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!