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!

3/10/10 Word of the Day: rizzo

As has been the pattern for the past few weeks, I never get to have all three connectivity keys – electricity, internet rizzo, and cell phone rizzo – at the same time. Right now, I have electricity but neither network, so I’m typing this entry into my laptop in hopes that I’ll be able to post it sometime soon. Soonish. Well, whenever, really. =/

So what is this “rizzo”?

It’s actually one of the many words that Tam has borrowed from Darija (Moroccan Arabic), which in turn stole it outright from French.

Originally, the word was réseau, meaning network. But as wireless technology has leapfrogged landline technology out here, as it has in so many third-world countries, rizzo has taken on new shades of meaning. Moroccans will ask if there is rizzo the way an American would ask a friend if they have “signal” or “coverage” – that is, if there are any bars of connectivity visible on their cell phone.

Is illa rizzo? Is there rizzo?

Eyyah, illa shwiya. Yeah, there’s a little. (ie, I have two or three bars out of five)

My internet connection runs through a dialup connection, but I don’t actually have a phone line. I have a small phone that’s not plugged into anything (well, except the wall, for electricity). It has a built-in antenna that sends a signal to the radio tower perched next to the cell phone company’s tower, on the hill just east of town. If the antenna from my “landline” (now there’s a misnomer) can see the radio tower, and if the radio tower itself has electricity, then that tower sends a signal up to a satellite, and just like that, my little lappy can talk to the outside world. I have “internet rizzo”.

Similarly, if my cell phone can talk to the cell tower, and the cell tower has enough electricity to talk to its satellite, my little snickers bar cell phone can talk to the outside world. (Or even to the cell phone of my friends next door.) I have cellphone rizzo.

Both towers have power generators, so sometimes they work even when there’s no electricity. And my phone, laptop, and cell all have their own batteries, so sometimes I can still be in communication when the power is out.

But this past few weeks, possibly because of the incessant wind/snow/wind/rain storms (and yes, I put wind in there twice – the winds have been at least twice as powerful and twice as common as precipitation in any form), none of the three – electricity, cell rizzo, or internet rizzo – have been dependable.

Oh, and the cycling of the powerouts appears to have zapped my laptop’s battery for once and for all. My lappy is now insisting that it doesn’t *have* a battery, which is a worrying sign, to say the least…

Ooh, hey, cell rizzo just came back! OK, I’m off to shoot a message to a buddy… Bye!

2/27/10 Mbruk l'3id Milud!

Today, Muslims around the world are celebrating the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. In Arabic, the name of the holiday is 3id Milud. It translates approximately as Feast of the Birth, and is one of only 3 major religions holidays Muslims celebrate annually. (Morocco has lots of holidays, but most of the rest are secular, and usually nationalistic - ascension of the king to the throne, king's birthday, the day Morocco staked its claim over Western Sahara by marching hundreds of thousands of people in to occupy it/live there...holidays like that.) Most of those holidays are marked on the Western (Gregorian, solar) calendar, so they fall on the same day each year. Islamic holidays, though, are marked on the Islamic (lunar) calendar, so they shift about a week and a half each (solar) year. So last year's 3id Milud was March 5th and 6th (? as I recall), and the year before was I think March 21st(?).

In addition, Islamic holidays are determined by the observed phase of the moon, which builds in some uncertainty. How full the moon looks to astronomers in key places in each country, determines whether or not they celebrate the holiday the following day. So folks don't know until the week of, and sometimes not even till the day of, if it's a holiday. There's probably a point to be made about the impact that has had on the role of uncertainty in the local culture, but I'll let it go.

Enough background.

Today we celebrated!

This is the first 3id Milud I've actually gotten to celebrate as such. The one two years ago was during CBT/stage, and though I was with my (first) host family, there was no real celebration. Nobody ran around calling "Mbruk l'3id! Mbruk l'washer!" (Happy Feast! Happy Holiday!) Nobody spent the morning going door-to-door for tea and cookies. Midafternoon, my host mom set everybody in the family down and gave us each a piece of chocolate...and that was it. Safi. Rather anticlimactic. Our LCF (Peace Corps-hired tutor-person) found the whole thing depressing, since she's from a part of the country that makes a much bigger deal of it.

My second 3id Milud in-country, last March, I spent with a group of friends in Essaouira. Since we'd been given 2 vacation days for the holiday, we took a 4-day weekend for fun in the sun. :) Good times, yes, but not exactly a traditional celebration.

Today, I went early to my (2nd and final) host family's house. I would have gone even earlier, but torrential winds rattled my doors and windows, making me unwilling to walk across town. (I'm not a crazy wimp - pebbles were being flung at my windows so hard that when I woke up, I thought it was hailing. Life without paved roads means that there are lots of bits of dirt and pebbles around.) The wind died down mid-morning, so I headed over.

Before that, though, I gathered up the gifts that I've been accumulating for a while, for my host family. Crayons and stickers and books I found in Marjane and cookies from SouqTown and suchlike. Bubbles, complete with wand-in-the-bottle-cap. A handmade wooden rattle for the baby. Etc. I also dressed in a relaxed version of Moroccan-wear: headscarf, turtleneck, slacks under a skirt. I left off the jellaba that I've worn the past few 3ids, because almost no one in town wears them. (They're more common in my CBT region, where I bought two of them.)

Ama was delighted to see me, of course, and promptly served me bread and cake and cookies and tea. She assured me that today is not a feast of meat like 3id al-Adha, to which I responded with a hearty, "Al-humdulillah." A few friends and neighbors came over and shared in the deliciousness, and then Ama and I headed over to one of my aunts' homes. More chatter, more tea, more cake, more hugs... :)

Then back to Ama's house for lunch and some quality hanging-out time (including the distribution of presents). I explained that in America, gifts are traditional at birthday parties (both regular ones and Christmas, which is the closest analog for 3id Milud). I didn't explain that I feel awkward giving just-'cause-I-was-thinking-of-you gifts, and so had been waiting for an opportunity - an excuse? - to give them the presents I've been accumulating.

I've brought gifts for my little brothers and sisters, and occasionally for Ama and Baba, every holiday I've spent with them. They've never given me a present as such, but it never occurred to me to find this odd. They feed me a few times a week, house me whenever I want, and have been a source of love and refuge in a thousand different ways. I respond with cookies and presents (and lots of love!). It seemed perfectly equitable to me, the few times I even thought about it.

But apparently, unbeknownst to me, Baba had been thinking about it, too. Today, while I was watching my little brothers and sister parcel out their stickers (they're sticklers for equity between the siblings, so they tore apart the long coiled strip of stickers to make sure that each one had exactly as many stickers as the others) , Baba (apparently) told Ama that she should give me something. She told me a couple weeks ago that she'd been hoping to weave me a rug or aHandir before I left, but between chasing a newborn and then convalescing from surgery, she didn't think she'd be able to. I'd assured her that it was fine, but that I did want an aHandir from her tribe, both to remember her by and because they're gorgeous, and she'd promised to help me buy one.

(Her help would be key because, though my haggling skills have gotten steadily better over the past two years, I'm still going to be starting from the tarumit - foreigner - price, where Ama will be starting from the tamaghrebit - Moroccan - price. As she explained, and as I already knew, most weavers would simply expect that I'd pay at least 100dh more than they'd think to charge a fellow Moroccan. So she was planning to do the negotiations for me, if I'd just provide the cash. I found this an excellent idea, and felt very grateful that Ama would overcome her severe dislike of the souq to help me.)

But then, this afternoon, as I sat in the living room, playing with my siblings, she walked in carrying something. (She, and everyone, routinely come and go from the kitchen, the bathroom, the other room, so I hadn't even noticed her slipping out a few minutes earlier.) Wrapped in shiny paper was a folded, carefully stored, aHandir. Of her tribe.

I blinked. Gasped. Felt my jaw drop.

"Snnit?!" (Really?!)

She explained that Baba had urged her to give me something, but that she'd felt bad because she had nothing to give. Then she remembered that I want an Ait Brahim aHandir, and she realized that, well, she's got two of them.

So she gave me one.

I unfolded it slowly - reverently. I love both the ancient and modern styles of her tribe's cape; the only difference is the brightness of the colors. The "classic" design features organic dyes, as have been used for centuries or millenia. The more modern look uses synthetic dyes, and therefore really "pops". Both look beautiful. This - my! - aHandir featured the organic dyes.

Some women still use them today, though most have switched to the brighter colors, in the ongoing evolution of their very-much-alive-and-dynamic culture.

"Did you make this?" I asked, softly.

"Yes," she answered. "Well, me and Xalti." I immediately imagined the two women sitting at a loom, weaving together, chatting together, spending hours upon hours creating this... But wait, Xalti hasn't lived with us over a year. And Ama's loom hasn't been set up since well before that.

"When?" I asked next. This isn't the kind of project you can work on in secret; the loom fills a good chunk of the family room, and a project of this scale takes weeks or months, depending how many hours per day you spend working.

"We wove it for my wedding to Baba," she said with a smile. "I was twenty."

And then I realized that not only was she giving me a handcrafted work of art, she was giving me her wedding dress. (The cultural equivalent thereof, anyway.) Tears rose to my eyes, and I hugged her again.

I spent the next hour or so fingering the wool - I can still feel the lanolin, thirteen years after it was woven! These things are extraordinary - and then, eventually, it was time to go. I asked Ama to take a picture of me, wrapped up in her - my? our? - aHandir, feeling delightfully Moroccan. Yes, my clothes were actually all western, but I'd chosen ones that don't look out of place here. And most of them were covered by the cape, anyway. All you could see was my scarf-wrapped head, my Imazighn tafuyt earrings, and this glorious cape from my mother's - and therefore my - tribe.

Kauthar tin Ait Brahim.

1/28/10 FML

Yesterday, I Froze My Laundry.

Froze it solid.

This has happened to me before. Given the low-angle winter sun and the short days (shorter even than astronomers would predict, because the high mountains on all sides of me mean that the sun is behind a mountain for hours when it's technically above the mythical "horizon"), we don't get a lot of sunlight up here.

What sunlight we do get is intense - enough to make a 20-30 degree difference between sunlight and shade - but it's brief.

So in winter, I often leave my laundry on the line overnight, in hopes that the second day's rays will prize the last of the water drops from my clothes.

This usually works (which is why I do it), but sometimes we get snowfall overnight, so the clothes get re-wetted. Other times, it gets so cold that the clothes freeze solid, and then the morning rays have to thaw them before they can start to dry them.

But this, yesterday, was something new.

Something not good.

I got a late start to the day, and didn't get the clothes on the line till almost 11am. At least they'll catch the highest, most direct sun angles, right? I went back out at 12:30, to check how that high-angle sunlight had fared...and my clothes were crispy. They bent, but didn't ripple.

I froze my clothes.

In direct sunlight - sunlight that felt warm on my back when I hung the clothes, sunlight that made me want to spend the afternoon basking on my roof - they froze.

My trusty thermometer claims that it's 35 degrees outside (in shade) and in my bedroom.

Maybe it's not as trusty as I thought.

'Cause at 35 degrees, nothing freezes.

At 35 degrees, my clothes have a chance to get baked by the sun.

Instead, I Froze My Laundry.

...FML...

12/15/09 Snow Status

Here we are, mid-December and there's been no significant accumulation yet.

We've had a couple of flurries, the odd overnight dusting-that-might-just-have-been-a-heavy-frost, and even a couple inches a few days back, but nothing worth writing home about. (Or worth blogging about. ;) )

The temperatures have dropped below freezing now, so if we get any precipitation, it'll probably be snow, but we've gone through a long dry spell. Other than the aforementioned dustings, we haven't had any precipitation for months. Far cry from last year's torrential rains and meter-deep snowfields.

Here in Berberville, we just have crisp air, blue skies, and an apparently endless succession of sun-drenched afternoons.

11/12/09 Climate Update

When I lived in New England, the first snowfall of the year often came on 11/11. It seems statistically unlikely, but year after year, it was the case.

Last year, Berberville got its first snowstorm on 10/10, and received heavy storms fairly regularly for the next five months. This year, October came and went without a single snowflake. Now 11/11 has passed, and we're still adfel-free.

I've been told many times that last winter was the worst one in a decade or two. I wondered if people were just saying it so I wouldn't go home before this winter, but now I'm starting to believe it.

But it is cold.

When I woke up this morning, about 7:30, my indoor-outdoor thermometer said that the indoor temperature was a balmy 42 (I live in a fridge again! I can leave out leftovers and not worry about them!) and the outdoor temperature was 35. As the sun rose, outside got steadily warmer; at this point, in direct sunlight, it feels like mid-sixties, maybe mid-seventies. Nice and warm. Inside, the air has heated up to almost 50.

So yes, my heater is on. I used it for a week or so, during a cold snap, and then let it sit cold and dark for about a month, as Berberville enjoyed a warm fall. But now, and for the past several days, it's been on for at least several hours each day.

Just the little butagaz (butane) heater. My giant buta heater won't get fired up till snow falls, inshallah.

10/23 The Dumma

A month or two ago, during our period of heavy rains, I found myself walking across town, swinging my umbrella on its short looped cord. A little boy came up to me.

"Dumma!" he said, pointing to the umbrella.

I'd never learned the word for "umbrella", and was happy to rectify that. I hunkered down to his level. "This is a 'dumma'?" I asked, for clarification. He just pointed again, and repeated the word.

"In English, it's an 'umbrella'," I explained, continuing to swing it between us. "In Tamazight, it's a 'dumma', and in French it's a 'parapluie'," I said, the word floating up to me from the depths of middle school French class.

He reached for it. "Dumma!" he said, this time almost angrily.

I repeated my short language lesson.

And he repeated himself one more time, this time speaking slowly: "Dunn-ma."

And then I got it.

He wasn't giving me the word for umbrella. This wasn't a language moment. He was saying - mis-pronouncing - "Donne-moi," the French equivalent to "Gimme." I suppose my middle school French teacher would have pointed out that he'd left out the definite article: "Give it to me" should be "Donne-le-moi." But we have gimme and apparently, in Moroccan French, they have donnemoi.

I laughed, scolded him gently, pointed out that it was *my* umbrella, not *his*, and that I intended for it to stay that way, and then stood back up and continued on my way across town.

So there, friends, is an illustration of begging in Morocco. There's no associated shame, as some middle-class Americans might imagine. Just an expectation that anyone with fair skin has more than they need, and should cheerfully hand it off whenever requested.

It's very different from American materialism. Americans always want more things, it sometimes seems, but it's never enough. Americans have created an entire consumer culture out of the idea that if you buy enough things, you'll achieve ... peace. Nirvana. Happiness. Contentment. And so there's marketing, and advertising, and suggesting, all to create the illusion that if you buy *this* thing, it'll satisfy your inner craving. And yet it never does. It never can, really, because what we crave isn't anything material.

Here in Morocco, or more accurately, here in Berberville, I don't see that inner craving. That anxiety so familiar in America, the desperate need to do more, buy more, try more, in hopes of achieving ... whatever it is you want.

Some foreigners see the cheerful begging - the constant stream of "Give me a dirham!" or "Give me candy!" that children babble in butchered French - and conclude that Moroccans are greedy.

I disagree. There's an innocence to the desire that reminds me of crows reaching for car keys. Sure, it's shiny, it'd be nice to have. Can I have it? It bears no resemblance to the driving American acquisitiveness that feels like greed to me.

PS: Later that day, I told my sitemate the story. I didn't get far before she said, "No, wait, the word for umbrella isn't dumma, it's mddla." I grinned and told her the punchline was coming. But at least now I know what to ask for if I'm caught out in the next round of fall rains...or are we heading straight for late fall snows?

10/1/09 Recipe: Pumpkin Spice Muffins

I know fall officially begins with the equinox, but October just *feels* like fall. September is all about Indian summer afternoons and school starting, November is really getting seriously cold...October dwells between them, crisp and cool and crystalline. October is about crunching leaves underfoot and smelling woodsmoke from chimneys and picking out pumpkins.

Mmmmm...pumpkins.

In the States, I loved cooking pumpkiny foods. Pumpkin pies, of course, but also pumpkin breads, pumpkin muffins, even pumpkin soups. The taste of pumpkins is the taste of October.

Here in Morocco, there's no canned pumpkin. (OK, it might exist at Marjane, but since the nearest one takes a full day of travel each way to get to, I don't go to Marjane all that often.) Nor do they have the big, chubby orange vegetable (gourd? yeah, gourd), endemic to North America, that we all know and love from pumpkin patches and jack'o'lanterns. What they do have, though, is the taghsayat, also known as the gr3a (the former is Tam, the latter Arabic).

Taghsayat covers every variety of squash, from zucchinis to butternut squashes to these large, green or yellow round gourds that are shaped sort of like a cross between a butternut squash and a pumpkin, but which have orange meat on the inside that tastes just like pumpkin. It must be the Eurasian/North African cousin of the American pumpkin. For obvious reasons, I refer to it as pumpkin.

Last year, I made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. It was the Very First Time I ever attempted to cook pumpkin without having a can in my hand. I was nervous, anxious, worried that I'd somehow botch the whole thing...but, with lots of help from my lovely sitemate Fatima, I managed to stew a stringy, pumpkiny mess that we successfully turned into three pumpkin pies. :) Victory! Yummy pumpkin goodness!

This year, having faced the fear of the unknown, I marched into Pumpkin Season with my chin up and my smile bright.

I found pumpkins (and sweet potatoes!! which I'll rhapsodize about another time) in the souq in SouqTown. Pumpkins have actually been in season for several weeks, but I've been running around so much lately that I couldn't take advantage of it till now. After all, it's October. Regardless of the growing and harvesting seasons, October is Pumpkin Time, right? Right.

So I bought half a kilo of pumpkin flesh in SouqTown a few days ago. I imagine they'd sell a whole pumpkin if you really begged for one, but generally, people just tell their buxodart (vegetable stand guy) how much they want, and he hacks off an appropriately-sized chunk of pumpkin. My half kilo - over a pound - constituted a small fraction of the whole giant gourd leaning against the buxodart's stand.

Then I brought it home to Berberville and inaugurated Pumpkin Cooking Season.

I poked around recipezaar.com and epicurious.com until I found a pumpkin recipe I liked, and then I adapted it. Because one of the many, many lessons I've learned from my time in Morocco is that cooking is an art, as well as a science, and that improvisation and adaptation are the keys to freedom. :)

So here's *my* Pumpkin Spice Muffin Recipe, with thanks to hers.

1/2 kilo pumpkin (reduces to about 1 1/4 cup)
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 very heaping tablespoon cinnamon
half a nutmeg, grated (about 1/2 teaspoon)
1 heaping teaspoon ginger
25 cloves, ground (about 1/2 teaspoon) (To crush cloves, pull the small round head off the hard stalk. The stalks feel like twigs, but the heads crush surprisingly easily - just pinch them between your fingers.)

Directions

1. Cut rind off of pumpkin. Chop pumpkin flesh into 1" cubes and put into boiling water. When the pumpkin is completely tender, about 15 minutes, pour everything into a colander. Mash the flesh. (This part is a lot like making mashed potatoes. I used a fork, but if you have a potato masher, go nuts.) Leave the pumpkin in the colander for another half hour or so, to let as much moisture as possible drip out.
2. In a large bowl, whisk 2 eggs.
   
3. Add pumpkin mash and vegetable oil to eggs. Whisk together.
4. Sift together dry ingredients.
5. Add them to the pumpkin mixture, whisking steadily to keep the batter airy.
6. Grease and flour muffin tins. (Or use muffin/cupcake cups.)
7. Ladle pumpkin batter carefully into the tins; fill the cups ~2/3 full.
8. Light the oven and keep an eye on them. Americans, try 30 minutes at a 350 degree oven. Moroccans, try 20 minutes on a low flame.
9. The pumpkin muffins are done when they pull away from the edges of the pan, or when a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
10. Serve the 18 Pumpkin Spice Muffins to loved ones, and listen for the mmmmm sound of pumpkin-inspired happiness. Alternatively, serve 12 to loved ones and eat the other six yourself. You deserve it. ;)

Total number of times pumpkin appears in this blog post: 42. ;)

PS: I also tried to roast the seeds, but left them in waaay too long and ended up with a sad charred mess. Note to self: Seeds only need a few minutes to roast.

9/28/09 Buta Battles Begin...

In the spirit of documenting winter, I should note that I bought my first tank of butagaz today. I haven't fired it up yet, but I'm thinking really hard about it. It's currently looking at me, daring me to cave into the cold.

Today marked another first - the first time I bought butane from the hanut on the hill. I have my regular hanut guy, Ali, who I'm fiercely loyal to. Next door to him is Sayeed, who I'll bring my business to if Ali is busy, sold out, or otherwise unavailable. But tonight, both Ali and Sayeed's stash of butagaz tanks were ismmr. Used up. Their racks were full, yes, but of empty tanks, already traded in for the full ones.

I don't think I've explained this before. If I have, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs. (Or, for that matter, scroll down and read one of my friends' blogs from the bottom right of the page.) Up here in the mountains of Morocco, butane gas is available in pressurized tanks. The smallest is about the size of a gallon of milk. There's a rarely-used medium size, comparable to a big bottle of bleach, and then there's the huge size, which is as big as a 5-year-old (if the kid were curled up in the fetal position, anyway). It's really ginormous. I use a big tank for my oven and stove; it lasts for 6-9 months, depending how much I cook. I also use a big tank for my big buta heater - the one that shoots out 4 square feet of flame constantly. That burns through in a few weeks, again depending on how much I use it. In the depths of last winter, when I hibernated in front of the heater and ran it all day, I went through a tank every two weeks. I also have a little heater, whose flame-face is only the size of an index card. That one is powered by a little gallon-of-milk-sized butane tank. Since I only use it in mild weather, it's never on for more than a few hours at a time, so the tank lasts for quite a while.

In the US, I'm most familiar with the gas that we put in cars. You pour some in, drive around for a while, then pour more in. Here, you don't get to refill your container. Because the butane gas is so highly pressurized, there's no safe way to fill a butane tank around civilians. So what you do is this: The first time you decide to purchase a buta tank, you pay a hefty deposit on the steel cannister and then pay a small amount for the butane itself. When your buta runs out, you carry the steel can back to the hanut you got it from, and trade it for a new tank. Theoretically, the hanut guy could give you back your deposit and then collect it back from you for the new tank, but that would be kinda silly. He just charges you the (really very reasonable) price for the butane inside the tank and takes your empty one off your hands. He stores it in the same locked rack as the full tanks, and waits for the return of The Buta Truck. Every week or two, The Buta Truck rolls up the mountain from The Great Buta In The Sky (seriously, I have no idea where the butane processing center is), filled to its massive capacity with full tanks of butane. The Buta Truck swaps out its full tanks for the empties now filling the ranks of the hanut guys, then heads off to another town's hanuts.

When rain, snow, sleet, hail, transportation strikes, or other problems inhibit traffic up the road from SouqTown, Berberville's supply of buta runs low. In the summer, during the transportation strike, this was annoying, but not fatal. A few people had to eat cold food for a day or two. During the vicious winters that hit my mountains, butane heat can mean the difference between life and death. (OK, Kauthar, stop being melodramatic. It means the difference between staying warm at home and going to the house of a neighbor with a woodburning stove.) It's a big deal.

So I was a little alarmed to discover tonight that both of my favorite hanut guys were buta-free. I headed up the hill - Berberville is big enough to have about half a dozen hanuts, lhumdullah - and found butane at the third hanut I tried. Theoretically, he could have demanded a deposit for the tank he gave me...but since I gave him the last tank I emptied last May (the last time I used my little heater), we just let it go. When I leave Berberville for the last time, I'll take my tanks to the hanut and collect my deposit from them. For three of the four tanks I have in my house (two big - kitchen and big buta heater - and two small - little heater and backup for little heater), this deposit was actually paid by the PCV I replaced. For the fourth, Sayeed didn't actually ask for a deposit; he just asked me to remember to return the tank when I left. Note to self: don't ask for money back on that one.

So tonight, September 28, 2009, sitting in my chilly apartment - temps - listening to a cold rain fall outside, I've decided: the moment has come. I'm lighting up.

Winter has officially begun.

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.

9/15/09 Word of the Day: Abrid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9/12/09 Really? Already?

For all the whining I did last winter, there's a lot I didn't record. Like When's the first time you wore long underwear? Or What day did you first fire up your butagaz heater? In fact, I don't remember if I used my little buta heater (inherited from my predecessor) before splurging on my huge, mamba-jamba heater in November. I think I just spent a lot of time wearing coats inside.

So this year, I'm going to document this stuff.

Why bring it up so soon? After all, it's only September - not even Fall yet, technically.

Yeah, but I'm already wearing long underwear. After shivering for over 12 hours straight on Thursday, 9/10, I came home and poured myself into some CuddleDuds(TM). I haven't broken out the polar fleece yet, but I've been wearing sweats over long underwear, with SmartWool(TM) socks, for two days.

(By the way, if CuddleDuds and/or SmartWool want to sponsor this blog, contact me here. Or if you make a competitor product and are willing to send me free stuff, I'm happy to plug you, too.)

Also, this morning, I heated water in a kettle before using it to do the dishes or laundry.

For the record, it's not *that* cold yet. According to my handy-dandy indoor-outdoor thermometer, it's 52 outside and 59 inside. The water temperature is probably somewhere inbetween those two. But it's cold *enough* that long underwear and preheated water make a nice contribution. I could Stoic it out a little longer - that's why I didn't buy a heater till November last year - but what's the point, really? Why be miserable to prove that I Can Take It, when a few small concessions will keep me comfy?

In fact, now that the endless rain has, um, ended (for now), it's gorgeously sunny outside, which means that it feels like 75. It still feels like 59 inside, which is why I'm signing off now. Time to enjoy the fall sun. :)

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.

9/11/09 Where There's Smoke...

The American cliche says, "Where there's smoke, there's fire."

8 years ago today, smoke indicated something else entirely.

Last night, trudging through darkened streets after an epic journey, I smelled burning cedar wood, and knew three things: (1) I really love the smell of woodsmoke; (2) Winter has already come to my mountains; and (3) My work as an environmental educator has barely begun. Cedars are protected species, and grow only in forest reserves in Moroccan national parks. The fact that my neighbors are burning it for fuelwood means that the woodpoaching has already begun for the year.

Tonight, I smelled the distinctive scent of burning plastic. Either someone was disposing of their trash or impoverished Berbervillians were burning the only fuel they could find to stay warm on this chilly night.

Because, at least in this snow-scented village, where there's smoke, there's usually...winter.

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.

5/26/09 Mo-Rockin' Rainstorm

I'm sitting in my house (home sweet home!), listening to a storm whirl around me.

Loudest are the drips, splats, plunks, and spatters of the water leaking through the cracks around my skylight, into my front hall. (That's why my front hall stays mostly empty.) It drops and splashes in a never-constant, near-syncopated rhythm that reminds me of improv jazz.

Overhead, the sky roils; thunder growls and rumbles continually.

Out my window, I hear the rain slapping the ground and the nearby rooftops. It sounds like rain on leaves, but there are no trees nearby, so the drops must just be smacking the rapidly-growing puddles.

The light keeps changing, as clouds thicken and blow past, and as lightning sears across the sky.

I don't hear the wind, but I know it's out there. As I hurried home from teatime at a friend's, it hurled dust and sand in widening gyres. I hadn't realized my mouth was open in awe until I tasted the grit on my teeth. Trees swayed like cat-o-nine-tails, while paper bags shot through the air like they were en route to Oz.

My doors are bolted shut, my windows are locked, and I sit cross-legged, camped under a blanket with a flashlight close at hand... But this storm refuses to be shut out of my house, as the rapidly deepening pails of water (from the front room) noisily attest to.

Just another afternoon in my mountain aerie...

5/8/9 Prepping the River Mural

This morning, Fatima and I headed over to the school to begin drawing in the giant river mural. Our first challenge was finding a ladder, since the one we used yesterday has vanished along with the handymen it apparently belonged to.

Once we'd found another, we snapped in grid lines (lhumdullah for chalk lines!) and used them to scale up from the small sketches.

At noon, we broke for lunch - at the urging of a school staff member who wanted to be able to lock up the room with our supplies so that he could break for lunch. He promised he'd be back by 2pm to unlock the room.

We returned at 2, climbed back up on the chairs and ladders, and got back to work.

For a while.

While walking the couple kilometers between our houses and the school, Fatima had pointed out to me the massive stormclouds visible in nearly every direction. They looked thickest in the north, where sheeting rain poured down on the mountains past the lakes.

The wind blew from the east, though, where a few faint blue glimmers gave me hope that the storm might blow past us without quite hitting.

No such luck.

As I stood at the wall, sketching, I heard the distinctive sound of raindrops hitting the ground, but I didn't feel anything. I figured the storm was *about* to hit...but after several minutes of no change, I turned away from the wall and looked around. It took a minute to realize what I was seeing.

Rain was falling - heavily - everywhere I looked. I wondered if we were under an overhang, but a quick glance upwards showed that we weren't. Then I noticed a two-foot strip of dry ground hugging the west face of the building. The building whose west wall we were drawing on.

The wind from the east hadn't let up at all, so all the rain was being driven at an angle just steep enough that the building itself was keeping us dry.

Until the wind shifted.

And then we packed it up and made a dash for home, before we got as wet as the river we'd drawn. :)

Until tomorrow...

4/15/09 Weather update

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

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

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

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

Happy Spring, everybody!

3/5/09 March came in like a lamb...

...but that didn't last long.

The first few days of March were chilly and overcast, but calm. Then, the night of March 3rd - March 4th, we got our first snow in ... two weeks? Three? Long enough that there were only a few drifts left.

The storm system reached across most of the province, but at lower elevations it showed up as rain. Up here in Berberville, (one of?) the highest-altitude site(s?) in Peace Corps, we got snow, naturally.

When I left town for the weekend, I noticed that I could watch Spring arriving just by traveling down the long road to SouqTown. As we steadily lost elevation, the trees grew more and more blooms, until by SouqTown they were flowering and glorious.

I imagine that driving up on the 3rd would have shown a similar switch from rains to a wintry mix to pure snow, as the seasons wound backwards with the increasing elevation. Up here on the mountaintop, I got to indulge in childhood's pleasure, watching chubby flakes swirl and twirl in the wind. By morning, we had about six inches, much of which melted throughout the day, even though the sun barely poked through the thick clouds.

The snow shut down the town, for the most part; nearly everyone chose to stay indoors. I was no exception, spending most of the day in front of my heater. Power flickered on and off a few times, but never stayed off for more than a minute or two.

Just another winter day in Berberville...in March!

2/14/09 Solar Seduction

For Valentine's Day, it seems appropriate to describe my most recent seduction. It was Thursday. I walked the 2k roundtrip to the lycee twice - once at noon, then again at two - and was utterly seduced by the beauty of the day. I scrapped my original plans in favor of a long walk to the lake. As I walked the 5k (uphill, but it's pretty gentle), I found myself in that simultaneously warm-and-cold sensation that always reminds me of skiing. The air is cold, but the sun is warm, and the exertion heats me up from within... It's early February in the mountains - there are still multi-foot snowdrifts along shadowed hillsides - but the sun's whispering, cajoling, teasing, baking rays won me over. I wasn't wearing a coat, because the sun shone so brightly, but I was wearing a thick fleecy sweatshirt...which I unzipped...and finally removed.

By the time I got back to town, friends I passed on the street were all asking, "Aren't you cold??" but I'd cheerfully answer, "No. There's sun. And the sun is good." (This alliterates nicely in Tam: Tlla tafuyt. THla tafuyt."

Score:
Sun: 1 Winter: 0
Total kilometers walked: 14 (about 9 miles)
Total number of tea invites: 2
Total number of meal invites: 2

It's a good day. :)