L-eid Again

            Since I last posted the Muslim world celebrated the major holiday of Leid al Adha.  I talked about the holiday last year in this post, so I won’t repeat myself describing it.  I’ll instead tell you a few stories and observations from the last few weeks, since nothing too exciting has happened otherwise—I’ve pretty much devoted my time to working on graduate school applications and trying to get stuff started.

            On the holiday itself I again celebrated the sacrifice with my mudir’s family.  As they were preparing organ kebabs wrapped in fat, one of his daughters (aged eight) asked me if we ate meat this way in America.  I explained we have kebabs, but usually not organ wrapped in fat.  The father said that she should note that Americans were just like Moroccans then, though the daughter seemed skeptical.

            A week later I was excited to see her not skeptical when she skipped into the Dar Chabab and started to tell her father and me all about the science class she’d had that day.  I couldn’t catch everything she was saying, but the words “birds,” “shapes,” “years of study,” “Darwin,” and “Galapagos,” came up over and over again.  Since I’ve met some adults here who do not like the idea of evolution it was nice to see that the topic is still approached in a way that gets kids excited.

            My town went through a transformation that I didn’t notice during the holiday last year.  Since it is the biggest holiday of the Muslim year tons of people come home from their work and school in other parts of the country.  In my town that means a huge upswing in the number of people who can speak English well.  From two or three to several dozen (notably, all but one of the regulars left town for the holiday).  It was an exciting reminder that the kids who acquire English and other skills have enough opportunities out of town that they don’t often come back.  One guy is even studying in the States.

            There are two new English teachers in town, and unlike the people they’re replacing they seem much more interested in working with me directly.  One of them especially has helped me meet teachers of other subjects who I hadn’t met yet, some of whom speak quite good English.  The other day I had a very informative conversation with them.  When I first came to Morocco, I read in my guidebook that the name of the capitol, Rabat, is the Tamazight word for fortress.  In the desert I’d even heard some Imazighin (Amizight people) calling a fortress-like building a rabat, so I thought I’d had this confirmed.  However, according to these teachers rabat is actually originally an Arabic word which means “armed camp,” and was later adopted into Tamazight.  They say it got associated with permanent fortresses because overtime people used for any place warhorses were gathered and cared for.  An interesting derivation for a semi-correct guidebook fact!

            In another interesting discovery, I’ve gotten both the heaviest praise and heaviest criticism of my Arabic accent recently.  Some kids from my town said they thought that while my vocabulary isn’t as extensive as the last Youth Development volunteer’s (a guy universally praised for the quality of his Arabic), my accent is much more authentic.  My new, English-speaking teacher friends, on the other hand, think I pronounce a bunch of things wrong.  One example the teachers gave me was that my pronunciation of one of the glottal letters (kh, خ) sounded like it was actually a failed attempt at another glottal letter (gh, غ).  What’s interesting is that when I first learned the word for bread in Tamazight I couldn’t tell if people were saying it with a خ or a غ.  When I asked, people said either would work, saying the sound was kind of between the two Arabic letters.  Between the local kids praise and the teachers explanation of what is wrong in my pronunciation I’m fairly certain my attempt to adopt a rustic accent and grammar worked.

            So yeah, not too much exciting these last few days.  I’m excited to get back to work, though it looks like that won’t start for another couple of weeks because, after this coming week, there is another week long school holiday, this time for some secular national holidays.  That means that since the beginning of the school year kids had three weeks on, then a week off, now two weeks on and another holiday.  Although the Dar Chabab is open during the holidays not many kids come in, especially my most regular English students, many of whom live in a dormitory and go home to outlying towns for the holidays.  Still trying to get stuff started next week, but I don’t expect much work until the middle of November, which is right in line with last year.  Some things you cannot change.