Minarets and Satellite Dishes

Salaam wa alaykum!

            Properly translated that means, “Peace be upon you.”  More loosely, “hi.”  It’s my second morning here in Rabat.  The day’s first call to prayer ended about an hour ago, it’s the first morning call that I’ve heard.  I woke up just before it started, so instead of jerking me awake it was instead a beautiful and haunting melody that guided me up.  In Turkey, I found the call to prayer a little abrasive; here, to my ear at least, it is beautiful.  I don’t know whether that’s because its actually a more coherently melodic version of the call to a western ear or if its because I’m obviously deeply in the honey-moon stage with Morocco, but in either case the call to prayer, like everything else in this country, has me entranced.

            On Monday this week I was in Philadelphia for staging, the last training event in America before we flew over to Morocco.  Before it began I was worried that it would be tedious and painfully bureaucratic. I was worried that hours of paperwork and procedures would dominate the fun part of meeting my fellow trainees.  My fears were entirely misguided and I have to hand it to the Peace Corps, they know how to run a training session.  The staging coordinator, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV) who served in China, was informative and funny in just the right proportions and made sitting in a conference room all day more than just bearable, it was fun and energizing.  Staging forced me to really think about my reasons for joining the Peace Corps and about my anxieties and aspirations for my service.  If nothing else, it reassured me that I’ve made the right decision, this is where I need to be.  One thing he asked me to think about was my definition of a successful service, something I had not thought about before.  I’ve concluded that I’ll consider my service successful when I’ve really managed to integrate into my community, with all that entails.  This means that I’ll be able to speak the language reasonably well, that I’ll know most people in my neighborhood by name (and they will know me), and that I’ll be trusted to help the children in the community grow and learn.  I was excited to discover that my fellow volunteers and I share similar aspirations and anxieties, we’re all terrified of being isolated by lack of language and cultural knowledge, and we all really want to be integrated in the community.  We’re also, for the most part, all really excited to see camel spiders (giant arachnids that ride on camels and lie in wait to tear scorpions apart), but also kind of frightened of the idea of them.  They’re really big.  Google it.  Or follow this link.  Be warned, its not for the faint of heart.

            The next day we flew to Morocco.  Even getting through the airport was a learning experience.  At staging the coordinators asked five of us per bus (there are three bus loads of trainees!) to act as “group leaders” the next day.  Little did we understand when we volunteered that the coordinators were leaving back to D.C., so we wouldn’t have a staff member to guide us until we got through customs in Morocco.  Leaving the hotel went smoothly, and we were all pretty proud of ourselves and happy that the Peace Corps had given us this opportunity to be responsible adults, working with minimal guidance and supervision.  We didn’t really hit a hitch until we reached the airport, which was, of course, the job I’d volunteered to handle.  We arrived just after noon, but Royal Air Maroc didn’t have anyone for us to check-in with until two-thirty.  The buses had to leave, so we had to disembark and find an empty corner of JFK to sit in with all our bags.  We looked something like an Occupy camp.  The airport group leaders from the other two buses and I were eventually able to talk with airline officials and get our massive group through check-in.  I was a little concerned that my boarding pass were almost entirely blank, but since everyone was issued the same one I decided it couldn’t be a problem.  After getting through security a rumor started spreading through our group that they’d only given us receipts, not boarding passes.  There was another flight at our gate, but instead of saying that they didn’t know they confirmed that the boarding passes were, in fact, receipts.  Another volunteer and I ran around trying to find out how to get in touch with the airline.  Various TSA employees said there was no way to get in touch with Royal Air Maroc, until one of them finally said that there was.  He gave me a phone number.  It didn’t work.  When the employees finally did arrive at the gate it turned out there was no problem, their boarding passes just weren’t scanned.  I hadn’t needed to run around like a chicken with my head cut off at all.  Guess that’s what I get for being too credulous!

            After a long flight, with little sleep, we touched down in Casablanca, and, shortly after that, arrived in Rabat.  The country has, thus far, been absolutely fascinating.  When people talk about the mix of the traditional and the modern in Morocco they always talk about the mixture of traditional and western clothes people wear in the streets.  While this is true I think there is another, more apt description.  While driving through the countryside I noticed that two things continually broke the relatively flat skyline.  Minarets and satellite dishes.

            Since our arrival on Tuesday we’ve been very busy, shuffled from Arabic class, to lessons on Moroccan culture, to lectures on safety and security while working with the Peace Corps.  My big achievements language wise thus far are the times that I overhear something in the street and recognize it as a word or phrase I’ve learned in class.  Baby steps.  I think I’m progressing fairly well.  I’ve been twice to the Medina (Arabic for city, now usually used to mean the old town surrounded by a modern city), but haven’t really been able to explore it, but we have some free time in the next few days so I should be able to look into it further. 

I’ll leave you with one pretty funny language story.  A former volunteer recommended that we all try banana milk, a common Moroccan drink that’s kind of like a smoothie, but creamier.  It is hard to describe, but really good.  After we heard about it a few of us went to the café where we have wifi access, but we realized we didn’t actually know how to order the drink.  We knew that asir is the word for juice, but we didn’t know how to say banana.  I remembered it was similar to banana, and so I went to counter and ordered an two asir du banana for a friend and myself (notice there are three languages, Arabic, French, and English).  My roommate, whose Arabic is usually much better than mine, showed up a few minutes later and ordered an asir benana, which is what he thought the similar word was.  After ordering we both remembered hlib was the word for milk, and hoped we’d get the right thing.  When the first two drinks came we got exactly what we wanted, and discovered that although hlib is the word for milk its not used for these fruit drinks, even when they’re milk based.  About a minute later my roommate got mint tea.  It turns out that the word for with mint is benana and the word for banana is banan.  A very informative lesson!

Bslama.

(Good-bye)

P.S. I wrote this on Friday, the 23^rd, but only had a chance to post it today, the 26^th, I have tons of new experiences which I can hopefully add in the next few days.

P.P.S. All my photos but these two ended up looking funny once uploaded, I'll look into it when I have more time.