Adjust

Trying to adjust to live in a new country, submerged waist deep into a different culture, is hard to do. There are days of wonderment and there are days of puzzlement. I have been here for now for nearly 12 weeks and the battle of adjustment is far from over. Who’s to say I will ever be adjusted? Currently I am trying to get to a place of comfort in my life here. After two weeks in my final site I am slowly but surely doing the things to make this city my home. I have already found some amazing local friends who want to help me in my quest for success here. I have found a wonderful apartment that I fell in love with and hope to turn it into my home. I have begun talks on when and how I will be working in this city. Days are good and days are bad. Sometimes days go back and forth. One hour could be wonderful and the next not so much. I have been exploring and making my presence in the city known. My presence is surely an interesting one. People like to stare at me and very often yell things at me, none of which I understand. It’s hard to tell for sure who is trying to genuinely greet me and who is trying to hassle me. But I feel my instincts are on high alert here. I can usually sense a genuine person from a fake one. The more I look the more difference find in Moroccan and American cultures. It can be so small as eating meals at different times of day to as large as differences relationships between men and women. I came here to see these differences. I feel I have been blessed with an open mind and that is what is making me able to accept these differences. I know I can’t always expect everyone to be as open-minded as I have been. I plan to be who I am while I am here and not hide where I came from. I can’t apologize for the way I am and the country I call home. The reason that I am here is to promote peace, friendship, and hopefully some understanding.

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Thanksgiving came early

Gendarmes are the royal police of Morocco. They are the kings police. Think of them like the secret service. The king commissions them to keep watch for him on all cities around the country. Peace Corps volunteer safety is a high priority to King Mohammed VI. So the gendarmes in my city have a job to keep me safe. I have visited the office a few times in my first week here. The chief gendarme is named Ahmed and he had a huge personality. He is very welcoming, nice, protective, and funny. He has so much charisma and he likes me a lot. He takes on a fatherly roll with me telling me to hold my purse close every time he sees me. He tires to speak a little English to me, he knows he is not good, so we usually just laugh. The other day he invited me to lunch at his home with his wife. So today my host dad and I went there for lunch. His home was the biggest I’d been in so far. It was just the two of us eating this lunch but I can only compare it to a Thanksgiving feast. Beef, fish, shrimp, salad, bread, French fries, olives, fruit, pop, and an avocado milkshake. And not just a single serving of all these things. There was enough food for about 10 people. I tried to eat as slowly as possible so I could at least try everything but no matter how hard I tried I kept hearing “eat, eat, eat.” When my host dad and I could eat no more we tried to explain that we were full. I wasn’t sure what was being said but I’m sure it was something along the lines of “my wife made all this food for you and that’s all you want.” Well I don’t know what was expected but it was an incredible amount of food and there was absolutely now way we could have eaten it all. I figured “I’m full” cues were universal but the minute I would stop eating I would get “eat, eat, eat” again and again. I don’t want to be insulting but there comes a point were you have to listen to your own body first. In Moroccan culture eating a lot of food is a sign showing that you like it. Well I surely did think this food was delicious but I defiantly didn’t want to make myself sitting there. When we were done I graciously thanked Ahmed’s wife for the meal and I really hope she knew I enjoyed it.

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Whatever Works

In Peace Corps you learn a whole new way of problem solving. If your water bottle breaks you don’t go buy a new one, you find a way to fix it. You use everything until it can be used no more. You find a way to rig a handle to open a window if the handle is long gone. You find some way, even through your best charades, to communicate that you want teach kids how to dance. I’ve never been faced with the same problems that I have been faced with here in Morocco. And above all my biggest problem right now is communication. There are so many things that I want to say, so many feelings I want to let out to the people around me but I just cant. Usually I can only work with the very basic emotions and feelings. “I’m happy”, “I’m tired”, “I’m hungry.” But already I have been able to find creative ways to get the solutions that I seek. I just recently had an instance of the most creative communication I’ve ever had. Aziz is a friend of my host brother and after the three of us left the youth center together we stopped in a cyber café for a while. Aziz was trying to talk to me with little success. He is very computer and technology savvy so he came up with the idea of going online to Google Translate. He typed message in French and it would slowly transform into English before my eyes. Then I would reverse the translation and type my response in English to be translate into French. I agree, you could call this cheating. But you could also call this genius. I was able to ask questions that I wasn’t able to ask before and actually say things that were on my mind. It was funny because if there was a typo in one of the words the translation would make no sense or turn out to mean something complete different. There were a couple times I had to say “WHAT” out loud to myself. I keep saying communication is bad, and it is, but each day I get little surprises and I understand more and more. Being alone in my site with very, very little English spoken is really what is forcing me to learn Arabic better. I have only been in my site for 1 week and I feel confident in my progress so far. So I know that if I can have some patience with myself and the process I will get better and better with time.

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Lesson #1: Don't be overconfident

The third day I was in my new site I started to feel over confident. I arrived home from travel and night was just setting upon me. I had walked to the taxi stand one time with my host family and wrote down the directions, so I was confident I could get back to my house on my own. But as I know very well I was not blessed with a good sense of direction and the dusk sky didn’t help the situation what so ever. So here was the situation: I needed to get back to my house, it was getting darker by the second, and even though I had the phone number of my family I knew I couldn’t communicate with them over the phone. I didn’t want to keep walking around and get even more lost so I figured my best option was to stay put. Ok so you must be thinking that I was totally freaking out. I’m not sure why- but I wasn’t. For some reason I stayed calm and I knew I would eventually get home. Don’t get my wrong I did envision spending hours standing there waiting for a solution but fortunately that’s not what happened. The first option I thought of was to call the Peace Corps volunteer that I had just been with who’s Arabic is much better than mine. He had met my family previously so I called asking him to call my family and tell them where I was. Great thought in theory, however my description of my whereabouts wasn’t good enough and that solution didn’t work. At this point a family standing on their step was loudly trying to flag me down and get me to come to them. It is really difficult putting trust in so many strangers but it’s has become a norm since I have arrived in Morocco. At this point I had no other option. My family had just called me back so I gave the phone to the family so they could explain where I was. Then they made me sit down on their step with them while them made a wall around me. The women kept making punching motions and I took this as them trying to tell me that someone could be out there wanting to hurt me so they wanted to protect me. One of them women of the house held my hand while I waited to be picked up. So far in my site everyone has been so kind and generous and I am confident that this will not be the first time that the citizens of my city will want to protect me. I have heard that it is very common for locals of a city to really take care of their volunteer because you are “their American”.
I hope I haven’t horrified too many of you by telling that story. The whole time this was happening I was so angry at myself for doing something so stupid and being so overly confident. Please know that I have learned my lesson and I will learn to ask for help when I need it and that my own safety is my number one priority. Since my own personal independence has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 3 years it’s hard to break the desire to want to do everything on my own. I mean it’s the American way. But I understand just by being here I am independent and I shouldn’t feel ashamed if I need lots of help in this difficult situation.

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Here I go again on my own

So here I go again on my own. For the past 9 weeks I have been training and living in the same city as 3 other trainees as well as our language teacher. So even though I was far from home I was by no means alone. I also got to see all the other members of my youth development sector about once every other week. My support system was as strong as steel. But now since I have successfully finished my 9 weeks of pre-service training I have proven myself worthy to be able to live in Morocco on my own. One the day following my swearing in ceremony all the members of my group had to say goodbye to one another and scatter off across Morocco like leaves in the wind. So now I have an incredible amount of challenges staring me in the face now that I have arrived in my final site. Challenges that seemed impossible to me 9 weeks ago but now, as they still seem difficult, I know I can face them. I still haven’t figured out where exactly this drive is coming from but I’d rather just go with it. There really hasn’t been a time that I have had that nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach and I have never felt truly scared. I’m not saying I will never have times like these but I am glad I am at least off to a strong start. The comforting thought of the support from my friends and family at home defiantly keep me going. Although there are many times that I wish that certain people were here to experience these things with me.
I’d like to fill you all in on what it is I will be doing in my site for the first several months.

1. Get my Carte De Sejour-this is a ID card that everyone needs to live in Morocco if they plan to be here for more than 3 months. The application is comparable to getting a passport.
2. Get a post box so I can receive all the wonderful mail that people want to send me!
3. Find myself a tutor who can help me with my language in a formal setting.
4. Look for my own house or apartment and things to fill it with.
5. Meet with the authorities in my town.
6. Socialize with people in town so they can get to know me and understand why I am here.
7. Start to figure out exactly what youth in my town don’t have but wish they did, and see how I can help them.
8. Hopefully start teaching English classes or at least tutoring some people in English.
9. Get to know my way around town and find out where all the things and places are that I need.
10. Brainstorm projects and activities that I want to do with kids here using the skills that I have.

So by doing all these things I will slowly integrate and find my place here. I know all this will take several months and I know I have to be patient. I want to take as much control of my own life as possible because up until this point I haven’t felt like I could control much in my own life here.

Let me now talk about my new family.

I like to call them my host roommates because they are just a young couple aged 27 and 29. Mohammed and Bahija. She is pregnant right now and due in 5 months. My room here is really nice but pretty small and not much space for my things. I am sleeping on a really hard Moroccan couch for a bed, but I guess it’s better than the floor, which would be my other option. Their apartment is very small but extremely clean and nice. They have very nice things here like a range, washing machine, a shower with hot water, and 2 Tvs (one of which is in my room). I am defiantly not used to the because in my last home I defiantly lived a lot more modestly. I feel a little spoiled here right now because of all these nice things but right now I am going enjoy it while I have the chance. When I live on my own I wont be able to afford tv and I might not even have a shower. I don’t want spoil myself when I live on my own because I joined Peace Corps to learn exactly what it is I can live without. So my host roommates are very nice, however I can’t really communicate much with them at this point. They fluently speak French and Arabic, but I can’t speak much of either with them. They speak a lot faster than I am used to and they are not used to dumbing it down for someone who cant communicate well. They seem to be a little protective of me which is great but kinda makes me feel like a teenager or something. They also seem to want to tell me what I should do without making it clear to me. For instance I just visited Casablanca for the day and I was gone all day walking all over the city in the hot sun. I was tired and had a headache and just wanted to relax the rest of the night. But when I got home they wanted to dress me up and take me to a wedding. I was in no mood to be a public spectacle at that particular point in time. But otherwise they seem like a young hip couple that I can already relate to a little and hopefully it will grow in time.

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Finishing up pre-service training

Wrapping up my pre-service training was defiantly a blast. My entire group traveled to Mehdya, the beach city that we first came to when we arrived in Morocco. We spend 3 days there having fun, enjoying the weather, and oh yes…training. We were lectured by day and enjoying each others company by night. I was looking so forward to this time that I got to spend with all my fellow trainees and it ended up being wonderful. One night some of us went to a pool hall/dance club and watched some Moroccan men putting out some flawless moves. We watched many sunsets from the beach. Rachid, our training coordinator, had worked hard to organize a talent show for us. Our last night there I was provided with entertainment from my friends and staff. No I didn’t showcase any talent, however I offered lots of support to those who did. At 8 am the final day we were there we boarded buses en route to Rabat, Morocco’s capitol. This is where we were to have our swearing in ceremony. First we stopped off at the Peace Corps office, which seemed more like a compound to me. There were a couple of building and really pretty landscape inside of it. This is the place where all PC Morocco business takes place and where we will go for medical attention from our PC doctors. We had our ceremony at a near by theater. We were joined by the US ambassador to Morocco, our country director David Lillie, and a couple members of the Moroccan ministry. (I guess it’s kinda like parliament) We all stood up together and gave the oath of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. I felt very noble and honored to give it. After that we were officially PCVs! We were served lunch on the lawn of the PC office and it was very nice. Then we traveled to the very nice hotel that we got to stay in. Yorda, Cyntha, Sarah, Emily, and I went to Marjane after that. Marjane is the Wal-Mart of Morocco. The stories I had heard about it defiantly were true. It was so big and included almost anything you would ever need. I bought myself a nice travel hair dryer, some peach black tea bags, and a couple other things. All in all I spent about 80 durhams there and it equals 10 dollars. There was also an attached Pizza Hut and ice cream store. There were also beauty stores nearby. Quite expensive though. But if I am in dire need of something like that, its nice to know I can get it. There is a Marjane on Casablanca which is only 40 minutes from my site. After the excitement of Marjane some of us went to a little café and had a couple of drinks to unwind. We were forbidden to drink while in training so this was something that most of us to excited to get to do. Also since drinking alcohol is forbidden and illegal in Muslim countries it is not available everywhere. But there were plenty of drinking establishments in Rabat. We went back to the hotel for our buffet style dinner and laid down in the room for a bit. Despite being the most tired I had been in 9 weeks I pushed myself to go out again after that. By this time it was about 10pm and I had gotten up at 6:30 that morning. But a bunch of us went to a bar and sat upstairs in the lounge. They were playing American music from the 1980’s and we were all loving it. But music progressively got more “dancey” and a lot of us couldn’t hold it back for much longer. To be more exact it was the boys who were having a hard time fighting back the urge to dance. “Sweet Dreams are Made of These” by the Eurthmics was enough to get them out of their seats and make a dance floor when there wasn’t one. We spent three hours there dancing, laughing, and enjoying our last night together. We left at 1:30 after which we went to the roof of our hotel and enjoyed the night sky for another hour. I finally went to sleep at 2:30 and awoke at 5:30. My train didn’t leave Rabat until 9:45 however we had people departing at 6:30 and I couldn’t bear not seeing them off. So I just got up and hung out in the hotel lobby with everyone as the slowly left. These relationships that I have built over the past 9 weeks are ones that are very important to me. Before I came here I remember saying that I didn’t want to rely on relationships with other Americans because I wanted to build good relationships with Moroccans. However you don’t realize how important your American relationships are until you get here. We are each others allies and family while we are so far from home. Saying good bye to everyone was like leaving home all over again. We are sprinkled all over this country but we are so incredibly lucky to all have cell phones and Internet access. Whenever I feel sad, alone, or lonely I keep my support system in mind. Between other PCVs, PC staff, and my wonderful friends and family back home I can safely say I have at least a few hundred people backing me up and I’ve never felt more honored.

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Thank you

I want to thank all of you out there for your genuine love and support. I am moved and honored by all the love I have coming from friends and family at home. This will be a short post for now just because I need some time to digest all the events of the past few days for myself. Once I figure out how to put everything into words I will fill you in.

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Cooking for Ourselves

As a part of our training our group was responsible for cooking a meal for ourselves using local foods and resources. We decided to make chicken stir fry, sounded easy enough. We had some vegetables but we had to buy rice and chicken. Yorda and I were in our usual store trying to describe rice to the owners without being sure of the word. Couscous is like gold around here so of course everyone knows what it is. Yorda was attempting to tell them couscous, but longer. Using a series of hand gestures and basic adjectives. After a few minutes we had others around us participating as well. At a point one kid thought he knew what we were talking about, but he was wrong. The whole time I kept saying “ruz” in my head and finally in the end I stopped second guessing myself and just blurted it out. Turns out I was right and everyone cheered. We asked for a half kilo of ruz and went along on our way. When we showed this rice to Lahcen and Malika they said it was not the rice we were looking for. Unrenowned to us there are different kinds of rice depending on what you want to use it for. The kind we got apparently gets all sticky and mushy when you cook it and it is for some special rice dish comparable to rice pudding. So later Malika told us exactly what to ask for and we attempted to buy it again. We said exactly what she told us to and we got the same rice the second time. We decided to just suck it up and use it.
So we also had to buy chicken and up to this point Malika always bought our meat for us. But since we were doing all this ourselves we were sent out to buy some chicken. Rachael and I arrived at one of the many butcher shops. It was near the end of the day so there was no more headless, naked chickens hanging in the window. We asked for a half kilo of chicken and the butcher disappeared into the back. We of course figured that we would go pull some from the refrigerator in the back. Next we heard a generic squawking and struggling sound come from a live chicken. Rachael and I looked at each other with a look of shock and fright. Then the butcher comes out carrying a live chicken by the neck. He places it on a scale. We knew what was about to happen to him. In the few seconds that I knew that chicken alive I named it George. We weren’t sure why but next the butcher ran with the chicken a few shops down. We stood there and conversed for about 10 minutes knowing all the while what was happening to the chicken. It was hard for me to picture exactly what form George would come back to us in. When he returned I saw a naked warm chicken still steaming. Apparently the de-feathering machine creates a lot of heat. Then George was cut in half and put in a black plastic bad. I had to walk away holding something in my hand that I had just seen alive 10 minutes earlier. We knew this was how people bought chicken however it was our first time doing it. Apparently it is cheaper to just buy yourself a live chicken and do all the legwork at home. So it is not uncommon to see people walking through town carrying live chickens by the legs or neck while they do their other errands.
To make a long story short our meal was awful. Somehow we had forgotten spices, which are an absolute staple of all Moroccan dishes. The rice was just as bad as we expected it to be. Yorda compared it to food that hospitals give to heart attack patients. George was pretty tasty though, I must say.

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Making Bread

I had kept asking the women in my host to show me how to make bread. Bread is a way of life here in Morocco. If’s bread were a religion, Moroccan’s would follow it. I eat bread at last 5 times daily and this point. Breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, and dinner. Often times bread it your eating utensil. I don’t know how I haven’t gained 20 pounds. The bread tastes good, but I know it can’t be good for me.
The day finally came where I would get to help Aisha make bread. Aisha is my “step-grandmother” so to speak. She married my widowed grandfather a year ago, so I guess that’s what it would make her. She and my grandfather are 42 years apart. I’m not in the position to ask questions with my limited vocabulary and inability to complete a thought. Anyways Aisha is a really sweet woman and was excited to teach me this skill. We started off making the dough by simply mixing water and white flour. This flour was white as snow. So much for the whole grain bread I assumed I would be eating her. Nope nothing but bleached flour full of carbs -carbs-carbs! She was teaching me how to properly knead this dough and I surely wasn’t as fast or as good as her. We kneaded for good 15 minutes, at this point I let go of the thought that I would be making bread for myself in the future. We let the dough rise for a while then formed it into single flat loaves. I don’t think Aisha knew it but it sounded like she was making music the way she was slapping and patting the dough. We sprinkled what I think was a little wheat germ on the top of the bread and let it sit again.
We put in it the oven and let it bake for about 20 minutes. We had some for lunch and I was asking. "Xubz meyzen?" Meaning "bread good?" Any my family kept reassuring me that "xubz Layla mumtaz". Layla's bread is excellent.

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streets

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Halloween in Morocco

Instead of the usual handing out of candy or wearing of way too skimpy “costume” I had a different experience of Halloween this year. Here in Morocco Halloween will go by as just another day, unless you take the time to share it’s appeal with the people of Morocco. Yorda, Rachael, Chris and I planned a little Halloween party for the kids at our local youth center. Chris and I started off by teaching the kids some phrases like “Happy Halloween”, “trick-or-treat”, and “It was a dark and scary night.” Chris took the liberty of finding a “pumpkin” and carving it into a jack-o-lantern. I have to say it was quite good and very spooky. We then told the kids that we had some activities planned. We went into the bigger room where we had bobbing for apples set up and a table for making masks. We also brought them candy and said they must say trick or treat in order to get it. I don’t think any of them had bobbed for apples before, but they really thought it was great. Only one girl was brave enough to do it, but all the boys had a riot sticking their heads in the bucket of water and then whipping their head back to splash everyone. I downloaded some classic Halloween tunes like Ghostbusters , Monster Mash, and the Addams Family theme. The kids were jamming to them, but I’m sure they didn’t even know how awesome those songs really are. The kids really did have a lot of fun but most of all the party acted as a little piece of home for us Americans. Chris was trying to explain trick or treating to the kids and to me it brought back some many memories of my childhood and the excitement of pouring all your candy out on the living room floor at the end of the night.
We did the party of Oct. 30th and on actual Halloween night we went over to another PCV’s house in our town to watch some scary movies. We watched Scream, and to me it brought back memories middle school when it came out. There were things we laughed at that we never had before, maybe because we were too young to have known. I would like to call Scream the classic scary movie of my generation. Anyone who would like to dispute that statement can take it up with me if they want! Oddly enough watching that movie made me miss the 90’s. One of girls in Scream wears a pair of flannel cloud pajamas and I know I had a pair too because they were so darn cool at the time. I want to say I got them at DEB, the store where I got half my wardrobe in the late 90’s. (I’m not sure why I just admitted that). I still go in there from time to time, strictly for old times sake. Anyways we watched another movie, which was really scary and good. I wont say what because I’m not sure it was exactly legal for us to be watching it on a personal computer in Morocco! We made dinner together and enjoyed the holiday away from home. Walking home at 11pm was fun and spooky. Of course there was nothing out there to get us, but after watching horror films our minds were creating the worse. I had a nice time this Halloween but I can’t wait until the time I can experience a real, American, Halloween night once again.

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