4/25 Sorry for the interruption...

Lots has been going on in the past few days. Some has been wonderful - I just attended the Berber wedding of two PCV friends! - and some has been upsetting. I'm in a fairly toxic mood right now, so I'll wait to update y'all until I can maintain the positivity that I'd rather share. OK?

Peace out,
Kauthar

4/21/09 Duncan on Wood Stoves and Other Benefits of the Redesign

Some of you have commented on the new redesign. :)

One of the new features that no one seems to have noticed yet is the list of links down on the right-hand side. Under the heading "Hey, I Know These People!" is a series of links to blogs written by some of my Peace Corps/Morocco buddies. No one you've heard about before, I'm afraid; as far as I know, I'm the only one of the SouqTown gang who keeps a blog.

I wanted to draw your attention to Duncan's current post. He cites a New York Times article discussing the effect of soot from wood-burning stoves on global climate change, and provides an excellent and thoughtful counterargument to some of the scientists' assumptions. I could summarize or paraphrase it, but I'd rather you see what he has to say, directly.

Another frequently-mentioned aspect of innocentablogged's redesign is the "Favorites" list, on the top of the right-hand column. That list includes the most popular blogs (according to my spies at Google Analytics) as well as a few cult favorites. If you have a favorite blog entry that is not on the list, please let me know via email or by posting to the comments, and I'll add it. :)

4/20 Soccer Tourney Day 2.5

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...a really high header.

Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, I watched the 3rd and 4th guys' elimination games. Somewhat against my will, I'm actually becoming a soccer fan.

Like yesterday, we had a student step up to ref the games. Also like yesterday's ref, today's was skilled and fair, and all-around impressive.

In Game 3, the Tall Ones faced off against ... a team whose name nobody could remember. Fortunately for our tournament chart, the Tall Ones dominated the game, ending with 2-1, so they'll advance to the semi-finals to play the winners of Game 4.


All the teams played well today, helped by the clouds which minimized the sun's glare, but hindered by the incredibly dry ground which kicked up dust with every step. You can actually see the dust in some of the photos, it's so thick.

The final game of the day was also the most exciting, in part because of a last-minute bending of the rules: only 3 players showed up to play for the Sons of the Lions, so we let them fill in their ranks with ringers from previously-defeated teams (including Saturday afternoon's ref).


In the first half, the Gazelles*, their opponents, dominated the field, scoring one goal right away and a second in the middle of the period. Coming up on halftime, it looked like a blowout. But the Sons of the Lions (who I keep wanting to call the Cubs) shot in a bullet kick from midfield, right before the buzzer, that pulled it up to 2-1. After the half, the Cubs - ooh, sorry, the Sons of the Lions - nailed another goal, and suddenly the game was a lot more interesting. With about 15 minutes left to play, they bombed in a third goal, and suddenly the crowd was on its feet. The Gazelles couldn't pull it together to tie it back up before the final bell, so the Sons of the Lions, complete with 4 previously-defeated players, advances to next weekend's semi-finals.

* I found this a weird team name, because "gazelle" is the single most common thing shouted at girls walking through big cities. More accurately, it's the thing I hear most when walking through cities. It's meant to be flattery, as gazelles are universally perceived to be beautiful and graceful creatures. It comes across as harassment, though, since I don't actually *like* having "compliments" shouted at me by strangers. When I asked one of the teachers why the guys would choose such an effeminate team name, he pointed out that gazelles are also fast, strong, and deft. Which they certainly are, but still...

4/19/09 Soccer Tourney Day 2: Hope Springs Eternal

Today, we have one match in the morning (girls) and two matches in the afternoon (boys). Then the tourney will pause for a week and recommence next Saturday, with the boys' semifinal rounds. Sunday will be the championship games for both the girls and the boys.

The match was set to start at 10, so I got there at 9:45, and by 10:15, we were rolling. That's pretty extraordinarily prompt given that one of the teams didn't actually show up. I don't know where the miscommunication occurred, but we ended up a team short. Fortunately Hope, the losers of yesterday's girls' match, appeared (in uniform, which makes me think some of this was pre-arranged) to fill the void.

Sunday mornings, the students get to sleep in. It's the only day of the week without any classes at all. I therefore expected minimal attendance, as students chose their snug beds over the windy, dusty soccer field.

As the game began, there were indeed only a handful of onlookers. As the sun rose higher, though, more and more brave souls emerged from the dorms, and by halftime we had 35 guys and 20 girls watching the game. The second half, cheerleading erupted spontaneously, and we had rival factions shouting the names of the two teams (Hope and Sisterhood). More and more students trickled into the stands (by which I mean the dirt hump next to the field.) At the final buzzer, the score was tied 2-2, so the crowd of now 80 guys and 21 girls held their breath for the sudden death overtime. Three or four minutes later, Hope executed a slick triple-pass that slid the ball all the way around the goal and then slipped it just inside the goalpost. Looks like their defeat yesterday wasn't the end of the story after all; they'll face Jasmine again for the championship, next week.

More to come, including a bunch more pictures, but it's time to head back for the boys' matches...

4/18/09 "But Girls Don't Play Soccer"

I realize that it's counter-intuitive to start a blog about girls and soccer with a picture of *boys* and soccer, but, well, I really like that picture. And I promise, we'll have pictures of girls really soon.

Today's story actually began several months ago, in October of 2008, when Peace Corps informed us that the People Of America had donated hundreds (possibly thousands) of soccer jerseys to the People Of Morocco. Exactly how the POA did this, I'm not sure. But we had hundreds (thousands?) of jerseys available to us, to be distributed as appropriate.

So we requested some - we being the PCVs working with Berberville's college and lycee teachers to organize a club for 3rd-year students [the equivalent of 9th graders]. We've been planning to hold a "soccer tournament" for the final few weekends of the schoolyear, and that time is upon us!

From the begining, we said that we wanted this tournament to be for boys AND girls. Which is when the teachers said, "But girls don't play soccer." We tabled the conversation at the time, saying only that after all, one of our long-term goals for the club is to develop leadership skills in the students, so we'll let the students--the male AND female students who come to every club meeting--organize the tournament. Over the many Saturdays we've spent on campus, with the club (holding meetings, painting murals, planting trees, etc), we've noticed girls on the soccer field. We brought this up with teachers, who shook their heads and calmly reiterated, "Girls don't play soccer."

It's really quite frustrating to have someone calmly and blandly say things you know to be untrue. But again, we didn't want to make a big thing of it, so we went back to our trump card: the kids would organize everything, anyway.

This past week, the students created the teams for the tournament: 8 teams of boys (7-10 players per team) and FOUR TEAMS OF GIRLS.

Fatima and I jumped up and down a lot when we got the rosters. :)

The students had originally planned to keep the tournament limited to the 3rd-year students, which would have meant a total of 12 girls. (Some other time I'll rant about the extraordinary drop-out rates among female students. For now, suffice to say, of the 3rd-year students - the equivalent to American high school freshmen - only 10% are female. Yeeeeah.) In their planning sessions, though, they must have changed that rule in favor of having an actual elimination-style tournament for both boys *and* girls, which meant that they opened the soccer tourney to every girl in the school, and netted FORTY eager players.

"Girls don't play soccer"?


The first two teams to compete selected the team names "Hope" and "Jasmine". And this afternoon, they battled it out for the chance to go to next weekend's championships. These girls knew their stuff. I saw headers, chesting, high kicks, straight kicks, tight passing, fancy footwork, and hustle, hustle, hustle. The teachers had originally suggested two twenty-minute periods, but after 20 minutes, the girls protested pausing for halftime. "We're not even winded yet!" they insisted. So the referreeing teacher agreed on the spot to extend the periods to 30 minutes each - the same length as the boys.

Oh, and to address the question that the boys wouldn't be interested in watching the girls play? Picture a crowd of one hundred and forty-nine boys and thirty-five girls, peering through shuttered eyelashes against the blinding midday sun, buffeted by frigid winds, blinking away the dust clouds being kicked up by the ... girls playing soccer. In slick-looking jerseys and headscarves. (Of the 20 girls on the field, only 3 have uncovered heads.) That's 184 students who are here to watch the girls' match. :D

After the final whistle, Jasmine had defeated Hope 2-0. The girls headed back to the dorms to shower and change, and the boys took the field for the battle of the Berber Lions vs the High School Lions. (Did I mention that the kids picked their own team names?)

The crowd whittled down slightly. 19 of the female spectators went down to the practice field to prep for their own game, tomorrow morning. A few more guys showed up. At the half, I counted 154 boys and 16 girls, for a total of 170 students watching the lions compete.

My favorite thing about the above shot is the contrast between the high-powered players on the field and the indolent spectators on the hillside above. :)

Final score: Berber Lions 2, High School Lions 1.

The third game should have started at 4pm, but things were running late, and it was 4:45 before the Lions finished up. The shadows were long, the team facing west had a blinding low-angle sun staring at them, and the chill in the air was making me shiver under my four layers.

But the students wouldn't hear of putting their game off till tomorrow, so at 4:50, the whistle blew for the match between the Berber Brotherhood and the Stars. Oh, and who was blowing that whistle? Not the teacher who had been refereeing the previous two matches. One of the most skilled players from the defeated HS Lions asked if he could ref the third game, and in the spirit of encouraging student leadership, we enthusiastically approved his request. I wondered if he'd show favoritism to his friends or exhibit any other shortcomings that would make me regret my decision...but he was phenomenal. Quick, responsive, alert, and brutally fair, he made the final match of the day feel professional. Final score: Berber Brotherhood 2, Stars 0. Next weekend's semifinals will feature the Berber face-off: Berber Lions vs. Berber Brotherhood.

Tomorrow, we have three more elimination matches - one for girls, two for boys - so stay tuned, sportsfans!

4/17/09 To-ing and Fro-ing

Today was a nice, full day, and I thought I'd share it with y'all.

7:00 Wake up. Go back to sleep.

8:00 Wake up. Stay up.

8:01 Remember that my butagaz ran out yesterday, and thanks to the strike, there were no full buta tanks to be had, and that I therefore won't have hot water for cocoa, laundry, dishwashing, etc.

8:02 Discover that my toilet, which has been slooooow ever since a mouse drowned in it (and I just flushed it down, rather than extract its bloated little mousy corpse and think of another way to dispose of it) is now completely blocked.

8:03 Do laundry. Heat up water with electric hot pot (which blows the circuit breaker every 5-15 seconds, which is why this is not a good system) and then say forget it, I'm using the rubber gloves anyway.

9:00 Hang laundry on the roof.

9:15 Count soccer jerseys and sort into bundles of 10.

9:30 Go to "Fatima's" house. Feed her cat. Look for toilet plunger. (Unsuccessful.)

9:45 Buy toilet plunger in souq for 14 dh. Probably a ripoff, but I'm not in the mood to haggle.

10:00 Meet with the Middle School English teacher to discuss tomorrow's soccer tournament. And life in Morocco. And employment opportunities in America and Morocco. And racism in America, France, and Morocco.

12:00 Go home. Plunge toilet. It now flows free as the Father of Waters (anyone get that? please?), lhumdullah. Encouraged by success, plunge shower drain (which hasn't worked in the year I've lived here - one reason I rarely shower. The lack of hot water is a bigger reason). It works! I now have TWO functioning drains in my bathroom! This is very exciting.

12:30 Pick up miskota (coffee cake) and bring it to my host family's house, where I partake of couscous lunch, my favorite Friday tradition. :)

2:00 Go home. Pick up full butagaz tank en route, but don't bother installing it. Clean frantically, because Ama is coming over soon. There's a chance we'll just meet up at my doorway and then head to the sbitar (medical clinic), but she'll probably come up...

2:30 I hear a knock at the door just as I finish sweeping the front hall. I hastily shovel the mountain of tracked-in dirt into the dustpan, flick the broom over the remnants to scatter any visible dirt into the anonymity of my mudbrick floor, and run down to welcome Ama.

2:32 Give Ama tour of my house. She raves over most of it, especially the pictures of my family (thanks, Dad!), and makes a few adjustments to the decor. Notably, she thinks the top of my TV looks naked, so she puts a flag* in my favorite mug** and sets it next to the satellite box.

3:00 Ama and I visit the sbitar. She's in the 7th month of her pregnancy, so she had some bloodwork done in SouqTown a week or two ago. The results were sent up to her on yesterday's tranzit (the first tranzit to run in a week, because of the transportation strike), so now she's taking them to the doctor for interpretation. She asked me to look them over while we were waiting for lunch; they're in French, so legible to me, but even though I know what the words *are* in English, I don't know what 90% of it *means*. What's a hemoglobin, anyway? At the sbitar, Ama was very disappointed to discover that the doctor was in. Counter-intuitive, no? Being a traditional Berber woman, Ama infinitely prefers to visit with the female nurse-midwife. Fortunately, the nurse came in halfway through our visit, and Ama happily followed her back to the OB/GYN ward for her examination. All is well, but the doctor prescribed some routine pregnancy supplements.

3:45 I go to the pharmacy to pick up the supplements for Ama. The pharmacy is right in the heart of downtown, so Ama never goes there. Most Berberville women avoid downtown, for that matter. Of course, I live half a block from downtown, but fortunately, there are back-znqt (alley) paths that sneak past the city center to allow Ama and my other female friends to slip up to my door. The pharmacist is still at lunch/siesta. I walk back to where Ama is waiting for me, by the preschool, and tell her that I'll try the pharmacy again later, and then bring her the prescription.

4:00 Back home. :) Set up the butagaz tank, cook the zucchini bread whose dough has been sitting in the oven for 36 hours (which involves re-lighting the oven every three minutes for the first half-hour, at which point it settles down obediently), heat water, wash dishes, make a pot of cocoa, check email, check zucchini bread, check email, check zucchini bread, check email, try first batch of zucchini bread - big success!

5:00 Wrap up second batch of zucchini bread. Head to pharmacy. Hand pharmacist prescription. He asks (in Tam), "Are these for you?" I say no, they're for my host mom. He clarifies which, of the 58 women in town who share her name, she actually is, and then fills the prescription.

5:15 Deliver bread, meds, and April rent to Ama. She asks me to verify how often she's supposed to take the meds, so I pore over the French fine print. I burst out laughing. Ama wants to know what's so funny. "This medicine is for women who are pregnant," I explain. "The pharmacist asked if it was for me. He thought I was pregnant! Hshuma! I'm not married!" We both chuckle. Then, after a beat: "You did explain that it was for me, right?" Ama asks, sounding a bit worried. "I did, lhumdullah," I reassure her.

5:30 The kids get home from school, accompanied by Baba. We all share the zucchini bread. Ama asks for the recipe, and is shocked to discover that you can put xodart (vegetables) into Helawa (sweets). It took a while to find the word she for zucchini, though, since the one I learned - kurjet - she doesn't recognize. I try to sketch them out with my hands, explain that it's a green vegatable (which there aren't many of, here - I live in a land without broccoli or spinach), and she finally says, "Taghsayat?" Squash? "Yes!" I agree. I hadn't realized that the word was so flexible. There's orange taghsayat, which is pumpkin, the yellow taghsayat, which I'd call squash, and now a green taghsayat, zucchini. "Yeah, I saw some of those in your kitchen," she said, pleased with her deductive skills.

6:00 I head home, tired but happy. :)

* My latest package from home featured 3 small American flags. Not knowing what to do with them, I displayed them prominently on my tea-shelf (the eye-level rack on the north wall of my kitchen).

** The mug features a cow in bas-relief, complete with an emerging head which serves as the handle. I bought it to give to my cow-loving sister, but figured I'd use it for the many months till I see her. Then I cat-sat, and the visiting kitty knocked it to the ground. It now has several hairline fractures, so I'm scared to pour boiling water into it, lest it shatter...but I still love it, so I had it perched on top of my tea supplies, in the kitchen. It's purely decorative now (sigh), so Ama's use of it to enhance my TV aesthetics is entirely appropriate.

4/16/09 My Brush with Algerian Prison

At some point, and I'm not going to say when, I drifted close to the Moroccan-Algerian border. I was with a group of ... people ... and we were all excited to see it.

I saw the barriers and the guards and the flags, and it all seemed mighty photogenic to this shutterbug. I reached for my camera, but fortunately I was reminded that it's a federal offense to photograph government installations, whether they be office buildings or dams or border crossings. I put my camera away.

Shortly thereafter, as we were heading away from the border, an honest-to-goodness stretch limo drove past me. I didn't know those *existed* in Morocco, so I snapped a couple shots of it. (Like I said, shutterbug.)
A minute or two later, Algerian police stopped us. As they approached, a brown-skinned American who is often mistaken for Moroccan quickly said, in English, in his down-home-iest Midwest American accent, "Hi, there, can I help you with anything?"

They brushed past him and looked around for blond heads. There were two of us, and we were urgently ushered over to them. "Did you just visit the border?" one demanded in French and then English.

"Yes..." I let my voice trail off.

"Did you take pictures of the border?" he barked.

"What?" I asked, feeling the blood drain from my face.

"Pictures. Of the border. Do you have any?"

"I took pictures of the limousine," I stammered. I have no idea if I spoke French or English. Probably English, but I really don't remember. For that matter, I don't remember which language he was speaking. The sudden interrogation left me a little shaken.

"Where's your camera?"

I pulled it out of my shoulder bag ('cause really, when is my camera *not* in arm's reach?) and handed it to him.

"Your pictures?" he barked again.

With shaking hands, I turned the camera on and flipped it to the display setting. A shot of the limo, receding into the distance, appeared.

"The next one?" he demanded.

I obediently hit the button to show the previous picture: a closer shot of the limo (the one shown above).

"I'd never seen one in Morocco before," I stammered, but he waved away my explanation.

"You didn't take pictures at the border crossing?" he demanded a final time.

I shook my head, wide-eyed and chalk-white.

He growled something to his associate, and they both strode off.

Shaken, my blond friend and I continued on our way, away from the border. Far, far away from the border.

Note to self: Don't irritate border guards.

The prisons here - in both Morocco and Algeria - are scary, scary places. I'd probably just be deported, not actually jailed, but we don't want to test that theory, now do we?

No, no we don't.

4/7/09 Word of the Day: 3mmr

Whenever I travel in Morocco, my ears stay open for the few words of Darija that are the same as words in Tamazight. One that comes in handy is 3mmr, which means full. It is used to refer to pitchers and buckets, as in "the opposite of empty", and is also used where we in English would have some other antonym for empty, like "taken", as in, "This seat is taken," (l-blas-tx i3mmr).

[Sidenote: The longer I'm here, the more complex English vocabulary seems. Why do we have so many words for virtually the same concept? I mean, I know why - our complicated linguistic heritage, giving us words from Provencale, French, German, and the Nordic languages - but it still seems bizarre.]

While traveling back from Spring Camp, I started to board a bus and was told that it was i3mmr. Full. But Moroccan buses routinely carry more passengers than there are seats, and I really wanted to get going, so I climbed on anyway. Sure enough, there were no seats available, but I found a space by the back stairs where I could nestle in on the floor.

Moments later, the jumper asked for my ticket. I told him I didn't have one, and asked what the price was. He quoted me a price that's at least double a fair fare. (Hey, that's a homynym.) I stared him down, and asked what the real price was. He didn't flinch, but the onlookers ('cause when are there *not* onlookers?) shared the mischevious smile that I've come to associate with being tricked.

(Side note: deception is a key part of the Moroccan sense of humor, I've discovered. People will look you in the eye and tell you (1) your bus left an hour early, (2) your pet died while you were away, (3) there are no more of [whatever staple item you're trying to buy] left in the province, etc...and after you start to panic/flip out/cry/whatever, they laugh and laugh and laugh and tell you it was a big joke. I've run into this countless times. I never find it funny, but folks around me always do.)

So I chuckled, and quoted back a more fair price. He stood his ground. I caught the eye of the only woman nearby, and asked her what a fair price was. She looked away. All the men watching this little scene chimed in that the price he'd quoted was the real one. When he refused to back down, I gave up and handed him the money. Everyone around me had a good laugh at their collective ability to deceive the tarumit, and I felt a bad mood begin to percolate.

I nestled back down into my corner and felt grumpy.

A few minutes later, though, the woman nearby leaned over and whispered that yes, I'd been more than double-charged.

I wondered why she hadn't stood up for me before, but appreciated her honesty enough not to take out my grumpiness on her.

She continued, "The people sitting right over there will be getting off in a second. If you move quickly, we can get those seats." Sure enough, they stood up as the bus began to slow down. Some of the encircling men tried to move towards the soon-to-be-freed seats, but she batted them away, then motioned me over. A moment later, I found myself perched on the rise between the two bucket seats. Apparently, three of us were going to share these two seats. (All female, of course.)

As we continued on our route, the three of us chatted while the bus continued to empty out. When we got to my new friend's stop, she told me that I should come by for tea whenever I came back through, and then she and the other girl climbed down off the bus, leaving me with an abundance of space and a heart i3mmr.

3/27/08 Muralled maps (final)

A few weeks ago, I told you about the world map ecosystem mural we (PCVs, teachers, and students) painted for the school we've been working with. But I don't think I ever showed you the final map, so here it is.

Note that we used a non-Mercator projection, so Greenland is visibly *smaller* than South America. Also note the Key on the left, where we describe the biomes we mapped (in English and Arabic), the title (between Africa and Antarctica), the compass rose (upper right) and the Moroccan flag (lower right).

A week or two later, we painted a biome map of Morocco. In the map above, it's all averaged out as "Chaparal", but when you zoom in, you can begin to see some of Morocco's extraordinary biodiversity:

Instead of a text key, we have an illustrated one.

Hopefully, the teachers will continue to use these as learning aids in talking about ecosystems, biodiversity, geography, and countless other topics. Plus, they make the school look gorgeous. :)

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!