RPCV: Ragamuffin Peace Corps Volunteer

Saturday, I volunteered at Boston's Head of the Charles, the biggest regatta in the world. (Or so they claim, though I had a South African fellow-volunteer assure me that the Henley Regatta in England is still the biggest.)

Knowing that I'd be outside, on the water, exposed, for about 10 hours, I dressed carefully.

For the first time since leaving Morocco, I layered on multiple sets of long underwear, and kept layering up.

As I walked towards the subway in the chill predawn, I realized that for the first time since starting my new job (ie since buying work-appropriate clothing), I was dressed completely in clothes that I'd brought back from Morocco.

Two sets of long underwear: check

Thermal jacket: check

Polar fleece: check

Jeans: check

Hiking boots: check

SmartWool socks: check

And moreover, as I'd noticed while dressing, these clothes are RAGGED.

I wore. them. out.

Life in the Peace Corps is hard on clothes. I tended to wear them a lot of times between washings, and then to wash them, I'd soak them overnight (which is hard on the fibers) and then scrub the bejeebers out of them (which is hard on everything). But what damaged even more of my clothes than the heavy wear and tear and washing? Burns. Between sitting too close to my heater, wrapping myself around my heater, carrying my heater from one room to another, and using my sleeves as hot-mitts in the kitchen, I managed to burn virtually every piece of clothing at least once.

I'd forgotten this till I got dressed Saturday morning, and kept finding more damaged bits.

My favorite blue jacket? Hole in the forearm. Bigger than a quarter, smaller than a ChipsAhoy cookie.

My beloved green fleece? Sleeves mostly destroyed with multiple burns from (ab)use as hot mitts.

My trusty jeans? Hole near the hem from sitting too close to the fire. It used to be the size of a nickel, but it's growing.

My stalwart hiking boots? Scuffed and stained and trim-torn-off. Oh, and I'd forgotten that I have the slipperiest laces in all of creation: I have to quadruple-knot them, and they still tend to come untied every few minutes. Square knots, too.

And so on.

As I tromped in my trusty (abused) boots towards the T, I couldn't escape the conclusion that I was one raggedy-looking PCV by the end of my service.

And yet it seemed so normal at the time...

5/14/10 Berberville Says Goodbye

In its own, inimical style, Berberville has given me a goodbye present.

It snowed!

Yes, it's mid-May.

Yes, I had left laundry out overnight, since it was still damp after yesterday's clouds.

So, yes, snow piled up (about an inch deep) on every cranny of every recently cleaned garment.

But it's still the prettiest goodbye present it had to offer, and I'm taking it in that spirit.

And the sun came out this afternoon, so my clothes may yet dry before I have to pack them.

I'm leaving Berberville for the last time - for the foreseeable future, anyway, though I keep promising folks that I hope to return - in less than 24 hours.

This week has been filled with goodbyes - with PCVs and HCNs - and yet more giving away. Ama has a sister with eight children, so most of my clothes are going to them. (The thermals I'm not keeping are going to a newbie PCV, though.) I've made several dozen cookies, and have more to bake, 'cause that's part of the goodbyes, too....

Off for tea and cookies with yet another family!

5/6/10 Word of the day: Dwr

Like many words borrowed from Arabic, dwr has just three key letters. And it's related to dur, which is spelled the same in Arabic (where o, ou, u, and w are all varying transliterations of the same character, "wew").

Dur means turn. As in, "Taxi driver, please dur right here." But if you linger over the central oo sound, stretching it from dur to duu-wer, it shifts meaning. Dwr can be used to mean "turn all the way around in a circle", but it's most commonly used to mean "walk around" or "wander" or "go walkabout".

Today, my visiting friend and I dwr'd town all afternoon.

At noon, we headed up to Ama's house for lunch. (Bread, mashed potatoes, and tea.) We hung out there for a while, then came home just long enough to grab a drink of water and change shoes before going for a walk through the fields. We wandered behind the caid's palace (perched on a jutting outcrop in the middle of town), down by the river, over to a nearby village, and back. We passed clover patches (which we promptly paused in, to hunt for four-leaf clovers), buttercup-filled meadows, dandelion fields, poplars, weeping willows... The perfect spring weather simply iced the cake of our perfect spring walk. :)

We got back, grabbed more water and a mikka of baby clothes (and I changed out of my mud-spattered pants!), and headed up to see the world's cutest 3-month old, who lives up on top of the caid's outcrop.

NB: My little brother is 10 months old. They're not in competition.

His mom fed us bread, jam, and tea.

Then we walked back down, swung by the house again, I picked up yet more baby clothes, and headed off to see a newborn. (And his mommy, my cousin.) First, though, I swung by Ama's house, so we could go over together.

An hour in a room full of chattering women, and I was finally free to go home. After eating a pancake, and jam, and tea. And a plate of aHrir (Moroccan mac & cheese, aka the food always served when a baby is born).

As I kicked off my boots, I told my friend, "I'm ready to not leave my house for a year." Or ever eat again.

Dwr-ing is fun, but 7 straight hours of socializing? Whew.

4/16/10 Travel Conversations

Whenever I travel, I strike up the most interesting conversations. We might talk about dance, books, my marital status... Here are a few snippets from conversations I haven't recorded before:

"So why are you here in Morocco?"

"I'm a Volunteer with the Peace Corps."
"So what do you do?"

"I'm an environmental educator. I talk to children and adults about the environment."

"Oh, teaching is good. You should be a full-time teacher. You could teach everything!"

"Yes, I could, but for now I'm working for the Peace Corps."

"But you could teach Hsb, arabiya, aud lbiya..."

"Yes, but I'm not a math teacher or Arabic teacher."

"But you could be!"

"Inshallah."

Another time, the jumper made me grin with a linguistic juxtaposition:

"Montez-vous parlez francais?"

At first I was saying "Montez-vous. Parlez francais.", which is French for Get into the transit already. Speak French. And that didn't make huge amounts of sense.

But then I realized that he'd said, "Montez!", ie Get in, followed by "Vous parlez francais?" Do you speak French?

'Cause if, unlike 90% of the foreigners he's ever seen, I don't speak French, I clearly won't have understood the first thing he said. Which makes it a better question to ask before, rather than after, he's ordering me around in that language...but better late than never, I guess.

Of course, I denied all knowledge of the language, as I do most of the time, so he repeated the instruction in Tam - "Alli!" - and I promptly climbed aboard.

Another time, when in a bigger city, a taxi driver began speaking to me in Arabic. I'd greeted him in Arabic - the greetings are the same as in Tam - so when I protested that I don't speak the language, he gave me a funny look. In my survival Darija, I said, "I only speak Tamazight. Do you know Tamazight?" He laughed and said no, then gave me a look and said, "Voluntaire de la paix?" I laughed, too, and nodded. Volunteer of Peace? Not my official title, but I like it. Clearly, he's driven around PCVs before, and remembered that the only foreigners who speak the language so little-known that even he and most of his fellow countrymen don't speak it...are us. Les Volontaires de la Corps de la Paix. Aka Peace Volunteers. :)

4/21/10 Lincoln and Condy

I've been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Lincoln and the men around him, Team of Rivals. On the back is one of the more famous portraits of Lincoln, flanked by portraits of the title rivals - Seward, Chase, Stanton, and Bates.

So I was reading in the transit one day, and the man next to me decided to strike up a conversation.

I'd paused in my reading, to think about what I'd read, and let the book fall closed (my place still marked with a finger). He pointed to the pictures on the back and said, "Who are they?"

I pointed to Lincoln and said, "Ibrahim Liin-kon. The president of America, a long time ago."

Of course, as soon as the conversation began, the two of us became the most interesting thing around.

The moment I'd responded to his question, the peanut gallery began chiming in.

"Hey, she speaks Tamazight!"

"Hey, she's reading about the president!"

"Yeah, she speaks Tamazight!"

"Do you think the book is in English or French?"

"Probably French. Look at the letters - those are French."

"How long ago was he president?"

I answered the oh-hey-you-speak-our-language with a grin, and gave an actual answer to to the one about Lincoln. It took me a second to work out the numbers - I don't usually use numbers over a thousand. "He was president in one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one."

"Oh, eighteen-hundred sixty-one?"

Of course, they simplify the dates - silly me for forgetting. "Yes, eighteen-hundred sixty-one."

At this point, the peanut gallery began asking me the standard questions about my marital status, my age, how much I liked Morocco, whether I thought Berberville was too cold, etc, etc. When I got tired of fielding them, I reopened the book and continued reading.

A few minutes later, my neighbor poked at the page and asked, "Is that French or English?"

"English," I answered. "In America, we speak English."

"And this man was the president of America?"

"Yes."

"So who are these other people?" he asked, pointing to the gallery of faces on the back. [I tried to find an image of the back cover to post, but couldn't. You can see it here if you click on "Look Inside" and then "Back Cover".]

"They're his ... um ... ministers," I said, suddenly recalling the word from my trip to Rabat, when I spent the better part of a day taxiing between different ministry offices, looking for the secret trove of geological maps for sale (which I found! but that's another story).

I pointed to Seward. "This was his ... First Minister," I said, trying and failing to come up with a better translation for "Secretary of State." Then I thought of something. "You know how Hillary Clinton is the First Minister for Barack Obama? Kif-kif."

He still looked confused, so I tried again. "Seward was the same minister to Lincoln that Hillary Clinton is to Barack Obama. And remember how Hillary Clinton wanted to be president, but Obama won, so now she's the First Minister? It was the same with Seward. He wanted to be President - all these men [gesturing to the other faces on the page] wanted to be president, but Lincoln won, so they were his ministers, instead."

At that point, the peanut gallery began an involved discussion among themselves, in an incomprehensible mix of Arabic and Tamazight. When they'd reached a consensus, a designated spokesman explained the problem to me.

"But Hillary Clinton *isn't* the First Minister of America. We know who the First Minister is, and she's a black woman."

I blinked for a second, then figured out what he was talking about. "That was Condoleezza Rice. She *was* the First Minister, for President Bush."

The guy next to me put it together first. "You mean, when you get a new president, you get new ministers, too?"

"Yes! Exactly." A new president gets to pick a whole new Cabinet, I thought, but lacking the words for "pick" and "Cabinet", I let his explanation stand. And I really didn't want to get into the nuances, like Secretary Gates.

"So Hillary Clinton is not president, but she's the First Minister now? Like the black woman was?"

I felt a lot of muscles clenching at their repeated use of "the black woman" to refer to our former Secretary of State, but I took a deep breath and said, "Yes, Hillary Clinton is the First Minister, like Condoleezza Rice - the black woman - used to be." (By the way, the word for "president" in Arabic and Tam is raiis, a perfect homophone for Rice. So this was probably confusing.)

"Yeah," chimed in another voice, "America always has women for their First Minister. Before the black woman, it was the old woman."

More muscles clenched, but I calmly replied, "Yes, President Bill Clinton had Madeleine Albright - the old woman - as his First Minister. And then President Bush had Condoleezza Rice and now President Obama has Hillary Clinton." Then I thought of something else. "But it isn't always women. It can be a man or a woman. Yes, the past three First Ministers have been women, but it can be either."

At this point, the men wanted my opinions on the presidents, and tried to bait me into a discussion of the Gulf War. I dodged most of the bullets and returned to reading.

Just another day in the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer...

4/24/10 Squished Muffins

The ubiquitous mikka bags aren't *just* litter - they're also picked up and used for various purposes. For one, they're usually cleaner than the ground they're sitting on.

So if you're a Berber lady, and you want to cop a squat somewhere, you might reach for the nearest mikka and sit on that instead of the dirt.

Or, if you see a mikka sitting on the edge of somebody's front stoop, you might choose to sit there. Right there. Even if the mikka is suspiciously puffy looking. Like it might have something in it.

Like maybe a pan of muffins, fresh out of the oven, wrapped in 2 mikka bags to protect them for the coming hours of transit rides.

It was my fault; I'd wandered a few feet away, and was chatting with friends. And then I looked over and saw an aHandir-wrapped woman lowering herself onto my muffins. My freshly baked, still warm, delicious pumpkin muffins. I squawked a protest, but not before she'd sat on them and squished them flat.

In retrospect, I kicked myself for leaving a mikka right on the edge of the stoop like that. Of course it would look inviting. But silly me, I thought that a plastic bag, located next to a big pile of luggage (on the ground in front of the stoop), would look like it belonged to somebody.

::sigh::

Epilogue: The muffins still tasted as good, and they reinflated OK. Leaving them in the pan was definitely the right call - if I'd just dropped them into a bag, they'd never have survived the trip.

4/30/10 On Relationships, aka "That's Why I Got a Dog"

A while back, some PCVs were talking about relationships in Morocco.

Most of us hold the idea that getting romantically (let alone sexually) involved with a Moroccan is just A Really Bad Idea. Some hold differing opinions, and there are more than a few PCV-HCN relationships, but on the whole, most of us think that opening that door invites a host of problems.

Which means that, in the quest for romantic partners, we're pretty much looking at each other. (There are some Fullbright scholars around, and a few people working for European and American NGOs, and I know people who have dated them, but most of us stick to PCVs.)

Not counting trainees, there are around 220 PCVs serving in Morocco. It's a roughly 50/50 split, males and females, nationwide, but we aren't distributed evenly throughout the country. Down in the south, it's been entirely female for years. We call that province "The Convent". My province is famous for its sexual harassment of female Volunteers, so we have far more men than women. I haven't done a head-count in a while, but we have something like 20 PCVs, of whom, um ... six? ... are female. Four are taken. That leaves an awfully small pool for the guys around here.

PCV1: You know, it's not like I can't deal with being single. It's just ... it's nice to have someone to snuggle with. To keep you warm on our cold mountain nights. To go for walks and hikes with.

PCV2: Yeah. ::sigh:: That's why I got a dog.

5/2/10 Going Away, Giving Away

A few nights ago (Friday night), my SouqTown buddies got together for a goodbye party. Like thegoing-away, giving-away party I threw 27 months ago, this was both to see loved ones and to get rid of my stuff.

Thanks to the generosity of friends and family, I've accumulated quite a stockpile of care package boxes. I distributed these around my living room, labeled with the names of the various guests coming to the party, and proceeded to fill them with whatever I found. Spices, uneaten foodstuffs, books, appliances, things I've bought, things I've been sent, things I've inherited from previous PCVs... They all got divvied up.

Altogether, I filled 3 giant souq bags, which are about a meter long, half a meter tall, and a foot wide. That's a lot of stuff.

All of which I'm now free of!

My replacement is inheriting the vast majority of my stuff - my bed, my furniture, my giant buta heater, my stove, my oven - but I wanted to share the largess, plus my house has felt crowded lately, and I want him to have room for his own stuff.

So I'm about 100 pounds lighter (which made for a beast of a walk to the transit station, lemme tell you) and that much closer to being ready to leave...

...which, honestly, isn't very close at all.

But it's a step.

When we got here, our mantra was shwiya-b-shwiya. (Take the first sound from Garth and Wayne's "shwing!", add "ee" and then "uh". Shw-ee-ya.) Little by little. Step by step. We learned Tamazight shwiya-b-shwiya. We adapted to the culture and food shwiya-b-shwiya. And now I'm getting ready to go...shwiya-b-shwiya.

Two weeks.

I'll make it.

::deep breath::

5/1/10 My Last Month

Wow.

After months of not-really-thinking-about-it, I can't hide from it anymore. It's May.

MAY.

I swear out on May 19th (inshallah).

I will be in America on May 25th (inshallah - and that's a big inshallah, because I have a stopover in Iceland).

I will be in America THIS MONTH.

I will finish Peace Corps THIS MONTH.

I need to figure out how cell phones in America work. (Those shiny credit-card sized things with a thousand apps? They freak me out. Moroccan cell phones are candy-bar sized hunks of plastic that are good for calling, texting, telling time, and if you're really lucky, playing two games. How on Earth can you access the internet, take photos, play music, and read a novel **all on the same little gizmo**??) Do I *have* to have a contract, or can I pay-as-I-go like I do here? Will my candybar phone work in America, if I buy a new SIM card, or am I stuck buying a new phone?

I need to finalize my travel plans. Most of it is locked in place, but there are still a few holes. (Like will I take a ferry from Tangiers to Algeceris or from Melilla to Malaga? Or give up my dreams of taking a ferry across the Mediterranean and just hop a flight from Fes to London?) Including what will I do with my final days of service? A lot of my friends are getting together to party...but I kinda want to be a homebody and play with my baby brother and chat with Ama. On the other hand, I've still never gotten down to the south, and I'd love to visit Agadir at least once. And then there are the PCV buddies I haven't seen in months - I'd love to visit them one last time.

One last time.

I have to be at 72-hour checkout in two weeks, which means everything is "the last time".

And while my service in Morocco hasn't been all sunshine and puppies, it's been a good two years. Full of love and laughter and joy. And while I know my next adventure will also be rewarding and fulfilling...it's hard to say goodbye to this one.

Very hard.

4/25/10 QOTD: "So, are you Ali's wife?"

I've been meaning to write this blog for a looooooooong time. Almost a year.

Last May, I visited my PCV buddy "Ali". He's one of my very oldest PCV friends - we met in Philadelphia, and were hanging out even before we flew to Morocco. But this was the first time I'd made it out to his site.

His is a hike-in site, so after I'd taken the requisite buses and taxis and such to his nearest decent-sized town, he met me at a cafe and walked me the half-hour uphill walk to his house. (And this being a Moroccan town, as opposed to a city, my enthusiastic and warm greeting after 12 hours of traveling to see him consisted of ... a handshake. In a city I could hug him, but in a town, that would raise too many eyebrows.)

As we walked, we stopped to chat ... oh, must have been at least a dozen times. Ali is friendly and outgoing, plus he lives near a tourist town where half the folks speak English (and are always looking to practice it!), so he's developed warm friendships with ... everybody, apparently.

And every time we stopped, the first question he got, in either English or Tamazight, was, "Oh, is this your wife?"

Sometimes they'd address it to me: "So, are you Ali's wife?"

He's lived in this place for a year. Been chatting with these guys for a year. Don't you think they'd know if he had a wife?

And for that matter, I'm the third female PCV who's come to visit him. Do they think he's that big a philanderer? And that his American wife would have left him alone for a year?

I couldn't find any logic by which it would make sense that they'd think I was his wife.

This was before I'd fully understood the need of folks here to place people in family networks.

Whoever had gotten the question, we'd both laugh, and shake our heads. It wouldn't work to say "We're friends" - the concept of cross-gender friendship doesn't exist here, so they'd think we were confirming a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. So we tried other options. "We work together." "We've known each other a long time." "We're both Peace Corps Volunteers." Of course, none of these necessarily rule out being married, but they do present other relationships...none of which make as much sense as marriage.

But once folks had accepted that no, we're not married, they'd usually follow it up to Ali with, "So is this your sister?"

By the time we'd fielded these questions for the 5th time, I was ready to say "Yes" and let it go. If they seemed to want more, I'd say, "Just like his sister," or "He's just like a brother to me," but they were often happy to drop it once they had a familial category to drop me in.

We look enough alike to fool someone who doesn't see too many foreigners. We both have reddish hair and pale eyes (mine blue, his green). That's enough to be family, right? :)

I've said before that I'm a terrible liar, and it's true - but calling Ali my brother didn't feel like a lie. Cheezy though it may sound, I do see Peace Corps as one big family. Ali is like a brother to me.

But definitely not a husband.

4/29/10 Blogs to write

When an idea strikes for a blog entry, I like to jot it down so I don't forget about it. If I don't have paper and pen handy - as I often don't - I type it into my phone, as a "draft message". (Yes, I text enough that I can jot things down pretty quickly with just my thumbs and a candy-bar sized phone.) But when I'm sitting in front of my laptop, I'm usually thinking of other things, so the messages in my phone stay unwritten. The number of notes I've written myself has gotten so ridiculous that I'm running out of phone memory. So in order to clear some space in my phone, I'm transcribing the various blog ideas. Originally I was writing it just for myself, but then I realized that these little notes are kinda entertaining all on their own. (For one thing, it cracks me up that these notes are written in three languages. Yeah, my head is a linguistic stew...) A few I've already written, a few are so telegraphic that even I don't know what they mean any more, and hopefully the rest, now that they're publicized, I'll be prodded (not to say shamed) into writing. Y'know...soon.

Those that have already been written get hyperlinks. Hopefully, within a week or so, they'll all be linked to actual blogs. Inshallah...

The law of the mikka.

So, are you Ali's wife?

Squished muffins.

WOTD tesarut.

That's why I got a dog.

Walnut bullies.

Moroccan and American on my shoulder.

I will zayd and return.

Ama - you used to come all the time now wallu Kautar.

Lincoln and Condy.

COSers stamp out.

Kitty transportation.

Soyoun's service.

Pizza place.

Teach Hsb arabiya lbiya.

Zaka sadaka.

Montez-vous parlez francais?

Popcorn &

7passengers-like you said.

Voluntaire de la paix?

Makeup w Ama

Barbarians 'betes'.

Adxllsg' addug' - aud Rebha.

On birth control.

4am waiting.

Narrow-bedded sandstones as grave markers so they can Point Due East! Of course!

Buta tanks of milk line the road.

Peanut butter and maple syrup.

If any sound especially intriguing to you, lemme know and I'll write those first. I do take requests. :)

In the same vein, during a chat-conversation, my sister recently asked me to write some posts reflecting on things I've learned over the past two years. Since that's an awfully big (and vague) request, I asked her to be more precise. Here's her list. Again, if there are any that you especially want to read, be in touch (via email or hitting the comments button), and I'll tackle those first.

Her: I think that covering up women is a sign of repression. I'll fight for a woman's right to dress as she sees fit, but I would prefer that women don't veil themselves at all.

Me: I used to completely agree with you, but I see more layers to it now (no pun intended)

Her: interesting. that sounds like it would make a good blog entry.

Me: hmm

Her: I know that you have a lot of finishing up stuff to do, but you might think about at least writing notes about stuff that you know now that you 'thought' you knew before and your new perspective is very different

Me: gimme ideas

Her: madrassahs

* veiling for women

* sexual harassment - how it's different for foreign women - how it's different btw large cities and the bled

* in general, the thousands of ways that the bled is different from the big cities

* when folks visit Morocco, they usually never leave the big cities, so even though they might travel around the world, they'll just see the European front that Morocco shows Westerners. Morocco absolutely has European-like cities, but it has many more places that are totally unique

* feral dogs and how 'pets' are treated, in general

* how MANY women are totally deprived of schooling

* and how that's slowly changing

* what folks can do to help (if they're so inclined)

* which NGOs are helping and which are not, & why

4/26/10 Ice Cream in Morocco

You'd think a desert country would be filled with cold treats.

You'd be wrong.

If you want American-style ice cream, you're limited to the biggest cities. I've been to a Haagen-Daaz in Marrakesh, where I was so bedazzled by the *glass* *dish* and *spoon* and *napkin* and other amenities that I actually snapped a picture:

In the Jm3 al-Fnaa in Marrakesh, you can get ice cream cones that slide down deliciously, but which always make me feel thirsty. (Maybe extra rock salt was used to make the ice cream?) In Essaouira, you can find gelato by the harbor. In Rabat, a gelaterie is located across from the train station. (You can also get a cone or shake at McDonald's, found in every major city, but would you really want to? They taste just as plastic here as in America.)

There are also pseudo-ice cream dispensers in most of the moderate-sized cities, where for 1DH you can get a cone with a swirl of cold squishy stuff that *looks* like ice cream but tastes like dirty water. (COLD dirty water, though, so I've gotten it more than once, on blisteringly hot days.)

And then there are the ice cream bars. Remember ice cream sandwiches, and chocolate-coated ice cream on a popsicle stick (what are those things called again?), and push pops, and nutter butter cones? They all have analogues here in Morocco.

My personal favorite is the Magnum. Usually available (where you can find it!) in Double Chocolate or Double Caramel, this is the brass ring of Moroccan ice cream options. I've spent many an hour wandering a strange city, questing for a Double Caramel Magnum. Mmmmm. Imagine the usual chunk of ice-cream-on-a-stick, dipped in caramel, dipped in a hard-shell chocolate coating, then dipped *again* in caramel, and again shelled in chocolate. Mmmmmmmm.

When Magnums cannot be found (sadness!), I'll settle for a MaxiBon. This half-ice cream bar, half-ice cream sandwich combines my two favorite cold treats into one delicious snack. Tip: eat the bar half first, because it's easier to hold the sandwich half. Especially if it's *really* hot, and the whole thing will melt in something less than five minutes.

Oh, and be prepared to haggle. Smart hanut owners know that Magnums and MaxiBons make the world go 'round, and they charge accordingly. Don't be surprised if they ask for 20dh apiece. Never pay more than 18dh, and do your best to get the price down to 15dh. (I know the difference is less than 50 American cents, but it's the principle of the thing.)

Bon Appetit!

4/20/10 Sprinks' Camp Photos, cont.

And now for the social side of Spring Camp.

When we weren't leading classes or clubs or otherwise responsible for something, the five PCVs could often be found in a cafe or one of our rooms or in the cafeteria, talking and laughing and playing cards. And most of the time, "playing cards" either meant Spoons or else ERS, dubbed "Double Jack Action" by RoRo and "Double Jack Slap" by me. 'Cause the easiest way to win? Slap a pair of jacks. Like this:

Alternatively, we might take a walk into Emerald City's town center, in search of note cards or art supplies or masking tape or ICE CREAM.

Note the remains of the MaxiBons we all got. Mmmm, MaxiBons...

And of course, we also socialized with the kids. Students. Young people attending the camp. Some we got quite close to over the week. On the last day, as they waited for their parents to come drive them home (and what does it tell you about the socioeconomic status of the campers that they all have parents with **cars**), several pulled out notebooks and asked us to write them farewell notes. Which we did, of course:

...So that was Spring Camp. L-mokhiam. English Language Immersion Camp. Call it what you will...I call it my favorite week every March. :)

4/27/10 Word of the Day: Tezolt

Tezolt is the Tamazight name for what Arabic speakers (and ancient Egyptians) call(ed) kohl. It's used where most American girls would use eyeliner or mascara, ie to darken the eyelashes and/or the area immediately around the eyes.

Traditionally made from galena (PbS, aka lead sulfide), it's now usually made from charcoal or other carbon sources. Well, in countries that regulate health issues and lead poisoning.

Here in Morocco, it's still made from galena.

In souq, I've watched artisans grind up the shiny grey metal cubes, shredding them into a very fine black powder that's mixed with a secret liquid and poured into a small container shaped more or less like a perfume bottle. Check out the illustrations here (and, for that matter, the text, most of which is relevant to Morocco).

I'm on a one-Volunteer campaign to reduce tezolt use. I know it's a Sisyphean battle, given the power of tradition, but I'm working on it. Lead poisoning is serious, especially in children, and it's common here to put tezolt on babies' eyes. In their eyes! It's bad enough in the eyes of adult women, where its soft-tissue access gives it carte blanche into the bloodstream. But in babies?! In America, parents are required to strip and repaint entire houses that have old, lead-based paint in them, just in case your kid decides to lick the wall. And here, parents rub a 50% lead goo into their newborns' eyes.

With a stick.

About 50% longer than a toothpick, and about as big around as the bottom part of a golf tee, the tezolt applicator is a wooden stick that you coat with tezolt - lead - and then jab into your eye. With practice, women become adept at it, and learn to do it without making themselves cry. The lead still stings, of course, but they've accustomed themselves to that.

So I explain to my American friends that yes, tezolt is made from galena, which, yes, is 50% pure lead (Pb), and that's usually enough to keep *them* from using it. And we're all trying to explain it to the women in our communities, but... Tradition is a hard one to fight. People here still rub mud into babies' umbilical cords, to "help them heal". In a land where handwashing is ritualized to basically wetting the fingers, and where mud is viewed as antiseptic, yeah, we've got our work cut out for us. But this is one battle I'm not giving up.

4/14/10 Four A.M.

Last night, I checked in with the driver of the crack-o-dawn transit. He said he'd be leaving at "Arrba nishan." 4'o'clock, straight up. O-dark-hundred.

So I set my alarm for 3:30, packed, and said goodnight to my visiting buddy. I left her playing on the internet (not everyone is as lucky as I do, having internet at home) and crashed out. Except that I couldn't sleep. Till almost 2. At 3:30, the alarm went off faithfully. I pulled myself together, assembled my bags (one to bring to Rabat, one with zucchini bread, and two of muraling supplies, for next week's Earth Day fun with Zakaria and Nacima), and trudged out to the road. I got out at about 10 till 4, and saw nothing. No one.

Did the transit leave early? It sometimes does...but the driver knew I wanted to go, and I even told him where I live, so I know he wouldn't have left without honking outside my door.

5 cold minutes go by.

I look up the road. No sign of the transit. No one waiting for the transit.

10 cold minutes.

I wonder if anyone else will drive past that I can hitch a ride with. Seems unlikely.

I hear the wake-up call. It precedes the predawn call-to-prayer by about 15 minutes, giving people time to wake up and clean up before their morning prayers. The caller says things like, "Prayer is better than sleep," and "You will be rewarded for your devotion!"

It occurs to me that the morning transit never leaves before the prayer call. Folks pray, *then* travel.

I stop worrying that I've missed it, and simply wait for it to show.

I hear the morning call to prayer. "Alllllaaaaaaahu akbar! Alllllaaaaaaahu akbar! La illa...." the voice rings out over the dark town.

I see shadows shifting on a nearby building. Where's the light coming from? Both moon and stars are too dim on this overcast morning... I get up, look around, and can't find the source of the light. I sit back down. A moment later, headlights approach over a hill. The transit is here! Alhumdulillah!

I stow my bags on top (with a lot of help from the jumper) and climb on board. 4:23am, my phone claims. So much for 'Arrba nishan', I grump to myself, then settle down to try to sleep. (Unsuccessfully. I can never sleep when sitting up.)

We finally roll at 4:45, rolling eastward towards the approaching sunrise...

Just another morning in the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer.

4/10/10 QotD: "Did you die?"

This morning, while picking up bread and yogurt from my favorite hanut guy, my host dad came up behind me and cried, "Kauthar!"

I spun around with a huge smile on my face. We clasped hands, said the routine greetings, and then he asked, "Did you die?"

I laughed, as he expected me to. "No, I didn't die. I just traveled. A lot."

"Your mom keeps asking about you. 'Is she back yet? Is her house still shut up?' and every day I have to tell her, 'No, she's not back. Her house is still padlocked.'"

I reassured him, "I just got in last night. I'll be over soon."

With a tone that said, you better, he said, "OK, we'll see you soon, then."

"See you soon."

As I walked away, I couldn't hide a big grin. It's nice to know that I'm missed when I'm gone. :)

4/1/10 Sprinks' Camp

While a successful Spring Camp experience requires many things, from competent staff to friendly kids to tasty food, in my experience it hinges on having a great group of PCVs. If you love the Volunteers you’re working with, you can weather nearly anything. If there’s drama, tension, resentment, or any other negative emotion, everything becomes harder.

Al-humdulillah, we have an awesome group of Volunteers working here in Emerald City. Awesome.

And from here on out, I’m going to refer to us by the nicknames we gave each other.

Our fearless leader is Sprinks, shortened from Sprinkler, who famously sprayed an entire table and several friends with water after hearing the 10,000th joke of the day from our resident comedienne. That fabulous female is now Wudja, from her habit of posing brain-twisting “Would-you-rather” puzzlers, like “Would you rather run naked through your site for a full day, or spend a full week slapping on the butt everyone you greeted?” or “Would you rather battle a witch pilgrim or a zombie shark?”

My Environment partner-in-crime is now Zifi, truncated from Zombie Fish. See, we Volunteers tend to slip off and play cards from time to time, and one of our games of choice is E.R.S., also known as Double Jack Slap. (You know, the one where you slap doubles and sandwiches, and where face cards let you steal the pile.) If you run out of cards, you’re out – but you can slap your way back in, if your fingers are quick enough. Zifi got out early in one of our first rounds, and his outstretched palm, twitching and flopping and shuddering as it kept reaching out to slap the stack and then checking itself against illegal slaps, looked like a cross between a flopping fish-out-of-water and a shuddering zombie. Hence, Zombie Fish.

The only Volunteer working the camp who I hadn’t met before was RoRo. He’s the newest of the five of us, having only been in-country for about six months. Whence the nickname? Well, we were trying to decide what simple song to sing with the campers at the pre-dinner camp song spectacular (previous favorites include “Boom Chick-a Boom”, “Go, Go Banana” and "The Hokey-Pokey"). Somebody suggested “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” so we gave that a trial run. RoRo opened with an arpeggio. When, after three gentle (and not-so-gentle) reminders that all three Rows are supposed to be on the same note, we just accepted that (1) he’s tone deaf, and (2) he’ll be RoRo forever.

And my nickname? Well, between my penchant for playing the original “Big Yellow Taxi” (which I taught my kids, for its English vocabulary and environmental message), my habit of bursting into random snatches of song, and my general tree-hugging hippy behavior, it was decided that I’m an updated version of Ms. Joni Mitchell. And since I give back rubs to my fellow PCVs, and there’s no record that Joni Mitchell is a massager, I’ve been deemed an upgrade: Joni 2.0.

So without further ado, I’d like to introduce the American staff of Spring 2010’s Spring Camp in Ben Slimane: Sprinks, Wudja, Zifi, RoRo, and J2.

1/6/10 Inventory

Yes, this post is three months overdue. Whoops.

As I rode the bus back after my long European vacation, I reflected on the transformed contents of my backpack. I’d traveled with a small pack, so I could carry-on with it (and thus dodge RyanAir’s travel fees), and had deliberately brought my least favorite clothes so that I could leave them behind, in trash cans and/or hostel share-boxes. I managed to drop 2 thick cotton shirts, a longjohn shirt, a pair of socks, and a bottle of shampoo.

I also swapped out an apple for 4 granola bars, and an empty memory card for a full one (despite repeated purgings).

And I filled the space left behind by the abandoned clothes with FOOD. Mmmm, food. 3 bottles of herb-saturated olive oil from Rome. A round of goat cheese from Amsterdam. A wedge of brie from the airport in Brussels (there’s a story there…). A wedge of parmesan from Rome. A wedge of redball cheese from Fez’s Marjane. A box of green tea. A bottle of syrup-infused crème. A bottle of fish sauce. A toy box with 8 Van Gogh paintings, from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh museum. A Starry Night mug from a tourist shop in Amsterdam. A holy shot glass from the Vatican (by special request for a friend). A rainbow pin saying “Peace” in Italian. ~15 country patches, to be sewn on to backpacks/jackets/whatever. Postcards and notecards from the Escher museum.

But my best exchange story involves books.

4 random romance novels inherited from a COSed Volunteer went into Café Clock, in Fes, where they magically transformed into 3 much better books: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (so much better than I’d expected!), Europe on a Shoestring (necessary for any cheap/broke/PCV traveler in Europe), and Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood (as hauntingly memorable as her other dystopian futures). I swapped Dracula for Isabelle Allende’s City of Beasts (nutshell: she should stick to writing for adults) on my second day in Marseilles. I swapped Year of the Flood for David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day (soooo much funnier than his depressing Christmas stories) on my first day in Rome. In Amsterdam, Shoestring and Beasts left me in exchange for James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (not my cup of tea) and D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (couldn’t get into it – too much dry psychoanalysis, not enough nice people). In Brussels, a friend gave me John Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (redefining what a “novel” can be – breathtaking!), and I surrendered Joyce for Khalid Housseini’s Thousand Splendid Suns (which made me sob hysterically for about half an hour; Housseini is not for the faint of heart, and his portrait of womanhood under totalitarian regimes and totalitarian husbands…searing, to say the least).

Thus did 4 totally forgettable novels turn into some of the best books I’ve read.

Traveling is cool. :)

3/26/10 Peace Corps Morocco: Sh*t Happens (Rated PG-13)

Scene: 4 PCVs sit around a table, eating lunch. I knew the other 3 before this conversation took place, but most of them hadn’t met each other before.

The conversation turned to intestinal distress, as it so often does when PCVs assemble. One of us pointed out that most Americans would find it at least odd, and probably disgusting or even nauseating, to discuss diarrhea while eating.

But, well, that’s life here. Like the book says, everybody poops. And since it’s a source of distress and fear for so many new Volunteers, it gets brought up in scared tones – at first. But as time passes, it becomes more and more normal-seeming to discuss your bowel movements with your friends. Newbies compare symptoms and offer diagnoses. Mid-term PCVs share the results of the required poop test portion of Mid-Service Medicals. Older PCVs reassure newbies that this, too, shall pass. (No pun intended.)

And before you know it, it’s just another topic of conversation, as appropriate as anything else for mealtime chit-chat. After all, it’s not nearly as alarming as some of the other things that happen to Volunteers here.

As one of us proposed today: “That should be the motto of Peace Corps/Morocco: Sh*t Happens.”

3/27/10 How To Open A Door 101

This afternoon, 4 of the 5 PCVs who will lead the Spring Break English Language Immersion Camp here in Morocco’s “Emerald City” arrived on site at the welcome center. After a warm welcome, our gracious hosts showed us into our prepared and freshly cleaned accommodations. We gladly shucked our bags, checked out the gorgeous views from the windows, and tried to figure out the slightly rattle-y lock. I made sure all the knobs turned smoothly and that the lock could be opened with the key before I closed the door. Confident that everything worked, I shut the door gently and tried the lock again.

The bolt slid as smoothly as ever.

Which made it hard to figure out why the door wouldn’t open.

At all.

After a few minutes wherein we each tried the lock a few times, our fearless leader, Sprinks, figured it out: the small slip-latch, that should turn with the doorknob, was caught.

Because there’s no doorknob.

We could overlook the lack of plumbing attached to the toilet, the hopelessly clogged bathroom drain, the bug corpses squished against every wall of the kitchen…but the missing doorknob felt like a dealbreaker.

Sprinks crawled out a window, spidermanned her way around a ledge to the door landing, and hopped down so she stood outside our door.

Turns out there’s no doorknob on the outside, either.

She went in search of our gracious hosts, who brought a variety of tools, sticks, and toys that they tried to use to twist the knob-hole and free us.

None worked.

Oh, some succeeded in twisting the hole, but that didn’t budge the latch.

Nothing did.

After the third day of our lock-in (OK, yes, I’m kidding, it was something less than half an hour), they took a crowbar to the door and used it to shove the doorjam far enough over to free the latch. We promptly taped it down with half a dozen pieces of electrical tape, so it’ll never catch the door again. Inshallah…