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

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.

1/9/09 100 Things for Geologists to Do

As many of you know, I was a geologist in my past life, which is to say up until a few years ago. Now I'm just another amateur geonerd. :) This evening, I stumbled across the world of "geoblogs", and found this at paleochick.blogspot.com:

100 Things You've Done Meme: A Geologist's Version

MJC Rocks over at Geotripper has created a wonderful new meme based on the 100 Things You've Done meme that has been going around. Read about how he came up with/adapted this list here.

Bold the ones you have done and tell us some great stories!

1. See an erupting volcano (in Hawai'i National Park)
2. See a glacier (in Alaska, in Glacier Bay and other places)
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta.
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage (I lived on the Mississippi during the Flood of '93 and the Flood of '95. Plus, this fall had massive flooding on every creek and rivulet in the northern half of Morocco.)
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia)
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw. (The Siq in Petra, Jordan. Remember the final scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when they're approaching the temple with the Holy Grail? Yeah, that slot canyon.)
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. (Yup, Stillwater. Where I nearly started an avalanche.)
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate
16. A ginkgo tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones)
18. A field of glacial erratics (in Wyoming and Massachusetts)
19. A caldera (in Hawai'i as well as the Yellowstone Caldera, plus I mapped part of the Olympus Mons caldera on Mars - not in person, though!)
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high (Does mapping them on Mars count?)
21. A fjord (in Alaska)
22. A recently formed fault scarp (In Washington State)
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta
25. A natural bridge (Zion National Park)
26. A large sinkhole
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees
34. Lava tubes (Walked a few miles through one in Hawai'i. Amazing features inside.)
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. (I've only done the rim, sorry!)
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible (Walked all the way around it with my Impact Physics class. Collected samples, too. Yay for profs who pull strings!)
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing (Isn't Devil's Tower in South Dakota? Anyway, I've seen it twice and hiked through the boulder-y base once.)
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault (Half my extended family lives on it)
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches) (both!)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm (This summer - I think I wrote a blog entry about it!)
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game). (The sky turns *green*!)
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. (Just weakly, from my parents' front yard in Illinois)
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century (Hale-Bopp and Hyukatake)
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane (only the outer edges, lhumdullah, in Houston)
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash (Was in position and watching for it, but didn't see it.)

Looks like I've done 46 out of 100. Clearly, I need to do more traveling. :D

November 22, 2008 Geo-luck-y

This morning I met a French man who lives in Berberville. He’s a professor of geology at a university in one of Morocco’s biggest cities, but he lives during the off-season in Berberville. He has traversed most of the local terrain searching for fossils and minerals. I don’t know how it is that I haven’t met him before.

We rode the tranzit into SouqVille this morning. We spent most of the four-hour ride discussing the geology we were driving through. It was fantastic, on so many levels: I’ve *missed* having these kind of technical conversations; I’ve had tons of questions about the local geology, many of which are now answered; I got to practice my French with a native speaker, and I understood something like 90% of what he said; I made a new friend and got invited to his house.

I also reflected that, even though I studied French for seven years and geology for about the same (counting undergrad and grad school), I’ve never studied geology in French. Many of the words come pretty directly from Latin or Greek, and many more were borrowed between the languages (mélange and roche moutonée are both in every Intro Geo textbook), so for the most part it wasn’t too bad. I also learned the words for “sandstone” and “limestone” by the simple expedient of driving past them and saying “What’s that called?” (Marne and calcar, respectively, though I’m guessing at the spellings.) He told me about an outcropping of what sounded like gavreaux (might have been graveaux) that is world-renowned. It was the better part of half an hour, during which he talked about the relative properties of intrusive and extrusive volcanic rocks, before I figured out that he was talking about gabbro.

But linguistic fumblings aside, it was a wonderful conversation, and I look forward to pursuing a friendship with him and his wife, a Berberville native. :)

July 10, 2008 Fossil hash

The aHli (naked mountain) behind our house is a rock hound’s dream come true. I’ve climbed around on it several times now, and every time I find rocks that make me happy. The last few times, my little siblings have come with me, and they’ve all gotten into the business of finding iHla (good) rocks for me. At first, I was afraid to reject any of their offerings, lest I hurt their feelings, but when I had several kilos of rocks in front of me, I began getting more selective.

I have vermetids, mudcracks, tiny clams that remind me of my thesis fieldwork on the Florida coast, big brachiopods that remind me of Geo 20, and enough fossil hash specimens to start my own gallery. :) I also have several soft-sediment fossils that remind me of the Ediacrin Fauna (sp?). I can’t identify most of what I see in the soft seds, but I plan to take them to the Geology department of The Professor’s university next time I’m in Springfield. Hopefully someone there will know what I’ve got. :)

5/27/08 Surprise, Surprise...

K**, the Moroccan I work most closely with, has a knack for surprising me. Surprise #1 was that he didn’t exist. Fortunately, that one turned out to be a mistake.

I’d gone looking for him during my site visit. I visited the Park headquarters, and that’s where I was told that he didn’t exist. Since he’s the director of the Park, I found that both surprising and a bit unlikely. So I called him. He answered the phone, thus proving his existence, and then gave directions to the Park employee I was talking to. Turns out that he doesn’t work in a park office (Surprise #2), but is another two miles outside of town in a Water & Forestry Department office. So I headed down there, met him, had a great conversation about my project, and all was well.

Three weeks later, I returned to the region, this time for good (inshallah). Even before making it out to my site, I scheduled a meeting with him, since he works in SouqTown, which was my layover en route to Berberville. I was supposed to meet him at 10am, in his office, but (Surprise #3) he showed up in the café where I was having breakfast at 9:15. He had a completely new project for me (Surprise #4), and wanted me to meet with the leader of that project, a professor…who was in fact sitting across the café, waiting for me (Surprise #5).

Two days later, I was wandering through downtown Berberville with Zahra when I heard a honk-honk. I barely registered it, since I wasn’t in the middle of the street and therefore it was unlikely to have anything to do with me. Then there was another double-beep. I glanced over in case it was my host dad in his jeep, but it wasn’t, so I deliberately turned my back on the truck (following the advice of other Peace Corps Volunteers to ignore unwanted attention from Moroccan men). Then Zahra said, “I think that’s your counterpart.” I turned…and it was. (Surprise #6) He was in Berberville, a 4-hour ride away from his home and office in SouqTown, driving around with the professor. He laughed at me for forgetting him so quickly. While we chatted, we set a meeting for the Monday 10 days away.

The next Monday – only 3 days later – I was in SouqTown on other business. I’d planned to leave on Tuesday’s 9am tranzit back to Berberville, so about 8:30 I put my scarf down to reserve a seat, then went to the PCVs’ favorite café for a quick breakfast. When I walked into the café (the same one where Surprises #3 and 4 had taken place), my fellow Environment Volunteer “Brahim” told me, “Oh, hey, K** was just here. He’s driving out to Berberville right now with “Sku”*. Do you want to go with him?” Surprise #7. And, for that matter, #8 – he’d been planning to go to somewhere entirely different and coordinate a tree planting today. I told Brahim that of course I wanted to go, so we went outside to look for him. I didn’t see K** or Sku, but Brahim recognized K**’s truck…which was pulling away. He chased it down – which took three blocks of hard running – and was told that K** would meet me back at the café.

I heard this news after I’d caught up with Brahim—he’s a better runner than I am, but I was doing my best—so we both turned around and retraced our steps, breathing hard. I wondered if I should run back to the tranzit to grab my scarf and tell the driver not to wait for me, but I didn’t want K** to miss me, either. The other PCVs pointed out that the only road to Berberville goes right by the tranzit stand, so it would be easy to take care of it as we drove out. I waited at the café for about 20 minutes before seeing Sku, the third member of our Environmental triumvirate*. K** had dropped him off to find me and tell me to meet him at the end of the street.

Of course, the streets in SouqTown don’t follow a particularly regular grid pattern, so neither Sku nor I really knew what that meant. We waited at the end of the big square in town for a few minutes. By then it was 9am, and I was feeling anxious about retrieving my scarf from the tranzit driver. (I didn’t want him to wait around for me and delay everyone else’s trip.) I told Sku my plan and walked the two blocks to the tranzit station…where I found K** in his truck. Surprise #9. I told him that Sku was waiting at the square, so he went jogging off to find Sku while I retrieved my scarf. 10 minutes later, we were all rolling west. Lhumdullah. The fourth person in the car is also named K**, so I’ll call him GradStudentK – ‘cause he is one. For the first hour or so, Sku and I chatted; this was my first chance to talk to him for more than a couple minutes, and we’re probably going to be working closely over the next year, so I wanted to take advantage of my chance to get to know him. Then K** dropped him off in his village instead of bringing him on with us to Berberville (Surprise #10).

For the next few hours, I had a conversation with the two K**s. They both speak a lot of French and a little English. GradStudentK turns out to be fluent in Tamazight, lhumdullah, so he helped both K** and me work on the language. Yes, high-ranking K** is actually working to learn a Berber dialect. Surprise #11. Every other high-ranking Moroccan I’ve met denies any knowledge of Berber. (For that matter, several Berbers have tried to speak to me in Darija – Moroccan Arabic – because it’s considered the more appropriate language for educated people to use. But I don’t know Darija. I’m not stupid, I’m American.) So as we drove, we attempted to speak to each other in Tamazight, falling back on French or English when needed to ensure comprehension. (Which happened a lot. But hey, imiq simiq.) And then, about an hour into our multilingual conversation, I was pointing out a really beautiful anticline, and I discovered that they’ve both studied geology (Surprise # 12). GradStudentK has actually taught biology and geology classes to middle schoolers. So then I got to learn the French and Arabic terms for geological structures, which was a blast.

When the terms are from Latin, they’re virtually identical in French and English (syncline is syncline, for example, and eclogite is éclogite), but the more basic terms cracked me up. A “layer”, aka a bed or a stratum, is a couche. Which is a bed. Like the kind of bed you sleep in. It has been so long – over a decade – since I first learned these words that I’d forgotten how many of them have non-geological meanings. Like “fold”. Which in French is plie, aka bend. Because y’know, folds are bends. “Crust” is crût, which I learned in French class as the thing that goes on a pie. I’ve gotten so used to thinking about the Earth’s crust as kilometers of rock that it takes hearing the word in another language to make me remember where these terms came from. Yes, the crust is the crispy outer layer. Yes, the mantle – manteau – is the thick blanket inside. Of course earthquakes produce a tremblement (trembling/quaking). Isn’t science fun? Oh, and K** still has some of his textbooks on the geology of Morocco, which he has promised to lend me. L’humdullah!

Eventually, we got to Berberville, where it turned out we weren’t going to tackle the Park information booth that Sku had speculated was the purpose of the trip. K** needed to speak to someone else about a completely unrelated project, so I wasn’t even part of the conversation. He just dropped me off at the bosta (post office) near my host family’s house and said goodbye (Surprise #13).

I’ve known him for less than a month, and only had two official meetings with him, but he has managed to surprise me THIRTEEN different times. They say the first step towards overcoming “culture shock” is being able to predict actions. I’m getting there in the home life of my host family – I know when to sweep the floor now, and when to expect afternoon tea – but I’m still apparently in phase one of “counterpart shock.” :)

* There are a total of 5 Environment PCVs assigned to this national park. K&D, the married couple, live on the north side of it. They’re in a different province, and there’s not much transportation between us, but we’re still planning to work together on projects. Sku, Brahim and I live along the southern edge of the park, on the road between Berberville and SouqTown; they’re both closer to SouqTown than I am. For that matter, everyone I know is closer to SouqTown than I am. Sigh. Anyway, Sku and Brahim and I are all assigned to work with K**, but I hadn’t had a chance to talk with either of them before this weekend.

May 21, 2008 Day II as a volunteer

I’m writing en route from SouqTown to BerberVille. I’m currently the most interesting commodity around; better get used to that. Ito, the woman on my right, says she wants to go to America, but only if I come with her. How’s that for making friends quickly? :) The man on my left is dredging up high school French to try to make conversation. Is my accent really that bad, that they’d rather speak a language they barely know than try to understand my attempts at their language? Or is it just habit for folks in this friendly, tourist-heavy country to assume that all Westerners would rather speak French?

I got to the tranzit station half an hour early, which turns out not to be enough; the bus was already i3mr – full. There wasn’t anyone sitting on it yet, but everyone knows how to reserve a place: leave something sitting on your seat. So since all the seats were spoken for, with jackets, handbags, etc, I set down my shesh (long scarf) on a plastic stool. Hopefully, folks will get off soon, and free up some seats. Of course, there are about five people who are standing in the back; I’m guessing that they have dibs on available seats before I do.

But my pinched posture aside, it’s a beautiful ride. The mountains – aHli – are gorgeous. And everyone is nice. They probably still view me as an odd and possibly dangerous foreigner, but they’re perfectly nice. :)

This wonderously austere countryside is inspiring geological rhapsody # 17 or so. See, yesterday I saw differential deformation on the way into SouqTown. As I explained to my friend (who was either interested or faking it well – thanks!), the top layer had been battered but the lower layers were flat and even, like the pages of a book. It’s either an unconformity that’s been completely overturned or else a weak layer that deformed before its neighbors – but is strong enough to resist erosion, and is therefore the highest visible layer of the stack, aka the resistant layer. Hence the rhapsodizing: Bend, slide, surrender to pressure…but endure. If pushed, give…and be here after the pusher has rifted away across the sea. It reminds me of bamboo, the wonder-plant: it bends and sways, but it can resist thousands of pounds of torque without snapping.

Grateful for: the tranzit driver, who recognized me from my visit three weeks ago, and was delighted to see me again. His boisterous greetings instantly transformed me, in the eyes of everyone around, from an awkward tourist into one of the gang. Llayrhim iwalidin. (Blessings on his parents.)

…for the mountains. When they are folded, they roll and rise like puppies at play. When they’re not, their extreme lateral extension is suggestive of infinity.

We just drove through – oh, hey, there’s more, we’re not through them yet – a herd of grazing camels. (Herd? Flock? Bunch? Knobble?) Those placid, llama-faced tan or brown beasties always look so calm. Maybe it’s the heavy-lidded eyes.

… that the cyber had my thumb drive!! I’d lost it there three weeks ago. I went back the next morning, but the morning shift of the 24/7 business didn’t know whether or not the night shift had found it. I told them I’d be back in 3 weeks, but I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. But I was wrong to doubt! They found it, kept it for me, and now I have it back! :D

…and the journey continues. March 1st, I met a roomful of strangers. Yesterday, I said goodbye to dozens of friends. And now I’m heading to Berberville, where I get to implement the advice of D**, my almost neighbor (he and his wife are 4 days’ walk away): “Love them. Let them love you. Drink lots of tea. Let them trust you. And then you can find ways to work with them and help them.”

May 1, 2008 Traveling back to SouqTown

It’s 2pm and I’m sitting in front of a café, waiting for the tranzit, the shuttle bus from here to SouqTown that runs 4-5 times a day, weather permitting, inshallah. The shuttle is scheduled (loosely) to arrive between now and 2:30, inshallah.

I can see 24 people from my seat – I am in the heart of downtown Berberville, after all – but not a single female. 24 men, 0 women. Really, my very existence at this moment, sitting at a café while being female, is probably Hshuma (shameful / inappropriate) – but I don’t know anywhere else to wait where I’ll be sure not to miss the tranzit. Fortunately, the moqaddim, who I met yesterday, and who knows that I chatted with the Quyd not long ago, is sitting at the next table, so no one will say anything inappropriate to me.

OK, now it’s 3:30pm and I’m en route to SouqTown. The tranzit got in right around 2:30, but didn’t leave again until 3:00. I guess I don’t need to be so worried about missing it; it’s got a nice long layover. We’re driving past the igran – the irrigated fields – some of which are apple orchards. They’re right on the cusp between flowering and leafing. Some are all apple blossoms, some are all leaves, and many are at some point of the journey inbetween those two states. I feel like I should make some sort of metaphor for my own position, about to finish my training and start my Peace Corps service (inshallah), but I’ll let the opportunity pass.

Note to self – there’s a dike about 45 minutes out from Berberville, only visible from the road when you’re heading this direction. Two parallel dikes, actually, looking a bit like an italicized # sign as they cross the bedding planes. One of the prettiest cross-cutting relationships I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to get the GPS-tracker gizmo that can sync up with a camera and tell you exactly where you took any given photo.

April 30 Random observations (aka excerpts from letters)

I don’t remember how much of this has made it into earlier blogs. Please forgive any redundancies. :)

I can’t believe it’s been two months already. Where did the time go? Why didn’t I spend more of it studying? Eek!

I’m loving my village. It’s a high desert, with virtually no vegetation outside of the irrigated fields. It’s ringed by mountains that have been battered by repeated rounds of crashing into Europe and North America over the past 500 million years. And there’s no grass or trees to obstruct the view – just a few bramble-bushes. It’s a geologist’s dream come true. :) As an environmental educator, though, I’m concerned for what this means about drought conditions and local ecology. (Though it did rain for half an hour this afternoon) But I have months to work all that out, inshallah.

My village still doesn’t have internet access, but they promise that it’s coming. Sometime. I won’t hold my breath, but it’s possible it’ll be in town before I finish my service. It already has 1200 residents, three schools, a police station, a hotel, several hotels and cafes, a few markets, and two paved roads.

April 29 Long day. Ighzif wess

6:00 Wake up. Linger in bed, praying and thinking happy thoughts.
7:30 Get up and ready for the day.
8:00 Go into the main part of the house. For the second day in a row, breakfast was waiting for me. After breakfast, I helped Ima in the kitchen. She’s making ksuksu (couscous) from scratch.
9:30 Went with “Fatima” – the adopted name of my sitemate and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer – to the school and post office and to meet a couple teachers. All the teachers we met today speak English – most of them are English teachers – and that’s a real blessing, because like most teachers in these Berber villages, he doesn’t speak Berber. Darija, Classical Arabic, French, and English, but no Tamazight or Tashelheit. The poor students have to hear everything in a new language.
10:30 Met the gendarmes. Language became an issue again, because they also don’t speak Berber, and Fatima doesn’t speak any Darija or French. Fortunately, I remember high school French (I keep meaning to write a long thank you letter to Mme. Lyons and Mme. Chartres), so was able to communicate well enough to fill out the paperwork we needed. My rusty French was sometimes hard for them to follow, and I had trouble coming up with all the words I needed, but we could communicate, lhumdullah. Volunteers who have learned Tam (Berber) but don’t know any French or Arabic – like Fatima and most of the other PCVs I’ve met – have a really tough time. Or is the Peace Corps trying to subtly tell the Moroccan government that everyone should know some Berber?
11:45 We’d finished our errands, and I wasn’t expected home until 1pm, so I decided to walk up the mountain and look at my home from above. Either I’m at 10,000 feet* or I waay out of shape. Possibly both. The big resistant layer above town is very cool, though – it’s easy to see from anywhere in the town, because it makes a big shelf jutting out of the hillside (hence the name “resistant” – it resists eroding more than anything around it), and it’s got bazillions of brachiopod fossils in a sandstone, plus one trilobite and a really mysterious thing that looks like an octopus leg. For the non-geologists in the crowd, trust me when I say that’s odd and really cool. :)

* I’ve looked at Berberville on a couple of topo maps, and depending which map I look at, I’m living anywhere from 7500’ to 10,000’. There’s a difference.

4/28 Geological Rhapsodies

The rocks around Berberville should be included in a structure textbook. The folds surge out of the ground like a breaching whale. Anticlines arc like rainbows, while complex folds snake into and out of the ground like a Loch Ness Monster toying with tourists. At one point, two resistant layers separated by two meters of soft shale rise vertically out of the ground like guardrails on the road to heaven.

Berberville’s Hills Are Alive

I just looked unto the hills, and remembered that I haven’t said anything about my surroundings. There are mountains on every side of me that I can see from my stoop. I’ll head up on the roof in a minute and see if it’s true up there, too. They are folded and faulted in ways that would make any structural geologist’s head spin all the way off her shoulders. Recumbent folds, thrust faults, overturned beds, anticlines, synclines…all these terms from Geo 11 and Structure resurfaced today as I rode across the High Atlas Mountains in the tranzit (shuttle bus from area villages to souq towns). Someday in the next two years, inshallah, I’ll bike or hike the 140 k to SouqTown so I can take pictures of all these textbook-worthy places.

I can understand why the folks who came here on field trip described it as ugly – but I beg to differ. The mountains are naked, yes – no trees, no grass, hardly any shrubs – so they lack the organic beauty of the Appalachians…but these exposed rock layers are a geonerd’s dream. The sere hillsides are more reminiscent of the Black Hills than Memorial Hill, and the muted tones pall against the startling hues of the Painted Desert…but this place is beautiful.

Welcome to SouqTown

I've changed my mind - EAC is too impersonal name for my nifty souq town. So from here on out, I'll refer to it as SouqTown. Without further ado... The news:

--------
I wish I’d brought a pen that didn’t bleed through the paper; I’m stuck taking notes and journaling on only one side of a page. Otherwise, my life is pretty fantastic right now. :)

SouqTown is mumtez (wonderful). I can see why so many volunteers in the region spend their free weekends here. Not only is the company great – SouqTown PCVs rock the casbah – but the town itself is pretty perfect. It’s big enough to sell everything you’d need, from stoves to mattresses to tupperware to teapots, while still small enough that you can walk the entire city center in 15 minutes. Plus, the gorgeous mountains rising up at you as you walk up the main street…take my breath away. It’s reminiscent of Boulder, with the Flatirons looming on the horizon.

Souq Day!

So much to write about. Bzzaf bzzaf. Going to souq – the scale of the Khan-al-Khalili in Cairo, but 90% produce. Running into the other CBT groups. :D Meeting a fledgling association that tried to bring a hospital to their village, and succeeded in getting an ambulance and first aid training. Not bad at all, especially for a first project! :)

Making phone contact with S**, the SBD PCV. Next week, we’ll meet him, tour the cooperative he works with, eat lunch, and give him the saffron project idea. :) Then hitting the Cybèr for an hour or so, and getting to talk to my sister! And getting an email from the editor of my story! And from Nana and Mom and my auntie!

My awesome friends rocked the internet research, so now I have lots of info on the geologic history of Morocco on my thumb drive, and maybe some books to request from the library guy at Peace Corps headquarters. (More information is always welcome, by the way!) :D

Field Trip Recap

On Sunday, we got back from our field trip to visit a Peace Corps Volunteer working in the Middle Atlas. I'm not sure how far away her village is as the crow flies, but it took a loooong time to get to. Two six hour bus rides, and then another 2 hours of assorted transit methods. We also spent a night en route, since Peace Corps forbids travel after dark. So, we left at 8:30 Wednesday morning and arrived at 9:30 Thursday morning. 25 hours. It took even longer coming back. (We left at 7am on Saturday and arrived at 11am on Sunday - 28 hours. Yeesh.)

Buuut...it was a great trip. Here's a post pulled from my journal entries duing the trip. Enjoy! :)

This is a loooong entry, partially to make up for my week-plus absence from blogspot, and partially because I'm back to typing my entries on the laptop, which is cheaper and easier, and therefore lends itself to verbosity. I also make a request in the final paragraph…if you're interested in helping me out but not reading the three pages of stuff I wrote, please scroll down to it! Thanks! :D

We just finished our field trip to P**'s site. I've ridden about a third of the length of the country, twice, in the past several days. Moroccan buses are an education in themselves. CTM and SupraTour are the higher class of bus. They run less frequently, but they actually stick to their schedules. They're about 10% more expensive, but the trips are about 30% shorter, since they almost never stop on the side of the road to pick up hitchhikers or just because they feel like it, so it's entirely worth it. The other bus lines run when they feel like it, which can be handy, as in when we showed up in [Mid-Sized City] on the way north, and even though there was no scheduled departure towards [Smallish City], we found out that a bus was leaving in less than thirty minutes. It can also be disturbing, I'd imagine, when you show up and discover that the bus you were planning to take has been canceled with no notice and no explanation. In addition to the buses, there are the grand taxis, the petit taxis, and the transit. I'll elaborate more on them another time; suffice to say, the grand taxis are painfully misnamed.

My chief observation from the 53 hours in transit: The countryside changes drastically, rapidly, as you move through the mountains. You could be in Zion-National-Park-type territory for hours, then go through a Mediterranean forest and a Badlands panorama with two turns around a mountain. This was a trip of so many fleeting impressions that I wish I'd had a pen handy… There were herds of camels, goats, sheep, cows (not together!)…snow-capped, jagged, alpine-glacier-carved peaks…rolling hills…palm trees…and a little French village near [Smallish City] that I might bring my family to for Christmas. (Inshallah, and climate permitting.)

Yesterday, P** took us for a hike what turned out to be a massive coral reef. The jagged limestone made for terrific traction under our boots – when intact. When eroded, it created soft, shifting lime sand underfoot. The combination made for great hiking/walking (as in, the kind of "hiking" that's pretty much "walking on a path, which may or may not be steep"), fantastic rock scrambling (which I find both more fun and less strenuous than hiking/walking), and a minor shd (slip) for me. Don't worry, I just got a scratch.

It was great to get to check out the local ecosystem, see P**'s town as a whole, AND have fun, all at the same time. It was also great to have couscous with her wealthy friend R**, the heart and soul of the association she works with, plus tea with her host family. It's comforting, too, to realize that someone who still hasn't mastered the local language after a year in-country can nonetheless be a successful volunteer. P** was also a fount of useful information. Some gems: mud homes are easier to heat in winter and keep cool in summer than cement buildings…when plans go sideways—and they WILL—remember the Peace Corps mantra of persistence, patience, and flexibility…roof access = truly awesome stargazing. We saw the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, and M-13 [ID'd by J**, who out-geeked even me], all with the naked eye! Plus, we could see Orion's whole bow, extra bits of Cassiopeia's throne, the V of Taurus (or some random V, what do I know), and shooting stars.

What wonderful stuff worked out this past week… I thought I'd left my fleece at the [Mid-Sized City] bus station, but Jonathan found it on the bus's overhead rack (where I had *no* memory of stashing it)… I was *sure* I'd left my shower supplies in the cute hotel in [Smallish City], but then it turned up in my luggage… I was a little intimidated at the thought of hiking up to the douar (small community) on top of the mountain near P**'s site, but found myself loving the hike, especially the rock scramble, and let out a fairly thunderous "Humdullah!" (praise be to God, aka hallelujah, aka yippee) at the summit. My memories of that climb – from our collective "The hills *are* alive," to the three (count 'em, THREE) waterfalls, to the angry dog, to the braying mules, to the vision of P**'s town nestled into the countryside, not to mention the dozens of pictures I took – will be with me for a long, long time.

All my worries lately have turned out to be groundless. Concerns about cross-country travel? It's already practically routine. What if I don't get along with the other PCTs? I've made tons of great friends, one of whom has already invited me to travel with her after our term is up. (Inshallah) I keep playing out worrisome scenarios, and all that unfolds is blessing upon blessing. I've been doing well with the gratitude in hindsight – maybe it's time to work on gratitude in advance, aka hope.

[A little later]

Just got back from dinner and the Adventure That Must Not Be Named. :) Suffice to say, the directions we were given were accurate as to which streets to take, but grossly inaccurate as to distance. By a factor of about 3. Quotes of the evening: "The only way to make couscous appetizing right now is to hide a club sandwich in it." And, shortly thereafter, also in reference to couscous, "Why not just give me a spoon and a bag of flour and cut out the middleman?" The discussion of a zombie-macaque battle was also highly entertaining.

While wandering around in search of dinner, I remembered more of the details from the field trip that I'd meant to memorialize, like the dozen-plus egrets we saw (I saw that many simultaneously, so the total number was undoubtedly higher) near the [Smallish City] bus station. They were all white, none had yellow slippers, and in flight – and some flew right by, less than 20 feet away, with gorgeous morning sun shining full on them – I couldn't see their feet at all, just a cluster of grayish tail-feathers. Speaking of birds, we also saw a *massive* bird of prey soaring yesterday – it was at least bald eagle sized, and it certainly looked like a 6' or more wingspan – with a W of black and white (or dark brown and buff) on his underside and a startlingly stumpy head. Almost owl stumpy, if that makes sense.

Also, Jeremy saw 12 monkeys – the animals, not the movie – but by the time he'd pointed them out to me, the bus had driven past them. Apparently, the Middle Atlas are known for them. Sadly, the reason they hang out along the roads is that tourists feed them, like black bears in Yellowstone in the 70s and 80s. There's a desperate need for Environmental Education of the kind that Yellowstone churned out in the 90s…and hey, guess what, that's my job description! So if I'm posted near here, that might be something I work on. :)

So I missed the monkeys, but I'm definitely claiming yesterday's coral reef. It was *huge* – maybe Great Barrier Reef scale, but I'm not sure – and before I figured out what it was, neither P** (who is a fellow geo major! Yeah for the geobabes!) nor J**, a geo minor, had recognized it. Once I'd said it, though, they both concurred. So when this region is developed for ecotourism – which is in the works!! – now they'll know what the underlying geology is! And that makes me happy. :) P** suggested that I write a Roadside Geology of Morocco as my EE project. Tempting, tempting… On the fossilized-coral-reef-turned-mountain, I observed a small round snail that appears to be nearly ubiquitous on the mountain, as well as a less common, spiky gastropod that reminds me of the drill snails in Florida. Here's hoping that one of them hasn't been found on any other mountainsides, and can therefore become a protected endemic species, paving the way for headwater protection (which the whole region needs) and laundry stations (which apparently can only find government funding if there's an endangered species around).

Sometime in the past few days, I became obsessed with headwater protection for this region. It was probably planted in the back of my head when I was in Monteverde, and is just coming into bloom now. For those not familiar with the term, headwater protection is exactly what it sounds like – protecting the highest parts of a mountain so that all the water that runs downwards from it is clean. If you keep the headwaters clean, everyone downstream has a chance at clean water. If you pollute the headwaters – by, for example, washing your clothes with Tide in the canal on the mountaintop – then nobody downstream can have clean water. But the people on top of the mountain deserve to have clean clothes, so what are you going to do? One solution that has been used in Morocco is laundry stations. I haven't yet gotten a clear sense of exactly how they work, just that they provide a way to access running water and wash clothes without using the irrigation canals or streams.

I'd also like to find some research that confirms my gut feeling, which is that Tide is not good for crops or fish. It would be easy enough to set up the experiment myself, but I'm guessing that it'll be easier to get grants if there's a published study. Anyone with highspeed internet on tap (not to be confused with my Cybèr internet, which is a satellite connection shared among 8 machines, aka slowspeed internet) interested in doing a little quick research for me? And while I'm asking for favors, if you can find a brief summary (or not-so-brief, I've got time) of the geology of Morocco, I'd love a PDF of it or link to it. Just shoot me an email or put it in the "Comments" down below.

Day One in River Village

We were first introduced to the River Village community in Ali’s* living room, a long, skinny room full of overawed, silent PCTs and chattering women, plus Ali, MCing the whole event. My host mother turned out to remind me enormously of an old family friend, which was comforting. Her cheeks are round and pink, and appear to be engraved by decades of smiling. She suggested that we PCTs talk amongst ourselves while the women talked among themselves. It was a nice suggestion. J

Some of my new siblings took me for a walk after lunch, which was great. I learned some useful new vocab: azro = rock, jbel = mountain, aswo = whooping crane [Later note: no, it doesn’t - it means wind - and besides, it was a stork], ayur = moon, aman = water. My host sister-in-law kept trying to teach me the names of all the plants and trees, God bless her, and I just kept smiling my way through this mix of Eden and Lilliput. (My oldest host brother is almost my height, but everyone else in the family could walk under my outstretched arms.)

The local geology is striking for its conglomerates of GINORMOUS rounded clasts, which are poorly (if at all) sorted. This area must have been near the headwaters of a really massively large river, many moons ago, if I’m remembering my Sedimentology notes correctly. The matrix is a very clay-rich sand. It’s surprisingly resistant, given how readily the clasts fall out. The result is massive cliffs that look like they’re made of a pinkish-tan swiss cheese. [Later note: it’s not just the clasts that fall out…the house Ali grew up in was destroyed when heavy winter rains soaked into the cliff face, ultimately dislodging a ~250 cubic foot chunk of mountainside that fell into his home. It isn’t a slump or a landslide or an avalanche…it’s an intact chunk of cliff that fell less than 20 feet. Is there a name for that? It knocked out several walls, obviously, and the family moved up to the top of the cliff.]

* I know I said I wouldn’t use proper nouns in this blog. But Ali is probably the second most common man’s name in Morocco, after Mohommad, so it’s not particularly identifying. Plus, there are already too many people with A names in this blog – it’s getting confusing.

March 4-7, aka Pre-Service Training begins...

Since typing on these computers is so frustrating; I spent a couple hours today typing all the events of the past few days into my laptop and then saved the document onto a thumb drive / jump drive, to copy and paste into the blog. Unfortunately, this machine is too old to have a usb port. I'll try the other internet cafe in town tomorrow...

Hey, wait, I'm wrong, I just hadn't found it! And I just found the exclamation mark! Yeah!!!

Without further ado...

Blog updates
Since typing on these Moroccan keyboards (which I’ve also heard described as French keyboards) is hideously frustrating, I’m going to start updating my blog on my laptop and then thumb-drive it in at the Cybèr, as Internet cafés are called here. For the past few days, when I couldn’t blog, I wrote in my journal, so this is pretty much a direct transcription from there.

I left off in a sea of fog…an appropriate image to leave y’all hanging. :) So here’s the continuation of my update from Tuesday, March 4th.

…We approached [Arrival City] as the sun was rising, so it was a bit challenging to look ahead – directly into the glare of the sun reflecting off of the Atlantic Ocean – to try to catch a glimpse of the city. Also, it was incredibly cloudy. My seatmate (M**) and I squealed whenever we caught sight of building contours through the haze, but mostly we saw undifferentiated white. As we descended, the clouds never seemed to thin. M** commented, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the clouds *never* cleared, and the plane just stopped in the middle of one?” And then it happened. I turned to her and said, “Wow, that just became the Quote of the Day.” Apparently a fog bank had blended with the low-hanging clouds. On the ground as in the air, we couldn’t see more than a few dozen feet in any direction. As we taxied around, we kept exclaiming over everything we saw: “Moroccan flowers!” “Moroccan shrubs!” “Moroccan palm trees!” “Moroccan shrubbery!” (Insert requisite Monty Python riff.) And then we were disembarking.

We were met by Gordie, the Program and Training Officer (who reminded me a lot of Chuck). He escorted us to customs, which was straightforward. While waiting for our bags, I played the Name Game with everyone I could see, getting significant help from K** and E**. (By the way – and this information is publicly available, I’m pretty sure, which is why I mention it – we have 2 Erins, 3 Elizabeths, 2 Brians, 2 Natalies, 2 Melanies, plus a Kathy and a Kathleen. 53 names spread among 60 people.) I think I’ve mastered everyone’s name by now. Yeah!

We didn’t linger in [Arrival City]. After loading the two buses, we zipped off to [Coastal City]. Impressions from the drive along the coast:- There’s a startling amount of green. Perhaps because of the ocean, or because there’s not a huge area between the coast and the rain-stripping mountains, or maybe the rainy season just ended, or maybe just because it’s spring…in any event, the coastal road was lined with lush grasses, wildflowers (that looked, at ~35mph, like buttercups) and flowering bushes that looked like forsythia. - Also sprouting up everywhere, like mushrooms after a rainstorm, were satellite dishes. There were thousands of them. Every home must have had at least one, and apartment complexes had dozens. Maybe hundreds.

Then I dozed off and woke up at the Peace Corps headquarters. We met the Country Director, Bruce Cohen, and were introduced to the rest of the PC staff (except for some of the Program staff, who were in [Mountain City] preparing for our arrival on Friday. We also got a tour of the headquarters and the ubiquitous Moroccan mint tea. It’s very aromatic, and very sweet, and I love it. I guess there’s a chance I’ll become tired of it eventually, but so far – as of Saturday, March 08, 2008, when I’m typing up this entry – I’m still loving it. :)

Then we got back into our vans to get to our hotel in [Coastal City]. One of our company found herself roommateless, so there was some maneuvering that ended up with us changing rooms to a threesome. So I got to schlep my bags twice in about half an hour, and I found myself appreciating the weight restrictions the Peace Corps had placed on us…those things aren’t easy to move around. Then came lunch – also known as the Feast Of Lunch – followed by two hours of informational sessions with the Peace Corps staff. In the evening, rumor floated around that the hotel had wireless internet available up on the top floor. The rumor was sort of true…there was a wireless signal, but it was only available to one person at a time. So we all took turns on A**’s computer, shooting quick emails to our friends/family. The rumor got most of us up to the top story, though, so we hung out up there for a while, watching the street scene below. We were strictly forbidden to leave the hotel before receiving the safety/security briefing from the State Department’s Regional Security Officer, so we were limited to observing from on high. That all changes tomorrow…

March 5, 2008

My first full day in Morocco!! The folks here are following the election with more attention than I would have expected, so I know that Clinton picked up 3 of yesterday’s 4 states, but I don’t know what that does to the delegate counts.

This morning, I missed my chance to shower (too many people with the same wakeup time!), but I shrugged it off as the first of my Peace Corps sacrifices, and headed down to breakfast. I also tried out my new glasses for the first time, in hopes of trying out the transition lenses when I was allowed to go OUTSIDE for the first time.

One of the first things that happened this morning was that we got our “walkaround allowance,” in dirhams (which is pronounced almost exactly like euros – “deurhomms”, more or less)and learned basic Arabic phrases relating to buying things. “La shukran” made an appearance, along with many others. :) During the Arabic lesson, we were cycled in for vaccinations, and then we got to hear from the Regional Safety Officer, which meant that we were allowed OUT during the lunch break. Exciting!! Perhaps because it had been forbidden for so long (or at least, what felt like so long), it actually seemed quite momentous. A few of us headed up the street by the hotel, walked a few blocks, took a right, then the next right, and returned to the hotel. Probably about a half mile or so all together…really not anything dramatic, but it was the first time I was outdoors in Morocco when not accompanied by the entire Corps, so it still felt pretty fantastic. Our group – five Caucasian females, talking loudly in English – did attract some looks, but no undue, let alone inappropriate, attention. :D

This afternoon, we got our medical kits and a long lecture about diarrhea. The take-home message was Don’t Freak Out, which is always good advice. :) Then we met Ambassador Riley and his wife – both really nice people, and Mrs. Riley is doing wonderful work bringing health care to villages. After the Ambassador left, we were briefed on the Emergency Action Plan – yes, there is one, and no, I don’t anticipate it being used any time soon, don’t worry – and then we were done for the day! It was almost 6, and our curfew was 8, so we all headed out into the city, mostly in groups of 3-6.

My group walked up to the Medina (the old city, and effectively synonymous with marketplace, since it’s crammed with hundreds of shops), which was strongly reminiscent of the Khan al-Khalili in Cairo. We tried to stop in an internet café on the way back, but the huge one we’d seen earlier turned out to be temporarily closed, and the others we found were overflowing with other PCTs. (PCTs = Peace Corps Trainees, aka *us*.)

Earlier today, I commented to one of my roommates that it hadn’t really sunk in yet that I was *in* *Morocco*. Walking through the Medina this evening, I realized that what I meant by that was that it didn’t feel foreign. And it doesn’t. I don’t want to make a bigger deal of this than it is – maybe it’s just because we’re in a European hotel in a westernized city, and because I’m hanging out with Americans, speaking English. But it really doesn’t feel any more “foreign” than any other time I’ve moved. It feels *less* foreign than New York City, for that matter. Come to think of it, I felt the same way when I was in [another Middle Eastern city]. Sure, I couldn’t read the signs, and my clothing (and coloring) stuck out, but I had no doubts that I could live there some day. Walking through [Coastal City], I was certainly aware that it was a *new* city to me…I didn’t know where the markets or Internet cafés or bookstores were (though I do know a few of each now!), but I wasn’t uncomfortable except when I was in an especially crowded section of the medina. And I’ve never liked crowds, in any country. But maybe it’s a sign that I’ve already accepted, at some visceral level, that this is my home. For now, anyway. I’m not visiting, and I’m not a tourist…I’ve moved here. With fewer boxes than usual, to be sure, but it was a *move* nonetheless. Morocco is my new home.

And that’s a pretty great feeling. :)

March 6, 2008

Our last full day in [Coastal City]. [Mountain City], here I come! As always, it was a full day. Another shot, more financial paperwork (this time creating our in-country bank accounts), a Drop Out Now anti-pep talk from the Program and Training Officer (which was a bit surreal, but I guess he’s right that it’s easier on everybody if you quit earlier rather than later), the “medical interview”, and Darija numbers. Since I already knew the Arabic numbers, it was an interesting opportunity for linguistic observations. Like most Darija words, the numbers are a little “compressed” from their Arabic originators, with some consonants dropped and vowels shortened or erased. Example: 2, “Ithnan” or “ithnayn” in classical Arabic, is “tnayn” (for all 2s from 22 on up; for the number 2 itself, it’s “jooj” in Darija…no idea why). “Thalatha”, 3, is compressed to “tlata”.

At the end of the day, we were split up by program group, and I got to see the Environmental Educators as a unit. Turns out I’ve mostly been hanging out with Health Educators. Oops…?
At lunch, I ran out to the Internet café and was able to post a quick, fairly gushing, blog. :)

While walking back from the Cybèr, I crossed paths with two tiny munchkins – probably 4 and 6 – walking from (or to?) school. The younger one chirped, “Bonjour!” When I responded in kind, they both smiled widely. The little dude followed with, “Ca va?” I recognized the script from French 1, and gave the response: “Ca va bien. Et tu?” But either his French or his courage failed him, and the conversation lapsed. I smiled all the way back to the hotel. :D

Our post-session “SDT” – Self-Directed Training – took the form of getting to know [Coastal City], aka taking a bigger lap through the Medina, then going out looking for the ocean. We’d heard that it was near the Medina, but didn’t know quite where. We kept heading west, mostly because of my assumption that, since the Atlantic Ocean is west of us, if we walk towards the sunset, we’ll get there. Oops. Turns out it’s north of the city. North of the Medina, anyway, which is in the north part of the city. Guess the coast curves here. So after walking parallel to the beach for probably a mile, A** finally noticed it off to our right, when we were crossing a big intersection. So we walked towards it, and found it less than a quarter mile up. The sun had long since set by then, though, so I tried out my camera’s snazzy NIGHT setting. Worked beautifully. Then I hit the NIGHT PORTRAIT option and got pictures of A**, O**, and T**. The huge long exposure time (while the camera is getting the image of the dark surroundings) didn’t make a blurry image, since the camera was balanced pretty well on my knee, but my friends’ motion did. The photo showed them all with glowing haloes, which A** promptly claimed as pictures of their auras. :)

Oh, and last night, after getting back to the hotel, I started reading Culture Shock Morocco: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, which is more or less a handbook for expats moving to Morocco. As it described the steps of culture shock, I realized that all yesterday’s back-patting on how comfortable I feel here might be due to the fact that I haven’t yet *left* my culture. As long as I stay surrounded by American friends, I’m barely encountering, let alone confronting, Moroccan culture. Food for thought.

March 7, 2008

Notes jotted down while on the 8-hour ride from [Coastal City] to [Mountain City]. Most are geological in nature; sorry, that’s how I see landscapes. :)

We get to do laundry tomorrow! Woohoo!

The Atlantic ocean is right outside the window!

The soil here is so red – reminds me of Georgian soil. Come to think of it, Morocco and Georgia probably used to border each other. Where’s a paleogeographic reconstruction when you need one…

The land is pancake flat, with mostly horizontal stratigraphy…which I guess is to be expected, since we’re on a receding margin (like the Atlantic seaboard of North America). Every once in a while, there are metamorphic outcrops with a straight vertical foliation…from the suture with North America or with Laurentia? And why didn’t I think to read up on the geological history of Morocco when I had unlimited books and Internet access??

E** is sharing some really delicious swiss chocolate…yeah, unselfish PC people! :D

2 hours out, the red soil is replaced by chocolate brown dirt soil.

Nope, it’s cycling back to red. Guess it’s mostly red, with some local variation. Sometimes it’s the bright red of Georgian soil, other times the more dun-mixed tones of Mars…and the wind-carved outcrops rival the painted desert with their pink and tan bands.

Ears popping…mountains are visible in front of the bus. Guess we’ve turned west.

Now we’re in rolling red and green valleys. The contrast between the soil and the vegetation is truly striking.

The adobe-mud block houses wouldn’t be out of place in Arizona…and they’re only a few minutes up the road from a Bedoin sheep herder with his tent.

Ghostly mountains buried in snow hover before us; they are clear to the naked eye, but still invisible to my camera.

Stopping for lunch in [another big city]. The phrase “tropical paradise untouched by time” keeps floating into mind, thanks to these acres of palm-filled gardens. It’s easy to see why films set 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago are filmed in Morocco – and it also means that my image of historical architecture is actually shaped by modern structures. And the lush grasses – are those native species?? They look like they belong on a golf course.

The palm forests remind me of Florida and Southern California. Coincidence? Convergent evolution? Or were palm trees introduced to the US by one of the thousands of Americans who visited this region in the 19th century?

At my right hand are acres of olive trees, and at my left, mountains leaping into relief like the fault-block Tetons.

Ah…the darkness of the red soil is, at least sometimes, a function of moisture. Areas that have been irrigated (or get more rain) are dark, while dry areas are much paler.

There are black and white vultures circling over the town dump. It reminds me that I’ve seen a few white egrets. They don’t have yellow slippers, but I forget which species that makes them.

There are so many teeny villages, clinging to the hillsides and nestled in the valleys. Some contain only a handful of homes. (Literally, less than 5 sometimes.) I wonder how many – if any – are Peace Corps sites?

Update: yes, some of these areas *have* been Peace Corps sites. The terraced agriculture is a giveaway.

The erosion channels feeding the creek/river we’re driving along are visible both from their relief and from the color change – their channels are grey…an alteration product? Erosion product? Polish?

The wind turns treetops silver…

Can these soil-choked brown streams be filtered enough to produce potable water?

The road is following the stream/river pretty closely – after all, it carved this path through the mountains! I can see oxbows and abandoned meanders…the word “anastamose” comes to mind, but I don’t remember if this is a “braided” or “meandering” river. Why didn’t I reread my Geo 11 textbook before I left? I’m pretty sure I still have it…

Hey, a tiny waterfall, on the mountain across the valley from us!

Brown hillsides…

How long has this highway been here? How long as it been paved? What was it like before this, for these communities?

This landscape looks just like the Badlands of South Dakota.

The trees in the hillsides are planted in rows – looks like erosion protection. So why were the grasses in rows on flat surfaces?

No update from today, yet - my laptop battery was dying and a friend had borrowed my converter, so I couldn't plug it in. And another friend is now waiting for a computer, so I'll surrender this one. As always, your comments are welcomed - just click the link below!