Arts and Crafts and Music and Food

            This week I went to one of the most surreal jam sessions I’ve ever attended.  Frequent readers may remember that a couple of weeks ago I met a high school aged guitarist at the local hipster café.  Since then I’ve run into him a few times in the café and around the neighborhood and have met the members of his band.  This past Saturday they invited me to sit in on their rehearsal at the Dar Chebab.  I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before; our Dar Chebab here has a drum set.  They are a four-piece metal/hard rock band, although unfortunately their regular lead guitarist was sick, so a couple of their guitar playing friends and I rotated in on 2^nd guitar and we had a jam session instead of rehearsal.  It was a lot of fun; they are an extremely talented group of kids.  The boy I met first is the singer and rhythm guitarist.  He has fantastic technical chops on the guitar (which means I’m very excited to meet his lead guitarist).  His musical interests seem to tend towards the progressive end of the genre.  I’ll expose him to Porcupine Tree sometime soon.  The bass player can lay down a solid groove, though he was having some trouble with his amp (they use a guitar amp with the bass pumped up for a bass amp, this is a matter of necessity rather than taste, Fes doesn’t seem to have many shops for electric instruments).  The drummer is a great player on both drums and bass.  It’s clear that while he likes metal his musical interests are quite a bit wider.  One of the additional guitar players was a trash metal player; the other was more of a blues and classic rock guy.  It was an interesting mix.  Unfortunately my brain wasn’t with me and I didn’t bring either my recorder or my camera.  I’ll make sure not to repeat the mistake when I go to their next rehearsal.

            For the first hour and a half or so I just listened as the other guitar players rotated in and out.  Since my knowledge of metal is extremely limited I can’t tell you what they played, though it was all very up-tempo and technically complex.  The thrash metal influence was clear.  It’s not anywhere near my favorite music, but they were having a blast and playing well so I had a good time.  After one particular aggressive number my friend decided he’d rest his fingers and handed his guitar over to me.  The bass player and drummer had switched places a few songs before.  The drummer’s bass playing focused around slapping; he clearly wanted to play some funk.  I thought he’d have fun with a dramatic rhythmic change from the metal they’d been playing, so as soon as I had the guitar I started to play the bass line to Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.”  If the looks of excitement on his and the bass player (now on drums) faces weren’t enough, the looks of confusion from the more metal focused players made the change worth it.  They all ran with it though, and we had a fun, though strangely guitar feedback inflected, version of “Chameleon.”

            On the next song the thrash metal player handed his guitar off to the classic rock guy.  I let him pick the song.  He started playing “House of the Rising Sun,” which anyone who’s ever played with me knows is one of my favorites.  Apparently the rock classics are classics the world over.  We jammed through a bunch of songs and chord progressions, constantly changing line-ups (I politely declined making them suffer through my drumming, though I was impressed to see that pretty much any of them could double competently on any of the instruments there).  The only song that threw them for a loop was Porcupine Tree’s “Sound of Muzak.”  The time signature in the verse shifts back and forth between 6/8 and 8/8 and the drummer (back on drums) had a little trouble dealing with the change.  No shame in that, it took me longer than I care to admit to be able to play it, and I’d heard the song before.  They liked the tune though, so we decided to jam through repeats of the chorus and a modified version of the verse that stayed in 8/8.  The first boy I met, back on the other guitar, played a wild solo over it.  We played until the Dar Chebab closed, another hour after I picked up the guitar.  It was a lot of fun, even though my fingers burned for days afterwards.  A month of not playing and my callouses are gone!

            Towards the end of the jam session the mudira (director) of the Dar Chebab came in and introduced us to a local teacher who wants to start a formal music program there.  The mudira did not introduce me especially as an American, so I just went through a standard greeting in Darija.  The musicians and I had been speaking an English-Darija patois.  Their English is good enough that my limited Darija can fill any holes in our communication.  He stayed and jammed for a while; in addition to being a math teacher he says he’s a semi-professional flamenco guitarist!  After the jam he and I started to talk.  I introduced myself as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  In a pride inducing moment he said, “I thought you were Moroccan!”  One of the boys asked, “What, do you think we speak in English for fun?”  Guess my accent is getting better.  After the jam I went with the boys and the teacher to watch the soccer game at the local café.  Another volunteer joined and we started to talk with the teacher.  He was very interested in our work and with our take on the cultural similarities and differences between Morocco and America.  It was interesting to see how a Moroccan teacher views the Peace Corps’ Youth Development project.  He believes that the biggest difference between Moroccan and American youth is that American youth are encouraged to chase their aspirations and ambitions from a young age in a way that Moroccans are not.  He thinks a big part of our mission will be to help children search themselves and find their ambition.  I took his number.  Hopefully he and I will be able to work on some music programs at the Dar Chebab before the end of my training, if nothing else.

            The next day I took my second real trip to the Medina.  This time we took a bit of time to see some of the sites, rather than just get lost and explore, though there was a bit of that too.  My roommate from Rabat, one of the girls from my training group, and I met up early and walked into the Medina from the Ville Nuveau (the part of the town built by the French during the Protectorate, it was once a European only area, now it’s the center of any Moroccan city).  We entered in the Mellah (Historically Jewish District), which in Fes is very interesting.  The medieval Muslims and medieval Jews built their parts of the city differently.  The Jews, unlike the Muslims, built balconies out from their houses over the street, which means that their district looks very different, overshadowed by the brightly painted balconies.  We planned to walk through the newer part of the Medina and meet up with some others near the gardens I described in my last post.  My roommate and I were confident that our sense of direction and relative knowledge of where we were going would see us through the maze.  Our friend was confident that we would lead her in a big circle.  Take a guess who was right.  There’s something to be said for feminine intuition, we literally popped out of gate five feet away from the one we went in.  It was not time wasted.  In the process of getting lost we stumbled on a sooq (open air market) where we could have bought delicious looking fruit, lamb head, and “the best coriander in Fes!”

            Following another route (and a few more wrong turns) we met our friends near the Bab Bou Jeloud, one of the old city’s main gates (it’s the gate in the photo in my last post).  We’d heard that some Volunteers working in the Small Business Development sector would be at Café Clock, one of the medina’s most popular tourist cafés, to promote an event called Marche Maroc, a Peace Corps organized crafts fare for Moroccan artisans.  We’d heard correctly, as had a bunch of other trainees, I think I’m not exaggerating when I say about a third of our training class passed through the restaurant in the time we were there.  The food was delicious, the view from the roof incredible, and the Peace Corps volunteers and crafts were fascinating.  I’ll talk more about Marche Maroc later in the post, since we had a chance to visit their real event on Tuesday.

            Across the street from Café Clock is the Medrasa Bou Inania.  Bou Inania was a religious school built in the 1300s.  It has a fully functioning mosque built into it.  It is one of the few mosques in Morocco that lets non-Muslims in.  The inside is stunning.  I’m not even going to try to describe the intricate carving work; the pictures will have to do it for me.  I can only say that in the courtyard, with these carvings surrounding you on all sides, the effect is even more dramatic.  From Bou Inania we wandered down one of the Medina’s main thoroughfares past some live chickens and spice shops.  We turned off onto a side path and exited through one of the Medina’s northern gates and climbed a small hill up to the Merenid Tombs.  These also date from the 1300s.  They are a royal cemetery, long fallen to ruin.  They have a commanding view over the entire old city.  While up there, a jellaba seller came by to peddle his wares.  My roommate and another trainee bought one each, but he didn’t have a color I wanted (I’m a fan of the brown, perhaps because they look the most Obi-Wan Kenobi-ish).  Not that my lack of interest stopped him.  He was seemed fairly convinced that I wanted nothing more in the world than his bright purple robe.  If I had been I would have gotten it for a steal, but both it and the flowery one he offered me seemed very feminine.  I’m glad I didn’t buy.  When we returned to the medina the shopkeepers started to laugh at my roommate; he’d apparently been fobbed off with a woman’s jellaba.  None of us could tell the difference.  I was actually taken with his too, had it been brown I would have gotten it.  He made up for it and got a cool woolen hat, as you’ll see in the photos below.

            After a little more exploring and a drop into a bookstore our trip was done.  It was good to visit a bookstore; it’s the first I’ve spotted since I got here.  Our LCF explained today that Moroccans don’t normally read for fun (he is an exception).  This jibes with my family.  Other than for schoolwork, I’ve never seen any of my host siblings touch a book.  I’d like to blame this on the overuse of T.V., but I think it might be a very old situation.  There is only one verb, kan-qra, to describe both the actions of reading and studying.  I’ve been thinking a lot about language recently, and on methods of communication.  In Morocco communication is not in a single language.  While Darija is the main language, the average Moroccan can communicate at least conversationally in two other languages, French and Classical Arabic.  Darija is not a written language (though it can be), writing is done in Classical Arabic.  In other words, the written language here is not the language of everyday communication.  Perhaps this is why reading for pleasure is not common.  In addition to these three languages, many Moroccans speak at least one dialect of Amizigh.  There are three or four dialects in country, seemingly depending on who is counting.  In addition, a sizable minority of Moroccans cans also speak English, Spanish, or German.  That’s five languages, or more!  The amazing thing is, people don’t stick to one.  They can, and do, switch from one to the other in the course of a single sentence.  Communication becomes a matter of speaking in the most convenient combination of languages between the two speakers, and the fascinating thing is that it’s not always predictable.  I listen in while our LCF talks to the mudira, sometimes the conversation is in Darija, but just as often they slip into French.  I haven’t heard him do this when he talks with the other LCFs, it just must be the best way to talk with her about the topics they’re discussing.  On the one hand, I’m worried I’ll always be missing something, not being communicative in all these languages.  On the other, it is incredible to watch!

            It was an amazing weekend, but this week has treated me well too (I’ve definitely had more honey than bee stings recently).  In language we’ve moved from our heavy grammar study of last week to a more topical study of vocabulary for various situations, such as bargaining and shopping for food.  More importantly, we’ve had some important training experiences, the most important of which was our trip to March Maroc on Tuesday.  Marche Maroc is a crafts fare that the Small Business Development Volunteers have been hosting for the last few years.  Artisans come from all over the country to a major city for a fair organized by the Peace Corps.  This one, obviously, was in Fes.  Unfortunately, because the program here is moving entirely into Youth Development this Marche Maroc will be one of the last ones.  We went partially to see the fair, but also to get information from the volunteers on ways we can work with artisans in our sites and maybe try to organize similar fairs on at least a regional level (without the funding they’ve had the National fairs will be almost impossible).  One our most interesting contacts was with an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who finished his service a couple of years ago and is now working with Moroccan artisans on setting up a website for them to sell their products.  It’s still in the formative stages right now, but for more information you can visit www.theanou.com.

            The fair itself was incredible.  It featured traditional arts from all over the country, from weavings and carvings from to desert to daggers from the mountains to jewelry from the plains between the mountains and the coast.  There were also people selling fresh cous cous and argon oil for both cosmetic and gastronomical purposes.  I don’t think I’d ever eaten argon oil before their sample (I just dipped some bread in it, like a nice olive oil), but I immediately bought a bottle as a gift for my host mother upon trying it.  She was very excited when I pulled it out for her; it’s a treat they don’t get to have often.

            Alright, I think that’s almost all for this post.  I will finish by giving the recipe for a noodle dish my host sister taught me and another Joha story.

            The Joha story comes via my roommate in Rabat.  He also likes Joha stories, and told me this one the other day.  I realize I’ve only told stories that paint him as a bit of a bumbler.  He’s actually a really interesting and frighteningly intelligent person, and easily the most passionate warrior against poverty I’ve ever met.  I have all these stories where he makes a language or clothing based mistake only because he puts himself out there more than all the rest of us, and for every hilarious mistake story there are tons of successes.  There more times you put yourself out there the more likely you are to make a mistake, and the more likely you are to learn.  That’s the approach he and I both try to take anyways, though he’s better at it than I am.  Before joining the Peace Corps he worked in Americorps in Kansas City.  Apparently they told this Joha story when they would go to work in soup kitchens.

            One day Joha was invited to a feast.  He had been working all day and he didn’t have a chance to change his clothes before the feast.  As such he was in his working clothes, which were torn and sweaty.  The people at the feast were very rude and ignored the poorly dressed man.  Eventually he went home and changed into his nicest coat.  Then he returned to the feast.  When he came back everyone wanted to talk to him.  He was the life of the party, until he went to the table and started to stuff food into his pockets.  The other guests asked why he was stuffing food into his pockets.

            Joha said, “When I was here earlier in my poor clothes everyone ignored me.  When I came back in this coat everyone talked to me.  I haven’t changed, so it must be the coat you all really like.  Since he is obviously the guest of honor, I thought he should enjoy some of the feast.”

Recipe: 

I’ve been calling this shareia in my posts, but I’ve since discovered that shareia is actually the name for the noodle they normally make it with (a kind of short spaghetti), and they call anything cooked with that noodle shareia.  When I’ve had this sauce with other noodles they call it macaroni.  I haven’t been able to explain to them that I’m asking for the name of the sauce…

I’ve had this particular sauce with several different kinds of noodles now, shareia, shareia chinois (vermicelli), and macaroni, which has been either rotini or shells.  I like it best with rotini, but feel free to play around with it.

The primary ingredient is cilantro.  This confused me for a while; they kept calling it qsabur, which is the word for coriander.  Talking with other trainees, I’m glad I wasn’t alone in my ignorance when I discovered that cilantro is the plant grown from the coriander seed, which is what we call coriander.

All measurements are approximations; they don’t really measure in this kitchen.

Ingredients:

Chopped Cilantro.  A lot.  Have a good solid handful of the plant before cutting it.

2-3 cloves garlic

Olive Oil

2 tablespoons tomato paste

½ teaspoon coriander (what we call coriander)

1 tablespoon powdered ginger

1 tablespoon paprika

Pinch of saffron

Salt and pepper to taste

Blend cilantro with water and olive oil until its smooth (like a pesto, but with cilantro).

Add tomato paste and coriander and mix well.

Put on medium heat, add the rest of the ingredients.

Heat until hot, mix with pasta.

That’s it!

The One Who Wants Honey Must Tolerate Bee Stings

            Or, in Darija, l-li bgha l-asl y-sbr l qris n-nhl.  It’s a bit of Moroccan wisdom from our textbook I’ve been thinking about a lot these last few days.  It strikes me as very apropos of life in the Peace Corps (perhaps why they put it in the book).  While there is plenty of “honey” in the form of successful lessons, interesting interactions, and the amazing act of living in Morocco there is also the ever-present risk of “bee stings:” frustrations with language, occasional exhaustion, and fairly constant confusion.  Ok, that last one can be honey too, depending on the situation, there’s nothing quite like a misunderstanding that leads to a new discovery.  These last eleven days have had both honey and stings, though thankfully much more of the former.

            The day after my last post overflowed with milk and honey without a bee in sight.  One of my host cousins (the relationship is more complicated, but cousin works) and his friend, who are both law students, took a couple of the other volunteers and me around the Fes medina.  Just like in the U.K, law students start to study law during undergrad, so my cousin and his friend are a year or two younger than us volunteers.  Like most of the Moroccan university students I’ve met who don’t study English, they think their English is a lot worse than it is.  It is a whole lot better than my Darija.  Ironically, since I’m saying this, one language hurdle we had to jump over was their course of study; they had never learned the English word for law.  My smattering of French comes in handy again.

            They started our tour in the Bou Jeloud gardens, a beautifully manicured garden that remains pretty close to how it looked when it was first laid out around the year 1200.  As with my other more touristy post I’ll let the pictures do the talking.  These gardens were actually built with the part of the medina called Fes Jdida, New Fes.  It only seems new in comparison to the older part, which was started in the late 700s.  After we finished a spin around the gardens we ventured into this super-millennial labyrinth.  Just like in Rabat, the first thing that struck me was how many Moroccans still live, work, and play in the medina, it’s not so overrun with tourists that you don’t see locals, except at one or two of the prettier gates.  I also noticed that, again like Rabat, the shops were a mixture of the chintzy, the traditional, and the bootlegged.  Despite these similarities, the Fes medina puts the Rabat one to shame.  I don’t know how much larger it is in terms of area, but the Fes medina feels infinitely bigger, probably because the alleyways are even tighter and more twisting and turning.  When there is a roof over the street (which happens fairly frequently) it’s usually much lower to the ground than in Rabat.  All in all, it gives the medina the feel of a tunnel system, with the occasional open-air courtyard and passage. 

In the tight space, smells and sounds come to the forefront.  I noticed the scent first.  Since automobiles are only allowed into very small areas along the edge of the medina the primary forms of cargo transportation are handcarts and donkeys.  Either one is wide enough to grind traffic to a halt as everyone rushes to the side of the tunnel to clear a path.  The smell of donkey dominates most of the passageways.  This is actually a good thing, when donkey and donkey droppings aren’t the predominant stench the most noticeable smell is usually from the tanneries.  My host cousin took us up to the top of one of the numerous leather shops (all of which sell high quality Fassi leather goods) where we were able to look down into the tannery.  The picture almost catches the amazingly striking visual, but what was really incredible was the smell of the tanneries.  The tanning and dyeing processes create a unique order that is easier to experience than to describe.  I know this paragraph comes off sounding kind of negative, but its not meant to be.  I came to the Fez medina for the full medieval experience, and the smell is a big part of setting the mood!

Since the alleyways are so tight and the roofs so low the medina quickly becomes one giant echo chamber.  As you’d expect, there are a lot of Darija, French, Spanish, and English words floating around.  Also a fair amount of Italian and German, and presumably other languages that I didn’t catch.  They all blend together with the sound of donkey hooves on pavement, squeaking hand truck wheels, and of course the occasional call to prayer to form an endless cacophony that again, more than anything else, adds to the medieval appeal of the old city.

While there are a few sites in the old city, the most important attraction is the medina itself.  Later in my time in Morocco, either during training or service, I’ll get a chance to swing by the supposedly fantastic folk art museums, and some of the more out of the way madrassa-mosques (at least the ones that let non-Muslims visit), but on this first trip the focus was on the experience of the old city itself.  Other than the trip to the gardens and the top of the leather shop we didn’t visit many sites.  Most of our time was spent exploring down one street or another, stopping at both tiny and surprisingly gigantic shops, getting lost and finding ourselves (yes, even Fassis like my host cousin get lost in the old medina).  We did, of course, stop by the Kairaouine mosque and university, possibly the oldest university in the world.  It was founded in 859.  Like all of the world’s oldest universities it started as a religious institution and remains so, non-Muslims can’t do more than glimpse through the gates at the voluminous courtyard of the mosque-university complex.  My host cousin and his friend, following the lead of decades of tour guides, took our cameras inside for us.  Out of respect for the spirit of the law I won’t plaster pictures of the mosque all over the Internet, but if you’d like to see them feel free to e-mail me.

It was a long afternoon of sightseeing, but the next day was Sunday, our one day without any Darija class.  I spent that particular Sunday with my host family calling at a host uncle’s house.  As always, the couscous was delicious.  I tried to master the trick that the older Moroccans do where they roll the couscous into a ball in their hand and then flick it into their mouths.  I failed terribly, but it might just be a generational thing.  None of my host siblings or cousins eat it that way and I wasn’t alone with my spoon.  This host uncle lives in a different area from my family, right in the very outskirts of Fes, and his was the first neighborhood where it really struck me that I’m living in the cultural Middle East.  Maybe it was the preponderance of horse drawn transportation (or the cool half motorcycle, half pickup truck combos that street venders use), maybe it was the strange lack of grass in his neighborhood compared to the surrounding countryside and inner neighborhoods, maybe it was just that time, but last Sunday was the moment when I really realized where I was and how differently I’m living.  It was a great moment, and an important step in integration I think, though daunting at the same time!

The following week was exhausting on two fronts.  The Peace Corps has decided that it wants more time spent in training doing the kind of work we do in site, so for the first time ever trainees helped out at the annual spring break camps that happen at each of the Dar Chebabs.  Of course they sent a current PCV to help, and there was our LCF (frequent readers may remember Language and Cultural Facilitator) and a small but energetic Moroccan staff, but this was still our first step into a larger world.  In the mornings we taught English lessons and helped the Moroccan staff lead camp activities, in the afternoon the staff and the PCV worked with the kids while we worked on language, our second front.  This was, of course, the week where we really started to lay into verbs and the weird conjugation patterns of Darija.  We went from knowing how to use just three or four verbs to being able to use about 80 verbs in all four different conjugations of the simple past in about three days.  It’s huge, I can communicate much more fully with my family.   In the past tense.  The much more complicated present tense is this week’s challenge.  Baby leaps.

Working with the kids was a lot of fun.  The camp was not particularly large, maybe about 15 kids, but we were still able to divide them into two English classes (beginner and intermediate/advanced) so that each of the trainees who wanted to would have a chance to run a class.  The PCV noticed that although the higher level class wanted to speak and write in the past tense not all of them had a grasp of when and how to do use different tenses in the past so I gave a lesson on the simple past tense.  Grammar lectures are hard to make fun and exciting, but now I know a few things that work to make class more interesting, along with a bunch that don’t.  In the second half of the class I had the kids play a game that involved correctly conjugating verbs in the past. They actually seemed to really enjoy it, even though the girls (who were much more advanced) had an extremely lopsided victory.  I don’t know if the more advanced students learned anything new, but I think the less advanced students learned something.  If nothing else the kid who pronounced “walked” as “walk Ed” can say it correctly now, so I call that a success.

Camp games are the same the world over, though of course “steal the bacon” has another name here, even in translation.  Never quite caught what that name was.  It was interesting to see where the language barrier caused a problem and where it didn’t.  One day we led a short basketball skills tutorial and I was able to show my students how to dribble, pass, and shoot all with decent technique even with my limited Darija, but no matter how hard we tried we couldn’t explain to them how the game “knockout” worked.  I would have thought explaining the rules to simple games would be easier than transferring technique, but I guess not.

While on the topic of simple games, this is as good a time as any to describe the Moroccan version of checkers that my host brother taught me last week.  It is similar to what we play in the States, with three major changes to the rules.  First, you can play with either 8 or 12 pieces to a side (the American version is always 12).  If you have just eight pieces the strategy changes dramatically.  Second, if you have the opportunity you must make a jump.  I know some people play like that in the States, but there’s a Moroccan twist, if you miss the fact that you have a jump or decide not to take it because you would set up the opponent’s double jump you lose the piece that could have made the jump.  Third, and most important, kings can move as far as they want in a straight line, like bishops in chess, and can only be stopped by two pieces in a row.  If they take a piece they can keep going as far as they want/can, and if there is an opportunity to take another piece in a different line after they’ve taken the first they can turn down that line.  At first I didn’t like the outsized power this gave the kings, but learning how to contain and catch them has been a lot of fun.  Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it I can usually beat my host brother, who is just 16, but his uncle is a force to be reckoned with and I can usually only just trade wins with him.

After our long week of teaching/learning grammar and playing games (read that sarcastically if you want, it really was exhausting) some of the other trainees and I took a break by going to the nearby town of Moulay Yacoub and taking a hike.  Moulay Yacoub was built on top of a hot spring and boasts two hammams that use the hot spring to fill pools like Roman baths.  Our plan was to hike in the hills around the town and then visit one of these hammams.  The hike was fantastic.  The weather was touch and go all day, and the recent rain made the trail so muddy that we had to kick the mud off our shoes every few steps to be able to move at all.  I say trail, but it was really more of a sheep path, which just made it all the trickier to navigate.  The beautiful, deep green, rolling hills around the town more than made up for these setbacks.  We had a picnic lunch on a vista over the town, which was a multicolored flash in the middle of the solidly green terrain.  Pine trees grew next to cactus grew next to grain in the fields that surrounded us.  At the top of the next hill I pulled out my ocarina; the wind was so strong that if I held the little instrument at the right angle the wind played it for me.  Unfortunately I have no photos since the combination of hail when we set out and the plan to visit a hammam made me leave my camera at home.  I don’t really regret it.  No photo I could have taken with my camera would have done the view justice, and with all the slipping in the mud it might have gotten damaged.  It was a great day off and I’ve been able to throw myself into my classes this week with all the more energy because of it.

So there you go, honey and bee stings.  The Peace Corps training experience.  The honey is so sweet it’s easy to tolerate the stings.  I’ll close with one last bit of honey for you and me.  Hopefully it will help you tolerate the bee sting of this unfortunately, yet necessarily, rambling post.  I mentioned to my LCF that I’m interested in Joha stories.  He loves Joha stories.  He told my one, so here it is, my first Joha story told to me by a Moroccan!

Joha had a garden, and everyday he would go out to his garden and ask God to give him one hundred gold coins.  Everyday his neighbor heard him calling to God, so one day, as a joke, he threw a bag full of gold coins over their shared wall.  Joha picked it up and thanked God for his good fortune.  Later, the neighbor went to Joha’s to explain the joke and get his money back.  He knocked on the door.  Joha threw it open, greeted his neighbor, and told that God had answered his prayers and given him a bag full of gold.  The neighbor told him what actually happened.  Joha said he did not believe him and they argued.  Eventually the neighbor said they should take their arguments before a judge.  Joha said, “I can’t got to see a judge, I don’t have a donkey to take me to one.”  The neighbor said that he would lend Joha a donkey.  Joha said, “I can’t go to see a judge, my djellaba has a tear in it.”  The neighbor said that he would lend Joha a djellaba.  They set out to see the judge, Joha riding the neighbor’s donkey and wearing his djellaba.

When they reached the judge the neighbor explained what had happened.  Then the judge asked Joha for his side of the story.  Joha said, “This man is crazy, ask him about anything of mine and he’ll say it is his.” 

The judge asked the neighbor if the djellaba was Joha’s.  The neighbor said, “No, its mine!”  The judge asked the neighbor if the donkey was Joha’s.  The neighbor said, “No, that’s mine too!”  The judge ruled in Joha’s favor.

P.S. Next post’s honey will include a recipe for shareia from my host sister, I just want to double check the English translation of a couple of the ingredients.

P.P.S. I just had my first genuine Moroccan harisa at lunch with my host family.  For those of you who don’t know, harisa is a spicy North African condiment.  I’m going to have to eat a lot of it these next two years, because I don’t think I can go back to the American versions I’ve had after this!

Life in a Moroccan Family

            This post will be shorter than the last, but it should give you an idea of what the typical day in my life is here, so much as there is a typical day.  One of the three primary goals of the Peace Corps is to introduce Americans to how life is lived abroad, so this will be my attempt to tell ntuma (Darija for ya’ll) about how life is lived in a typical Moroccan family.

            I wake up every morning around 7.  The first couple of days the morning call to prayer (sobh) was a problem, but now I sleep through the 4:30 call, just like all the Moroccans.  Thus far I have yet to see anyone pray at the prayer times.  After the early evening call I sometimes see men in djebblas (traditional Moroccan robes) head for the mosque, but I don’t know if they’re going to pray or to socialize at the near-by café or hammam (or at the mosque, for that matter).  I’ve seen my host brother pray a couple of times, and another time, at a party last Sunday (more on that later) all the men prayed together.  Other than the habitual invocations of God that pepper speech here, Inshallah (God willing), Labas hamdullah (I’m fine, thanks to God), Bismillah (in the name of God, used to start any activity, most often it works as Bon Appetit) and the call to prayer, religion doesn’t visually affect the everyday life of a Moroccan person any more than it does the life of a secular American.  This doesn’t surprise me, it was very similar in Turkey and across large swathes of the Arab and Islamic world, but Americans tend to think of all Islamic countries as fundamentalist, which is, of course, about as far from true as possible.  Across a lot of America the average American is much more ostentatious about their faith than the average Moroccan.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  In either direction.

            When I wake up about half my host family is already up.  I usually have just enough time to wish my older host brother good luck in school (in English because he’s practicing for his Bac, the Moroccan test that seems like a mutant hybrid of British A-Levels and the SAT.  One of his subjects is English).  My oldest host sister, who is about my age, is usually getting ready for work.  The sister between them goes to a school that starts later and works late after that, so she’s still asleep, as is my youngest brother.  My youngest host sister is usually up, we warm each other up for the day by quizzing each other on words in the other’s language, colors or numbers or foodstuffs.  My host mother is up and has already laid out the morning spread, various types of bread, olive oil, butter, jam, and the ubiquitous sweet mint tea.  Actually, she makes hers with shiva, which, if I’m not mistaken, are the leaves from the star anise plant.  It’s not quite as fresh tasting as the mint, but makes for a nice, sturdier tea.  The real amazing thing is the variety of bread.  I’ve almost got their names all memorized.  Most of them I’ve never seen before in the States.  The range of consistencies and flavors is astounding.  My favorite is hamel, a doughy flat bread.  Sometimes my host mother cooks eggs.  Her signature dish is an open face omelet (made with eggs, milk, and olive oil) that she sprinkles copious amounts of cumin over.  It’s incredible.

            During breakfast the T.V. is already on.  In fact, it’s always on.  Most of the time we watch the children’s channel (my youngest host brother is nine), which I don’t mind since I can actually follow some of the easier shows (most of them are Disney and Nickelodeon imports that are either dubbed or have Arabic subtitles).   Oftentimes it’s tuned to the football channel.  The rest of the time its either Arabic or Turkic soap operas, except for when its Moroccan Idol.  My host family doesn’t really watch the T.V., they just have it on in the background.  The exceptions are football and Moroccan Idol, which they watch religiously.  A lot of the time they’re actually focusing on the radio, with the T.V. as ambient light in the background.  Speaking of which, my host sisters have been telling me the names of Moroccan pop artists I’ve liked, so you can try some of these people out.  I make no promises about the spelling of the English transcriptions and can’t give you song names, but give youtube, itunes, or spotify a shot with these guys.  My favorite is Adil Maloudi, a Moroccan man who often sings with women and traditional Moroccan instrumentation backing his auto-tuned pop grooves.  Dahwdi Abdullah is similar, but with more western instruments mixed in.  My favorite women singers (who tend to be more oriented towards the Western pop with interesting backing rhythm end of the genre) are Najatataba, from Morocco, Dalila, from Algeria, and Njwakara, from Lebanon.

            After breakfast I go to language lessons at the Dar Chebab.  It’s a short walk through a part of the neighborhood with open spaces so you can see beyond the community.  The neighborhood has great views of the hilly terrain covers the area Fes, which is beautiful.  Unfortunately, while Moroccans are very cleanly in their homes they don’t have an adequate amount of public dumpsters and trashcans, so they leave their trash in public places.  In the parts of my neighborhood close to the municipal dumpsters it is very clean, but that’s more than a ten minute walk from my path to the Dar Chebab and there are no public trashcans between the two locations, or for another ten or twenty minutes in the other direction.  It’s a huge problem.  One of our plans for an activity at the Dar Chebab is a community cleanup day, though the Mudira (supervisor) of the Dar Chebab says that when they’ve done those in the past it doesn’t stay clean for very long.  There are just too many people for the amount of trash receptacles.

            Four hours of brain grinding language lessons later I go back home for lunch.  Lunch is the big meal of the day in my family, which is traditional.  In my training group the families are split, about half keep lunch the largest meal, the other half have switched to dinner as the main meal.  I like the change, though its going to make it hard to learn to cook the delicious Moroccan food since I’m never home when my host mother cooks.  Usually she pulls some amazing concoction out of a tagine.  Today’s lunch was chicken with ful and artichokes all cooked together in saffron.  I’m not quite sure what ful are, they look kind of like giant peas, but they taste more like beans.  They’re very tasty.  A couple of days ago we had lamb with homemade French fries cooked in the lamb juices.  Another day we had a whole roast chicken stuffed with shareia chinois, which is a traditional noodle dish spiced with ginger, saffron, paprika, coriander and garlic made “chinois” by preparing it with thin rice noodles.  We eat with our right hands and bread as utensils.

            Once lunch is over I go back to the Dar Chebab, where we sometimes continue language lessons, sometimes have cross-cultural training and sometimes meet local officials.  We’re also starting to practice our Darija with locals.  Today in one of the cafés I met a kid in his teens wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigarette, drinking a black coffee, and playing the guitar.  He played the same cocktail of classic rock songs that kids in America learn, Sweet Child of Mine, Tears From Heaven, Yesterday.  Some things are the same the world over.  Earlier in the day my teacher had asked about my ocarina, so I happened to have it on me; the kid and I played together a bit, between songs we spoke in Darija as much as I could.  Around 5:30 or 6 I head home, usually just in time for snack, more bread and jam, occasionally salad or cookies (and once fried fish!) as well.  Usually this is the time when I unwind, practice new language with my hosts, listen to music with my siblings, play cards or checkers, write these posts, etc.  Around 9 or 9:30 we have dinner.  Dinner is usually just leftovers from lunch.  Most days a family member or family friend joins.  One uncle comes very often.  Whenever he walks in the door I run to grab my notebook, because I know I’ll be learning a whole slew of new words.  Over the next few hours we slowly drift off to sleep, I usually retire to my room around 11 or 11:30 after the youngest children have passed out.

            So that’s the average day, though once in awhile there’s a bit more to it.  Last Sunday, for example, my host mother hosted a huge party for family and friends.  I think this is a more or less weekly occurrence, as I know we’re planning on going to a cousin’s for something similar this week.  At the party I got to see a few cultural things I’d heard about, but not seen, in practice.  As the guests came in they all took off their shoes before walking on the rugs, once inside they immediately started to greet people individually, starting to the far right of the room and going through one by one to the left.  Since there were at least 25 people this was no small feat by the time most people were there.  The sexes were segregated with the women on one side of the room and the men on the other, the children played in another room.  Despite sitting apart everyone talked together, but when the food came out it was served on two separate tables, one for each sex.  This was the day we ate the roast chicken and shareia, though it was followed by a second entrée of lamb.  It was a pretty fun day; at one point I was hanging out with the older children and young adults and taught them a bunch of American card games.  They really liked Egyptian Ratslap (my host brother and I have played almost every day since, he’s getting dangerously good).

            Alright, I think that’s enough for now, since I’m sure my next post will be huge; next time I write I’m sure I’ll have visited the Fes medina (my host sister was going to take me after the party, but it ran really late and was raining very heavily at the time we would have left).  I’ll leave you with a Joha story since I haven’t in awhile.  This one’s coming from memory, so I’ll do my best to get it right.

            There was a day when everyone in town realized that Joha owed them some money.  They saw him in the souq and approached him as a mob.  Joha ran home and told his wife not to let anyone in, since he could not pay off all his debts at once.  He then hid upstairs in their bedroom.  The mob came up to his door and demanded that his wife let them in.  “We saw Joha enter this house, he must be here,” they said.

            Hearing this Joha threw the bedroom window wide open and yelled to the mob, “I could have gone out the back!”

Moroccan Rhythms

           I’ve tried again and again, but I can’t find any way to start off this post, so I guess this’ll do.  In the week since I wrote the last post so much has happened that I could easily divide this into two stories, or even three.  The thing is, this week couldn’t have been better made for a continuous narrative if it were fiction.  This week was a story; it is bound by themes and motifs and pulling apart the individual episodes into separate posts would ruin the overall effect, just as if you tried to analyze each tile of the tile work in my new host family’s foyer.  Each tile is stunning on its own, but it’s the overall effect that really matters.  Yes, I’m with my host family now, but that’s not for until the end of the story, and there’s a lot of tale to tell until then.

            Our day off this week was Sunday the 24^th, so on Saturday night the staff hosted a “Peace Corps Morocco Party” where they said we would dance to Moroccan and American pop music, watch/learn some Amizigh (Berber) dances and have a giant jam session cum sing-a-long with any staffers and trainees who cared to join.  As you might expect I wasn’t particularly fond of the American Pop part of the dance party, but the Moroccan pop was interesting.  Although it is as heavily auto-tuned as American pop music, it is much more rhythmically nuanced than our pop.  I don’t want to make this blog in any way the snooty music criticism of an under-qualified listener, so I’ll stop myself and just say I liked it! 

The Amizigh dances did not start off well.  Six of the LCFs (Language and Cultural Facilitators, our teachers’ formal title) performed a dance, but I think it had been awhile since they had last done the dance because they had three or four false starts and stopped to fix several flubs throughout.  Of course, we probably wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t stopped and pointed out the mistakes.  Part of the problem was that the dance demanded that the men drum, dance and sing a call while the women sang a response and performed a more complicated step, but the only LCF who really knew how to play the Amizigh hand drum (correct name pending some research) was one of the female LCFs.  She took up the drum after the first dance and started to play a very complicated, finessed rhythm.  She could draw a huge range of tones simply by changing how much pressure she exerted on the drumhead with her left hand, and the beat she kept seemed to change time signature constantly but stayed infectious throughout.  I wished I’d brought my recorder up, but although I’d meant to grab it after the “dance party” changed to traditional dance the first dance had discouraged me from bothering.  Soon the other LCFs jumped into what looked like a wild dance, though we quickly realized it was not traditional when one of them started doing the funky chicken.

The next morning some of the trainees woke up earlier than we otherwise might have on our day off so that we could see a bunch of sites.  At first we thought it would just be seven of us, but at the last moment one of the LCF’s decided he’d join us for at least part of the sightseeing.  We were very glad that he did; only a few minutes walk out of our hotel we started seeing people carrying signs with the Dome of the Rock on them walking towards the medina, just like us.  Before I say anymore I do have to say that this is not the place to discuss politics, so I won’t.  I will only report on what we saw and heard.  As we approached the medina we also approached larger and larger crowds, some holding Palestinian flags, others with placards, still more with the Dome of the Rock sign.  Without the LCF we probably would have tried to find another route to our first site since we wouldn’t have been able to read the crowd or know what they were saying, and if any of it started to focus on us.  As it was we learned a lot.  The protest was, obviously, for a free Palestine, but also had an element calling for solidarity with the Syrian people.  There was a lot of singing and chanting throughout the crowd, but the words the LCF made out most translate to “God is Great.  Muhammad is his Prophet.  We die by these words, we live by these words.”  The center of the rally was on Avenue Hassan II just after it passes through the old walls just south of the Bab al Had gate (the gate behind me in my blogger profile picture).  The breach in the wall that Avenue Hassan II makes marked where the protest was segregated.  Outside the old city walls were where the male protesters lined up, inside was the women’s part of the protest for a few blocks until the very front of the rally, which again was exclusively male, at least among participants.  This was a convenient place for the front; we got to see the largest flags and most informative placards right before we had to turn to continue sightseeing.

After a walk down the beautiful, palm-tree lined Avenue Mohammad V, past the Sunna Mosque, the well-guarded gates that eventually lead to the royal palace, and through the southernmost gates of the old city we reached Chellah, our first real stop of the day.  Chellah is a ruined 14^th century mosque, medersa, and tomb complex built next to and on top of the old, even more ruined Roman town of Sala Colonia.  The entire complex is now overrun with storks.  Its pretty surreal.  And beautiful.  The Roman site is heavily decayed.  It takes a lot of imagination to see the old buildings, though its cool to be able to get right up near the slowly crumbing ruins in a way you never can in Europe.  The only guardrails in all of Chellah were on a viewing platform and around the tomb of its builder, the sultan Abou al-Hassan Ali.  The Islamic part is in better shape and houses most of the storks.  Two different pairs have even set up nests on the Mosque’s old minaret.  If I can get a stronger Internet signal this time posting I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

From Chellah we took a long walk along the outskirts of the city where we got to see beautiful views of the surrounding country, complete with cows, cattlemen, and the omnipresent storks.  Once we made our way back into the town we stopped for our first outside the hotel Moroccan meal.  We ate at one of the ubiquitous small restaurants that call themselves snack shops.  The name is deceiving.  The portions are both huge and delicious.  Most serve a wide selection of paninis (here usually a single meat with melted cheese and some sauce), sandwiches, tagines, and rotisserie chickens.  I had some of my favorite drink, the asir banan from the last post and a kefte tagine.  The lamb meatballs were tiny, just about thumbnail size, and perfectly spiced.  The sauce they cooked in was tomato based, heavily spiced with a Moroccan blend, and mixed with scrambled egg.  I’m sure it sounds good.  It tasted better.

We next visited the Tour Hassan and the Mausoleum of Mohammad V.  The Tour Hassan is the last standing vestige of a mosque built by Sultan Yacoub al-Mansour (the Victorious) in the 1100s.  If it had been completed it would have been the second largest mosque in the world at that time, but he died while it was under construction and the minaret, though tall enough it can be seen for miles, is about 16 meters shorter than intended.  However, all that remains standing is this massive minaret, the rest of the mosque was destroyed in an earthquake in 1755.  As with Chellah, the ruin is what gives the place its charm.  Around Tour Hassan are the remains of columns that used to support the mosque.  They are all different heights and make a fantastic tableau.  A lot of tourists (myself included, I’m only half-ashamed to say) play stylite for a couple minutes on top of the shorter ones.  The mausoleum, built sometime after Mohammad V’s death in 1961, uses the old ruin as a courtyard.  It houses both he and his son, Hassan II, the present king’s grandfather and father.  It is breathtakingly beautiful and opulent.  I think the strength, in part, comes from how the architect contrasts the ornate design inside the mausoleum with the simple ruined columns outside.  He somehow designed the building so that the complexity of the inside just melts as you go outside.  It contrasts without clashing and creates one contiguous structure out of two, built centuries apart.

Our day still far from over, we walked down the hill from the Tour Hassan into the medina (the rally by now had either ended or moved on).  Our goal was to get ourselves good and lost in the old cities labyrinthine twists and turns but eventually make our way out to the Kasbah on the coast, hopefully just in time for sunset.  We succeeded, though not the way we thought we would.  We entered at the mellah (the historically Jewish quarter in any Moroccan medina) and were almost immediately assaulted by the smell of roasting shawarma.  Soon after we came under another assault, a group of young schoolgirls greeting the foreign looking party in French.  We tried to reply in Arabic.  They laughed.  I guess our pronunciation still has a ways to go.  Further into the medina the smell from the spice shops hit us.  The cumin and coriander were overwhelming and amazing.  We passed an instrument shop, but they all looked poorly cared for and were out of tune, so all I knew was that this shop would not be where I eventually buy my oud.  We sifted through stalls selling brightly colored clothes and cloths, sometimes western and sometimes Moroccan.  We rushed by the shops that sold chintzy western culture inspired merchandise from China and the stores that provide pirated DVDs so we could ogle the ones next door that sold traditional handicrafts, still homemade.  Like everything else I’ve seen here the Rabat medina is a complicated knot with strands of the modern west enmeshed with strands of traditional Morocco.  In the midst of the confused bustling we stumbled into a shop.

From the outside it looked like nothing in particular.  It had some nice crafts displayed outside (I particularly liked the wooden camels), but none that stood out from the work at other shops that decorated that back alley.  It was larger than we expected, it had a courtyard inside and several rooms around, each displaying different types ceramics and woodwork.  I actually didn’t get to explore the shop too much, as the other five trainees (the LCF and one of the other trainees had left at this point) browsed I tried talking with one of the shopkeepers.  He didn’t laugh.  So much improvement in so little time.  Just as I was running out of things I could say and understand (it took less than two minutes) a few of the others came up and the process repeated itself.  Then the shopkeeper invited us to have mint tea with him.  Of course we said yes.  He took us into one of the rooms around the courtyard and had us set up chairs for him and ourselves while he went and brewed the tea.  At this point we still thought he wanted to sell us something, so we started to look around for inexpensive things we wouldn’t mind carrying around the rest of the day that we could buy after tea.  He came back and we shared his delicious tea.  With his very limited English, Spanish, and French (we had a couple of French speakers, and I speak Spanish passably when not worried about passing a class), our even more limited Darija, and a lot of hand gestures we were able to learn that we was originally from the Rif mountains in the North (Shemel) of the country and the names of several neighborhoods around the Hay Salaam neighborhood of Salé, which is the city across the river from Rabat.  We learned this because we mispronounced the words we’d learned for Peace Corps, Hay’at Salaam.  He assumed we were teaching English in the Hay Salaam neighborhood and was recommending places to visit, we thought he was telling us alternate names people called the Peace Corps.  So much for that language improvement.

Soon one of the other shopkeepers joined us.  He’d studied English in university and was fluent, even though he’d never left the country.  We were shocked; we’d assumed he must have spent some time in the States or England.  He was also from the Rif and explained the Hay’at Salaam confusion.  Then he gave us a mini Darija lesson.  Once the tea was done and the lesson over they sent us on our way with directions for the Kasbah.  We’d been there about an hour and a half, maybe more.  They didn’t seem to want us to buy anything.  Talking about it later my roommate and I agreed, it would have felt weird, wrong even, to have tried to buy anything after the tea.  The relationship had changed.  Their directions were spot on, we went a little ways back the way we’d come, took one turn and went straight for a few minutes and came out at the coast, the Kasbah immediately ahead.  The Kasbah is a wealthy neighborhood with incredible views of the river, Salé, and the Atlantic.  The houses are universally painted deep blue up until about elbow height and then white above.  We worked our way through to the ocean and watched the sunset sitting on top of a breakwater.  After a quick stop at a snack shop on the way home we ended our long day!

The next day we were back in class, able to show off some of our new Darija and improved pronunciation from the day before, but the real noteworthy event happened between the end of class and dinner.  Four of us (only my roommate and I were the same as the day before), tired from sitting all day in classes took a stroll out to the medina, mainly because one of the girls wanted to get postcards.  Since the two girls hadn’t been to the Kasbah yet we took them, using a different route then the day before (read: dumb luck).  While we were waiting to cross the street from the medina to the Kasbah a well-dressed older man called out to us.  With our usual patois of limited languages we explained the usual points, this time without any Salé based confusion.  He told us he was a technician who worked at the university.  There he’d met several students who came to Morocco to learn Arabic and teach English, with our limited Arabic this is more or less what we told him what we were doing, except with the Peace Corps.  He offered to take us to a house in the Kasbah, we thought where one of these students or their professors lived.  Now, I don’t think any one of us would have gone with him alone, but since there were four of us, he was taking us into one of the richest and most touristy parts of the city, and he just gave off such an honestly friendly vibe we felt safe.  As it turned out the only mistake we’d made was that he was taking us to his house, where he introduced his lovely wife, beautiful children, and newborn kittens (we’d just learned how to ask how old someone was in class that day, the kittens were 20 days old).  He showed us the beautiful view of Salé from his roof.  He also showed us the room where he and his wife put up two students studying Arabic at the university, though they were away.  Then he took us on a quick tour of the Kasbah.  We wished him good-bye at the edge of the medina and reached the hotel just at the start of dinner.  For the second day in a row we were treated to amazing Moroccan hospitality.  I’d read about this kind of thing happening in a few of the books I’d read about Morocco, but I’d assumed you’d have to be fluent in Arabic, like the authors.  I’ve been corrected, though I look forward to having more Arabic so I can learn more next time.

The next few days were unexciting, though I got a little sick (along with a whole bunch of other trainees).  I think of it as acclimating, though I’m glad its past.  Actually, I’m more glad that it was past before I reached my host family, I’d hate for their first impression of me to be a sick one.  To explain, for the next month and a half or so I’ll be living with a Moroccan family somewhere in the area of Fes (sorry, we’re told not to be more precise than that on a blog or social network) while I continue my language lessons and other elements of training.  Again, Moroccan hospitality.  My host family is huge; I have five host siblings!  A couple of them speak a little English, but for the most part we communicate with Arabic and hand signals.  Their place is beautiful (remember that tile work I was talking about).  We sleep on couches on the edges of the rooms.  They very nicely gave me my own room (right next to the mosque, but I’ve been sleeping through the morning call to prayer anyways), while four of the siblings sleep in the dining room and the mother and one of the daughters sleep in the living room.  The food is delicious.  My oldest host brother, who is sixteen, took me to the hammam today.  Its an odd experience; as advertised, you strip to your boxers, go into a sauna and wash yourself in public, and then douse yourself in cold water at the end.  You do feel especially clean afterwards.  The Moroccans go their with their good friends and actually clean each other, but my host brother and I are a long, long way from there.  We’ll probably never reach it.  I’ll definitely go again, though it won’t be anything like a weekly thing.  So this is life in Morocco.  It has a very different beat than life in the U.S.  It has a subtlety and complexity I’m only just beginning to even comprehend is there.  And just like that complex Amizigh drum pattern at the “Moroccan Party,” it has me entranced.

P.S. Amizigh is the Berber word for themselves.  It is their own languages it means “Good People.”  In recent years Berber has apparently stopped being an offensive term, or at least is less offensive.  Until about two days before learning that Berber had lost its offensive connotations I didn’t even know it was offensive.  Although Berber is now considered a (more or less) neutral term I’ll use Amizigh.  This is as much for politically correct reasons as because I think Amizigh is more poetic sounding.  And yes, I am using my Post Scripts as footnotes, I’ve been writing academically for too long and can’t break the habit of footnoting.