My Host Family

Ama is a gourmet chef, I think, or at least a masterful sukuzina (cook). She served me cupcakes with chocolate filling for kaskrut (tea) after I arrived. That’s the best pastry I’ve had in Morocco, no exaggerating. She offered to teach me how to cook, and I was thrilled to say yes. [Note from later – her couscous is also the best I’ve ever had, in Morocco or anywhere else. Wowsers.]

Bba is a tour guide. I’ll learn more about him when he returns. I’ve heard that he speaks some French and English, lHumdullah.

There’s a 16-year-old sister, the daughter of Banu’s previous marriage. She goes to college (junior high) and lives with her grandmother.

Then there’s 11-year-old Mohammed, a 9-year-old brother, and a 5-year-old sister. I don’t know them yet, but that will come.

The current topic of conversation is my Moroccan name. The one my previous host family gave me, Eliaz, has bee universally rejected, mostly because Elias (which sounds pretty much the same) is a boy’s name. On the table are Naddia and Yasmin – both nice, though I’m leaning towards something Biblical. (Is Quranical a word?) Elizabeth isn’t in the Qur’an – I checked, and her husband Zachariah and son John the Baptist both are, but she got left out – but Sarah and Miriam (Mary) are. I wish I’d thought to ask H** what other women are in the Qur’an…

Berberville’s Hills Are Alive

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

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

Welcome to Berberville

…and now I’m in Berberville. (For some reason, that nickname keeps making me think of the Barber of Seville, which is not an allusion I’d make deliberately. Oh, well.) Sitting on my back stoop, watching the trees in my courtyard sway in the breeze. For the record, the sound of leaves in the wind is just fantastic. There are sfsaf (poplar), tfaH (apple), khokh (peach), plus some of the famous lwrd (roses) of Kelaat MaGouna.

My host families are very dissimilar in obvious ways – this one is very wealthy, the dad lives at home, the house is enormous – but both are warm and inviting, and both have made me feel welcome despite my repeated failures to communicate. My host dad is a mountain guide for tourists, and he’s off in the mountains this week, so I won’t get to meet him until after I swear in (inshallah).

My language skills are nowhere near sufficient, but lHumdullah they’re light-years ahead of where they were when I went to RiverVillage for the first time. My conversations are short, choppy, and ungrammatical, but I can have conversations, which counts for a lot.

Welcome to SouqTown

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

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

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

Site assignments!

Humdullah! We've gotten our site assignments!

Friday morning, our program staff gave us our sites and assignments, telling us where we'll be and what we'll be doing for the next two years (inshallah). Not surprisingly, since I'm learning a Berber language, I'll be in a Berber village in the High Atlas Mountains. Berberville, as I'll call it here (for purposes of safety, adherence to Peace Corps Policy, and just because it seems like a good idea).

Yesterday, Saturday, I left Mountain City to come to Berberville. Berberville doesn't have internet access, sadly, but [Eastern Atlas City] does, and that's where I spent last night. :) I'll be going back and forth between Berberville and EAC fairly regularly - probably once a week - for things like shopping, internet access, and language tutoring. (Why not find a tutor in Berberville? Two reasons: There aren't many available - my sitemate is not thrilled with hers -
and more importantly, because H**, the language and culture facilitator I've worked with (and been hugely impressed by) for the past two months, lives in EAC! :D So I get to keep studying with her! (She's fluent not only in Darija and Berber but also in Classical Arabic and French, the other two languages I'm going to want to be working on over the next two years.) lHumdullah!

So I haven't actually seen Berberville yet. We'll head out there in the next hour or two. I've spent the past 18 or so hours in EAC, spending time with the other new PCTs assigned to the area and with the PCVs who have been here for the past 5-23 months. (Youth Development and Small Business Development volunteers come to Morocco in the fall, so they arrive in site in November; Health and Environment volunteers come to Morocco in the spring, so we get to site in May.) It's a great group of people. I'm sad that none of my Environmental buddies will be too nearby - the other three PCTs are all Health - but the volunteers here are pretty fantastic, so I'm looking forward to making friends with them. And with my Environmental friends scattered so broadly, I've got people to visit all up and down the country.

The social aspects of last night and this morning were great, but at least as wonderful (in my opinion, because I'm a big nerd, and like to feel like I'm doing productive things) is that I made contact with people I'll be able to collaborate with on my projects. There are two environmental volunteers, married to each other, (K&D) who live on the opposite side of the National Park I'll be working with. K&D don't come into EAC very often--I think this is their second visit in the year they've been here--so it's wonderful that they were here when I was, and we were able to talk about our projects and plans. We've already decided to collaborate on their plans - which include hiking the five days from their site to mine and marking the trail and surveying it, plus doing a count of the Barbary Sheep that live in the park - and mine.

About my plans...

Friday morning, after I knew where I'd be coming, I talked with the Environmental Program staff about what their vision was for Environmental Education (EE) in Berberville. And they've got one. As most of y'all know, I'm a certified science teacher, back in the States. Apparently, there aren't many certified teachers who have been EE PCVs in Morocco, so they're excited to take advantage of my training. (Oh, and coincidence #23: D**, of K&D, is also a certified teacher. Science teacher. Who taught middle school. And he also has a M.S., but his is in Wildlife Ecology. This collaboration, inshallah, is going to be iHla bzzef.)

So what are these education-intensive EE plans?

They want me to meet with teachers from each of the schools in the National Park. (The Park is less than 20 years old, and the government wanted to include large swathes of land--53,000 hectares, but I don't know what that means in acres or miles--so there are many villages and towns that are entirely within the boundaries of the Park.) Inshallah, these teachers will work together as a Park-wide EE committee, determining which environmental issues the students in our region need to learn. We'll create EE clubs in the schools and create EE curriculum to target the issues that the committee decides are important. And then I'll monitor the implementation of this curriculum.

It's ambitious, but then, I knew our staff had big goals. :) There are challenges, not least of which is the sheer scope of the Park and the virtually nonexistent transportation between these villages. (I may well be getting to most of them on foot, and they range from a two-day hike to a five-day hike away.)

So...ambitious. But this is good work, and the work that I've been called here to do. Which means that I've got legions of support to make this happen, not to mention another certified teacher who lives on the opposite side of the park. lHumdullah. :D

Bedecked and bedazzling...

Tonight I picked up my tjlabit, aka jelabba. I went to the fabric shop and tailor the last time we were here in [Mountain City], and now that we're back from CBT, I returned to pick up the finished ... garment.

Imagine a cross between a dress and a monk's habit, and you'll more or less have the right mental image. It reaches to about 6" off the ground, and has just enough of a v-neck to show off my necklace. It's blue-grey, with a slight sheen, and I found a fabric with an interesting texture and a very subtly embroidered flower every foot or so. The result is something that's understated but pretty. Of course, I haven't seen myself in a mirror bigger than the palm of my hand, so I'm mostly basing this on other people's comments. But I'm willing to believe that they're not lying, and I really do look zweena. :)

Tomorrow morning we'll get our site assignments, inshallah. Some of my PCT friends have been really tweaking out over this, but I'm staying pretty chill; I haven't yet seen a part of Morocco that didn't have its own natural beauty, and wherever I am, I'll have the opportunity to do good. So what's to stress over? :)

Back from CBT Week 3

Hi! I'm typing this entry live, which makes it different from the ~15 pages of material I just uploaded, which I typed in my village. Yeah for laptops!

If you'd like to read any of the new stuff, use the handy index on the left side of the page. The material is dated from when it took place, so the dates go as far back as 3/20. Basically, everything from the end of March and from all of April is new. Nearly all, anyway.

I promise I'll learn soon how to upload photos. For now, though, you're stuck with my descriptions. :) Enjoy!

How Drinking Water Came to My Village

It started with German tourists. They were in my souq town for a festival (the one I’ll be going to soon, inshallah!), and heard that there was a huge flood on the nearby river. They came to River Village to take a look, and were shocked at the terrible quality of the water, which was the only water that people had to drink. It turned out that these weren’t just any German tourists; they were members of an NGO that focused on potable water in third world regions. They said to the villagers, “We can’t work with individuals or with the local government. If you can put together an association, give us a call and we’ll bring potable water to your village.” The association came together quickly, and the Germans put their famed engineering skills to work.

Before long, my little village had two water chateaux (aka water purification towers) and plumbing bringing the purified water to the center of town. That was used as a communal well briefly, but since then, plumbing has been run to each of the 80-some-odd homes in the village, so that everyone in town can turn a knob in their home and have potable water gush out. :) The water consumption is metered, but over half of the households can’t afford to pay their water bills, so the association quietly takes care of it. (They didn’t specify how, and I didn’t ask.) Everyone in my little duwar has clean, safe water to drink, right in their own homes. It may not sound like much, but it’s huge to my host family and to everyone else in town. Much of the sky-high Moroccan infant mortality rate is blamed on bad water. Some say that every child is his (or her) parent’s whole world…which means that if bringing potable water to my village saves even one life, it has saved the world.

OK, now I feel cheesy. But I’m still awfully grateful that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens decided that they could do something for a small village 1,000 miles away in the mountains of Morocco.

Evening Perambulations

Lots of goodness today. Great discussion of Peace Corps issues, great walk to the assif (river), where D** taught us how to balance rocks – yeah for a nifty new hobby that makes my inner geologist glow happily!

After l-mdrasa today, Mma wasn’t home, which meant that everything was a little more relaxed. This week I came to realize that, while Mma looks a lot like an old friend of mine, she’s different in lots of important ways. She’s great, but she runs a nishan household, with rather more yelling than her apple cheeks had led me to expect. When she’s not home, there are more smiles and the atmosphere is just generally lighter.

After kaskrut (tea break), my aytma (siblings) and I went out for a walk. I finally got to meet the secret girlfriend of Teen Bro. After our meeting – which, since this relationship is still secret, consisted entirely of shaking her hand, smiling at each other, watching her greet the assorted brothers and sister who were with us, and then walking on – Teen Bro asked my opinion of her. With nothing at all to base an opinion on, I decided to agree that she was tHla (good, sweet, nice, kind, and beautiful – really a very handy adjective), mostly because she’s studying to become a doctor, which I firmly approve of. :) Oh, and he invited me to come to their tamghra (wedding) in four years, when they’re old enough. I gave him a hug. Fifteen-year-olds really are a universal phenomenon.

Then we walked to the edge of the bluff, where we listened to the tagruts in the river. I asked where the frrtdo (bats) were, since they usually fly around. Not long afterwards, Teen Bro and Little Sis ran off, leaving me and Middle Bro to look at the lights of the town across the river. When they didn’t return soon, we began calling for them. Turns out they’d been looking for bat caves for me. :D I love my family!

After we came back to the house, I discovered that my brothers had captured a sparrow and were holding it in a box about 4”x4”x2”. Didn't love my family quite so enthusiastically at that moment. I told them to set it free, which they very reluctantly did. :( Then we went inside and read the Newsweeks that B**’s family had sent her. They were a hit. Sis-in-Law loved the pictures of pregnant women and newborns, in the article about surrogate mothers, and the boys are looking at the pictures of Barack Obama. “He wants to be the President,” I was able to say, correctly.

“Bush is the president!” Teen Bro argued.

“Bush is President now. Barack Obama wants to be President in the future.”

“Aaaah.”

Yeah for complete sentences! Actual communication! Ideas being shared, one Tamazight word at a time!

Oh, and remind me to tell you about singing the National Anthem. :)

Village Analysis

Right now, I’m supposed to be completing my Mid-PST evaluation (attention, future PCVs: Take notes on everything; it will be on the test) but I stalled out on the question, List the assets (strengths) and constraints (weaknesses) of your village, as based on your environmental assessment. I’m doing well with listing strengths: strong and proven association. Universal appreciation of green space and living things. Large population of youths with ample time on their hands.

I’m having more trouble with the “constraints”. The lack of western toilets is certainly a weakness in my eyes, but it’s hardly a developmental constraint. Ditto for the lack of hot showers and dish soap. (Yeah, that one was a bit of a shocker for me: they used Tide for everything. Tide. As in, the laundry detergent. They use it to clean clothes, dishes, tables and counters…you name it.) I guess the lack of paved roads limits the amount of equipment that can be brought in, but the main road is only half a kilometer away, so it’s not prohibitive. I think mentioning the moqaddim or the mudir (school director) would be politically incorrect. (Because the people reading my midterm, unlike any of my lovely anonymous blog readers, know which of the thousands of mountain villages I’ve been living and working in.)

After reviewing my notes from the discussion we had after CBT week 1, of the “resources” and “problems” (yup, yet another way to avoid saying “strengths and weaknesses”) of all 5 CBT villages, I have a few more ideas: poor infrastructure (not only are there no paved roads, there’s also no permanent bridge over the river – large rocks in one place and a log nestled in mud a mile upstream do not a permanent bridge make – and the school only goes to 5th grade), dependence on outside resources and support, and inaccessible schools. That last could be interpreted as a dig against the mudir, but it’s really just a statement of fact. Two facts, really: we couldn’t access the school, and the local junior high and high school are 5 K away, which is prohibitive for all but a very few families.

Grateful for: walking to our SouqTown (aka our regional ecological survey); the unbelievable beauty of this place; getting to talk to Mom and Dad yesterday; going for evening walks with my aytma (siblings); finding Santa-shaped chocolates in the taHanoot (little market) in our SouqTown; the infinite resources of Soul; Love meeting every need; the baby falling asleep on my lap. Kulshi bikhir. It’s all good. :)