Travelling

            It’s been a busy three weeks of travelling and training since my last post.  Most of it actually isn’t worth writing about, so I’ll give you the quick version with the funniest and most ridiculous stories.  The day after my last post I went back to Rabat for the first time since swearing in, ostensibly to attend a workshop on how to run an Environmental Awareness club, and then, after that, to sit in on a meeting of Peace Corps Morocco’s SIDA (French acronym for AIDS) committee to give input from our most recent stage (group of volunteers, pronounced in the French fashion) on how to change their goals given that all volunteers will now be focused on youth development.  The Environmental training was a bit of a fiasco, the NGO which presented to us (in French) seemed more interested in telling us about their organizational history than in giving us practical tips, which is what most of us had come for, but the SIDA meeting went very well. 

However, for me the best parts of the trip to Rabat ended up being two surprises.  The more important of the two was my chance to sit and watch one of the volunteers from my stage (a former broadcast journalist and mass communications professor at Itasca Community College) and a volunteer he’s been working with from a previous stage (also a former journalist, naturalized American citizen (I want to say originally from Liberia, but I might have the wrong West African country)), the two hands down coolest volunteers I’ve met in the Peace Corps, give a presentation to a group of girls working with Girls Global Media, an NGO that teaches journalism skills to young girls in the U.S. and around the world.  Actually, they’re just starting to work on the around the world part, and Morocco is one of the first countries they’ve tried expanding to, when the volunteer from the previous stage finishes her service in a month she’ll be helping with the program in this country.  It was great to see the twenty or so really passionate young girls (all with phenomenal English) pitch their story ideas and go through the expert vetting of the two experienced American journalists.  It all took place at a vocational film school, which we got a tour of before the event.  It was a very different world from the small town I’ve gotten used to!

There is a lot of interest in my site in a student journalism club, so now I know two volunteers to go to for advice, and if there are any talented and dedicated young girls an NGO to get them in touch with.   Not bad for a trip that I went on because the volunteer in my stage thought I might be interested and mentioned it in passing (this just after we’d begged and forced the poor guy to tell us his entire life story).  The other highlight, significantly less important, was eating bacon and other pig product for the first time in five and a half months.  It’s quite easy to get in Rabat, we discovered, and a trip to the American Club netted us bacon cheeseburgers and, almost as important, Dr. Pepper.

My last day in Rabat was September 11^th, the day of the attacks in Libya and Egypt, and I travelled home in a bit of a daze.  My site mate (who is on the SIDA committee) and I travelled home together, and we only found out about the death of ambassador Stephens (an RPCV from Morocco) when one of my site mate’s friends called.  Soon after we both got a text at the same time and knew it couldn’t be good news, but it was just a warning from the Peace Corps to keep calm and caution and to avoid large, angry looking crowds.  At the time we were sitting on an overcrowded and overheated bus.  Not good ones for following directions us.  I was never near any of the demonstrations in Morocco, but from what I’ve heard they were entirely under control.  A Moroccan friend of mine (one of the metal heads from Fes) even posted on my wall and said that I shouldn’t worry.  Moroccans, he said, don’t have major protests over religion, they save their protests for politics and the economy.

After just twelve hours in site I was on the road again, this time travelling to Agadir to attend a workshop on setting up and running a library in my Dar Chebab, a project that both my mudir and I are very passionate about.  The workshop was great, run by Peace Corps Morocco’s fantastic librarian, and I have a lot of material to work with my mudir on.  I also learned that there is a book donating charity that the Peace Corps works with a lot based in Darien, Connecticut, my hometown.  The Darien Book Aid Plan, Inc., something I’d never heard of growing up.  Go figure.  While the workshop was great, I have to say that Agadir is the first place in Morocco that I just did not like.  My buddy Eugene and I had met up in Marrakech on the way town to travel together the last leg of the trip and the moment we stepped off the bus con artists with just a smattering of English tried to prey on us.  One offered to have his friend take us to our hotel in his taxi, just 100 dirham each.  We’d heard that the price to downtown should be about five, so I told him that we know how prices work in Morocco and we walked away.  He started screaming at us (in English) that we knew nothing.  We then proceeded to get a five dirham taxi, but not without a few other insincere drivers trying to insist we should buy out a whole taxi because we would have to wait a long time for one to fill (we filled one and left instantly once we found the line).  One guy even had the gall to ask for a tip for showing us where the line was, which was a loose translation for walking with us and talking at us as we walked towards the obvious group of people.  Once we arrived downtown all the small taxis refused to turn on their meters, and while we bargained one down to a reasonable price it still cost twice as much as it should have.  In other words, within twenty minutes of arriving in Agadir five or six people tried to cheat us.  That is about five or six times the number of people who’d tried to do that to me in country since arriving.

In all of their defense, it didn’t help that the Peace Corps put us up in a luxury hotel overlooking the beach.  Their regular place in town was full-up, and in desperation Peace Corps had to put us up in what amounted to a giant palace, so we did nothing to dissuade the idea that all Americans are made of money.  Still, nothing like a stunning view over the Atlantic for a couple of days to get you over your rancor at failed attempts to cheat you.  Agadir has a highly built up beach frequented by European and Gulf state tourists.  The beautiful marine distract only houses expats and the very richest Moroccans.  Once the workshop was over it was nice to finally get a swim in this summer, but the touristy boardwalk with its touristy prices was a bit of a turnoff.  Leaving the next day even the bus ticket salesman tried to overcharge us by twenty dirham each, but we called him out on it and he gave us the real price.

After a night at my friend Nicole’s site just south of Marrakech with most of my CBT group (during which we watched many episodes from Nicole’s complete collection of How I Met Your Mother) we found ourselves in Marrakech for the start of our Inter Service Training, or IST.  Basically our entire stage got together for a week filled with trainings and information sessions at a swank hotel (actually a retreat for employees of an arm of the Moroccan government that the Peace Corps could rent cheaply, but still complete with swimming pool).  Some of the sessions were useful and gave me great project ideas or insights, some were not, but overall I’m happy with the quality of IST.  It was mainly a time to see friends we hadn’t seen in months and relax.  Unfortunately, because of the busy schedule and our extreme distance from the center of town (either an expensive twenty minute cab ride or cheap but long bus trip) I wasn’t able to see too much of the city, just the main square (djamaa al fna, the frighteningly named meeting place of the dead, where they used to hold executions) and a few of the surrounding medina streets.  Since I’ll see it in a few weeks when my parents come I’m not upset about that.  The main square gets incredibly lively at sun down, filled with snake charmers (I went with a friend who is terrified of snakes, so my job was to look around and say, “oh, lets go this way instead”), musicians, tourists, street venders, and languages from all over the world.  It is one of the only places in Morocco that I’ve seen street performers.  I didn’t have the instant love affair with the medina streets that I had with Fes’s, but maybe that’s because I’m so much more used to medinas now.  That could be it, but they definitely lack that labyrinthine charm that Fes has. 

That being said, I’m excited to go back and give it a second look, and I do have one funny story from a shop (actually two funny stories, but I’m going to keep the second one under wraps until after my parents come and leave, for reasons that will become clear once I tell the story).  We were talking to a shopkeeper about our jobs as Peace Corps volunteers and we each told him where our sites are.  I’ve gotten used to being general about my site, the town is too small for most people to know it, but when I mentioned that I am nearby Khenifra he asked for more detail.  It turns out his cousin lives in my town, and upon hearing where I was from he decided he liked us and immediately dropped the price of everything in his store.  A lot.  In the case of some jewelry the girls were looking at almost 75% (which got him enough sales to make up for it).  It’s nice to know you can get Moroccan prices if there is a possibility you might know a family member (I’d never met the cousin).  The other story will just have to wait, but I promise it’s good.

After IST a few of us decided we’d take a stab at climbing Jbel Toubkal, the tallest mountain in North Africa, located just south of Marrakech.  It’s a steep, two day trek leading almost three miles up above sea level.  You start from the small, beautiful Amizight town of Imlil at the base of the mountain.  We got there late the day after IST and explored the town, which is beautiful.  We even found the local women’s center and talked to the women there about their export, Argon oil.  We even got to see the process of making some.  We went to a café and got some hot chocolate looking at the mountain ahead of us.  Already I could tell there would be some problems.  There was a heavy feel of rain in the air, and I was starting to have strange pains in my belly.  I woke up the next morning in a downpour and with some pretty severe stomachaches.  Once the rains subsided a bit I told my friends to climb without me, I would have been a liability even on a dry trail, let alone a wet one.  It was a bit of a bummer, but the right decision; I could not have handled such a tall mountain.  They, luckily, ended up having a good climb, though slower than they’d expected because of the dampness and occasional returning storms, so they ended up having to spend an extra night on the way down.  I waited in Imlil for a bit and then went back to Nicole’s site, where we watched more How I Met Your Mother, not a bad way to get over a stomach bug.

Now I’m back in site and starting to get some work done, but because of a ministry meeting scheduled next week and my parents visit soon after it’ll still be a little while before I really get into the swing of working with the kids.  I’m actually very happy about that, with all the prep work that I’m putting into these programs with my counterparts I’m hoping to have some very good activities to get us started.

Sorry for the rambling post, nature of the beast this time I think.  I’ll leave you now with two Joha stories from my tutor and a must-read postscript if you want to visit me over the next couple of years!

Joha went to the pulpit.  Before he started his sermon he asked the congregation,

"Do you know what I will be talking about today?"

"No," answered the congregation.

"If you don't know then what can I tell you?" he replied, and walked away. 

Next week he went to the pulpit and asked the same question.  This time the congregation answered, "Yes, we do."

"If you do then there is nothing I can tell you," Joha said and walked away again.

The members of the congregation decided that if Joha asked the same question again next week half of them would say "Yes," and the other half would say 'No."

The following week Joha went to the pulpit and asked the same question a third time.  As they had decided, half of the congregation said "Yes, we do," and the other half said, "No, we don't.”

"In that case, those who know tell the ones who don't know,” said Joha and he walked away again.

One day, Joha was riding his donkey to the next town.  He was tried, so he sat in the shade of a huge walnut tree.  He took off his turban and his robe too.  He noticed some pumpkins on the ground a few feet away.  He looked at them for a while and said to himself “God sure works in strange ways.  He makes these huge pumpkins grow on the grass and these small walnuts on tall trees with long branches.”  Suddenly, a walnut fell off the tree and hit Joha on his head.  He jumped up in pain and his eyes started tearing up.  He put his turban on and when his pain subsided, he looked up and said, "Forgive me, God.  I will never meddle in your affairs again, what would have happened to me if you had pumpkins growing on this tree."

P.S.  For those of you planning on visiting me sometime while I’m here, I’d like to let you know how vacation works for me.  For every month of service (not including training) I accrue two days of vacation time, which I can use whenever.  As of now I have eight days, though I’ll be using most of those when my parents come.  I will get six additional days after I’ve been in country nine months (including training, so in December), which represent the six days I should get for my last three months of service (when I won’t be allowed to travel).  If you want to visit, the best times are in the Fall and in the Spring.  I recommend highly against Royal Air Maroc, it is expensive and not that great an airline.  If you’re coming as part of a longer trip I’d recommend going first to Europe and then flying over here by budget airline (or taking the ferry from Spain), it might save you quite a bit.  If people want to travel but don’t particularly want to see Morocco let me know, I’d definitely be willing to meet up in Spain.  Also willing to do other trips, but Spain is easiest.  In any case, anyone who wants to visit is welcome, get in touch with me and we can figure out a good time!

Family Ties

           It’s been a hectic couple of weeks since the end of Ramadan, and I have three more hectic weeks coming up, so it’s time to slip in a blog post while the slipping is good!  On one of the last few days of Ramadan I had to break the fast early one more time, so that I ended up breaking it three times in total (the first two days I had some sips of water to help me through a cold, that last time I don’t know what I had, but water and a little bit of yogurt made it feel better).  I think that for a first attempt twenty-seven out of thirty isn’t that shabby, not that I think I’ll make another full month attempt next year.  On the very last day I travelled up to Fes both to work a summer camp there and to see my host family from training.  Unfortunately, I did not get to see my host sister get married, she and her fiancé had a falling out and the marriage was called off!  While it’s fortunate both that they figured this out before the marriage and that their families are both westernized enough to accept it, the whole event highlights the fact that for a lot of Moroccan couples this can’t happen.  After the engagement they would have to marry, or they wouldn’t even have had the chance to interact between engagement and marriage to discover they were incompatible.  All in all, my host sister and her family didn’t seem too upset about the whole thing.  Apparently this happened a few months ago, but between cell phone distortion, the fact that most Moroccans (my host family included) shout into their phones (increasing the distortion), and my weak Darija I hadn’t once been able to puzzle it out on the phone.

            Regardless, it was great to see them and actually have real full conversations with them.  Although I was aware how much my language skills have increased since I left Fes it was really great to have proof of it.  We could really communicate, in a way we couldn’t before, though I did have to remember my Fassi vocabulary and drop all hints of Tamizight from my language.  They use a different word for “sun” than the entire rest of the country (shd rather than shms), unfortunately in the rest of the country shd means “he caught” or “he took,” and I spent a few very confused minutes recalling that.  I celebrated leid sighir (small feast, properly called eid al fitr, feast of breakfast), the holiday that ends Ramadan with them.  In some places leid sighir really is just a small version of leid kbir (sighir means small, kbir means big, both these names are slang names for the holidays, but in my site no one ever uses the real names), the holiday that commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail (yes, that’s not a typo, in Muslim countries the name doesn’t have the “sh” sound Ishmael, and in Islam it is Ismail, rather than Isaac, who was to die).  Leid kbir (properly eid al Adha) will be in October this year and, as you might imagine, involves everyone slaughtering a lamb.  In Fes, or at least with my family, the lamb sacrifices are left for the later holiday and this leid we celebrated with a slightly larger and more ornate lftor in the evening and a really big and welcome breakfast the next morning (complete with potato omelet!).  Otherwise the day was pretty relaxed, though we did officially slip back into the “new time.”  This change went almost unnoticed among Moroccans.  It is in fact still unnoticed across large swathes of the country, back in my site three nights ago one of my students told me he isn’t switching to new time until he goes to university in two weeks.  His friends are split fifty-fifty as to which time to use.  It must be very confusing for them.

            The next day the camp started, right in the Dar Chebab where I’d done my language training (they’ve acquired a pool table and ping pong since I left in May).  We had been told to expect one hundred students, so we had seven volunteers willing and eager to handle the crowds.  As it turned out on the first day we had a volunteer for every student.  It was a bit of a momentum killer.  By the end of the camp it was up to maybe around thirty students total, but still well shy of the numbers we’d been hoping for.  Since our student body was very inconsistent and we never knew how many we’d get on any particular day the camp was difficult to plan and run, though we did have some very fun days and the kids seemed to enjoy even this disorganized opportunity to have semi-structured time, and I was glad to try out some new lesson plans with my group of intermediate and advanced students.  One of the best days, though, was the day that the Moroccan staff and kids decided to take us Americans on a walking tour through the medina.  Two of my advanced students decided that they would be my teachers for the day and practiced their English by lecturing me on the history of this and that building and teaching me various Arabic words for different kinds of arts and crafts sold in the old city.

One of Fes's old Synagogues

From the Synagogue roof

This is El-Attarine Medrassa, another religious school like Bou Inania which I visited during CBT

            While walking to the Bou Jeloud gardens for a picnic lunch (remember those from my pictures from CBT?) a man overheard a few of my coworkers talking about Peace Corps and recognized a few acronyms.  He’d just finished his two years of service in Sierra Leone and was going on a post service trip through Morocco and Europe with his sister and was very excited to meet some PCVs and hear about our work in a very different Peace Corps experience.  He’d been an English teacher at the equivalent of a high school in a small town out in the hinterlands.  In some ways I envied his job, as a teacher in a school students had much more accountability to him, his job was a lot more structured and defined than my “agent of development” role here, and, of course, serving in a former British colony he had far less language woes (his primary language was a Creole patois of English and some local native dialects).  On the other hand, he only had Internet access once a month and his “running water” was a complex system of buckets and pulleys set off by a foot pedal that the Peace Corps had given him directions on constructing.  Actually, I was a little jealous of all that too, everyone imagines those kinds of hardships when they submit their Peace Corps application and it can be a surprise disappointment not to get them.  A guess the grass is always greener on the other side of the Sahara.

            After camp was over for the day I divided my time between my host family and the other volunteers.  My host mother’s cooking remained fantastic, and she was a little less adamant that I shouldn’t be in the kitchen to watch her make it.  She even let me fill up my own cups of water, a great leap forward.  I got down to my old favorite hipster café a couple of times and was able to catch up with my friends the metal musicians too, so even if the camp was a little bit of a disappointment it was still a great trip to Fes.

            Once the camp was over I decided to take the long way home to site and swung down to Azilal, a medium-sized town located where the middle Atlas start to turn into the high Atlas, where a few of my friends were working at another camp.  It is also the hometown of one of the LCFs who worked with a CBT in Fes, our teacher and our friend.  Azilal is a place of stunning natural beauty, but its main claim to fame is the nearby Ouzoud waterfall.  As per usual I’ll let the pictures explain. 

A Tamazight Letter, and a popular symbol for the Amizight

At the falls we had a very funny interaction with the LCF that we felt was very typical of our interactions with Moroccans in general.  We saw a man climbing down a goat trail to reach the bottom of the falls.

            “That looks fun,” I said.  “Do you guys want to go down that way?”

            “He is crazy,” replied the LCF, “there is a stairway right on the other side of the waterfall.”

            “Yeah, let’s climb down the cliffs!” said the other Americans.

            “You are crazy.”  The LCF shook his head.  “I will take the stairs and see you at the bottom, Inchahallah.”  At this point using Inchahallah like that doesn’t even strike us as nerve wracking, the way it would have a few months ago.  After hearing, “I’ll see you for tea in five minutes, Inchahallah” a few too many times, the idea that God might not be willing doesn’t cross our minds anymore.  The climb down the cliffs did prove to be a whole lot of fun, the bottom of the waterfall was gorgeous (if slightly terrifying, Moroccan children jump from much too high into much too shallow water), and we drove back to Azilal very contented.

We climbed down that, maybe we are crazy.

            The next day I returned home to my own town (which still doesn’t seem to have quite woken up from Ramadan yet), but I won’t be spending very long here.  This September will be a very busy month of travel for me since I have various trainings all over the country (at one point I will have to come back from one training, spend the night, and leave the following morning to race south before the next training).  At first I was a little annoyed at Peace Corps for planning all these trainings right now, just as school is about to start up and I could finally start doing some valuable work (Inchahallah), but now I realize it’s for the best.  Earlier in the summer and I wouldn’t have known which trainings were most valuable for my community (I’d probably have gone to “Amizight Language Training” rather than “How to run an Environmental Education Club,” and useful as Tamizight would be there’s more interest in my site in me running an Environmental Education club than in my having a second language to use with them), and if I was free now, I’d probably try to start a whole bunch of clubs and classes that students wouldn’t want to attend because they’re right in the first throes of back to school.  Now they’ll have time to settle before I can possibly bombard them with extracurriculars, and it’ll give me something to do for the weeks that they probably wouldn’t have come to my activities anyways.  I’ll keep you posted on my adventures as much as I can, but I might find myself with less time for Internet access than I have had.  With a little bit more direction and training I think the grass will start to look greener this side of the Sahara too, especially since I can use a hose to water it.

P.S. Since writing this post I’ve gone on an amazing hike through the mountains near my site, up to a tiny Amizight village (complete with a minaret and several satellite dishes) and over the ridge to see into the next valley.  To see the spectacular views all you have to do is come visit!