choices... and the sustainability of lifestyle

So… I haven’t updated in a little while. I’ve been trying to stick to my new years resolutions as best as I can, I did a nice little yoga routine last night and tried my hand at a little corpse pose meditation which was nice. I’ve got a ways to go, and sloth generally wins out. My classes have been hit or miss, with a lot of what I call “youth center roulette” where you see whether or not people are going to come to your classes or not and at what degree. For example this morning I got a real doozie in the chamber when about 8 kids came to my sport class this morning (after a full week of no one coming to any of my classes) but they were all teenage girls and it was difficult to get them to stop being ridiculous, follow what I consider simple instructions and do sport… you know… the class I was teaching. So ups and downs in terms of my technical “work” I’ve been finding fulfillment in other ways, by hanging out with my friends at the cookie store and helping them make cookies (very slowly) and just generally hanging out. 

I apologize this is sort of a rambling and ranty post, I promise one specific to my time in morocco is coming soon, I had an awesome adventure this past weekend, and I want to try my hand a video blog post, so that’s something to look forward to!

So, as you know I haven’t had internet for the majority of my service. The signal is sort of frustrating and it feels like a waste of money to pay for something that doesn’t work the majority of the time. But I’ve gotten myself a new usb extension cable  that goes all the way up to my roof and got a ½ off recharge so I’ll be online for another month without even having to think about it. As a result I’ve gotten to keep up with more of the worldly current events, my friends opinions on political and social matters, and watch some awesome video’s on youtube. Excluding the youtube video’s for the most part this means that I am once again plagued with the things that I hadn’t thought about since I was last living in America.

green onions

I was on skype with my dearest friend Crunchy and somehow the discussion about canned items came up and how they’re bad for you and bpa and all that good stuff. I was excited last week to use the last can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup to make myself a delish and homey-feeling tuna casserole (which is a strange comfort sort of food for me to have because my mom never made it….) I wasn’t thinking about bpa or where the soup came from or how it was manufactured etc etc when I was going to make this delicious meal, I was thinking about how I was going to have a piping bowl of America for lunch 4 days in a row, and how that is freaking awesome. When I receive something in a care package I’m not going to think at all about where it came from, how bad it is for me, or any of that crap, I am just excited for a taste of home, even if it isn’t the food I would normally eat in America (that kind of makes it even more fun!)

getting ready for peak market hours- notice the big milk crate. 

The skype conversation reminded me of how I think about things when I was back home. I’m still interested in the politics/social/global aspects of food so it’s something I do read about from time to time with my lovely internets. I just recently read an article about quinoa and how it’s affecting the native farmers and poverty in Bolivia, my good friend Caitlin is asking questions on how she can make the world the better place, how to be more environmentally conscious and reduce our impact on the earth and the global community. These are the sorts of things I thought about all the freaking time in America. Sometimes I didn’t walk the talk, but I knew when I wasn’t. I hadn’t bought or accepted a bottle of water in almost a full year when I left for Morocco. Now here, I buy bottled water because in some places the water isn’t drinkable or tastes absolutely terrible and I need to have the extra bottles around my house in case my water goes out for a long period of time, I don’t think about it. Now that I’m a year in I am beginning to be aware that I’ve accumulated an obscene amount of perfectly good plastic shopping bags that I get when I buy my veggies each week. Let me clarify, I get a plastic shopping bag after I pick out what vegetables I want from the same dude every week that are arranged nicely in big plastic milk crates that are re-used every week. I put the veggies in the banged up plastic bin, he weighs them, then tosses the in a plastic bag which I then put in my backpack. I’m not thinking about where these vegetables are coming from, whether their gmo or how much gasoline was used to cart them to me. I’m not staring at the shiny plastic rows of supermarket apples tied up with a bag clip. My weekly routines feel more like a farmers market then anything else. 

Having the internet has reminded me how stressful being in America can be. I sustained my vegan lifestyle for 2 years because I firmly believed I was helping the world by doing so, I believed that my choices to eat low-impact low-death foods made the world an inherently better place, even if it was just a small corner of that space. I don’t think about that here. I see the sheep people buy at the markets, and then hang in butcher shops cruising the mountain tops around my town. I can’t smell them from miles away like the one time I drove by a factory farm in Texas, they’re cruising the desert with their nomad guardians picking at scrubbley little bushes and walking around for probably miles from week to week. Can you say free range? I don’t think about all the things I used to in America, and it wasn’t until just recently that I realized how liberating it is. I’m going to try an experiment here for the rest of my service and see how little waste I can produce. I’m not going to go crazy about it, it’s not going to rule my life. But I’m going to be more aware of the packaging (of which there is little here) I buy. We’ll see I’ll let you all know.

cow head! cow is in stock! 

 This comes around to a more fundamental issue- in America we are responsible to make these decisions. In morocco, I don’t feel like I need to make those sorts of decisions, most of my food comes in bulk and therefore wrapped only in the necessary plastic bag to contain it. Moroccans re-use to the point of ridiculousness- like way far beyond when something should be considered trashed. I don’t feel responsible to think about the global impact of my choices here. However, as Americans it’s important for us to realize how our lifestyle, how our choices affect others. It’s weird that we have so much processed foods. It’s weird that we don’t know where our food comes from. I was explaining to my friend that it was weird to see a cows head near a butcher shop (to indicate they have cow there) and that I took a picture of it (see below) and she asked me, “so what you don’t eat the head?” I said “no..” she said “what happens to the head of the cow?” I said “umm… I have no idea… ha”. She thought that was pretty freaking weird. What does happen to all those sad cows heads in America? The things I miss dearly here, ie cereal, cheese, potato chips, tofu, vegetarian food, ethnic restaurants are generally things that kind of make no sense in the bigger perspective. I’m not really sure what I mean by that, maybe I’ll come back to it. Maybe what I mean is, yeah, sometimes this simpler lifestyle can be annoying and sad, but do I really need cheese and crackers when I have bread baked in front of me and olive oil in a recycled water bottle? I don’t know…

One time I was talking to my host sister and I was saying how in America, we think we want to live like Moroccans. A lot of us hippy/earthy/environmental types want locally grown and seasonal vegetables, free range meat, local dairy, and to only have the things available to us that reduce our impact on the global community. But as one of those people, I told her, if it was December and I wanted to make a strawberry birthday cake, I would probably still go to a supermarket to make a strawberry birthday cake. If we all had to commit to the ideals of a purely local lifestyle we would probably get cranky really fast. Having done a bit of research, people who go all the way, and I mean more or less 100%,  with these “ideal” lifestyles (no waste, vegan, local etc etc) it is more or less a full time job in the states. Here it’s just how things work.

fancy veggies laid out in rabat

I think part of the reason I stopped being vegan was because it wasn’t making me happy anymore. It was consuming my every moment, I had to pre-plan everything, it took up all my time, and was mentally very taxing. It came down to a peace corps buzzword- sustainability- being vegan wasn’t sustainable for me anymore… it wasn’t making me happy, it was actually making me obnoxious and righteous and angry more then anything else, so I stopped. When it comes to all of this I guess what I want to say is yes… our choices are important, especially in America. It’s ignorant to think that choosing to buy one thing over another or making one choice over isn’t going to affect the world in the long run. Unlike a very close person to me, I do believe the world has the capacity for goodness, and that when each of us makes a decision to  do the right thing or a makes a conscious choice to do one thing differently, even if it’s a small one, like refusing a straw in your tap water (shout out!) you are making the world a better place.  As excited as I am to get back to America in 10 months or so, I’m going to enjoy the liberation of not having to think as hard about this stuff.