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.