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!