in hand and sunscreen and a water bottle, you can explore that place all day quite happily. There is MUCH to see, and most of it isn’t roped off at all. You might as well be the first person to stumble across that nearly pristine mosaic of Venus in the ruins of an old house, and you can sit on the steps of the old forum and watch the storks feeding their chicks in their huge nest built atop an old column in the ruins of the basilica.
Mid-service Medicals… what is that? Well, that’s when volunteers who have been in-country for a year go to the Peace Corps medical staff for a check-up or, as the case may be, a tune-up. We get screened for parasites, go to the dentist, have a physical, etc. It’s fun, though, because the entire stage (the group I came to Morocco with) gathers, and we get to hang out! This happens infrequently. Most fortunately, our MSM’s happened right near the time the annual Rabat jazz festival, Jazz au Chellah, occurred. Jazz au Chellah hosts many musicians from Europe, Morocco and Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the artists are forgettable, but some are amazing. Each night they pair an artist from Europe and/or Sub-Saharan Africa with and artist from Morocco. At the end of the night the play together, and it can be really, really awesome. This is the second year I have been lucky enough to attend. Also exciting about Rabat was a trip to the beach. An adventure that included city buses, taxis, advice from taxis, a long walk to find a place to change into a swimming suit, and a big beach full of Moroccans, with rocks on either side and a powerful rip current in the middle. We volunteers had fun exploring both Rabat and some other towns nearby more fully. I went on another city-bus adventure to find a friend from my site who usually lives in Rabat. Moroccans are so helpful! I had nothing but a slip of paper with my phonetic scramble of the words my friend gave me to get the right bus, and by asking directions, people got me to the right bus station, right bus, and the right stop. It was magical when I got to an unremarkable market way outside of the city to see her standing there in jellaba and hajib to greet me, calling my name to make sure I got off the bus! Lunch and tea and then return to the city for a stage meeting with Program Manager…
Who shortly thereafter arrived at my humble abode (site) in the mountains. I spent a good bit of time prior to his arrival running around and making phone calls trying to get meetings arranged for him. When he did come, we were off and running immediately. Four meetings in one day, but it was worth it! Or, well… some of it was definitely worth it, and some of it was frustrating. Some projects are moving forward steadily, some are brand new and exciting, and one is frustrating because the members of this one association can’t seem to make up their mind about what it is they want. We’re running in circles until they make up their collective mind. Another meeting is in order, but how to arrange it? They took time out of their (admittedly very busy right now) schedules only because my Program Manger was here. And the president couldn’t even make it… well, that’s life. But it was good, and hopefully we’ll get everything else properly arranged… J
So, that was my June. Poof! The beginning of summer, warm but not hot, fruits and veggies just starting to come in… apricots are the first to come in season, then peaches, plums, grapes, figs, apples, pomegranates… perhaps, before I know it I’ll be breaking open my last pomegranate and waving goodbye to wearing only one layer of clothing again. That is, if July and August poof like June did!

fun with bureaucracy

2009-06-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

Today was magnificent. I made a special trip to the nearby provincial capital for the express purpose of finishing of some paperwork that needed doing. Firstly, a vacaction day request. Secondly, the replacement of a stamp that is needed for my carte de sejour; my working visa equivalent. Really its magical how much time one can use up when one combines French bureaucracy Moroccan style with my own procrastination and the vagrancies of transport and circumstance...
So:
First to the Water and Forest Department. I had called ahead several times last week to attempt to find out when my counterpart would be in his office. Unfortunately, the phone number wouldn't work. Thus, I was flying blind, hoping that he would be there. Predicatably, he wasn't. I found this out by talking to the one person there who I have a language in common with: a secretary who speaks a version of Berber reasonably close the one I know. I have to remember words back from Ouarzazate, but it works. He was in Rabat, and to be back tomorrow. So I wait for the other guy, the Chief, to come back. She said he would come in... he didn't. At least, I gave up waiting for him to come back after three hours sitting there (reading a good book, the Dark Star Safari). I arranged with the secretary to call me tomorrow, and left a photocopy of the vacation days request form with her to make things as easy as possible tomorrow. I left, and went to go check up on my site mate who is beginning her technical training at the hospital here.

Task 1 having failed, I moved on to Task 2.
So, I find the Gendarmerie Royale, and ask them if they have the stamp I need. No, I am told, but they have it at the Provence, the Amanala. ie. the big complex where the government bigwigs work. I go, and the guard at the gate stops me until my Qaid's secretary magically appears and tells me 1) where to go and 2) vouches for me. I go to the security office and wait for the guy to register my name in the books... he then escorts me into the big, huge, fancy building with the shiny marble and the courtyard of desert plants inside and the huge, beautifully tiled stairs. Up we go, but the man he wanted isn't there. So he talks to the guard, who refers him to another guy, who calls over another guy, who says put her in a room to wait for the orginal guy to come back from lunch. So another guard goes to get the key to an empty room where I am stashed for... about 45 minutes. The guy finally comes in, I explain to him in my broken Moroccan Arabic what I want, he seems confused, but nods and leaves. Another guy comes in. He says, we don't have that here. I explain that the Gendarmerie Royale said they do... and then I am lead all over the complex, hither and thither, wondering what on earth is going on... finally to an office, where I finally have an epiphany. I'll just ask Eric... he did this before, he should know where to go. Turns out it's in a little cell phone store in the middle of town... I extricate myself from the Provencial Offices and march over to the store. After much wandering and a bit of asking, I locate it, and ask the storekeeper to change my stamp... only to discover there isn't another stamp. We call my gendarme, the storekeeper searches again, but it doesn't exist. He tells me to go ask the 'Bulis', ie. the police. I decide to go buy toilet paper instead.

Thus, today, I have accomplished... the purchase of four lovely, lightly packaged rolls of toilet paper. We may hope for better things tomorrow. ;)

Mountains and Weather

2009-06-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

So often when I go for a walk, I stop and marvel at the land surrounding me. It is harsh, steep, rocky, grand, majestic, naked, depleted, elemental, and beautiful. In the spring the slopes bloom a dusky green as every grass and bush type thing makes a dash at reproduction before the powerful summer sun burns all but the hardiest to a dull or bright gold.
With that summer sun come the storms. As in many mountain ranges, the mountains here provide a daily weather cycle. The sun pours energy into the air, the ground, the plants, and water evaporates, heat rises, air moves. It rises, channeled by the slopes of the ground until it reaches the cold heights where it condenses and “poof!” cumulus clouds are born. Over the course of the day, these little clouds grow into thunderheads. If rain clouds were already there that morning, then these thunderstorms grow big. These storms move across the mountains quickly, and the mountains rake the fingers of their high peaks through the clouds, forcing them up, forcing out rain, snow, and hail as they reclaim the water the sun drew out of them that morning. The rain settles into the ground, setting the stage for the following day when the sun rises into a once more clear sky.
This is so regular and predictable that (as are the usually accompanying power outages) that no one does their laundry in the afternoon. Not even me anymore. J You just have to bring it in half-dried if you do. We all keep candles handy, too.
Today was no different; we got a pretty good storm. Gusty winds, boiling clouds, yellow light, hail, curtains of rain. I had taken a nap, and awoke to a prematurely darkened sky and the constant rumble of thunder from the west. Ominous gusts of wind threw dust, sand, and dirt into the air. I walked to the side of my porch to assess what was coming. Pale grey, but turbulent clouds were mounting up behind Sarat (the peak west of us) and tumbling over. Lightning sparkled across the sky nearly continuously, and the thunder echoed metallically off the mountains. I took my clothes in and parked myself on my porch to watch the storm come. The wind picked up and I watched as curtains of rain dove down between the mountains and me across the way, driven by the wind. It reminded me of large flocks of ducks diving out of the sky to a lake to land in. That lake was soon to be my porch, and I retreated to a window view to watch women and children fight the rain and wind as they hurried to shelter. With no more preambles, it came down hard, and then a sharper tapping sound from my roof announced the change of rain to hail. I remembered the cement downstairs and ran to try to cover it more effectively. The rain was knocking gravel and rocks out of my neighbor’s wall all over my steps, and water was pouring out of the pipe from my roof onto my porch, where an impatient lake of brown water waited to swirl out of the downspout off my porch. Hail smacked my head, as I ran up and down the stairs, trying to manage the water and the cement. A peek inside my house revealed that only the normal problem spots were leaking, and not too badly at that either. L-hamdullah! In a few short minutes the storm had passed, leaving trails of bright brown water wending their way down the mountains.

Sometimes when I’m out walking, I imagine the mountain peaks are reaching up to slap hands—High five! —with the clouds as they drift over. As if they say, “Way to go on that last gullywasher, man! Did you see those little human-people scurry??! Righteous, dude.”

2009-06-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

Disillusion: verb
we pretended to have a happy marriage because we didn't want to disillusion the children disabuse, enlighten, set straight, open someone's eyes; disenchant, shatter someone's illusions, disappoint, make sadder and wiser. antonym deceive

A synonymous phrase might be ‘to take off the rose-tinted glasses,’ or ‘to break the news’ or ‘to tell him/her how it really is.’ As you can see, this word is very much negative in both definition and connotation. Yet, it is necessary to see the truth (be what it may) before one can choose the most logical, effective course of action. Otherwise one can only make decisions based on what one thinks one knows. So, in some ways, it might not be such a negative thing after all… once one gets over the accompanying disappointment and avoids sliding into a “shlump” of discouragement… for after all, “un-shlumping oneself is not easily done.” (thanks Dr. Seuss!)

Recently I’ve been confronted with some realities, both here in my village and in the whole of Africa. In my own village, there have been some nasty accusations of money-pocketing (embezzlement, essentially) by some officials in connection with this first project I am involved with. I have followed up the reports with other officials, who I trust, and have been told that the accusations are nothing but lies. Lies meant to throw me off, discourage me… but still I am unsure. Which means that these “trusted” officials may, in fact, be complicit in whatever may or may not be going on. I keep asking around, we shall see what comes to light. On a much, much larger scale, I was reminded how important sustainability is for successful development. A newspaper article and a book both elucidated the debilitating nature of un-sustainable development work very clearly. The scale and import of this I had not known before… I had no real idea. I had an idea, and intellectual understanding, but I didn’t really “get it.” I didn’t put the pieces together, how the huge infusion of money from government to government can actually fuel corruption. Or, on a smaller scale, how a nice organization can provide negative reinforcement for entrepreneurship.

Sustainability is a current buzzword of the development world and its related academic world. Basically, it is the quality of a certain activity/project/development scheme a to be able to continue over the long-term. More important is sustainability on the level of the local. If a Peace Corps Volunteer runs a project that creates a niche for itself that cannot be carried on in the absence of that PCV once they leave, that project is not sustainable. Thus, I find myself in the unique position to be able to do something about all this. I can do my darnedest to make sure that all I do here is, in fact, sustainable. Without me or another properly idealistic American living in my little village. And that goal right there makes all kinds of difference in how you plan and implement. It requires a lot more effort in the way of planning, and education. It’s so good to be reminded of these things, though! I welcome the challenge these realizations provide, for they represent an opportunity to make a long-term difference as opposed to a giving out temporary bandaids.

some thoughts on the turn of a year

2009-05-25T06:14:00.000-07:00

How on earth did it get to be May 21 already? Well, here we are then, and I am officially a 2nd year volunteer as of Tuesday. Neat, huh? That means I am halfway through with my time as an actual volunteer and over halfway done with the time I have allotted my self to live in Morocco. Or, as my thoughts ran about 2 weeks ago: part II of "Jini’s" Peace Corps experience has officially begun. That thought ran across my mind the evening I went to go and meet my sitemate, Meg, to show her the way to our little village. The new routine has yet to establish itself, probably won’t establish itself until she moves out of home stay and into her house.
I keep finding myself thinking about this year vs. last year. And what it was like getting dropped into this little village, alone, and figuring out how to speak and who I was going to be, here, at the same time. It wasn’t much fun, actually. I didn’t realize it at the time, as I was just putting one foot in front of the other, one word after the next. That in-the-zone dodged mindset that running cross-country with asthma teaches one. Thankfully, all things pass. J Some 2 to 4 months later, I had learned enough to be able to hold actual conversations in our obscure little dialect here, and, more importantly, had found what looked like a workable way for me to be here. I had some ideas for projects, I had helped others complete their projects, I had learned how to cook, was living in my own house, had my own pets, and was slowly establishing myself as myself (instead of that-girl-staying-with-the-sheikh). Mom commented on the phone at that time: "you sound much happier now than you did during the summer." And I realized, I am! And, I am glad to report, I still am! Projects move along… slowly… but they do move all the same. I have good friends here, a sweet (in the both old-fashioned sense, and the sweet-awesome sense) boyfriend, good Moroccan friends, and a slow-born but no less real affection for this land, this place. I figured out a way to not feel spiritually alone, too. That was key. I still don’t know if two years will be "enough" time for me here, or if I’ll extend, or if sometime in the next couple months I will suddenly realize that I am "done" with life here. It happens. We’ve lost 6, I think, volunteers from my stage (including both Health and Environment). Some broke themselves on the mountains or were broken by parasites, some got sick of the …slowly… aspect of things here, some became discouraged by the ministry they work with, some just wanted to go home. I can only hope that if I should find myself feeling "done" that I will find it in me to finish what I have begun. Because, as my brother says, "that’s how I do!" The first volunteer to live in O. Ali was a health volunteer who called it quits after three months. Meg is her replacement. I am doing what I can to help her adjust to life here with more ease than I did. Because there is MUCH for us to do here, though it isn’t always easy to see how one ought to do it. And because—selfishly—I like having another volunteer here. For company. For when I want to cook up a good stir-fry and share it with someone that will eat it from enjoyment and not because they feel bad for my effort. Isolated Moroccans are notorious for not liking food they aren’t used to. J
So, this is phase two, part II, the halfway point. Restlessness resurfaces after months of focused effort on settling myself in this place. Projects move ahead… slowly… and I say good-bye to friends who were here a year before me. In one year, that will be me.

welcome

2009-05-10T05:20:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Ait Ali, home of the most confusing Tamzight/Darija/Tarifit spoken in Morocco! A bit of an exaggeration, but that’s how I felt like welcoming my site mate. It’s great, actually, that the Peace Corps has taken my suggestion and placed a Health Volunteer in my site. She’s great! She’s smart, enthusiastic, and most importantly, game to take on the formidable task of learning how to talk to people here.
She’s been here for about a week now, and people are slowly getting used to the idea that I’m not the only volunteer in town anymore. They keep saying, “oh, she doesn’t know Tashelheit.” I remember how frustrating it was! Oh man, it was so hard. I’m more than happy to try to help her with every single little language trick I have learned here. The cool thing is that, as she methodically goes through the language learning words, I’m learning things too. My goal, last year, was to learn how to be understood. I stopped worrying about grammar, exactness, and worked on mastering the sounds, the basic words, basic phrases, and basically just trying to survive. Now that my site mate is here, she is attacking our version of Tashelheit methodically and aggressively. It’s great. I’m filling in so many holes in my language!
The other fun thing is that she is a dance instructor and longtime yoga student. So I can learn both dance and yoga from her! Hopefully, I mean we’ll see. Also she loves fantasy books and likes hiking. If you know me, you know that I think these are important character traits. :) Hopefully we can also collaborate on projects, working on improving things, educating people about both health and the environment. I’m excited!

bees

2009-05-10T05:19:00.001-07:00

Ait Ali is humming again. I remember last year, my head was all fuzzy with changed sleep patterns, new food, and an avalanche of new words. I stepped out onto my host family’s roof/balcony and heard this all encompassing humming. At the time I thought, “Sweet heaven, that canNOT be the flies… but there are a lot of flies… ooog.” It wasn’t flies though. It’s bees. Hundreds of thousands of bees. Hurrying to every flower they can find. The air is abuzz with their activity.
Ait Ali is known for it’s honey. There are a couple kinds made here. There is rosemary honey, or “white honey” as they call it. It is white, too, especially when it crystallizes. Pure, sparkly, creamy white. It’s delicious. There is also “black honey,” which isn’t quite black, but it is very dark. Its flavor is complex and delicious. It is not easy to get your hands on any of this honey, though. Those who have their own hives (most people) eat all the honey themselves. The cooperative sells the honey in big cities. The women’s association sells the honey to the first comers, I guess, and the que fills up fast.
This year is supposed to be really good for the bees. We had a lot of rain in the spring, so there were just bunches of flowers. The bees responded by reproducing. Hive after hive swarmed, and the beekeeper experts would don home-made bee hats, and coax the bees into a big basket with the help of a large metal spoon. A honey bee swarm is when the number of bees gets to big for the physical size of the hive. The queen then lays a new queen egg, and once she matures, she leaves. She takes half the hive with her, and they start a new hive somewhere else. Bees are much more aggressive when they are getting ready to swarm. They just come after you randomly sometimes. At different times, one part of the village would suddenly become dangerous to traverse. People would drape scarves over their heads and run. My host family’s bees swarmed, too.. they swarmed to right outside my front door. One morning I stepped outside my door, and locked it, and as I walked away, I thought “Gee, that sounds like a whole lot of bees really close by…” and I turned my head to see a couple thousand of them clustered on a small log sticking out of my neighbors wall, hanging on each other like the monarchs do in Mexico. A solid mass of humming, buzzing, worried bees. I stood stock still and stared, and then quietly walked away. A short time later the bee-man came with his bee-hat, his basket, his metal spoon and his sting-impervious hands and feet.
I like the bees. I like bees even better when they like me. Maybe someday I will be a beekeeper and grow medicinal plants (rosemary, lavender, sage…) for my bees to drink nectar from and make delicious honey. I think it would be fun!

Aftermath Part III

2009-05-10T05:18:00.000-07:00

There are about 180 bags of cement sitting in my basement. The remaining 20 have been transported up the river to the site of the repair of one of the irrigation ditches. Every morning I am awoken by a dull banging on my door at around 7 am. This is the boy who carries the bags 2 at a time on his mule up to the construction site. I walked up there myself two days ago with my camera, and got some good pictures! Where there used to be a sheer wall of crumbly, dry dirt there is now a carefully constructed rock wall cut into the side of the cliff, and paved on top like a sidewalk in the US. Like some one needed to make a fancy path for some reason. Right now they are working on the sides of the irrigation ditches, having carried several large planks of wood up there to serve as molds for the concrete. It looks good! I’m excited, and relieved, to see the work in progress.
I also went over to look at the other irrigation ditch that they laid with plastic for temporary watering purposes. To be honest I wondered a bit when they told me about the temporary plastic. Couldn’t we find a way to make that permanent? Plastic is much cheaper than the cement I have already purchased. But after seeing it, I am again relieved. The plastic, being uncontinuous, leaks, and where it leaks, the water escapes into the crumbly dirt and it does it’s thing. That is, it crumbles. There are a whole bunch of new rock, tree, dirt and other stuff fallen into the riverbed. So, in the interest of the irrigation ditches lasting any time at all, the cement is in fact necessary. My understanding of the scale of the problem of the irrigation system came slowly. First I walked up one side of the river, then I walked up the river bed, and finally up the other side of the river. It was on this third trip I really understood the engineering problem these ditches represented. Smack in the middle of 100 ft cliffs of crumbly soil was where the ditches had to go for a gravity-powered system to work. But due to the flooding, the riverbed run right up to the base of cliffs, and when the river is at flood, it doesn’t take much time at all for the river to eat away the cliff causing the whole thing to fall into the river. Again. That’s right, this could easily happen again. Thanks to my father, I keep thinking: “We need a better mousetrap.” The problem with better mousetraps is that they require more money and people who are actually engineers, not just engineer’s daughters. I can envision all I want but I don’t know what it takes to make it actually happen… for now, the villagers and I have settled for the original mousetrap. We are all praying God sends rain in more moderation this year.

Aftermath, Part 2

2009-04-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

Last month, I was visiting some people I know in the Ifrane area, and through a series off (ultimately very fortunate!) circumstances, I met a couple studying at the Ifrane university. We were crashing at the same people's house as I. They happened to mention that they had been entrusted with some money donated from the US for relief after the big earthquake in Casablanca in the last few years... and I spoke up. Mentioned that there had been major infrastructure damage and that we could definitely use the monetary help. Time passed... there were texts, phone calls, and more of the same, until I got the great news!! The director of the relief money would be very happy to see the money used in my little village!!

Followed a trip to pick up the money... it's truly terrifying to be entrusted with large amounts of cash... I know now I will never be a banker! Not that there was any doubt before... and measuring mission...

To be continued...

Aftermath, Part 1

2009-04-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you remember the flooding last fall? If only from reading my blog, you may have heard of it. We are still struggling with the aftermath of it here. I remember going to watch our little creek of a river turned into a raging torrent of coffee-with-cream colored water that roared like a giant rock polisher with the village. We would gather on cliffs overlooking the valley and watch the river pull cliffs down, over run fields, and rip full grown trees out by the roots. The men and women looked grim: sad, troubled, beaten, frustrated… even the ones whose fields were high enough to be safe from being bodily carried away. I didn’t understand why. I understood a little better when I was told that the irrigation system had been badly hurt by the flooding. I understood more when I went to go see it myself. Where the ditches weren’t filled or buried by rockslides, they had been sheered away by the water, leaving a crumbly wall of dirt and rock behind. And then I began to think about how many fields rely on that river water for irrigation… somewhere between 60% and 70% of them… and I really began to understand the worry. But the pessimism confused me. Surely there would be money forthcoming. I had read in newspapers about millions of dirhams that had been set aside specifically to repair flood-damaged infrastructure. Surely this qualified…! But time has slipped by, and the only repairs have been the emptying, by hand, of one of the three big ditches to take advantage of a seasonal spring that is currently flowing. I talked to one family that is planning to move out to our souk town this summer. They’ve had enough; they say this life is too hard. I talked to another man and his family. His words were, "there is no life here anymore. No fields, no work, nothing." So, we’ve begun looking for outside funding for repairs. Because one thing is clear: this village needs those irrigation ditches to survive. And it needs them all summer long, even when the seasonal springs stop flowing.

The Idarab

2009-04-22T07:19:00.000-07:00

After I made my way back from Figuig, I got stuck in site for almost a week. No, there wasn’t a late snowstorm, although I did, ironically, loose power. It begins to seem that if I am stuck site, I will also loose power. :) That was the result of a little windstorm, though. The reason I got stuck in site is the same reason we still haven’t had the Women’s Wellness Workshop, even though it was scheduled to occur last Monday. The greater part of Morocco has been more or less immobilized for the past week due to the striking of all road bound public transport. People say "they are doing an Idarab." The deal is, they want to change one of the accident laws, and there’s a big meeting of all the transportation big wigs soon, and they wanted to get their attention. Well, they got a lot of peoples attention, alright! The only functioning public transport was the train, expensive bus lines and those local transport you could convince to risk running the gauntlet of the striking transport folk. The most reliable form of transportation in the bled (backcountry) was to try to catch a ride with someone. People were either thumbing it or pulling strings to get around. I just hunkered down in site and decided to ride it out, after much frustration trying to get to the W.W.Workshop.
I and my two chosen women attempted to leave for the workshop, but got no further than my souk town… we were informed by text that the workshop had to be postponed because most of the women couldn’t make it due to the strike. We rescheduled for 3 days later. But had to delay again, because the strike still wasn’t over yet. And then we had to push it back again… by this time, we decided to push it back by 10 days to be sure the strike would be well and truly over! The interesting thing is that even the people who would normally carry vegetables to market aren’t going, and so there’s a temporary food shortage in many places. I myself got caught out and had to borrow some little carrots, a zuccini and one old, small, but delicious tomato from my best friend in site. To give you an idea of the scope of the strike, the Safety and Security Coordinator for all of Peace Corps Morocco was sending out texts telling us the status of the strike and what the travel policies were concerning it. So, this morning, I finally received the text telling me that the strike was OVER, lHamdulillah!! All prayers that it will not commence, and that the Workshop will go smoothly and wonderfully, and that both of my women will be able to go!

Spiderman, Spiderman...

2009-04-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

…does whatever a spider can… how many of you all remember the little jingle at the beginning of the original Spiderman comics? Well, now there are a couple of Berbers in the Middle Atlas Mountains that do. I sang it for them. J It’s amazing what little scraps of pop-culture seep into life here. Sometimes completely unappreciated, sometimes known and loved… or at least appreciated… like the Dora the Explorer backpack my little neighbor girl wears to school every day. I asked her if she knew the name of the girl on her backpack… she said no, but then I told her. But I couldn’t find a way to explain Dora the Explorer and hold her 5-year-old attention span. More universal is the appeal of hip-hop to teenagers. The love it for the same reason American teenagers do: it’s hot, it’s danceable, and their parents don’t like it. But back to Spiderman.
There was a little gum wrapper lying on the table at the house where I ate kaskarot, the late afternoon meal, today. The little boy picked it up and waved it at me, and from the depths of my memory emerged this little jingle… Spiderman, Spiderman… I couldn’t help myself, I was suddenly singing it to them. They liked it, and asked me, what does it say? So, here I was, explaining Spiderman to them, and reviewing my thievery vocabulary at the same time. This led into a conversation about which spiders in the region are poisonous to humans and which are not. **Note to self, the big ones that crawl around on the floor are the ismn (bad) ones… which means the family that used to reside in my bathroom are better off gone… I used to call them Big Scary, Little Scary, and Mama Scary. For obvious reasons. I digress… So, they asked me to sing it again, and again, and now… despite listening to Radiohead and Led Zepplin, there’s this little jingle floating around in my head…

"Spiderman, Spiderman.
Does whatever a spider can.
Spins a web, through the skies
Catches crooks, just like flies.
Look out, here comes the Spiderman…"

spring camp

2009-04-09T05:19:00.000-07:00

there is a small city, hemmed in by mountains, at the end of the Moroccan map. Figuig, city of palms, cut off from its Berber brothers in algeria, walled city. thats where i went to help out with spring camp. the only people i knew there were antonio and dunia (to use their moroccan names), but it turns out we had a really great crew! all good workers, cheerful, even in the face of adversity. i had so much fun getting to know them and having fun bringing the american to english language immersion spring camp!
figuig is a very long way from just about anywhere. it took me two days to get to Bouarfa, where we were stuck for a night because of the torrential rains. Figuig is in the desert. just across the border there are proper Saharan ergs (dunefields). but the drive down looked more like... the Serengeti. it's a high plateau, flat mostly, some slow-rolling hills, and the occasional small, rocky, morocco style mountain massif thrusting through. but it was all covered with... grass... and flowers... great streaks of purple, yellow, green, reaching to the horizon! sosososo beautiful. i miss green!!! the bus ride down from oujda takes a few hours. and it was allllll greeennnnn.... sigh of contentment...
camp was fun. the kids enjoyed it, when they weren't busy being too cool for school (some things never change). we had a raining inside incident involving all of the girls lugging their mattresses to the guys room to sleep without being dripped on from above. we had a door become unopenable, and the lock had to be knocked off with a sledgehammer. we had the 'pink vest boy', desire of the heart of every moroccan teenage girl. we had leapfrog, charades, dancing, halloween, and lots of english classes. we had a traditional wedding drum song, and one of the girls was 'taken by the music' and did the crazy hair dance. the environment club (me, antonio, nate and 15 kids) planted a medicinal plants garden (so much fun!! getting my hands in the dirt felt great!). we went for a hike to a fish-farm/irrigation pool.
we had the 'walled city' effect. people who have been subject to raiders for centuries (and still have the walls to prove it), who are separated from their trading routes by rather arbitrary borders that are now indefinitely closed, who are proudly berber in the very Arab eastern region, are walled people. they dont trust us or each other very well. and it made it hard to do silly team building activities that americans like to do at camp. you could literally see the tension between kids from different towns at times. there was a fight. did we make any headway? maybe. its hard to tell. but we tried!!! team-building, emphasis on togetherness, not joining in the between town teasing.
we had a theft, and a huge convention, and a semi-miraculous return of the stolen item, after tears, lectures, threats, tears, police, worries about honor and reputation, promises that a thing stolen from a moroccan would have had the same reaction, and finally... we got it back. thank God!
and then the kids left. and some of them cried to leave. whether they were sad to leave us, or their new girlfriend, or something else... at least they had a good time! i pray they learned something too.

an old, old conflict

2009-03-24T04:04:00.001-07:00

Sometime in the middle of January, I started noticing scarves of red and white or black and white check showing up more and more and more. Especially on young people, both male and female. These scarves are a show of support for Palestine in the continuing saga of war and peace between Palestine and Israel. It’s interesting watching the difference between the news coverage of, say, CNN, BBC, and Al Jaziera. Three different takes on it, three different ways of displaying the fights, three different levels of graphic footage. There is a LOT of support for Palestine here, but not in a scary way. People protest, they talk about it a lot, and they wait to see if the new world leaders can get a handle on the problems… I spoke to an old man, and asked him if he thought there would be peace. He said, "we will wait and see. Inchallah, there will be peace." I hope so! And I hope the support here remains peaceful, for it is only something like that that would put us onto Plan Z: evacuate. And I don’t want to evacuate. I want to be here. I do want peace, though. Fair peace, for both sides.

traditional healing

2009-03-24T04:02:00.000-07:00

My host father is a healer. He sets bones, fixes dislocations, sprains and strains, and treats various maladies including colds, arthritis and slow to heal injuries. He’s pretty darn good at bone-setting. I’ve seen him do it, and I’ve seen the results. They are impressive. A compound fracture that protruded the skin is now a mostly functioning arm. Still weak, but hopefully it’ll get there. He makes splints out of cardboard and string, or bamboo and string.
He also brands people. With a nail, and in conjunction with a blessing. It’s called "kt"-ing. This technique can be used on just about anything. On the belly for a cold, on the place of injury or pain for a slow-to-heal break or strain or arthritis or what have you. I’m beginning to wonder what percent of the people here have scars from it. Probably quite a few. The blessing is interesting. He uses a little crystal, of salt, maybe, and waves it in a circle over the area to be treated, while muttering some God-phrases that I really can’t make out at all. He then sticks the crystal in his mouth and blows/spits forcefully over the area three times, says a parting blessing and then commences the branding. After the branding comes another blessing. It seems to have some effect, or at least people think so, for they come to him from all over the village and from other villages, too.
He also has a formidable array of knowledge about various causes and effects, some of which is probably valid and some of which probably isn’t. The other night, after watching him work on a shoulder and wrist, I mentioned that I had had a screw put in my foot to fix a break. He asked if I had taken it out, and I replied no. "But you must take it out!" he said, "or you will get shellal!" And illustrated by shaking his hand like a feeble old person in the grips of Parkinson’s disease. I didn’t quite know what to say… For certainly if this were an important consideration my doctor would have told me. But my host father simply brushed that off with an "ur isin!" ("He doesn’t know!") But he should know. Doctors pay an awful lot in schooling to know just that kind of thing. I can only imagine the lawsuits… "Repair of compound fracture of femur causes Parkinson’s!" No, I don’t think that’s a good cause and effect… but how does one explain that if that were the case, someone would have figured it out by now??? I gave it up as a bad job that time. Next time, we shall see.

Hmmam

2009-03-06T11:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's an actual word, albeit spelled phonetically. Hmmams are the coolest! Actually, the hottest... they are communal baths here in Morocco. Sort of like a sauna, but with multiple rooms of various hotness, and wet. The idea is to get really hot, slough off skin, clean out pores, and wash hair and everything else in a good hot climate. I've really come to enjoy them, and think ther is really no better way to get turly clean.

That said, today takes the cake! I went to a Hmmam in a new city, a pretty big on with two sections for men an dwomen, as opposed to alternating hours like at smaller Hmmams. It was lovely and relaxing, and the people were most helpful. I am currently travellig, and so had to borrow a chair to sit on and a cup to pour water. All of this done in my Arabic... which is realy pretty bad. I call it 'Keyword Arabic'. But everyone was very helpful.

The way it works is you wet doan, and the put a special soap made of olive oil all over, and leave it for a couple minutes. It helps the skin come off once you rinse off and then start scrubbing. And scrubbing... there are special mitts for it. At some point shampooing and conditioning happen, and shaving if you are so inclined. I hear in the mens section they also strech eachother... women typically dont do this. Maybe its because many are also occupied with cleaning off their children.

So I had done all this and thought I was just about done, rinsed off all my soap and shampoo and the little chair and my mitt, and headed on my way. But, little did I know, I was not done! A mother and daughter who I had noticed enjoying their Hmmam together tugged on my hand, and motioned a question: did you have someone scrub your back? I motioned and tried to say that I had done it myself. She, understandind, shook her head in dissapproval, and motioned emphatically for me to sit down in front of her. So, after my protests met with no giving way, I sat myself down, and proceeded to be scrubbed more thoroughly than I have ever been scrubbed before. Back, arms, sides... all rescrubbed! She finished and rinsed me off, handed me my scrub mitt and motioned me to get to work on my legs... again... so I scrubbed away, and then rinsed off. I asked her if I was done (I was learning that my bathing was no longer only my own concern...), and she handed me a loofah with her own soap on it. Lovely soap it turns out. Must have been half oil, because it left my skin amazingly soft. I was finally rinsed off (think buckets helpfully splashed and dumped over my head), and then my things re-rinsed, and I was done. According to all involved. :) I turned, told her 'God bless your parents,' ie. thanked her, and went on my merry and smooth-skinned way. I don't know if I will ever be this clean again!

“Bum-be-dum-bum-buuummm!”

2009-02-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been teaching English classes at the town primary school. It’s pretty entertaining, and good for me to have a bit of an external schedule to stick to. It started pretty informally, that is, I only talked to the director of the school. He seems to be very enthusiastic about it though. Now we are getting paperwork squared away with the regional office. I sincerely hope it doesn’t cause any problems!
So last Wednesday (I teach on Wednesdays and Thursdays) after class I had a couple of errands to run down town. I came upon a group of my students, girls, all clustered together. They came running up to me, and I noticed a couple of boys on bikes moving away from the girls but watching us. The girls came up to me and said, "what is this?? : You ha a bee asz!!" I had no idea, and asked them to say it again, and if it was in English. "Yes, yes! You ha a bee asss!" A sudden thought came to me… but I didn’t want it to be… what is it again? "You ha a bee ass!!!" Yeah, if it’s in English it must be… You have a big… I asked them who it was who told them this, and they pointed to the same boys on the bikes. Hmmm. I’m thinking, you never know what kids will come up with! And I’m still wondering, who taught them that??? It most certainly was not me! And clearly it’s being applied to me…
I mean, it’s kind of true. Elyse can testify to the fact that I do not fit into her swimming shorts… it’s the way it goes, and frankly I don’t really mind. Except, I didn’t realize people, that is men here were, well, commenting on it. Although, in retrospect I really should have realized that it couldn’t be only happening in the cities. There was this one guy in Marrakech (and it is Kesh, after all) who made a comment about both me and my friend Alicia, in English, in earshot, loud enough for us to hear while walking behind us: "Nice! Very, very nice!"
Which is all pretty funny, really. Once one decides that it just is and won’t change and is therefore best thought of as little as possible, and in as bouncy and irreverent a manner as can be found. Bum-be-dum-bum-buuuummmm!!! J

Food

2009-02-16T05:22:00.000-08:00

Food recently eaten and/or cooked:
Wheat bread. Baba ganoush. All bean chili. Lentils and macaroni and curry. Coffee with bread and olive oil. Breakfast barley. Cheese omelette with toast and Mom’s black-raspberry jam. Egg and tomato spiced and eaten with bread. Grilled cheese and tomato soup. Chocolate chip cookies with flax seeds and whole wheat flower.
I’m expanding my culinary enterprises! It’s fun, and delicious. The baba ganoush though, was a bit of an undertaking. First, make tahini from scratch (it’s pretty simple, just olive oil and sesame seeds) and then roast the eggplant and then throw it in the blender together with other ingredients and blend. Chill. Eat with delicious bread. I’m learning how to use a blender properly. Blenders were rarely used in the house when I was growing up, but I am quickly learning how useful they are, if used enthusiastically and properly. I never would have thought a blender could make tahini paste… but there you have it! They can.
I love making bread, but unlike my friend Adrienne, do not often rustle up the gumption to do it. But the thing is, if I want bread here, I a) buy the bland, dry, white store bread in my souk town and transport it back b) beg it from my neighbors or c) make it myself. So, inspired by Adrienne, guided by the bread book sent from home, and motivated by my desire for delicious wheat bread, I hope to be making bread far more frequently.
Chocolate chip cookies are delicious, and one of the things that seem to have more or less universal appeal. I have given them to many a Moroccan with great success. Other things have had less success, like zuccini bread and pumpkin bread. But chocolate chip cookies, no prob. J Which means I spend a fair amount of time chopping up bars of chocolate.
I found powdered tomato soup in Marjane! What is Marjane? Wal-mart. Wal-mart in Morocco. And thus in French and Arabic. I have spent far too much of my money there… as time goes by I find more and more products that I thought I could only get at Marjane elsewhere. Which is good! I’m glad to be supporting small business owners! It’s just a little more difficult to unearth things in tHanuts sometimes. THanuts tend to be all higgledy-piggledly in organization. Well, to the casual observer that is. I’m sure the storeowners would say otherwise. The powdered tomato soup, though… that’s gonna be hard to find elsewhere. I guess I’ll just have to use it sparingly. But for the occasional lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup, I may just be willing to go to Marjane. Wal-mart. Sigh. Globalization is evident everywhere you go… I remember watching a Target go up in the 5 months I was in Dar es Salaam… and just recently I realized that one of the reasons the herders here have such large herds of goats and sheep is that they can sell them to city folk at a good price for the annual feasts. On the other hand, I just bought the most delicious eggs from my neighbor. There’s an interesting mix of local and decidedly not local food in my kitchen. I know which one is easier on my conscience, though.

Ps: the other thing i recently ate for the first time was... alfalfa! Yup, that's right, cow food. Carefully chopped, steamed, spiced and oiled, it was, in fact, delicious. I am only wondering, can it possibly have had any nutritional goodness in it??

Marrakech

2009-02-07T13:17:00.001-08:00

Marrakech!!

It’s one of two truly famous cities in Morocco, and frankly one of two truly dangerous cities. You know, like New York City… or maybe Los Angles… actually, I don’t know that there’s a comparable city in the US. I had yet to visit it, and wasn’t really itching to, either. There have been some not-so-fun stories comin’ out of that city from other PCVs. I however, had a lot of fun there! Yes, a woman swindled me out of 10 DH for a poor quality Fatima-flower in henna on my hand, but that’s fine. My fault for sitting down.

Every year in Marrakech there is an international marathon. I came down to watch Anthony, Sarah, and Moira run the full and a couple others run the half. Little did I know that about 15 PCVs total were signed up to race! So there was quite a bunch of us, either running or serving as moral support. I ended up running around the city on foot quite a bit without even racing. I didn’t run no 42.5 km (26.2 miles), though! It was fun hanging out at the finish line and seeing all the different runners come in. There was one girl (I believe she was the winner of the full) who looked like she was from the Ethiopia region of Africa, and un-numbered French people, even a woman who has now run well over 40 marathons on most of the continents I think. For those runners of you, most of the PCVs running either half or full didn’t come in with blistering times. For the full, only one of us came in under 4 hours. But then, it’s not always easy to train properly in the back of beyond! One of my friends is a talented runner, and he gave up on the marathon because training was proving to be insufficient. Well, I was still inspired to train and see what happens next year. Even though my site is basically a town on the side of a steep and rocky mountain. Most of the terrain is therefore quite hilly and the ground often made up of 2-inch diameter up to head-sized rocks. Perfect for long distance running! J

We also found this neat café, Earth Café, on one of the side streets there. A vegetarian café. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was vegan, which is quite simply astounding to find in Morocco! Meat is a big deal here. The food was great, so was the atmosphere, and then the owner came to chat with us. Turns out he’s a Moroccan who has lived and run restaurants in Sydney, Australia, Los Angeles and NYC. Here he runs his café and an educational farm. The kind of deal where people can go stay there and work and learn where their food comes from. Super cool, and the guy’s attitude was amazing. It was fun to see the response of the PCVs. Some volunteers become quite jaded, and to see them inspired by this guy’s positivity was awesome. I, too, felt lifted by it. Highly recommended if ever you go to Marrakech. It’s near the hotel Sindi Sud, if that helps. J

The thing about Marrakech is how far away it is. It’s a 13 hour bus ride direct, and a good deal further if you go round the long way. However, that distance means it’s a good bit further south, which was fantastic! Warmth! Hurry up spring!

Overview of January

2009-02-07T13:16:00.001-08:00

4 February 2009

Wow, January just flew by! Which is good, seeing as it’s the second coldest, and darkest month here. December is both colder and darker. Now, spring is tussling with winter over who possesses this land. It’s still very cold a night sometimes, but the sun (when it breaks through the winter storms that march along the mountains whipped by gusts of wind) is fierce to my now pale skin. Yes, that’s right, I’ve already been sun-burned. In February.

January flew by because I was either hosting someone in my site or out of site on a lot of those weekends. After Adrienne left, Natalie came to help me care for Trouble as he healed, and then Erin came up to evaluate my site for a new health volunteer. Lots of fun hosting everyone, but after all the hosting followed by traveling for meetings, marathons, and naming ceremonies, I was cashed! So, these last days of January and first days of February have included some good down time.

It looks like I’m going to get a site mate in April or May! I’m excited about that, and hoping for the best. Peace Corps really wants to send a man, but the villagers want another girl “like me.” There are pros and cons either way. It would be good to have a guy, because he could reach out to the men of the village more effectively than ever I could, especially on issues of STIs. A man would also help them to get a wider picture of what US culture looks like in a person than a woman would. A woman, though, is an easier fit into the culture here. She isn’t a threat to the woman of the village’s honor (and thus no competition to the men either). She can work with the women easily, visit homes more easily, broach difficult topics with families more easily because of that one reason. So we shall see.

My own projects go so slowly! A new horizon or two of challenges has appeared with the building of the Women’s Center. The first and most difficult is that of infighting within the association I’m trying to work with. This fighting existed long before I was here, and now… now it continues. What do they want to do with the honey? Sell it and keep the money for helping out with building the building? Eat it and enjoy it? A lot of this seems to stem from a general lack of administrative organization and good decision-making skills. Unsurprising as none of these women have much experience in this sort of organization, and compromises don’t seem to have been forth-coming. Following that are mis-understandings, and who knows? Accusations have certainly run thick from certain quarters. I still have hope though, because they have (several of them, anyway) a strong will to succeed. And I have to believe that where there is a will… we will find a way. I started teaching English in the school. I hope that out of that and Environmental Education Club will get started. Certainly the kids are enthusiastic about learning English! There’s one older boy who comes, we can call him Joe, a friend of mine and a member of my extended host family. He’s the only person of his age who comes, and also the only of my students who will bring in long lists of words to learn. His enthusiasm makes me happy, but it also makes me sad. He’s not finishing high school, I’m pretty sure because his family needs help at home. He’s a sharp cookie, too, and a full education is something he would take advantage of, I’m sure! Literacy lessons for the women have still not happened… a million small delays in finding a place to hold them… a million more in my search for a woman teacher… And in my other project, the herders are out to pasture and that makes it really, really hard to hold a meeting. So that goes uber slowly. In short, patience and stubborn persistence seem to be my two best skills right now. J I think I can thank my time on crutches for developing those traits in me… never thought that time would have a direct impact on my later life like this!

There, that’s a bit of a summary about the past few weeks. Peace to all ya’ll!

2009-01-12T04:53:00.000-08:00

An Eulogy of Sorts
I have lost one of my kittens. I will post a picture of both of them here. The tabby one’s name was Sean or Knuzzle, and the other’s name is Travis or Trouble.
About a week ago, I and my friend Adrienne (who was visiting) woke up and began making breakfast when we heard a strange sound. I turned to watch the younger of my two kittens, Knuzzle, vomit a strange yellow liquid. I cleaned it up and remarked that I hope he wasn’t sick, or that he hadn’t eaten something rotten. You see, he had been perfectly rambunctiously normal the night before. I thought he would rid himself of whatever it was and be fine. But as the day progressed he continued to vomit every few hours, and refused to eat or drink. I began to worry that perhaps he was getting dangerously dehydrated. But I didn’t know what it was, still hoping that it would pass in good time. All through the night he continued to vomit at intervals, looking more and more depressed and tired. The following morning I contemplated going to Outat L-Haj for to see the veterinarian there, but instead opted to call the Canadian vet in Fez. Who was spectacularly unhelpful. Increasingly worried, I watched my little Knuzzle deteriorate. He lost weight, he hid from us. I went out and got the number of another veterinarian, and tried to call him. No answer. I had to go to a meeting with my ladies, and because of this I did not take the last transit into town… later that evening, Adrienne and I watched my little kitten struggle into death. I wrapped him in a cloth with teddy bears on it. I cried. I cuddled my remaining kitten.
The next morning Adrienne and I awoke to a most unwelcome noise: my second kitten had contracted whatever it was. I made my decision without deliberating, put my cat into a box with a soft cloth, packed a backpack and caught the first transit to Outat. Adrienne graciously agreed to teach English to 30 plus kids-without knowing more than 5 words of the local language-so I could go try to save the life of Trouble. I went to my host family’s house in Outat, and my Aunt of some sort agreed to go with me to the vets so as to translate for me from Tashelheit to Moroccan Arabic. The vet had to be called in, and when he came he seemed unconcerned. He gave Trouble 5 mL of some drug and told me to feed him up. We dropped Trouble off at my family’s house, and I, slightly hopeful, went to the cyber to look up the name of the drug. It turned out to be sorbitol, a sugar-alcohol that is often used in make-up. And therefore of little use to him… So I put Google to work for me, and looked up cat diseases. Before long I had made an educated guess based upon my observations and the list of symptoms and the high mortality rate. (Note: two other kittens had recently died of similar symptoms next door). Decision: Feline Distemper, or Feline Leukopenia (CHECK THIS SPELLING). Mortality rate over 60%. I went and purchased some meds and learned how to give a cat a shot (the skin is a whole lot thinner than a cows… obviously…). I proceeded to try to nurse him back to health. With the help of my host sister, my host aunt, and later Adrienne, we have gotten him past the 5 day mark of probable survival, but he still refuses to eat. I am so so so so thankful to everyone who helped, consoled, and encouraged me… Adrienne, Anthony, Natalie, Erin, my parents, Johnny, Liz, Nate, and Sarah.
It’s interesting: animals become so important to us as companions. I am grateful that he has survived this far… I am now certain that living alone is less than ideal, though perfectly workable, for me. I hope and pray my little buddy will pull through and beat the stats.

Note: I am happy to report that Trouble has made it to day 7 and has begun eating and drinking small amounts on his own!!! Just getting him this far is a fantastic thing, I only hope he continues to improve. :)

Christmas, post from dec # 3

2009-01-12T04:40:00.001-08:00

Christmas was fun. It was also an adventure to figure out how I was going to celebrate this holiday with others who also celebrate it. So, I and several friends planned to meet in Midelt, at the (I believe Franciscan) monastary there. We gathered on Christmas Eve, and headed right out to the monastary. What an amazing place! These monks 5 of them, live and work there with the people in Midelt and the surrounding area. They mostly seem to work with artisns to help them promote their products for sale. Tey also provide a wonderfully welcoming place for pilgrims and Christians to celebrate holidays, go on pilgrimages and generally practice that religion in a community, as it is meant to be practiced.
Thus, they asked no payment for the rooms, beds, bathrooms, food and drinks that they provided for us and several other visitors over Christmas. Donations were made but not because they were requested, but because they were so deserved! We all went to Christmas Eve mass, all 2 plus hours of it in French. Some of the songs were familiar, some not. Much of the ceremony was unfamiliar to me, but the two catholics in our number did their best to explain how things worked to us of Protestant background. I particularly appreciated the fact that I was welcomed for communion. It made me feel welcomed and at home and right. Thank you!!
After the service we gathered for cookies and hot chocolate, delicious! The following day we rose just in time for breakfast, went to another service and then had a delicious lunch complete with salads and... wine? It was so strange to be presented with this evidence that the Christian religion doesn not view alcoholic beverages in the same way the Muslim religion does... :)
After saying a sad goodbye and a heartfelt thanks to the monks we continued to the home of another Peace Corps volunteer to make a delicious dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffing, apple pie, pumpkin bread and corn bread. Mmmm... happy tummy memories!
The following morning some of us headed back to our respective homes, while others stayed a while longer. I was lucky enough to host one of my friends at my house on his way back from Christmas, extending the holiday spirit another day!!

In general, it was great!! So wonderful to be a part of that tradition even in a culture centered around different traditions. A little like going home! Next year perhaps I will try to hold a pre-Christmas celebration for a little cross-cultural exchange in my village, we will see! Some people requested to be a part of that next year.

So, yeah, hooray for a Merry Christmas!

post from dec #2

2009-01-12T04:36:00.002-08:00

Of Loneliness --early December
1) I’m usually not the one who is homesick. I have traveled much in my life, and I love it. I am used to being away from home, and loved ones. Distance does change things. I remember being in Tanzania, and realizing there (just about literally half the world away from home) that distance does make a difference. Somehow, though it seems like it shouldn’t, you miss folks more. Well, time makes a difference too. Yes, I saw this coming. But its still somewhat unexpected… or rather, what I miss is unexpected. My family of course, but also places. Seeing the sunset from my parents’ house, the Havens’ Homestead (sorry guys, but you do have that sign! And you know I love it), Madeline Island, Hope Community Church and my alma mater, Macalester. And then other places even less expected: Dar es Salaam, my research campsite by the Serengeti, the Boundary Waters, the flippin’ highway between certain places… I think I miss green. And sunsets. Though I have really come to appreciate the beauty of the clouds reflecting the suns light as it finally sinks behind the horizon hidden by the huge mountains surrounding the village. Sometimes the light somehow comes around the backside of the mountain and turns the snow up there the same color as the clouds. It’s so beautiful!! I love these mountains, denuded and forbidding though they are. You could also say bold and majestic in their simplicity and starkness.
2) Intellectual isolation caught me off guard. A lifetime of listening to my father talk about physics, politics and whatever else catches his eye, of reading good books and talking them over with family and friends, the blessing of smart and creative people as my friends, 4 rich years surrounded by intelligent and caring people at Macalester, and then finally a similar situation during training here… how little I realized how much value that had in my life! Not to say that people here are not intelligent, not at all!! There are some super sharp cookies here! But relatively few have ventured into high school, and far fewer into higher education, fewer still have seen other cultures and places. Especially women, those who I spend most of my time with. Conversation is gossip, clothes, the cost of food, the weather, and family. All worthy topics to be sure, but sometimes I just wish for more! Yes, I know, that’s what cell phones and other PCVs are for. And truly, I do call and talk to them every now and then. Every now and then.
3) "Lonely for a doe." Watership Down, anyone? Maybe it’s the constant (and I mean CONSTANT) questions about whether I’m married, when I will be married, and to whom, or maybe it’s just the lack of males I am close to physically around me. I have lived almost my entire life in a co-ed situation. I grew up with my brother. I always lived on mixed gender floors or in a mixed gender house during college. I have had pretty close male friends almost constantly since high school. Thus, to have no men to hang with, talk with, mix with is… strange and not exactly to my liking. I can’t help thinking we were made male and female to complement each other. Nope, I don’t need a man, as people here sometimes put it, but gee, it sure would be nice!
4) The act of being alone. Strange to say, at the same time I feel lonely here, I often feel the need to be alone here. Go for a walk with the trees for company. Or rocks and aromatic bushes as the case may be… hole myself up in my house and work on my mending, or my shelves, or read books. Tolstoy right now, and lots of him. People here don’t do alone. They don’t sleep alone, don’t walk alone, don’t work alone if they can help it. It’s great, because if I want to I can just drop in and hang out (provided there is the proper ratio of male to female adults around). But that means I am constantly on alert, working hard to understand what is said around me, to respond in the context of their culture and language, to represent my culture, religion, country and organization (well) and to be alert to opportunities for educational/work-related conversations. It’s a bit tiring. So I retreat to my (cold) house with my (warm and mischievous) kittens to let myself just be myself. Or I pick a direction and start walking.

post # 1 from december

2009-01-12T04:36:00.001-08:00

December 11, 2008
The past few days I have been going from house to house to house all day long, greeting people with the special greeting reserved for the big holidays here: "Mbruk L3id!" It is the largest festival of the year, L3id Amqrant. It lasts 3 days, or 5 days, or 10 days depending on who you ask. Formally three days I think, judging from the number of people who have told me that. This is important information for me, because I need to know just how much time I have to try to go to the house of everyone I know and greet them and be persuaded to sit down and have tea and a kabab or two and maybe some bread and olive oil… in other words there is a whole lot of eating going on here! And I have learned (once again) that there is a definite limit to how much protein + oil + fat that I can eat and digest happily. Unfortunately I do not know exactly where that limit falls… and marinated kebabs made of just-slaughtered-this-morning-lamb happen to be delicious! So I just try to pace myself…
Interestingly, yesterday and today I kept getting asked about how things work in the US. Ie. are your children yuar (troublesome) too? Do wives fight with their husbands in the US? Yes, and yes. Or, perhaps more accurately, there are difficult children and easy children everywhere, and I imagine most wives and husbands run up against each other at least once and a while. Being two separate people and all… Not having the time, I didn’t go into detail. That is to say, yes we have difficult children, but there is a slightly different ethic of discipline. I’ll describe the way it is here since that is easier for me to put into words. When a child is young here, they are more or less (depending on the family) the center of the planet. Even moreso if they are male. And the favorite method for making a child to stop crying is to give them what they want. The predictable result is that they become quite spoiled. At least for a while… in most families, this is balanced by the fact that they child slowly learns that everyone else is equally (or slightly less equally if they are female) entitled to what they want as well. The importance of family and community is slowly taught to the child. I wonder if a lack of contentment is also taught, but I’m not so sure about that. It seems to work alright for the most part.
Of course, there are children who are just spoiled too. The children that prompted the question are two of the most spoiled little one I have ever seen. A little boy and his older sister girl, who are constantly vying for the attention of everyone around, and are especially concerned with getting as much or more as their sibling… for example, we sat down for the evening snack (kaskarot) and the hostess put down a plate of cookies. The little boy had been sitting there sipping his tea with a taunting eye on his sister (who had none… remember tea here is so sweet it might as well be soda) when he spotted the cookies. It was classic! His face lit up and he said "Gateau!" or "Cookies!" And proceeded to grab handfuls. His sister was right behind them, and soon they had half the plate in their collective possession… leaving the rest of us (four or five people) to the rest. Fortunately, the hostess (not their mother) is a no-nonsense kind of women. "Ee-HEE!" she said (that means no). "You get only one at a time!" And she grabbed the whole lot of them out of both of their hands and then handed each back one. No tears, they know not to mess with this woman. Contrast the screams and tears when their mother mediated a fight over actual soda the day before. In a word, piercing. It reminded me so of Captains Courageous, when the little boy is so spoiled in the beginning!! Its interesting, because their mother gets mad at them for behaving poorly, but doesn’t get after them until they cross a certain line, nor does she respond when other people point out her children’s misbehavior. She only disciplines what she sees. I am certain that there are mothers like this in the US, even though I haven’t had the opportunity to observe them so closely. As I still do not (to my frustration) understand the whole of what is said the whole of the time, I have plenty of opportunity for careful observation!

Travellint--second real deceber post

2008-12-08T05:21:00.001-08:00

How is it possible that it takes me almost 2 whole days to get from Casablanca to my site but right around 36 hours to get from Casablanca to Buenos Aires? And that’s with a generous layover partway there. Let me tell ya something, I didn’t expect to realize that I had taken ease of travel for granted! This has been one of the most insistent realizations though. Pretty much no matter how I spin it, it takes darn close to 6 hours (if I am lucky) to get to the nearest big city, and almost 24 hours to make it to the Atlantic Coast. 24 hours on the way out that is. It’s at least 36 hours in the other direction, if not nearly 48. It’s funny, because it really isn’t that far if you calculate the kilometers/miles. It just the transportation system. Either you take grand taxis (downside: you have to switch in each city most times, so sometimes you get stuck partway) or the suq bus (stops at every small town on the way, dramatically lengthening the trip) or a transit van (same problem as suq bus) or the train/high-end bus (expensive and only available in big cities).
Thus, traveling takes a while, and you never can predict what is going to happen. Once, the taxi I was in got stuck in 2 foot deep dust. It was supposed to be a short cut ("short cuts make long delays," anyone?) but the driver slowed way down before heading off road. ‘Keep going!’ I thought. Nope. He slowed waaaay down. So that our previous copious inertia was reduced to zip, and instead of scooting over the dust, we just sunk straight into it. It’s a habit of drivers here to slow waaaay down whenever they go over a bump or rough terrain. Good for the shocks I guess but makes you way more likely to get stuck. We spent a good 10 minutes revving the engine and spinning wheels (ie. sinking deeper in the dust). A kind transit driver stopped by, and attempted to pull us out with a very light weight rope. It broke. Twice. Then another vehicle got stuck nearby attempting to go around us. A bus went by to my destination… I contemplated jumping ship… er… taxi. Another truck came along with a chain (‘Ah ha! I thought. ‘Now we are getting somewhere!’) With difficulty we found a place to hook it on, positioned the truck, stuffed dead bushes under the taxis wheels and all the men got over there and pushed. (Yes, I tried to help, too) And, with a bit of spinning of wheels and a LOT of flying dust, we were free.
Or all that flooding washing out the road, and I had to get out and hike 5 km to meet another transit.
Or the time(s) I said, forget transit, I will take my bike and carry it across all the wash out zones.
Or the time I got stuck in Sefrou and had to stay with a Moroccan family overnight.
Or the time I got stuck between four carsick people, all vomiting at the same time. Good thing I don’t get carsick! Actually, it was pretty funny, because I had my kittens with me, too, and at that exact moment when I and the transit conductor were both realizing I was surrounded by vomiting on all sides my kittens started making a racket trying to escape (who can blame them?). The guys were like, "her cats are sick too!!" and we all laughed.
Or the sheep, goats, chickens, bags of flour, crates of grapes, blocks of cement, Tvs, beds… everything… that get packed into the transits with people.
Yup, transport is an adventure. I know volunteers who have even made a game of it, see who can find the most creative transport method from point A to point B. Any method will do… makes for good stories.
Nope, that’s right. Never a dull moment!

Religion Revisited... first real December post

2008-12-08T05:19:00.000-08:00

Religion Revisited 01-12-08
On my way back from Thanksgiving with my family, I stopped in Fez to recover. At that point I had been traveling for about 38 hours straight… so I got a hotel near an area I know pretty well, and spent some time wandering the streets through the cold rain and more time chillin’ in the neat place called CafeClock. It’s a place where expats, students both foreign and domestic, and occasionally PCVs mix. They have good food, decent drinks, a cool culture of art display and (most importantly!) free wireless internet! So I came in, and found an open couch in the library area, and set up. A little while later two Moroccan-looking women came in and greeted the woman sitting next to me, and then commenced to speaking in excellent English! It turns out one of those two "Moroccan-looking" women was a cultural British ethnic Pakistani taking some time out of her teaching career to learn Arabic and immerse herself in a Muslim culture.
Now, all three of these women are well educated, intelligent, motivated, and religious people. So they started chatting about this, and that, and then the conversation moved to religion. Different experiences they have had, lessons they have learned, methods of prayer and worship they have tried… I am NOT used to listening in on these conversations! It was amazing!!! It was also a kind of trippy experience, because the way they were talking, even many of the lessons they had learned about God and about themselves were so very, VERY similar to what it sounds like when I get together with my close girlfriends who care as much about following Jesus as I do. Like, learning the benefits of repentance, or the beauty of certain prayers, or how difficult it is to balance modern life with religious life, or how frustrating it is when people of religious conviction use religion to continue to keep women "under control." I sat there listening for a very long time, an hour at least, and then finally screwed up the courage to say something about all these thoughts. I had chimed in here and there before, but it took me a while to chime in on the religious conversations.
And they were so understanding, welcoming, and pleased that I was joining in. I remember one of them saying, "well, of course this reminds you of your religion, for it is said ‘there are many roses, but only one water source.’" Which I still think is very beautiful. Forget for a moment all the debates about who is saved and who isn’t (I am SO glad I am not God and don’t have to make decisions like that!!), it was amazing to find this common ground with these young women, and to have that conversation. So often here, I feel isolated, just as that British woman feels surrounded and edified, by the religious life here. And I wonder if she feels like that in England??… maybe, but the general public here are far, far more religious than the general public in any other country I have been in. Secondly, it was amazing to get the educated feminine perspective on religion here. There are one, maybe two other women in my village who have been to college in my village. One is the doctor at the clinic and the other is nurse at the clinic. So often all I get for my questions here is "because God wants," or "because God doesn’t want" for an answer. And to just hear these women engaging their religion emotionally, spiritually AND intellectually was a huge, huge breath of fresh air. And made me take a step back from what I had been thinking. I admit it, I had been just about fed up with this seemingly close-minded, insistent, rule-heavy religion. And here, for once I found the fabled tolerance, devotion and thoughtfulness I had heard of. So, l-Hamdulillah (Thanks be to God) for the opportunity to meet those remarkable women!

Books I have been reading and the thoughts they inspire

2008-12-08T05:14:00.000-08:00

A Generous Orthodoxy. Hmmm.
I’m reading a book called A Generous Orthodoxy. It’s good, I recommend it so far, to just about anyone. Just buckle up and be prepared for a very cerebral look at faith. Which is cool, because I just read a different book that approached faith from a very different angle. Mysticism and experience. Eat, Pray, Love was the name of the second book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it! Both of these books happen to be a part of some things I’ve been thinking about.

First off, let me say, I have yet to be convinced by any of the arguments presented to me intending to convert me to Islam.

However, I’m curious. I’m looking around me and trying to learn from my neighbors, both American and Moroccan. Plus, faith is practiced differently for me here. No weekly communal worship, very little in the way of singing. It was an emtional experience to listen to the recording of "Jesus Christ is Risen Today" by the Trinity College Choir, complete with amazing organ music. Just to remember that I am not, in fact, the only Christian/Jesus-follower left on the face of the planet.

But!! This is not all bad! I’m being forced to make this work, just me and my God, and that is a good thing. So, my prayer now includes Yoga, because it focuses me in the present, which is a good place to pray from. I am slowly working my way through the Bible, front to back. And there is, actually a church in Ifrane, a mere 6 hours away. I hope to go sometime in the relatively near future.

All of this has been a bit toungue in cheek, but I am quite serious about all this. Praying gets me through the day. Yoga gets my day started right, and so does reading the Bible. Meditating on 2 Timothy 1:5-7 (-ish) motivates me. "For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but of love and of power and of self-discipline." So when I’m afraid to call a meeting because I don’t know… so many things… I remember that. I am not to be afraid, because of the spirit that was given me. I just have to live in that spirit. (Just? Yeaah… it’s not easy always… not in America and not here either) And I remember that all I really have to worry about now is the next step. The one after that comes after this one, so I won’t really know what it is anyway until I take the step that’s right in front of me so I might as well take it and see what happens. Hell, I came here to take chances! So take ‘em already!!

So, a generous orthodoxy… well, I got sidetracked, but a generous orthodoxy is a cool book. It’s got stuff on all sorts of different Christian denominations and talks about the strengths of each. It also talks about the current downfalls of the church, and he doesn’t pull his punches. For all those out there who died a little inside every time certain political leaders professed their faith brazenly, this is a breath of fresh air. And as for the other book, well it’s about healing. From the heart, in a place of openness and freedom. Freedom to practice devotion in whatever way comes sincerely from the heart. And that, too, is a breath of fresh air. Perhaps especially here, in a place of tradition that guides and encloses. Not always in a bad way, but not always in a good way either. So yeah, I’d recommend either book, and if you do read it, please DO share your thoughts with me. I love talkin’ about this stuff! By whichever modes of communication I find available to me. J

Fun with Knives

2008-12-08T05:13:00.000-08:00

Fun with Knives
16.11.08
Actually, I’m kind of surprised I hadn’t done it before. Slice my finger open, that is. See, there aren’t really cutting boards here. So, when I was helping my host mothers prepare dinner, it’s just our hands, the veggies, and a knife. Sometimes terribly dull, sometimes very, very sharp. And this includes vegetables like carrots and onions and tomatoes. There are some different techniques that I learned to avoid cutting myself, and they worked while I was living with my host family, and cutting veggies the Moroccan way. For example: when chopping an onion, hold the onion in the palm of one hand and chop it up, but don’t go all the way through. Then slice through the now pre-cubed onion. Pretty slick, right? Peeling tomatoes is tricky. Yes, I said peeling tomatoes. Moroccans (or at least Berbers in the two regions where I have lived) have a strong predilection to peeled vegetables. So, not only carrots, turnips and potatoes are peeled, but tomatoes and cucumbers, too. I believe this may have something to do with the general lack of teeth often observed… but who knows! So, to peel a tomato, you really do want a sharp knife, because a dull one just can’t make it through the skin. But you can make do by stabbing the point of the knife in to make an entrance and then pull of the skin from there.
But tonight I was chopping veggies American style, that is, using a plastic plate as a cutting board. And I was chopping fast, thinking about other things, and then I felt my knife hit my thumb tip. No pain, not yet. Too sharp of a blade and too fast moving. My nerves felt mostly the pressure. And there I am halfway through a soup recipe with my thumb. As I want to eat dinner, I keep cooking, and administer first aid to myself at the same time. Hopefully no blood got in the soup, but I guess it doesn’t really matter since only I am eating it anyway… somehow the soup got cooked, and my thumb was washed, allowed to stop bleeding and bandaged all at the same time. The soup turned out well, but the beans still aren’t quite done. I haven’t mastered beans yet. But the real miracle is that I didn’t take off another patch of skin at least while making first aid white bean soup. J

Games Children Play

2008-12-08T05:12:00.000-08:00

Games Children Play 15 November 2008
Ever watched children play with nothing but trash and rocks and love it? Well, I remember doing it as a kid, and I know that my friends did but I bet that is a sight increasingly rare in the suburbs of the US of A.
Anyway, I know for a fact that I was nowhere near as creative with my rock and trash games as the kids here are. Or, perhaps, some of the rock and trash games have been ‘tidied up’ over the years. For example: every child and woman (and probably men, too) knows how to play a complicated version of jacks. Find 5 small rocks and toss them up and try to catch them all on the back of your hand. How many you catch determines how many you have to pick up each time you attempt once you put all the rocks but one on the ground. You toss one rock into the air, scoop up a certain number of rocks and then catch the first rock on its way down. Or something like this… I still don’t get it entirely. They play hopscotch, too, but they call it meetch. It goes like this: scratch out the grid on the ground with a stick (there are two main shapes) and then throw a rock to a specific square and hop everywhere but there, and then come back, but pick up the rock with one hand on your way. And the ever popular mud-pies… sardine cans, some of mom’s baby celery, bottle caps, dirt, rocks = lunch!! And the most impressive of all: trash fastened together properly makes an awesome car for boys. You can even steer it if you attach a long stick to the front axle. Neat, huh?
And then there’s rock paper scissors. Yup, that’s right, it’s here, too! Only the kids say "Siss, boom, bah!" and then they shoot. I think the general method is to have the whole group throw down, and the losers step out, and then the winners go again. If there are ties, then they go against each other specifically. Or so it seems… I love rock paper scissors… as a decision making method between people it’s great. Definite and entertaining decision-making! If only I could play rock paper scissors with myself effectively…

election night

2008-11-06T05:34:00.000-08:00

Barack Hussein Obama is our 44th President-Elect!!!!! (I sincerely hope I nailed the spelling on his name…) I am very much excited about this. Do you know what this means to the developing world? In this country where there is both blatent and latent racism, people have told volunteers that there was no way Obama would win because he is African American, this is a powerful statement. We Americans are inching toward being truly colorblind!! We’re not there yet, but this is a great step. I cannot say how proud I am. His heritage, too, is of great encouragement to the developing world. If the child of a Kenyan and an American can become the president of the United States, then there truly is vast opportunity for all peoples on this planet! The message says, have hope! Shoot for the stars, you just might make it!!

I am currently at in-service training, or IST, and that means that we have access to the internet and to televisions every day. Last night, we set up camp in the sitting room in the hotel where we are being put up for the training. There’s a 5-hour difference between us and the eastern seaboard of the United States, which means that the declaration of Obama’s election happened at 4 am for us, and his acceptance speech wasn’t until nearly 5 am. So, yes, we stayed up all night long. It was fun! We drew ourselves a map and colored it in as the election results came in. The majority of us had already voted by absentee ballot, so yes, we did participate in this election. And in some states, like North Carolina, it’s so close even absentee ballots are needed to determine the result! The result of this is that there are some very tired PCVs wandering around like zombies this morning. J I myself snagged between 3-5 hours of sleep, I’m not really sure.

In any event, this is history, this is our history, to my generation, this is ours!!! Ours to celebrate and, as our new president-elect said in his acceptance speech, our opportunity to make change in the world. It is also an opportunity for all ages, but for my generation this is our first testing. Let us all remember that hardship is an opportunity, because it means change, and change can go either way. It is entirely up to us what we do with our lives. I encourage everyone to make the most of the time given them. This has been inspiring and motivating for me, and I hope it is for you, too!

note on flooding

2008-10-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

it continues. its bad. one storm dropped over 70mm of rain in one hour in a nearby city. that's well over 20 inches of rain for you non-metric folk. people have died (not in my town, but nearby). our mud houses are in danger of falling down. mine seems to be weathering the weather really well, considering its previously decrepid state. only minor leaking, and not in a way that makes me worry. a village up the river valley that is located directly below a cliff is in danger of a landslide.
as far as i can tell i am safe (or as safe as i can be) but we could use prayers. we could also use a forest. we could also use a long break in the rain.

frustrations and hopes

2008-10-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

24 October 2008
Thoughts on a Macalester magazine… today, I looked out my front door and saw some ominous looking clouds, moving our way fast. I got dressed in a hurry, because I wanted to make it to the post office: maybe the package from home had arrived! The rain clouds were moving in quickly, but I got to the post office and back just as the first drops of rain began to fall. With a package!! In it my mother had thoughtfully supplied newspapers and magazines to read. One with the headline: “DOW falls 778.something points on the delay of the relief package.” Other similarly dire headlines accompany… the other newpapers were from tamurtinu (my land/place/earth/floor), Mount Horeb, which instead sport headlines about building referendums and such. And then there was the Macalester College magazine, most of which is devoted to pages and pages recognizing the many, many folks who donated money to the school in recent times. Bravo-alik! (means what it sounds like: bravo or good job) The rest of the magazine was stories about faculty, alumni and current students. Touting their successes and how Macalester helped them get there. Some people went on to work for Morgan Stanley, or become a professor at another esteemed college. And then there are the current students. So full of promise, excited about life and passionate about what they are studying! That is why I loved Macalester, that attitude. A mentor of mine once said she loved working with Mac students because “You are going to change the world!” Takes some living up to! Not that I ever minded a challenge, though. J There is truth in what she said. Some examples: one of my fellow alumni is Kofi Annan. One of my good friends from Mac is going to be a doctor, another already has her Masters degree and is out there traveling the world and chasing down job experience so that she can use said Masters degree, others are scientists, teachers in hard places, after school volunteers in the city… suffice it to say, looking around me and seeing the company I’m keeping, it encourages a little introspection.
Am I doing good where I’m at? Is this what I wanted it to be, am I satisfied that I am using my time well? In other words, am I “living up to it?” Well, I don’t know if I can answer that last question with certainty—time will tell—but I am satisfied that this, living in Morocco, and trying to be a little catalyst in a little town in the most overlooked region in northern Morocco, is well worth my time, my effort. So many of the women I talk to don’t know how to read or write, and not because there aren’t schools. Most were kept home by their parents. Parents who sent their boys (or, at least, most of their boys) to school, where they could learn and do some good, while keeping their girls at home. Where they are safe (from what? Boys, maybe), where they are needed (yes), where they belong (…), and where they will live their lives (most likely true). And now, their husbands tell them, “no, no I cannot spare you for an hour or two to go and learn to read and write. You must make my tea and my dinner and take care of the children and the animals and clean the house and the clothes and keep us all alive and healthy!” And maybe they tell themselves the same thing, and put their desire to learn aside in the pursuit of raising good, healthy children. Which is honorable. What is more honorable is that they are not often bitter about this… it is also sad!
I hope to help people here, all people, to see the value in education! In the basics, so that knowledge of healthcare and nutrition and changes in laws (like marriage laws) spreads and works its good work. And even more, so that people understand what is going on in the world beyond what the TV tells them. And even more, so that the people of this village understand the multiplicity of value that a forest holds. Not just firewood, not just fruit and nuts, not just shade, not just beauty. No! Erosion control, flood mitigation, the slowing of desertification—in other words, safety and livelihood security! (Would that I knew all of THOSE words in Tashelheit…) In a village that has claimed the only semi-flat ground in the middle of a treeless, steep slope, anything that keeps the flashfloods at bay and the soil on the ground should be highly valued. Education! How important! Not memorization, but knowledge integrated and made one’s own. And applied. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here. Apply what I learned at “dear, old Macalester.” Wish us luck, say a prayer; we shall se what we can do with these rocky slopes!

Flooding

2008-10-20T07:23:00.001-07:00

20 October 2008

I have lost count of how many times the river that cuts the floor of this valley has flooded in the past month and a half. I think the novelty wore off two or three weeks ago. Flash floods are still exciting, though. Not least because at least some of them result from rain here (as opposed to further up in the mountains), which means I find out just how waterproof my house really is.
Last night it started raining late, maybe 12 midnight or 1 am, and kept it up most of the night. By morning, when I stepped out my door to run down the stairs through the light rain to the bathroom, I could hear the river roaring already. So, having planned an early morning walk anyway, I decided to make the object of that walk viewing the river. I saw a youngish man and his younger and very pregnant wife on their roof looking around and shaking their heads. I greeted them and asked them how they were doing: “Labas Shwi.” Or “we’re doing just OK.” Was his answer. Rain had soaked through his roof and was now dripping off of the beams. Most roofs have decent sized pipes or other water exits on them for just this reason. A mud roof will eventually saturate with water if you don’t get that water off quickly. I asked about the flooding river, and he invited me up on his roof. I declined and asked directions to see the flood (I know the way, but I wanted him to feel good about something after I declined the invitation).
I walked down a back path, it cuts just below the post office and along several fields by a house where I know the family. Their teenage son, Ahmed appeared as I passed. We chatted as we walked… this sounds very simple and not very interesting, but he is one of the most animated people I know (he can give Katherine, and my Emiline a good run for their money!). Thus, it was quite entertaining! he asked me if their was water escaping into my house, great concern all over his face. No, I said and he nodded a satisfied grin. Your house? No, he said, still smiling but his face said: preposterous! At the transit stop we parted ways.
I found a high vantage point next to the president of the women’s association. Half the village turns out to watch the river destroy the fields each time it floods badly. This was the highest I had yet seen the river. The entire 200 ft wide riverbed is covered with pale brown, milky water that bludgeons everything in its path. This morning, some trees were over half submerged, and throwing up a spray on either side like a water-skier as they struggled to remain upright in the torrent of water. I asked the people near me where their fields were. Some said, up high, with a satisfied and relieved nod. Others pointed and said, ‘see that huge milky brown mess? That’s mine.’ ‘What’s growing there?’ ‘Turnips.’ ‘Will they be OK?’ ‘Yeah, they’re not corn.’ Corn doesn’t stand a chance in a flood, it ends up flattened and stripped of its ears.
I stood and watched for a good while, noting the beauty of the view even in the presence of a natural disaster. The colors of the earth are darkened by rain: there is red, purple, maroon, teal, yellow, orange, brown, and grey depending upon where you look. Contrasted by the rich greens and yellows of the patchwork terraces of the farm fields, and the swirling grey of the clouds it is beautiful. Speaking of those clouds, they way they were tumbling over the mountain hinted there just might be more rain on the way. I also noted the transits stopped in Ait Bartal… so the other river is flooding, too. This has to be at least the 6th or 7th time the road out of town has been buried by literally tons of rock, sand and mud. Hopefully, the bulldozer will come today and clear it off… otherwise I’ll be hauling my bike over that mess to get to souk tomorrow.
At this point, I have a couple questions: 1) will it ever stop raining? 2) is it like this EVERY autumn? I suppose the answer to first question is, of course, yes. And the second I have asked of folks. No, they say, last year we had very little rain in the autumn.
Somehow I never expected to be writing about constant flash-flooding in my blog from a village that is placed right on the very edge of the Sahara desert…

typcial day

2008-10-20T07:22:00.002-07:00

5 October 2008
Typical Day in Site:
This morning I woke up in my new room. Yesterday I did a lot of cleaning, building and moving to get my stuff out of the sitting room and into the room where I have always intended to sleep. Thus, I woke rather disoriented at 6:38am: I still haven’t got things set up the way I really want. I read a book for an hour, and then got up to feed the kittens and make breakfast—crushed barley with whatever I feel like putting in it. Then I got dressed (stay off the cold, cold floor!!) and contemplated what to do with the day. My plan for the day was to call my program manager to ask him for more information, and then go find the raisa (female president) of the women’s association and tell her about the neddi project, and go to the far dwar (tiny village) that I haven’t explored yet, and then return and work around my house.
The information I wanted from my PM (program manager) is about the National Initiative for Human Development, a program that is tied to the U.N. According to the Water and Forest Department representative with whom I work, it has chosen Ouled Ali to be eligible for funds to be used for human development. I don’t know much about the INDH, but am hoping to use that money to build a “neddi”, a sort of women’s center. It would be great thing for the women here: a neutral place outside of their homes where they could do communal artisan work to be sold in Missour, tourist joints, or even Ouled Ali if we can get tourists to come. They could hold literacy classes there, or even have a library. It is worth noting that these are my dreams for them—the only hopes I have heard expressed thus far are generally restricted to the husband-favored money making ones. Either way, it would be a great thing for them. Thus my desire to get more information.
So I beeped my PM and settled down to wait for him to call me back. That’s standard operating procedure here, because the Peace Corps specifically foots the phone bill at the Office, while we volunteers have to budget our money ourselves. It’s a bit of generosity that is greatly appreciated, and completely taken for granted at the same time. In the meantime, I read A Prayer for Owen Meany, which is so far quite good. He called me back, and promised to send me the information later today, along with other previously promised and forgotten information. So then I got up and prepared to leave the house, cleaning up after my still-sick kittens (Poo! Scat! Shit everywhere!! Bring out the Wet-Ones!!!…), and packing a back pack, I started walking over to Ait Ahendor, where the Raisa lives (I live in Ait Abou, which is on the other side of Ait Ali from Ait Ahendor, which are all duwars within the village of Ouled/Ait Ali). At the central transit stop/cluster of stores I met a women I know (she’s my host mothers sister, and her name might be Aicha… I wish I had Grandma’s memory for names… it would make life easier!) and we talked and walked until we came to a field where a family was harvesting their corn by hand with little hand scythes. The women went on, but I stayed to help load the corn onto donkeys and into bags so the women could carry the corn and cornstalks back to the house. While helping I was invited to tea, so I accompanied them back to their house and had tea with bread and oil and homemade butter and l-helwa (buttery finder cookies). Tasty! I ended up getting roped into staying for lunch, too, which was fine. I made friends with one of the next generation of mothers in the village. Her name is Aziza. There, now I can’t forget!! Extra good because her uncle is the president of the Medicinal Herbs and Honey Cooperative that exists here, and I need to get to know them better! They’re rather successful, and the money supplies this family with a nicer-than-usual home… ie. more rooms, actual decorations on the walls, a completely equipped kitchen, concrete walls and floors and ceilings in most rooms, and stairs to the roof instead of a ladder.
After this I left and found my Raisa, who was back from her own morning or corn-harvesting, and very tired. But I explained to her the some newly discovered hoops the association and I are going to have to jump through to get that INDH money for the neddi project!! We’ll see… if this goes really slowly, I’ll start talking to people about honey production and see if we can’t improve that, it’s been pretty “piss-poor” the past two years (to borrow an euphemism from a family member). And then walked out of town across the deep gorge that floods every once and a while and is home to a small river that dips in and out of the ground like a butterflier swimming in a pool. I then climbed up on the path that I know leads to that other duwar I haven’t been to, and spotted a raptor, probably a falcon! I whipped out my binoculars and planted myself on a rock to watch and see if I couldn’t glean enough to ID it. I got lucky, not only did I get enough info to ID it (a male Kestrel), but I got to see it hunting! A successful kill and then I watched it munching on what seemed to be a mouse. I then walked over to the other duwar, but found no one outside, so I decided to explore the path a bit further… it turns into a rather thrilling path along a steep mountainside that extends quite a way, who knows, it might go all the way to Tirnest (where a fellow volunteer lives). I then walked back, and met two women from that duwar, but decided to return to my house instead. I then made myself some tea and at a bunch of dried figs, and read a bit of the Christian Science Monitor (a fascinating newspaper, generally liberalish in the social justice area, but surprisingly conservative politically because of moral issues like pro-life/pro-choice… or so I believe… feel free to correct me!). And then more of Owen Meany… I am still super susceptible to a good book. :)
The plan from here on out is to take a shower (brr!!! There’s no door on my bathroom, so a bucket shower is unfortunately drafty!! Maybe I’ll just wash my hair instead…), and take some phone minutes over to my host family, and prepare some questions for my tutor and then have a lesson, come home and eat the chili that I made last night. Which was a decisive victory!! Not only did my host sister and mother like it, my much pickier younger host brother liked it too!!!! It seems I just need to pick and choose what food to introduce to Moroccans… things that are too unfamiliar don’t go over so well. Lesson learned.

10 October 2008

2008-10-20T07:22:00.001-07:00

Living Healthfully

I don’t mean not smoking, drinking in moderation, or sleeping enough, though those are all legitimate subjects for such a title. No, I mean figuring out how to live in a new place: cook for yourself, adjust to the local microbes, local customs and lack of familiar stress relief. It’s a challenge. One that I was definitely looking forward to before I came here. I remember thinking how cool it would be to successfully turn whatever food is available to you into nutritious meals… buy/harvest it, get it back to your place of food preparation, get the bad parts out of it (rocks, bugs, rotten spot, peels, whatever), use unfamiliar cooking tools and turn out something both delicious and healthful. I can boast that I can do that now, and it is awesome, as expected. Boy, it took me a while to get there though! At first it was training, and then living with a host family (excellent experience though it is, it does not afford much opportunity to cook…) keeping me from figuring it out. And then there’s the whole adjusting to the local scene: microbes specifically… the microbes thing is pretty darn tricky if you are in a situation where you can’t cook for yourself. Then you must trust to whoever is cooking for you to take the necessary precautions to shelter your poor, weak GI tract. And while the cooking standard of said host family was good, it wasn’t quite good enough to keep me in health. I spent the vast majority of those 3 and-a-bit months with my host family sick. What with that and Ramadan, I had definitely lost weight—enough that my tutor noticed when he returned after his 2 month summer vacation. What did I have to lose you ask? Not much… Those who know me well know that I am one of those people who worry about losing weight more that gaining. It’s the result of a fast metabolism and an athletic history—it’s just difficult to keep enough weight on to feel good. Which is why it is so amazingly awesome to have been in good health for an entire month (!!!) and cooking good food and eating it and enjoying it and Hamdullah (Thanks be to God) gaining back that weight!
The other thing is learning how to deal with stress in a new situation. All, well not all, but most of the stress relief techniques used in the United States have either been modified by necessity or are simply not available here. Example: my faith—it’s hard to be a practicing follower of Christ when there is no community of fellow followers within 200 km. I have still only been to a church service once since I’ve been here, and had two Bible studies with other people of vaguely similar religious persuasion. That’s 3 in 7 months. Inchallah (God willing) I will be going to church in Azrou with an older volunteer one of the last weekends of October, but that’s not a trivial distance either: it takes 5 hours of blessed travels conditions to get me there, and if travel goes slowly en route, it might take all day. Aside—I’m not trying to complain here, I’m just trying to paint an accurate picture. Or music: I have lots of music to listen to (THANK GOD… no, seriously) but I, for some reason that I frankly fail to understand, did not bring my guitar with me. I don’t know what exactly inspired me to do that, especially after how much I missed having a guitar with me when I was in Tanzania, but I decided it wasn’t worth it (what were you THINKING, Jeannie???). I did, however, buy a fiddle. So, I’m learning how to play the fiddle, which is plenty fun, but… how many of you musicians can understand: having a new instrument to fiddle with (whoops, that’s a pun!!) is just not the same as noodling around on an instrument you know, you own, you can bend to your mood.
The point being, there have been some adjustments. I have adopted new stress relief activities—yoga anyone?—and learned about the depths of other ones.

re-modeling

2008-10-20T07:21:00.001-07:00

7 October 2008
About remodeling a house in Morocco. Lessons learned (could probably be applied in any country, actually): 1—assume that you will not be moving in on the day you are originally told you will be moving in.2—be prepared to be amazed at the number of ways rocks can be used in building3—being involved in the building process will help to ensure that you get better quality, and that little things don’t get forgotten.
I wish I had taken before pictures so you could all see the transformation (as yet not-quite finished)! The house had not been lived in for 8 years. It had been neglected, used as a good place to slaughter goats, and to store random bits of stuff. There were broken pots in the back room along with old shoes and an inch of dust, and the roof needed structural help in a couple of places. The roof was also leaking very badly, I remember looking at the floor when I first got there and noting the drip marks in the dirt floor… not a good sign. Why, you ask did I decide to live there when I had another perfectly good option? Well, there was the fact that my host family really wanted me to live in this house (for a variety of reasons; money, proximity…), and then there is the balcony. ( Like my mother, I looked at the view from the balcony and was more or less sold on it. It’s a pretty typical house for Ouled Ali: mud walls, and floors. Kind of like an adobe house in the southwest, actually. The roof is made of logs and sticks with mud, plastic and more mud over top of it all. The windows don’t have glass in them but do have iron grating in them and wooden shutters. The house is built onto my neighbors house. Most houses are sort of paired up with at least one neighbors house. The result is a kind of warren of curvy, narrow, steep walkways between chunks of houses. For example, my host families house shares roof and walls with both their neighbors and the mosque. This meant that at prayer time I had to be careful about going from my room to the kitchen, because the east facing windows looked right into the courtyard area of the house. Not so good to be distracting the men while they are praying. Anyway, the point is, houses are built together like combs in a beehive here.
4 months, major structural work, plastic on the roof, concrete added to the floors and half the walls, after the installation of stairs (instead of a steep and rickety ladder), and the installation of a bathroom, and a sink and counter, running water, electricity, two windows, a clothesline, a new metal door, a layer of whitewash and the rebuilding of the door frames later… I am living in a comfortable house. No furniture… cooking appliances for sure, though! I am lucky to have electricity, so I can have a refrigerator.
I painted a goodly portion of that whitewash myself. I don’t know what the whitewash is made of here, but it is super, super corrosive. I have scars on my arms from where some of the whitewash caked and dried and gave me chemical burns. Needless to say, after that I decided to buy some heavy duty rubber gloves so that I could whitewash with my skin intact. Whitewashing has been followed by scrubbing. LOTS and LOTS of scrubbing, to get the drips off of the wall and the floor. I still have some scrubbing to do. The thing is that I’m trying to keep things moving along as far as getting projects going and integrating into the entire community. This keeps me out of the house and away from scrubbing and washing and furniture building that needs to happen. Oh yeah; I’m stealing my friend Dan’s good idea and building myself some furniture. I bought 50 stalks of bamboo and a roll of wire to build myself some risers and shelves for storage. It should be an adventure, I’ve never worked with bamboo before, nor have I ever built furniture! Good thing I have wire-cutters with me. Thanks Dad!
Most creative use of building materials: my host father installed a new lock on my kitchen door using the old top of a sardine can as a backing for the lock… talk about reusing possible trash materials!!! It looks good, too, with its brassy finish. Kudos to him!

Hiking in early october

2008-10-20T07:20:00.001-07:00

15 October 2008
Lots of it! I have been hiking all over the Middle Atlas these past few months. They’ve been pretty intense hikes, all done with two second-year volunteers, Sarah and Nate, or with the rais (president) of the herders association I am working with. They’re all fun people. Sarah and Nate are ambitious in their hiking plans, and they like to move quickly! I’ve learned to walk quickly carrying quite a bit, and to find my own trail. When hiking with the rais, we move still more quickly, aided by a mule carrying our bags. My favorite hike so far was one with Sarah and Nate. They planned an ambitious 7-day hike that included summiting Bou Nacer (highest peak in the Middle Atlas, I believe) and then traversing close to 100 km. I decided to cut the hike short and leave at the midway point, because of 1—my kittens, and 2—my need to be in site.
We started with Justin, my closest PCV neighbor, at his site. He walked with us up the mountainside and then returned that same afternoon. We camped in a dry riverbed and prayed for good weather the next day. As it turned out, those three days were the only good weather days for a couple of weeks. A good thing, it was freezing cold on top of Bou Nacer even in the full morning sunlight! The view from the top was great, I could see all the way to High Atlas in one direction and Tezzka in the other. It was an abnormally clear day, gorgeous! We then faced the descent: some 1000m of unmarked, steep scree slope riddled with gullies cut by recent storms and surprise cliffs, some over 100 ft in height. And my boots decided to start to fall apart. Duct tape to the rescue! We made it down after a stop for lunch, and found a herder’s trail to the village we were hoping to stay the night near. It’s always an adventure trying to find water sources, usually you have to ask directions, and this was no different: we asked an old Berber herder, who was most helpful! The good thing is that Sarah and I speak Tamazight and Nate speaks Arabic, so between us we can communicate with everyone in the Middle Atlas. Except for French or German or Dutch tourists, I suppose… anyway, we found the water source at sunset. What a spring! Freezing cold, clear, fast running and high in volume! So constant that grass, grass! is growing all around it. The next morning we set out to find a TaHanut (little store) to resupply in Ait Maqabl, the nearby town. They do not get foreigners very often: we had 30 kids and 12 young men following us by the time we got to the TaHanut! Too funny, it reminded me of Tanzania. They were very helpful, showed us the way and picked up a water bottle that fell out of my pack. I met an incredibly striking Berber women, too. Most women wear semi-Berber-style headwraps or the traditional hijab of Islam, but she was wearing her hair in the super traditional Berber style: Two long braids with fabric woven in and crowned with brightly colored fabric. It’s regal and beautiful. I had never seen it before; more evidence of how isolated that town is! As we left town to find the riverbed we planned to walk down we got a lovely surprise! The riverbed was revealed as a huge, wide canyon! Gorgeous, and very difficult to get in a picture. It took us almost an hour to get from the canyon rim to the canyon floor (not a straight descent, but still!). We then walked down the river, passing the most truly Berber villages, meeting more women in traditional dress and having grapes pressed upon us by a nearly deaf older gentleman. Who watched us eat lunch, kept us company (even though he was fasting for Ramadan!) and then sent us on our way with an invitation to return for fast-break that evening, and went to pray. Sitting there cross-legged, for all the world like a Buddhist meditating, but chanting Allah Ahkbar… We got another surprise later: the canyon narrowed to huge red cliffs on either side of us, the river twisting and turning over the rocky bed. And, still, anywhere open was a tiny Berber dwar. We also found an offshoot, so beautiful… the cliffs were even higher here, some trick of geology left harder rock there, but the back of the offshoot (box canyon??) was a huge, dry waterfall. You could see where the water had carved channels in the nearly vertical rockface and where it lept off of overhangs to fall down and then run over a slope of rock shaped like a wide, curved staircase. We stood there in awe, looking over ferns and moss and beauty… brought Led Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven” to mind. On our way out we raided a few fig trees of late figs: DELICIOUS!!! I LOVE figs. Especially perfectly dried ones. We hiked out another long day, and made it to Berkine, my drop-off point. Sarah and Nate continued on through rainy weather and unknown territory all the way to Taza. Check it out on a map, that is no small distance!
I have come to love the land here, in its own way, on these hikes. The mountains are endlessly majestic, full of character and sadness. The rock is all that’s left in places, the dirt all eroded off for lack of trees. On one mountain you will find a thriving cedar forest, on another, a cedar graveyard. And one can witness cedar logs being smuggled out… they bring good money for people strapped for cash with few good ways to make more money. So hard to see… these majestic forests disappearing. The healthy cedar forests here rival the Northwest rainforests for majesty. I wish people would come to enjoy them, and pay the Berbers for the privilege!

Kittens-October 1

2008-10-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

I have two kittens. They were both gathered from the streets, and they are both sick. I have taken them to the vet, but the doctor wasn’t there and I decided not to stay another day to wait for him. The vet in question is in Fez, and to be legal according to Peace Corps policy, I needed to get back to site post haste. The vet tech saw me, but… well, the jury is still out: we’ll see how they respond. They’ve been half-dewormed (the second half to be administered in about 8 days) and I have medicine, but they are still sick, and it is a PAIN!!! I follow them around with newspaper and wet wipes trying (nearly in vain) to keep my house and blankets free of kitty poo. I’m sure it would be a pretty funny video if you put it on fast forward, actually. On the other hand, they are adorable. Two tiny, skinny kittens who think I’m their mother. One of them has even tried to nurse from my skirt… unsuccessfully… none of my clothing produces milk, as it turns out… ( They like to sleep and cuddle together and tear around like mad things when they’re feelin’ good. They also like to perch on my shoulders, curl in my lap, sneak under the covers, and climb straight up my legs. My fellow inhabitants of Ouled Ali are always asking if I do, in fact like living alone, and I tell them: I don’t live alone, I have two cats! Never fails to get them to laugh… But these boys do keep me company, and definitely keep me busy! Mothering these two little guys is a job! They get cold really easily (and I don’t have central heating… or any heating for that matter), are always hungry but fairly picky about what they’ll eat, have fleas that I’m trying to erradicate and poo accidentally every few hours. I’m glad to have them, though. They are company, no matter what anyone says. And they keep me warmer at night and serve as an excellent alarm clock between 5 am and 7 am. Why pay for a clock when you can raise it?

update

2008-09-15T06:17:00.001-07:00

hi all
due to computer problems, there will be a brief pause in posts. by brief i mean 2 to 4 weeks. there are viruses on my jump drive that i dont have the software to fix, so i need to get my computer to a cyber cafe so i can download software onto it to fix the problem. this will probably take some time, as there are many other things that i need to be doing with that time, and some of that time will probably be spent high in the mountains helping to with other projects.

so, a quck update
ramadan is going just fine. fasting isnt that hard but it sure does make you tired!!! i have fasted for 11 days, but not consecutively, since the beginning of september. ramadan is half over now, the full moon was last night, marking the halfway point. i live in my own house, but it is unfinished. slowly i am fixing that. painting, and then washing and scrubbing, and then organizing of stuff, and then building of furniture from bamboo, and then reorganization... its a work in progress! something to take up the time, though, which is nice. i also have two kittens. they are rambunctious and adorable and way too small to be away from their mothers, but there you have it!!

in other news, i have been healthy for a good long strech now (ie. longer than two weeks), and hopefully that will continue!! sending you all my love

8 August 2008

2008-08-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

1st church service in morocco
So I went to my first church service in Morocco the other weekend! I went up to Oujda to celebrate my birthday with some other volunteers, and me and two Catholics went on a search for a church service. We found the church fairly easily (only two or three wrong turnsÉ) but then, how to get in?? We saw some folks in African style clothing who seemed to know where they were going, but lost them. The front door was lockedÉ and someone had thoughtfully piled the garbage from the square right by the door. The mosque was spotless. One way to know when you are in a Muslim countryÉ so we walked around back, trying all the doorsÉ at the very back door, we knockedÉ and the door was opened to us. By a Moroccan gentleman. And thus we found the Saturday evening mass of the chuch of Oujda. Attended by 5 West Africans and two French expatriates. And three Peace Corps Volunteers. Apparently this is usually better attended, but during the summer people leave for the cooler coast and the priest was sick, soÉ it was just us. Singing the mass in French, led in a very sub-Saharan style of call and response. It was beautiful! Very different, but beautiful. I miss that style of singing, how it’s all of a piece with dancing, the call and response, the earnestness. We introduced ourselves eventually, in French, English and Arabic, and were welcomed back. Oh, and I took the body. The bread. I hope that’s OK, seeing as I am still not Catholic. J

more universal things

2008-08-04T08:01:00.002-07:00

"Universal" Things
**this list will grow, too
--Paper, rock, Scissors (used to make decisions the world round)
--Jacks. Only you play with little rocks here instead of jacks and a bouncy ball
--Boys throw rocks at things.
--House flies.
--Barn flies.
--Biting flies.
--Women fix up their hair to go out. Here that means putting on a slightly nicer veil/scarf. For me it means making sure I don’t look like a fool.
--Sugar. In huge volumes.
--Mothers worry.
--Drum circles.
--Dancing. In some places it happens in gender segregated rooms though.
--Grandmothers/older women tell young women to put on more clothes/different clothes.
--People like cold water.
--Homemade popsicles.
Installment 2
--People pick their noses
--Black cats are considered unlucky… poor things
--Little boys pee on things
--Teenage girls are moody
--It’s still amazing what you can build with rocks, water, and dirt. Cement helps, too.
--If you are in a broken down car with more than 5 men looking at it scratching their heads, you’ll be there a while.
--2-year-olds are terrible. Especially when spoiled. They are also adorable and occasionally amazingly sweet.

3 August 2008

2008-08-04T08:01:00.001-07:00

3 August 2008
So this is about social mores. And how they are very interesting… for example:
Some things remain the same, like reaching in front of someone at the dinner table. It’s rude, but not inexcusably so in most cases.
On the other hand, if someone started digging into the meal with their hands in most well-bred company in the United States, or Europe for that matter, they would be seen as very strange, possibly retarded or at least in possession of poor manners. Here, though, that is what you are expected to do, and it has become VERY strange for me to see people eating certain dishes with silverware at tourist joints. Why would you use silverware? All you need is bread with some soap and water afterwards… which they provide, by the way. One of the kids or someone feeling nice carries around a little kettle with it’s own name and a basin for people wash their hands and mouths out after a meal. Yes, that’s right, mouths. They spit in the basin. For some reason I find this physically more disgusting than the numerous flies… I have a thing with spit.
And then there’s the whole picking your nose thing. Taboo at home, right? People will "take the mickey out of you" (to use a great British phrase, probably improperly, sorry ya’ll British folk). But the thing of it is, most people do it themselves… that’s why it’s such a satisfying game for kids to count how many people they see picking their noses in other cars on long car trips. One pastor I knew decided that all of this falsehood was ridiculous and freely acknowledged his nose-picking habit… he even had a saying "Pick it, flick it, don’t lick it, and remember to live like Jesus!" Memorable right? I bet his kids were absolutely mortified!! Anyway, here, it’s more or less accepted. Some men even grow out their left pinky fingernails for that specific purpose (it’s taken me three months to figure that one out… I’m still not sure I believe it but that’s what I’m told). And tonight, I witnessed the most open picking of the nose ever: a father picking his 2-year-old son’s nose for him!! I was fascinated. He was so obviously doing this carefully and lovingly and gently but determined to get his son’s nose picked clean…! Who would have thought? Sometimes I think we should adopt the open nose-picking policy… maybe with an accompanying social mores about always washing your hands or having a specific finger that you disinfect frequently?? I mean, I think everyone does, whether with a tissue in hand or not (still counts). Just as long as no one tries to pick my nose… I don’t think I could handle that.

of birthdays

2008-08-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

. Around 31 July 2008
Birthdays abroad are funny. Odd, I mean. Good, fun, different (you never know just what will happen). One of the first things I did in Tanzania was turn 21. It was pretty funny to me (ha-ha funny) actually. One of my favorite memories, actually. The program directors, who barely knew me, gave me a beautiful wooden bowl with a carved elephant on it (I still have it, back home). The other students all pitched in and got me two cakes and a whole bottle of Hakuna Matata. Tanzanian liquor, that’s what that is… The cakes were dry and not particularly flavorful, but we had fun and then when there was plenty left over I wandered around the cafeteria giving away the rest. We went back to the dorm and got ready for our first day of school. Yup, all I had on my 21st was one shot of not particularly burning Hakuna Matata and then I went to bed. J Fitting, right?
Anyway, this birthday passed with very little fanfare: I couldn’t find any eggs so I didn’t even get a cake, instead I bought a bunch of candy and cookies and soda for my family and we celebrated the day after my birthday. The morning of I helped slaughter a sheep. Which is something only men can do… I tried to ask why but was only told it is Haram (absolutely forbidden by the Qu’ran). I bet there’s a reason behind it, maybe something about life-givers not taking life, but I’ll have to figure that out later. Anyway, it was somehow a little frustrating, sad, not as clean as I wanted it to be. For starters they just cut the neck while it’s awake and then leave it to die, fully conscious. Don’t even break the poor thing’s neck… anyway, it was pretty cool to watch it cleaned out, and then to take the amazingly soft meat upstairs and watch it be cooked and then eat it later. It was good, too. Except that I am just about through with dwaz. I want a whole week off of Moroccan food. Well, local Moroccan food, anyway. Or rather, my host family’s cooking. Not bad, but there’s a flavor theme that I’m a bit tired of.
Highlights of the day were definitely when two PCVs (Sarah and Nate from the Eastern Middle Atlas ENV, if you know them) called me to sing me Happy Birthday… and tell me that Nate brought me floss threaders from the United States!!!!!! Hooray no cavities in my front teeth!!!!!!!! But so many others texted me their wishes, and some even called (thanks Jon) to make their wishes, so it was great. And Mom, your box actually came ahead of time. J And then Mom called from Madeline Island to talk, and I got to talk to my cousin’s son, who is sharp as a razor at barely 3 years of age. All in all, a Happy Birthday, but it was funny. What with the sheep slaughtering and everything. :)

universal things 1

2008-07-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

favorite quotes 1

2008-07-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

9 July 2008
Favorite Quotes:
**this list will grow as time goes on. Underlined things are book titles. I’ll put the author if I know it. Some quotes are from PCVs. Some are literature. Some are funny. Some are serious, and some are there just because the writing is so flippin’ beautiful.
1 "The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too may fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed." -Cry the Beloved Country
2 "Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future." -The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel
3 " ‘So God just leaves? Abandons creation? You’re on your own, apes. Good luck! (speaker 1)’ ‘No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering. (speaker 2)’ ‘Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing about it. (speaker 3)’ ‘But the sparrow still falls. (speaker 2)’" –The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel *I would add to this a bit… ask me if you care to know.
4 "Do you know the word for ‘clipboard’?" "No. What is it?" "Here let me explain it for you. It’s like a board with a clip… err… um…" -the very earnest Logan
5 "And now for something completely different: Morocco." –advertisement seen on the plane to Rabat from New York City.
6 "I went to the Post Office today. It was awesome!" –the unflappable Jake
7 "Why does George Bush not like democracy?" –an earnest question asked by a young man in my village, translated from Tamazight… sweet, sweet irony
8 "Oxford is excavating a Paleolithic settlement at my site, 500 ft. from my house. Ahhhhh!" –text message from Jonathan, who is an archeologist by training
9 "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our sill, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." -Aeschylus
10 "Would you practice what you preach, would you turn the other cheek? Father, Father, Father help us; send some guidance from above. Oh, you know you got me questionin’, where is the love, the love, the love?" --a great song whose title I don’t know

June 25

2008-07-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

27 June 2006
Wheat Harvesting Part II
So, I believe I previously wrote about the wheat harvest. Well, that was only part one. The wheat was cut by hand from the fields and carried by hand/mule/donkey to the families designated wheat drying place. Upon closer examination, I noticed that a lot of these wheat drying places are semi-circular flat bits of ground set back into the hillside. I had been seeing these circular bits and other random seeming structures before and wondered about them, but now all is clear. Well, not quite all, but you know what I mean. J
About a week ago, I noticed a strange humming noise, and some odd lights on one side of the village that I hadn’t noticed before. I asked about them but didn’t really understand the answer. But the humming (akin to the noise a snow-machine makes) continued, and the lights moved closer each night, so in a couple of days I had my answer. Three tractors pulling three wheat chopping/threshing/separating machines had come to town. These machines are from Turkey, and they are named Super Istanbul. Each family was being given a 2 or so hour slot of time, and then the entire family turns out to get the wheat into the machine, carry the wheat kernels away in 50 kg bags, and then carry the chaff away in HUGE bags. Depending on the family, some families had to carry their wheat to the machine and chop it on the road with big mats strung up to minimize the amount of chaff blown away. Others simply had the machine driven up to their harvest circle, and the chaff was blown into the high side, and caught by the stonewall there.
I went to go watch and help a little but soon enough it was our turn and I got some first hand experience. Getting the machine up the hill to our circle… obstacle one, made difficult by the fact that the road up to the circle is made up of loose rocks. Then, loading the wheat into the machine… hot wind and sun making the scene veiled in golden dust that magically turns your face black. I noticed some of the sheafs of wheat had mold growing on them… too much rain and not spread out well enough, I guess. It’s a frenetic pace. The machine chops fast so we hurried to keep up on both ends, bagging the wheat kernels and feeding the sheafs in. In an hour or so, the machine is done, and the drivers take it away to the next family. Leaving us to carry away the chaff (la3lun) and the bags of wheat. The cycle of family to family began each day before 6 am and ended around midnight. Families don’t necessarily work alone: friends and neighbors and extended family help out too. Those who help out can expect to have dinner provided for them by the people they helped. I benefited from that the day after my family got their wheat harvest taken care of. I had some of the best couscous I have yet had. Heavy on the black pepper, with turnips and chicken. Simple but delicious!
Also had a fascinating conversation about politics after that meal. It was begun by a trick lighter that actually casts out a color picture of Osama bin Ladin. I couldn’t stop laughing… so ridiculous! I kept thinking, I found Osama! He’s been hiding in a flashlight this whole time! The funny thing is that the brika (lighter) belongs to my sister, but she had no idea the political significance of the thing until a cousin explained it. Which helped her to understand my laughter a bit.

of stress

2008-07-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

3 July 2008
I think it’s time I wrote a little bit about the stress of this whole deal. It’s huge. But it’s tiny all at the same time. "Death by a thousand slices," as my dad says. The funny thing is, I didn’t even realize how stressed I was until the doctor called me on it. Well, she introduced the idea that my seemingly never-ending gastrointestinal issues may be caused by poorly handled stress being internalized. I thought, no way! I mean, I’m a Macalester grad. We thrive on stress. Or maybe that’s just what we thought and we were just fooling ourselves… seemed to work fine then. Anyway, suffice it to say, my stress has never manifested itself in my intestines before. Be that as it may, the thought stuck with me, so I re-evaluated. And discovered that I am, at times, as stressed as I ever have been. Now, before you panic, all my moms, hear me out. J Realizing that you are stressed is a good thing! It means I can take measures against it. Like allowing myself more sleep, more chocolate, and giving myself permission to draw necessary boundaries, and reminding myself of the importance of being disciplined in time management and prayer time.
What exactly is the deal? Well, one big thing is the time change. The Moroccan government decided to put the country on Daylight Savings time. So, for the first time in some 17 or so years, the official Moroccan clock moved an hour ahead. However, since the vast majority of rural Moroccans never worried about official time much in the first place, what happened was that everything happens at the same time it did before, but that clock reads an hour later. So dinner, late for me at 11pm before is now VERY late at 12 am. Give or take a half hour.
Other things are cultural… and health related (having your GI health fluctuate every couple of days is stressful!)… and I do miss all of you at home (although I’ve realized that there is no one place, not even one state in the US, not even one country! where I can be close to everyone I love/care about)… and it is harder being spiritually isolated this time around… because religion is such a huge part of this culture, and I am accustomed to being a part of the religious culture wherever I am. When I was in Tanzania, I found a church home. Except in the field but that was only a month and anyway I had GREAT friends who would talk to me and listen to me talk about religion, faith, etc. (I appreciate you so much more right now Susie and Leigh…). At Mac and at home I had wonderful church/spiritual families (you know who you are!). So between all that…
That’s that deal. Word from the older PCVs is that homestay is the hardest part of service—and I can’t say how much I am looking forward to eating dinner at 9:30 at night (or even earlier… hee hee) again in my own place in about a month—so that’s good to know. I have also recently learned that in many countries, PCVs live with host families for the whole two years. All you out there that do that have my undying respect. It’s not that host families are bad people… no, it’s just that it’s really different. We were independent, Western adults, and now we are feeling like teenagers in a new culture. We push for freedom, we want to control when we eat, sleep and what we do with our days. And our host families want us safe and for us to behave according to their culture. See the conflict? It’s just hard. Period. Even for me, and I have possibly the best host family ever. So I eat chocolate, am learning yoga and pilates, and take naps and pray. Which is actually the thing that helps the most in a tight spot. J

pictures 2

2008-07-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

picture of Ouled Ali village

View of the valley from Beni Hassan

Can you find me in the first picture? Look for the obnoxiously orange bandana that I have come to love.

of food

2008-06-23T07:34:00.001-07:00

22 June 2008
The taste of plums is in my mouth. Not quite ripe ones, so they are satisfyingly tart, but still delightfully plumy and a little bit sweet. I wasn’t expecting to have good fruit in the mountains, but when it’s the season, the fruit here is nothing short of very, very good. Plums, peaches, figs, grapes, apples, cherries, apricots, and then oranges, bananas, and dates from the plains and Agadir (which is the California of Morocco, that is you can grow anything there all year round). Spoiled as I have been in the past, I still wish for mangoes, passionfruit and fresh avocadoes, but this is not the tropics. It is the Mediterranean.
I thought I would do a little entry about the food. Now that you know about the fruit, you perhaps think that this must be ideal… and it all depends on how much money you have to spend on food. You can eat very, very well indeed here if you want to and have the money to buy the supplies. I get the feeling, though, that there are certain families that do not eat so well at all.
Traditionally the main meals of the day are served in one very large platter: tajine, dwaz and sksu (couscous) are big traditions. And bread. If you run out of bread but have plenty of say, rice on hand, many a Moroccan will say that they NEED bread. One of my teachers was particularly adamant about this. You would have thought he was going to die if he didn’t get his bread! In my region dwaz is the commoner of the first two (which are more or less the same thing just cooked in a different container). I hadn’t had any tajines here at all until my older host siblings came home to visit.
(non sequiter… my 11-year-old host brother just stood up and started wiggling his hips around to the music as loose-jointedly as any of the hottest Carribean/Latin dancers you’ve ever seen… this culture will never cease to surprise me…)
If my host mother doesn’t want to go to the trouble of cooking a dwaz, she is likely to put some couscous in a pot with milk and salt and butter and then heat it to a boil. We eat this every few nights it seems. Sometimes small noodles or rice are substituted for the couscous. Homemade couscous, by the way. Not store bought. They are decidedly different animals, store bought and homemade, by the way. There are bunches of ways to eat couscous…
Also there is the homemade butter (adhan) and the homemade buttermilk (aghi) and cheese (jbnn)… the first two of which I like. The adhan tastes like yogurt a little bit, and the buttermilk is drunk alone or mixed with couscous for a snack. The jbnn tastes like I imagine the color white would taste if it had been left out a little bit too long…
There are five meals a day: ldftar, thduayif, imshli, kaskarot and iminsi. People also drink atay (tea) and kahwa (coffee) whenever someone comes over to visit, and usually at meals too. Some people call atay Moroccan whiskey. J Sort of… they certainly are well caffeinated from a very early age. The food is, in short, good, but I am missing all kinds of food… ice cream, frozen custard, cheddar cheese, Colby cheese, swiss cheese, reubens, spinach salads, Afghani food, mangoes, Mexican food, and good chocolate.

job description

2008-06-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

18 June 2008
My work currently is: Needs Assessment and Personal Integration.
Yes, I know, it sounds terribly interesting and noble.
The thing is, you can’t do development work if you don’t know what is there already. Well, you could (and people have and probably do), but it’s generally not terribly effective or sustainable. So. Assessment it is. Environmental, Social, Financial, and Spiritual. Because it all applies. What does that look like? Me wandering around, and asking as many questions as I can make understood (easier said than done), and asking to meet with people, associations. I am, hopefully, holding my first community meeting next week. Two, actually. One for the men and one for the women. If you are a praying person, PLEASE pray for this… that I would be understood and understand, that I would get a functional seasonal calendar out of it, and also daily activities… we can even do some gender roles assessment if all goes well, but… that relies on lots of things. Like people coming, for one. Like me getting the proper permissions from the proper people. Like me remembering all the words (cheatsheets!!) and grammar structure necessary. Like the chemistry of the whole thing gelling… yes, I am a little intimidated by it all, but here we go!
What about Personal Integration? Well, that’s learning the language, more wandering around and asking questions in the language, and introducing myself and helping people to get to know me and learning the language. I suppose I mentioned language in there somewhere…
So there you go, that’s what it means to be an environmental educator right now. Sounds an awful lot like figuring out what the blue blazes is going on, doesn’t it? :)

thoughts while cutting grass related plants

2008-06-23T07:32:00.000-07:00

15 June 2008
I spend a lot of my time harvesting alfalfa. We go out and harvest some for the four cows and 13 or so sheep and goats twice a day most days. We also cut down the weeds of the fields and bring those back. What are you picturing right now? A big, glossy John Deere tractor and hay rake behind it? Perhaps you were more conservative, and thought of an old-fashioned hay-rake behind or horse. Or, closer still, a long handled scythe. All of these are incorrect… we squat on the ground, grab bunches of alfalfa with one hand and fit the small one-handed scythe behind it, cutting it off, bunch by bunch by bunch. Then it is loaded onto the back of a) a mule b) a donkey c) a woman/girl or d) rarely, a man/boy. This is loaded high and wide and cinched down tight with a long rope with a wooden hook or loop on one end of it.
Skills I did not know I would learn… but I’m getting pretty good at it now. It’s not hard, but if you’re not careful you can slice yourself. No, I have not done that… merely abraded one of my fingers slightly…
Speaking of cuts, I also ended up helping out with a large cut on a mule. Now, I’m not a veterinarian, or even a health volunteer, but this was a big gash (4 inches long and pretty wide) and I do know a thing or two about taking care of such things. I am a lifeguard, I have worked with horses for the greater majority of my life, and I have spent long hours following vets around in Wisconsin. Thus, I know that it is quite important to get the wound clean!! And olive oil is OK for little cuts and stuff as far as keeping it clean goes, but you have to wash it thoroughly first… Anyway, we got it flushed out with clean water and ran some good disinfectant through it followed by more water, and attempted to bandage it, but the olive oil put an end to that idea. She seems to be doing OK anyway. Eating and drinking and looks bright-eyed and all that good stuff.
And I wonder once again: is this what I should do with my life? Get my DVM and then find a place to work? Would I want to be a part of the factory farming that is the reality of so much agriculture in the US? I doubt it… sigh. Quandries.

harvest part 1

2008-06-09T03:08:00.002-07:00

08/06/08
It is harvest time here! Yes, I know, it is barely June. But it is still time to harvest the wheat and the rosemary. I have helped some with both of these harvests. It’s fun! In a hard labor, dusty, satisfying sort of way. It had been a while since I had done any real agricultural type work like that, although I used to work on a vegetable farm and then after that worked at a horse farms for years. Lots of hay bales and straw bales got thrown around by rather smallish women over those years at the horse farm… Similarly here: lots of stacks of wheat and sticks get carried around by very small women.
The rosemary harvest has been going on for some weeks now. Rosemary grows wild all over the mountains here… it smells quite beautiful when it rains. Taking advantage of this, some of the people in my village have formed a Medicinal Plants Cooperative. They go out and cut lots and lots of the rosemary, and then pile it in long lines to dry in the sun. Rosemary is a small bush, so what they are cutting off is essentially lots of sticks with pine-needle-like leaves all over them. Once it is deemed dry enough, people take small piles of it and beat it with a stick to knock all of the leaves off. The branches and sticks get set aside and then carried away to be used as firewood. It seems that it is mostly women who do this. I have seen some men working on it or at least overseeing it but for the most it is the women who did the gathering and beating, and only women who carry the wood back to the village.
It’s ingenious, really. They stack the sticks probably 5 feet high, 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep, tie rope around it, put a burlap bag on their back to keep from getting scratched and lash the whole thing to their backs with the end of the same rope, as though it were a hug, bulky, scratchy backpack. They do the same with alfalfa, wheat, big tree branches, and bags of flour. All of these loads range between 20 and 50 pounds, I would estimate. Keep in mind only a few of these women are over 5’5" and many are a good deal shorter.
The wheat harvest was somewhat different. The men did most of the cutting and binding into sheaves (with a break for tea), and then the women come and haul it all back to the drying and threshing grounds (also with a break for tea). There it stays for a while, all piles of gold. You can hear groups of men working in one part of the valley or another, because they sing when they are harvesting. The women I worked with weren’t singing, though. We also used donkeys and mules to help carry the wheat. It amazes me how much weight they carry too.
I helped with the beating of the rosemary and the carrying of the wheat. Little enough, actually, because sometimes people seem to think I am not strong enough to help. Which I am, right now. But I will not be if I don’t get to do my part carrying heavy loads. I guess that is just a matter of stubbornly offering my help and hopefully it will be accepted. :)

laughing the hailing rain

2008-06-09T03:08:00.001-07:00

07.06.08
Today I went for a hike! I had planned to go with my 12-year-old host brother, but I couldn’t find him right away, so I called one of the neighbor girls over and we went. Her name is Fatima, a pretty common name. As it turns out she is scrappy and curious and loves to laugh. We found my host brother, who proceeded to tag along behind us the whole time.
For weeks I have been eyeing the rock quarry halfway up one of the mountains on one side of the valley. You can see it from well over 50km away as you drive up to my souk town. It is visible as a white gash in the side of the mountain. So we set off, at first up the road and then up a dirt and rock path, scrambling a bit to short cut past several of the switch backs. It is really steep! Up the side of the mountain there is a large expanse of area that is thoroughly grazed by sheep-herders. The only things that grow in abundance are two aromatic herbs: rosemary (azier) and zushin (whose English name I do not know). Everything else is scrappy bits of grass and flowers that have managed to claim a root-holdm but not much of it. Most of the land is packed dirt and/or loose scree and rocks. There are rocky outcroppings all over the place; it is starkly beautiful and in amazing contrast to the lush green of the river floodplain and farm fields.
So we come up over the first long scramble to a long slope upward along the floor of a huge bowl in the mountains. Cutting across the switchbacks we found a bunch of cool bugs! Insects, I should say. Fatima was really helpful with giving me the names of things, which I have dutifully written down and will hopefully commit to memory over time.
Then my host brother decided that we should cut off the next bunch of switch backs by climbing straight up a rockfall in between two rocky outcroppings. Which turned out to be difficult but a lot of fun! I love rock climbing. We met a man from the village up there, where apparently he lives, guarding the entrance to the quarry. He hiked out on the rocks to us, and my host brother stayed and chatted with him. Up and up and up and then along the road a bit and we were there. Big cliffs of white calcite type rock, carved out by the quarrying. It is as if someone took a knife and decided to cut slices out of the mountainside. Very, very impressive to walk into, a little intimidating, too, as I reminded myself that this is a seismically active region. J
About then we heard the first rolls of thunder. The fluffy clouds overhead were morphing… in the ten minutes we were at the top the thunder went from random to consistent and then constant. We started walking down as the first raindrops fell. We met my host brother and started jogging… the smell of rain in dry dust rose up. The drops were startlingly cold to feel as they fell, and then began to pelt down. We passed up an offer to wait out the storm, and kept booking it down the mountain. And then the hail started falling. Lots of it! Somehow it really surprised me. No wonder the rain was so cold! The biggest one we saw was well over a quarter-size in diameter. It was so beautiful, though! Rain is precious here, and we were loving the wet and cold of it after the hot climb up. And the thunder in the air was wonderful. The view of the other side of the valley kept changing as the sun peeked out from behind one cloud or another, lighting up this rock out cropping, that peak, or encrusting a flat plain in light. We kept running and walking alternately, laughing at the hail and our increasing soaked clothes, loving it all! By the time we got back down to the village, we were soaking wet. I took the opportunity to jump in a couple of puddles. You know, seeing as I was already soaked and dirty. Totally worth it, too!!! As we walked down the village road, saying hi to people and laughing at how absurdly wet we were; I chanced to look back. There was a rainbow arching delicately over the exact place we had just ascended and descended.

there are many good insects in the world...

2008-06-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

01/06/08
New most despised insect: fleas.
That’s right, I have fleas. This kind of disgusts me. I am not certain where I picked them up or if they are just endemic to my host family’s house. I could have picked them up at the wedding I went to. We slept overnight on the floor there. Or it could have been the adorable puppy that I petted (although I washed my hands immediately afterwards and didn’t pick him up. I wanted to but after feeling lots of little bumps on his head I investigated and found the worst tick infestation I have ever seen. The little guy literally had 15 ticks at least per square inch…). Or it could be the huge rug my host family insists I lay my sleeping pad on. Or it could have been the cows. Or something else… anyway, I don’t know. What I do know is that fleas are really irritating. I am learning what they feel like, and have managed to catch six on me. All of them have been summarily torn in two or thrown out the window. I also am learning where they like to hide in garments. In the seams. If you unfold the seams and move quickly (REALLY quickly) you can catch them before the little buggers jump off and disappear into the carpet. And then you can rip them in two. Which is every bit as satisfying as ripping ticks in two. Who used to be my most despised insect-type-thing.
Methods used in my flea control: 1—Catch an kill, as previously described. 2—Spray self and bedding down with bug spray every night. 3—Put sprigs of rosemary all over my room and in all of my clean clothes (it is supposed to discourage insects). 4—Take bedding outside and leave it in the sun for a day. Or two. 5—Put nasty chemicals underneath the blanket that goes under the rug that goes under my sleeping pad. My next plan is to research fleas online and learn more killing methods. If you know any, dish! OK? I need back up plans.
I think the score is Fleas: 30+ Jeannie: 16 or so. But I am staging a comeback.

28 may 2008

2008-05-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

I’m not quite sure just what to write about… so much has happened! I have moved into my new host family’s home at my site. It’s a mud house, but a huge one. My host father is one of the Shixh in the village. A shixh is a person of authority, kind of like a governor, only usually a little more personal. So, closer to a mayor, I suppose. There are several local levels of command. The moqadem, then shixh, and then qaid. And after that there are more that I don’t know about. J Anyway… we have two cows, two calves, 11 sheep and lambs, one ram, two goats, one donkey, one mule and three chickens. And one cat who is usually hiding. My family spends a lot of time going to gather alfalfa for the animals. They harvest a new small patch of field everyday (by hand), and pack it all onto the donkey’s back to get it back to the house. Sometimes the sheep go out to graze, but I’m not sure the cows ever do. It is good we have cows, though, because that means we have milk! Hooray!! I won’t become lactose intolerant from under exposure after all. I might become intolerant anyway, though, who can fathom the ways of the intestines?? Certainly not me!
Some things that have happened, since I can’t decide what to write about:
--I had a meeting with a bunch of volunteers from the Eastern High Atlas region: lots of fun, some good ideas and hopefully some hiking buddies later!
--Tried to show my host mother that I can milk a cow, but she is afraid it will kick me, and I don’t know how to tell her I’ve been kicked by a cow before, so it’s OK, it won’t kill me (probably).
--Went to a Berber wedding: fascinating ceremony, involving a mule and lots of dancing, I’ll put a separate entry up about weddings sometime. On a side note, I don’t know if I mentioned that I got married a few weeks ago? Just kidding!! We had a mock wedding at training, and two "couples" got married. Somehow I ended up being one of the brides, and was completely decked out in Arabic finery. Pictures will follow at some point… The other girl was dressed like a Berber bride. The big plus from this is that if I need to claim to be married in the future, I won’t exactly be lying!!
--Biked 40 km to my souk town: a gorgeous ride, very remote, so I carried all sorts of tools just in case my bike got a flat or something truly irritating like that.
--Helped my host brother take our sheep out to graze. Fairly entertaining... the goats are sneaky.
--Made friends with our donkey. She’s very shy.
--The highlight of today is when I broke the tap in our kitchen. I am not at all sure how it happened, I was just turning it on to get some water when the whole handle just came off! With water flying everywhere as I frantically tried to screw it back in, I was thinking, "how come there is water pressure only when I don’t need it???" I almost got it back in, but then it came off totally with a spectacular shooting of water into the air and I realized that the sink drain was clogged… perfect… I tried to plunge it with the handy-dandy sink plunger nearby on the counter but no go… so now not only is water flying everywhere but the sink is a mere minute or two from overflowing, no end in sight… I try yelling for help but no one is in earshot and I cannot seem to stop the flowing fountain… so I put a big clay dish under the tap (think massive 2 ft. across and 4 in. deep clay dish) and sprint down the dark, unevenly huge spiral stairs to find someone, anyone… run out the front door and find my host father chumming around with some friends, I am yelling and telling him to (follows a rough translation of what I said) "Come! Now! Tap, kitchen, water, everywhere!!! Lets go! Now! Come ON lets go!! Now!!!!" Finally he understands my urgency (or maybe it was my soaking wet clothing) and comes up, screws the stupid thing in and the water stops. None too soon, either, as my makeshift water-catcher is filled to the brim. We sweep the water into the drain, and I go change and then go to meet the Qaid. Did I mention I was trying to hurry to a meeting the whole time? I have resolved never to use that tap again. Which leaves only one question: how on earth did I break it in the first place???
--My host father wants me to become a Muslim. Fortunately, I just learned the word for Christianity, so now he really wants me to become a Muslim. I predict many conversations about this… perhaps at some point I will succeed in convincing him that I do, in fact, greatly enjoy my choice of spirituality and that it’s great! Really! All without giving the appearance of proselytizing… a bit of a tightrope walk.
--I hope and pray each day that somehow the lightning fast conversations will magically begin to make real sense instead of bits and pieces here and there, but I know that it will instead require steady practice… I seem to be improving, anyway, which is encouraging.
--They have something like chapatti here! (Shout out to all you who know and love chapatti…) It’s called misms in Arabic and rrumtfos in Tashellhit/Tamazight. And it’s at least twice as big as Tanzanian chapatti. Usually served with more butter than I care for but I got one without any today! Delicious!!
Peace and joy to you all. In Jesus’ name… because I can say it here. J

2008-05-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

May 12, 2008

We presented our final project today! This the first actual project that I have done with Moroccans, and really the first formal environmental education project that I have completed. It is also likely to be the only one for quite a while. My site is a new one to Peace Corps, and so is unlikely to be ready for a project in the first few months of my service. Instead I will be relearning Tamazight…
But back to the project! I am very excited about it, mostly because we actually managed to pull it off. I had my doubts, mostly in technology coming through for us. And while it was quite stressful, we were able to actually pull it off. So, the project!
We decided to work with the local school in my training site. We needed to do an environmental education project, and we needed to do it in about two weeks time. My language teacher has experience in making films for educational purposes, and had the necessary editing software with him. With his ideas and some group brainstorming, we came up with a good storyline for a movie. Then, we planned out some in-class environmental education to go along with it. The movie and the in-class EE were both targeted to increase awareness about trash management and water conservation, and to get the kids excited about actually doing so.
The storyline is as follows:
The students are sitting in class, where the teacher is teaching them a passage from the Haddith about the importance of conserving trees. As one student is reciting the Haddith, crying interrupts the class. No child is crying, so the whole class leaves to search for who it is. They search the classroom, and then go outside to search the grounds. Finally, they find a small tree who is crying. Why are you crying they ask, and the trees answers: because there is trash on the ground all around me, and it makes me sad. Can you help me, it asks. Yes! The children reply and pick up the trash. We then go through this scene another time, only this time the tree is crying because there is no water in the ground and it is thirsty. So, then the children go and turn off the tap that they had left running.
The best part of this all was a tie between two things. Firstly, when we came back after shooting it and showed them the movie, they were very excited about it, especially to see themselves on the screne! Secondly, when we were shooting, it was so much fun to watch the kids gain in confidence over time. They all started out very shy, but eventually they became more confident, actually acting the parts and even having fun with it. One boy in particular set the mood for the whole film with how convincingly he delivered his one small line. We also tried to have just as many girls as boys involved, so we split up the speaking parts between people.
So now we have only to get them a copy of the the film. Hopefully they will find a way to watch it again, becuase we are givng them a CD/DVD, which isnùt the most appropriate of technologies, but it is the best that we can do.
In any event, it was a lot of fun, and hopefully the kids learned something, or found some enthusiasm for actively preserving their resources. Hooray!

Dialects

2008-05-03T15:29:00.001-07:00

So, about dialects.
Dialects are a thing of evil, created specifically to cause weeping and gnashing of teeth in the hearts of all Peace Corps volunteers in Morocco. Well, not quite. I actually think it’s cool how language changes and evolves when distance, mountains or whathaveyou separate people from each other. Be that as it may, the language that people speak in my site is quite different from the language that I have been spending the last 2 months trying to learn. Hence my initial frustration.
However, I have since realized that it’s not as different as I originally thought. Also, there are good things about the dialects, too. They’re beautiful. Just listen to anyone from Glasgow or the Deep South speak English. It’s beautiful. I suppose once I speak these well enough I might find a deeper appreciation for the beauty of the dialects in Tamazight as well.
The thing with language in Morocco is its fluidity. It’s REALLY different from place to place. Moroccan Arabic is pretty consistent throughout, but that in and of itself is a dialect of Arabic. Classical Arabic is also spoken in certain situations. French is also widely spoken. And then there are the Berber languages/dialects. They are called dilects, but are (as far as I can tell) completely different from each other. People speaking one cannot communicate to people speaking in another. Instead they resort to Moroccan Arabic (Darija). The dialects are three: Tashelhit, Tamazight, and Tarafit. Within each of those there are MANY dialects. Further, some who technically speak Tam claim to speak Tash. So, it’s all rather confusing.
Interestingly, these dialects survived quite a few years in Morocco even when they were technically illegal to speak. The Arabs had control of the country, and made it a law that everyone should speak Arabic. They were trying to get the Berber out of the Berbers, for many reasons, some religious in nature, while others were more for reasons of political control. However, Berber survived in the remote mountains. Certain aspects have mostly disappeared, though. Their number system is all but gone, and the written script has been largely forgotten. This is changing though, as "Berber Pride" has become more and more popular. They use the last symbol of the Berber alphabet as their symbol. And all Berber children now have a least some exposure to Tifinagh, the script, in school. This is one of the many things that have changed in recent years in Morocco. I am really glad to find that people are embracing their old culture… it’s encouraging! In an era of globalization, you have to be really intentional about preserving cultural heritage, or it just fades away.
So, really, I am happy that I have to learn an obscure, difficult dialect of a language spoken by very few people… it’s just that right now I the lazy part of me wishes it were a little bit easier. J

Site Visit

2008-05-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Site Visit!
I have actually been to the site where I will be staying for the next 2 years, Inshallah. Hooray!!! It was very exciting to actually be on a bus on the way. It is very far away from our training site. It took two very full days of travel to get there. If we were allowed to travel at night, it would have been shorter, but it is not very safe at night, and to Peace Corps doesn’t allow that… For good reason, really, since the incidence of car accidents goes up a lot at night, and Morocco has some of the most dangerous roads to be found on the planet. Or so it seems… I haven’t actually looked at any statistics, but even Moroccans I’ve talked to will say the same.
As we drove up to my site, the landscape went from hilly, gully filled desert to flat, arid plains that are almost desert, almost grassland… the mountains on my left hand as we drove north. We went over mountains, and then back to the plain. Wide open and dry and hazy from all the dust in the air. I admit that a few times a thought drifted across my mind: wow I hope there’s more greenery in my actual site. Arriving in my souk-town, 40 k from my actual village it was still flat plains, dry and dusty and already quite hot. And it wasn’t even May yet. And then waited for the transit to go… we waited for a couple hours. I was traveling with a Moroccan woman, very sweet person, who was being my translator for the introduction to my host family. We got into the transit, and then went up, and up and over, and up and up and over and then finally, around one more foothill, and we were between the mountains of the Middle Atlas, and there is my little village, tucked between huge peaks of stone and scrub. Along a river, mud houses (think adobe) and well-established fields in by the river. Green! Huge mountains!! I am so lucky.

21/04/2008

2008-05-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

Extremism
As I write this, I want to paint a clear picture. I also want to do it in such a way that I am understood… here goes.
For the first time I have experienced what I would really call "culture shock." Not just a feeling of things being weird and a little out of place, but straight up shocking.
I had an encounter with a gentleman of extremely conservative religious belief. There are people in the Islamic faith who choose not touch, talk to, or sometimes even look at people of the opposite gender. Now, before this gets blown out of proportion, I would like to remind people back home that there are extremists in the Christian faith who would rather ignore someone because of their sexual orientation than give them the time of day. Not very many, but they exist (more’s the pity). My point being, there are people who take things to the extreme in all places.
One of the extremes here is that, as a female, there are a few men with whom I cannot work with because they refuse to work with me. Or talk to me. Or hold a conversation with me. Or even look at me. Thankfully, they are few and far between here. Morocco is a moderate Islamic country. Here, women do have rights, by law. Some of them are very new, but they are on the books. And, I hear, mostly enforced. Here, most people, even very religious people, are very happy to shake hands with, talk to and work with people of the opposite sex. Even people who choose not to touch the opposite sex are often willing and happy to work with people of the opposite sex, as long as there is no need to touch each other. Wherein a greeting is merely verbal instead of an extended handshake or kissing-of-the-cheek (just like in France, Tanzania, or Spain) as it is with the majority of the population.
So.
Surprising, shocking, even. But when there are countries where women cannot do anything outside of their home without the consent of their male guardian, what have I to complain about?

time

2008-04-16T04:15:00.000-07:00

so, we are technically about halfway through our training now. somehow, though, the end seems to be coming faster and faster and faster; we find our our site assignments in less than a week!!!!!! i am incredibly excited and nervous to find out where i will be. part of me would like ot avoid being in snowy areas, but that is pretty much impossible at this point: my language assignment indicates that i will probably be in the middle and high atlas, where they receive snow even now. some of the volunteers have pictures of sledding with some of the kids at their sites! and yet there are places in this countyr so hot in the summer that palm trees spontaneously combust. i have been told over 140 degrees farenheit, at least. so we will see.

today we head back to our community based training site, to continue our language immersion and training. we are planning to hold and earth day celebration this weekend with some of the kids from the school. even though earth day isnùt until next week, we are celebrating is on the weekend, because that is when we will be there. it should be fun! we have some posters to give the classrooms, and will try to do some education about the cool animals and plants that make morocco their home, and then play some educational games. should be good; but it will be an adventure for sure with the amount of language that i have actually mastered! heh_heh.

pictures

2008-04-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

hey all!!

i am finally going to get some photos up here... i hope.

hooray!!!! the hand is my hand with tradtional tamazight henna on it. the village is my homestay vilage, near kalat mgouna. you can see the difference between the river valley and the surrounding scrubland. water is soooo important here. the picture with the flag is the vilage school. it is actually the central school in the area, has 600 or so students in it. we will hopefully be doing an environmental education project with them, trying to promote water conservaiton and trash management. there seems to be no formal trash management system in morocco. each city is responsible for it, and most seem to do very little about it. lots of lmika bags, or plastic bags, lying and blowing around. houses are build of concrete or adobe.

thats all for now!

sending my love home

2008-04-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

29 March 2008

Yesterday I was in a crowded taxi, smushed into the same front seat as the PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) who I and three other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) had been visiting. As we rolled around corner after sharp corner, we were again and again greeted by two flags waving proudly in the wind. Vibrant scarlet red, with a dark green star shivering in the center. The flags are there because the king is coming to visit that part of the country. Every town, school, mile of road that he might see is covered with the colors of Morocco. It’s amazing. And then there were the Christmas lights. Yes, green and red Christmas lights, strung in the trees just like they do in Mount Horeb, and complete with some flashing green flowers reminiscent of St. Patty’s Day. It’s humbling to see the patriotism, but at the same time it’s kind of… thought-provoking. It’s hard to see how clean the towns become (no trash, flowers planted, banners and flags everywhere…), knowing that more than likely it will no longer be so clean in a few short days. Still, one cannot deny that the effect was way charming.

We were on our way back from our field trip, in the “foothills of the High Atlas,” according to the volunteer we stayed at. I disagree, we were most definitely in the mountains. No question. Not snow-covered, but in pretty easy view of the white caps of snow. It was fun to see an actual active site, with the volunteer in action. We were able to help out with an Environmental Education session in the nearby school. That was fun, the kids were super cute. The girls were very shy, though. We did a trash pick-up and then a discussion about the different kinds of trash and how long they tend to stick around if you just throw them out on the ground. The girls answered questions, but didn’t want to pick up any trash. The boys were all about the trash, but didn’t answer questions. Some things stay the same, right? Only sometimes the girls are WAY too shy to answer questions, even. Definitely a culture of shyness here. Even outright fear in some cases.

Now we are back again at our seminar site. In a couple of days we return to our host families, though! I look forward to it!

22 March 2008

2008-04-02T09:06:00.001-07:00

22 March 2008

Well, this is more of a record of what occurred around this date, but there was cool stuff, so I’ll just take a little trip back in time for this. J
I stayed a week with my first host family!! My host father’s name is Brahim, and my host mother’s name is Fatima. These are some of the most common names here in Morocco, in fact, one of the other trainee’s parents have the exact same name. And exact same last name. Because I’m related to what must be half of the village through my host family. There is also a little girl, Aisha, and a little boy, Murad. They’re great, really kind, understanding and easy going. I’m lucky in that. Mine is not the house where food is forced upon me until I gag. Let me explain: in the Moroccan culture, hospitality is INCREDIBLY important. If you have a guest, you roll out the red carpet. You buy extra nice food if you can, and give them all the best parts of it even if you can’t buy special food. You would never dream of allowing them to help you in the kitchen. You want them to eat as much of that best portion of food as they want, and the way they make sure that you get all you want is that they tell you to eat. And eat, and eat and eat. Because in this very subtle culture, it’s only good manners to refuse food on the first, second, third, fourth try. Thus, one of the first words I learned was “tsh!” meaning, “eat!” In my family, if I say “safi! Baraka, shbeght!” three times or so, they will get let me stop eating, realizing that when we silly Americans say “I’m finished, I’m blessed, I’m full!” we really do mean it. The kids are very helpful with learning the language, too. I think they’re tickled pink to have someone who pronounces the words worse than they do! It’s hilarious, every time I try to say a word with a “q” in it my little sister gets right up in my face and emphatically demonstrates how to properly say it. “q” is a sound made in the very back of your throat, kind of like a crows caw, only duller and louder. Needless to say, it’s pretty challenging when thrown between a few other consonants. Vowels are unpopular here…
I wrote in my email what the valley looks like… I’m going to try to post a picture here to show just how very, very green it is in the river valley and how very, very dust-colored it is everywhere else. Water is an amazing and precious resource. Let me just reiterate that: we in the Midwest of the United States of America are blessed far beyond our understanding with the water the flows in abundance in streams, rivers, ponds and lakes all across our land. The fact that our well water exists and is drinkable, instead of salty, is a blessing. The fact that it does, in fact, rain and snow regularly is a blessing. The fact that we do not have to pull every last drop of water out of a river that has filth, laundry detergent and all manner of trash in it to irrigate our crops, wash our laundry, and even drink is a blessing. It is incredibly rare on the face of the earth, and we should be singing and dancing in thanks and praise every day. I know I do now when my shower actually has pressure and balanced cold and hot water for more than 2 minutes!! (Honestly, I’d rather have a bucket shower with one temperature than a shower that keeps you guessing.)
Some fun/funny/interesting little things I’ve noticed:
--Horses are well treated here. Donkeys are not. They are scorned, beaten, and their legs are all too often sore from running up and down roads without shoes.
--Cheese goes onto pizza after it comes out of the oven at my host family. And my host brother loves pizza, but without the cheese, veggies or sauce. Never seen a 9-year-old so excited about vegan pizza!
--Children of all ages love soccer. It is the only game I’ve ever seen them playing.
--Satellite dishes are common! Apparently they’re cheap, because they pepper every kind of housing unit you can think of.
--People don’t always bother buttoning their flys. I don’t know why, but especially kids. Maybe it’s just too much trouble??
--Motion sickness is a common occurrence on public transportation. Very.
--The Saharan dust is more than equal to crossing the height of the High Atlas Mountains. When there’s dust in the air, there’s dust in the air. Everywhere.
--Apparently people use camels to plow their fields. I wait with great anticipation to witness this!!

6 March 2008

2008-03-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

6 March 2006

Well, tomorrow it’s off to our PST sites! I’m very excited, but also kind of sad. Up until this point both the Environment Education and Health sectors have been going through all of this together. I ended up making friends with some of the folks in the Health sector: almost more than in E.E. I suppose if I actually counted then I might actually know how true that is, or if that’s just what it feels like. Anyway, both of the roommates that I’ve had, the girl I borrow the guitar from and the guy who I sat next to on the plane over are all Health volunteers. So, hardly a week into training an I’m already saying a goodbye of sorts again. That is unexpected, to say the least.

On the other hand, I am so incredibly excited to get into training proper! In less than a week we’ll be in language classes, and in only two we’ll be in home stays!! Knowing which language we’ll be learning is even cooler because it gives us a specific region where we’ll be working. (!!!!) And, no I can’t post exactly where I’ll be online. In fact, doing so could easily get me fired. So, if you want more detailed info on that, write to me. Or call me. Once I get a cell phone. Also awesome is starting the technical training… hooray! Well, I’d best get to sleep.

Bslama (goodbye) for now.

4 March 2008

2008-03-08T13:56:00.001-08:00

4 March 2008
We have arrived in Morocco!! It’s wonderful to finally be here. The countryside that we saw on the way from Casablanca to Rabat was very beautiful. Flocks of large sheep, fields of cactus that look like over-sized prickly pears, donkeys pulling carts. We’re staying in a nice hotel, all 60 of us. It’s a large group to herd around, I’m sure the directors feel like the shepherds of those large sheep. Only moreso—one of the PCTGL’s (that would be Peace Corps Trainee Group Leader’s) said it was like herding cats. J
Interestingly we saw a street demonstration soon after we arrived in Rabat. We asked about it, and were informed that this past week there have been several demonstrations (which are legal with permits in Morocco). This one was about the unemployment of intelligent, educated young people. The group included both men and women, most of who weren’t over 35, but some of who probably were. It’s hard to tell from a distance. Apparently there is a shortage of jobs… or, some say, a shortage of jobs with the government. Anyway, it was an interesting glimpse into Moroccan life, economics and politics, if only a glimpse.
Rabat is a clean city, cleaner than I expected, which says more about my expectations than it does anything else. For example, I was expecting something like Dar es Salaam, but this is not a third world country. It’s a second world country. Thus, the rolling black-outs I nearly expected aren’t in evidence either, which is nice. We got to see the Peace Corps Office; a lovely little complex in the city, with a library, offices for all four sectors, doctor’s quarters, and a swimming pool that has been converted into a garden with a curious concrete lip all the way around it. The PC staff here seems friendly, excited and competent, all of which is really good to know, as all of those qualities are needed here!
So, that’s the news from me! There will be more later…

4 March 2008

2008-03-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

philly!

2008-03-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

i'm in the home of the philly cheesesteak, the city of brotherly love. it's cool to chilly, and there's 60 Peace Corps Trainees running around. it's a great group so far. lot's of smart, funny people, who're passionate about doing good in the world! there's three married couples in our group, one of whom are in their retirement years. i am, however, mostly in the company of my own age group for the first time in months. it feels great! i have even met two, count them 1,2 Christians already. I know some of you were praying for that, and i'd have to say, prayers answered! although neither are in my sector, the fact that they are there at all is comforting. just someone to understand where i'm coming from if things get hard, you know? but everyone is super nice and friendly and excited and full of hopes and fears and ideas and plans and all sorts of crazy emotions! it's great, but tiring. which is why i'm going to bed. and, dad, there are many who brought their laptops. which makes me feel somewhat better, even though i'm still decked out in technology, as only your daughter would be! :)

for all of you who are over 50 and think you're too old for peace corps, but wish you had done it, i have news for you! the oldest volunteer to ever serve was eighty. that's right, 80! so, if you really want to, have the time and the consensus with your spouse, check out the online application!!! anyway.

we've been orientating, getting to know each other, and just chillin' for a couple of days. we registered, i got all my paperwork in. Mrs. Erickson, you should expect a call about the school-partnership thing sometime in the relatively near future. :)

things are going well so far!
love and peace to all

formalities

2008-02-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

according the Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook, it is necessary to put a little disclaimer on the blog before i start talking about my time serving in Morocco with them. thus, here is the disclaimer:
the views herein do not represent the views of Peace Corps, or the United States government, or anyone else, except my own, Jeannie Coffin. and, i will do my best to make it clear that whatever i feel or think is not a comprehensive analysis of Morocco, Peace Corps, or the United States. of course, my own bias and slant is a product of my experiences, good and bad. thus i will try my utmost to be fair, but if i fall short, please forgive me and do not make your mind up about any of those three mentioned organizations/entities based solely upon my experiences.
whew!
i thought i was done packing, but now i know... i MUST rearrange... perhaps thin down... boo. but i'm leaving so soon!!! super excited!!

farewell!

2008-02-25T23:15:00.000-08:00

saying goodbye-for-now. it's a funny thing. i'm sad, but i'm excited, i'm happy, but i don't want to leave my people here... so many thoughts and feelings and lists of things to do running through my head all at once. it's no wonder i can't stop to feel any one thing at one time! so different from saying goodbye when the other person is leaving. then, i nearly cry. sometimes.

packing is not fun. and i have much left to do.

farewell to snow falling softly through the night. farewell to turkey-angels leaving their prints in the snow. farewell to farm family sitting around the dinner table and laughing into the small hours of the night. farewell to friends and family, for now (!). farewell to my bed, to warm showers, to quiet moments, to my dog, to my cat. farewell to ice on branches, sticking pines needles together like the hair of a wet cat. farewell to skidding sideways across the road. farewell to waiting only, now to begin waiting while doing (i hope!).

you know what the best part about travelling? (well, one of the best parts) corresponding with people back home!!! ***shameless plug for people to write to me***

:)

treasures in the snow

2008-02-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

i went cross-country skiing today. out our front door: one of the advantages of wisconsin in the winter is that there is usually snow. especially this winter: 90+ inches of it! so, i strap on my skiis and start hurrying around the edge of the farm fields, and enjoying the "warm" temperatures, ie. greater than 20 degrees F. the last snowstorm we had started with an inch of rain, and then some freezing rain, followed by 8 inches of snow. the result was the glazing of every single twig, dead queen anne's lace, dried leaf... everything. in sheltered places, it's still like that days later! it is truly lovely, like strands of blown glass along the delicate edges of plant skeletons. the light shines through it and it might be a forest of glass, or a blown glass sculpture of flowers and weeds.
i hurried on, squinting sunlight and slipping out of the tracks laid down by previous skiers, following the contour of the forest and field. now looking at the snow beneath me, animal tracks every which way in some places, unbroken sparkle-space in others. little friends searching for food in the foot-and-a-half deep snow. life isn't easy in the winter for the critters. mice, tiny prints show the leap inches at a time, trailing their little tail behind them. deer, feet plunging through the snow because of their weight, all balanced on four little points of hooves. coyote, cleverly walking through the skiers tracks, where they won't break through the snow as much. and turkey. messy, seems like a fuzzy trail cut through the snow, 3 inches wide. sometimes you see the edge of a talon. i scared a flock of them up, and the sprung into the air, wings thumping out their retreat. and then, the most beautiful track of them all. a turkey had landed, trailing tail feathers in the snow, and then flapped it's wings powerfully one last time to keep its balance, leaving an imprint of the tip of each feather as it carved out the snow. then it ran into the woods. so lovely! the symmetry of the wings, the delicate shape of each feather-track, the trailing tail feathers when it first touched the ground. wow!!
i skiied on, hurrying again, but having to pause to gaze at the tracks again on the way back. what wonderful gifts of winter, to remember when i am far away. :)