summer is upon us. for reals.

Summer is once again upon is and I find myself planted in front of my fan wearing as little clothing as possible, turning my computer off midday to keep it from overheating and I take long naps with a wet sheet covering me. It is notably hotter this summer then it was last summer, the hottest it ever got in my house last year was 97 degrees, and yesterday we banked in at 99- when it gets that hot, really all I have the energy to do is sleep. While I never took naps in college, or partook of the midday siesta’s at camp they have become wildly important  to my summer schedule here in morocco. Naps always made me feel lazy and like I’d wasted a huge part of my day, but culturally I’m in good company- most everyone else in my town sleeps through the hottest times of the day as well. If you want bread or milk at 2:30 pm you are shit out of luck my friend- everything is closed and most people are taking their typical afternoon snooze. The nice thing about taking a nap (for most of the) midday means that you can stay awake comfortably when the sun goes down, the breeze picks up and it becomes way more comfortable to be alive.

Nothing much new has happened here, classes are officially over at my youth center, we held a little “party” with the last 2 students standing on Friday which mostly involved us doing the coke or pepsi taste test, playing guitar eating cookies and then them showing off their kung fu and “parkour” skills.

I’ve decided that this will be my summer of betterment- which means I am actively (and happily) working out every day- I’ve been rotating between some biggest loser dvds  I bought before I left and some yoga videos. I love being back to a point where I crave my exercise and feel like my day is empty without it. I love building onto my yoga practice and it feels nice to feel strong in my body again. Morocco can be very lazy. While I do walk everywhere, it’s a lot of walking then sitting. Sitting then more sitting then some more walking. I’m pretty sure most of my muscles have atrophied past the point of health so its time to kick my own ass back into shape, and yoga is such a great way to do it. It is a little on the hot side, but I figure I paid 30 bucks to do bikram in America, and the temperature at my house is almost that hot, so might as well do some hot yoga for free!

I am currently in zagora to work a camp, that was very moroccoed in its architecture and setup. It was a surprise camp, no one knew it was happening until yesterday afternoon when me and another volunteer were frantically drafted to help. We showed up in zagora this morning, and made our way to the house of the volunteer where we are staying. Because she is traveling she left her key with her local store/hanut guy. When we showed up, he wasn’t there. So in a very Moroccan fashion we knocked on his door and confused his poor daughter into letting us keep our bags in their living room while we went to souk/the weekly market to pick up some food for the week. Mashi mushkil (no problem) the guy was back upon our return and apologized profusely, but really it was no big deal. (I realize how wonderful morocco is that it was no big deal that I just left my belongings in a strangers house then walked away for an hour or so to go buy veggies). Now we are settled in with the internet, waiting until it cools down so we can meet with our manager/boss guy. So, very un-American of me to be as calm as I am when less then 24 hours before this camp is meant to start I still have no idea when it is, where it is, what I’m doing, how many kids there will be, lets be honest I LITERALLY have next to no information. I think morocco is having a good influence on me.

As I was sitting waiting for the taxi today I have learned that while I still can be highly anxious and easily frustrated by many things I have gained so much patience. Before morocco I don’t know how relaxed or laid back I would have been about sitting on the curb just chilling with nothing to do until 6 more people decided to go the same direction as me. I definitely would not have been ok with my bag being in a stranger’s house and walking away from it and I would absolutely unequivocally not be ok with this work situation. I’m really thankful for the things morocco has given to me and I’m hoping that I will be able to carry some of it back to the states with me.

So that’s it for now I think, here’s some random pictures from the last few months.

on of my ladies threading beads for her bead crochet. 

me and my lovely site mate tiffany in traditional n'kob garg

one of my favorite things about bigger cities is that you can buy pre-cooked chick peas and fava beans. yum! 

souk 

apricots and plums!

a pretty door in my friends site

 you can kind of see under the right wing that there is a baby bat under there! they had gotten trapped in my big room one night and while they took me by surprise  i know they made their way back to their home in the rafters above my stairs. i also have baby birds living on my stairs- literally i have no idea where their nest is meant to be, and they are literally just cozied up into the corners of my stairs at night.  they're so young i can get right up to them and look at them from less then a foot away and they just stare back. 

reflections in the palmerie

carbohydrate fiesta! we had our closing day party at our women's center and everyone brought their own type of bread, personally i made banana bread with chocolate. 

i washed my bracelets in bleach, they needed it. 

danger guys and girls, we now have a full time donut guy in town. while they aren't the best donuts i've had in morocco they are now available to me all the time. luckily during the summer, i don't often walk down that way.

baking and hotness and buses oh my!

Hello Internet world. I hope you are all doing well.

Holy cow. Morocco is hot. I don’t mean to whine but a lifetime of new England summers have given me next to nothing for dealing with this. The other day it hit 101 degrees  in my house. My internal seasonal calendar is totally confused. My brain keeps saying “but Michelle it’s june! What’s going on?” and I say “Brain we’re in morocco now, this isn’t maine in june.. you best be ready there’s more to come” my brain responds “awwwwww….” Most days it gets to be 92-95 during the day then drops down to 87-89 when the sun is down. The nice thing about it is that it’s not humid, which is a great thing. Also Morocco does sell fans, my fan and I have become really good friends. The hardest part about the heat is traveling, because you get all crammed up with 3 other people in the back of a 50’s Mercedes’, then you get to experience not only your own sweat, but the special feeling of someone else’s body covering half of yours, so it’s a double deal. Sauna? Not really… No….

But exciting news! My site just this week got a super fancy CTM bus that runs through from my neighboring site all the way up to Marakesh. It’s difficult to communicate why this is a big deal, so let me first give you the  hierarchy of niceness in terms of modes of  travel here in Morocco-  ONCF first class trains- CTM buses (AC, and individual seats)- Supratours buses (reserved seats, but a little cheaper and not as new as CTM)- ONCF trains (they never “sell out” so you sometimes see people literally pulling people in and out of over-crowded cars, and the windows don’t open, so it can get pretty unpleasant- Transit’s (vans, with seats really close together, but generally you get your own ‘space’ and they have pretty decent circulation of air)- Grand Taxi’s (7 + passengers in a Mercedes’ sedan but the drivers can get kind of stingy about how open the windows are and they take the roller bits of the window controls… jerks), Souk Buses (bus with no AC, no reserved seats and no “sell out” point (read people crammed up in the aisles who get asked to sit everytime we pass a police stop), also they stop ANYWHERE and so it makes any trip exponentially longer. But the nice thing about Souk buses is that they stop in more places then CTM and Supratours). So as you can clearly see CTM is up at the top of that list in terms of awesomeness. Getting a CTM that comes through town means that as long as I catch the bus in Marakech and barring mechanical dysfunction I will get back to site in one day. Before it was always a crap shoot with catching a taxi from Ouarzazat (the biggest city in my region, about 2.5 hours away from my site). No more hanging out at the taxi stand in Oz for hours waiting for my taxi to my tiny town to fill up! Or showing  up too late and no other taxi will go to my site unless you buy out the whole thing (which I will not do because that would be crazy expensive).  Now I can hop onto a CTM claim a large amount of space and cruise all the way home with not a care in the world. It makes traveling exponentially less stressful. Last time I went to Marakech I was in site for 2 hours waiting for my taxi to fill up to take a 9:45 CTM bus in the a city about an hour away every minute it got closer and closer to me missing the bus.  Every time I did that I was always so stressed I was going to miss the bus, so I end up waking up really early and waiting around either in town, or in front of the bus stop an hour away. The one downside though of having a CTM in town is that me and the ticket lady at the CTM an hour away had become pretty good friends because I always end up waiting there. She’s great, understands my Arabic, laughs at my pathetic attempts at joking and shares her food with me. It’s possible I’ll still go up there from time to time if I don’t want to wake up super early to catch the bus here in town. It would be worth it to sayhello to this woman from time to time. So  yay! It’s the small things in life people. If you can’t get excited about the small stuff what can you get excited about ?

What a thrilling rant about travel. Honestly every volunteer I’ve talked to lately has heard about this new bus, I literally called the volunteer in the site next to mine, and it was like listening to two teenage girls get excited about a new hanson brother’s album or something. My one friend said “now I understand what it must have been like to be our grandparents getting excited about stuff when they were kids… vacuums… mops… microwaves… new buses.” Good times.

After being in Rabat for so long it’s nice being home. I’ve changed rooms, because the room I had set up in for the winter gets full sunlight for the majority of the day, the room I’m in now is almost 4 degrees cooler at any given moment. I decided to finally move the day my thermometer read 101 degrees. 101 degrees… in june. ( i know we've already visited this, but this is a big transition/experience for me... i will admit sitting outside comfortably in june is nice- but 101.. come on now that's just silliness...) I remember my first summer at camp in maine wearing sweatpants, a sweater and an overcoat in june, and sleeping with two blankets on. The other night I wet a sheet wrung it out and let it dry a little then laid it over me as I fell asleep. A damp sheet to keep cool is not equal to a fuzzy blanket and sweatpants. Le sigh. I miss Maine. I miss Mass. There is a distinct lack of cool green grass for me to walk barefoot through here. There is however a large amount of rocks and a courtyard for me to scamper across as quick as I can because my feet are literally burning from its hours in the sun.

So yes. As you can tell by my rambly ranting things are a bit boring here, but not boring in the mind numbing way, just boring in the way that you spend a lot of time fixating on small things and your successes are a lot smaller then they used to be. 

After all that time in rabat then in ourzazate for the regional meeting I am so happy to be back in site. As I said before I’ve changed rooms, and the new room has a nice cozy feeling to it, that I really like. The one downside is that because there isn’t as much sunlight hitting the room there isn’t a lot of light which makes crafting a bit more difficult. I’m making it work though.

a close up of my flower garland

Now that my classes have tapered off substantially from shwiya ( a little ) to walu (nothing). I have a lot more time to devote to crafting! I’ve become obsessed with crochet these days. This week I’ve made a flower garland and bunting. The flower garland I made from yarn I brought with me from America and the bunting was made from a color changing yarn I got from my good friend Kali, I have the crochet fever! I’m really enjoying having different kinds of projects. I alternate between crochet, bead crochet and cross stitch and lately I’ve taken up baking.

a view of my flower garland going across my new room

my bunting! i love it so much pattern from crochet with raymond.

wide shot of my bunting. thanks kali!

my second and maybe best quiche i've ever made

 I’ve always been a crafter, but I’ve noticed that sometimes you make something for someone and you can tell they appreciate the gesture but what you have given them is something they would never use or wear. I discovered, however, that baking is a craft that most everyone (except for people with eating disorders, vegan or gluten free people) can appreciate. I also was lucky enough to be passed down an electric oven from a volunteer who just recently left morocco. It’s fancy because it’s electric and not propane so it’s easier to maintain and understand the temperature inside of the oven. So far I’ve made 2 quiches, a peasant loaf and a sweet cinammon raison and almond bread. (did i mention i've only had this oven for a week and a half?)  I really enjoying baking here also because it is instant gratification. Very rarely do you finish a book in a day, or a craft. But when you bake, you make the dough or whatever walk away for 20 minutes to an hour then come back to a delicious present. I currently have a “peasant loaf” with onions and garlic in it. I’m going to bake it first thing tomorrow for a second breakfast. I’ve also gotten more exciting in the kitchen. Last week and this week I made a thai style peanut sauce with Moroccan collard greens and rice noodles. Super delicious. I also tried my hand at some green beans with curried slivered almonds. I’ve also made my own watermelon juice and lemonade, and iced tea with mint. I’m telling you people, come visit me and I will whip you up a fancy Moroccan/michelle styled feast.

my peanut sauce with collard greens. delicious. i am obsessed with peanut sauce. 

Not having classes means I’m trying to channel my time more towards spending time with the people in my town. All the students are done with school (unless you failed your exams I think and if you fail them you have to re-take them maybe? I don’t know for certain). Because no one has school and I don’t have classes I’m trying to spend more time with individuals in my town as well as my host family. So far it’s been working but I’m also trying to just stay upbeat and active as life gets a lot slower. because of how hot the sun is no one is particularly active until the sun has set or is setting. there are whole families that are just parked outside their houses, shop owners and workers are hanging out on the side walks, town definitely has a different feel. i'm going to try and benefit from this publicness the heat has brought out in people. 

Please let me know if anyone wants to skype/chat ahead of time or text me on my Moroccan number so I can plan my internets accordingly. Not having the internet means I’m spending a lot more time reading too. I’m on my 13^th book in country!

Stay classy everyone.

some pretty looking vegetables in the indoor market in rabat. trust me the veggies don't look this nice once they've made the hot voyage over the mountains to me. veggies near me look substantially more abused and wilty. 

some turtles for sale in rabat

me and a volunteer from sierra leone in jlaba's- i bought that one. 

i got to "see" mariah carey in concert for free while i was in rabat. she showed up almost an hour and a half late then had sound issues. diva. but it was a fun experience.