25/11/08
I survived pre-service training and am now officially a Peace Corps volunteer. My group was sworn in on the 20th in Fez in a kick-ass hotel with an amazing view overlooking the city.
This time to get to my site, I and quite a few other volunteers rode the bus from Azrou to Marrakech, spent the night there, and continued to Ouarzazate via the Tichka pass. Marrakech is an awesome city, and the Tishka pass is known for its beauty and its nausea-inducing switchbacks. There are a few scary spots where the road falls away on one side to thousand foot drops. It was absolutely gorgeous. Saw a peacock and his lady along the way and bought some walnuts for my host family. Puked twice.
When we got to Ouarzazate, I and my site mate (the volunteer who lives in my souk town) picked up our entire luggage, paid an exorbitant amount, and were driven straight to our respective sites. I had to cough up 70 dirhams to pay for the ride: in comparison, my bus ride from Azrou to Errashidia (300+km) on a really nice charter bus was 70 dirhams. My site is only 45km from Ouarzazate. 70 dirhams is about 10-12 kilos of veggies, enough to feed a family of 5 for 2 weeks. I hate being seen as a ‘rich’ foreigner here sometimes, especially since I do not have the kind of money people demand from me.
Since I’ve gotten back to my home, I’ve unpacked and arranged all of my things. What a change to not have to worry about packing up and moving again. Permanence is a good thing. My host mom hung a string of lights (kinda like chirstmas lights) in my room, and I hope to get up my calendar mom made and a map or two to make the place homier.
On the 23rd I wanted to walk around the village and see the lay of the land, so I asked my 5-year-old sister to take me around. We walked a bit and she took me to a friend of her mother’s house, where we were invited in for tea, bread and honey. We chatted, or rather I tried to chat, watched some TV, then left. Next, my sister took me to another friend of her mother’s, where we once again drank tea, ate bread, eggs, and honey, and chatted a bit. I was stuffed when we got back home for lunch and exhausted from constantly having to thing in another language. I have a feeling that my sister simply wanted to get some free food…
Yesterday was souk day, so my mother, father, and I all loaded into the donkey cart and road 18k (2 hours donkey cart time) to go shopping. I abandoned my family and went and met up with my site mate to enjoy some English speaking time. We wandered through the town, fought with her potential future landlord (who will no longer be her future landlord because he was being a greedy douche), got my bike, ate lunch with her family, and biked my butt home. The bike ride is rather long and tiring, about an hour over rough terrain and through sandy and sometimes wet riverbeds. I have to say, I do prefer my bike to the donkey cart. Peace Corps requires that I wear a bike helmet; if they catch me without one, it is automatic firing, or what they diplomatically call ‘administrative separation.’ Anyway, I look like a total dork and everyone stares at me 20X worse than they normally do. Stupid helmet.
Today, I need to come up with a plan for something to do. I try to accomplish one thing a day, like today I’ll meet with my counterpart, or today I’m going to visit where the weavers work, just to keep myself sane and busy. Otherwise, I’d just be sitting here staring off into space as everyone stares at me.
It’s hard to get used to being such an object of interest and debate.
26/11/08
Yesterday evening I got caught in the middle an interesting argument, and managed to get out of it with the excuse of “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
My host mom and I visited her sister-in-law for teatime. An older woman was there (I’d say my host father’s mother just by resemblance) and kept commenting on how cold it must be at my host mother’s house because I was all snuffy and coughy (from cold-ass Azrou, not my host family’s house). She kept on in this vein for quite a while, oh you poor thing, it must be so cold in that house!, and finally asks if I’d like to spend the night in her house to get away from the cold. Mind you, my host mother is sitting across from me, silently fuming at this older woman the whole time.
I totally understood what she was asking and what she’d been saying, but I always have to think about relationships in my new setting. I live in a village of supposedly 500 people; I cannot afford to piss anyone off right now. Maybe later when I understand the power dynamics better… anyway, I have to figure out a way to turn her down without upsetting her or my host mother.
So I play the “I don’t understand” card. My response was something along the lines, “Thank you for making me welcome here. Maybe in the future I’ll spend the night.”
She won’t drop the offer, saying that I need to spend the night TONIGHT so I do not get any sicker in that cold house. I turn to my host mother and ask, “I don’t understand, is there something wrong with my room? I think it is nice and warm at night. Do you need me to stay here tonight? I’m confused.”
After that, she dropped the subject and I went home and curled up in my toasty bed.
Today I managed to take a nice bucket bath and then headed down to the fields to watch my host mother gather clover for the sheep. After about 10 minutes of watching, she sent me up the hill to Bouschera’s house for tea and socializing. Bouschera’s a young woman (probably my age) who laughs at everything and seems so full of life. She was host mother to the last volunteer here and I have a feeling she’d be a good friend to have.
It’s gradually been getting colder. The nights usually get down below 45 and the days are their warmest at 65. Yesterday the wind was blowing cold and I ended up with a heavy film of dust all over my stuff (I forgot to shut the windows. Remember days like that in Arizona, Mom?). Today’s been warmer, mostly because of no wind, but I can see the rain clouds headed this way. It’s actually kind of cool; to the north of me are the High Atlas Mountains and I can actually see it snowing on them.
Tomorrow I should be going to Ouarzazate in order to get my visa and eat out Moroccan Thanksgiving style with a few other volunteers.
28/11/08
Took 2 hours to bike into my souk town yesterday in order to meet up with another volunteer and go to Ouarzazate. We squished into a taxi and were off. 40 dirhams and a few hours later, we had legal work visas for Morocco.
For lunch, a bunch of volunteers from my stage (i.e. the volunteers I trained with) all ate together at an outdoor café, slightly thanksgiving style. I had a turkey sausage sandwich and French fries so it was kind of like turkey and mash potatoes.
Met my delegate, got a small notepad for random vocab I hear, and ventured back into my souk town, where I had tea with my new tutor. My site mate introduced us and since he is the only English-speaking teacher willing to work with us, he’s got the job.
Because it was too dark to bike back, I stayed in my souk town for the night.
Today had a tutoring lesson, was harassed by a crazy drug addict, reported him to the police, ate delicious couscous twice (my site mate’s mom and my mom both ‘forced’ me to eat it) and pedaled my happy butt back home. My butt is a little bruised from the ride though.
I also got a care package today from my parents containing ‘Christmas in a box’: a small xmas tree, decorations for said tree (including blinking lights), xmas candles, a small snow globe, canned ham, and a kick ass candleholder that my mom made from clay. I was grinning all the way home from my souk town thinking about all of it. Can’t wait to decorate the tree.
I really want to light the candle to see the candleholder glow but I cannot find a lighter. Theoretical god hates me…
30/11/08
Interesting cultural difference to note:
The concept of personal space or personal possessions is different here than it is in America. Case in point: I get all of my luggage to my new home, get everything unpacked and arranged the way I like to make my room seem more homey, and then when I’m gone to Ouarzazate for the day, my host mother comes in, cleans, and rearranges everything to how she thinks it looks best.
What was so funny was that I knew she’d been dying to get in here and see what I’d done to the room. Once, when I left my door open to run across the house to get something, I heard her tell her oldest to run to my room quick (before I got back) and report back what I’d done to it.
I do appreciate that she swept up for me, but I can do that myself, she’s got enough to do during the day; and I know she was proud of how she rearranged my room, but I ended up moving everything back to the way I wanted it anyway. I’m locking the door next time I’m away for an extended period of time.
It is definitely an interesting experience to be daily watched and analyzed like some sort of Jane Goodall/Discovery special. Every gesture I make, everything I wear, everywhere I go, what’s in my room is fully examined and picked over by everyone in the house, and to some extent, the village. The feeling of being watched doesn’t bother me now (it pays to be oblivious to attention sometimes) but I could see how on a bad day I’d want to hide or scream at everyone to get away from me.
What’s really fun to do now that my language is improved is to go to tea with my host mother and listen to all of the women gossip about me while I’m there. I’ll pretend to be playing with the kids, not paying any attention, then randomly comment on something one of them said about me. My favorite is “Oh the poor thing. She’s not married, has no children, no family in Morocco. Poor thing!” to which I’ll pipe in, “I’m not a poor thing. I have a lot of family in Morocco. I have three mothers! You all always always always say I’m a poor thing.” This usually causes everyone to burst out laughing.
After two months of living with my host family, I’m allowed to find a house of my own to rent. The last volunteer who worked in this village dropped out of Peace Corps because she had some issues with the job and because there was NO house here to rent. She had to rent a place far away and bike into the village. Supposedly, Peace Corps refused to place another volunteer in this village unless they made at least one place available for rent. They did, so now I am here. Or so I thought.
One evening, I was asking my host mother about the house here that I could rent. She looked confused and said that there is no house here for me to rent. I asked her again, thinking I’d said something wrong but she insisted that there is no house here available to rent. I could stay with her and the family for my entire two years, she insisted. That concerned me, for as much as I love my host family, I cannot live with them for 2 years; I need my own place for the sake of my sanity. So I’ve been trying to get a hold of the housing coordinator to see if he can clear up this situation. Unfortunately, the big holiday is coming up and I don’t think I’ll get him until a week from now.
The big holiday is Eid Kbir, when all families buy a ram and slaughter it in accordance of the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for the lord (it’s also a story from the Old Testament). Depending on the moon, the Eid is either on Tuesday or Wednesday and it is basically a week full of eating the entire ram and getting new clothes. My mom’s bought me a new caftan. Google image one, they’re quite pretty and the traditional dress of Morocco along with the jellaba. We went shopping for the kids’ new clothes yesterday evening and I bought a lighter. My candle smells amazing (it’s clove-scented) and I had to shove it in everyone’s face and tell them that my mother made the candleholder.
We’re having lentils for lunch. I’m excited.
2/12/08
I am not a fan of Moroccan music. If there is one thing that I hate in this world more than a vocorder I have yet to find it; a vocorder is all that is ever used in Moroccan music. It makes everyone sound really whiney to me.
Yesterday didn’t do much of anything exciting. Spent the day reviewing 100 some ought verbs and then tagged along to Fatima’s house. Her son had just retuned from Saudi so they were having quite a gathering. The weather was lovely until the evening, when the wind really started to pick up.
I woke up around 3 this morning listening to the wind absolutely tearing around the house. The house itself is a solid mud and cement construction, so the walls are and easy foot thick and impenetrable to wind.
Thick mud house + wind = April feeling cozy and warm at 3 in the morning despite the weather
The wind’s blowing off of the High Atlas Mountains since last night and it is freaking freezing. If you can manage to stay out of the wind but get in the sun, you’ll be perfectly warm; otherwise, the wind chill knocks the temp down an easy 15-20 degrees. I watched a cat try and walk across the yard this morning. It ended up leaning severely to one side because of the wind as it tried to make it to the doorway. By the time it made it, it looked like someone had run it backwards through a vacuum hose. Funny stuff.
I think I’ll stay in my room most of the day, light a smell good candle, and do some intensive reading of nothing particularly mentally stimulating.
7/12/08
Nothing much has been happening the past few days. The most exciting thing by far was that I helped bury an electrical line in order to give my counterpart’s house electricity. While all the woman worked on digging a really long trench from one house to my counterpart’s, placing the cord in it, and burying it, the men stood around and watched.
I found out that my counterpart’s sisters have hosted at least 5 Peace Corps volunteers in the past and are quite good for teaching me Arabic. Unlike my host family who sometimes correct my Arabic when they at least semi-understand what I’m saying, my counterpart’s sisters really try to understand me, correct my Arabic, and make me repeat the correction. They’re what Peace Corps label as “sympathetic interlocutors.” And the sister’s are not nearly as busy as my host parents, so they have more time to sit and talk.
My host mother works all day cooking, cleaning, gathering fodder for the sheep, washing clothes, and yelling at the kids. My dad’s quite busy digging up clay dirt, making clay, making pots from the clay, gathering wood to fire the clay with, painting the pots, cooking them, and taking them to souk. Supposedly after this holiday is over he’s out of business for a while since no one buys his pots after the Eid and it gets too cold for him to work outside.
Yesterday was my first hammam day in my site. I think it may be one of my last, unless I can go when there are less people and when I don’t have to sit there and wait for 4 hours on my host mother.
The hammam is wonderful, especially when you haven’t bathed for 10 days. You go into the hottest room and just scrub layers of dead skin off until you feel clean again. The only problem was the tiny hammam was very crowded since all of the women went to bathe before the holiday. There were 3 10x10 rooms, each with at least 7-10 bathing women in them so I got in and got out as quick as I could. Once I stepped out of the hammam into the changing room, I started to black out because I’d been in the hot room for too long. After that passed, I got to sit out in the sun for 3 plus hours waiting for my host mother to finish and take me home. One of the women of my village (the hammam is located in another village) took pity on my sisters and me and finally walked us home. My host mom didn’t show up until an hour after we’d gotten back. I think she’d spent a total of 5 hours at the hammam. I don’t blame her; it must be a nice escape, the equivalent of a spa day in the states. But I don’t plan on going back with her and the kids anytime soon. They take too long for my American standards.
12/9/08
So the Eid started out great yesterday. The night before, my host parents fasted, which resulted in Hrira, or Moroccan soup, for dinner (I love it and haven’t had it in a while). She also showed me how to make what I call Moroccan sapodillas, a type of fried brad that you usually eat with honey.
Yesterday started with a visit to my counterpart’s house for henna. I stayed there half of the day and got to watch the ram be slaughtered. The culture shock book I read claimed the Muslim way of sacrificing an animal is relatively stress free and painless to the animal; the way the poor ram thrashed around after having it’s neck slit would tell me otherwise.
Then I watched my host uncle butcher the ram; it’s a rather simple process of stripping the ram of its pelt and pulling out the innards. I think the women get the short end of the stick with having to actually clean out the organs for cooking. That was messy and smelly.
The worst thing I got to see was how my host father emptied out the large intestine of sheep shit. The process involved dumping water into the large intestine from the anus end and then puckering up and blowing air through the asshole of the ram into the intestine, forcing all of the shit out of the other end. It was hilarious looking, my host dad with his lips pressed against the ass end of a skinned ram.
My host mother, on the other hand, had the fun job of cleaning all of the crap out of the stomach and other innards. She then chopped up the stomach into large sized chunks, wrapped the stomach chunks around bits of spiced lung, liver, intestine, and then tied the pouches of stomach shut with the stringy small intestine in a kind of a ram-gut-Hot-Pocket contraption, if you will. My host father hung the Moroccan Hot Pockets from a bamboo pole hanging from the roof. The sun will cook the meat and in a few days, it’ll be delicious…or so I’m told.
Unfortunately, my host dad’s father took sick last evening and had to be rushed to the hospital. The evening was spent with family, waiting for news from the hospital on the grandfather’s condition. The news last night was good; he’s in stable condition and they’ve got meds into him. From what I’ve gathered this morning, they’ve moved him from the souk town hospital to the large one in Ouarzazate. My host dad and his brother left early to go see him.
In the middle of all of this, my host dad took my sisters and I home to feed us. We spitted and roasted chunks of ram over and open coal pot and feasted on more meat than I’d seen in a fortnight (…I think, how long is a fortnight exactly?). He apologized for his father being sick and me not experiencing the holiday as it normally would be. With my limited language, I told him it wasn’t a problem.
This morning, all of the men of the village are outside on the main drag praying together. I can hear snippets of the chant floating over this way between the chatter and the housework. It’s rather beautiful. Today is also a day of wearing all of the new clothes you’ve bought. I’ll get to parade around in my new caftan and head scarf my host mother got me.
Tonight, depending on the grandfather’s condition, my counterpart is supposed to host some sort of party at her house for only women. Women-only party here means dancing, something I’m not partial to in any culture. I’ll be forced to dance and then I’ll be pissed and embarrassed. I hate dancing. Luckily, there will be lots of meat to eat for the next few days. That makes me happy.
11/12/08
My host father’s father pasted away the afternoon of the 9th. What was supposed to be the biggest holiday of the year has turned into a time of mourning.
The last two days the town has stopped by my counterpart’s house to pay respects. When I walked into the house, I’d never seen such a quite Moroccan gathering. With that many women in one room you usually can’t hear yourself think with all of the commotion, chattering, yelling at kids, and yelling at each other. It was very much like a wake in America.
I have seen my host parents off and on for the past few days; mostly, they’re busy shuttling food to my counterpart’s house feeding the mass of guests. They took most of the second ram and the entirety of the first ram my host father had slaughtered (he slaughtered two rams; one on the eve, and one that they’d been raising themselves on the day of the Eid). I waved goodbye to the delicious meat with tears in my eyes.
Yesterday was a difficult day for me; everyone was out of sorts anyway and the atmosphere was just so sad. I yelled at the oldest sister when she kept asking me if I was going to go to my counterpart’s house. I kept responding, “I don’t know,” because I did not know if it was culturally appropriate for me to show up while they’re mourning as they were. She kept asking and asking (perhaps thinking that I did not understand the question) and I could not explain in my limited language that I didn’t know because I didn’t know if it was appropriate. Finally, I just exploded and yelled at her in English, “Jesus Christ, I don’t freaking know!”
In America, this would have been inappropriate and at least raised an eyebrow or two in disapproval; here, outbursts are a way of life. If you’re pissed, you yell, you don’t let it pint up.
So she didn’t think anything of it, she just stopped asking me the question. I tried to spend the rest of the morning in my room since that outburst had left me close to tears but the girls were all in the house and wouldn’t leave me alone. They’d sit outside my door and tell the 2 year old girl, “Tell Hsna this…” or “Say that to Hsna…” and the little girl would come running in, say it, run out, and everyone would giggle. I had to keep my temper in check and remind myself that they’re only 10 at the oldest… Finally, I got up and bolted the door and it stopped. Sort of. After an hour or so, they left me be. I spent the morning playing with my DS and chilling out.
The rest of the day went better, and this morning I went for a walk through the oasis. It freaked everyone in my family out. The two oldest girls were home and as I left, I told the oldest one where I was going. She looked confused and asked me, “You’re going alone?” then yelled at her younger sister to go with me. Then a small fight ensued since the younger girl did not want to go but the older sister was ordering her to. As I was walking off, the younger sister went running to her mother (at the neighbor’s) to scream out that I was going to the oasis alone and that her older sister was trying to make her go with me but she didn’t want to go, make the older sister go with me. I was out of earshot to hear the response to that. As I topped the hill and came into site of my counterpart’s house, my host father saw me and demanded to know where I was going. I answered and luckily he left it at that.
The oasis is in no way dangerous unless you slip and fall into a puddle and drown, but it really freaked them out that I wanted to go alone somewhere. Alone is a strange thing, something to be avoided. When I finally got back my host mother wanted to know where I’d been and why I’d gone by myself; in fact, all of the extended family was asking about me. I got a little feeling of teenage rebellion as I explained that being alone does not bother me and it’s normal in my culture.
17/12/08
The most exciting thing to happen today was when I let the girls do my hair and walked to my counterpart’s house with my new do. All they did was pull half of it back into a ponytail; nonetheless, all of the women just stared.
The volunteer in my souk town ventured out to my site on Sunday despite the horrible wind that’s beginning to plague the village. We hung out a little bit, spoke some English, and amazed my host sisters.
Yesterday, attended my first tutoring session and tomorrow I go back for more. I have homework, but as of now I’m too darned tired to try doing it.
