Thanksgiving on the Desert’s Edge

Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’ve been here eight months and Thanksgiving is gone and past.  Others it’s hard to believe I’ve only been here eight months and Thanksgiving hasn’t passed twice or even three times.  It seems to vary hour by hour.  But I digress; I’ll get to Thanksgiving in a minute, because first I want to talk about the Tuesday before, my last day in town before travelling south for turkey.

I taught in the cooperative in the morning, as per usual, but there was much more activity than normal.  It turned out that after my class there was going to be a presentation from an organization from Casablanca which teaches women at these rural cooperatives how to use their traditional skills to make non-traditional items (IPod sleeves and the like) which can then be sold to the tourist or even international market.  The woman running this training was a Moroccan, but she had spent 16 years living and working in D.C., Brooklyn, and Manhattan and her heavily Brooklyn accented English was perfect.  She claims that since she went to a French school in Casablanca her English is better than her Arabic at this point, but I wouldn’t have guessed.  Their presentation was great and does something that I really like to see, Moroccans helping Moroccans to develop, which I think is much more useful and successful than the development work that I’m doing.  It also reaffirmed my desire to learn Tamazight, at my table at the obligatory lunch it was all the women would speak, though the woman from Casablanca was just as left out as I was.

The next day I made the long trek down to my friend’s site in the vicinity of Kalaa M’Gouna, a medium sized town close to the important Saharan trading post Ouarzazate (repatriated as a center of Moroccan and international cinema).  Kalaa is famous as a center for roses; they have a big festival every year all about rose products, which must smell amazing.  My friend’s site, however, is a very depressed neighborhood.  With her cement house, often broken waterlines, and breathtaking views she has the closest service I’ve seen to what we all imagined we were signing up for.  The area is absolutely stunning, the entire region is arid, the pre-Sahara it’s sometimes called, and all the towns and cities are built around oases.  It rests between the High Atlas and the anti-Atlas mountain ranges, with stunning views of both.  There is snow on the High Atlas, but palm trees grow on the slopes of the Anti-Atlas.

Is this a cross lingual pun?  It means "biggest" or "greatest" in Arabic.

Ouarzazate

The High Atlas over the new city

Foothills of the Anti- Atlas

Six of us tucked into a very traditional Thanksgiving, complete with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, spinach artichoke dip, hummus (I guess not purely traditional), green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie, all home made.  We also had gravy from a packet and surprisingly tasty cranberry sauce made from repatriated craisons.  Probably one of the tastiest Thanksgivings I’ve ever had just on the strength of the Moroccan produce.

The next day we had way too many leftovers and since my friend had to travel for a training in Rabat no way to eat them all.  We ended up taking them to her host family’s house and sharing a second Thanksgiving meal with them.  Only a few of them were around to eat with us, and they seemed wary of the strange things we served them, but they seemed to like both the hummus and the mashed potatoes.  After the meal they pulled out some drums, then pulled my friend and I up to learn some traditional Tamazight dances while the rest of the group got to laugh at our mistakes.  Before getting ready to all leave to spend the night in Ouarzazate we dropped by the local Dar Chebab, where a group of students had forgotten that my friend wouldn’t be teaching that day.  She and I ended up teaching an impromptu lesson on Thanksgiving, which, though not as good as we could have done if we’d had forewarning, was not a train wreck.  Overall it was one of the most fun days I’ve had in Morocco.

The next day my friends all left from Ouarzazate to go to Rabat for a week long training.  I opted out of this one since I don’t think it’ll be particularly useful in my site and I didn’t want to spend another week away for something people here wouldn’t need.  Instead I took the day to explore Ouarzazate, a picturesque old caravan city now called the Hollywood of Morocco.  Not only are Moroccan films produced here, with easy access to both the mountains and the desert it often appears in American and European movies as well.  The old city is small, but made of stunning adobe work, and the Kasbah was gorgeous, if not as sumptuous as the palaces in Marrakech.  In the old city I ran into a shopkeeper who is from my region.  Since tourism dries up in Ouarzazate in the fall he invited me to tea and we chatted for awhile about Khenifra province and tourism in Morocco.  After a full morning exploring I met up with the local Peace Corps volunteer in a café near her house.  At the table behind me a Moroccan man was speaking German with someone over Skype.  On the wall I noticed something strange, an unusually designed pitcher and mugs (see picture below).  I instantly recognized them as from (or at least based on) Villeroy and Boch’s New Wave collection, designed by my German uncle!  The café owner confirmed that they were a gift from a German friend of his, though he didn’t know their make.

That afternoon I met up with another friend of mine whose site is just outside of the city center.  We ended up playing soccer with the English teachers in her site, most of whom were amazing players, at least to my untrained eyes (and untrained feet, I only saved myself from being a complete liability to my team by foregoing the ball but always covering the other team’s fastest guy so he couldn’t get the ball either).  Since it is a bigger site than mine there are many more English teachers, and talking with local students I found that the level of English was much higher in her site than in my rural mountain town.  The advantages of city living, which is why Morocco is fast becoming more and more urban.  The next day I took the incredibly long bus ride back home, happy with my short vacation.  So far this week lessons have been going very well, and hopefully some of my clubs will start this Saturday or next.  I’m also excited that I have an uninterrupted month in site coming up, no trainings or excursions planned until Christmas, when some of my friends will be coming here.  I hope this means things will finally really start to get running, or at least walking less hesitantly!

As usual I’ll end with a Moroccan joke, but I’m going to break tradition and tell one sans-Joha:

One day a doctor entered a madhouse and saw that each of the patients had a dirham.  Some were throwing them against the wall, others were stomping on them, and still others bit them.  One man was different.  He was slowly rocking the coin back and fourth in his hand.  The doctor walked over to him and asked what he was doing.

“Quiet,” replied the madman, “the king is trying to sleep.”

The Ghostly Beginning of a Routine

            So it’s been awhile since I last wrote, but there really isn’t all that much to write about.  It’s been cold, very cold in fact.  There is snow on the mountains around my town, though none here yet.  I’m told we don’t get much snow in town, if any.  It mainly stays in the surrounding mountains.  It makes them look much more regal, so I don’t mind, but I wish it wasn’t a mile’s hike to enjoy the snow.  Instead it’s just cold.  The problem with cold here is that unlike New England, which is much colder, there is neither insulation nor central heating, so you can never escape the cold (or in Arabic the menacingly named brrd); in fact my house is colder than the outside during the day, though about the same at night.  One lucky weekend—just before Obama’s reelection—it was warm and sunny and a bunch of us volunteers got together and went kayaking on a mountain lake.  It was awesome and beautiful and discombobulating.  I certainly never expected to kayak in Morocco.

            Other than the weekend of sunny kayaking there has been little to break the dreary, rainy days.  I’ve started teaching regularly, and there are moments of that which I really enjoy.  I have an intermediate class which meets once a week, a beginner class which meets twice, beginners at the artisanal cooperative who meet four times, young beginners who meet just once, and, as of yesterday, an advanced class.  Each of these classes is an hour to an hour and a half, depending on the age and level of the students, though any class is about fifteen minutes shorter than publicized since the majority of students are late.  So far classes have been running smoothly—except for young beginners, which, even though the students are all over ten, feels more like day care with an English focus—sometimes even well.  Occasionally hilariously.  For their first lesson the intermediate students requested a lesson on asking for/giving advice, a topic they’re learning in school.  At the end of class I made a series of scenarios in which they had to advise me.  In one where I had guests coming over but no food in the house all the boys said I should take my friends to a restaurant.  Almost all the girls said I should buy food, and then tell them and they would come over and cook, since obviously as a man I couldn’t be expected to cook for a large group.

            In addition to class time I spend time at the Dar Chebab just hanging out with students, time which I hope to convert into clubs now that the first rocky weeks of making a class schedule that actually works have finished (the surveys I talked about a few posts ago did almost nothing for helping me create reasonable schedules).  I’m hoping to start a chess club, a creative writing club, and a journalism club, as per the interests of my students.  That should leave me with a little time when I might try to either give music theory lessons to the few students with musical instruments (no guitars unfortunately, but the two kids with electric keyboards have good enough technique that if I show them some scales, chord types, and how to venture off the white keys I think my inability to play their instrument shouldn’t matter).  Other possible ways of using that time could be a current events club or a series of life skills and employability classes created by previous volunteers.  It will depend on student interests.  Eventually some local counterparts and I also want to get a hiking club/environmental education club up and running too.  Until the clubs start though this has been a time when I sit, chat with students (pretty much all boys in this unstructured time), teach them card games, and, on the rare warm day, Frisbee.  The other day there was one quite strange moment during this time.  We were playing Egyptian Rat Slap (an American card game) and I noticed a boy cheating.  I called him out on it and he asked if I was Muslim.  Thrown and wary I said no.  He then declared I had no right to make a judgment on him cheating.  Before I could make it a teachable moment I quickly had to defend him from the other boys, who shouted down how obviously rude this was.

            My other failure to make a teachable moment came earlier this week when I came home from a short post morning class hike and found a group of boys beating another boy with sticks just around the corner from my house.  I yelled at them to stop, and ran in to snatch their sticks away, but since now they know I won’t hit them I couldn’t scare them into good behavior and they dodged around me.  This gave the boy they’d been hitting a chance to throw in some punches and kicks of his own, so I found myself ineffectively trying to stop both sides of the fight.  I looked to the surrounding adults for help reining in the kids, but none was forthcoming.  Eventually the crying boy got on his scooter and sped away, so I walked home, ignoring the small rocks the other boys were throwing at me.  As many of you know from my Facebook post about it I was very upset at the time, but thanks to your messages of support and advice for ways I might move forward against bullying and adult indifference I think this event might mark a turning point in my service where I find more of a purpose.  Or it might not; I’ll have to see how receptive the community is to it.

            Since I’d hate to end on a downer I’ll tell you a positive story from yesterday.  I was walking towards the cyber so that I could print a couple of things when I heard the unmistakable sound of a live guitar, a sound I miss here whenever I’m not playing one myself.  I backtracked and found an open door where a couple of boys were playing together.  One was using a guitar body with three strings as a drum, while the other played on an unconventionally tuned guitar with just four strings (but still places for six).  As I got closer I realized this was an intentional modification, someone had also ripped out the original fret board and put in a new one where the frets were spaced inconsistently.  Inconsistently, that is, for Western scales, but not for the Tamazight one, with it’s quartertones and mysterious harmonies.  While not as versatile as the “Moroccan guitar” I’d seen in Fes so many months ago this was another clever way of making it possible to play traditional Moroccan music on a western instrument.  It was essentially a loutra grafted onto a guitar body.  The boys played and sang several popular Tamazight songs for me and voiced an interest in coming to English lessons at the Dar Chabab.  In the future they might help me start up a music club too, so it was a lucky day.  Then I went and had stomach and intestine and cous cous at my host family’s house, and for the first time actually enjoyed the taste of those parts of the cow.  Auspicious, I’d say.

            Auspicious, just like one day when Joha walked into at teashop and sat down beside a friend.

            “How are you?” asked the friend.

            “Well, to tell the truth,” said Joha, “I’m a little thirsty and hungry.  I haven’t been able to drink or eat a thing for the past three days.”

            “My dear Joha,” said the friend, “let me buy you some tea and pastries,” and he ordered some.  “You must have been quite ill,” the friend said.  “What was wrong?”

            “Oh, I wasn’t ill,” said Joha.  “I was broke.”

L-Eid Al Adha

            This past weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) was one of the Muslim world’s most important holidays, L-eid al Adha.  This holiday, set in the month of Hijjah, marks the end of the Hajj (Pilgrimage to Mecca), one of the major religious duties of any Muslim who can afford it.  Muslims commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Ismail (notice, not Isaac in the Muslim tradition), his beloved son, and God’s reprieve of a sheep instead.  To celebrate, every family buys a sheep or goat—or several of the above—and slaughters it, cleans it out, and eats it for several days.  They often share with friends and family, and also donate some to the poor, another important element of Islam.  It is an important holiday because, in my mudir’s words, it is the day that everyone, even the very poorest, eats meat, and therefore everyone is, to some extent, equal on that day.

            In Morocco, everyone waits until the king kills his sheep at around 10 AM.  I was with my mudir and his family for the sacrifice, which was done with surprisingly little ceremony—apparently they say a silent prayer just before cutting the sheep’s throat, but since it’s silent all I saw was him killing the sheep.  It was the first time I’ve ever seen an animal killed and butchered, and I was worried I wouldn’t handle it well.  I ended up being just fine, it’s actually quite interesting, and it’s nice to know that I can handle where my meat comes from.  After letting it bleed out and go through it’s death throes they cut off the head, and hang the body neck down to let the blood drain out.  They make a small nick in the back leg and then blow air into the carcass, which apparently makes it easier to separate the skin from the meat.  The skins, my mudir said, will go to the tanneries in Fes to become leather goods—further South they probably go to Marrakech or other regional tanneries.  Then they disembowel the sheep, and on the first day the family eats liver kebabs wrapped in fat, heart, intestine, and something of unknown provenience which many volunteers think is the spleen (none of us know the Arabic word for spleen, or how to explain it).  All of it, except for the intestine, is quite tasty.  Intestine was even alright the way my mudir served it, burnt to a crisp and covered in salt and cumin, but other families ate it in a more rubbery and less becumined way which I didn’t like as much.

            When it came time for my mudir to pray and his wife to start visiting family, I went to my host family’s house, and though I tried to insist I’d just eaten they had me join in their lunch feast.  When naptime hit there I went home, but stopped in on my landlord.  I was only just able to convince him I couldn’t eat another bite of meat, but couldn’t escape without tea and cookies.  He also insisted I come to his house for dinner, and since I’d already made plans to go to my mudir’s again he had a simple solution.  I’d had first lunch with my mudir, so I must have first dinner with my landlord.  We had roasted sheep head, with salt and cumin.  It was quite tasty, but I was never quite sure which part I was eating (I know I politely declined eyeball).  At my mudir’s we had sheep head tagine, with onions, tomato, and chickpeas.  I was later told that this order of meats on the first day—liver and innards in the morning, head for dinner—is actually a Tamazight tradition; Arab families eat all the same things but in a different order.

            The next day I dedicated to my host family, and for lunch had cous cous with sheep meat (the cuts we normally eat in the west), ribs (sheep rib is delicious, though fatty), and meat kebabs.  Yes, all of that for lunch.  L-eid is like a combination of Easter in religious significance and Thanksgiving in food intake, but three days long.  It was my site mate’s last day in town, so after tea at our host family’s house he and I went to my house because our friends wanted to cook him a good-bye dinner.  Although they each brought meat from their families our host family insisted we take some of their meat too.  We ended up cooking a tomato and egg and meat tagine twice over, once in my tagine and once in my frying pan, and still there was meat left over.

            After so much meat the first two days my stomach started to protest—I probably ate more meat then I had for the last month—so for the last day of the holiday I limited my visits to dropping in on people between meals and cooked vegetarian.  Most of the day we spent removing the stuff my site mate left behind.  Although the things I inherited make my house feel much more like a home it was weird waking up as the only American in town, and still is.

            A short post this time—I’m sure tons of you are saying hamdullah (thanks to God)—but an important one.  As promised, I’ll leave you with a new Joha story.  I’ve found a book of them, so it’ll be awhile before I run out!

            There was a man who often asked Joha for advice.  Usually Joha thought the man’s problems were not very important.  One day he came to Joha with this problem: “I have a headache.  What should I do?”

            Joha replied, “I’m not sure, my friend, but I can tell you that recently I had a toothache.  I had the tooth pulled out, and it doesn’t bother me now.”