4/18/10 The Middle of Beautiful Nowhere

It's time.

After 26 months in-country, after 23 months of service, it's time for me to go...which means it's time for me to be replaced.

I'm on the cusp of my Berberville departure, which means Berberville will get a new Environment PCV to carry on my work and begin his own.

My replacement's term of service starts May 5th, which means we'll get 2 weeks of overlap before I swear out on May 19th (inshallah)...but he's here now, getting his "Site Visit", aka sneak peak.

I admit, I was a little apprehensive about my replacement. I knew he'd be male, since I'd insisted on that with my entire staff, all the way up and down the chain of command. But beyond that, I had no idea what to expect. I could anticipate a great person, simply Peace Corps is just about exclusively staffed by amazing human beings, but still...

What if he doesn't like Berberville?

What if my host family doesn't like him?

What if he alienates everyone I care about in town?

I admit, the first concern was probably the biggest. I could be almost positive that he'd be likeable, since, hey, he's a Peace Corps Volunteer. But what if he didn't like the town I've come to love? What if he took one look at my naked mountains and barren hillsides and recoiled?

This fear is well-grounded: my first stories of Berberville came from a CBT/stage friend, who came here on a field trip. She came back to us with stories of "the ugliest place in Morocco". She said something like, "If they put me there, I'll cry. And then I'll ET."

So when I got assigned this site, I thought, Oh, no, I'm going to the ugliest spot in Morocco!

But then I came here.

And I realized that there are many kinds of beauty. And while my friend didn't appreciate the sere beauty of my brown hillsides, I rejoice in the visible geology, with its sweeping folds and tearing faults and the vertical beds that rise like highways to heaven. I've taken hundreds of photos that I hope will be published in geological textbooks - this place is literally textbook geology. I've seen cross-cutting relationships that took my breath away, and complex folds that stir my heart.

Am I a geonerd? Abso-blimmin-lutely.

But I find my site truly, deeply beautiful...and I want others to, too.

The times I've shared my site with visitors, I wait with bated breath to hear them say something gently disparaging, like, "It must have been lovely when trees covered the hillsides," or "Well, at least the skyline is kind of dramatic."

So far, everyone has admitted only to liking it.

Alhumdulillah.

But still, what if my shoes were filled by someone who felt Berberville was a site to endure instead of a place to celebrate?

So his reaction mattered.

As we rode up on our four-hour journey from SouqTown, he kept asking me about the geology.

This encouraged me.

His field is biology, not geology, but he finds it interesting.

I felt hopeful.

When we got to the final 5 km of the trip - the most breathtaking geology I've ever seen (and yes, I've been to the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park and other gorgeous spots) - he let me revel in the beauty. He sounded appropriately appreciative, for which I was grateful. I told him how nervous I'd been that he might not like it.

His response: "Anyone who can come to the middle of beautiful nowhere and not appreciate it shouldn't even be in Peace Corps."

The middle of beautiful nowhere.

150 km from any decent-sized town.

12 hours from any city.

The cultural, historical, and geographical center of Morocco.

The middle of beautiful nowhere.

Oh, and my host family and everyone else? They like him.

Yeah, I'm leaving Berberville in good hands.

Alhumdulillah! :D

3/27/10 Emerald City

My eyes bulged out. My jaw dropped. My breathing quickened. Or maybe slowed. I dunno, but I got lightheaded one way or another.

Everything’s so green. Every field we pass swells with growing wheat, still grass-green. Behind the fields, trees drip with leaves. Bushes fill the gaps between.

After years in my barren mountains, I’m intoxicated by the lushness.

A sign we passed called this place Morocco’s Green City. I wondered if that was an environmental designation, but it seems more likely to reflect the simple fact that this place looks like Frank L. Baum’s Emerald City, without Dorothy’s green glasses. So that’s what I’ll call it: Emerald City, my home for the next week.

1/17/10 Beautiful Berberville

Walking back from my host family's house, I looked at the alpenglow tinting the mountains dusky rose and thought, "Wow, I live in a beautiful place."

It's easier to appreciate now, in the winter, when barren hillsides are to be expected. Mid-summer, when the only thing green is the irrigated fields, it's easier to mourn the brown hillsides and naked slopes.

But a few days after a snowfall, when the intense sunlight has melted moire patterns onto the mountainsides, I look unto the hills and my heart catches with a glow of pure aesthetic joy.

I didn't have my camera with me, but here's a picture I took last year that captures it:



And since my internet connection is behaving, I'll upload some more. Here are some pictures I took at sunset, a few days later, from my roof:



Here's the same hillside from the first picture, taken about a year after the shot above (funny how some things don't change):

That's my view to the south. Looking east, I see this:

...and looking west, I see this:

Yes, that's the same mountain range you saw in the shot a few pictures above. This was just four minutes later, and already most of the blue is gone from the sky, but the colors on the clouds are even more intense...

Yeah, my site is beautiful. :D

9/15/09 Word of the Day: Abrid

Abrid translates best as path, and works both literally and metaphorically (as path does in English). Most newbie Tam speakers are taught that it means road, which it does, but it means so much more than that.

If someone asks, “Is tsnt l-abrid?” – Do you know the path? – they mean, do you know how to get to/from here?

“Ida abrid-ns” – He went his path – means he left his wife. “Tda abrid-ns” is the equivalent – she left her husband.

The plural - “Ida ibrdan-ns” – He went his paths – means he hit the road. Left. Done gone. It can also be used as a command: “Du ibrdansh!” – Go your own roads – Get out of here!

The last week or two, I’ve heard the word most commonly in the phrase, “Ibbi l-abrid.” The path is cut. In American English, we’d say, “The road is closed.” Interestingly, though they don’t use closed when the road is impassable, they do use open – anf – when the obstacle/flood/landslide/meters of snow are removed and the road is again available to use.

Lately, the roads have been closed – cut – due to flooding. As discussed before, the heavy rains have raised the rivers, and since the roads generally follow the rivers – in mountains as steep as these, river-cut valley floors are really the only places you could put a road – the roads are frequently buried under flooding water.

Places where the river twists but the road goes straight, or vice versa, are the most easily flooded. The bridges are never built very high, so rising water pours across them with little provocation.

The lowest of these bridges is only half an hour outside of Souqtown, which means that my road home gets cut off pretty regularly in inclement weather. I intended to come into Souqtown yesterday, but couldn’t, because the road had been cut (ibbi) early in the day, so no Souqtown transits drove up to Berberville, which meant that I had no way to go down from Berberville back (on their return loop). Then the rain stopped, the floodwaters receded, and the road reopened, but too late for me to have a ride down. So I came down on the earliest transit today, leaving at 4:30am (just after the dawn call to prayer). We made it through, but the driver slowed many, many times, cautiously inching the oversized van across slurries of mud, rubble, and larger stones. Once, we scraped the undercarriage of the transit on some flood-deposited boulders. The shallow bridge, right outside Souqtown, was underwater. Floodwaters poured across it, rushing and splashing, but we pushed over the 3-4 inches of water safely, and made it into town, lhumdullah.

It rained again today, though, so imkin l-abrid ad-ibbi eska – the road might be closed tomorrow. Tomorrow is the first day of our Project Design and Management Workshop; I hope our workshop attendees will be able to make it down the mountain…

8/30/09 Snapshot: Giralda Tower in Seville

Journal entry from the foot of Giralda Tower:

Sitting on the edge of an enormous fountain at the foot of the Cathedral's massive tower. The Tower that used to be a minaret, when this biggest cathedral in the world was one of the biggest mosques in the world. (The biggest mosque? Then? Now? I wonder...)

Bought this tiny journal for 3 Euros in a Cathedral gift shop, both because I liked it and because I was hungry to do exactly this: sit on the street and write.

Looking at this mosque-turned-cathedral, I see now that you can't possibly understand southern Spain without understanding Morocco. But vice-versa? And how many other examples of crossfertilization speckle the European/NorthAfrican/MiddleEastern landscape?

For that matter, when did this building get its flying buttresses? Who gets the credit for that stroke of engineering genius?

Closer to the tower - just meters from its base - wait five horse-drawn carriages. Quaint, picturesque...and saddening, as I watch the horses stomp and stretch and shake and shudder and generally chafe against their blindered, harnessed, immobile parade rest.

...while above them soar stones who have rested for centuries. Think of that - this jam3/Cathedral draws close to its millenial anniversary. It was old when knights were young.

Sultry, rich, muffled *DONG*s clang out 8pm. Now a higher-toned bell from another tower. Now a tenor submits his entry to the timekeeping competition.

The sun edges towards the horizon, already so low that the cathedral's shadow covers the courtyard, and the western wall of the building behind me glows golden in the rich light.

[Slightly later]

I found a photo book about Seville. I successfully resisted buying it - though it tempted me - but I scanned it and want to record some relevant information: This Giralda tower is sister to the Koutubia in Marrakesh and the Hassan in Rabat (quoth the book, but I wonder if it meant the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca?). Also, the curtain wall I noticed near one corner of the cathedral? One of the last remaining bits of Muslim architecture in the city; it belonged to the palace of a Moorish potentate. The posted sign calls it the oldest royal building still in use in Europe.

I'm now sitting on the steps of one of the cathedral's many corners - no longer at the Courtyard of the Virgin di Reyes - listening to an Irish harper and watching the crowds. A clock just struck 8:45. Since my watch broke months ago, and my cell phone is dead, I have no timepiece of my own, but depend on clocktowers to ring out the time...much as people have done in European cities for centuries.

I wonder how many of the passersby are tourists, and how many are residents?

I'm repeatedly struck by Seville's myriad architectural styles...
...and fashion paradigms
...and ages, languages, clusterings, strides, etc, of the people on the street.

The tapas restaurant across the street is starting to fill. Time to eat.

8/14/09 Breezy bliss

Preface:

I slept on my roof last night, watching the meteor shower for the third night in a row, under two blankets. Both were doubled over; I burrito'd myself in the lower blanket, wrapping myself entirely, and left both folded layers of the upper one draped over me. That's three layers of blanket pressing down on me...and when I woke up, just as dawn brightened the sky but before the sun breached the eastern mountain, I found myself curling up against the chill, unconsciously trying to warm my icy toes.

In August.

I love coming home.

I love that final stretch of the four-hour transit ride when I know that I'm finally almost there.

No matter how engrossing my book or how deeply I'm in my eye-glazed reverie, I always know when I'm near home - because of the way the air changes.

About 20 kilometers from Berberville, we drive through a narrow pass that serves as the local Continental Divide. That is, to the west (where Berberville is), all the water drains down towards the Atlantic, but to the east (where Souqtown is), everything runs southeast until it evaporates into the Sahara.

The pass marks a microclimate as well as a drainage boundary. Berberville gets rain or snow every few days throughout the year. Some weeks we'll have a storm every afternoon, other weeks might be bone-dry, but on average, we get precipitation every 3-4 days.

That changes at the pass.

My lake is so flooded right now that the road past it - which sits a good meter or so above the usual shoreline - is about a meter underwater. No one I've asked has ever seen the water this high. In a friend's village, only 20km on the other side of the pass, the water table is so low that the water pressure is failing. He lives in a second-story apartment and can't get water most of the day, while his first-story neighbor has water 24 hours.

...but I digress.

When I ride through the pass, after three and a half hours of hot, crowded, awkward travel, I abruptly trade the heavy, sticky air of the lowlands for my clean mountain breezes. The air pushing through the windows changes in character. It suddenly screams cold in a way that fast-moving hot air simply can't.

I've tried to figure out how to describe the chill promise in the air, the taste of snow it never loses, the beneficent touch of mountain grace that means home... The best I can do is compare it to car trips on hot days in the US. I usually avoid using the A/C, to spare the engine and the environment, but sometimes I just have to hit the button. The shift from cooled air blowing through the fans to air-conditioned air blowing on me....that's the change I mean. With chemically-cooled air conditioning, I always think of the liquid freon, and let the liquid cool pour over me. When I cross the pass into my high valley, I don't feel a liquid chill, I feel the hint of solid crystalline snow, the reminder that just because my mountains lost their last snowfields in June doesn't mean it's gone for long. The air tastes like it skimmed over a glacier and flirted with a blizzard before dancing down to me.

Come wintertime, I may regret living in the coldest site in Morocco, but right now, hearing friends talk about chapstick melting in their pockets and pouring bottles of water on themselves to try to sleep and feeling too hot to move most of the time...right now, I love every snow-laden promise in the air, every reminder that my aerie paradise is immune to the Sahara's reach.

June 25, 2009 Birding in Morocco

Morocco gets plenty of visitors from Europe and the US, but not enough birdwatchers. This means that there’s pitifully little information available to birders in Morocco. One of the best resources is Bird Guide: The Most Complete Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, published by Harper Collins. It has a pro-Britain bias, so includes statements like “This bird is only a summer visitor here, but winters in Spain and Africa,” but even so, its maps – available for *every* bird in the book – include the entire Mediterranean rim, including all of North Africa.

That one pairs well with Birding in Morocco, which is not meant to be a field guide. It cuts Morocco into a few dozen regions and tells you what to look for in each region. There are a handful of maps to the more remote sites, but is mostly useful for the lists of birds you can expect to see in each area. Partnered with the Bird Guide mentioned above, you can actually figure out what you’re seeing.

That said, neither book is 100% accurate. It’s not really their fault; Morocco is a big country – the size of California – and has dozens or hundreds of different microclimates and micro-ecosystems. This means that we have birds that haven’t yet been noticed by the nice folks writing the books. So if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has webbed feet, don’t worry if the map says that it’s never found south of France. :)

My dad is a devoted birder who has several hundred birds on his “life list”. I’m a tagalong birder; when I’m with him, I’ll do the field guide thing and have a fair eye for diagnostic details, but when I’m on my own, I tend not to pay too much attention to our flapping feathered friends.

But in just a few days with the family, I saw dozens of species of birds that I’ve either never seen before or just never noticed before.

Even the most bird-blind visitor to Morocco can’t help but notice the enormous storks (some say “cranes”) atop nearly every mosque in the country. These gigantic birds nest on the highest thing around and ride thermals on sunny afternoons, meaning that they’re nearly always visible, and always striking in their glossy black and radiantly white plumage.

But it turns out that they’re not the only black-and-white birds in my skies. There’s also a tuxedo-colored bird of prey, known in French as a beuze (spelled phonetically) or busard according to my French-English dictionary. Then there are the Eurasian Coots, which are all black except for a streak of white down their faces, and Black-winged Stilts, which look like skinny penguins teetering on stilts, just to name two more.

And colored birds? Ooooh, boy. There’s the blindingly yellow Golden Oriole, the radiant turquoise-and-rust Roller, the rust-bellied Moussier’s Redstart, and the multi-hued Eurasian Chaffinch (North African race) - not to be confused with the Blue Chaffinch, which is, yes, mostly blue.

In a day spent in the Ifrane National Park, visiting four lakes – Dayet Aoua, Dayet Hichlef, Dayet Ifrah, and Agoulmem Afenourir – we saw countless birds. Hundreds for sure. Probably thousands. The other species we’ve so far identified include…

(Eurasian) Common Kestrel

Lesser Kestrel (I spotted this one!)

Cattle Egret (these fill trees in Azrou, near the bus station, and are found *everywhere* up here)

Great Crested Grebe (a truly gorgeous duck-like creature)

Turtle Dove

Ruddy Shellduck (striking black and white wings while flying, but the wings vanish when it sits on a lake; then, you just notice the rusty neck)

Eagle (probably the Booted Eagle, but we’re not sure)

Alpine Swift

Coal Tit

Mistle Thrush

Willow Warbler

Black Kite

Red Kite

Little Grebe

Eurasian Coot

Red-knobbed Coot (incredibly rare – nests only in these lakes!!)

Black-eared Wheatear

Black-billed Magpie

Barbary Partridge

We saw more, but couldn’t ID them in the field. Dad snapped pictures, though, so we may work them out later. Stay tuned…

4/16/09 My Brush with Algerian Prison

At some point, and I'm not going to say when, I drifted close to the Moroccan-Algerian border. I was with a group of ... people ... and we were all excited to see it.

I saw the barriers and the guards and the flags, and it all seemed mighty photogenic to this shutterbug. I reached for my camera, but fortunately I was reminded that it's a federal offense to photograph government installations, whether they be office buildings or dams or border crossings. I put my camera away.

Shortly thereafter, as we were heading away from the border, an honest-to-goodness stretch limo drove past me. I didn't know those *existed* in Morocco, so I snapped a couple shots of it. (Like I said, shutterbug.)
A minute or two later, Algerian police stopped us. As they approached, a brown-skinned American who is often mistaken for Moroccan quickly said, in English, in his down-home-iest Midwest American accent, "Hi, there, can I help you with anything?"

They brushed past him and looked around for blond heads. There were two of us, and we were urgently ushered over to them. "Did you just visit the border?" one demanded in French and then English.

"Yes..." I let my voice trail off.

"Did you take pictures of the border?" he barked.

"What?" I asked, feeling the blood drain from my face.

"Pictures. Of the border. Do you have any?"

"I took pictures of the limousine," I stammered. I have no idea if I spoke French or English. Probably English, but I really don't remember. For that matter, I don't remember which language he was speaking. The sudden interrogation left me a little shaken.

"Where's your camera?"

I pulled it out of my shoulder bag ('cause really, when is my camera *not* in arm's reach?) and handed it to him.

"Your pictures?" he barked again.

With shaking hands, I turned the camera on and flipped it to the display setting. A shot of the limo, receding into the distance, appeared.

"The next one?" he demanded.

I obediently hit the button to show the previous picture: a closer shot of the limo (the one shown above).

"I'd never seen one in Morocco before," I stammered, but he waved away my explanation.

"You didn't take pictures at the border crossing?" he demanded a final time.

I shook my head, wide-eyed and chalk-white.

He growled something to his associate, and they both strode off.

Shaken, my blond friend and I continued on our way, away from the border. Far, far away from the border.

Note to self: Don't irritate border guards.

The prisons here - in both Morocco and Algeria - are scary, scary places. I'd probably just be deported, not actually jailed, but we don't want to test that theory, now do we?

No, no we don't.

4/15/09 Weather update

In reviewing old posts, I noticed that I spent a lot of time this winter talking about the snow, the cold, more snow, more cold, etc. So now that the weather is gorgeous, y'all deserve an update. :) The picture is from Spring Camp, on a day when the near-sea-level air was heavy with gorgeous clouds. As a quick aside: I found an unexpected benefit in dropping from my mountain aerie down to sea level (ish) in a single day. The heavy, oxygen-drenched air was so thick that I could feel my lungs exerting themselves to breathe it, but the flood of oxygen felt nearly euphoric. I could run further, fly up and down flights of stairs, and generally revel in air that felt thick enough to swim in. How ironic that I had to drop low to feel high. ;)

Up here on my mountaintop, we've been getting a few sprinkles some afternoons, but no serious precipitation for a few weeks. Instead, each morning dawns blue and clear, then the day warms steadily, till a glorious sunset brings chilly evening air, the stars glitter over a cold village, and then the cycle repeats. It has been very windy, which is the only thing keeping me from spending all day every day out enjoying the glorious days.

The thin, dry mountain air up here at 2100m can't trap the heat the way humid, heavy, sea-level air can. This means that it's always warm in the sun and chilly in the shade. You feel a cloud passing in front of the sun even before your eyes register the darkening. The cool air and warm sun combine to make me feel hot and cold at the same time, in a way that always reminds me of ski trips I took as a kid: I'd sweat because of the ski parka and the exertion, but the air would still feel cold against my face and any exposed skin.

When I went to bed last night, around 10 or 11, the outside air temperature was 43 and the inside temperature was 52. In the fall, 52 would have felt chilly. Now it feels comfortable. I guess I'm adjusting to more than just the language and culture. :)

Happy Spring, everybody!

3/25/09 Picture Page - Lake at Dawn

About a week and a half ago, the Morocco Country Director and I took a walk out to my lovely lake. We left not long after dawn, and watched golden light pour down the sides of the mountains we walked past.

We got to the lake in about an hour. (It's a 5k walk, all up a gradual incline.) No one was up when we left town, and I got to enjoy the sight of my mountain village in its silent, slumbering calm. We weren't quite the only ones awake - we did pass a shepherd and his sheep as we walked, plus a bouncy shepherd puppy decided to herd us. It ran eager laps around us the whole way up and back, delightedly urging us on.

Out at the lake, it felt like we had the whole world to ourselves. Even the coots (black and white ducks) that live on the lake were still nestled in their nests. I couldn't resist the appeal of the water's mirror-like stillness, so I shot several pictures of my mountains and their reflections. This one looks almost due east. You can see that the sun has risen over the horizon, but it hasn't yet breached the mountains - my horizon - so we're left with the pearly pink light of the earliest morning.

3/20/09 Berberville's Highways and Byways

I've mentioned before that Berberville has two (and only two) paved roads. Neither has a name, that I'm aware of, though there may be one on a map somewhere. It's just the Road To Souqtown (or the Road To [Insert name of village between here and Souqtown]) and the Road To That One Village North Of Us.

Everything else is known as a znqt, or alleyway.

In the nine months I've lived in Berberville, it's been interesting to observe how these different roadways are used. Probably 80% of the income-generating enterprises (hotels, cafes, shops) and of the government buildings are on one of the two paved roads. But about 95% of the citizens live on a znqt.

I happen to live on the Road To SouqTown. I have exactly one neighbor, my uncle the moqaddim, though I can see many families' houses from my roof - they live in other directions, or are set one building back from the road.

I've always taken the paved roads when walking through town. They're wide, smooth, amenable to brisk walking (I still walk like a New Yorker), and filled with people I say hi to. Plus, the 10 streetlights that Berberville can lay claim to are nearly all along these streets, so when I'm walking home from dinner at my host family's house or my sitemate's house, I use my LED flashlight much less. The only time I took the znqts were when I was walking with my host mom. Since she rarely goes out - we went to the hammam a couple times, and she walked me home from her house maybe twice, but those are the only times we've crossed town together - I didn't think much about the fact that she stuck to the back paths.

I never really thought about my habit of using the paved streets until the night of my cousin's wedding. A group of ladies walked me home around 1am, not because the party was over, but because I kept dozing off. :)

None of us were carrying a flashlight, so I tried to get the group to walk along the lighted street...to no avail. I talked about the lighting, the unevenness of the dirt path, the safety of avoiding dark alleys in the middle of the night...nothing. So I stumbled over rocks and hillocks until we got to the intersection with the main road that's just a few steps from my front door, and there they left me.

That was the first time I realized just how dedicated the women and girls of Berberville are to avoiding the main streets.

There are some who will stride along the pavement, wrapped in their sheets and shawls and capes, but the majority - the vast majority - stick to the znqts.

I know many reasons: avoiding the crowds at The Intersection, aka Downtown Berberville; avoiding the stares of the men who loiter in the cafes lining the streets; staying out of traffic (of every variety - trucks, bikes, mules - though mules and sheep take both the paved streets and the back ways); plus, the znqt paths are often shortcuts.

But I stuck to the main roads, mostly out of habit. I'd also gotten slightly lost, the few times I'd tried some of the back paths. OK, true, you can't get too lost in a village this small, but I did end up at a dead end and have to back track a few dozen yards. :)

I've lately begun to rethink my habits. There has been an uptick in the level of violent crime in my formerly sleepy village, and suddenly it makes more sense to stay out of the main roads - out of the sight of the loitering and shopping and coffee-drinking men.

Plus, these paths really are shortcuts, once you learn them. Or so I tell myself whenever I step off the pavement to slip down a znqt...

3/17/09 Worktastic Monday

6:00am Alarm goes off.

6:10am Alarm goes off again. Get up and dressed.

6:30am Meet CD for sunrise tour of Berberville, featuring a walk to the lake (10 km roundtrip). Discuss parenting strategies, puppies, gender relations in Morocco, Peace Corps policies and the enforcement thereof, the peach juice incident, homosexuality in Morocco, Volunteer attitudes towards Peace Corps staff, Morocco's differing types of natural beauty, Berberville's geological wonders, and Crazy Dancing Man.

8:45am Share breakfast with CD, Fatima, and her host parents.

9:15am Run up the mountain to my host family's house, to make sure Ama is prepared to host lunch with CD.

9:20am Promise to acquire half kilo of chicken for said lunch.

9:30am Discover that there is no chicken for sale anywhere in Berberville. The butcher truck hasn't arrived yet from the nearest larg-ish town.

9:34am Try to call Ama to ask for her second-choice meat. Call doesn't go through.

9:40am Buy half kilo of the leg hanging from the butcher's hook. Might be sheep. Might be goat. Rbi daysin.

9:50am Deliver meat to Ama, with apologies for its obvious non-chicken-ness.

10:00am Rejoin Fatima and CD. Continue discussion of Peace Corps programs, policies, etc.

11:00am Walk down to college campus (2 km) to (1) show the CD our murals, and (2) talk to the mudir abour our plan to plant a couple hundred trees on his campus.

12:00pm Walk to my host family's house (2 km) for lunch.

12:15pm Stop in at the weaving cooperative, so Fatima can show the CD what she does.

12:25pm Run into two French teachers from the school. I explain our tree-planting plans and ask them for various kinds of support - all in French. CD looks on while Fatima explains why Morocco PCVs need to know either French or Darija.

12:30pm Stop at the hanut, where CD buys host presents for the folks feeding and housing him.

12:35pm Say hi to the moqaddim, my uncle.

12:45pm Finally make it to my host family's house. Eat a fabulous lunch prepared by the bestest host mother ever.

1:45pm Walk to a cafe to wait for the tranzit which will take the CD to his next PCVs.

1:50pm CD takes a phone call; Fatima goes to the post office to check on our mail.

2:10pm Arrive at the cafe. Drink cocoa.

2:30pm Say goodbye to CD. Promise to keep him updated on thoughts about PC and how our tree-planting works out.

2:35pm Walk to Caid's office. He's still at lunch/siesta, so sit and wait. Text friends about tree-planting. Discover that virtually all of them have decided to do tree plantings, too, so they can't come help with ours. Curse you, Arbor Day! (Kidding. Of course it's a *fantastic* thing that so many trees will be planted across the province. But it's also, y'know, inconvenient.)

3:30pm Meet with Caid. Explain tree-planting, source of trees, plan for planting, sites for planting, community partners, goals, long-term maintenance, logistics, and about 75 other things. The Caid speaks Arabic and French, so this entire conversation is in high-speed French. Then he remembers that a few weeks ago, we came to meet with him, didn't find him, and left a plan of action for February and March. (I'd written it in English and French, then sent it to Peace Corps, where smart people who took all of their college courses in French fixed up my phrasings, idioms, and word choices. This revamped document was the one we'd left for the Caid.) So he takes out this document, reads through it, and asks us about the status of each action item. In French. Then he explains that, given the king's imminent trip to Berberville (rescheduled from December to, inshallah, April), and the king's commitment to environmental protection, this tree-planting is a key piece of the Berberville Improvement Plan. To underscore the importance of the king's visit, he shares with us the budget that he hopes the king will approve and fund, for Berberville's Capital-I-Improvement. The dollar (OK, dirham) figures make my eyes bulge out and my head spin. At this point, I start translating everything for Fatima. I'd been leaving her out of the conversation, since everything the Caid and I were discussing was stuff that she and I had talked about beforehand, and at length. But this stuff was (1) news to both of us and (2) requiring some serious processing, and translating bought me some time. We wrap up the conversation with him reiterating his support for our tree-planting and saying that we should let him know if we need anything. My head whirling from the highspeed French and higher-speed translations (for the final 10 minutes), I follow Fatima out of the Caidat. Somewhere in the course of the conversation, he decided to call my counterpart and request an extra 500 trees for government properties. Of which he's added a few to our planting-sites-list.

4:15pm Head to meet Fatima's host dad (FHD), who has asked us to visit his preschool and decide where to place his share of the trees.

4:20pm Apologize profusely for being late. (We were supposed to meet him at 4.) FHD, Fatima, and I start to walk to the preschool.

4:23pm My phone flashes CAID OF BERBERVILLE. I blink, then answer it. He's saying that he's contacted the head of the Berberville PTA, who he promised would help us with digging the holes and planting the trees. (This was the "community partners" part of the conversation.) Mr. PTA is waiting for us across town. I explain this to Fatima in English, then try to explain it to FHD in Tam, but it comes out in French. Fortunately, he speaks French - better than I do - so he understands, and accompanies us to meet with Mr. PTA.

4:25pm Meet with Mr. PTA. He says that his group will only help out at the mdrasa, one of the now-four? five? sites where we'll plant over a hundred trees. We thank him for this much help, but continue to hope that some of the parents will choose to help us at the nearby Caidat or Commune building (the latest addition to our list of worksites). Mr. PTA also mentions that the Commune owns a large number of shovels and pickaxes, and offers a few more useful suggestions and pointers. This meeting takes place in a blend of Tam, French, and English - all languages that Mr. PTA speaks fluently, and all of which are crowding each other in my head.

4:35pm Return to the preschool for our 4:00 meeting. FHD knows exactly where he wants the trees, insists he will dig all the holes himself, on his day off, and is generally just fantastic.

4:45pm I make Fatima promise that I don't have to speak anything but English for the rest of the day.

4:46pm We decide to stop at the gendarmarie, in hopes of meeting with the police chief (who we've been missing for the past couple of days). He's not there, we discover through a mix of Tam, French, and Arabic.

4:50pm Walking home, we pass some Tam-speaking Berberville colleagues. Walking up to them, I mutter to Fatima, "You have to do all the talking." She agrees, but of course, I run through all the (Arabic) greeting phrases, and then we all chat for a minute, in Tam. We turn down repeated invitations for tea, coffee, or beer. (BEER?!? Yes. He was trying to be funny. Or else to imply that we're prostitutes. With this guy, you never can tell.)

4:55pm We run into my cousin and Fatima's colleague. (Both female.) We hug, kiss, chat (in Tam, of course). My baby cousin Layla is there, too, so I pick her up and get a baby kiss - the perfect antidote to linguistic meltdown.

5:00pm Only 11 hours later, I'm back home. Fatima gives me a few minutes to decompress (I make cocoa and eat chocolate chip cookies), then we sit down and plan out our To-Do list for the next couple of days. It's long. Actually, our list for tomorrow morning is about as long as our list for today.

6:00pm Fatima goes home. I go online and start writing this. I also check emails, translate some French engineer-ese for a friend, identify potential funding sources for this and future projects, chat about plans for a science club at the upcoming English Language Immersion Camp, write a few emails, console an overwrought friend, and read today's comics. Three and a half hours later, I'm done. (So done.)

Just another Day in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer. A *good* day. :)

3/14/09 The Moroccan Flag

Behold the flag of Morocco. I find it truly beautiful, its crisp red swath cutting the crystalline blue of the mountain and desert skies. The design in the middle is a green, five-pointed star.

These stunning flags are visible at every school, post office, commune building (a local legislature), caid's office, courthouse, or other government building. Plus, when the king was rumored to be visiting - those rumors have returned, by the way, with the date revised to April, now - these flags were *everywhere*. Red and green banners hung from windows, draped across awnings, fluttered along roadways. The 140 km road from SouqTown to Berberville was peppered with flags, usually clustered in groups of three, fanning outwards like a sign-language W.

This particular flag was in front of the ... you know what? I'll leave it vague. Photographing public buildings is a crime, and while I genuinely doubt that extends to their patriotic decorations, it just might. Suffice to say, I shot the picture looking up the flagpole, because I loved the way the red looked against the shimmering blue sky.

3/13/09 Picture Pages

I know I haven't posted in days, and I'm sorry! I'm posting a lot of material today, so be sure to check the links over ----> there if you don't want to miss anything. :)

My laptop screensaver is set to display random pictures. I've taken so many here in Morocco - a couple thousand! - and shared so few of them with y'all, and I want to change that. My hope is to post a picture nearly every day from here on out, and I thought I'd get started with a whole bunch, today. :)

First, a caption for the two pictures you see all the time - the sunset shot next to the blurb about me, and the alpenglow picture above.

The above picture was taken on December 20th, 2008, after a long walk through Berberville and surrounding communities, shared with some of my Peace Corps buddies. (They'd come up to help out with the school club we're working on.) We walked several miles, over the course of several hours, and were coming back only because the sun was sinking behind the mountains. As we walked, "Brahim" and I both noticed what looked like a hawk in a tree up ahead. I shot some pictures, then when we got abreast of it, I shot a few more. I blew them up as big as I could on my camera viewscreen, but couldn't identify anything beyond "bird of prey". Sigh. Only after I got back home and uploaded the pictures did I realize I'd captured my gorgeous Berberville mountains and the alpenglow of twilight. :)

The one to the right was taken a year ago, on 3/19/08, in my CBT village, far south of here. Down there, nearly every building is tipped with crenelated corners that make everything look like a castle. The silhouetted building is a tourist hotel (the only one in the village), so it's trying extra-hard to be photogenic and lovely...and against that flaring sunset, it indeed was.

Here are a couple more shots:
This was taken during that same December walk. We climbed up to the remnants of an old fortress. It's one of my favorite parts of the Berberville skyline, and I'd never gone up, so I asked the guys if they'd mind a detour. The ruins are, well, ruin-y, but I love the patterns of the stonework and wish I had some idea just how old they are, and what they were built for. This was a whoopsie-shot - I didn't mean to let the sun flare into the image - but I decided I liked the effect after all.


This is one of my favorite pictures from our trip to Merzouga. It shows "Brahim", who quarterbacked all through school, and "Lahcen", his willing foil, and the football that encouraged us all to run around and have crazy-fun on the goldensand dunes of Erg Chebi. We all took turns throwing and catching it, with varying degrees of success. One especially fun game put Brahim down at the bottom of a dune, and the rest of us up on top, probably 50 feet above him, up a steeply pitched slope; he'd heft the ball up to us, and then we'd throw it back down to him. Gravity was working for us and against him, which meant that we had a closer-to-evenly-matched game of catch. Talk about your uneven playing field... :)

This is my friend Natalie, at her recent (2/28/09) birthday party. Notice the one chubby candle in the cake. Birthday candles either don't exist in Morocco or just aren't easily found, so we do what PCVs always do: improvise. Our friend Tori made the cake, complete with honest-to-goodness *Betty*Crocker*icing* from America. (Insert happy sigh.) The strawberries were a special touch for me; they aren't ripe in my region yet, so these were the first strawberries I'd had in ... just about a year.

That's all for now...more pictur-iffic posts coming soon, I promise. :)

1/29 25 Random Things About Berberville, Part I

There's a meme going around, where people post 25 factoids/hobbies/whatever about themselves. I thought I'd post one for my village. :) Also, since I haven't had access to blogspot in over a week - the posts have been emailed to a friend, who's been putting them up for me - I wanted to get back into the swing with a nice, newsy, informative post. :) I'll try to mix the formal factoids with more flavorful stuff.

1. We have a sbitar, a hospital/clinic. It provides a safe and clean place to take care of birthing mothers, minor injuries, and run-of-the-mill illnesses. The staff includes a doctor and several nurses, who rotate in and out over time.

2. We're famous for our lakes. So much so that to elaborate would be to erase the anonymity with which I've shielded Berberville thus far. But trust me, they're awesome.

3. Berberville is quite possibly the coldest site that Peace Corps uses. I'm not positive this is true, but I haven't found anyone else who's had ice indoors, let alone repeatedly. Of course, that's also because most people in cold sites live in mud houses, which don't get as cold as cement houses do. I'm thinking of upgrading my thermometer to one that can track temperature over time, so as to create a climatological record for Berberville. "Bloody cold" isn't very precise, after all. :)

4. The Caid for the region lives here. A caid is an executive-branch official, outranking the moqaddim, which every village (or three) has, but reporting the the governor, who's responsible for the whole province. Our caidat, the fancy building where he works, perches on top of the hill south of downtown.

5. Most Berbervill-ians live in the valley or on the mountain north of downtown. My host family is in the latter group, in a house as remote from downtown as they could arrange. Ama and Baba had been living right on the main street, and Ama worried about having young children in such a high-traffic area. Now, they're in a house perched halfway up the mountain, at almost exactly the same elevation as the caidat. If Batman shot one of his grappling hooks from the window in my old bedroom to the Caid's office, he could sail across the entire village. :)

6. Berberville has several outlying douars, or suburbs (more or less). These tiny villages - is there a word for something smaller than a village? Maybe "hamlet"? - OK, these hamlets contain only houses, so their residents come to Berberville for all their needs.

7. We have a courthouse, complete with a judge, to attend to the legal needs of the region. I don't know what sorts of cases usually come before the court, but I do know that my Xalti got a ruling forcing her ex-husband to pay her alimony and child support, under the mudawana, the family law code, also known as the new protections for women's rights.

8. We have many cafes, restaurants, hotels, and shops, because of the tourist trade. I only patronize them when other Volunteers are with me. It's Hshuma - shameful, inappropriate - for a woman to go to a cafe or a restaurant in general. People mostly exempt me from that, because of my tarumit - foreign girl - status. But since I live and work here, I try never to play the tarumit card.

9. Why do we get so many tourists? Because of our lakes, a major ecotourist destination, and our festival. We hold a major festival every summer, like many of the larger Moroccan cities do. I don't know if any other villages our size hold a festival, but they might.

10. Berberville hosts the gendararie for the region. This houses the gendarmes, the rural police. (Urban police are called bolis.) Both words come from the French. They colonized Morocco briefly, and held a heavy presence for a much longer span, before being thrown out about half a century ago.

11. You can see the French influence everywhere, in the school calendar, the structures of the ministries, and most obviously in language: it is taught in school from 3rd grade onwards. Throughout primary school and up until the end of secondary school, half the classes are conducted in French, half in Arabic. When you hit the tertiary level, at one of the universities, all of the courses are in French, and French expatriates fill the faculties.

12. Berberville has a large and lovely mosque, located right next to the souq. The call to prayer rings out from its minaret five times a day.

13. Souq? Yes, I said souq. Though I take the trip to "SouqTown" every week or so to pick up supplies, Berberville does, in fact, host its own souq. This is a cross between a farmer's market, a flea market, and a mall. Souq happens every Friday and Saturday in the center of town, and in fact probably defines downtown. The word souq means both the markets themselves and the place where the markets take place - I'll try not to be confusing, but that's what happens with versatile languages like Berber and Arabic. For that matter, souq also means "I bought", but I promise not to use it with that definition!

14. Because Berberville nestles into a valley, surrounded by mountains on all sides, flat land commands a premium. Farmers cultivate all of the flat land along the rivers (we have two), and the buildings take the steeper areas.

15. In order to create a "market square", as Americans or Brits might call it, they terraced the lower, shallower slopes of the mountain. Souq has three tiers (terraces). At the bottom, closest to downtown, you find the dry goods, spices, and kitchenwares. On the middle level, clothing vendors set up shop, selling imports, second hand clothes, and anything else conceivable. Leather jackets? North Face parkas? Bathrobes designed to be worn as outerwear? I've seen them all. Selection changes week to week, though, so stay alert. The top level holds the food. It remains half-full all week long, lhumdullah, so I always have a selection of produce available to me. But on souq day, it fills to overflowing with grains, more produce, chickens, etc. There's an additional level, yet higher up the mountain, behind the courthouse (which overlooks the food court, you might say). It holds Live Animal Souq. If you want to buy a sheep, goat, or (rarely) a mule, this is where you come.

More to follow...

1/23 Dashing Through the Snow...

...I wasn't in a one-horse open sleigh, but sometimes if I wonder if the tranzits have more than one cylinder churning away, dragging our 20-odd-passenger van up a hundred plus kilometers and a thousand vertical feet, on the way from SouqTown to Berberville...

But I have to say, after the Inauguration Night Blizzard closed the road to Berberville for a few days, I was soooo delighted to be riding in a tranzit again. Because it meant that I was going HOME!

As we drove through the landscape, progressing steadily from a near-Saharan gravel desert up to my snowy valley, I was struck by the sere and beautiful scenery over and over again, as well as the responses to it from my Moroccan neighbors. About halfway home, it occurred to me that I'd never recall all my observations unless I recorded them, so I pulled out my notebook and began to scribble.

Here they are, unedited - note the ever-changing levels of snow along the route:

* A woman in a housecoat/bathrobe and bedroom slippers picking a path through two inches of snow, carrying a tarp filled with wood in one hand. [At some point, I'll write a whole entry on the practice of wearing bedroom-wear as outerware. Suffice to say for now - it's not uncommon.]

* Like a scene out of It's A Wonderful Life: Kids sliding on hardpacked snow, some on their feet, hunkered down so their bums and fingers skim the ice, others on their bellies with their feet curled in the air

* Dark-eyed boy with flushed cheeks, bright against his tan skin, wearing thin blue rainboots against the 3" of snow, grinning as I catch his eye

* Moisture stains at the foot of the mud walls show how much has melted already this morning - looks like 6" or more

* As the transit toils upward, low gears straining to haul us uphill, the snow steadily deepens. No, not steadily. The bright, high-altitude sun has done its job to clear the snow, but in shadowed vales and lee sides of slopes, the snow rests 4-5" thick, sculpted into sharp ridges.

* In the village of my nearest Volunteers, which had 2' of snow Wednesday evening, Friday morning reveals a strong dichotomy: on sunny slopes, it has compacted to 6-8"; on the north side of buildings, it's still a heavy, wet 1.5-2', currently being chunked out by businessmen opening a path to their doors.

* I see streaks and stripes, moire patterns of white and dark that dazzle the eye and inspire the mind... Geological features leap out with a new relief, beds and rivulets and resistant layers all standing out in blinding contrast to the snow...

* It's tempting to wave an arm and call it all black and white, but that would diminish the thousand shades of brown and red and gray of this arid landscape, breaching through the dust-tinted snow, where the colors are echoed in the palest pastels.

* Climbing the Divide, we escape from the gloom of the grey-shrouded village below, rising towards cerulean skies with carded-wool clouds.

* Egg whites! That's what the razor-sharp snow ridges have been reminding me of. Not the sea of peaks atop a Baked Alaska, or the shining mounds drifting over a lemon meringue, but the egg whites in the bowl, just as you finish beating them, glossy and perfect, smoothly undulating and swirling up to a startling peak of implausible crispness.

* Going through the pass that crowns the Divide, the road beneath our tires is snow-packed, not cleanly plowed - due to post-plowing winds, perhaps? - and the plow-pushed piles to either side reach 4 or 5 feet, up to the windows of our high-riding tranzit.

* ...but as soon as we clear the pass, we're surrounded by shallow swales; the countryside here is mostly denuded of its blanket of snow.

* The blizzard exerted its force against the flags, still flapping their cheery red and green welcome to the (still absent) King. Their crisp colors glow against the fields of white - they're contiguous here, with only a few brave patches of brown peeking through - but the poles are no longer jauntily vertical (or, when in groups of 3, forming shallow angles like a sign language W). They've been bashed and battered until they lean at every cockeyed angle. Some poles snapped near their base and lie fallen, a casualty of the winter storm. the splash of red across the ground heightens the parallels to a fallen soldier.

* Elsewhere, the flags have ripped off the poles, sometimes just at one connection point, leaving them flapping like a racecar pennant or a lady's favor. In a few cases, they've blown away entirely, leaving their naked pole a forlorn and lonely sentinel.

* Now on the outskirts of my nearest village - passing my favorite volcanic intrusions - the road is almost uniformly snowpack, not sun-dried asphalt as it has been for the past 3.5 hours. The driver's speedometer still reads 0 km/h, as it has for the past 120 km, but we're going around 5-10 mph. A walker couldn't keep up with us, or even a casual jogger, but a sprinter would leave us behind.

* 18 km from home, the dusting over the snow has deepened, and makes me hungry for a Baked Alaska just perfectly browned under the broiler.

* In my nearest village, a man is digging out a path, carving the heavy snow into crisp chunks before throwing each shovel-load over his shoulder. His precise work and the wet, snowman-friendly snow have created a pile of white cubes, scattered across the dust-browned snow like he's assembling the building blocks for an igloo.

* 9 km from home, I see my first flocks of the day. Sheep and goats, their dun and black striking against the snowy hillside they're clambering over. I guess the other shepherds are keeping their animals indoors a little longer...?

* Erosion from today's snowmelt has turned the river along the road into a flood of chocolate pudding.

* From a stretch so naked the plow seems irrelevant, just moments ago, we've rounded a bend to a scene that could be lifted from any New England winter: a narrow ribbon of asphalt winds through deep plow-stacks that reach some 6-8 feet on either side, tapering from 1-1.5' deep down to a scattering of walnut-sized chunks at the farthest reach from the road.

* Clustered icicles drip down off rock faces like a witch's skeletal fingers reaching down to pluck tasty children for a winter stew...

* Berberville looks like a ski resort, the snow so thick and heavy as to make venturing outside seem a fool's errand.

* The sky at the end of my fally looks like the opening of "The Simpson's", an implausibly radiant, pale blue with white-puffed clouds.

* The remnants of the fortress built an age ago, at the summit of the nearest rise, are now clear. Its steep walls and exposed location leave few crannies for snow to linger.

1/18 Biking Backpedal

As you may recall, last Thursday, my friend "Jamila" and I went for a jog/bike trip. She's prepping for a marathon, but I'm no runner, so I kept her company by biking the journey with her. Well, sort of kept her company. Bikers and joggers tend not to go at the same pace, it turns out. (Speaking of which, Jamila did a phenomenal job of maintaining a constant pace of 6.5 - 7.5 minutes per kilometer for the entire 16 Km. Woo-hoo!)

We started at the mile-marker 13km from her town. (OK, yes, if you're going to be all particular, they're kilometer-markers, but that doesn't roll off the tongue. They're about a foot - maybe 30 cm - tall, painted crisp white, with bright red splash across the top. They tell you the distance to the bigger towns along the road for most, if not all, of the 140 km from Berberville to SouqTown.)

Unfortunately, this mile-marker (OK, kilometer-marker) was located halfway up the steepest hill in the region. The crest of this particular mountain is sort of a mini-continental divide. All the rain and snow that falls to the west of it flows down my river, past Berberville and into my lake. Everything that falls east of this divide flows down to SouqTown. This is the highest point of the entire road, so of course it was where our trip began. Sigh. Oh, and while I'm still rambling about geography, I should point out that Jamila's town and Berberville are both well over a mile above sea level, which helps in making ours two of the coldest sites in the country, but the little village perched on the side of this mountain is several hundred feet above either of us. Plus there's no running water. And the Volunteer assigned here has had the roof above her bed cave in. Twice.

...but back to our story. When I punched the button on my stopwatch, Jamila leapt off to a great start, and I pushed the bike pedal. Her lead got longer and longer as I toiled up the side of the mountain. I grumbled to myself and remembered how to work the gears. Jamila just kept plugging away, her red jacket growing smaller and smaller. After enough whines to fill a car trip, I got to the top...and found myself looking down a steep straightaway right out of a biker's fantasy. There was a long, flat section along the top, on which I caught up with my friend. I made sure she was doing well, and I promised Jamila I'd meet her at the top of the next one...and off I went.

Biking is awesome.

My open parka flapped behind me like a superhero's cape as I flew down the mountain. My hair wanted to join in the fun, but was strapped down beneath my stocking cap and the regulation Peace Corps helmet. The wind whipping by crept behind my sunglasses and made my eyes water, making it harder to see the patches in the asphalt. I blinked the tears away and stretched an arm out, doing half of the "King of the World" pose. (Or else signaling that I wanted to turn right, but fortunately there was no one else on the road to misinterpret my bliss.) I flew a full kilometer and then a little more, before a small hill bled off my speed. Just when I would have had to start pedaling, I crested the hill. I rolled to a stop and looked back to find my erstwhile partner. Her red jacket could have been mistaken for a woodpecker's topknot, she was so far behind me.

We continued to leapfrog through the hills and around the bends. The stretch of road she'd picked was nearly all downhill, so I was often well ahead of her, but I never let her get out of sight. Whenever a blind corner approached, I'd stop and wait at the point of the bend, so no reckless motorists could careen around and ... cause problems. This was fairly pointless, though, since we saw a total of three cars on the road - two were tranzits and the third was a private car. But it made me feel like I was playing a role.

My official role was cheerleader. During the flat stretches, I'd pedal slowly enough to keep pace with her, and say encouraging things to her. When I waited for her at the top of a hill, I'd call down praise and support (and once held out a water bottle as the carrot to get her all the way up an especially challinging section). I don't know how much she heard, because I could never tell when her iPod was on, but I liked doing it.

I also pointed out some of the more awesome geologic features, and talked about my plan to bike the full 140 km length of the road, over the course of a few days, to capture them all on camera and GPS. So many features here deserve to be put in a textbook. I use the phrase "textbook example" every time I talk to folks about the geology of the region, and often in reference to widely different things. There are textbook examples of braiding streams, anastamosing rivers, cutbanks, swales. And that's just the assif (river/stream). The prettiest cross-cutting relationship I've ever seen is 5 km outside of that frozen town I mentioned earlier, perched on the mountain between my site and Jamila's. (It's a pair of dikes cutting through a shale.) I showed Jamila the clearest mass wasting example I've seen in years, which I hadn't even noticed before today. Hence my wanting to do it on a bike instead of from the window of a tranzit; not only can you stop as often as you want to get just the right shot, but also, you see more when you're going slowly. Anyway, Jamila wants to come with, and recommends March as the time of year when it should be warm enough to be out for hours every day but cool enough to bike dozens of miles without overheating.

...but I digress.

We got to Jamila's site just after the midafternoon call to prayer. She hoped that meant that we wouldn't see anyone, but no such luck. We got lots of stares as we went through the center of town. On the far side, we picked up a small gaggle of girls, who decided that they wanted to jog, too. They kept pace with Jamila for almost 2km: knees high like dressage ponies, skirts swirling around their legs, hard-soled shoes clop-clopping against the pavement. They finally fell away, leaving us alone for the last push.

Jamila and I both believed that we'd gone the final 1 km, but no mile-marker (whatever) appeared around any of the bends in this extra-windy stretch of road, so we kept pressing on. Finally, she said, "Can you bike ahead and see where the next one is?" I'd been creeping along next to her for a while, keeping the munchkins from swarming her, so was glad to stretch my legs and pull forwards. I went around another bend, and then another, loving the wind whistling past my ears but curious as to why this kilometer felt so much longer than the others. I finally found the next marker, broken and overturned. And sure enough, it was 2 km from the previous one. The block imbetween must have fallen victim to a blizzard or tractor or something. Or maybe it was never installed, for whatever reason. I turned back to reunite with the flagging jogger, but she'd rounded the previous bend already. "Is that it?" she called to me. I shouted back in the affirmative. She pulled up next to me and I pushed the STOP button on my stopwatch. 16 kilometers in an hour and 47 minutes. Less than 7 minutes per kilometer - just a hair over a ten-minute mile - and she'd been steady as a metronome, uphill and down. I praised her effusively as she stretched and panted, and then we turned back to her town for an uphill cooldown. 3 km later, we flopped down in front of her favorite hanoot, tired but victorious.

I threw my bike on top of the next tranzit to pull into town, and rode home. Just another day in the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer.

And a quick final note - the sunset, as I went home, was one of the most gorgeous I've seen here. The rosy light hit the clouds just right to splash huge swaths of color across the skies. Frederick Turner, eat your heart out. I promised myself I'd grab my camera as soon as I got home. Of course, by the time I'd finished wrestling my bike up the stairs to my walk-up apartment, I'd forgotten all about the sunset and busied myself getting cocoa and reheating leftover lentils. Oops. I guess all I get are mental pictures (aka memories), this time.

October 23, 2008 Hailstones

I always thought hailstones were round. Perfect little spheres, actually. I have only a vague sense of how hail is formed, but I recall it involves rain falling down, getting caught by a thermal, tossed back high into the atmosphere where it freezes, then it falls some more and picks up some more water molecules, then it gets tossed back up again, ad infinitum. Well, actually, ad it-gets-too-heavy-for-the-thermal-to-mess-with-it-and-so-it-falls-down-to-the-ground-um. I think.

But I always imagined the little droplet, y’know, spinning as it got tossed around. Hence the perfect sphere.

But I was out in a hailstorm today, visiting the Berberville schools, so I had time to take a closer look. It hails pretty regularly these days…a month ago, it was raining nearly every afternoon; now, it’s raining or hailing nearly every day. No snow since that first storm, lhumdullah, and the temperatures have mostly been in the 50s. (Well, not right now. Right now, it’s 38 outside, and 47 inside. So if I had windowsills, they’d be refrigerator temperature; as it is, I don’t bother refrigerating my food. I don’t think the extra 10 degrees makes much difference, and it’s been in the 40s all day. Inside. {shiver})

So as I walked the kilometer or so back from the school, I caught several hailstones on my glove and took a good look at them. They weren’t round. They were almost perfect cones, actually. Their bottoms were rounded, not flat, but they were otherwise cone-shaped. Like an ice-cream cone whose scoops are almost licked away, except more shallow. Exactly like the Apollo re-entry vehicles, come to think of it. And maybe for the same reason? This little ice pellet was bombing its way through the atmosphere and its bottom was melted and sheared by the air pressure of terminal velocity?

Or maybe hailstones are just funny at high elevations. I live somewhere between 6500 and 8500 feet, depending which map you look at, and since I’ve spent nearly all of my life within a few hundred feet of sea level, I’m constantly surprised by the differences of life at elevation.

(If you have any insights, please feel free to post a comment or shoot me an email. I'm actually curious about this.)

October 10, 2008 10-10-SnowDay!

Almost all my windows are frosted. I’d never really noticed this until today, and I only noticed it because I was in the one room with clear glass windows – the bathroom (go figure – fortunately, it faces a brick wall across a narrow alley) – and out the window I saw SNOW! Not just white-stuff-on-the-ground-that-was-probably-hail-anyway, but actual snow. Big chubby flakes, pouring out of the sky and sticking on the ground. A quick check of my new indoor/outdoor thermometer confirmed that it was 37 outside – perfect snow weather – and a balmy 44 inside. I was so excited that I went into the kitchen and started making oatmeal.

This might not be a normal reaction. But I’ve been saving my box of oatmeal – available only in the biggest cities – for cold weather, and today seemed like a great opportunity. :) I also made a pot of tea, some herbal stuff that the former volunteer left behind. It’s pretty fantastic, actually – Ruby Mist from Stash. Then I did the dishes, which was probably a mistake; the water is only a few degrees above freezing, and my hands have been red ever since (and that was over an hour ago).

Also, it turns out that the former volunteer left me about 30 spices, but NOT cinnamon or ginger or nutmeg or cloves, all of which I’d been planning to sprinkle on my oatmeal. They’re all available in the souq, I just hadn’t realized that I’d need to get them. [Update 10/15: She did have cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg and cloves. I just hadn't found them yet.]

Today is supposed to be a souq day here in Berberville, but apparently it’s a Snow Day instead – it’s the first Friday in the four months that I’ve been here that has no souq. Saturdays are also supposed to be souq days – Berberville is regionally important enough that we get two – so I’ll see if anything shows up tomorrow. If not, I’ll take a run into SouqTown on Monday. It’s also warmer down there. :)

Status check: I’m in my sleepsack, in my sleeping bag, wearing two pairs of socks, long underwear pants, PJ pants, a tank top, a long underwear top, a flannel shirt, and a fleece jacket, and I’m only slightly chilly. Except for my fingers. Turns out typing doesn’t keep them warm. Looks like I’m going to need to pick up some gloves at souq, then chop the tips to make hobo gloves. I tried laying a blanket over my hands. That works OK, but it feels weird, plus I miss hearing the sounds of the keys. It mostly gets in my way when reaching for the further keys, like the backspace or the HOME or END buttons.

Other observations:

* I can see my breath inside, but only when I exhale really hard. (I first noticed it when I was clearing my throat.)

* My computer is being **really** sluggish. Either I’ve got a Trojan horse or else Dells aren’t optimized for functioning at 44 degrees.

* The power keeps cutting in and out. My cell phone and laptop are plugged in – batteries on both were pretty run down – but they’re plugged into a powerstrip, which I’m hoping will prevent them from getting zapped by the on-again-off-again do [electricity].

PS: When I was living in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the first snowfall of the year was almost invariably 11/11, aka Veterans’ Day. The two times it wasn’t, the snow fell on 11/22 or 11/33, aka December 3^rd. My inner math geek loved it. Now that I’m in Morocco, the first unambiguous snowfall has come on 10/10. :D

September 28, 2008 Snow

It occurred to me recently to start a betting pool among the PCVs on the mountain.* When will the first snow fall? My host father promised me that we never get snow before November, but that it will continue snowing till March. Jamila’s counterpart, who I chatted with on a recent tranzit ride, said that April and May snows aren’t uncommon, and June snows not unheard of. And today I was told that it can snow as early as September, but won’t ever snow past February. (This I do not believe.)

…and then the whole issue of "first snowfall" was rendered moot, because WE ALREADY GOT SNOW. Not here in Berberville, but along the road between Berberville and the next big village down the mountain, there are fields covered in about an inch of snow. When I saw the first pockets of white in shadowed crannies, I doubted myself. But as the pockets grew into patches, and then drifts, and then whole fields, I stopped doubting and started grinning. We got snow!!
IN SEPTEMBER!?!?!?!?!??!?! This winter might last longer than I want to consider.

**Update: It may not have been snow. My host mother assures me that it was hail. Can tiny, couscous-sized hail grains pile up to look like snowdrifts from five feet away? Can they blanket a countryside to an inch deep? I really don’t know much about hail. And I’m not actually sure whether I *want* it to be snow or hail. I’m emotionally invested in snow, but I’m also rather afraid of the length and intensity of the coming winter, and would rather believe that it hasn’t begun yet.

*In case I haven’t used this term before, "on the mountain" refers to all the Volunteers who share my SouqTown. Most of us are scattered in mountain villages between Berberville and SouqTown, though a few are on the far side of SouqTown, Also, while Berberville is much higher in elevation than SouqTown, there are actually several different mountains that we all live on. Nevertheless, we occasionally use the phrase to refer to the dozen Volunteers in the region, as in, "Say hi to the mountain for me," or "I invited the mountain to help out on this project."