The Tale of Youniss

            As I’ve been in site for more than a week now it seems like high time that I start to tell you all a bit about it.  After learning about our site placements, Rabat was a bit of a blur; we were only there for a few days and all much too excited about our new placements to think about anything else.  We did get a chance to go to some of the shows in the big musical festival that was going on that week.  I was challenged to (and dramatically lost) a dance-off with a random Moroccan kid.  A Cuban salsa group was playing.  It was as surreal as it sounds.  That Wednesday we swore in and became genuine Peace Corps Volunteers.  It was really cool; since this is the 50^th anniversary of the program in Morocco several alumni volunteers came to swearing in, including a couple from that first Peace Corps stage.  Fifty years ago the program was very different, they trained for longer, but not in a homestay and in French rather than Arabic.  While there were English teachers a lot of their program focused on other things; I talked with a guy who’d been a surveyor.  Different times.

            The next morning we all set out on separate trails to reach our sites.  Actually, the trails didn’t all start out separate; my first bus (a CTM, the equivalent of Coach buses in the states) was more than half full of volunteers.  After arriving in the major city of Meknes I was on my own for the rest of the day.  My second bus was still a long distance bus, but meant for slightly more local travel than a CTM (even though I was going further on it).  It was cramped and crowded, but in typical Moroccan fashion I was soon fast friends with the guy sitting next to me.  He spoke English fairly well and we talked in Darij-lish about the area and his visa application to go to the States (he’d just been denied that morning, but he had ideas for giving it another try).  Once I arrived in the nearest big town that bus let me off and it was a quick grand taxi ride through the mountains to reach my site.

            As I mentioned in my last post, my site is a small town nestled in the middle Atlas.  The surrounding countryside is absolutely gorgeous.  The town itself is built on the slope of a hill.  Fields of grain spread out in all directions from the town for a couple of miles until the mountains rise up.  On some of the mountains you can make out other communities, some larger and some smaller than mine.  There is supposed to be some fantastic hiking, though I haven’t had much of a chance to try yet (except one very short one a few evenings ago with one of my Moroccan friends).  I have been both very busy and very sick since I arrived.  Now that I’m feeling better and have a routine I’ll hopefully get a chance to start exploring the area around town more.

            The town is primarily (though not exclusively) Amizigh.  My first night this made me very nervous.  I went out to a café with my host uncle (the primary form of recreation for men here is to go out to cafés) and some of his friends.  Although they all can speak Darija they prefer speaking in Tamizigh (one of the three Amizigh dialects spoken in Morocco).  They would politely answer the questions I asked in my stumbling Darija, and then switch right back.  I was scared that my first two months here had been a complete waste since I didn’t have my community’s preferred language.  Luckily later that night my host mother explained to me that while most of the old men in town like to speak Tamizigh the women and children usually speak Darija, although it is a Darija inflected with Tamizigh.  I find I have a much harder time understanding people here than I did in Fes (and they seem to have a harder time understanding me), but I’m sure that as I get more used to speaking here and get a local tutor I’ll be able to communicate better.  Inshahallah.

            As I said above, men’s primary form of recreation is to go out to cafés.  For recreation most women stay in the house (you never see any in the cafés except maybe one waitress per café) or occasionally go to the cooperatif (artisanal center), though a new women’s center just opened up.  At home and at the centers, so far as I’ve seen, they spent most of their time honing their skills at traditional arts and crafts.  My host mother is the secretary for the cooperatif, so I’ve spent some time there watching them do crafts and host classes.  They make some really amazing rugs and decorations.  Just like everywhere else in Morocco young boys spend a lot of time playing soccer in every conceivable corner of the street.  Young girls seem to entertain themselves a lot just by walking around the central square in small groups.  Some of them also go to the cooperatif and learn the traditional crafts.

            Older children have been focusing more on their school examinations.  Most of them are about to be done for the year, but the oldest, the bacc students, still have a week to go before their major test hits.  I’ve jumped right into work with these students and host a two-hour review session/class everyday (except Sundays and Mondays) for them, plus some additional review time.  I’m still working out the kinks, but the classes have gotten better and better each day.  I open each class by playing a song in English and then try to lead a short discussion on it.  The first day I went a little too hard, the kids were not ready for “Sound of Silence,” but by the third class I was able to get them to start talking about “The Times They are A’Changin’.”  It wasn’t much of a discussion, but one ventured a guess about the meaning of the song, which is a big first step.  The next day two of them started to talk about “Nowhere Man,” which is bigger (one of them called the song amazing; he’d never heard it).  Discussion is not a big part of the primary and secondary education here, in any subject.  Students are not used to having their opinion asked.  Hopefully as the class goes on they will become more and more willing to share.  I’ve also started to have them end each class with a little writing.  So far only one has volunteered to read what he wrote aloud (it was pretty well done), but a few of the others let me read theirs.  Hopefully more will start to feel less embarrassed and share.

            My days here are very consistent.   Every morning I wake up around eight or so and immediately start working on my lesson plan for that day’s class and have some breakfast (read, bread).  Around 10:00 or so I go out and walk around town, trying to meet some new people and explore.  Most days someone will invite me to join a table at a café and drink tea.  This ends up being hard work since my language skills get a work out.  From around 12:30 to 4:00 the town shuts down for lunch and a nap.  This is very consistent across rural Morocco.  It’s already starting to make sense.  It gets too hot to do work.  Except for a few shop owners and the most persistent men in the café, no one is out.  In my first week I was very sick, so I used this time to recover, but now I hope to make it into a language studying time.  At 3:30 I go to the Dar Chebab to set up my room (I don’t have easy access to a printer so I have to write song lyrics on the board), and class goes from 4:00 to 6:00.  My first few days I sat around the Dar Chebab afterwards, waiting to see if any kids wanted extra practice.  They never did (they do have other subjects), so now I go out to a nearby park to “read.”  I’m almost always interrupted, and so I get a chance to talk with a bunch of kids.  Around 8:00 or so I meet up with a couple of my Moroccan friends, mainly guys who’ve studied some English at university.  We go to a café and drink tea with luwiza (another herb used like mint and shiva to flavor the tea, I’m not quite sure what it is in English) and talk about Morocco and America.  They like the chance to practice English and I like the break from Darija.  Later I go back home and have a very late dinner, around 11:30.

            Despite the regularity I do have a few standout stories.  One day sitting in a café I heard my first nookta (joke) told outside of a controlled class context that I understood.  It went like this:

There was a madhouse.  One day the chief doctor drew a picture of a door on the wall.  All the men but one scrambled to the fake door and fought to be the first one to get it open and get out.  The doctor was very excited; was this one cured?  He ran over to talk to the man and asked why he wasn’t with the others trying to get out.  The man smiled and said he had the key in his pocket.

Another time I was out to lunch at a family friend’s house (we had every part of a goat, including its stomach).  I talked to a man there who told me that he worked with a company that makes the covers for airplane engines.  In Darija he told me they use carbon materials because they are light and strong.  I said I understood, and then we somehow found ourselves in a discussion about the bonding patterns of carbon (thank goodness for the first half of a chemistry major).  Luckily, a lot of science words are shared between the languages, from Greek via French.  Otherwise it would have taken a lot of pantomiming to explain we both knew what a tetrahedron was.

Yesterday, I went to watch my host uncle at a shotgun shooting competition.  He did quite well.  Although the contest itself wasn’t that interesting it was good that I went, because I got to see a Moroccan social gathering.  More than a competition, this was a chance for the men to get together and see friends from all over the region (we were quite far from the site, almost an hour and a half’s drive).  I was left out of the conversation since I know nothing about shooting, and in any case I find I have a hard time speaking in Darija when there are more than three people in a conversation since it gets so fast.  It was still interesting to watch the men be men.  The awards ceremony was also interesting.  While first prize (I think it was first, there seemed to be very little rhyme or reason to who got what when) was a flat screen T.V., most of the other things were prizes less for the men than for their wives.  My uncle won a nice platter and set of glassware.  I’ve never been to a shooting contest in the States, but I imagine the prizes are less kitchen focused.  I like this way a lot; the men get to have their fun shooting and socializing, but their wives get a present, even though they were left out of the event.

Lastly, of course, there is the story of Youniss.  It’s actually not much of a story just most of the volunteers who’ve been here in the past have had a Moroccan name, so my host mother gave me one too.  I am now Youniss, which is the Arabic equivalent of Jonah.  They consider him a very major prophet here before Mohammed and a lot of people share the name.  Since the way they pronounce Ted here (teed) means detergent, and Rizzo means cell phone coverage, I’ll take Youniss!