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. |
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| Ouarzazate |
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| The High Atlas over the new city |
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| 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.”
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