I guess I am a socialist. Here’s the deal: I don’t think about socialism at all. I don’t think about overthrowing the American government and forcing my values on others. I don’t think about nationalizing huge corporations, although I do think a lot about a national health service, which I suppose qualifies me. Back that deal- it seems like there’s a big group of people back there in the States that’s doing all this thinking for me. I mean, I can mention that I like something or someone- Obama, for example, or Sonya Soto-Mayor, or soccer, and suddenly I’m a socialist. I think it’s that last one that gets me the most.
Here’s how it works: Soccer makes me happy. And soccer, according to the Tea Party folks, is a socialist game. Here’s the reasoning behind that:
1. Soccer is a team game. Teamwork is socialism.
2. It reflects European Economic values, and everyone knows the EU is a socialist organization.
3. You don’t have to use your arms for it, so if you are a soccer player it’s likely that your arms will become atrophied and drop off. This means you will need to rely on other people and possibly even need governmental assistance to get basic things done for yourself. Even if you manage to escape the fate of relying on others or social safe guards, if you have no arms when the reds march in and start taking over your town, you won’t be able to fight back.
4. Spain won (OPENLY socialist government, lots of greasy hair) against Holland (Amsterdam, gay marriage, and Dutchness= socialist, duh). Socialism fought against socialism and socialism won. It wouldn’t have been like that if they could use their arms.
So… I guess I’m a socialist.
Listening to news from the States, it sounds like the World Cup is a bigger deal back home than it ever has been before, but I currently live in the rest of the world. In the states, the general feeling is that soccer is played by elementary and middle school students so they can learn socialism… pardon, I mean teamwork. But in North Africa, as in the rest of Africa, and Europe and Central America and South America and Asia, soccer is life. Nike uses this as a slogan, but it really is true. Both boys and girls, even in my tiny community, play from an early age. I’ve mentioned before how the grass here is hand cut by women and girls, leaving behind large swaths of perfect lawn in late summer. It’s not unusual to see three or for games being played at once on these fields. Girls here are uneducated, over-worked and married off early, but they still play soccer. I’ve seen a young mother in her traditional dress, returning from the fields with a sack full of grass on her back kick a stray ball back into a game with perfect accuracy. I believe Morocco’s national team should, in the future, recruit from among the shepherd boys of the High Atlas. This is the only way to get a team that can contend for the world cup in any seriousness!
Anyway, I started this year’s world cup adventure in the place where it all ended for the rest of the world, Madrid. Two pints of Guinuess, a jamon and pineapple pizza, and a handful of American School of Madrid teachers helped us celebrate our tie match with the UK. The Irish bar we chose was split 50-50 with Americans and Brits, all well behaved but noisy. The man sitting at the table beside us yelled “For FUCK’S SAKE!!” repeatedly, which really is the only thing you can say when your keeper lets a half-hearted American kick roll gently between his arms and into the goal.
After that game, I saw a serious of games during a trip to the North of Morocco and then home again. I managed to catch every US game, including two that happened while I was in the clutches of a nasty case of giardia. I dragged my dehydrated ass out of bed and over to the café around the corner to watch the Algeria vs US game and then the Ghana vs US game two days later. The young guys who run the shops in town kept me up to date on all the other scores and commiserated with me when the US was knocked out. During every US game I saw, the majority of Moroccans rooted for us, even though, they assured me after the US vs Ghana game, they really didn’t mind seeing an African team do well. This is Africa, after all!
My site has had electricity for four years, but even here, the World Cup was unavoidable. Souk, the main part of town, usually has several very social hours between the afternoon prayer and the final prayer, with a brief break for the sunset prayer. During the world cup, however, only a few old men lingered in the streets. Everyone else packed into the three cafes that had shelled out for Al-Jazeera sport. Typically if I travel somewhere, I get back to site within the period of time between the calls to prayer and find my town bustling with men. But afternoons during the cup, I’d step off my transit and find my world deserted because my community, like communities all over the world, was watching the world cup. The speaker mounted outside one café blasted Arabic play by play into the streets and the sounds of vuvuzelas could be heard even from inside my house, but I don’t mind at all. Even if I made the decision not to watch, I still felt like a part of it all.
I watched the final in my souk town with a handful of other volunteers. During the day, the temperatures averaged around 45 degrees C, too hot to think, but the evenings are lovely. A group of local associations had set up a stage and invited several Moroccan musicians to play. The square was packed with families and groups of friends. We found some space on the upstairs terrace of a small café overlooking the square. The sounds of Arabic and Tamazight hip-hop mingled with the commentary and a cool breeze blew across the terrace. Just perfect! The outcome was not exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t mind at all that Holland lost. It was a great game, a blissful setting, and a wonderful way to wrap up the tournament!
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Questions from the kids
How is the weather compared to WA?
Well, that’s an interesting question. The weather varies widely in Morocco. They call it “the cold land with the hot sun.” In some areas, it can get REALLY hot. Friends of mine in other parts of the country say that they have been dealing with heat as high as 130° F. When it’s that hot, you don’t do anything except try to stay cool. That means you wet your sheets and leave them in the refrigerator for the day, then go to sleep at night with bottles of ice.
However, where I live, in the High Atlas Mountains, it’s a different story. The hottest it got this summer was about 95°. Since I’m from WA, I’m perfectly happy with that! But it’s about to change.
We’ve been having really wet weather lately. Unlike WA, when it rains here, it floods immediately. Within five minutes, rivers of water are running down the streets, the river is racing to creep over its banks, and the fields are flooding. This is because there ground is so dry and hard, and there is very little vegetation to absorb the excess water. The corn crop was destroyed just as people were starting to harvest it, and the neighboring province has lost a lot of its apple crop. Apples are one of the few things that people around here grow to sell, everything else they grow for subsistence. The loss of the apples is a pretty serious problem. Imagine how big of an economic disaster it would be for WA if all the apples in Eastern WA died before they were ripe. And then imagine that all the people who own those apples are incredibly poor, relying on the small amount of income they get from the apples to maintain their family for the rest of the year, and that they don’t have any insurance or economic safety nets like American farmers have. Mushkil axatar! (That means “big problem.”)
Back to the weather in general. A friend of mine recently told me that there were two meters (over six feet) of snow in my town last winter. No big deal, you say, but then remember that I have no indoor heating, aside from a few small electric heaters. I have no hot water, either. So, as you can imagine, bathing is not going to be that much fun this winter!
Types of foods and what is your favorite?
Well, right now it’s Ramadan, the month of fasting. I have been fasting the entire time and enjoying very much the special food that everyone eats to break the fast in the evening. The traditional meal is water, milk, coffee, dates, a honey-sesame-orange water pastry called shebekiah, and a vegetable soup called harira. My absolute favorite thing for Ramadan is Agroum n Tadunt. You take a traditional Moroccan loaf of bread, which is round and flat, slice it in half, and stuffed with veggies, spices, and fat. Sounds gross, but it’s so tasty! I like the way my host sister makes it best. It’s spicy!
The main traditional dish of Morocco is tajine. A tajine dish has a flat base that you set directly onto the stove or fire and a cone shaped lid. You start with onions, meat, and spices on the bottom, then add whatever vegetables are in season. It cooks for well over an hour, until the veggies are pretty soggy. You eat it with fresh bread from the same dish. I like it, but people in my area spend so much time in the fields that they rarely have time to make tajine. I am learning how to make it for my host family as a special treat.
What type of clothing do you wear?
I wear mostly clothes that I brought from America, but I have to take the sensibilities of my community into account. All the women here wear a lot of clothes. Even on hot days they wear a few sweaters and several pairs of thick leggings under skirts and cloaks. I don’t know how they do it! I am allowed to dress a bit more liberally because people know that I am foreign. I still try to wear clothes that cover my arms, go up to my neck, and cover my butt. If I wear clothes that expose too much of my body, like my arms or neck, then I tend to get more attention than I like.
What is the daily life/routine of most people?
The daily routine of the people I live with varies widely by gender. Everyone wakes up early and starts with feeding the animals and household chores, and then they go their separate ways. Since you are all about the same age of my sister, Rkiya, I will give you a sample day from here and you can see how it compares to you. This, by the way, is every day for Rkiya. She does not go to school.
Rkiya is responsible for most of the household chores so her mom can spend her time in the fields. When she gets up, she helps her parents feed the four cows, mule, and sheep that the family has. Then she makes bread and sets it aside to rise. While it is rising, she makes tea or coffee and gets breakfast to the whole family. Then she cleans up, does the dishes, and sweeps the room. After the bread has risen, she bakes it in the big gas oven. When the bread is done, she grabs her tashimut. The tashimut is two big woven plastic bags with ties at each corner, which she uses to carry whatever she harvests from the fields. Sometimes she meets up and a friend and goes to cut grass or hay with them, but most of the time she goes by herself. She cuts the grass using a small hand-held scythe, and then gathers them into bundles and loads up the tashimut. The sizes of the loads she can carry are unbelievably huge! Rkiya is very strong. She takes the hay back to the house and either leaves it out to dry or feeds most of it to the cows right away. Then she makes lunch for the family. While she is cooking, she watches Turkish or Egyptian soap operas on TV. Most of these soap operas are in Standard Arabic, which she doesn’t understand. Rkiya has never been to school- she taught herself Moroccan Arabic and sometimes uses Standard Arabic phrases to sound cool. After everyone eats lunch, Rkiya cleans up and sometimes takes a little rest. Then she goes back to the fields a couple more times. In the evening, as night falls, she gets to hang out with her friends for a bit, and then makes dinner. The whole family sits around and watches TV, then eats dinner after the last call to prayer, sometime in between 9:30 and 10pm. After that, it’s bedtime.
In comparison, my host brother seems to have little scheduled activities aside from praying five times a day. He wanders around with his friends, maybe does a chore or two for his mom, and sits around, expecting to be waited on. This is a pretty common schedule for a young man.
What are the construction materials for most houses?
This is one of the COOLEST things about where I live, I think. In the cities, the houses are made out of cement cinder blocks. But here, they’re all made out of compacted earth. First, they build a basic foundation out of rocks, and then they build a wooden frame and set it on top of the foundation. The frame is about a meter long by half a meter high. A mixture of mud and straw is loaded into the frame a basket load at a time and is pounded down with a cement weight by someone standing on the frame. When it is full, they remove the frame and move it on to the next spot. The blocks dry pretty slowly, but when they do dry, they are very solid.
Once the walls are built, they place solid beams across the top of the walls, and then weave together bamboo to form a roof. The roof is covered in plastic (several layers, in my roof’s case… it’s fallen in three times) and then more mud. Doors, windows, and skylights are all bolted in. My house doesn’t have many because too many windows makes the walls much less structurally sound.
I watched some neighbors of ours tear down a house by just pounding it all down with sledge hammers, mix the dirt up with water, and build a brand new house out of the same dirt.
Why did you join the PC and or what inspired you to join?
I have a lot of reasons for wanting to join the Peace Corps! I have always really enjoyed volunteering. I find it far more rewarding that any job I’ve ever had. I was also thinking about going back to school after graduating from college, but was not drawn to any particular subject. I thought that what I wanted was a really challenging experience to push me outside of my boundaries and to challenge my worldview. Peace Corps seemed to fit the bill! By the time I applied, I was volunteering as a health educator for Planned Parenthood, which was a great experience, so I asked to be placed as a health educator in the Peace Corps. Because of my experience and background, which is in human development and psychology, I was given several options for places to go: the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Western Africa, and North Africa/Middle East. I speak French, so the two African options made the most sense. I chose North Africa/Middle East for one main reason: I wanted to learn about Islam and live in an Islamic country. Most Western African countries are also Islamic, but many people practice a brand of Islam that contains aspects of Animism. Morocco has had an important role in the development of modern Islam and it is practiced here in a somewhat purer form.
The Peace Corps has three goals for its volunteers. The first one is the basically the “work” part. It says that Peace Corps will help developing countries reach their goals for development by providing them with aid and technical training. The second and third goals relate to cultural exchange. The second says that we are helping to teach the country and people served about Americans and the third is teaching Americans about the country and people where the PCV lives (hey, that’s what we’re doing right now!) I love being a health educator, but my actual daily life here is the fulfillment of those last two goals.
Getting back to where those goals intersect with my interest in Islam, after September 11th (which happened when I was in my senior year of high school), I started to be worried that the mis-interpretation of Islam and the fear that it bred were becoming a part of our culture. Yes, the men behind that attack and several others were Muslims. Yes, there are parts of the Qu’ran that mention attacking unbelievers. But there are parts of the Bible that say the same thing and there are Christian and Jewish terrorists too. I have believed for a long time that one of the reasons why there are so many religious fanatics in the Middle East these days is because of the economic strife and expansion of the gap between who holds the money and who doesn’t. I wanted to live and experience this. And I was pretty sure that misunderstandings and misconceptions go both ways. They certainly do!
What do you miss most about home/WA?
The food. You don’t really realize how spoiled you are with food until you go to a foreign country! I love eating sushi, Thai food, Mexican food, Vietnamese food, Italian food, etc. You can get some of those things in the big cities, but it’s too expensive for my volunteer budget. I also miss getting a wider variety of fresh vegetables, like broccoli, spinach, and mushrooms. And I miss salmon.
I also really miss my family, but mostly I don’t want to go home to see them, I want them to come here! I have a two-year-old nephew who I think about all the time. He calls me and sings songs to me on the phone. I also just found out that my brother’s wife is pregnant with twins! I love kids and being an aunt is one of the most exciting things that has happened to me, so I sometimes have a rough time with being away from my nephew and with the idea that I’m going to miss the first year of the twins’ lives. But I’ll buy them baby jellabas (that’s the traditional item of clothing around here) and remember that being a PCV automatically makes me a cool aunt.
What are your favorite things about Morocco?
The people are really nice (for the most part). It’s a beautiful country and I’m constantly being surprised by how lovely it is. Also, every day is an adventure. This country is full of surprises and contrasts. I like how much it keeps me on my toes.
I also love the intersections of different cultures. Morocco has a rich indigenous culture in the Amazigh people, who have remained independent through the successive invasions of Phoenicians, Romans, Turks, and modern European colonial powers. There is also a rich Jewish history, and the art and architecture of the country have been strongly influenced by Andalucian culture. Modern Morocco is struggling to balance the ancient traditions and the push to modernize. Morocco is a Monarchy, but the king is young, educated in Europe, and interested in making Morocco a leader among Muslim countries. On the other hand, this is a Monarchy- the king can and does throw people into jail who are too critical, and people are afraid of speaking out against him as a result. Morocco is also still strongly influenced by the French, who colonized Morocco in the first half of the 20th century. Independence was gained in 1956, but Morocco rarely does anything without the support of France. But in comparison to other North African/Middle Eastern countries, Morocco is very modern and liberal. Morocco is full of contrasts and mystery. Like I said, every day is an adventure!
What is your age?
I’m 25, but I’ll be 26 on November 10th!
Is there much wildlife there?
Yes there is! There are a lot of amazing birds, for one thing. In my area there is an endangered species of wild sheep. We also have the Barbary Macaques, or Barbary Apes. They live here in Morocco and in Spain on the Rock of Gibraltar only. When I take the road to Meknes or Fez (two of the larger cities in my area), I pass places where tourists go to feed the monkeys. I’ve never done it myself- they can get aggressive and I believe that the best thing for them is for them to remain wild!
The most prolific form of wildlife here comes in the form of creep-crawly things. Scorpions, snakes, lots of different kinds of beetles, and lots of flies. One of the coolest things we have here are camel spiders! Look them up! They got a lot of publicity from soldiers in Iraq, so you should be able to find some really scary photos.
Was the language difficult to learn?
VERY! Language is the most stressful thing I have to deal with. Some days I walk outside and have great conversations with everyone I meet and people tell me that I speak very well. Other days, I go out and don’t understand the simplest questions. Sometimes I can understand but not answer, and sometimes language just fails me altogether. It is also really difficult switching between Tamazight (that’s my local language), French (which I speak with the medical staff that I work with), and English. I have to have a sense of humor about it, or else all I would do is hide in my house!
What is your job?
I am a health-sector volunteer, which basically means that I am a health educator. We have a framework for the projects that we are supposed to be doing. The first relates directly to health. This means working with kids to have good health and hygiene, brushing their teeth, and learning how not to get sick. Then we have to do work with pregnant women because a LOT of women and babies in my community die every year from health problems that can be prevented. The last element of this project is HIV/AIDS education, but this is not a big problem in my area. The second project is with training health officials, people who work in the local government, and people who are interested in community service to help with some of these projects. This is so that what we do will continue after we leave and the health of the community does not become dependent on Peace Corps. The last project relates to sanitation. We are expected to look into water supplies to make sure that it is clean to drink and easy to access, make sure people have good bathrooms, and help with trash pick up.
In my site, I have a lot of freedom to dictate how my actual work will go. I usually spend a lot of time every day in the sbitar (clinic) with my counterparts (essentially my bosses) who are the nurses. The nurses are both new to the community, but we’re all excited to have them. Up until this point, we’ve had an unmarried male nurse, which poses all sorts of problems because the men won’t let their wives and daughters go to see him. He was a fantastic nurse! When people would come into the Sbitar, he listened carefully to their complaints. He is also a native Tamazight speaker, which is unusual for the staff here. Most nurses and doctors do not speak Tamazight, and most women do not speak Arabic. He understood that a lot of the health problems experienced by women and children stemmed from the lack of education and limitations on the women’s freedoms, and he was very interested in working with me to do health education. I hope the new nurses are just as excited as he was!
I am thinking about and beginning to work on a number of different projects. Almost all of the health problems in my community relate to sanitation, hygiene, and lack of education. Sanitation means lack of clean water and good places to use the bathroom. No one in my town has water in their homes. We all, myself included, collect water from communal taps that come from a treated well. Because water has to be collected, people don’t use a great deal if they can manage it- that means they don’t bathe often. Sanitation also relates to having good places to go to the bathroom. Most people do have what we call bit-lmas (room of water, in Arabic), but a lot of women don’t use them. There are cultural stigmas attached to women being seen entering the bit-lma, so most women just wait until they are in the fields to use the bathroom. The fields are surrounded by drainage ditches, which people also drink from. Major problems there! So I’d like to do a lot of education about how to use the bit-lmas and perhaps help more people get them in their homes. I may also do some work with making the water supply more safe for winter time, when most of the taps freeze.
Another project that I am working on has nothing to do with health… yet! Not very many women in my community have been educated. Perhaps they have done a few years here or there, but it is not seen as worthy enough to spend money. This is one of the roots of the health problems seen here. I am working on getting a space for women where we can hold Arabic literacy classes. The space will also have places where the women can sew and weave and perhaps do yoga classes! I hope that if it is used, I can also sort of put together a “club” of young woman who will learn about health things with me and then go out into the community to teach them by themselves.
Wow, that was a long answer!
What is the religion for most of the people?
Almost everyone here is a practicing Muslim, but just like in the US, people practice to various different degrees. Some people follow the Qu’ran very closely, while others practice it in a very modern way. Some people drink alcohol, which is haram (forbidden) and even eat pork (big no-no.) Some people try hard to push Islam on me, while others understand and respect the differences between us. Every body has their own relationship with ‘Llah here, but Islam is a very communal religion as well. People who practice are expected not only to pray with others, but also to learn from them and keep the community in the front of their minds.
What type of music do they have there?
Most of the people around here listen to Amazigh music, which, I have to admit, I don’t like all that much. I like the really traditional stuff, but pretty much every taxi driver or kid with an mp3 player choose to listen to music that is heavy on the vocoder. Ugh. Arab music is around, too. There is popular stuff, like Amr Diab, who is probably the most famous Arabic musician right now, and classical stuff. I like them both a lot! Arabs like to sing at every chance they get!
How do you spend your free time?
I read, do yoga, cook, go for walks, talk to friends, day dream, do crafts, ride my bike, clean my house, sing, play ukulele, and write long letters home!
What is a typical day for you?
A typical day for me starts pretty early, because I really like mornings. I get up; have a little tea and maybe some yogurt. I turn on music from the moment I get up, although sometimes I listen to podcasts from my favorite radio programs at home. Then I get dressed and check my water supplies. If I need water, I take my buckets or tubs out to the tap to fill them, then come back and fill up all my water storage. I’m getting really strong from doing this! Then I go to the sbitar and see what is going on. If the nurse is not there, I might go home, but usually I go looking for him. We see as few as 15 patients a day, so sitting around in the sbitar is useless sometimes! Usually by this point it is almost lunch, so I go home or eat with friends. After lunch everyone is relaxing, so I do to. I read or do yoga. Then I often study Tamazight and French, read the Qu’uran, or work on projects. In the late afternoon I like to go out to the fields and walk around. If I want to be social, I go when I know the women are still working and hope to get invited home with someone for tea. If I want to be unsociable, I go a bit later when I know they have left and enjoy my solitude. Then I go home, cook a big meal, watch movies or read, do dishes, or whatever is needed, before going to bed.
My schedule right now is pretty different because it’s Ramadan. I have been fasting, so that means that I cannot eat during daylight hours. I usually stay in bed later, then get up and go about my day as I mentioned before, just minus tea, lunch, etc. The evening call to prayer is the signal that we can eat again. I either invite myself over to someone’s house or make a big meal for myself. This meal is called lftur. After lftur I usually get a huge burst of energy, so do yoga or I clean. Later I eat a snack, then go to bed for a few hours. I wake up again sometime in between 3:30 and 4 to eat saHur, the last meal before the sun rises, then I go back to bed and sleep for a long time! I was recently spending time with a huge group of Moroccan friends at a conference, and I just skipped sleeping all together for about a week in favor of staying up to sing, play games, and talk.
What are your living conditions?
I have a really fantastic little house all to myself. It’s right next to my sbitar, so the commute isn’t bad. I have a lot of privacy. The house is made out of mud with cement floors. It’s perfect for one person. I have a kitchen, bit lma, bedroom, salon, and a cozy hallway. I also have a fully enclosed courtyard. I have electricity, but I don’t have running water, so every drop I use I have to collect and haul myself. That makes rationing easier!
I cook on a gas stove and have a gas oven that cooks very unevenly. I buy most of my veggies at the weekly market in my town. I rarely eat meat because it is expensive and hard to store, since I don’t have a refrigerator. I have to go 20 kilometers up the road to get to the post office or to stock up on veggies and other groceries. To get things like cheese and soy sauce, I have to go to my souk town, which is a 3-½ hr ride in a crowded van down the mountain. To get other luxury items, like ramen noodles, balsamic vinegar, and granola, I have to go all the way to Fez or Meknes, which takes 9 hours!
Have you made many Moroccan friends?
Yes, but it’s interesting how different my definition of friends is. In my site, anybody who shows positive interest in the Peace Corps or me is considered a friend. Anybody who will invite me for tea or who will help me with language is a friend. But they aren’t like my friends from home. I have to hide a lot of things about myself with them. I can’t talk about my male friends, or they think I am not a good person. I can’t wear a lot of the clothes I like. And because my language is not so good, I cannot explain myself well, joke, or really express my character well. It can be frustrating!
I very recently participated in a USAID sponsored conference in the capital city of Rabat. I got the chance for the first time there to interact a lot with people of about my age who have a similar educational background and access to more privileges. Yet despite these initial similarities, I found after a while that I missed my friends back in at home for their kindness and honesty. But I still made some really good friends at the conference and I hope to visit them all!
How do you bathe?
I boil a bunch of water in a big kettle, mix it with cold water, and clean myself by pouring this water over me with a small bucket. Sometimes I go to the hammam, or communal bathhouse. You pay a few dirhams (that’s Moroccan money, $1= 8dh) and grab a few buckets from the attendant, then head back into the hammam itself. The farthest room is the hottest. You mix water from hot and cold water taps, then find yourself a place on a bench and clean yourself all over. Should your neighbor ask you for help scrubbing their back, it is very rude to refuse! Of course, hammams are divided by gender. Women go during the day and men at night. The men can pay someone to come and help them stretch in the hot room, which is apparently very relaxing! In the winter I’ve heard this is one of the best ways to get warm.
Luckily my nearest Peace Corps neighbor has her own little one in her house. We build a fire under the house. There is a big bucket set into the floor over the fire, which we fill with water. It gets pretty hot in there, as you can imagine, but feels fantastic!
How are the schools?
Wow, this is a difficult question! I will do my best answer this, but I have not spent much time in schools yet.
In some areas you can either pay to send your kid to a pre-school or they are run for free by women’s associations, but for the most part kids don’t go to school until kindergarten, when they are seven. They start reading and Arabic right away. In some areas, the kids even learn Tifinaght, the Amazigh alphabet based on the Phoenician alphabet. They also start learning French in third grade, but most instruction they will have until they reach university will be in Moroccan Arabic or Standard Arabic. It’s all supposed to be in Standard Arabic, but while the students work on learning it, the teachers help them out by explaining things in Moroccan Arabic – which is very different. Primary school, or Madrassa, goes until the kids reach 11 or 12. There are Madrassas in most small towns.
The Moroccan middle school, or college, is usually only in a larger neighboring town. College and lycee (high school) are both free, but the kids have to pay to stay in the dorms while they are there so they don’t have to commute every day. This is why many people do not send their daughters to school. They don’t want them to be away from the home, where they cannot watch them, and they don’t think the expense is worth it.
The biggest focus of Moroccan education is on language. In Morocco, many different languages are spoken- Tamazight in my area, Tarifit in the Rif Mountains to the North, Tashleheit to the south, Sahawi in the Sahara regions and among nomads, Moroccan Arabic everywhere, French and Standard Arabic by educated people. Except in a few experimental schools, the Amazigh languages are not taught. Some of the local dialects of Amazigh are on the “Endangered Languages” list that UNESCO released last year. But I digress…
Other than language, students are taught math, history, and science. There is very little room for art and none at all for music! During lycee, students are expected to choose either language or math/science as a focus and then spend a year studying those subjects more in depth. To graduate, they must take an extensive exam called the Baccalaureate, or just Bac. A few American prep schools also offer preparation for the International Baccalaureate (they’re usually called IB courses, and are similar to AP courses). If you don’t pass the Bac, you can’t go to university. You can take it again as many times as you’d like, but the second test is harder than the first, which discourages many people from trying again.
Education in Morocco is going through a really rough patch right now. There has been increasing outcry about the poor quality of rural and intercity schools, much as there has been in the US. Teachers are assigned to rural schools. Very often they do not speak the local dialect and resent that they were not placed in their own towns or cities. They often only stay for a year or so before transferring. There are also problems with what they call Arabization. In the early 1980’s, Morocco made the decision that all education up to the University level would be in Arabic, but Universities (which are also free) continue to be taught in French. Can you imagine all your college courses being taught in a language that you don’t speak at home? Also, Morocco has a 15% unemployment rate, so people don’t see any point in going to school because they have no guarantee of getting work when they finish. I have met a lot of people who have degrees from local universities who work jobs that require no education at all because no other work was open to them. My favorite sandwich guy has a master’s degree in physics, but now he just makes sandwiches and tajines.
Are the people friendly?
People are just like they are in America. Some are friendly, and some are not. People in taxis will invite me in for tea after a few words of conversation, while others will refuse to speak to me or be very mean about my nationality and religion. Today I had a man whose idea of a good conversation was to tell me repeatedly that I didn’t know how to speak Tamazight. Finally I told him, “Ixha awawal-nish! Bslama!” (your conversation is bad, good bye) and shut my door in his face. The other people in the taxi with me then immediately started chatting with me about how I like Morocco and what America is like. When we got out of the taxi, everyone said “Ihila awawal,” which means “good talk.” So there you go!
People are also very generous. Generosity is sacred here. Two families in my time here have opened their homes and invited me to live with them. Numerous other families have hosted me for meals and conversation. People are generally really happy to meet an American who would come all this way to learn their language and work with them. They say that when you come to visit, after you stay for three days you are family. I have also been told repeatedly that I’m Moroccan already, since I’ve been here for more than 40 days! I don’t know who decided that 40 days was all it takes, but I’m happy to be Moroccan!
Well, that’s an interesting question. The weather varies widely in Morocco. They call it “the cold land with the hot sun.” In some areas, it can get REALLY hot. Friends of mine in other parts of the country say that they have been dealing with heat as high as 130° F. When it’s that hot, you don’t do anything except try to stay cool. That means you wet your sheets and leave them in the refrigerator for the day, then go to sleep at night with bottles of ice.
However, where I live, in the High Atlas Mountains, it’s a different story. The hottest it got this summer was about 95°. Since I’m from WA, I’m perfectly happy with that! But it’s about to change.
We’ve been having really wet weather lately. Unlike WA, when it rains here, it floods immediately. Within five minutes, rivers of water are running down the streets, the river is racing to creep over its banks, and the fields are flooding. This is because there ground is so dry and hard, and there is very little vegetation to absorb the excess water. The corn crop was destroyed just as people were starting to harvest it, and the neighboring province has lost a lot of its apple crop. Apples are one of the few things that people around here grow to sell, everything else they grow for subsistence. The loss of the apples is a pretty serious problem. Imagine how big of an economic disaster it would be for WA if all the apples in Eastern WA died before they were ripe. And then imagine that all the people who own those apples are incredibly poor, relying on the small amount of income they get from the apples to maintain their family for the rest of the year, and that they don’t have any insurance or economic safety nets like American farmers have. Mushkil axatar! (That means “big problem.”)
Back to the weather in general. A friend of mine recently told me that there were two meters (over six feet) of snow in my town last winter. No big deal, you say, but then remember that I have no indoor heating, aside from a few small electric heaters. I have no hot water, either. So, as you can imagine, bathing is not going to be that much fun this winter!
Types of foods and what is your favorite?
Well, right now it’s Ramadan, the month of fasting. I have been fasting the entire time and enjoying very much the special food that everyone eats to break the fast in the evening. The traditional meal is water, milk, coffee, dates, a honey-sesame-orange water pastry called shebekiah, and a vegetable soup called harira. My absolute favorite thing for Ramadan is Agroum n Tadunt. You take a traditional Moroccan loaf of bread, which is round and flat, slice it in half, and stuffed with veggies, spices, and fat. Sounds gross, but it’s so tasty! I like the way my host sister makes it best. It’s spicy!
The main traditional dish of Morocco is tajine. A tajine dish has a flat base that you set directly onto the stove or fire and a cone shaped lid. You start with onions, meat, and spices on the bottom, then add whatever vegetables are in season. It cooks for well over an hour, until the veggies are pretty soggy. You eat it with fresh bread from the same dish. I like it, but people in my area spend so much time in the fields that they rarely have time to make tajine. I am learning how to make it for my host family as a special treat.
What type of clothing do you wear?
I wear mostly clothes that I brought from America, but I have to take the sensibilities of my community into account. All the women here wear a lot of clothes. Even on hot days they wear a few sweaters and several pairs of thick leggings under skirts and cloaks. I don’t know how they do it! I am allowed to dress a bit more liberally because people know that I am foreign. I still try to wear clothes that cover my arms, go up to my neck, and cover my butt. If I wear clothes that expose too much of my body, like my arms or neck, then I tend to get more attention than I like.
What is the daily life/routine of most people?
The daily routine of the people I live with varies widely by gender. Everyone wakes up early and starts with feeding the animals and household chores, and then they go their separate ways. Since you are all about the same age of my sister, Rkiya, I will give you a sample day from here and you can see how it compares to you. This, by the way, is every day for Rkiya. She does not go to school.
Rkiya is responsible for most of the household chores so her mom can spend her time in the fields. When she gets up, she helps her parents feed the four cows, mule, and sheep that the family has. Then she makes bread and sets it aside to rise. While it is rising, she makes tea or coffee and gets breakfast to the whole family. Then she cleans up, does the dishes, and sweeps the room. After the bread has risen, she bakes it in the big gas oven. When the bread is done, she grabs her tashimut. The tashimut is two big woven plastic bags with ties at each corner, which she uses to carry whatever she harvests from the fields. Sometimes she meets up and a friend and goes to cut grass or hay with them, but most of the time she goes by herself. She cuts the grass using a small hand-held scythe, and then gathers them into bundles and loads up the tashimut. The sizes of the loads she can carry are unbelievably huge! Rkiya is very strong. She takes the hay back to the house and either leaves it out to dry or feeds most of it to the cows right away. Then she makes lunch for the family. While she is cooking, she watches Turkish or Egyptian soap operas on TV. Most of these soap operas are in Standard Arabic, which she doesn’t understand. Rkiya has never been to school- she taught herself Moroccan Arabic and sometimes uses Standard Arabic phrases to sound cool. After everyone eats lunch, Rkiya cleans up and sometimes takes a little rest. Then she goes back to the fields a couple more times. In the evening, as night falls, she gets to hang out with her friends for a bit, and then makes dinner. The whole family sits around and watches TV, then eats dinner after the last call to prayer, sometime in between 9:30 and 10pm. After that, it’s bedtime.
In comparison, my host brother seems to have little scheduled activities aside from praying five times a day. He wanders around with his friends, maybe does a chore or two for his mom, and sits around, expecting to be waited on. This is a pretty common schedule for a young man.
What are the construction materials for most houses?
This is one of the COOLEST things about where I live, I think. In the cities, the houses are made out of cement cinder blocks. But here, they’re all made out of compacted earth. First, they build a basic foundation out of rocks, and then they build a wooden frame and set it on top of the foundation. The frame is about a meter long by half a meter high. A mixture of mud and straw is loaded into the frame a basket load at a time and is pounded down with a cement weight by someone standing on the frame. When it is full, they remove the frame and move it on to the next spot. The blocks dry pretty slowly, but when they do dry, they are very solid.
Once the walls are built, they place solid beams across the top of the walls, and then weave together bamboo to form a roof. The roof is covered in plastic (several layers, in my roof’s case… it’s fallen in three times) and then more mud. Doors, windows, and skylights are all bolted in. My house doesn’t have many because too many windows makes the walls much less structurally sound.
I watched some neighbors of ours tear down a house by just pounding it all down with sledge hammers, mix the dirt up with water, and build a brand new house out of the same dirt.
Why did you join the PC and or what inspired you to join?
I have a lot of reasons for wanting to join the Peace Corps! I have always really enjoyed volunteering. I find it far more rewarding that any job I’ve ever had. I was also thinking about going back to school after graduating from college, but was not drawn to any particular subject. I thought that what I wanted was a really challenging experience to push me outside of my boundaries and to challenge my worldview. Peace Corps seemed to fit the bill! By the time I applied, I was volunteering as a health educator for Planned Parenthood, which was a great experience, so I asked to be placed as a health educator in the Peace Corps. Because of my experience and background, which is in human development and psychology, I was given several options for places to go: the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Western Africa, and North Africa/Middle East. I speak French, so the two African options made the most sense. I chose North Africa/Middle East for one main reason: I wanted to learn about Islam and live in an Islamic country. Most Western African countries are also Islamic, but many people practice a brand of Islam that contains aspects of Animism. Morocco has had an important role in the development of modern Islam and it is practiced here in a somewhat purer form.
The Peace Corps has three goals for its volunteers. The first one is the basically the “work” part. It says that Peace Corps will help developing countries reach their goals for development by providing them with aid and technical training. The second and third goals relate to cultural exchange. The second says that we are helping to teach the country and people served about Americans and the third is teaching Americans about the country and people where the PCV lives (hey, that’s what we’re doing right now!) I love being a health educator, but my actual daily life here is the fulfillment of those last two goals.
Getting back to where those goals intersect with my interest in Islam, after September 11th (which happened when I was in my senior year of high school), I started to be worried that the mis-interpretation of Islam and the fear that it bred were becoming a part of our culture. Yes, the men behind that attack and several others were Muslims. Yes, there are parts of the Qu’ran that mention attacking unbelievers. But there are parts of the Bible that say the same thing and there are Christian and Jewish terrorists too. I have believed for a long time that one of the reasons why there are so many religious fanatics in the Middle East these days is because of the economic strife and expansion of the gap between who holds the money and who doesn’t. I wanted to live and experience this. And I was pretty sure that misunderstandings and misconceptions go both ways. They certainly do!
What do you miss most about home/WA?
The food. You don’t really realize how spoiled you are with food until you go to a foreign country! I love eating sushi, Thai food, Mexican food, Vietnamese food, Italian food, etc. You can get some of those things in the big cities, but it’s too expensive for my volunteer budget. I also miss getting a wider variety of fresh vegetables, like broccoli, spinach, and mushrooms. And I miss salmon.
I also really miss my family, but mostly I don’t want to go home to see them, I want them to come here! I have a two-year-old nephew who I think about all the time. He calls me and sings songs to me on the phone. I also just found out that my brother’s wife is pregnant with twins! I love kids and being an aunt is one of the most exciting things that has happened to me, so I sometimes have a rough time with being away from my nephew and with the idea that I’m going to miss the first year of the twins’ lives. But I’ll buy them baby jellabas (that’s the traditional item of clothing around here) and remember that being a PCV automatically makes me a cool aunt.
What are your favorite things about Morocco?
The people are really nice (for the most part). It’s a beautiful country and I’m constantly being surprised by how lovely it is. Also, every day is an adventure. This country is full of surprises and contrasts. I like how much it keeps me on my toes.
I also love the intersections of different cultures. Morocco has a rich indigenous culture in the Amazigh people, who have remained independent through the successive invasions of Phoenicians, Romans, Turks, and modern European colonial powers. There is also a rich Jewish history, and the art and architecture of the country have been strongly influenced by Andalucian culture. Modern Morocco is struggling to balance the ancient traditions and the push to modernize. Morocco is a Monarchy, but the king is young, educated in Europe, and interested in making Morocco a leader among Muslim countries. On the other hand, this is a Monarchy- the king can and does throw people into jail who are too critical, and people are afraid of speaking out against him as a result. Morocco is also still strongly influenced by the French, who colonized Morocco in the first half of the 20th century. Independence was gained in 1956, but Morocco rarely does anything without the support of France. But in comparison to other North African/Middle Eastern countries, Morocco is very modern and liberal. Morocco is full of contrasts and mystery. Like I said, every day is an adventure!
What is your age?
I’m 25, but I’ll be 26 on November 10th!
Is there much wildlife there?
Yes there is! There are a lot of amazing birds, for one thing. In my area there is an endangered species of wild sheep. We also have the Barbary Macaques, or Barbary Apes. They live here in Morocco and in Spain on the Rock of Gibraltar only. When I take the road to Meknes or Fez (two of the larger cities in my area), I pass places where tourists go to feed the monkeys. I’ve never done it myself- they can get aggressive and I believe that the best thing for them is for them to remain wild!
The most prolific form of wildlife here comes in the form of creep-crawly things. Scorpions, snakes, lots of different kinds of beetles, and lots of flies. One of the coolest things we have here are camel spiders! Look them up! They got a lot of publicity from soldiers in Iraq, so you should be able to find some really scary photos.
Was the language difficult to learn?
VERY! Language is the most stressful thing I have to deal with. Some days I walk outside and have great conversations with everyone I meet and people tell me that I speak very well. Other days, I go out and don’t understand the simplest questions. Sometimes I can understand but not answer, and sometimes language just fails me altogether. It is also really difficult switching between Tamazight (that’s my local language), French (which I speak with the medical staff that I work with), and English. I have to have a sense of humor about it, or else all I would do is hide in my house!
What is your job?
I am a health-sector volunteer, which basically means that I am a health educator. We have a framework for the projects that we are supposed to be doing. The first relates directly to health. This means working with kids to have good health and hygiene, brushing their teeth, and learning how not to get sick. Then we have to do work with pregnant women because a LOT of women and babies in my community die every year from health problems that can be prevented. The last element of this project is HIV/AIDS education, but this is not a big problem in my area. The second project is with training health officials, people who work in the local government, and people who are interested in community service to help with some of these projects. This is so that what we do will continue after we leave and the health of the community does not become dependent on Peace Corps. The last project relates to sanitation. We are expected to look into water supplies to make sure that it is clean to drink and easy to access, make sure people have good bathrooms, and help with trash pick up.
In my site, I have a lot of freedom to dictate how my actual work will go. I usually spend a lot of time every day in the sbitar (clinic) with my counterparts (essentially my bosses) who are the nurses. The nurses are both new to the community, but we’re all excited to have them. Up until this point, we’ve had an unmarried male nurse, which poses all sorts of problems because the men won’t let their wives and daughters go to see him. He was a fantastic nurse! When people would come into the Sbitar, he listened carefully to their complaints. He is also a native Tamazight speaker, which is unusual for the staff here. Most nurses and doctors do not speak Tamazight, and most women do not speak Arabic. He understood that a lot of the health problems experienced by women and children stemmed from the lack of education and limitations on the women’s freedoms, and he was very interested in working with me to do health education. I hope the new nurses are just as excited as he was!
I am thinking about and beginning to work on a number of different projects. Almost all of the health problems in my community relate to sanitation, hygiene, and lack of education. Sanitation means lack of clean water and good places to use the bathroom. No one in my town has water in their homes. We all, myself included, collect water from communal taps that come from a treated well. Because water has to be collected, people don’t use a great deal if they can manage it- that means they don’t bathe often. Sanitation also relates to having good places to go to the bathroom. Most people do have what we call bit-lmas (room of water, in Arabic), but a lot of women don’t use them. There are cultural stigmas attached to women being seen entering the bit-lma, so most women just wait until they are in the fields to use the bathroom. The fields are surrounded by drainage ditches, which people also drink from. Major problems there! So I’d like to do a lot of education about how to use the bit-lmas and perhaps help more people get them in their homes. I may also do some work with making the water supply more safe for winter time, when most of the taps freeze.
Another project that I am working on has nothing to do with health… yet! Not very many women in my community have been educated. Perhaps they have done a few years here or there, but it is not seen as worthy enough to spend money. This is one of the roots of the health problems seen here. I am working on getting a space for women where we can hold Arabic literacy classes. The space will also have places where the women can sew and weave and perhaps do yoga classes! I hope that if it is used, I can also sort of put together a “club” of young woman who will learn about health things with me and then go out into the community to teach them by themselves.
Wow, that was a long answer!
What is the religion for most of the people?
Almost everyone here is a practicing Muslim, but just like in the US, people practice to various different degrees. Some people follow the Qu’ran very closely, while others practice it in a very modern way. Some people drink alcohol, which is haram (forbidden) and even eat pork (big no-no.) Some people try hard to push Islam on me, while others understand and respect the differences between us. Every body has their own relationship with ‘Llah here, but Islam is a very communal religion as well. People who practice are expected not only to pray with others, but also to learn from them and keep the community in the front of their minds.
What type of music do they have there?
Most of the people around here listen to Amazigh music, which, I have to admit, I don’t like all that much. I like the really traditional stuff, but pretty much every taxi driver or kid with an mp3 player choose to listen to music that is heavy on the vocoder. Ugh. Arab music is around, too. There is popular stuff, like Amr Diab, who is probably the most famous Arabic musician right now, and classical stuff. I like them both a lot! Arabs like to sing at every chance they get!
How do you spend your free time?
I read, do yoga, cook, go for walks, talk to friends, day dream, do crafts, ride my bike, clean my house, sing, play ukulele, and write long letters home!
What is a typical day for you?
A typical day for me starts pretty early, because I really like mornings. I get up; have a little tea and maybe some yogurt. I turn on music from the moment I get up, although sometimes I listen to podcasts from my favorite radio programs at home. Then I get dressed and check my water supplies. If I need water, I take my buckets or tubs out to the tap to fill them, then come back and fill up all my water storage. I’m getting really strong from doing this! Then I go to the sbitar and see what is going on. If the nurse is not there, I might go home, but usually I go looking for him. We see as few as 15 patients a day, so sitting around in the sbitar is useless sometimes! Usually by this point it is almost lunch, so I go home or eat with friends. After lunch everyone is relaxing, so I do to. I read or do yoga. Then I often study Tamazight and French, read the Qu’uran, or work on projects. In the late afternoon I like to go out to the fields and walk around. If I want to be social, I go when I know the women are still working and hope to get invited home with someone for tea. If I want to be unsociable, I go a bit later when I know they have left and enjoy my solitude. Then I go home, cook a big meal, watch movies or read, do dishes, or whatever is needed, before going to bed.
My schedule right now is pretty different because it’s Ramadan. I have been fasting, so that means that I cannot eat during daylight hours. I usually stay in bed later, then get up and go about my day as I mentioned before, just minus tea, lunch, etc. The evening call to prayer is the signal that we can eat again. I either invite myself over to someone’s house or make a big meal for myself. This meal is called lftur. After lftur I usually get a huge burst of energy, so do yoga or I clean. Later I eat a snack, then go to bed for a few hours. I wake up again sometime in between 3:30 and 4 to eat saHur, the last meal before the sun rises, then I go back to bed and sleep for a long time! I was recently spending time with a huge group of Moroccan friends at a conference, and I just skipped sleeping all together for about a week in favor of staying up to sing, play games, and talk.
What are your living conditions?
I have a really fantastic little house all to myself. It’s right next to my sbitar, so the commute isn’t bad. I have a lot of privacy. The house is made out of mud with cement floors. It’s perfect for one person. I have a kitchen, bit lma, bedroom, salon, and a cozy hallway. I also have a fully enclosed courtyard. I have electricity, but I don’t have running water, so every drop I use I have to collect and haul myself. That makes rationing easier!
I cook on a gas stove and have a gas oven that cooks very unevenly. I buy most of my veggies at the weekly market in my town. I rarely eat meat because it is expensive and hard to store, since I don’t have a refrigerator. I have to go 20 kilometers up the road to get to the post office or to stock up on veggies and other groceries. To get things like cheese and soy sauce, I have to go to my souk town, which is a 3-½ hr ride in a crowded van down the mountain. To get other luxury items, like ramen noodles, balsamic vinegar, and granola, I have to go all the way to Fez or Meknes, which takes 9 hours!
Have you made many Moroccan friends?
Yes, but it’s interesting how different my definition of friends is. In my site, anybody who shows positive interest in the Peace Corps or me is considered a friend. Anybody who will invite me for tea or who will help me with language is a friend. But they aren’t like my friends from home. I have to hide a lot of things about myself with them. I can’t talk about my male friends, or they think I am not a good person. I can’t wear a lot of the clothes I like. And because my language is not so good, I cannot explain myself well, joke, or really express my character well. It can be frustrating!
I very recently participated in a USAID sponsored conference in the capital city of Rabat. I got the chance for the first time there to interact a lot with people of about my age who have a similar educational background and access to more privileges. Yet despite these initial similarities, I found after a while that I missed my friends back in at home for their kindness and honesty. But I still made some really good friends at the conference and I hope to visit them all!
How do you bathe?
I boil a bunch of water in a big kettle, mix it with cold water, and clean myself by pouring this water over me with a small bucket. Sometimes I go to the hammam, or communal bathhouse. You pay a few dirhams (that’s Moroccan money, $1= 8dh) and grab a few buckets from the attendant, then head back into the hammam itself. The farthest room is the hottest. You mix water from hot and cold water taps, then find yourself a place on a bench and clean yourself all over. Should your neighbor ask you for help scrubbing their back, it is very rude to refuse! Of course, hammams are divided by gender. Women go during the day and men at night. The men can pay someone to come and help them stretch in the hot room, which is apparently very relaxing! In the winter I’ve heard this is one of the best ways to get warm.
Luckily my nearest Peace Corps neighbor has her own little one in her house. We build a fire under the house. There is a big bucket set into the floor over the fire, which we fill with water. It gets pretty hot in there, as you can imagine, but feels fantastic!
How are the schools?
Wow, this is a difficult question! I will do my best answer this, but I have not spent much time in schools yet.
In some areas you can either pay to send your kid to a pre-school or they are run for free by women’s associations, but for the most part kids don’t go to school until kindergarten, when they are seven. They start reading and Arabic right away. In some areas, the kids even learn Tifinaght, the Amazigh alphabet based on the Phoenician alphabet. They also start learning French in third grade, but most instruction they will have until they reach university will be in Moroccan Arabic or Standard Arabic. It’s all supposed to be in Standard Arabic, but while the students work on learning it, the teachers help them out by explaining things in Moroccan Arabic – which is very different. Primary school, or Madrassa, goes until the kids reach 11 or 12. There are Madrassas in most small towns.
The Moroccan middle school, or college, is usually only in a larger neighboring town. College and lycee (high school) are both free, but the kids have to pay to stay in the dorms while they are there so they don’t have to commute every day. This is why many people do not send their daughters to school. They don’t want them to be away from the home, where they cannot watch them, and they don’t think the expense is worth it.
The biggest focus of Moroccan education is on language. In Morocco, many different languages are spoken- Tamazight in my area, Tarifit in the Rif Mountains to the North, Tashleheit to the south, Sahawi in the Sahara regions and among nomads, Moroccan Arabic everywhere, French and Standard Arabic by educated people. Except in a few experimental schools, the Amazigh languages are not taught. Some of the local dialects of Amazigh are on the “Endangered Languages” list that UNESCO released last year. But I digress…
Other than language, students are taught math, history, and science. There is very little room for art and none at all for music! During lycee, students are expected to choose either language or math/science as a focus and then spend a year studying those subjects more in depth. To graduate, they must take an extensive exam called the Baccalaureate, or just Bac. A few American prep schools also offer preparation for the International Baccalaureate (they’re usually called IB courses, and are similar to AP courses). If you don’t pass the Bac, you can’t go to university. You can take it again as many times as you’d like, but the second test is harder than the first, which discourages many people from trying again.
Education in Morocco is going through a really rough patch right now. There has been increasing outcry about the poor quality of rural and intercity schools, much as there has been in the US. Teachers are assigned to rural schools. Very often they do not speak the local dialect and resent that they were not placed in their own towns or cities. They often only stay for a year or so before transferring. There are also problems with what they call Arabization. In the early 1980’s, Morocco made the decision that all education up to the University level would be in Arabic, but Universities (which are also free) continue to be taught in French. Can you imagine all your college courses being taught in a language that you don’t speak at home? Also, Morocco has a 15% unemployment rate, so people don’t see any point in going to school because they have no guarantee of getting work when they finish. I have met a lot of people who have degrees from local universities who work jobs that require no education at all because no other work was open to them. My favorite sandwich guy has a master’s degree in physics, but now he just makes sandwiches and tajines.
Are the people friendly?
People are just like they are in America. Some are friendly, and some are not. People in taxis will invite me in for tea after a few words of conversation, while others will refuse to speak to me or be very mean about my nationality and religion. Today I had a man whose idea of a good conversation was to tell me repeatedly that I didn’t know how to speak Tamazight. Finally I told him, “Ixha awawal-nish! Bslama!” (your conversation is bad, good bye) and shut my door in his face. The other people in the taxi with me then immediately started chatting with me about how I like Morocco and what America is like. When we got out of the taxi, everyone said “Ihila awawal,” which means “good talk.” So there you go!
People are also very generous. Generosity is sacred here. Two families in my time here have opened their homes and invited me to live with them. Numerous other families have hosted me for meals and conversation. People are generally really happy to meet an American who would come all this way to learn their language and work with them. They say that when you come to visit, after you stay for three days you are family. I have also been told repeatedly that I’m Moroccan already, since I’ve been here for more than 40 days! I don’t know who decided that 40 days was all it takes, but I’m happy to be Moroccan!
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Souk Thursdays
Souk starts earlier than I want to get out of bed, but last night I promised that there would be peaches to go with the pancakes I plan on making for breakfast. I mange to get out of bed in stages: Sit up, stare at the wall opposite. Climb out of the mosquito net, sit on the edge of the bed, stare at the wall opposite. Stand and collect some clothes, dress, then stare at the wall for a few more minutes. Slip out into the silent hallway, gather shoes, a more culturally appropriate shirt that will cover my tank top, and purse from around sleeping friends. Sit to put on shoes, and stare at the wall.
In the kitchen, the messy dishes from last night’s meal still sit on the floor, where I put them when I run out of counter space (this happens very quickly.) Three of my best friends are here. None of them are morning people, like I am. But today I wish I wasn’t a morning person, or perhaps so eager to feed them well. I want to go climb back into my bed and sleep a few more hours. I had made the mistake of drinking caffeine the night before, which carried me without fatigue through the marathon of enchilada preparation, two movies, star gazing, and a few hours of lying awake in bed chatting with my friend.
I ignore the messy kitchen for now. I’ll have to get more water for both the dishes and to fill the bathroom water supply again. But first, souk, or else all the good peaches will be gone.
When I was at home in the states, Sunday morning farmer’s market was an event for my housemates and I. We made an effort to get up early, headed to our favorite café for pastries and tea, then drove down to the market. We would split up, each of us searching for our week’s veggies, and perhaps some other special treat. Most of the people at the market were very much like us; educated, middle class, and liberal. Sometimes I ran into friends, but mostly I was completely anonymous in this crowd.
In my town souk is a necessity, not a luxury. If I do not go, I will have to go to souk in another town on another day, perhaps subsisting on popcorn until I do. It is also a social time, although with my limited language it is less so for me than for the men, young woman, and children who shop for their families. Very few woman shop; souk is a man’s world, but the young, unmarried woman go dressed in their beautiful white aHandils, decorated with reflective disks of metal. One of these hand-woven cloaks is beautiful to look at as it hangs on a peg in a house, but on a young woman, it is breathtaking. Her body disappears into the white cloak, and her face, framed by a colorful headscarf, is lit by the shimmering colors reflected by the disks.
I stand out here. Unless some tourist passing through happens to decide to stop, I am the only white person here. I have the only pair of blue eyes and my exposed hair is the only light brown hair in the village. I’m taller than most of the woman and most of the men, and I am not wearing an aHandil. Friends of all genders greet me by name and on this day I slur my words as I respond. SbaH lxir. Labas? Is tsouqt? Yeah, adsgg* swiya lxok, safi. LLah yerhem la walidin. La3awn. Then I shuffle away. Other people shout “Bonjour! Çava?” or “What is your name?” but I ignore them. I don’t know them and if they are going to assume that I’m a tourist, then I don’t want to. I look through the crowd for my host sisters or the group of teenaged girlfriends who helped me to buy an oven last week, but none of them have come today.
I turn my attention to the vegetable and fruit sellers. Grapes, apricots, and melons are at every seller’s stand, and I briefly consider getting apricots instead of peaches. Finally I find one lxdrt man who has a wooden box with the last of his peaches resting on the bottom. I ask the price and he helps me select a decent kilo of peaches. Five dirhams exchange hands with a “bismillah.” In the name of God. Then he congratulates me on my good health, “bisHa u raHa” and I respond with my wishes for his continuing good health, “Llah yticK SaHa.” I wish him to go in peace over my shoulder as I walk away.
I’m still groggy and feeling resentful of my sleeping friends when I get home. I’m thinking only of tea, so I fill the aluminum kettle and sit down in a chair to wait for it to boil. When it does, I start the tea steeping, and then pour hot water over my peaches to blanche the skins off them.
As I begin pealing the soft skins away, I forget about my fatigue, the dirty dishes, my tea, and my resentment. I think instead about how I’ll prepare the peach syrup I want to make for our pancakes. I compose haikus to the glorious golden orbs and sweet flesh of the fruit. I think about canning peaches with my step-mother. I think about the origins of peaches. I think about how I used to buy them from a little co-op on Orcas island in the summer, and the association makes me seem to smell madrona and the particular dusty smell of the islands under the sweetness of the peaches here now.
Finally the peaches are slopping around in my pressure cooker with water, vanilla sugar, and cinnamon. I return my attention to my tea, but continue to let the concern about the dirty dishes and my resentment out of my mind. This syrup is gonna be delicious. My house smells fantastic. I’ll fill up my water supply while my friends still sleep, and then begin the pancakes. And when the pancakes are also on their way to being finished, I’ll wake them up with music and we’ll eat.
Integrating into my community has been a slow and difficult process. Every day I have to challenge myself to leave my house. My language is progressing well, but I’m still a shy person. I still get frustrated with being asked the same questions over and over again. My community is also not very outgoing. I sometimes wander the streets and fields aimlessly, hoping someone, anyone, will invite me in for tea. In other places where I’ve been in the country, you get invited in at every house and force-fed sweet tea and bread. But we’re getting used to each other, imiq imiq, and I am proud to share my community with my friends.
In the kitchen, the messy dishes from last night’s meal still sit on the floor, where I put them when I run out of counter space (this happens very quickly.) Three of my best friends are here. None of them are morning people, like I am. But today I wish I wasn’t a morning person, or perhaps so eager to feed them well. I want to go climb back into my bed and sleep a few more hours. I had made the mistake of drinking caffeine the night before, which carried me without fatigue through the marathon of enchilada preparation, two movies, star gazing, and a few hours of lying awake in bed chatting with my friend.
I ignore the messy kitchen for now. I’ll have to get more water for both the dishes and to fill the bathroom water supply again. But first, souk, or else all the good peaches will be gone.
When I was at home in the states, Sunday morning farmer’s market was an event for my housemates and I. We made an effort to get up early, headed to our favorite café for pastries and tea, then drove down to the market. We would split up, each of us searching for our week’s veggies, and perhaps some other special treat. Most of the people at the market were very much like us; educated, middle class, and liberal. Sometimes I ran into friends, but mostly I was completely anonymous in this crowd.
In my town souk is a necessity, not a luxury. If I do not go, I will have to go to souk in another town on another day, perhaps subsisting on popcorn until I do. It is also a social time, although with my limited language it is less so for me than for the men, young woman, and children who shop for their families. Very few woman shop; souk is a man’s world, but the young, unmarried woman go dressed in their beautiful white aHandils, decorated with reflective disks of metal. One of these hand-woven cloaks is beautiful to look at as it hangs on a peg in a house, but on a young woman, it is breathtaking. Her body disappears into the white cloak, and her face, framed by a colorful headscarf, is lit by the shimmering colors reflected by the disks.
I stand out here. Unless some tourist passing through happens to decide to stop, I am the only white person here. I have the only pair of blue eyes and my exposed hair is the only light brown hair in the village. I’m taller than most of the woman and most of the men, and I am not wearing an aHandil. Friends of all genders greet me by name and on this day I slur my words as I respond. SbaH lxir. Labas? Is tsouqt? Yeah, adsgg* swiya lxok, safi. LLah yerhem la walidin. La3awn. Then I shuffle away. Other people shout “Bonjour! Çava?” or “What is your name?” but I ignore them. I don’t know them and if they are going to assume that I’m a tourist, then I don’t want to. I look through the crowd for my host sisters or the group of teenaged girlfriends who helped me to buy an oven last week, but none of them have come today.
I turn my attention to the vegetable and fruit sellers. Grapes, apricots, and melons are at every seller’s stand, and I briefly consider getting apricots instead of peaches. Finally I find one lxdrt man who has a wooden box with the last of his peaches resting on the bottom. I ask the price and he helps me select a decent kilo of peaches. Five dirhams exchange hands with a “bismillah.” In the name of God. Then he congratulates me on my good health, “bisHa u raHa” and I respond with my wishes for his continuing good health, “Llah yticK SaHa.” I wish him to go in peace over my shoulder as I walk away.
I’m still groggy and feeling resentful of my sleeping friends when I get home. I’m thinking only of tea, so I fill the aluminum kettle and sit down in a chair to wait for it to boil. When it does, I start the tea steeping, and then pour hot water over my peaches to blanche the skins off them.
As I begin pealing the soft skins away, I forget about my fatigue, the dirty dishes, my tea, and my resentment. I think instead about how I’ll prepare the peach syrup I want to make for our pancakes. I compose haikus to the glorious golden orbs and sweet flesh of the fruit. I think about canning peaches with my step-mother. I think about the origins of peaches. I think about how I used to buy them from a little co-op on Orcas island in the summer, and the association makes me seem to smell madrona and the particular dusty smell of the islands under the sweetness of the peaches here now.
Finally the peaches are slopping around in my pressure cooker with water, vanilla sugar, and cinnamon. I return my attention to my tea, but continue to let the concern about the dirty dishes and my resentment out of my mind. This syrup is gonna be delicious. My house smells fantastic. I’ll fill up my water supply while my friends still sleep, and then begin the pancakes. And when the pancakes are also on their way to being finished, I’ll wake them up with music and we’ll eat.
Integrating into my community has been a slow and difficult process. Every day I have to challenge myself to leave my house. My language is progressing well, but I’m still a shy person. I still get frustrated with being asked the same questions over and over again. My community is also not very outgoing. I sometimes wander the streets and fields aimlessly, hoping someone, anyone, will invite me in for tea. In other places where I’ve been in the country, you get invited in at every house and force-fed sweet tea and bread. But we’re getting used to each other, imiq imiq, and I am proud to share my community with my friends.
Monday, July 20, 2009
And the livin' is easy
It’s been a beautiful summer up here in the High Atlas. Just the other day a friend of mine here mentioned that there were two meters of snow in my site for most of last winter. So now I’m doing my best to store up memories that will keep me in love with this place through the bad weather.
While the rest of the country swelters in un-bearable heat, battles bugs, and most of my friends are on constant pest watch, I’m living with 80 degree heat, gentle breezes, and almost daily late afternoon thunder storms up here. I have been wandering around the fields a bit more than usual lately, trying to soak up the greenness of it all.
One of the things that I miss about America is lawn. I know it’s ridiculous, but stretching out on the grass with a novel and a glass of lemonade sounds like heaven to me. I haven’t seen a lawn in this country except at hotels or wealthy people’s houses, until recently. My town is divided into two neighborhoods by a river. On either side of the river, the land has been cultivated into fields for wheat, potatoes, corn, and apples. Some of the land, however, remains fairly marshy throughout the year. These days that land is dried out, and the woman have been busily cutting the lush grass that grows there, drying it, and saving it for winter fodder. The result is that now my site has a long stretch of soft, short, bright green lawn.
It’s perfect for croquet, bacce ball, sunbathing, soccer, or Frisbee, but there is no way that I could square any of those activities with my conscience. The woman of my village have spent hours upon hours cutting this grass short using small, handheld scythes. They then tie the grass unto bundles, load it onto their mule, leave it to dry for several days in the sun, and then store it. I’ve helped with pretty much every stage of this process, including carrying back-breaking loads of freshly cut grass. The woman like that I’m willing to help, but I’m not very good at it. When they ask me if there are fields like this in America, I always say, “there are fields, but they are different. And we cut grass with a machine.”
Here are some other memories and beautiful things I will try to remember:
Driving home on the last transit of the day in the front seat. Everyone except me and the driver is asleep, or so I think. As we head out of the town just down the road from me, we reach a high point in the road, and find a huge herd of camels grazing. Everyone wakes up to look at them, almost as excited as I am, even though they’re much less of a novelty for the people who live here.
Sitting on the roof of my new house, eating dinner and watching the stars slowly appear.
Going up to check mail in the late afternoon, just after a squall rolled through. Light rain and thin clouds with sunlight pushing through highlights the contrast of the greenery on the rocks, and the rainbow of colors on the rocks themselves.
Lying on a streambed with a good friend, watching the wind in the poplars and talking about boys.
Dropping down into the valley of my friend’s site, which I have to pass through to get to my souk town. The wheat is slowly ripening, corn is getting higher, and the apples are starting to color.
Sunset down in the valley. Watching the light change on the plains and the mountains around, then seeing the stars appear and the nomads’ fires in the distance.
Hiking around a nearby lake with friends on the Fourth of July. Skipping rocks, and flushing two beautiful cranes of some sort.
Lying in the fields, talking with my host-sister’s teenage friends and day dreaming about sex ed classes. (Other people day dream about sex, I daydream about sex ed.)
And this moment, right now… tired after a long day at work, writing down my thoughts, cooking ratatoille, and listening to some new bluegrass gifted to me by a friend.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Writer's Block
5/31/2009
I’m very quickly coming up on my first month in site. One down, only 23 left to go!! Doesn’t seem like much, does it?
Things have been going well up on the mountain, when I’ve had the chance to be in site! There is a lot of travel associated with various things necessary to getting situated here. For the first few weeks I was frantic to be in site, but lately things have calmed down quite a bit. I have been home enough to get to know my family and my counterpart really well, and I’m getting to know my neighbors, too! Language is still a struggle, but imiq imiq! People are very forgiving.
I’m also making a much more of a connection with my counterpart and am working on getting in touch with community leaders. Right now it’s a bit difficult because we’re getting ready for the community elections, coming up here on the 12th. The election that my community is dealing with is for the local commune, which is kind of like the town council. My counterpart says that there are a lot of problems in town right now that will disappear when the elections are over.
6/10/2009
It’s been a long time since I’ve really been able to sit down and write. No, that’s the wrong way to describe it. I’ve had the time, space, and motivation to sit down and write, but I’ve been experiencing a bit of writers block lately. Seems like everything I pull up this journal I get through a few sentences and then get distracted by something- a novel, solitaire, my maternal health book, or just sleeping. Maybe this is a result of my increased comfort in my environment here, because I certainly have started to feel much more involved in my community life. As a result, the things that I used to think of as fuel for these journals are now more just a common part of my life than something special.
However, that doesn’t mean that the magic of living here is gone. I’ve been reading a book called “The Traveler’s History of North Africa,” which documents life in North Africa from the time when the Sahara was either forest or grasslands, populated by giraffes, elephants, and many other species, many of which are extinct, through to Morocco’s last king, Hassan II. It’s an amazing book, and I am even more aware then ever of how amazingly lucky I am to live in this place.
Morocco has been touched by the influence of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Early Christian Byzantines, Arabs, conflicting Amazigh dynasties, and European colonial powers, most specifically those of France and Spain. And yet, through out that, the Amazigh people of my region have been constant.
There are Amazighren in the Sahara, still traveling ancient trade routes to West Africa. There are Amazighren in Libya who have resisted even the influence of Islam. There are people here who travel from Moroccan (Western) Sahara, up the Atlas mountain chains, and into Algeria on a yearly basis. Some of them are camped on the plain not to far outside of my site, and even more of them are living down in the valley around my souk town, selling wood most likely poached from the National Park.
I feel pretty lucky to be here. The more I learn about Morocco, the more fascinated I am. Even my little isolated mountain community has so much amazing history and tradition, stemming from conflict, struggle, success, and change. Perhaps learning Tamazight is not going to help me much should I decide that I want to go into some sort of international health organization. Perhaps the Islam that is practiced here is so dramatically different from that which is practiced in most other Muslim countries. But I have learned so much about people, about myself, and about both Morocco and the US already. And of course just the act of learning makes me more fit to participate in the global community.
6/17/2009
I got up early on Monday morning in order to join my counterpart and two other nurses on the equippe mobile trip. The equippe mobile is a traveling vaccination sensation. The goal is to vaccinate as many woman and children as possible in the outer douars. Most of these people cannot come to sbitar to get their children vaccinated, so we go to them. Birth control, vitamins (especially A- a pretty common deficiency around here), and some medications are handed out. They also tested blood pressure and did some very basic consultations. I didn’t do much except watch and chat with people, but I feel like I learned a ton.
Because this is obviously very time consuming work and the douars are fairly spread out, this adventure has lasted three days already and will continue tomorrow.
It has been interesting to scope out the other douars in my site. My site is technically all the douars served by the sbitar in my town. There are 13 all together, but one has it’s own small sbitar who does vaccinations there, so it isn’t on our list. My town is obviously the wealthiest douar in the area, but that’s not saying much. The same health issues that exist here are present in each douar. Almost all of the most common things stem from the lack of hygiene. Diarrhea, viruses, ear infections, infected wounds, and rashes are what we saw the most of. Also herniated navels in infants (they go away on their own), night blindness (caused by vitamin A deficiency), and slight birth defects that my counterpart says is the result of inbreeding. I saw one hairlip and one infant showing signs of birth defects, possibly caused by the lack of iodine in the diet of the mother while she was pregnant.
The other major issue we encountered was hypertension. A few women my counterpart obviously sees and treats regularily, but there was one new case that was pretty interesting. One of the mothers brought along her younger sister, was is three months pregnant. When the nurse tested her blood pressure, he found that it was unusually high. High blood pressure during pregnancy is a sign of toximia, which in turns become eclampsia. The woman was 20 years old, and had higher blood pressure than any of the older woman we saw in the day. The nurse made the sister go home to get the woman’s husband and made him promise that he would take her to the doctor in the morning. I watched the man start to complain that he was building a house, and the woman said she didn’t want to go on the transit because she might throw up. I don’t really understand what he said in response, but I think it scared them enough to go. I hope.
The other thing I was on the look out for was how I would be treated in these villages. In towns that are on the main paved road from, people showed the usual interest in me, but were not afraid or overly surprised that I spoke Tamazight. In the towns away from the road, children would run away or start crying when I said hello. Most woman, not expecting to be able to understand me, kept telling me they didn’t understand what I was saying, even though they often responded to my questions. In the towns by the road, girls and woman talked to me, let me hold their babies, and invited me in for tea. In towns away from the road, they spoke only to the nurses and looked uncomfortable when I was near them. I now have a better idea about what towns I can visit on my own, and which I will go to with back up.
Of course another goal of my equippe mobile adventure was to look into educational possibilities. There seemed to be plenty of time when woman and children are just standing around. The kids really like watching the vaccinations being given, so I think I could do a little session on why and what vaccinations are, as well as simple hygiene lessons and perhaps some pre/post-natal care for woman. One of our other equippe mobile adventures in the upcoming months will be for measles vaccinations in the schools. This will be another good time to do some teaching, I hope!
6/19/09
Since the end of the equippe mobile adventure, I have been glued to my notebook and copy of Where There Are No Doctors. My interest in translating the health survey has doubled. I am feeling really good about it all.
One of the major problems that Peace Corps volunteers face is a feeling like they do not have enough work to keep themselves occupied. I am not really worried that I will have that problem. I think one of the reasons is because I have been a health teacher in the past, and I know how slowly this type of education moves. Also, I did not come here with the expectation that I was going to need to have one big project to get done. I do not feel the need to build a new sbitar or completely change birthing practices in the span of two years.
However, that said, there are a couple of potential big projects. The first one relates back to the neddi. The last volunteer here got PCPP (Peace Corps Partnership Program) money to build tables and purchase supplies for the neddi so Arabic literacy classes could be held there. Once the tables and other supplies are there, helping to get the classes started and continued will probably take a lot my time every week. If this works out, this could potentially be a very rewarding project. The health of the individual, the family, and the community are very much tied in with education. Literacy among rural Moroccan woman is less than 15%. In my conversations with my counterpart about the health issues facing the community, it is clear that the lack of education for woman is at the root of many of them.
There are potentially two water/sanitation projects that are already in motion with the community, but I may be asked to participate. One is getting running water to the houses in town. The other is getting a hammam built. These are both projects that have nothing to do with me, but if they ask for my help, I am so there!
So as far as work goes, I’m feeling good. Feeling pretty good about my integration into the community, as well. I have friends here. There are people who just skip the greeting process and get straight to chit-chatting. My language is improving at a steady pace, and I get along well with my counterpart. I have to go to my souk town on Sunday for my usual tutoring session, but I don’t want to go! I haven’t been out of site for two weeks, and yet I want to stay. That’s a good sign, I think.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Made it!
4/25/2009
It’s been a long time since I wrote up a blog post for a couple of reasons. The first being that navigating the rules that the Peace Corps puts on our blogs is a bit difficult. All the rules they have given us make a lot of sense to me: I am a representative of the government and my blog should reflect that. Also, in the past host country nationals have found blogs written by PCVs and been upset. In one case here in Morocco, a community member of a PCV found photos that she had posted of her host mother and sisters unveiled in their home. The pictures were shown to the father of the family and he was extremely angry at this violation of his family’s privacy. The PCVs position and work in the community were compromised and it took her a long time to regain their trust.
I have made the choice not to password protect my blog for several reasons. I think the biggest one has to do with the third goal of the Peace Corps, which is for people in America to increase their understanding of the country and culture where PCVs serve. Blogs were a great resource for me before I came here… some of them I still read when I get to the internet café. But for people who are not headed to Morocco to serve in the Peace Corps, I will do my best to critically but positively report on my service here, focusing as much as possible on passing along information about the culture, history, current events, and issues of Morocco.
I may or may not have talked about why I wanted to come here before, so I will here. The other day my friend from CBT asked me if I’d ever had my heart broken. Something popped into my head right away, but I decided that was probably not what she was looking for. So I thought about boys I’ve dated, people who have hurt me, and difficult situations that I’ve faced, but none of them made me feel very devastated for a long time. So I returned back to that first thing: the outcome of 9/11 and the Iraq war. When 9/11 happened, I sat in my first period classroom and thought about what it would take to drive someone to do something so horrific. I cried a lot that day and in the days following, but living where I lived it was difficult to feel upset with the nature of the world for long. My community has the amazing ability making the world feel healthy and whole even after it has been ripped apart. When the Iraq War began, I could see no way in which the outcome of the war would be positive. I thought about the woman and children who would be affected more than anything else, and for weeks I walked around stunned that it was actually happening. All these years down the road, my worst fears about the American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have come true. One of the devastating outcomes has been how those two events have shaped American’s position in this world and the effect that it has had on our countries’ relationship with Muslims in our own country and abroad.
My personal goals in coming to Morocco are varied, but learning about Islam is equal in my mind to participating in development. This is because I want to have personal experience in order to better teach about it when I return to America. Morocco is at a crossroads of a lot of different cultures. In many ways, it is a very moderate country, tempered by the strong influence of Europe and the indigenous culture. Yet the people I live with live their lives much the same way their ancestors have for thousands of years. Allah is a central part of every conversation here. The motto of Morocco, which is carved into the hillside above the neighboring town, is “Allah, Nation, King.” They don’t mess around with it.
So, in order to keep my blog safe and to abide by PC’s policies, I am going to refrain from giving personal information and stick mostly with information about my service and the issues that face my community. I will also probably not post many pictures here (except landscapes), and do my best to remain respectful of the people that I am here to serve. Please feel free to ask questions and to send me any information you think might be relevant.
5/2/09
I have now been in my site for a little over a day. It has been a good few days, although right now I am battling myself over how it is best to behave in order to fully enter this community. I am once again battling some sort of bug (not the swine flu, LHamdullah) and not feeling up to socializing a lot with people I don’t know. However, I know that these first few days in site are critical to forming an understanding of the community and making myself known here as an active community member. Luckily for me, I am following another volunteer whom everyone seems to like quite a bit. She was medically separated from her service six months ago, but no one has forgotten her and they constantly ask me how she is doing. She is coming back to visit in a few months, so I let people know that they will get to see her soon, but she will only be here as a tourist and I am the new muttatawai3a n saHt (health volunteer).
So, how do I feel about my site? Well, I’ll start off with some information. I have one of the highest and most isolated sites in Morocco. I am one of the few volunteers who does not have running water in my home. Instead, when I get my house, I will collect water from one of seven treated public fountains like the other people of my town. I also am in a site where I will have to deal with extreme environmental factors. I will experience a delightfully warm (not hot) summer, but it will be short. Fall, winter, and spring will bring rain, then cold, ice, and snow. I will be unable to leave my site from time to time because of the weather. And because I will not have indoor heating, I plan on spending a lot of time hiding under my knitting this winter!
The area where I am living is one of the areas that held out against French colonization for a long, long time. The Amazigh population here is far more traditional than anything I have experienced anywhere else, including on Native reservations back in the States. If I stood on my roof and photographed the village, it would look much the same as it did hundreds of years ago, with the addition only of satellite dishes. The houses are made of mud, and surrounded by thick mud walls, which often have storage rooms or spaces for animals built into them. The people here raise cows and chickens, but I have only seen a few sheep or goats. For the most part, they grow wheat, potatoes, and apples for subsistence.
Families here follow a traditional structure. Women work the fields and are rarely seen in the main center of town, as small as it is. Men are mostly busy with the social aspects of the community. In my household, my host father occasional also works in the fields and is responsible for the family’s two cows. My host mother spends a great deal of time up in the hills cutting a low, woody bush that they burn for firewood or working in the fields. My oldest host sister works in the fields and does most of the families’ cooking and cleaning. My two youngest host sisters go to school, gather water, play and shepherd me around. I haven’t met many people in the community yet, but I have yet to see a woman wearing pants or walking around with her head uncovered, both of which I saw within my first hour in our CBT site.
The language is very different, as well. The aspirated K that I’ll have to admit was probably my favorite new sound is almost completely gone, replaced by a “sh” sound. I don’t mind this. It makes things a lot less confusing, because there is little difference between the aspirated K, x, H, and g*. Many of the words are different. Words that our LCF taught us that stem from Arabic or French are in a purer Tamazight form here.
The greetings are different, too. The phrase “LLah3awn,” (Allah help you) which I used as a goodbye in CBT is now a greeting, but only used with woman and only in the afternoon. “Mani” which I was taught means “where” also can mean “how” here, so “mani tarbatnsh” means “how is your daughter?” instead of “where is your daughter?” I have to remember to used the conjugations of “illi” (to be, in reference to location) if I want to specify that I am asking where someone is. And I often forget. I’m really excited to get started with a tutor in my souk town ASAP!
As far as work goes, I am excited about participating in a few projects left from the last volunteer. The one that is going to probably be my first focus is actually not a health project, but it will help me a great deal in networking with the community’s woman. The last volunteer in site started working with a local association out of a slightly larger town to set up a Neddi, or woman’s center. Neddis are places for woman only, where they can socialize, do crafts, and gain skills. Often neddis are where woman’s literacy classes are held. In our neddi, my first project is to get the classroom that Hannan (that’s the Berber name of the last volunteer) started set up completely. Not only will the classroom serve the woman, but also we are planning on organizing Arabic classes for some of the girls who no longer go to school there. It could also possibly serve as a space for some early childhood education and for me to teach English classes or do health projects.
I plan on involving myself as much as possible in the neddi in order to build connections with the woman. Also, it’s work! Some days there might be nothing that I have to do that actually has to do with health, but going to the neddi will be a good alternative. Besides, I want to learn as many local handicrafts as possible before I go! My family is already pretty impressed with the hat that I just finished knitting for myself tonight. I can’t wait to get my hands on some more yarn. I’m going to make them something fun!
The last volunteer also was in the process of gathering information in order to do a Traditional Birth Attendant training with the Ministry of Health. I would like to continue this project. I may have to re-do some of the leg work that she put in just because I would really like to develop a personal relationship with these woman, just as the last volunteer did. This will mean a lot of running around to my douars!
Another possible project is to put in a request with the ministry of health to get a female nurse at the Sbitar. The Sbitar currently has a nurse, who I hear is fantastic (haven’t met him yet) but he’s an unmarried man. The woman don’t like to go to see him because they don’t want to be alone with him for examinations. I have been told that people will very quickly start to associate me with the sbitar if I hang out there, and that many woman will ask me to accompany them during their exams. My host father asked me today if I would do my best to get a female nurse in here (this was after we established that I am not a nurse.) I said I would, although as you can imagine it is difficult to get people to commit to working here, as it is so remote and cold! Doctors, nurses, and teachers all can go to school on the government’s dime, but they are then sent wherever the gov’t wants to send them. The people who do the best in school are allowed to choose, and they usually pick urban centers. That mans that the doctors and nurses who serve the populations smaller communities are usually not the ones who made the most of their education. Also, they often only speak French and Darija, not Tamazight. I’ve heard that one of the reasons why everyone things the nurse in this area is so great is that he taught himself Tamazight when he moved here and has shown himself to be very committed. I’m excited to meet him.
It’s been a long time since I wrote up a blog post for a couple of reasons. The first being that navigating the rules that the Peace Corps puts on our blogs is a bit difficult. All the rules they have given us make a lot of sense to me: I am a representative of the government and my blog should reflect that. Also, in the past host country nationals have found blogs written by PCVs and been upset. In one case here in Morocco, a community member of a PCV found photos that she had posted of her host mother and sisters unveiled in their home. The pictures were shown to the father of the family and he was extremely angry at this violation of his family’s privacy. The PCVs position and work in the community were compromised and it took her a long time to regain their trust.
I have made the choice not to password protect my blog for several reasons. I think the biggest one has to do with the third goal of the Peace Corps, which is for people in America to increase their understanding of the country and culture where PCVs serve. Blogs were a great resource for me before I came here… some of them I still read when I get to the internet café. But for people who are not headed to Morocco to serve in the Peace Corps, I will do my best to critically but positively report on my service here, focusing as much as possible on passing along information about the culture, history, current events, and issues of Morocco.
I may or may not have talked about why I wanted to come here before, so I will here. The other day my friend from CBT asked me if I’d ever had my heart broken. Something popped into my head right away, but I decided that was probably not what she was looking for. So I thought about boys I’ve dated, people who have hurt me, and difficult situations that I’ve faced, but none of them made me feel very devastated for a long time. So I returned back to that first thing: the outcome of 9/11 and the Iraq war. When 9/11 happened, I sat in my first period classroom and thought about what it would take to drive someone to do something so horrific. I cried a lot that day and in the days following, but living where I lived it was difficult to feel upset with the nature of the world for long. My community has the amazing ability making the world feel healthy and whole even after it has been ripped apart. When the Iraq War began, I could see no way in which the outcome of the war would be positive. I thought about the woman and children who would be affected more than anything else, and for weeks I walked around stunned that it was actually happening. All these years down the road, my worst fears about the American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have come true. One of the devastating outcomes has been how those two events have shaped American’s position in this world and the effect that it has had on our countries’ relationship with Muslims in our own country and abroad.
My personal goals in coming to Morocco are varied, but learning about Islam is equal in my mind to participating in development. This is because I want to have personal experience in order to better teach about it when I return to America. Morocco is at a crossroads of a lot of different cultures. In many ways, it is a very moderate country, tempered by the strong influence of Europe and the indigenous culture. Yet the people I live with live their lives much the same way their ancestors have for thousands of years. Allah is a central part of every conversation here. The motto of Morocco, which is carved into the hillside above the neighboring town, is “Allah, Nation, King.” They don’t mess around with it.
So, in order to keep my blog safe and to abide by PC’s policies, I am going to refrain from giving personal information and stick mostly with information about my service and the issues that face my community. I will also probably not post many pictures here (except landscapes), and do my best to remain respectful of the people that I am here to serve. Please feel free to ask questions and to send me any information you think might be relevant.
5/2/09
I have now been in my site for a little over a day. It has been a good few days, although right now I am battling myself over how it is best to behave in order to fully enter this community. I am once again battling some sort of bug (not the swine flu, LHamdullah) and not feeling up to socializing a lot with people I don’t know. However, I know that these first few days in site are critical to forming an understanding of the community and making myself known here as an active community member. Luckily for me, I am following another volunteer whom everyone seems to like quite a bit. She was medically separated from her service six months ago, but no one has forgotten her and they constantly ask me how she is doing. She is coming back to visit in a few months, so I let people know that they will get to see her soon, but she will only be here as a tourist and I am the new muttatawai3a n saHt (health volunteer).
So, how do I feel about my site? Well, I’ll start off with some information. I have one of the highest and most isolated sites in Morocco. I am one of the few volunteers who does not have running water in my home. Instead, when I get my house, I will collect water from one of seven treated public fountains like the other people of my town. I also am in a site where I will have to deal with extreme environmental factors. I will experience a delightfully warm (not hot) summer, but it will be short. Fall, winter, and spring will bring rain, then cold, ice, and snow. I will be unable to leave my site from time to time because of the weather. And because I will not have indoor heating, I plan on spending a lot of time hiding under my knitting this winter!
The area where I am living is one of the areas that held out against French colonization for a long, long time. The Amazigh population here is far more traditional than anything I have experienced anywhere else, including on Native reservations back in the States. If I stood on my roof and photographed the village, it would look much the same as it did hundreds of years ago, with the addition only of satellite dishes. The houses are made of mud, and surrounded by thick mud walls, which often have storage rooms or spaces for animals built into them. The people here raise cows and chickens, but I have only seen a few sheep or goats. For the most part, they grow wheat, potatoes, and apples for subsistence.
Families here follow a traditional structure. Women work the fields and are rarely seen in the main center of town, as small as it is. Men are mostly busy with the social aspects of the community. In my household, my host father occasional also works in the fields and is responsible for the family’s two cows. My host mother spends a great deal of time up in the hills cutting a low, woody bush that they burn for firewood or working in the fields. My oldest host sister works in the fields and does most of the families’ cooking and cleaning. My two youngest host sisters go to school, gather water, play and shepherd me around. I haven’t met many people in the community yet, but I have yet to see a woman wearing pants or walking around with her head uncovered, both of which I saw within my first hour in our CBT site.
The language is very different, as well. The aspirated K that I’ll have to admit was probably my favorite new sound is almost completely gone, replaced by a “sh” sound. I don’t mind this. It makes things a lot less confusing, because there is little difference between the aspirated K, x, H, and g*. Many of the words are different. Words that our LCF taught us that stem from Arabic or French are in a purer Tamazight form here.
The greetings are different, too. The phrase “LLah3awn,” (Allah help you) which I used as a goodbye in CBT is now a greeting, but only used with woman and only in the afternoon. “Mani” which I was taught means “where” also can mean “how” here, so “mani tarbatnsh” means “how is your daughter?” instead of “where is your daughter?” I have to remember to used the conjugations of “illi” (to be, in reference to location) if I want to specify that I am asking where someone is. And I often forget. I’m really excited to get started with a tutor in my souk town ASAP!
As far as work goes, I am excited about participating in a few projects left from the last volunteer. The one that is going to probably be my first focus is actually not a health project, but it will help me a great deal in networking with the community’s woman. The last volunteer in site started working with a local association out of a slightly larger town to set up a Neddi, or woman’s center. Neddis are places for woman only, where they can socialize, do crafts, and gain skills. Often neddis are where woman’s literacy classes are held. In our neddi, my first project is to get the classroom that Hannan (that’s the Berber name of the last volunteer) started set up completely. Not only will the classroom serve the woman, but also we are planning on organizing Arabic classes for some of the girls who no longer go to school there. It could also possibly serve as a space for some early childhood education and for me to teach English classes or do health projects.
I plan on involving myself as much as possible in the neddi in order to build connections with the woman. Also, it’s work! Some days there might be nothing that I have to do that actually has to do with health, but going to the neddi will be a good alternative. Besides, I want to learn as many local handicrafts as possible before I go! My family is already pretty impressed with the hat that I just finished knitting for myself tonight. I can’t wait to get my hands on some more yarn. I’m going to make them something fun!
The last volunteer also was in the process of gathering information in order to do a Traditional Birth Attendant training with the Ministry of Health. I would like to continue this project. I may have to re-do some of the leg work that she put in just because I would really like to develop a personal relationship with these woman, just as the last volunteer did. This will mean a lot of running around to my douars!
Another possible project is to put in a request with the ministry of health to get a female nurse at the Sbitar. The Sbitar currently has a nurse, who I hear is fantastic (haven’t met him yet) but he’s an unmarried man. The woman don’t like to go to see him because they don’t want to be alone with him for examinations. I have been told that people will very quickly start to associate me with the sbitar if I hang out there, and that many woman will ask me to accompany them during their exams. My host father asked me today if I would do my best to get a female nurse in here (this was after we established that I am not a nurse.) I said I would, although as you can imagine it is difficult to get people to commit to working here, as it is so remote and cold! Doctors, nurses, and teachers all can go to school on the government’s dime, but they are then sent wherever the gov’t wants to send them. The people who do the best in school are allowed to choose, and they usually pick urban centers. That mans that the doctors and nurses who serve the populations smaller communities are usually not the ones who made the most of their education. Also, they often only speak French and Darija, not Tamazight. I’ve heard that one of the reasons why everyone things the nurse in this area is so great is that he taught himself Tamazight when he moved here and has shown himself to be very committed. I’m excited to meet him.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Somebody's gotta do it.
3/29/2009
Up until this point I’ve been pretty positive about my writing. This has been a very positive experience for me, in general, but there are a few things that I have been struggling with for the past few weeks. Some of them will be things that become easier over time, but some of them I think I will struggle with for the entire time I am here.
This morning I faced one of those things that I think will get easier, although it is possible that it won’t. I did my laundry. This is only the second time, so I had a LOT of clothes to wash. Some of them were very dirty. I ran into a PCV who has just completed his first year in Azilal last weekend, and was shocked by how dirty he was. But I could easily see how I could tend in the same direction when I live alone and have to do all my own washing. Because it sucks. Really, really sucks!
Here is how it goes:
Build a fire in your largest brazier with found wood. Fill a metal bucket with water and heat.
Go on a hunt for all your wash buckets. You may have a hard time finding them. One is in the field where you left it after your last wash. Another bucket is in the bitlma, where you used it to bathe last night. Another is in the sheep pen and will need a good scrubbing before it is fit for usage again.
Mix Tide (the generic term for detergent) with a little water.
Put heated water into your largest washtub with a little tide and all your white clothing.
Get over the embarrassment of having more clothes that your family owns combined. They don’t really care.
Wash each item individually, adding tide liberally as needed. Various washing motions are used. If the item has no spots, swish in soapy water and knead like you would bread. For spots, add tide directly to spot and scrub between your knuckles. This will surely be painful, as you are grinding concentrated tide into your nail beds, but at least your clothing will be clean.
Attempt to clean all your own underwear, so as to avoid the embarrassment of having your host mother do it. She will notice that you are doing this, but think that you are failing miserably at getting anything clean, so she will probably end up washing it anyway. Attempt to explain in Tamazight that some of it is very old and some of the stains will not come out, no matter how much tide you use. Save the rest of your embarrassment for when your underwear is hanging on the line where everyone in the village can see it.
Place whites in a bucket with a little bleach and water. Let sit.
Repeat process with colors, washing shirts and pants, first, then undergarments and socks.
Rinse all clothes in second washtub with cold water. Hang to dry on the wash lines outside, even though it is raining hard. Hope to God that you have a clean pair of underwear hidden somewhere in your luggage for tomorrow, as most of this will not be dry in time.
Repeat process with some clothes when the clothesline fails under the weight of your wet clothing. This is a good time for language exchange, as you can teach your host mother some English. Words like “crap” and the phrase “oh f**k” come in handy in times like these.
Prepare tea and drink it sitting next to the coals left in the brazier. Laugh with your host mother about everything.
And that is how you wash your laundry. I think I may end up paying someone to do it for me when I get to my site….
Useful Vocabulary:
Tide: the generic term for detergent. Sometimes it is actually Tide brand. More often, it is Omo, which smells worse and is more abrasive, but cheaper. It is pronounced, “teed.”
Ish: oops.
Sbbn: the verb used to mean “washing of clothing.”
Aman: water
Up until this point I’ve been pretty positive about my writing. This has been a very positive experience for me, in general, but there are a few things that I have been struggling with for the past few weeks. Some of them will be things that become easier over time, but some of them I think I will struggle with for the entire time I am here.
This morning I faced one of those things that I think will get easier, although it is possible that it won’t. I did my laundry. This is only the second time, so I had a LOT of clothes to wash. Some of them were very dirty. I ran into a PCV who has just completed his first year in Azilal last weekend, and was shocked by how dirty he was. But I could easily see how I could tend in the same direction when I live alone and have to do all my own washing. Because it sucks. Really, really sucks!
Here is how it goes:
Build a fire in your largest brazier with found wood. Fill a metal bucket with water and heat.
Go on a hunt for all your wash buckets. You may have a hard time finding them. One is in the field where you left it after your last wash. Another bucket is in the bitlma, where you used it to bathe last night. Another is in the sheep pen and will need a good scrubbing before it is fit for usage again.
Mix Tide (the generic term for detergent) with a little water.
Put heated water into your largest washtub with a little tide and all your white clothing.
Get over the embarrassment of having more clothes that your family owns combined. They don’t really care.
Wash each item individually, adding tide liberally as needed. Various washing motions are used. If the item has no spots, swish in soapy water and knead like you would bread. For spots, add tide directly to spot and scrub between your knuckles. This will surely be painful, as you are grinding concentrated tide into your nail beds, but at least your clothing will be clean.
Attempt to clean all your own underwear, so as to avoid the embarrassment of having your host mother do it. She will notice that you are doing this, but think that you are failing miserably at getting anything clean, so she will probably end up washing it anyway. Attempt to explain in Tamazight that some of it is very old and some of the stains will not come out, no matter how much tide you use. Save the rest of your embarrassment for when your underwear is hanging on the line where everyone in the village can see it.
Place whites in a bucket with a little bleach and water. Let sit.
Repeat process with colors, washing shirts and pants, first, then undergarments and socks.
Rinse all clothes in second washtub with cold water. Hang to dry on the wash lines outside, even though it is raining hard. Hope to God that you have a clean pair of underwear hidden somewhere in your luggage for tomorrow, as most of this will not be dry in time.
Repeat process with some clothes when the clothesline fails under the weight of your wet clothing. This is a good time for language exchange, as you can teach your host mother some English. Words like “crap” and the phrase “oh f**k” come in handy in times like these.
Prepare tea and drink it sitting next to the coals left in the brazier. Laugh with your host mother about everything.
And that is how you wash your laundry. I think I may end up paying someone to do it for me when I get to my site….
Useful Vocabulary:
Tide: the generic term for detergent. Sometimes it is actually Tide brand. More often, it is Omo, which smells worse and is more abrasive, but cheaper. It is pronounced, “teed.”
Ish: oops.
Sbbn: the verb used to mean “washing of clothing.”
Aman: water
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