Friday, December 30, 2011

hello all. I have been blatantly avoiding the internet at this wonderful holiday season because of just that, the holiday season. I've noticed my emotional state here in Morocco can often have a direct correlation to my access to the internet. So in an effort to maintain my sanity, and avoid my favorite things about america so as not to miss them I have been "off the grid" so to speak.

this was my first christmas away from home where I didn't have a family to celebrate it with. I celebrated christmas in belgium when I lived there in 2002, but as it wasn't a muslim country most people there had some form of christmas celebrations, the streets were decorated and my family exchanged presents. It would be easy enough to totally ignore christmas here, turn off the internet, turn around your calendars and don't remind yourself when thanksgiving was. It seems like a good idea in theory but never really is in practice. I celebrated christmas in the same way I celebrated thanksgiving here, with a small group of wonderful peace corps volunteers where we tried our hardest to replicate our favorite things about the holiday in our own special way. I drew a christmas tree, we all made cookies and cooked things like mashed potatoes and mac and cheese. Being in homestay means I've been eating exclusively moroccan food since.... um... september. I do really love moroccan food, don't get me wrong, but I was beyond ready to eat some american fare. As a vegetarian here it's slim pickings. For starters all my food is cooked with meat and  most foods are cooked either in a pressure cooker or a pot called a tagine, where vegetables are simmered for hours with meat in the middle. It is very delicious, but it means crunchy crisp vegetables are few and far between. It's funny that you can sit at a table with a 1year old baby and he can eat the same carrots as you at lunch. (this totally happened the other day btw, they don't have baby food here, so unless they're breast feeding everyone eats the same as everyone else, even if you're a little pudgy baby). Digression aside and long story short, christmas was great. I got to skype with friends and family, there was a christmas tree! ( i drew it, see image below), i got to eat good food, make some cookies, listen to christmas music all day and watch it's a wonderful life.

Back to food, having heard other accounts of peace corps countries I know Morocco is pretty special in the fact that most families can afford to eat meat. I know many other peace corps countries meat is so expensive that it is only pulled out for special occasions. I don't know the logistics of it, but Moroccans are able to afford meat one way or another, but it struck me last night how different they go about eating it. In america you cook a whole small chicken for a family of 4 everyone taking a breast and a leg and mowing down on the delicious poultry goodness. Here a single drumstick is put in the center of the cous cous and divided among the family, 4-6 people. I've been struck by the wasteful/overindulgence of america before, but being in a county like Morocco can throw it in your face like a bucket of cold wet spaghetti.  An example of this is that for christmas we bought two chickens for seven people. (I of course ate mashed potatoes and crunchy green beans! yum).

In other news I am slowly becoming accustomed to what I call getting "Moroccoed". for example, yesterday I had a pretty important list of things I had to get done. I've managed to lose my bank card, and it's not as simple as it is in america. In america:
me: "hello customer service, I'd like to cancel my card and be re-issued a new one"
lady in florida or illinois answering customer service calls:"that will be no problem ma'am expect a new card in 5-10 business days"
then you can use your credit card for a few days until your new one comes in the mail. Nope, not here, here I have to go to the police, and fill out a declaration of i'm in idiot and lost my card with 2 pictures and a photocopy of your passport included, and to top it off a stamp for 20d. It's like being in the alice's restaurant song by arlo guthrie-" They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and
they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each 
one was to be used " to get a new card.  My police station is down the hill on the edge of town and I literally walked there and back 6 times to get this whole thing done, and it ended up costing close to 45 dirham. not cool... Anyways.... So that was on my list for the morning along with get money out from the post office via different means. All things were stopped in their tracks. No, we don't have bank checks, this town is too small, no one was using them, come back in 2 days. No you need to bring this that and the other thing, come back tomorrow. Then as I was walking around trying to find the puppies I saw in town the other day I ended up watching part of a wedding. This is what I call getting Moroccoed. You start out your day with certain ideas and intentions and goals and by one way or another your day ends out totally different. It's more often then not a good thing, but not always. Things like missed taxi's, no taxi's, bus fights, bad perfume, no electricity, gross misunderstandings- all getting moroccoed. But I also count things like your taxi driver that you've befriended buying you tea and bread for breakfast, a store owner giving you coffee and not letting you pay for it, the lady next to you on the bus absolutely refusing your "no, thank you" to her bread, cookies and fruit she's eating, and unexpected kindnesses and moments of awesomeness as getting moroccoed. Luckily for me I've been Moroccoed in the good way more then in negative ways.

It's interesting to me how easily i've allowed my life here to become habitual. While on skype with my mom the other day she asked me how things were and I realized how much I have come to accept things as fact here. Kid sitting on the curb roasting a cows head with a propane torch? no problem, totally normal! Walking buy the sheep skins outside the butcher shop? totally legit, where else would they put them? No cheese? alright come back tomorrow, maybe there will be more. Asking every shop on the street if they know what soy sauce is? well maybe i can find a bottle and they can get it for me. dogs just chilling on the street? no worries, they're not mean ( i just wish i could find the puppies!). I find it's easier to just find the things that would be abnormal, to be normal. If i spent my whole time here going "OMFG IM PEEING IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND! IM EATING WITH MY HANDS! WHY ARE THERE DOGS EVERYWHERE! AAAAH DEAD COWS! AAAAAAH! NO CHEESE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!" i would get tired really fast. Maybe I'm lucky in this capacity, I know not everyone has been able to accept these things as well. I also am very privileged in the fact that there is NO harassment whatsoever in my town. Verbal harassment and unwanted attention from men on the street can be a huge problem for female volunteers here and I feel so blessed that this is not part of my life. So, while this is not the life i'm used to, it's the life i have right now; and I can either choose to live in it, or choose to be outside of it, and I'd rather choose to be on the inside. I've also found that for the most part, everything does work out here, even if it's in ways you wouldn't expect it to. Sometimes the smallest thing can make the biggest difference.

the hardest thing so far from being away from home hasn't been the turkish toilets, hasn't been the lack of language (though that is hard), hasn't been internet, it's been the food (and of course being away from loved ones- but food is easier to write about). Man do I miss food in america. I would kill for some chinese food or thai food or sushi, cheap pizza, popcorn that pops all the way, potato chips, and cheddar cheese. I really miss bbq and cheese products. I'm curious to see how this changes once i get into my own place, should be exciting, trying to cook american through moroccan ingredients. luckily i have a cookbook for moroccan volunteers to guide me and even though I haven't had a kitchen since I lived in seattle 2 years ago, I think i still have the skills to whip together some pretty good meals. Pictures will of course, follow, unless it tastes bad and looks like mush.

Monday I move into my own house! my regional manager managed to get me this AMAZING (and huge!) house for a really good price, she's a tough cookie and bargained the heck out of it. I'm impressed,  and I hope to channel her skills whenever i bargain or deal with difficult situations from here on out.  This is the first time EVER I will EVER be living alone. I am so excited and so nervous! I get to furnish the house myself (which is scary, what with the limited funds and  the need to bargain all my household items, should be fun. ), I get to listen to my music all the time, eat when i want, sleep when i want (kind of) and have some solid alone time. This is definitely a new experience for me. I have lived in so many ways; a bunch of people crammed into one space, cabins with kids, dorms, hotel rooms, tents, home-stays in 4 different countries, cabins with grown ups, house with roommates- but never alone. This is me becoming a grown up. I will have rent to pay, dishes i can only blame myself on, electricity and water bills and no one coming to make my bed while I'm at a load-in/performance, or the girls campus head coming to grade our cabins to motivate me to keep my stuff in order. As an american it's kind of ridiculous that at 25 years old i've only paid rent once in my life and i've never lived alone. But in a Moroccan context it's kind of ridiculous that I'm not staying with a host family and instead choosing to live alone. This has been a hard thing to communicate, but I hope I have done it well enough, and I know myself well enough to know that my relationship with my host family would deteriorate if i had to stay here for two years. This is sort of the next big step in my time here and that should be happening on monday. I might be spending the next few weeks living sparse until I've bought everything for my house, so it's kind of like a squatters camping trip, definitely a new adventure.  I don't know when I'll get internet again, but expect a video tour of the house before it's furnished and then again later down the road when I've done some work.

Alright! that's all for now, sorry my blog updates have been so few and far between. I'm probably going to buy an internet stick so I can have internet more regularly, because it will work out to be cheaper then going to the cyber cafe once a week, and also a lot more comfortable to be online and once i'm on my own i wont feel guilty for using it at random times in my room,  (and I can listen to music on 8tracks.com my favorite site ever). So we shall see! Enjoy the pictures!

 Sunset over the mountains

 A view of them montains from a day i went on a walk. 

 The mountains and the gardens

 Town from the backside.  One of my favorite things about N'kob is the fact that the majority of the houses are made out of mud, so they almost blend into the landscape.  


 Christmas cookies! I  have made these thumbprints in every country I have lived in. I tried some with nutella knock off- super tasty. but I'm always partial to the jam ones. 

 The Christmas tree I drew for us! 


 A view of the wedding clothing, I can't wait to see a full berber wedding! hopefully this summer. 

The wedding procession from behind. 

Saturday, December 10, 2011

a long awaited updat

Hello all! here is a long awaited update, with pictures and everything!

I have gotten more settled here in my town called N'kob. It's a small town off the beaten track that is known for it's kasbah's which are the moroccan equivalent of castles. there are 45 kasbah's in my town and i even live in one of them! tourism is the main income here, but to be honest there are not that many tourists. my host father said that tourists stopped coming around 2008 in full force. But if any of you are planning a trip to morocco i highly recommend N'kob, being off the beaten track it is way more friendly and authentic. I hate travelling as tourist places, because you only see what someone wants you to see of a country, never what people somewhere actually live. N'kob would give you the food most moroccans eat and in a setting many moroccan's live in. the thing i love most about N'kob is that most of the houses are made out of mud, so everything is this great earthy color. As you can see, my town is surrounded by mountains, and on the edge of town is a Palmerie where most of the people have gardens where they grow collard greens, alfafa and palm trees filled with dates. It's a good thing i've acquired a taste for dates here, because they are everywhere. The other day i stopped by a store and these woman just handed me a handful of dates. No one really sells them as far as I can tell, because everyone has their own. I'll have to see if my family can hook me up when i get to my own place. 

a lot of what peace corps tells you is about adapting and adjusting, and it's definitely an adjustment from 6 hours of language classes a day to the unstructured free for all that has become my life.  most days i wake up, have breakfast, go for a walk around town, try and talk to whoever i meet, maybe make a phone call to another peace corps volunteer, then i head home for lunch with the family. Then i often go to the womans center called the netti neswi and hang out with the women there in their sewing/craft room and either bead crochet or work on a cross stitch. the women there are very nice and are intrigued by the crafts i've brought with me (and i brought a lot). My town doesn't always have cheese, but there does seem to be a supply of beads and thread and string, and so i'm thinking I might try and teach the ladies how to do bead crochet bracelets, which would be cool. as they say in tashleheet (the local berber language ) ymik ymik- or little by little. Little by little I'm trying to get to know my town. Little by little I'm trying to understand what people say to me. Little by little I'm learning tashleheet. Little by little i am inshallah (god willing) going to be able to start some more english classes and do some none english classroom projects. 

I had my first english class on wednesday with the women at the netti neswi- and i think it went really well. we started with the alphabet and next week we are going to do numbers. I'm hoping in january i can start some more english classes with different demographics. 

the view from my roof looking out over town, you can see some more of the houses and the differences between concrete and earth. i like the earth houses better. 

you can see more of the mountains and the beginnings of the palmerie

 the view from my roof and part of my kasbah and the palmerie in the background. i love going up on the roof and looking at the mountains, talking on the phone, looking at clouds. a lot of my fellow pcv's are currently very cold. being in a desert region, the temperature has stayed at around 55-65 degrees so most days i'm comfortable in a light long john shirt and a flannel or sweater. at night it feels cold so i'm glad i brought more winter clothing with me, but for the most part it is really nice out. word on the street is that it gets unbearably hot in the summer though. which is another reason why earth is a more suitable building material then concrete. Earth houses are cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. many moroccan houses are colder inside then it ever is outside. the concrete takes the cold and holds it there. i'm hoping my apartment will be able to be an earth place, because i don't want to die when it's 115 degrees out. 

 these are the two kittens that live in my house. the one in the front i call hmqa or dirija for crazy and the one in the back i call vache or cow in french. my host family thinks it's totally bizarre the way i've befriended these cats. having them sit on my lap, petting them and letting them fall asleep ( i do have a favorite, vache is way more friendly and affectionate and there's a possibility i might try and take him with me when i move out. ) the concept of a pet here is totally foreign. there are dogs in my town, but they seem more to be a obligatory staple then anything else. it seems each dog has it's own stretch of butcher shops that it hangs out in front of to catch scraps or any food that is thrown out. most people seem to be afraid of dogs and offer them no respect or kindness. same goes with cats. there are tons of cats all over morocco, the problem seems to be pretty contained here in nkob because it seems most families have a cat that has a home inside the kasbah walls to serve the purpose of keeping away mice and bugs. they are a tool, not a friend. 

another thing that has been hard to communicate is the idea that i need to find an apartment. The other day we were talking about another volunteer with my family and they more or less said it was sad that she lived alone. Family is the core of most moroccan values and it is not uncommon for a woman to get married and stay in the house of her father or go to her husbands house. More or less, people do not live alone. I did a tour of 3 houses and i believe they would all constitute as family houses. no bachelor pads or small flats. I tried to describe to my family that in america living with your family past a certain age means you are not considered successful and in america we strive to have our own space, but the concept was lost. I will admit I am enjoying my time with a host family, but i am really excited about the idea of having my own apartment. The last times i had a kitchen was last year at nature's classroom (on the weekends and english muffins at night) and then in 2010 when i lived in seattle. it has been a long time since i've been able to cook for myself, and morocco has so many great ingredients that i am really excited to explore and try out in new dishes. Peace corps wants us to be moved into a new place by january first, and i'm hoping that can happen. I have my eye on 2 places, one is simple and earth and one is concrete. I'm partial towards the earth one, but we shall see, i'll let you know when i seal a deal. 

 the end of sunset. one thing i love here is the stars. the stars in N'kob are as good if not better then they were at nature's classroom and in the berkshires. N'kob isn't filled with street lights and the nearest big cities are over an hour and a half away so there is almost no light pollution to speak of. The past few days the moon has been so bright it casts shadows, and it isn't even full. I'm happy that most of the winter constellations I could see at home, i can see here, the seven sisters, orion, and there's planets that are crazy bright. The other night on the phone I saw 8 shooting stars in an hour. hopefully there will be a meteor shower while i'm here so i can lay outside and watch it. I'm also hoping to get some friends together when it's warmer out to do a campout on the mountains near a full moon. hike up for dusk, hang out during the full moon, hike down in the morning. im crossing my fingers. 

here's a view from a street i was walking on the other day. i love the windy roads, and earth houses contrasted against the blue sky. 


all in all things are great. keeping my chin up, riding the roller coaster that is the peace corps experience. I've been finding that day by day, and hour by hour makes everything work. I've dubbed it the great moroccan bi-polar express (gently stolen from the gandalf song) because one minute everything is great and perfect and you understand everyone and you are prepared and ready to go. then the next minute class is cancelled because you don't have a key to the door then the next you're being handed cookies by a group of friendly women. 

also, it seems the mail situation is totally working (HINT HINT) so if you want to send mail please do.