f l-mgrib: Month Two

(A very belated month two wrap up. In my defense, I was pretty busy at the month mark, what with swearing-in and moving to a new city ALL BY MYSELF, but it doesn’t bode well for this month wrap-up idea if I’m already making excuses this early into the project.)

During my first month in Morocco, everything was new. New country, new friends, new language, new family – everything was new and different, and it wasn’t until my second month that I started to find my footing and feel at home in Morocco. Part of it was just exposure to the culture and after two months here, I had learned my way around Sefrou, my CBT town, and knew my host family’s routines.

Part of it was my increasing language skills. As the month and my Darija ability progressed, I started going beyond basic fact-based statements (today, we ate tagine for lunch) into a little more depth (today, we ate French fries for lunch, but I ate my French fries with a fork, because I don’t like to eat French fries with bread like Moroccans). During my last week in Sefrou, my host-sisters and I had a conversation about why Americans are fat and Moroccans aren’t, even though Moroccans eat way more bread than Americans do. Being able to actually commutate, no matter how grammatically incorrect that communication might be, has done a lot to make me feel more comfortable.

My host family was wonderful, and put up with a lot of terrible Darija in an attempt to make me feel at home. Simo, my host brother, and I had a running joke where he told people he was from America. It started when Simo was playing a driving and shooting computer game and one of the levels was set in America. I told Simo he was violated American traffic laws. He told me he wasn’t. I reminded him that I was, in fact, from America and was quite familiar with American traffic laws, especially the ones involving not running a red light to ram a cop car, and Simo informed Soukayna and I that he was actually from America.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Which state are you from?”

“I’m from Florida!” he told me.

“Which city are you from?” Soukayna asked.

Simo, not knowing any cities in Florida, leaned over and whispered to me, “What’s a city in Florida?”

“Miami,” I whispered back.

“I’m from Miami, Florida,” Simo informed us, and that night at dinner he told the rest of the family that he was now from Miami, Florida, and continued to remind us for the next few weeks. A week or so later, my host mother made me a separate pot of tea with dinner because she knew I like my tea without sugar. Simo poured himself a cup from my teapot, took a sip expecting the saccharine mint tea Moroccans usually drink and immediately started gagging.

“What’s the problem?” I asked. “You’re from America. This is American tea.”

“You are from America, right?” his sisters chimed in.

“Yes, I’m from America. I can drink American tea,” Simo reassured us, bug-eyed, then took a tiny sip of my tea and a giant spoonful of jam to prove it. His sisters stole the jam and demanded that he keep drinking. Poor kid. No one deserves to suddenly get an extra older sister.


Simo, tiny Moroccan thug, and my sitemate Jenn. Just before this picture was taken, Simo was disco dancing. Americans disco dance, right?
l-عid l-kbir, biggest holiday in the Islamic calendar, was in early November and I celebrated with my host family. I thought the most important holiday was Ramadan, or would at least involve the Prophet, but l-عid celebrates Ibrahim’s (Abraham) willingness to sacrifice his son, Ishmael. At the last minute, Allah replaced Ishmael with a sheep, saving his life. Now, on the tenth day of the last month in the Islamic calendar (du l-Hijja), Muslims have a sacrificial feast to commemorate the occasion.

My family slaughtered a sheep. The sheep spent the night in the front hallway (which is in between the bathroom and the rest of the house, which made for an unexpectedly exciting late night trip to the bathroom), and on the morning of l-عid, my host father and sister killed it, skinned it and gutted it in front of the house. I stood on the front step and watched. The entire sheep is eaten during the holiday, and until a few weeks ago, I didn’t even know it was possible to eat a sheep’s face. I had already told my host family that I was vegetarian (they tried to convince me that lung and heart don’t count as meat) so I mostly ate bread that week, but my sitemate Kim ate an eye and was tricked into eating sheep testicles. Her host mother offered her some meat that looked like fat, and Kim asked what part of the sheep it was from. Her host mother patted her stomach, but once Kim had eaten it, she leaned over and swung her hands back and forth like a pendulum to explain that actually, it came from a little bit further south.


During l-عid, it's traditional to decorate your hands and feet with henna to ward off evil spirits. The day before l-عid, Naعima came over and drew henna on my hands. It's drawn free-hand with a syringe, which makes the results even more impressive.


The final product of the henna with a glass of mint tea. It's my iconic Moroccan photo.


My family's sheep hanging from a tree over the irrigation ditch in front of our house after it had been skinned and gutted.


After it was decapitated, the sheep's head was taken to a fire pit where a couple of guys cut off the horns and roasted it. You know, for the eating.
During month two, we started doing technical training at the Dar Šabab, which also helped make me feel at home in Morocco. We started the month by doing PACA activities with the kids. (PACA, Participatory Approach for Community Action, is the Peace Corps guide to community analysis. It’s about as interesting as it sounds.) Then we spent a week teaching English at the Dar Šabab, and we ended the month by holding a “camp” for the youth. I’m not sure how much help the activities were in terms of actual technical training — two 40 minute classes does not a teacher make, and the camp was held right after l-عid and was sparsely attended — but it was a great chance to meet and interact with the youth of our town.

The camp was supposed to be the big, final project in CBT, but it fell flat. Not only did we not have nearly enough time to plan for it and only a few interested youth, our original idea for the camp, a talent show/art exhibition, didn’t go over well, so we mostly just hung out at the Dar Šabab and talked with the kids. One of the boys taught me know to write my name in Arabic, Mariam helped me review my numbers and, pressured to sing, I sang Amazing Grace, because it turns out the only songs I know well enough to sing a-capella are either religious or patriotic. On the last day, the youth performed a variety show (like a talent show, but without the practice) with song, dance, poetry and skits. They were a great group of kids, and I hope they get a permanent volunteer soon.


Girls (and Kelly) at the Dar Šabab after making a community map, one of the PACA activities.
I went to a bunch of parties during month two. There was a birthday party for Fatima (my LCF), a Moroccan dance party at Hub, and a going away party my last night in Sefrou. Turns out, Moroccans like to dance a lot. At the two parties in Sefrou, we danced to music videos (both of traditional Moroccan music and more western music, including something that sounded almost like Gangsta's Paradise). Men weren’t invited to either party, so the women were free to shed some of their layers, take off their headscarves and have fun. The day after Fatima’s birthday party, we were discussing it in class, and learned that in Darija, there are two words for to dance: shth which means to dance and rdih which means to crazy dance.

For the dance party at Hub, Peace Corps hired a traditional Moroccan band (like the ones that play at weddings). The band consisted of drums and horns, and the songs were long - up to twenty minutes long. After each piece, the performers had to rest and catch their breath before starting to play again. Everyone joined hands in a circle around the band and danced around in a circle.


Everybody, shthu!
Despite all the fun I had and progress I made during my second month here, most of the month was overshadowed by an abrupt change in LCFs. Due to a dispute with Peace Corps, Fatima had to resign with three weeks left in training. Her departure was sudden and perhaps not handled as well as it could have been by everyone involved, and the experience left me with the impression that the well-being of my training was very much secondary to Peace Corps. While another LCF was eventually brought in, I know that my training, especially my language training, suffered a result. It was an unsettling introduction to how Peace Corps bureaucracy works, but it’s behind me now and I hope the rest of my service is smoother.

Site Annoucements

Site announcements were last Wednesday! Most of PST is spent at our CBT sites, but every few weeks, the entire staj comes back to Fes for a few days of group sessions, and this trip Peace Corps announced the permanent sites we’ll spend the next two years living in, i.e. the one thing I’ve been dying to know since I first got my invitation.

On Wednesday, the day of the announcements, Peace Corps drug the process out, and we spent all morning in sessions that no one paid any attention to because we all just wanted to know where our sites were. After lunch (which was half an hour late *insert face clawing*) we had yet another session with Abdelghani, the Youth Development program manager, introducing the regional managers, their duties and the regional system (a new introduction to Peace Corps Morocco) and other probably important things that I didn’t really pay attention to because I just wanted to know where I was going to be living. *insert more face clawing*

After the session, we were divided into our regional groups, which was a cruel tease because know we knew the general area we would be living in and who our neighbors would be, but still didn’t know our site, our home for the next two years, and we still had to sit through another ten minutes of talking. After region announcements, the groups met separately and our regional manager gave everyone a folder with the name of our site, a form about our new host family and a couple of pages of information about our the town. (People who are replacing or joining a current volunteer got a site journal written by the PCV, but since I’m the first volunteer in my site in a while, I got a generic form filled out by Peace Corps staff.)

My immediate thoughts were along the lines of OMG, I’m so excited, I can’t wait to see it, I love this place and am invested in its well-being ALREADY, must Google immediately, followed by Wait, Sra-what? I don’t even know how to say that! and Hmm, so I wonder where this is? It was a surreal moment.

My home for the next two years is Kelaat Sraghna (I can still only somewhat say that), a city about an hour and a half north of Marrakesh. Kelaat, or Qlaat or El Kalaa des Sraghna (there seems to be some confusion about the proper name and spelling) is big, about 65,000 people, and the economy mainly revolves around olive agriculture. There’s a high school, two Dar Šabab (youth centers where YD volunteers work), a sports center and a Marjan (think Wal-Mart, only nice and with an entire aisle devoted to cheese). I have a sitemate, Lucia, from my staj who I like a lot and think will be great to work with, there’s a Environment volunteer named Lena who lives 40 minutes away and Kelly, my current CBT sitemate and Peace Corps twin, is only an hour away. Kelaat is at the base of the High Atlas Mountains, just a couple of hours from the beach and close enough to Marrakesh’s transportation options that I’ll be able to travel easily. It sounds like an amazing town and I can’t wait to get there!

Amazing Moments in Stupidity

Part of being a foreigner somewhere is putting up with unwanted attention because you’re different. People stare, children shout things as you walk by in what they think is your native language (in Morocco, they all shout in French) and sometimes, you don’t get the same treatment that a native would receive because you’re different. It can also work the other way, and expats get away with all sorts of cultural faux pas because they’re foreign and people assume they don’t know any better. Either way, it can feel like people only react to the fact that you’re different and not to you as an individual, and it can be difficult to remind myself that sometimes it’s my actions that are causing the commotion, not my nationality, ethnicity or inability to speak the language.

Case in point: Last night, one of the innumerable cousins (I assume, I never did get a straight answer to who this guy was) came over. He spent the evening on the computer, which is in the living room and has a direct line of sight to my bedroom, where I was sitting on my bed, trying (unsuccessfully) to memorize adjectives. Every time I looked up, the cousin was staring at me, and after a bit, I started to get hostile. Why’s he looking at me? I fumed mentally. Hasn’t he seen a foreigner before?! I’m dressed appropriately, I’m minding my own business and I’m in the safety of my home. I’m not Moroccan, woop-di-freaking-do. I have to put up with enough attention all day. I shouldn’t have to deal with this at home too! What a creep! I spent the better part of the evening annoyed at the guy and sending him a covert stink-eye whenever I caught his glance.

And then, hours later when I got up for dinner, I realized that hanging right above me head, in plain view to the entire house, were a row of underwear that had still been damp when I took them off the line this afternoon.

Dude wasn’t looking at me. He was trying to figure out why I was displaying my undergarments so wantonly, especially when there was a male guest present. This had nothing to do with me being foreign and everything to do with me being kinda dumb. If I hadn’t immediately jumped to the conclusion that his attention was because I’m American and not because of something I had done, I would have looked around and noticed my laundry and could have saved myself some embarrassment when I had to sit down, red-faced, next to him for dinner.

Fkkr

(Sorry Mom, there's a bunch of swearing in this entry. In my defense, it's most as a pronunciation guide.)

Darija can be an incredible dirty sounding language to an English speaking. I know there are examples in every language of perfectly innocent words being dirty or offensive in another (my college Latin professor loved to remind us that we can’t decline sex in Latin), but in all the languages I’ve studied, Darija is the worst (or best).

“I ate” is klit. “Please” is afak, which sounds a lot like “oh fuck” and promptly became a swear word around Hub. (I left my notebook in my 5th floor room, afak!) We’ve started threatening to cut a bnt (girl) instead of bitch and last week, I asked Jenn the name of her hooha (brother). (That one was mistake. Hooha means "her brother" and I should have asked about the name of her non-dirty sounding hook (your brother).) If you woke up this morning, you fqt (which sounds very similar to fucked), but my favorite work is “to think,” which is fkkr, pronounced exactly like you think it is. (There are actually two works for “to think, dnn and fkkr, which has lead to us saying dnn-fkkr a lot.) We’re not exactly mature about it, and poor Fatima spends a lot of time rolling her eyes as we titter over things like Kat-fkkr (you think). The best moment came when Kelly, frustrated over forgetting a word, tapped her head and said, “Fkkr, fkkr, fkkr,” in a horribly obscene reference to Winne the Poo.

I really love my CBT group sometimes.

f l-mgrib: Month One

Friday was my one-month anniversary in Morocco. My staj arrived in Morocco early on the morning of September 14th, after an overnight flight from JFK. We were met right off the plane by Peace Corps staff, whisked through the diplomatic line at immigration and loaded onto a bus for the four hour bus ride to Fes by 8:00. The first day was long, busy and exhausting, especially since I didn’t sleep on the plane or the bus. We met Peace Corps training staff, had the first of many immunizations and dealt with reams of paperwork that goes along with entering government service. Siad, the assistant training director, took a picture of each of us that afternoon, then printed them out and gave them to us as a memento shortly before we left for CBT. In my photo, I’m tired, unwashed and giving the camera a bitch face, but things have only gone uphill from there.

It’s been a busy month, and one unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. The first week was spent in Fes, which only barely felt like living in Morocco. I was surrounded by Americans, the Moroccan staff all spoke excellent English and I rarely left the training center for more than a quick run to a hanut, the small convenience stores that abound on every street corner.

Then, after week, we moved to our CBT sites, which was a jarringly different experience and I was suddenly living by myself with a Moroccan family who spoke little English (at a time when my Darija was pretty much limited to telling people my name, where I was from and my marital status). My stomach was in knots all morning the day we left for CBT, and I had to make a fist to keep my hands from shaking as I entered my home for the next two months. That evening, I was sitting alone on the couch of my new home, nervous, clueless about how to start a conversation and dreading the long evening in front of me. Then Soukayna, my 17-year-old host sister, drug me over to the family computer so she could show me her Facebook page and took me outside, where I met the neighbors and we sat on the steps and listened to Barbie Girl on Soukayna’s phone. During dinner, Simo, my 11-year-old brother, made sure to find an American movie (Twister) subtitled in Arabic to watch, so that I would be included. All evening, my host family went out of their way to made sure I felt included and welcomed. I had anticipated a long and lonely evening, but instead went to bed feeling hopeful and optimistic about the next two months.

For the most part, living with a host family has been a positive experience. As my Darija abilities have developed, I’ve been able to start to actually talk with them, and one of my favorite times of the day is sitting around the dinner at table and trying to chat with my host mom and sisters. My host sisters and I have jokes, and my host brother and I play computer games and soccer together. They always introduce me as their sister, and last night, I told Simo I had three brothers. One was 23, one was 20 and one was 11.

“I’m 11!” he told me.

“I know,” I told him. “You’re my 11 year old brother.”

They’ve also been helpful when I’m studying. Ranya, my 13-year-old host sister, sits with me in the afternoon and helps me review my vocab flashcards and corrects my pronunciation. My host mom in particular is good at correcting me when I talk when her, but not correcting me beyond what I’m suppose to know. We learned present tense last week, and as soon as I started using it in conversation, she started correcting my mistakes, but last week when all I knew was the past tense and would attach deba (now) to any statement I wanted to be in present tense, she let it slide.

Not that living with a host family is always perfect. I miss the privacy and autonomy I had when I was living at home. My host mother decides everything, from when we eat dinner (answer: always later than I want, the latest has been 11:30) to when I can take a shower. While in theory I have my own room (a Peace Corp requirement), my host siblings are constantly in and out, the door I make sure to shut when I leave is always open when I return and after the first week, I realized that when people visit the house, my host mother immediately takes then to see my room.

I spend most of my day at school. I leave the house at 8:00 in the morning, and if I’m lucky, I’m home by 6:00. We study language all morning, and it’s amazing how fast I’m progressing. A month ago, I didn’t know a word of Moroccan, and now I have conversations. I’m comfortable, if not always adept, talking to shopkeepers and the neighbors, and yesterday I had my first program at the local dar chebab entirely in Darija, and it didn’t end in tears or fire or confusion. (Granted, I did write out the directions ahead of time and read from my notebook, but I also answered questions and talked with the kids and understood at least a large percentage of what was said, so I call it a success.) We’ve learned the entire Arabic alphabet, and I can slowly sound out street signs and write out simple notes.

I’m busier than I’ve ever been. In addition to being at school for ten hours a day, I have homework, grammar to study and vocabulary to learn, and when I’m not studying, I’m spending time with my host family, which is it’s own form of studying. There’s a stack of Peace Corp books on procedure and methods that I’m suppose to read before I swear in sitting on my desk, and every few weeks, I have reports on my progress to turn in. I live in a constant state of being behind on blogging and uploading photos and all my grand ideas of visiting other CBT sites during my one day off a week have gone out the window. I’m starting to feel a little frayed around the edges, but everyone I’ve talked to says that the pace slows down once you get to your site, and I can last another month.

Last Monday was National Woman’s Day, and the Peace Corps provided us with You Can Dream: Stories of Moroccan Women Who Do, a documentary about female leadership in Morocco, and one of the women featured lives in my town. Ten years ago, a Peace Corps volunteer had the idea of turning l3qad, the buttons from jellabas, a traditional Moroccan dress, into beads and using them to make jewelry. They applied for a loan and started a local artisans co-op for hand-made crafts. A decade later, the l3qad buttons and the co-op are still around. My host mother runs a shop at the co-op and sells jellabasand other traditional outfits. l3qad jewelry are now sold around Morocco and the women in my neighborhood sit on the front stoop and make beads while they gossip and watch their children play. I’m inherently skeptical of how much of a lasting impact I can make in only two years, but this co-op and the industry has made a real impact in the lives of the women here. Watching the video made me think that I have a chance of also making a real impact on my community, and reminded me of why I applied to the Peace Corps in the first place.



(Top Left: Entrance to a mosque near the Medina Fes-el-Bali (Old Medina); Top Right: Beautiful saqiya, public water fountain, in the Fes medina. Saqiya are all over the medina, and are still in use; Bottom: (from l to r) Fatima(my teacher) and Soukayna (my oldest host-sister)

s-salamu 3alaykum mn l-mgrib

s-salamu 3alaykum mn l-mgrib. I’m learning how to write Arabic script as well, but I only know 7 letters so far, which limits my written vocabulary to delicious turkey, grow, girl, door and room, so a proper greeting written in Arabic will have to wait. swiya b swiya.

I’ve been in Morocco for two weeks as of today, but it feels like I’ve been here forever. We spent the first eight days at Hub (a government owned youth center, like the dar chabab will I’ll eventually work) in Fes, where we got to know our staj (the staging group of 40 I came with) and learned some very simple Darija and basic life skills, such as how to poop on a Turkish toilet. (For some reason, the Turkish toilet session was on day three instead of the VERY SECOND WE ARRIVED IN COUNTRY, which lead to some foul smelling bathrooms while we tried to figure out how the hell to flush the things.) (I took photos of the Turkish toilet lesson.) (Of course I did.)

Then, seven days ago, our staj was broken into small CBT groups (I’m in a group of four) and we moved to small villages and towns around Fes, where we live with host families and study Darija, Arabic script and Moroccan culture. I really like my CBT group (three other girls and Dave, the imaginary guy we invented to we could practice the masculine pronouns and conjugation) and I adore Fatima, our teacher. My family has been great about letting me practice my pidgin Darija on them, although I end up getting laughed at a lot. Yesterday night, my host mama was trying to tell me something about eggs (l-bid), but I heard room (l-bit) and couldn’t understand her. Finally, she flapped her arms like a bird, squawked a few times and pretended to lay an egg so I would understand. Everyone, including me, got a good laugh out of that and my host siblings kept imitating her all evening.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well language training has been going. While real world application can be a bit shaky, two weeks ago all I knew was half of hello and now I can say whole paragraphs, especially if the listener is willing to be generous with my pronunciation. There aren’t nearly enough vowels in Arabic for my English conditioned throat and that 3 in s-salamu 3alaykum at the beginning of the post is actually a letter. (It’s properly written like a swoopy backwards three, although I’m told it looks different in script. I refer to it as a backwards 3 and it sounds something akin to an /a/.) Inshaallah, my pronunciation will improve, because half the time when I say something in Darija, I’m met with blank stares.

Two weeks into my service, I already have a reduced standard of hygiene. My family doesn’t bath with American regularity, probably because they perform ablutions before prayer, and I feel like a bother asking them to move everything they store in the shower area every night, so I’ve started washing my hair every few days instead of daily. I’ve also mastered the Turkish toilet, even with a bout of mild gastrointestinal distress, so I’m feeling pretty good. (Feeling good about my Turkish toilet skills, not in general, due to the aforementioned gastrointestinal distress.) (Also gone, any compunction I previous felt about talking about bodily functions. Poop was pretty much the main topic of conversation at Hub.)

I’m super busy with lessons and studying and getting to know my family, but I’m happy. The application was such an arduous process, and when things get uncomfortable or hard or I simply miss home, I remind myself how hard I worked to get here and that things only get better from here.

I am so lucky I'm getting to do this.