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. :)

5/2/10 Chitchat

Due to an odd and unfortunate series of events, I ended up having a longer conversation with Ama than I usually get to.

The conversation rambled, as long talks tend to do. Here are some of my favorite bits:

Ama: You'll be in America so soon!

Me: So soon.

Ama: And then you'll find a man and get married and have a big wedding!

Me: If God wills.

Ama: Here, you can't find a man. Moroccan men suck. But in America, you'll find a good man.

Me: [starting to protest her blanket condemnation of Moroccan men, then letting it go.] Inshallah.

Ama: In America, you can dress all sexy.

Me: [startled laughter]

Ama: You'll go to parties and wear little dresses like this [pantomimes strapless dresses, like the one she saw me wearing in a photo from my one bridesmaid stint] and get a man fast.

Me: [still laughing]

Ama: Here in Morocco, you have to cover up all the time. But in America, you can be sexy.

Me: [giving up on speech, falling over laughing]

A bit later, I thought of something.

Me: Oh, when Hassan comes, he might be embarrassed when you feed the baby.

Ama: What? I don't understand.

Me: In America, it's Hshuma to see a woman's breasts. They don't have to be covered very much [we laugh], but they have to be covered.

Ama: Really?

Me: Yes. It's very, very, very Hshuma to see a woman's breasts. So when you feed the baby, Hassan will look somewhere else. [I pantomime a series of evasive, embarrassed acts.] So if he looks down, or away, or suddenly starts talking to Baba - he's not crazy, he's just trying not to see your breasts.

Ama: But it's no big deal. If my husband is here, if my dad is here, if a male cousin is here...

Me: I know. Even on a transit, when strange men are around, a woman will pull out her breast to feed her baby. But it's strange for us. Because in America, that would never happen. When I was new here, I acted evasive around breastfeeding mothers, too. But then I got used to it. And Hassan will probably get used to it. But at first, he'll be awkward.

Ama: OK, I understand. Different people have different Hshuma things.

Me: Right.

Ama: Like once, Baba brought a group of tourists, and they were all eating dinner. One of them farted really loudly, so the kids and I were all shocked, because that's really Hshuma. They noticed that we were startled, and asked Baba what was wrong. He explained, and they said that there's nothing embarrassing about farting - it's a compliment to the chef.

Me: [laughing] Wow.

Ama: And another time, we took the kids up to [a city 2 hours north]. There, it's really Hshuma to notice when the goats are screwing, but here, it's just normal. So Mohammed pointed out to his auntie that the goats were going at it, and everyone began Hshuma-ing him. He was confused, and his auntie explained that you aren't supposed to talk about it. He said, "But why? In Berberville, we can talk about it."

Me: Right, different places have different customs.

Ama: OK, I understand. So maybe I should cover up with a blanket when I'm nursing?

Me: No, don't worry about it. He'll get used to it.

A little later...

Me: So you know how I told you that my friend Ali was coming to visit?

Ama: Yeah. Shouldn't he be here by now?

Me: I just heard from him - he's not coming.

Ama: Why?

Me: He spent all morning waiting for a taxi to fill up, and they kept asking him to buy out extra seats. They wanted him to pay for two seats, three seats...

Ama: Shame on them!

Me: I know! But he said, "No, I can't afford that, I'll wait for the taxi to fill up."

Ama: Right. Because you volunteers don't have a lot of money.

Me: Exactly! So they waited and waited. Finally, they had enough people - and the driver still insisted that Ali pay double!

Ama: What!? He can't do that.

Me: I know! Shame on him!

Ama: Ali should report this to the Caid. Or the gendarmes. Or both. That's just wrong.

Me: Yeah, he said he was going to tell his friend in the Caid's office.

Ama: Good.

The conversation rambled all over the place, touching on her kids, my future plans, the apartment I rent from her and Baba, and pretty much everything else. I told her that my American mom wanted to thank her for taking such good care of me; she assured me that all moms worry, but that it'll be better when I'm back in America. Of course, that's when she'll start to worry about me.

See why I don't want to leave?

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.

3/24/10 QotD: "I was the sixth person! Woo-hoo!"

The subtitle of this blog post should be: The Value of Lowered Expectations

As I’ve mentioned before, traveling in Morocco often means riding in grands taxis, 4-passenger wide-body Mercedes sedans that here seat 6 passengers. (Two ride shotgun, four squish in across the backseat. Duh.) The taxi won’t leave until all six “seats” (using the term generously) have been paid for.

This means that if you’re the first person who wants to go to, say, City Z from City Q, then you either get to pay for all 6 seats or wait for five other people to show up who also want to go to Z from Q. Or some combination thereof. The wait can be anywhere from five minutes to five hours, although as a rule of thumb, you should expect to wait about 5 minutes for each missing person.

When the stars align in your favor, you show up at the taxi stand and discover that five other people have already been waiting to get from Q to Z, and you get to hop right in and leave immediately. Hence the QotD: “I was the sixth person! Woo-hoo!” My buddy was celebrating a wait-less travel experience.

It made me reflect for a moment: in the US, land of car ownership and shuttle flights, we’re not really accustomed to waiting for travel. Transportation is on tap, like hot water and mochaccinos and so many other things that just aren’t readily available here in Morocco. We PCVs have become so accustomed to this waiting state of being that when we do get the instant travel we’d simply expect in the US, it becomes grounds for rejoicing.

Maybe there’s something to be said for lowered expectations.

2/12/10 Riding Afla

The preposition afla means on top of or sometimes just above.

In the Tam-glish blend that we PCVs speak, "riding afla" means riding on top of a transit.

Rriding afla entails sitting on a flatbed, wood and steel, shallow-sided cage, with no safety restraints other than however tightly you're holding on.

It's wildly unsafe, given the poor road conditions and prevalence of traffic accidents - the #1 killer of adults in Morocco* - and therefore forbidden to us Peace Corps Volunteers. It's also illegal, under a paternalistic Moroccan law reminiscent of American seatbelt laws, but it's one of the many laws that exists only on paper. The gendarmes routinely choose not to enforce the laws against riding afla, in exchange for ... let's call it "mutual goodwill."

Theoretically, the shallow-sided cage perched afla the transit is used to transport goods and belongings, like a car or truck roofrack. In practice, it transports goods, belongings, men, women, children, livestock...

What? Livestock?!

Yeah, I'll get back to that in a sec.

Many people prefer riding afla to riding inside the transit, especially in the summertime. The interior is stuffy, overheated, and crammed with sweaty bodies, while the roof has 360 degrees of fresh air, the steady breeze of our forward motion, and room to sprawl, at least until afla gets as crowded as the inside, which doesn't happen that often. On the other hand, there aren't anything like seats up there, so folks just push in between the baggage and the spare tires. Riding 150 km down the mountain on a spring afternoon, surrounded by fields in bloom, sun on your face, a breeze in your hair, and squishy luggage to lean against... It's not a bad way to travel.

...Or so I've heard. Of course, I have no way of knowing myself, what with it being forbidden and all. Yeah.

But get back to the livestock.

Hang on. In addition to luggage and, yes, occasional livestock, the roofracks carry nearly everything that people want transported up and down the mountain. I've seen ponjs, TVs, satellite dishes, tables, musical instruments, heaters... Most of this is available in souq in Berberville or the two other mountaintop towns that host a weekly souq, but you do get a much wider selection down in SouqTown, so some folks prefer to do their shopping down below.

I get it. People ride afla illegally, all sorts of goods ride legally, but what was the thing about animals?! Riding 10 feet off the ground in an unsecured roofrack??

OK. A couple weeks ago, I watched a herd of sheep get lifted, by their bound ankles, up on top of the transit. Ewes, rams, lambs...a herd - a small herd, but still - were hauled up by their fetlocks and lashed to the roof for a few hours of the 4-hour run.

I sat inside, staring open-mouthed at the animals that the jumper (driver's assistant / baggage handler) was pulling up past the window beside me. The jumper could lift two lambs at a time, one in each hand, but needed both hands to lift the sheep. (No surprise there - these sheep are about the size and weight of German Shepherds. Big ones are *big*.)

Now, this is hardly the first time I've shared a ride with livestock. I've taken rides in transits and buses where the chickens rode inside with me, where they fluttered afla, where sheep rode in the baggage cars under buses, even once when a frightened sheep lay bound in the trunk of a taxi.

But I do think this one wins the prize for volume. I didn't get an accurate count - it took me a second to realize what was going on, and another few seconds to believe it - but it was something more than 10 sheep and less than 20, I'd say.

But Kauthar, how else can people transport their livestock?

Trust me, that's not a problem. Transits are the only way for *human passengers* to make the ride from Berberville to Souqtown on *public transportation*. There are lots of other options for livestock. The simplest, of course, is simply walking them. Meets two needs at once - they get to graze and forage and they get to their destination. Most of the time, though, animals are transported in camios or runnls, different kinds of trucks. Some are small, and can fit only 5 or 10 sheep, crowded together onto two levels; others are the size of dump trucks, and can transport several cows or an entire herd of sheep. People routinely ride these, too. A couple will ride in the cab, with the driver, but most will sit back with the animals. (Not us Peace Corps Volunteers, of course - this, too, is unsafe and therefore forbidden.)

* As I said, the #1 cause of death among adult Moroccans is traffic accidents. The #1 cause of death among children? Diarrhea, most commonly from contaminated drinking water. It's entirely preventable and an enormous tragedy for the country.

8/10/09 Baby 'Twixt My Knees

Explanation on the dates: As I was doing some digital housecleaning, I found a bunch of old, half-written blogs. I'm finishing and posting them, but maintaining the original dates. Sorry for any confusion.

Snapshot:

I'm sitting on a bus, as I have been for countless hours. Like most Moroccan buses, this one rides a good six or eight feet high (leaving huge storage spaces underneath) and has both a front and a back door. I'm sitting right behind the back door, behind the railing of the back staircase.

The door opens, and a family clambers on: a dad, a mom, another woman (probably her sister), and assorted children.

The bus is already crowded, with bodies in every seat and several in the aisle. (It's illegal for buses to carry more passengers than seats, but gendarmes can easily be convinced to look the other way. - cough $$ cough - )

The family members look around and decide that their best option is the stairwell itself. Two girls on the stairs; the three adults stand by the door. One of the women has a baby strapped to her back; the other holds a toddler.

When the toddler starts to fidget, the mom's friend? sister? helps her unstrap the child, slung papoose style along her spine. With little more than a glance at me or my American buddy sitting next to me, she plops the kid on the floor of the bus, which is shoulder-high to her, but at my feet. Still not looking at my face, she wedges the child between my knees so he's in no real danger of plunging over the edge of the unguarded stair well, then turns back to her husband.

Reflecting on the "It takes a village" attitude I've previously noted with Moroccan child care, I accept that the munchkin is now my responsibility. Watching his mom for approval - though she has yet to make eye contact with me - I wrap an arm around him to hold him steady.

A few minutes later, the dad, who speaks some English, strikes up a conversation with my buddy. I chime in, and soon the three of us are chattering away about Peace Corps and environmental protection and suchlike...all with his son perched between my knees.

When we get to their stop, which isn't far, the mom reaches over to get her child; her friend helps her secure the toddler to her back, and they're ready to go. The woman finally looks me in the eye, to say thank you and goodbye. I smile, tell her it was my pleasure, and grin at her surprise in hearing tarumit speak Tamazight.

What was most remarkable to me was how blase everyone else was. Oh, sure, hand your child to a stranger for the next half hour. It's all good.

...and it was. :)

11/25/09 The Mountain

I could have sworn I'd written about this before, but can't find it in a quick search of the archives, so here goes...

My region is dense with Peace Corps Volunteers. For a relatively small region, we're flush with PCVs. For the past six months, we've had 13; we recently lost three, but we just gained five more with the newly arrived YD and SBD Volunteers, so we're up to 15. I thought we were nearly saturated, but I just got an email from our staff that says we're going to get a whole bunch more. The Mountain might have as many as 20 Volunteers.

So what is "The Mountain"? It's the shorthand that most of my local PCV buddies and I use to refer to those of us who share our Souqtown. Some people prefer "Souqtown Crew" or "The Souqtown Gang". I like "The Mountain."

Of course, it's not entirely accurate. The road from Berberville to Souqtown runs along a valley floor past several mountain ranges, and several of the Volunteers who make up "The Mountain" live in adjoining valleys, on the far side of these ranges. Some of our crew are in the flatlands on the far side of our Souqtown. They tend to prefer "Crew".

But I like The Mountain, for all its vagueness and inaccuracy.

Today, I visited my two nearest Mountain Volunteers. Our sites are close enough - evenly spaced every 20km along the road - that it's actually possible to go and return in a single day, if you time the transits carefully enough. Of course, given the vagaries of transportation on The Mountain, it's also entirely possible that you'll end up stuck in a friend's site overnight. But we all keep lots of sleeping bags and blankets and ponjs on hand, so it all works out well in the end.

I have to say, I'm going to miss these impromptu sleepovers when (if) I return to the US.

Remind me why we stopped having slumber parties after childhood?

11/16/09 Redball Serendipity

A cheezy movie had the tagline, "When destiny has a sense of humor, it's called Serendipity."

That's actually a terrible definition of a great word.

Serendipity is when unexpectedly delightful things happen. When challenges suddenly work themselves out. When you have to laugh and shake your head and say, "Well...um...great!"

Some may attribute serendipitous moments to destiny. Others to God. Others to their own karma. But if it happened due to your own deliberate efforts to make it happen, it doesn't count as serendipity, so regardless of your belief system, it's a thing to be thankful for.

Today, I had a moment of serendipity.

The day didn't start out fabulously. I slept on a friend's floor (not uncommon, here in the Peace Corps) and peeled myself out of my chubby sleeping bag at 4:30am. Several of us were trying to catch an early-morning transit. We expected it to pass at 5:30am, but knew that it didn't adhere to a strict schedule, so we wanted to be on the side of the road at 5am.

We pretty much made it - 5:08am, according to my new phone - and spent the next hour stamping our feet, huddling for warmth, and watching shooting stars. (NB: the Leonids have begun, and are already a *great* show, and they haven't even peaked yet! Tonight should be great, and tomorrow night should be breathtaking, with more great nights throughout the week!)

After 6, our host called the transit driver...who informed him that the transit had rolled at 3am, not 5am.

We grumbled and mumbled and trooped back indoors, some to sleep, others to get coffee and/or breakfast, still others to try to work out another solution.

Nine hours later, we were back on the side of the road. The transit had been spotted heading back, having returned its round-trip into town, and our host had gotten the driver to agree to take another trip, to bring us all down the mountain. The transit had rolled up...but what goes up doesn't necessarily come down *quickly*, so we were, again, waiting. For something like an hour.

As we waited, I tried to decide my route. After getting out of my friend's site, I could either head to SouqTown or go straight up to Berberville. I really, really, really wanted to get home...but I'd promised my host mom that I'd teach her how to make pizza, which requires redball cheese, which is only available in SouqTown.

If we'd gotten off the mountain at 6am, I'd've gone into SouqTown, bought some redball, Skyped anybody awake, run various other errands, and then ridden back up the mountain on the noon or 2:30 transit. But to head into SouqTown *now* would mean having to spend the night there. The earliest I'd be home would be around noon tomorrow.

So I had a dilemma. Not a massive give-into-the-terrorist-demands-or-watch-innocent-people-die kind of dilemma, but still, a tough choice: go straight home and apologize to Ama for delaying our pizza party by another week OR spend yet another night out of site and away from my friends/neighbors/kitties/family.

I owe Ama some quality time, plus my kitties don't have enough food to last till tomorrow, so both options were unpleasant.

And then came the serendipity.

Redball serendipity.

I had found a mediocre solution to my dilemma: go home, but ask one of the friends heading into SouqTown to pick up some redball cheese and send it up on the morning transit. I don't like asking friends for favors, nor do I like exposing myself to public commentary (and "she sent cheese up the mountain on a transit" is definitely interesting to somebody), so I wasn't thrilled with the choice, but it seemed like the best one I had.

And then.

When I asked my buddy for the favor, another friend - adopted name "Mina" - overheard.

Mina clarified, "You want 20dh worth of redball cheese?"

"Yeah," I confirmed.

"I have some in my bag," she announced, as though this were a perfectly ordinary thing. As though cheese is usually tucked in shoulder bags, along with chapstick and a novel for the transit. "Want to buy it off me?"

"Yes!" I exclaimed.

"I picked it up in Marjane," she explained, pulling out the wedge of plastic-sealed gouda. "It was on sale - that's more than the usual 20dh worth."

I nodded my agreement, still grinning. "That's 30dh, maybe even 40dh worth of redball. Sweet!"

I even had exact change in my pocket.

I handed her the 20-dirham note. She handed me the wedge of cheese, which I promptly slid into my own bag, next to the chapstick and the novel.

And just like that, everything was perfect. I'm equipped for some pizza fabulousness with Ama, I'm headed home tonight, and Mina - who had gotten the cheese for the previous weekend, and had no pressing need for it now - is 20 dirhams richer.

Oh, and the transit showed up only a few minutes later.

Luck? Destiny? Karma? Divine Love meeting *every* need? I have my answer; you're welcome to yours. :D

9/2/09 Leaving Morocco on RyanAir

They blinked at me. They glanced at each other. With wide eyes and the reassuring tones you’d use on a crazy person, they explained slowly, “It’s not time for Sevilla yet.”

“This line is for Belgium passengers.”

Their voices overlapped as they competed to talk the psycho (me) off the ledge.

“Sevilla will check in over there.” “Later.” “You’ll need to wait.”

They acted like I’d tried to check in for my flight a month in advance, not two hours. Two hours! Exactly the window recommended and often required for international travel leaving from the US.

I took another look at the monitors. The listed flight, the flight that folks were allowed to check in for, was scheduled to depart in less than half an hour. Check-in had officially closed 20 minutes ago. I looked at the boards hanging over RyanAir’s other lines. They were for flights leaving 30 minutes after this one. There were no lines for anyone hoping to check in more than an hour before scheduled takeoff.

I nodded, picked up my Leaning Tower of Possessions, and headed in the indicated direction. Maybe 15 people lingered, loitered, chatted, and generally waited in a line-like cluster that looked no more nor less like a line than anything else I’d seen. Queuing, I have concluded, is an acquired skill that many Moroccans have yet to acquire.

I dropped my stuff and slumped against a column. I’d carried two huge backpacks across half of Morocco yesterday and half of Fes today; I wasn't picking them up again until I had a firm destination.

I pulled out my journal:

So here I sit, waiting. I awakened early this morning, visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. (Dude, I’m flying to the land of sushi and guacamole and ice cream. If that’s not Christmas morning, what is?) I’d set my alarm for 6:15, but popped up at 5:45, and decided to roll with it. Why 6:15? Back calculations: 9:40 flight to Sevilla means 7:40 check-in. Bus to the airport takes half an hour and leaves on the hour from the train station, so I have to be at the train station at 7:00. The train is ten minutes across town by petit taxi, but there aren’t many taxis around at that hour, so I should be out by 6:30. No morning shower means speedy morning routine, hence the 6:15 wakeup call. My entire morning was planned around the expectation that checking in two hours before your flight is, you know, a *good*idea*. Turns out that the good folks at RyanAir think it's a specimen of insanity. Sigh.

My morning had gone as planned. Having the extra half hour meant that I got to repack carefully and take my time, but still got out onto the street by 6:15. No taxis at the Bab Bou Jeloud, so I walked out to the main street, about two blocks away, and found one.


“SbaH lxir. MaHta l-tren, 3afak?” Good morning. Train station, please?
“You speak Arabic?”
“No, I don’t know Arabic. I know Tamazight, and a few words of Arabic.”
“Are you fasting?”
“Yes, I’m fasting.”
“Do you pray?”
“Yes, I pray.”
“Are you Muslim?”
“No, I’m Christian.”
“Then you don’t really pray.”
“I do pray, but I don’t pray like you. I pray like my parents.”
Etc.

Just another morning in the life of a Peace Corps Volunteer…except that this particular morning, I’m headin’ to America! (OK, yes, heading to Sevilla, Spain. But only as a stopover en route to America.)

9/16/09 L-Abrid Ibbi Addendum (Rated PG-13 – Kiddies, stop reading)

I'm serious about the rating. This is not for children.

I used to feel irritated when the decision was made to close a road due to flooding. I figured that drivers are smart enough to know whether or not to try to cross a shallowly-flooded road, and that if they’re willing to go for it, if they know/believe that their vehicle is heavy enough to make it, then they should get to try it.

I don’t feel that anymore.

Just in the past week, there have been three major accidents, all related to floodwaters. In one, a small transit with three passengers washed entirely off the road, was swept down the river, and was never seen again. As my host mother grimly said, “They’re probably down at the dam, being eaten by fish.” Elsewhere, a bus driver overcompensated, the wheels locked up, and the whole many-ton bus flipped sideways, killing four. Just this afternoon, a transit driver did something similar, killing himself and the jumper clinging to the back. A friend of mine witnessed this one; the other two stories have spread like wildfire through the region. Four unrelated people asked if I’d heard about the washed-away transit and its 3 casualties.

In a country with as much desert as Morocco, it’s hard to see rain as anything but a blessing. Hard, but not impossible.

9/13/09 The Saga of the Sack

Note for Americans and other aliens: The French word for "backpack" is "sac-a-dos", so the Darija word for backpack, adopted from the French, is "sac", which sounds exactly like the English "sack". I've therefore fallen into the habit of referring to my hiking pack as my "sack", when talking to Moroccans or Americans.

Once upon a time, some nice folks at Kelty(TM) sewed together nylon and rayon and other tough, water-resistant, synthetic fibers to make a backpack. It was a massive, internal-frame pack, with a heavily padded back and shoulder straps, dozens of places to attach water bottles, sleeping bags, hiking boots, and nearly anything else, plus more heavy-gauge straps than any three bags really need. This thing was built to last and to lead a rugged life.

And it did.

The sack bounced along in a shipping truck to St. Louis, which made it feel vaguely ashamed - surely sacks aren't meant to travel by truck?? - but it brightened right up when it moved into its new home at the outdoor gear store. It had lots of sacks to talk with and trade stories (though so far, none had a good story to tell), plus sleeping bags and other camping gear, who told some really high-quality campfire tales.

Eventually, the sack found a home, with a nice family. They took it to Costa Rica, which made the little sack swell with pride. It trekked up and down volcanic terrains and through rainforests. It returned to St. Louis stuffed with lovely memories of its adventures, plus all the new stories it had heard from the other backpacks piled into the oversized baggage section of the airplane, en route to Central America.

Not long thereafter, the sack got to walk part of the Appalachian Trail. This proved to be an *excellent* opportunity to trade gossip with other hiking packs, since most of the gear was stashed together each night, while the people sat around the fire and swapped stories of their own.

After that, the sack's life quieted down somewhat. Over time, quietly gathering dust, it began to feel a bit forlorn. Fortunately, its family had *lots* of members, and the sack found itself being transferred from the tallest one to the second tallest one, who promptly stuffed it swollen and flew it to Morocco.

In Morocco, it returned to the quiet life; its new little sister, a featherweight pack, got to go on all of their new person's trips.

Many, many months after it arrived in Morocco, it found itself lent to a friend of its tall person. This shorter person carried it to Ireland, where the sack polished up its story-telling skills (it didn't hurt that the new person took it to the Blarney Stone) and remembered its glory days of hiking and starlit nights near campfires.

The sack returned to Morocco for only a few days before being repacked. It felt a bit confused as to its new contents - there seemed to be an awful lot of hard, lumpy objects, and very little of anything that felt like clothing or food - but when its tall person carried it off to the airport, it felt very important indeed.

The sack bounced through several major European capitals before traveling to San Francisco, where all its lumpy contents - lanterns, instruments, jewelry, scarves, and woven objects - were displayed during a talk about Morocco. The sack leaned against a wall, listening to the presentation. It wanted to make a few points of its own, about the quality of storage spaces on buses and in transits, but decided to wait for a more opportune moment.

The sack soon found itself repacked, this time with what it found more suitable contents: clothing, food, polar fleeces, and other vital items. Some of these would stay with his person; others would be given to friends. The sack slipped into the baggage space under the 777, flying from San Francisco to Europe, feeling very important indeed.

Its person made two quick connections in Europe before ending up in Sevilla, Spain. The sack had a somewhat different itinerary.

Just how different, it is still keeping to itself. Someday, it may share the journey it took during its five days of freedom...but for now, all its person knows is that it found its way to Sevilla after she had left, and that despite protestations from the good people at Air Berlin that it would be shipped to her home in Berberville, it instead came to rest at the airport in Marrakesh, where it will sit until the floodwaters abate and her work level calms down to the point where she can take the cross-country trek to retrieve it.

So now, the sack sits quietly, in a dark room marked LOST BAGS, waiting for its person to bring it home in preparation for its next adventure...

9/10/09 ...Rain's Gonna Come...

I had this one fragment of song - "...rain's gonna come..." echoing in my head for long enough that I finally put some serious effort into chasing it down. The result? More on that in a bit...

So why was this running over and over on my mental "Repeat 1"? Because for the past days and weeks, Morocco has been getting endless rains. Sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes shaking the mountains with thunder and lightning, other times just a faint drizzle, rain has been falling in my valley pretty much since I left.

The clay-rich soil has little tolerance for heavy rains; most of the water slides over the surface and finds the nearest creek, then pours down into a stream and thence into the rivers that carved these mountain valleys over the past millenia.

When the shallow rivers get hit with this massive influx of rainwater and runoff, they have nowhere to go but up. And so they rise.

And rise.

Last year, the flooding caused millions of dollars of damage in lost crops, flooded homes, and washed-away roads, not to mention the damage to the economy caused by folks getting stranded for days and weeks at a time, as the rivers poured across Morocco's roads.

This year, the flooding is starting even earlier.

I spent all day today trying to get home. I got up at 6:45 (after going to sleep after my 2am saHor) to catch the 7:30 transit from Souqtown to Berberville. I got to the transit station at 7:25, and found out it had already left. I reserved a seat on the 9:00 transit, then went back to sleep. I returned to the transit station at 8:45 and found that not only was it not about to leave, but that the 7:30 transit had returned.

Floodwaters covered the road deeply enough that these many-ton, 16-passenger-vans (weighed down by 20-30 passengers and their belongings, usually) were afraid to try to cross, lest they wash away in the torrent.

So I settled down, out of the ceaseless rain, to wait.

And wait.

10am came and went.

So did noon.

Since we're still in Ramadan, nobody ate lunch; I would have loved a cup of tea or cocoa to fight the bitter chill of the endless cold rain, but Ramadan prohibits drinking as well as eating, so I just huddled in my summer-weight clothes. (I'd packed warmer sweaters and jackets in my luggage, but said luggage had been lost by the airlines the day before. Sigh.)

By 2pm, we'd found enough people willing to attempt a rather desperate work-around. Since the 140-km "direct" road from Souqtown to Berberville was washed out, and since the floodwaters showed no signs of abating, the transit owner offered an alternative to those of us who didn't want to wait another day or three to wait out the flooding, as most folks seemed willing to do.

He proposed a detour. A very, very long detour. I haven't sat down with a map to calculate the mileage, but it was probably twice as long as the usual route. But it *should* bypass all the flooded roads and get us safely home. Inshallah.

So we sent up prayers, crossed our fingers, and trusted ourselves to the road, the fates, God, or whatever else we believed in.

An hour later, we skirted a partially-flooded section of road. The passable section was less than the width of a single car, so the tires got wet, but we made it through otherwise unscathed.

Only a few minutes later, we turned around.

Lhumdullah, we only had to backtrack a short distance before finding a detour around the detour.

Two hours later, we slowed to a crawl as we inched over rubble, gravel, cobbles, and assorted chunks of rock from a nearby rain-induced landslide.

Another hour after that, we bounced over pavement that was more pothole than surface; I was thrown out of my seat, but landed unharmed, and held on tightly after that. (Seatbelts? What are these 'seatbelts' you speak of?)

By this time, we were approaching lftor, the sunset fast-breaking meal. We pulled into the only decent-sized town within 100km, about 45 minutes before the moghreb call to prayer. We rolled to a stop, and I wondered if we would wait in this little town until lftor. None of us had eaten in at least 15 hours - I hadn't eaten in 17, since I ate saHor early - so it wouldn't have surprised me to know that yes, we'd wait.

Lhumdullah, most of us prioritized getting to our homes and families over getting a sit-down meal, so we stopped just long enough to buy some food and then continued on our journey.

The sun quickly dropped behind the mountains, but no one was sure when the sun would drop below the true horizon, and we were dozens of miles out of earshot of the nearest mosque. As twilight dimmed, folks broke out their food, but kept it in hand, waiting. Waiting. One impetuous soul stood up and called out, "Allahu akbar!", but he wasn't fooling anybody.

I kept an eye on my watch, since I knew what time lftor had begun the night before, in SouqTown. That time came and went, but my fellow passengers were conservative. We waited another few minutes, and then another few, and finally a tacit consensus was reached, and folks began tearing into their food.

One man had bought a 1-kg box of dates. Depending on the quality of the dates and the quality of his haggling, this cost him between 30 and 75 dirhams. He unhesitatingly passed it around the entire transit, urging everyone to take dates - the traditional first, fast-breaking bite of food. I took one, got a disgusted glance, and had a handful shaken into my palm. I thanked him profusely, and dug in. Moments later, another man offered me a section of his baguette. I showed him that I had my own bread, brought from SouqTown. A minute later, another man urged me to take a 1/2-liter container of a popular yogurt drink. I turned him down, and he re-offered. We went through the ritual three offers, and I kept saying no. He offered it, I think, 5 times, unable to believe that I wouldn't actually take it. (I didn't want to explain that I reeeeally didn't want to add any more liquid to a bladder already feeling the strain of the six-hour road trip after the five-hour wait at the transit stand.)

As we sat, munching on our respective - and shared - foods, I felt a powerful sense of community, a deep sense of the rightness of sharing both the fasting and the eating of Ramadan with my Moroccan friends and neighbors, and even an echo of every meal I've shared with loved ones over the past decades.

We finished our meal, some quicker than others, and full darkness approached. No longer able to read, and with nothing left to eat, all I could do was watch out the window at the mountainous landscape. It occurred to me that in all the times I've eaten in front of the TV or attended dinner theater, I've never seen anything quite so glorious during a meal as the gloaming of the twilight on the jagged mountains and sere valleys of the High Atlas.

As darkness descended, I began noticing distant lightning flashes. We'd driven mostly under dry skies, but these regular bursts of light reminded me why we were taking the long cut around. I also remembered why I've watched thunderstorms ever since childhood. The awesome power that lights half the sky, the roiling thunder that shakes the earth and heavens... These lightning bolts, shooting half a range away, back-lit the mountains around us. With a silent flash, a mountain would spring from the invisibility of a moonless night into vivid relief, and then just as quickly vanish away again, fading back into the endless dark around us. A moment later, another flash would light a different quadrant of sky, and another mountain would appear from nowhere, before flickering back into the waiting shadows.

I almost didn't believe it when I saw the shimmering of my lake out the window. We'd made it! Despite the length of the road, and the flood-induced detours, and the dinner-shopping-stop, we'd made the huge long detour in just under six hours, little more than half again the length of the usual run. (Of course, if it weren't for the countless passenger drop-offs and pick-ups slowing every "usual run", the trip from SouqTown to Berberville would take 2.5 hours instead of 4...)

I climbed out of the transit two blocks from home, grateful beyond measure to be back in my beloved Berberville for the first time in two weeks. I unlocked my door, mounted my stairs, and released my burdens with a hearty sigh. It was 55 degrees, inside and out, so I wasted no time before crawling into the blankets of my mountain home.

PS: Sometime overnight, the rains started up again, and continued, off and on, for the next 24 hours. The rains are indeed a-gonna come. And come, and come, and come. But after four hours of digging, on my own and with help from friends, I finally unearthed the origin of that fragment of a song.

It turns out it sounds like rain's gonna come, but it's actually the immortal "Change is gonna come," first written by Sam Cooke, and then covered by dozens of artists, from Bob Dylan to American Idol finalists. My very favorite performance, of the dozen or so I've downloaded tonight, is by Playing for Change. Enjoy.

8/31/09 The Tick-Tock

According to West Wing, the minute-by-minute accounting of the President’s day is routinely distributed to the White House Press Corps, and is known as the Tick-Tock.

Yesterday was quite a day. I won’t give you all 1440 minutes of the day, but here are some highlights, compliments of my memory and the journal I kept close to hand all day. [Update: This got way longer than I'd intended. I'll bold the most interesting bits, for ease of s

5:45 Pop up abruptly. Check time, realize I have 30 minutes till my alarm goes off. Decide to stay up.
6:10 Exit hotel.
6:15 Find petit taxi.
6:16 Petit taxi picks up Korean tourist Ho, who’s also on his way to the train station, to go to the airport, to ride the same flight to Seville. Small world.
6:24 Arrive at train station. Wait (with Ho) for bus to airport, which leaves on the hour…and rumor has it, on the half hour, too.
6:25 Grande taxi driver offers to drive me to airport…for 10x the price of the bus fare.
6:35 Ditto.
6:45 Ditto.
6:50 Bus 16 to the airport arrives!
6:58 Bus 16 departs train station. Good thing I didn’t cut it to-the-minute close!
7:24 Arrive at airport, x-ray bags, walk through metal detector, queue up for RyanAir bag drop*.
7:41 Get to front of line, and am told that I can’t “check in”* yet. Told to wait.
8:00 Check-in for my 9:40 flight opens up.
8:05 Drop off bag, boarding pass gets stamped.
8:06 Queue up for customs.
8:10 Get to front of line, am told I need to fill out “Immigration Card”.
8:11 Fill out Immigration Card.
8:18 Return to customs lady, who waves me through to the line for the passport people.
8:25 Passport people won’t allow me through to the gate area – told to wait.
8:27 Eat breakfast of bread, cheese, and juice.
8:45 Gate area opens for passengers on my flight.
8:51 Passport guy stares at my passport like he thinks he sees a watermark pointing towards buried treasure. Eventually asks if I’m a resident of Morocco. I say I am, and hand over my carte de sejour receipt. After much confusion, he stamps me through. I have now legally departed Morocco.
9:01 Walk through metal detector, x-ray carry-on bags (shrug off déjà vu). Security officer grabs my bulky cargo-pants-pocket and barks, “Do you have a cell phone in here??” I actually had it on the other leg, but after being grabbed at by a strange man, have no urge to confess this. Walk on through.
9:03 Boarding pass (aka crumpled printout) examined for the last time; gate check officials tear off the bottom half and wave me to the tarmac.
9:04 Walk across the tarmac. Reflect that walking up to a giant airplane feels waaaay more satisfying than going through those weird extendable tunnels universally used in American airports. (They have a name I’ve forgotten…jetway?)
9:05 Climb onto plane and survey sea of yellow-and-blue seats. RyanAir has open seating, like Southwest Airlines, so it’s first-come-first-get-the-good-seats.
9:06 Stretch out in the emergency exit row. My seat doesn’t recline, but I have acres of legroom.
9:38 Plane rolls off towards the runway. I turn off my phone and therefore have no more timestamps.
9:45ish I leave Moroccan soil.
9:50ish I gape at the Mediterranean Sea. For a while.
10:25ish I arrive on Spanish soil. Bienvenidos à España, Kauthar!
[Two hours magically vanish, thanks to the miracle of time-zone-change. Morocco hasn’t been on Daylight Savings Time since Ramadan began, but Spain still is, so that’s one hour, plus Spain is one timezone west of Greenwich.]
12:55 Make it through customs. The EU-citizen line flies, but the non-EU-citizen line moves at about 1/10th the speed. It’s also only about 1/20th as long, though, so I still make it through before most passengers from my flight.
1:05 Retrieve my backpack.
1:10 Start to board bus to downtown. See sign saying the fare is 2.30 €, and realize that I have no Euros. Return to airport.
1:20 Find the one lonely ATM in the Seville airport. Which rejects the ATM card from my Peace Corps bank account. I realize I have no idea what the PIN number is for the American bank account that I opened only a few days before leaving the US. Stomach tenses.
1:25 Ask at Information, and learn that there are no official money-changers in the Seville airport, but one of the airlines will do it unofficially.
1:30 Learn that that airline has no desire for Moroccan dirhams. Stomach twists. Abruptly remember the $20 bill I’d found while packing and tucked into a wallet on a whim. Give gratitude for the “whim” that’s saving my tuchus.
1:35 Am sad to discover that US$20 is only worth €13.20. I need to pay my hostel €17 to stay the night, so … mushkil.
1:40 Wait for next bus to downtown. Spot lots of folks from my flight – figures that if they’re taking a budget airline like RyanAir, they’re taking the bus instead of a taxi to town.
2:00 Bus arrives. Climb onboard. Only about half of those waiting get on; I hope another bus will come soon, for everyone else.
2:25 Get to downtown Seville. Note for other people taking the Seville Airport Bus: the final stop is officially the Prado San Sebastian, but when you get there, you won’t see anything telling you it’s the Prado San Sebastian. On the side of the bus stop you’re pulled up to, you’ll see Av. El Cid in big letters. I asked folks on the bus, who mostly shrugged. One guy told me – in Spanish – that it was the ultimo stop, which I’m pretty sure means the last one. Since the Prado San Sebastian is the airport bus’s last stop, I went ahead and climbed off. There’s also a city map stuck to every Seville bus stop, just like in DC, so I was able to study it for a minute, reassure myself I was in the right place, lhumdullah, and then start walking the mile or so to my hostel.
2:30 Pass time-and-temperature sign telling me it’s 41°C. Plus, it’s humid here.
2:35 Pass internet café. I stop in with the €11 left in my pocket, and start digging through emails to find the PIN number that I know Mom emailed me a year and a half ago.
2:45 Give up and Skype-call Mom, who comes to the rescue.
3:00 Pull €100 out of my American bank account. Heave giant sign of relief.
3:33 Check in at Friends Backpackers Hostel in Seville. The location is amazing – just steps from the breathtaking Cathedral of Seville – but the hostel’s services are pretty rudimentary.
3:40 Stash my stuff in the in-room locker, change my Moroccan-modest-long-sleeved-shirt for a tank top, and hit the streets of Seville.
3:46 Ogle Cathedral…take lots of pictures.
3:59 Buy ham sandwich (pork! I can eat pork here!) and banana smoothie (not nearly as good as the ones I get for 6Dh in SouqTown).
4:15 No internet café in sight, so I stop into a “WorkStation” and email Mom & Dad that yes, I found an ATM, yes, the PIN number worked, so I’m OK. Also shoot out a couple of work-related emails.
4:45 Begin wandering Seville.
4:50 Wander through park, watch pigeons.
5:10 Wander back towards Cathedral.
5:17 I’m a sucker for Gothic architecture. In I go.
5:18 Browse the gift shop. I’m a sucker for museum gift shops, too.
5:35 Wince, but pay the €8 admission.
5:36 It’s worth it.
5:49 Figure out the camera setting that will let me take pictures of stained-glass windows.
5:51 Sit on floor, lean head backwards against fluted column, look up it at awe-inspiring ceiling. I do this with massive trees – look backwards up the trunk – so why not do it with redwood-sized columns?
5:52 Oh, right, because cathedral docents are as inflexible as art museum docents. Whoops.
6:00 Discover the sign pointing to the Giralda Tower. I start up the gently inclined (fully wheelchair and stroller accessible!) walkway. Each stretch is numbered, so halls 1-4 take me on a full lap around the tower. Halls 5-8 repeat this, higher up.
6:06 Hall 15. How many halls are there, anyway?
6:13 After the 36th hall, I reach the top. It’s worth it. So worth it.
6:25 Return to the main body of the cathedral. Try to ignore the docents shooing me out.
6:35 Wander the orange tree grove, enclosed by this largest of cathedrals. Ignore docents.
6:45 Buy another souvenir or two in yet another cathedral gift shop, then accede to requests to leave.
6:55 Find and purchase a flamenco dress for my little sister. :)
7:00 Wander Sevilla for a while...
7:45 Perch on the corner of a public fountain and begin writing in the journal I acquired at 6:45.
8:15 Walk the entire perimeter of the Cathedral twice, once standing back to look at it, then back around, running my fingers over it. Because it's not real till you touch it.
9:00 Tapas!
10:30 Listen to street music for half an hour or more.
11:30 Wander back to my hostel.
11:35 Chat in my nonexistent Spanish with Sevilla native.
12:00 Sigh with contentment over one fantabulous day.

* RyanAir requires passengers to check-in online and print their own boarding passes. REQUIRES. If you fail to do this, they levy a stiff fine at the airport. I now know why: they don’t use computers at the airport. No computers! I gaped at them in shock. When you “check in” at the airport, they just scan a printed list of passengers’ names and passport numbers, then cross you off and issue bag tags.

8/30/09 Viva Espana!

I´ve been in Spain for about 4 hours. (I say about because with all the time zone changes and stuff, I´m genuinely confused. What time is it?)

I flew up this morning - more to come on that later, when I´m not paying European prices for a cybercafe - and have been reveling in the sun-drenched countryside.

It´s as hot here as it has been in SouqTown, but the key difference is that I don´t have to dress to Moroccan standards of modesty here.

Aaaah, tank tops. How I have missed thee.

Back to enjoy this gorgeous, too-brief taste of Europe. Tomorrow, I´ll hop through two more European cities - spending only a few hours in each - before I take a 10,000-mile flight to California. I´ll be in the US in something like 24 hours. Might be exactly 24 hours, come to think of it...drat you confusing time zones...

Hasta la vista, mis amigos!

8/14/09 Breezy bliss

Preface:

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

In August.

I love coming home.

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

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

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

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

That changes at the pass.

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

...but I digress.

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

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

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

7/14/09 Ouarzazate

Ouarzazate - pronounced Waar-zuh-zat, rhymes with Car-the-cat - is an often-overlooked city in southern Morocco. Perched on the edge of the Sahara, it used to be known as the Bab Sahara - the gateway to the desert - since every caravan traveling across the great desert would stop here to take advantage of the rivers and palm trees.

Ouarzazate looks like what tourists imagine Morocco will look like. Low buildings with crenelated roofs, scattered palm trees, huge expanses of scrub desert... Also, it's within an hour drive of a dozen different desert subecosystems (scrub desert, sandy desert, New Mexico-looking-desert, oasis-in-the-desert, etc), which is one of the many reasons it has become the filming destination of choice for most desert movies.

If you've watched a film made in the past 20 years with a desert scene in it, odds are it was filmed in or near Ouarzazate. Which we PCVs call Oz for short (and which suddenly makes me wonder if there's any connection between the nickname and the film industry...enh, probably just a coincidence). Kingdom of Heaven. The Mummy. (All the Mummy movies, for that matter.) Gladiator. Lawrence of Arabia (which, I know, is way more than 20 years old - it was the birth of the Oz film industry). Babel, which is one of the few actually set in Morocco. Charlie Wilson's War. Thanks to Hollywood's recent interest in desert-set movies (Rendition, Charlie Wilson's War, The Kingdom, Three Kings - notice a theme?), dozens of film crews come to Morocco each year...and over the years, a true film industry has grown up in Oz. There are hundreds of Moroccans trained as grips, sound boom technicians, sound engineers...all those names at the end of the movie? The ones that aren't actors or special effects guys? Yeah, those people. Morocco now has hundreds - maybe thousands - trained to do all that stuff. Plus, Oz citizens get to be extras a lot. Moroccans are mostly golden-skinned, black-haired, and black-eyed, which means that, especially in crowd scenes or in deep background, they can pass for most of the world's ethnicities. Mexican, African-American, Arab...

So that's the film industry. Which has been immortalized in Ouarzazate's Museum of Film History, well worth a visit.

But there's also the casbah - a gorgeous, if crumbling, testament to Oz's strategic importance in past military conflicts - a half-hour walk from the center of town.

There are the juice places, where you can get any conceivable combination of juices blended, smoothie-style (though without ice). *Any* combination. I usually play it safe with something in the mango-orange-peach-banana family, but some of my friends swear by the avacado-almond, and my sister fell in love with the mint juice. Yeah, you read that right.

And there's my all-time-favorite-place-to-shop-in-all-of-Morocco, the Fixed Price Store.

Of course, there aren't any useful posted signs or anything...just look for the shop to the right of the SuperMarche on Boulevard Mohammed V. (Oz has at least 3 supermarche's, I know, but only one on MoV. It's also across from Chez Dmitri's, a famous - and famously overpriced - restaurant.)

At the Fixed Price Store (not a real name, just what my friends and I call it), you can buy all the same things you'll find at other shopping-friendly cities (like Essaouira and Fes), but with posted prices that you don't have to haggle for. And the posted prices are *fair*. Not a ripoff for you, not a ripoff for the artisans. Fair prices. (Happy sigh.) Plus, if you buy a lot, as I tend to when I'm there, the owner will drop 5-10% at the register anyway. Although...that might be the discount for those of us who speak the language. So if you don't get the extra reduction, don't feel bad. The prices are still excellent, plus you don't leave with that icky Did I just get ripped off? feeling that dogs me whenever I haggle.

These days, there aren't many caravanseri crossing the desert on camels. Oz fills its role as the
Bab Sahara by providing treking tours. You can explore on foot, on camel, in a 4x4, or some combination thereof. Resist the urge to ride a 4x4 through the desert. Desert polish - that scrubby, weather-beaten surface - is actually incredibly fragile, and host to a surprisingly delicate ecosystem. In some places, the desert winds can repair damage from 4x4 tires within weeks or months...but in others, you can still see treads from WWII convoys. So go hiking or take the once-in-a-lifetime camel ride. :)

7/13/09 Miscellany: CASH / Money in Morocco

More than one traveler to my adopted country has tripped up on the question of money.

Money.

Floos.

Cash.

Especially Americans. America is rapidly moving towards a cashless society. Before I joined Peace Corps, I almost never carried cash. I paid for everything from a $1.85 Borders' Cafe Chocolate Bundt Cake (wow, I miss those) to a $100 shopping spree with a credit card. And even if I had a bundle of cash in my pocket, I'd never have attempted to register at a hotel, or rent a car, or ... any other of a host of transactions ... with anything but a credit card.

Morocco is different.

I won't say that you can't use a credit card anywhere - because the biggest, fanciest, most tourist-friendly hotels, restaurants, and stores will probably accept them, and I know Marjane does, too - but I will say that I have used a credit card exactly once in Morocco. And I've lived here for almost 17 months now.

So expect to pay for *everything* in cash. Hotel stays. Restaurants. Transportation (petit taxis, grand taxis, buses, and probably trains, though they might take plastic).

Fortunately, cash is easy to come by here.

The Moroccan Dirham (Dh or dh, formally MAD but nobody uses that) is not internationally traded, which means that it's virtually impossible to acquire them outside Morocco.

It also means that it has avoided the currency fluctuations that have been sweeping much of the world this past year.

Every major Moroccan city has Currency Exchange places where you can swap your dollars (or Euros, or whatever) for dirhams. Exchange rates vary from spot to spot; to my surprise, the exchange counter in Casablanca's Mohammed V airport gave us one of the best rates we found anywhere. (That was 7.98:1 Dh:$. Other times we changed money, we found 7.95:1, 8.1:1, 7.8:1, and a deeply depressing 7.5:1 - this last at a bank that didn't have its change rates posted. Grr.)

It's also incredibly easy to find ATMs here. My little village doesn't have an ATM (though we just got Western Union! Woo-hoo! Um...does anybody use Western Union anymore?), but my souqtown does, as does every other town (though not village) I've visited in Morocco.

So just walk up to the machine, stick in your good old American (or German, or Australian, or whatever) ATM card, and extract as many dirhams as you want. OK, I should qualify that statement. As many as you want up to your daily withdrawal limit. My Moroccan bank (BMCI) won't let me pull more than 2000dh a day (about 250 bucks) - but then, I've never wanted to. I could probably change my limit if I tried. But you might want to double check with your bank before you leave. You should also ask your bank what their fee is for international withdrawals. It's probably 2-3%, but some banks are mean about this kind of thing. Plus, the ATM itself will charge a fee - standard is 7dh (about a buck).

And how much should you expect to spend? It depends entirely on your lifestyle. As a Volunteer, my monthly stipend is 2000dh, plus rent. 2000dh covers everything I eat, drink, buy, travel to, etc, with enough left over every month that after a year, I had a ginormous surplus hanging out in my account... But when I was traveling with my family, living like a Stinkin' Rich American, we burned through that much in a week. Sometimes less, depending on the souvenir shopping.

The hotels I stay in when traveling are usually 30-50dh/night/person. That gets me a bed in a dorm-style room. (Often, I get the whole room to myself - Morocco is a popular tourist destination, but I avoid the cities and therefore spend most of my hotel-nights in mostly-empty-hotels.) No towels, no en suite bathrooms - there's usually a squat toilet somewhere on the hallway - and shared showers whose hot water is never trustworthy.

But I'm a Volunteer. I signed up for this. (And for the record, just getting *access* to a potentially-hot shower makes hotel stays feel pretty luxurious. At home, I have water for two hours a day - which still puts me ahead of a lot of PCVs who don't have running water at all - and if I want it hot, it involves butane gas, a stove, a kettle, and five minutes.) And while 50dh makes a decent chunk of *my* monthly salary, it's only 6 bucks to an American. For 20 bucks a night (per person - and that's another oddity of Moroccan hotels, they nearly always charge per person, not per room), you can get four-star accomodation. So it's all in what you want to spend.

Same for restaurants. When I travel, if I'm not in a PCV's home, I invariably get egg-and-cheese-and-veggie sandwiches for lunch, and either lentils or chicken for dinner. Because that's what's available at the cheapo places I frequent. I can get a filling sandwich for 7dh (it'd be 12 if I ot it with meat) or a plate of lentils for 7dh or a quarter of a chicken (remind me to post more about this later) for 15dh.

If I'm in a biggish city, I'll look for shawarma or pizza. Those are going to cost 20-40dh/serving, but I accept it for the splurge it is.

Basically, I live on a dollars-to-dirhams budget. That is, here I make 2000 dirhams a month, excluding rent and tax-free (because we're well below federal poverty standards!). I made something like 2000 dollars a month in America, after rent and after taxes. So what I can spend in dirhams is just about what I could spend in dollars. 5dh for a cup of cocoa in a cafe? Yup, I've dropped $5 at Starbucks more mornings than I should admit. 25dh for a ride into my souq town? That's comparable to Zipcar prices. Buying clothes, staying in hotels, eating out...if I could have afforded it in dollars in America, I can afford it in dirhams here. The PCVs who get into trouble are the ones who keep translating things back into dollars, and thinking Wow, this is so cheap!

Example: Taxis in Marrakesh. Taxis are supposed to be metered. But about 2/3 of taxi drivers claim that their meters are broken (or they break them themselves!) and then charge you whatever they want for the ride. The first time I took a taxi from the bus station to the J'ma al-Fna (Marrakesh's version of Times Square *and* Central Park)... Well, I'd been warned not to pay more than 10dh. So I walked up to the first petit taxi I saw and asked if they'd take me there. "Of course! Get in!" How much? "30 dirhams." I laughed and started to walk away. But in dollars, it's about 4 bucks. Which a New Yorker would find a bargain for a taxi ride across town. Which is why the taxi drivers can get away with asking for it. Not wanting to lose the fare, the driver called after me, "What do you want to pay?" 10 dirhams. Then he laughed. I turned to walk away again. He called, "OK, 25." 10. "20." 10. "OK, get in." 10? "Yeah, yeah, yeah..." And it only worked because I literally burst out laughing and turned to walk away each time. I was perfectly willing to find another taxi - even if it meant walking out to the street to find a cab willing to use its meter - and he knew it. [[Side note: I also carried little enough luggage - a medium-sized backpack and a slung-over-the-shoulder purse - that I could have walked downtown, if I'd had a mind to. Travelers who show up with more luggage than they can carry are at a massive disadvantage here.]] The one and only time I've had a driver use a meter between the bus station and the J'ma al-Fna, the ride cost 6dh. I gave the guy 10 just out of gratitude for his honesty.

So that's my take on Money In Morocco.

Bring cash to convert or just bring your ATM card.

Leave your travelers' checks at home (nobody but NOBODY accepts them).

Don't expect to be able to use your credit card. (You might be happily surprised once or twice, but if you show up expecting to be able to use it...you'll encounter frustration.)

If you want to benefit from just how cheap this country can be, stop converting everything to dollars (or Euros, or Canadian dollars) in your head, and be willing to share a bathroom.

Oh, and don't be afraid to sass the taxi drivers. Haggling: it's not just for souq day anymore.

PS: Srf. Srf is the word for change, as in "Here's your change!" and also for any small currency. Moroccan currency consists of tiny brass coins, which are tiny fractions of a dirham, and then 1/2 dh, 1dh, 2dh, 5dh, 10dh (all silver or silver-and-brass coins) and then 20dh, 50dh, 100dh, and 200dh bills. Srf is your friend. Keep some on hand at all times. For one thing, cheap little sandwich shops probably can't make change from a 200dh bill. (Imagine trying to buy a cup of coffee with a $100, in the US. Even though 200dh is only 25 bucks, it *feels* like a 100dh bill, and causes as many awkward cash-register moments.) Also, you'll spend srf all the time - 5dh for every piece of luggage on a bus, 5dh for a cup of coffee, 2dh for a packet of cookies (travel food!), 2dh for a packet of tissues (since toilet paper isn't always provided, either) - and you'll have a much smoother, more harmonious experience if you're not asking people to make horrific amounts of change all the time.

Also, waving big bills is an invitation to the unscrupulous. Even the smallest bill - a 20dh note - can get you into trouble. Example: My friend "Ali" put his bag on a bus and got hit up for the usual 5dh. (Technically, it's a tip for the jumper, and therefore you don't technically have to pay it ... but **everybody** does, and if you try to fight it, you will end up with an actual fight on your hands.) He pulled out a 20dh, expecting change - and the jumper immediately said, "Oh, of course, for 20dh we'll keep this baggage compartment just for you - nobody else's bags will be near yours, and nobody will have a chance to steal your things!" and pocketed the 20dh. Ali tried to explain that he really didn't want to rent out the baggage compartment...but the jumper suddenly lost all ability to understand Ali's (excellent) accent. Le sigh.

So keep some srf in your pocket at all times. Good places to break the big bills - and most ATMs will dispense either a mix of 100s and 200s or else all 200s, so you're going to have to deal with this, just like I do - are teleboutiques and large stores. If they balk at making change - although most will happily help you, if you ask with a polite Srf, afak? (Change, please?) - just buy something cheap. I've discovered some yummy 2dh cookie options when trying to break a 100dh bill. :)

7/24/09 Snapshot: Lizard

Riding in a 16-passenger van (aka a transit): 25 passengers.

Standing in the middle of the road: a lizard.

A small lizard.

Light brown.

Unusually broad head for a lizard; reminds me of the wedge shape of a poisonous snake, but it's attached to that ridiculous lizard body, not a gracefully curving stretch of solid muscle. (I admit it, I like snakes.)

Stray thought: is it just me, or do lizards look a little bit like minature dachsunds? That long, lean body on top of super stubby little legs?

This small, light-brown, wedge-headed, weiner-dog-lookin' lizard perches in the middle of the road. He edges his body forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, feet stuck to the ground but body weight shifting forwards and backwards, for all the world like a car trying to rock itself out of the mud, or a kid winding up a Hot Wheels truck.

Back-forth-back-forth-back-forth-WHOOM

...and he's off, scurrying to the edge of the road, stubby legs appearing to pinwheel from the shoulder (hip?) as he rockets forwards...

...unaware of the giant van hurtling directly towards him.

His trajectory and that of the van's front left tire head towards an inevitable collision...

To Be Continued...

June 26, 2009 SRAs vs PCVs

June 26, 2009 SRAs vs PCVs

A new acronym is born: the SRA.

Peace Corps, like most governmental organizations, loves the acronyms. The CD and APTO came to IST, along with PCMO. I saw friends I hadn’t talked to since CBT in PST. Etcetera.

So without further ado, I introduce to you: the Stinkin’ Rich American.

I suppose it could be extended to Stinkin’ Rich Westerners in general, or even Stinkin’ Rich Moroccans, but right now I’m traveling with Americans – my parents and sister – so SRAs it is.

Of course, “rich” is all a matter of perspective. After a lifetime in academia, my folks aren’t exactly dot-com billionaires. But here in Morocco, where a Volunteer (a PCV, to use the official acronym) can live on 250 dollars a month, you don’t have to be a billionaire to get to live awfully well.

What do I mean? It’s the little things. The four of us have been renting out the six-person “grands taxis” when we go from city to city. We stay in hotels where the bathrooms with ***western toilets*** are *inside* the rooms, and even have luxuries like *toilet paper* and *towels*.

Traveling with my SRA family has highlighted just how much I’ve wllf-ed to my Peace Corps life. I’m used to being squished when I travel. I’m used to having to walk down a hallway while carrying my own toilet paper, to use a squat toilet with questionable plumbing. I’m used to having to wait the minutes or hours for taxis and tranzits to fill up with fellow travelers. My SRA family, by contrast, walks to a taxi stand, picks out a car, and gets whisked away immediately.

But even more than getting to live in the comparable luxury of a bathroom *in*your*own*hotel*room*, SRAs get to go wherever they want. Not limited to routes available to public transportation, they can just wander the countryside.

In the company of my parents, I’ve gotten to seen parts of Morocco I’ve only ever heard of. Places like wildlife preserves and RAMSAR sites and other locations never served by public transportation. Without the deep pockets of my favorite SRAs, my only chance of visiting these spots would be hitchhiking, hoping for a passing dump truck to carry me within a few miles, then hiking the rest of the way. (Oh, yeah, and hitchhiking is a violation of Peace Corps policy, so if I did it, I’d be risking expulsion from Morocco.)

I also get to eat reeeeally well. We’ve been mixing it up, food-wise. A few times, we’ve eaten at the super-cheap sandwich shops I usually frequent…but then, a few times, we’ve eaten at places serving cheeseburgers and pizzas (which count as a splurge here). We stopped once at a super-zween restaurant featuring pastilla (a Moroccan delicacy) and Italian food and luxurious tagines. The décor alone was worth the price.

…to those with the pockets for it. My meal cost a reasonable percentage of my monthly salary…but it was still only a few dollars to someone living on an American budget. Even with the weakened dollar, Morocco is just plain cheap. I routinely stay in hotels/hostels costing less than 10 dollars a night. My usual haunt in Souqtown is less than 4 bucks a night. You can buy pastries for pennies, kilos of farmers’ market produce for quarters… My folks are spending more than they’d anticipated, but that’s because we’re enjoying luxuries like en suite bathrooms. And they’re still paying a quarter to a half of what they’d pay for a comparable room in the US.

So, friends, come visit my country. Revel in the luxuries that feel cheap to American pockets (though astronomical to my Peace Corps budget). Eat better food than you’ve ever had, for pennies on the dollar.

Get to live like a Stinkin’ Rich American. Because by local standards, you *are*. :)

6/4/09 "We left the top 35 minutes ago", and Other Ruminations on Time

Ask any of my American friends or family: I'm a watch-wearer.

Always.

About once a year, I drop 10 bucks at Target and get a plastic, waterproof digital watch that I never take off. I sleep in it, shower in it (pushing the band up and down to wash my arm, thank you very much, but still), and look at it a hundred times a day. I use the date feature whenever I need to know, y'know, the date. I use the stopwatch with students, when cooking, to time how long the subway takes to arrive...whatever. I've spent years looking for a pretty watch that has a built-in digital stopwatch and indiglo lamp and is waterproof, but not finding one, I settle for the 10 dollar Target watch. Which breaks after a year or so, when I replace it.

This has been the pattern...for at least a decade. Or two. Probably longer.

Which is why I laughed when I heard the line, "We left the top 35 minutes ago."

I'd been hiking with some American students, engaging in my favorite Goal 3 work of sharing my country and culture with non-PCV Americans. :) We'd talked about geology, environmental history, culture, traditions, language, and a thousand other things. We'd also walked a third or a half of the way up Jbel Toubkal, the tallest mountain in North Africa (and the fifth tallest in Africa), going up to the Shem Harmoush shrine. (I know that's not how it's spelled on maps, but that's what it sounds like to me.)

The climb up had been hard for many, but we cruised on the way down. About halfway down, I stopped - and urged others to stop with me - in hopes of regathering the group that had strung itself over a couple kilometers. One of the folks I sat and talked with looked at his watch, reassured me that we still had plenty of time (at least, I think that was his point), and then kept walking.

And I had to smile.

A year ago, I'd have known that without his telling me. I timed everything. I knew that it took 6.5 minutes to get from my front door to my subway station. I knew that I could make it in 5 minutes if I took a shortcut. When I got to Morocco, I timed taxi and tranzit rides. I always knew what time it was. Always. It was almost obsessive. Maybe not even "almost."

But Morocco worked its slow magic on me. I learned how to pace my day by the calls to prayer. I learned that "teatime" isn't found on any clock; it's to do with the angle of the sun in the sky. I learned that "We'll meet at 2" means "I'll see you sometime before 3. Probably." And I discovered that my obsessive attention to the time was ... useless.

So I looked at my watch less and less.

And then, like all 10 dollar Target watches, it died after about a year. I don't remember exactly when. (Irony, there.) I pulled it off and set it aside to give to my little host sister, who loved playing with the indiglo feature (which still worked, unlike the time).

I still have access to the time - my cell phone, like most phones, has a clock as its default display - but I rarely pull it out.

Things take as long as they take. The length of time something takes today is not necessarily the same as the time it'll take tomorrow. Boiling an egg? Depends on how high the flames are. Depends how much water you put in the pot. Walking across town? Depends how many people you run into. Depends how many of them are close friends that you have to stop and kiss cheeks with and chat with, and how many you can breeze by. Trip between Berberville and Souqtown? Depends how many people are riding, and where they want to get off. Depends how many women want to get on, since they will wait outside their front doors, regardless of where the informal-but-generally-agreed-upon "bus stops" are. If five women in the same village are riding a tranzit today, we'll probably stop five different times within a kilometer.

So timing things...is a waste of time. I mean, it'll give you a general guideline, I guess. I know that the ride between Berberville and Souqtown takes about 2.5 hours in a private car (thank you, Peace Corps Zweenmobile!), but will take 3-4.5 hours in a tranzit. But there's a big difference between 3 and 4.5 hours. I suppose I could time each ride, and analyze driver speed and times of day and make lots of pretty graphs. A year ago, this might have sounded appealing. But now...

I understand why my Berber neighbors don't care about Daylight Savings Time. What difference does it make, an hour earlier, an hour later? Summer days are still long. Regardless of what a clock says, the schedule of the day is Bread-making Time, followed by Breakfast Time, then Filling the Water Time, then Cleaning Time and/or Fields Time, then Lunch Time, then Rest Time, then Fields Time, then Tea Time, then Dinner Time, then Bed Time. For women, anyway. For men, there's no filling the water or cleaning or bread-making, but there is Cafe Time (all morning or all afternoon or both, depending on your socioeconomic status) and Prayer Times. (There are women here who pray the five prayers of the day, but there are more who don't.)

I haven't lost the habit of looking at the clock when I go to bed and when I wake up. I'm not sure why I bother - if I'm awake I'm awake (though I admit that I'll probably try to fall back asleep if it's before 6). But other than that...I often go the whole day without looking at a clock.

But the water came on about an hour ago, at which point I filled up several containers of water to last for the day, and now it's Dishwashing Time. Catch y'all ... later. :)