tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77463419430323699682024-03-13T23:49:03.281-05:00And death i think is no parenthesisAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05570337641211207877noreply@blogger.comBlogger221125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-91550083349248156222017-03-26T18:03:00.002-05:002017-04-29T18:36:10.725-05:00The Clink (New Friends)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Each other is all we have. It's no surprise, then, that when we think about the chapters of our lives, those chapters usually begin and end with the beginning and ending of relationships. My current chapter began in July 2016, when I made the move from Philadelphia to Denver. In many ways, it was the fulfillment of a promise made between Peace Corps friends; Carly, Evan, and I spoke often of our desire to live in the same place some day, and after two wonderful years spent with Kyla, it was time for me to join them.<br />
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The great advantage to this arrangement is that Evan and Carly had been cultivating friends in my absence, so upon my arrival last summer, I was met with a wonderful group of people who had been carefully conditioned by Evan and Carly to like me.<br />
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Readers of this blog will remember Evan and Carly from my Peace Corps days. They were the closest I had to family for two years, and by the end of our service, we were inseparable.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Evan</b></span><br />
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Pappy. Pop-pop. Dilly-dally. Evan is known by many names, but he is as consistent and reliable a friend as any man is likely to find on this earth. Whenever I need advice, I go to him first (although his advice is rarely straightforward, and often leaves me with more questions than answers). When I need dark humor, he always obliges.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Carly</b></span><br />
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Carly served the role of wiser, older sister all throughout Peace Corps, and even today I look to her for guidance. We are alike in many ways, which has its difficulties, but also gives us a richly rewarding and intimate understanding of one another. Carly has a strong moral compass and can always be counted on to stand by her principals. She's also become the political conscience of our household, a constant reminder to fight for what's right.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Lilly</b></span><br />
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Lilly is the first person I met after moving to Denver. I admire her for the passion she shows for her work and for her moderating sensibility. Lilly is not afraid to share her opinion, and she makes no apologies for her positions. She is quick to laugh, easy to talk to, and like Carly, politically active.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Tim</span></b><br />
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Upon my first few meetings with Tim, he struck me as a very calm, gentle, pleasant person. He is all of these things. Later, however, I saw another side of him. Tim is known for his ability to transform a tame party into a ridiculously fun party. He has a wonderful way of drawing people out of their shells, and he's always willing to join in whatever games are being played.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Carla</span></b><br />
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Carla was my partner for my first Park Progressive. I met her at Cheeseman park one day to practice some lawn games, and within the space of an hour, I knew she would become one of my best friends. Carla is a great hiking partner, conversationalist, movie-watching buddy, and block-walker. She has a clear sense of the direction in which she wants her life to head. She goes out of her way to make individual quality time with her friends. When I'm hanging out with Carla, I feel totally comfortable to be goofy and playful. She is truly something special.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Phil</span></b><br />
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I had the pleasure of bunking with Phil on an Autumn cabin trip, and although I had spent time with him in groups many times before, it wasn't until this trip that I truly appreciated Phil for his qualities. He is an extremely agreeable guy. If he is ever disappointed, if he is ever judgmental, ever negatively inclined in any way, he never lets on that this is the case. To be around Phil is to be lifted up, laughed with, appreciated. And boy can he talk. Sometimes I feel too tired to think of something interesting to say, but Phil doesn't care - he's happy to fill the silence, and always with a smile on his face.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Jake</span></b><br />
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I've been a terrible friend to Jake, I have to admit. Just consider the picture I chose for him. He looks fucking crazy in this picture, but he's actually quite well-adjusted. In addition, I have long promised to spend some quality one-on-one time with Jake, but (besides some porch wine-imbibing/cheese-nomming) I usually only see him when hanging out with one of his roommates. Nevertheless, I am resolved to spend more time with Jake, and gladly - for I appreciate his adventurous spirit, his goofiness, and his outlandish beliefs about cell phone radiation.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Fubbs</span></b><br />
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Like Carla, I knew right away that Fubbs would become one of my closest companions. She is a wonderfully complex person, and as our friendship has developed, as I've discovered more and more layers of her personality, she has only become more dear. Fubbs and I enjoy the same simple pleasures, and stopping by to cook scones and watch a movie feels like the most natural thing in the world. She displays a quirky sense of humor, keen thoughtfulness, and appreciation for beautiful things. It is evident Fubbs has a rich inner life, and I'm honored to be able to share in that.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Penelope</span></b><br />
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Penelope is, like Evan and Carly, a Peace Corps friend. As long as I've known her, she has been very sweet and considerate. She is a great listener, and has a way of making you feel like you're the only person in the room when she's talking with you. Sadly, the only picture I have of Penelope is the group picture at the top of this post, when she and Stewart vacationed with us in Southwestern Colorado. I hope Stewart forgives me for attaching him to Penelope's paragraph like this. I've not spent much time with Stewart, but he has always delighted me with his friendliness, bizarre sense of humor, and love of Brita pitchers. I hope to see both of them much more while I live in Denver.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Celia</span></b><br />
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Celia is one of my newest friends. She was around from the beginning, but for some reason or another we never spent enough time together to get to know one another. Luckily for me, this has all changed, and now we regularly indulge in common interests: musical theatre, podcasts, hiking, and countless nerdy conversations. Her interest in the world is boundless, and the joy and enthusiasm with which she approaches her life is truly inspiring. Conversations with Celia are always rewarding; her quick mind and ability to make connections between topics ensures that we'll never run out of conversation.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Josh</span></b><br />
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I met Josh on my first day in the office. All of the other friends on this list were made through Evan and Carly or through the Peace Corps. Not Josh. Josh is all mine. He was a co-worker before he was a friend. When I first came to Denver, I was working through a lot of emotions, and Josh showed sensitivity to this right away. We've spent many happy hours together talking about our respective experiences in the peace corps, in our job, and as young, white, straight males struggling with what we represent at this particular point in history. He's extremely thoughtful, funny, and kind.<br />
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I have been unbelievably fortunate to have made these relationships, and my social life in Denver is immensely satisfying. The last time I posted to this blog, I had lost a friend. It is gratifying to inaugurate the resumption of my posts with a celebration of so many new ones.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05570337641211207877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-40291724761746815892014-03-20T07:30:00.002-05:002014-03-20T07:35:12.520-05:00Grieving in the Peace Corps<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The shock of death shakes those both near and far.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A few days ago, a very dear friend notified me that his brother - our brother - died in his sleep. Ben Leake was just a little older than myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">You have to understand that this is no ordinary family. When I was finishing high school, my parents' relationship took a series of really bad turns that wounded my sister and I in radical ways and which drove me out of my parents' households for a time. I had already made best friends with Daniel Leake, and I knew his family well, but I could never have expected that they would reach out to me the way that they did. For that very troubling time in my life, the Leakes took me in as if I were another member of the family. I slept in Daniel and Ben's bedroom, in the attic of the big house on Broadway. My days were filled with shenanigans dreamt up by the three of us. We ate together, went to school together, played together; we tormented our poor English teacher, Mrs. Feil, and we tested the nerves of poor Marci Leake, who I think of as another mother.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Ben's unexpected death has left me in total shock. I want to be at his funeral. I want to see him one last time. More than anything, I want to be with the Leake family, <i>my</i> adopted family. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling trapped inside this country while my loved ones suffer grief and anguish. The sense of helplessness is profoundly paralyzing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The hardest part of Peace Corps isn't adjusting to the language, wrestling with the culture, or coping with lowered sanitation standards. It's hearing of family trouble back at home or being unable to celebrate a friend's achievement or missing out on both of your parents' weddings or being forbidden to leave the country in order to mourn with loved ones at a friend's passing. Would that I could hop on a jet today and do what I really want to do, more than anything: to be present, to cry with the crying, to share hugs, and to celebrate Ben's life with the rest of the family.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I'll miss him terribly.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ben loved going to the lake. This is him during a trip we took to Kanopolis.</td></tr>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05570337641211207877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-83389584269667715652014-03-08T05:57:00.000-06:002014-03-08T05:57:04.566-06:00Dr. Strangecountry, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Morocco<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="s1"><i>I wrote the following some time in the Summer of 2013 to be published in the Peace Corps literary journal, PeaceWorks. I just read the finished product, and thought I would be lazy and reproduce what I wrote there for this blog post. Enjoy!</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="s1"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>--------------------------------------</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="s1"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="s1">F</span>or one year now, I have listened to Moroccans tell me things—ridiculous things, shocking things, things that </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">fly in from far out of left field, that make me choke on an olive or spray qhwa nusnus all over the table in astonishment. I suffer from chronic bruising about the nose and brow, the result of repeated face-palming (and periodic face-desking). Every volunteer, I imagine, is familiar with the flavors of absurdity to which I allude. A taste:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“Science has actually proven that Ramadan [denying the body both solids and liquids during daylight for one month, then, instead of sleeping at night, gorging on massive amounts of sweets, nuts, and carbs] makes you healthier.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“Morocco is full of diversity! Not like America... [in fact, Morocco is 98.7% Muslim and 99.1% Arab-Berber]” </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“Our [super-saturated] mint tea [approximating the consistency of syrup] can’t cause diabetes! It cures illness!”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“American Muslims aren’t true Muslims because they are in gangs [because they’re black, and all black people in the US are in gangs].”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“Also, science has proven that eating with your hands is healthier than eating with a fork [Oh c’mon!].”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>“It has been proven that it is impossible to have just one drink</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>of alcohol [...huh?].”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>And my favorite: “The way to solve all the world’s conflicts is to exterminate the Jews [well everybody is entitled to their own--wait, what?!].”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moroccans are fiercely loyal to their team, and their team is--what? Their country? The Arab world? The Muslim world? It is all of these groups, and all things that belong to these groups are, by virtue of belonging to these groups, the best things. Arabic is the most beautiful and poetic language. Mohammed is the best prophet. Couscous is the tastiest food. Muslim values are the most uplifting. Arabic history is the most important and interesting of any history. And any idea, country, or institution that could threaten the supremacy of these things is rightly lambasted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I think of it as a super-charged, border-flexible patriotism. When Moroccans talk to me about their country, I sometimes picture them with one of those giant foam fingers, but the finger </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">is usually flipping me off, because the implication, more often than not, is that American values are depraved, American history is too short to be important, and American culture is tainted by all sorts </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">of shameful things, like depictions of people in art. I call this show of patriotism ‘flipping the giant, foam bird.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What especially bothers me is that the tone of this patriotism is indistinguishable from the tone of, say, a group of Steelers fans waxing bumptious, chest-bumping, back-slapping. In fact, fanboyism is exactly how I’d characterize the prevailing attitude toward values, art, religion, and all those things that should not be approached while donning the giant foam finger.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take me out to the ball game, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take me out to the crowd,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Buy me some harsha and mlwi, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Wash it down with some cloying </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">sweet tea,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let me root root root for Morocco, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If they don’t win it’s hshuma,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For it’s one thing to love your coun</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">try, but it’s quite another to see ev-- oh sorry, were you still trying to sing? I </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">say, it’s quite another to plant evidence for your country’s superiority in every news item, scientific study, and political analysis that filters its way through the creato-destructive, Shiva-esque machinery that is the Moroccan mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are a number of factors that make this so, and it would behoove us as representatives of the U.S. and as foreign aid workers to be ever-mindful of them. In fact, we ought to tape them next to our bathroom mirrors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Fanboyism</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In 1954, experimenters introduced two groups of 12-year-old boys into Robber’s Cave State Park, Oklahoma. The two groups were placed in cabins far enough apart that, during the first phase of the experiment, they were completely unaware of each other’s existence. The groups quickly established strong bonds, going so far as to develop their own codes of conduct and daily rituals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When the two groups were finally made to discover each other, they were at first antagonistic. The experimenters set up a series of competitions for the boys. The antagonism grew. Supplies were stolen. Attack parties were formed. The experimenters had to intervene when the two groups were ready to - no kidding - engage in actual combat with stone-filled socks and Boy Scout knives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Foreboding though it may be, this is instinctual behavior. We need to form an in-group, a clan. We need to have an ‘other’ to mock, scorn, taunt, and tease (and sometimes overpower and conquer). It was not too long ago in Morocco’s history that clan warfare was still a common occurrence. Remember how strong and primal a feeling this is, how hard it can be to overcome, and how comfortably we slip into clan mentality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Schemata</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We’ve got webs in our heads. Psychologists call them schemata. They are webs of ideas, like <i>courage is the highest virtue</i>, <i>the end does not jus</i></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>tify the means</i>, or <i>Tea Party politicians don’t know American history</i>. When </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">we encounter something that doesn’t </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">fit in this web, we have two options: 1) accommodate the new information by restructuring our web, or 2) assimilate the information into our web by modifying it, reinterpreting its implications, or downplaying its significance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If I release a piece chalk and it floats to the ceiling, I can either change my idea about how gravity works, or I can think, “This is no ordinary chalk.” That second option, assimilation, is al</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ways easier, and is most often the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">route that groups take (Creation</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ists are well-practiced assimilators, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">for example).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The tendency to assimilate is so much stronger when we aren’t familiar with the grayness of the world, the nuance and contradiction and moral messiness that is human existence. And because this is our brains’ default tactic, as long as we </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">have plenty </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">of authority </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">figures feeding us </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">assimilation techniques, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">no matter how bizarre, we are </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">all too eager to employ them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Remember this, and keep in mind Morocco’s condition: the nature of public schooling, the gravity of tradition, and the reverence paid to that which is eternally unchanging.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Cognitive Dissonance</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In 1959, two psychologists tried their darndest to bore people. You wouldn’t think this would be too hard, but nonetheless, they put some work into it. First, they asked a number of students to engage in a meaningless, tedious exercise, which involved a square board with a grid of wooden pegs. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Instructions went like this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Remove peg from board. Turn peg 90 degrees. Place peg back in board. Next peg. Remove peg from board. Turn peg 90 degrees. Place peg back in board. Next peg. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This went on for an hour.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After serving their time, the students </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">were required to recruit another ‘participant’ (who was actually another experimenter acting the part) by convincing him that the experiment was really fun. “And for helping us out,” the psychologists told the students, “We’ll reimburse you for your time.” Half were offered $20. The rest were offered $1.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which students </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">were the better liars? </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Counterintuitive though it may seem, the ones who were paid only $1 were superior. They were so good, in fact, that they managed to convince themselves. You see, after the ‘recruitment’ was finished, the experimenters took the students aside: “Okay, now tell us what you really thought of the experience,” to which the $20 recipients replied, “Are you kidding? I was turning pegs for an hour! It was boring as hell!” But the poor schmucks who got $1? Well, they said something like, “You know, it was actually pretty interesting. I’d do it again.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Both groups experienced intense boredom for an hour. But for one, it was okay, because, <i>awesome! twenty bucks!</i> For the rest, they had two options: live with the unpleasant, dissonant thought that they had just wasted an hour of their lives with little to show for it, or alter their perception of the experience by convincing themselves that they in fact had a good time, thereby removing the unpleasantness. The second option is what our brains are wired to do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which makes me wonder: what kind of psychological toll does it take, living in a society with rampant unemploy</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ment, few scientific achievements to speak of, lousy literacy rates, and (no offense, Morocco) terrible movies? More to the point, what is the psychological toll of feeling trapped in such a country, knowing that your chances of getting a visa are slim to none?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’ll never know, but I’ll bet you one thing – if I were confined to a lifetime of Morocco, it would be a lot more </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">enjoyable if I could convince myself that it was, indeed, the best. Do </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">you see what I mean? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Okay then, good. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now I can congratulate myself on my keen insight and unparalleled penetration into the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">workings of the Moroccan people. Satisfied that </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I finally understand what makes them tick, I-- wait. Americans are prone to cognitive bias, too. PCVs ought to be acutely aware of something called asymmetrical insight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Asymmetrical Insight</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We’re all familiar with this phenomenon. We fancy ourselves to be complex people, mysterious, deep, impenetrable. At the same time, we believe that we basically have everyone else figured out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When we volunteers voice complaints about x, y, or z, we should keep this tendency in mind. Far be it from us to presume that U.S. culture is nuanced and complex while Moroccan culture is an open book.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If we are at all honest with ourselves, I think we’ll start to sniff – in our judgments, in our thoughts, in the stories we relate to relatives and anecdotes we share with each other – the faint odor of cognitive bias. We are not rational creatures. No, not even PCVs. We are subject to the same chemical tides as our Moroccan brothers and sisters, and forgetting this puts us at risk of assuming a position of criticism we’re not ready for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Bringing It All Together</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take a deep breath. Now exhale. Your mind is a mound of silly putty, enveloping an egg. Your thoughts are roosters slung from a trebuchet. Your soul is a soggy nursery rhyme.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Okay, so none of those things paints a particularly noble picture of what we’re made of, but then again, we are by and large a clumsy congress of error, bias, and desperate, emotionally-charged attempts to make sense of the world. We’re disturbingly partisan, expert bastardizers of information, and we’ve been placed squarely in the middle of an out-group with whom we share precious few commonalities. The odds aren’t great that we’ll assess the situation perfectly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Our job is to develop Moroccans. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to change their thinking, and I want to change their values. Rather than coming at them as experts, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could approach them as fellow mistake-makers, laugh together at human folly, and in so doing, sharpen each other’s self-awareness and critical thinking skills?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">May we always keep a suspicious, wary eye on the trajectory of our thoughts and judgments, lest we one day find ourselves filling our socks with rocks.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05570337641211207877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-70797884043966955442014-02-11T17:25:00.000-06:002014-02-11T17:25:38.874-06:00In which I sing the praises of my mudir<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Admittedly, I don't often praise my local counterparts. Usually, getting them to work effectively with me is like getting blood out of a stone. For the moment, though, let's focus on what my mudir is like on a personal level.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We have a wonderful relationship. He has many names for me, including, "l3awni" (an old-fashioned Moroccan name, meaning "my helper"), "father Eugene," "my uncle," "Aristotle," and, since I've stopped shaving, "Barbarossa." He often tells me that he thinks of me as his son (he has no children).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We have a half a dozen different kinds of handshakes and fist-bumps, and he likes to deploy them at random in order to confuse me, which makes me laugh despite myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mostafa likes to bring me things. If I call in sick, he is known to walk across town bearing a pot of soup and medicine (sometimes western medicine, sometimes traditional). Sometimes at the end of class, he'll usher me into his office, where he will stick a loaf of home-made bread or a sack of fruit into my backpack.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He patiently helps with my Darija. If I mis-use a word, he not only corrects me, but launches into a veritable lecture, detailing the situations in which the incorrect word would have been appropriate, drawing connections between related names or words which I may have already learned. When misunderstood, he repeats himself without a hint of irritation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of his favorite things is idioms, and he could chat for hours about french and arabic idioms and joke phrases. For my part, I like to bring him some unusual English idioms, like, "There is more than one way to skin a cat." He really gets a kick out of those.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Most importantly, Mostafa understands that life in a foreign country is difficult for us volunteers. He sympathizes with my struggles, listening politely when I feel the need to rail against the peace corps or other Moroccans and their ways. It's obvious that he puts effort into understanding my situation with compassion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His wife is a tremendous woman, and when the two of them have me over as their guest, they are always generous and accommodating to the nth degree. I often leave their house with a box full of Moroccan sweets, a loaf of bread, several bags of spices, or a kilo of butter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He is much more open-minded than other Moroccans I've met, and I've felt comfortable telling him about things I'd never tell other Moroccans: that I drink, for instance, or that I have no religion. I'll expand a bit on this in my next post, about critical thinking in Morocco.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mudirs are one of the chief stressors volunteers experience, and though mine is not always there for me at work (literally - he often doesn't show up), I know I can always count on him to be there for me when I'm depressed or in need of a healthy, home-cooked meal. Indeed, I don't know many volunteers who personally enjoy their mudir as much as I enjoy mine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I often say to him, "Mostafa, ila ma-knti-sh, ma-knt-sh baqi f-laounate" - "If it weren't for you, I wouldn't still be in Laounate." And that's the truth.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-64250648629566099232014-01-30T14:17:00.000-06:002014-01-30T14:17:48.877-06:00Frustration in the Peace Corps<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">- Dale Carnegie </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some days, I sit on my ponj and stare into space, immobilized by disappointment. A gloomy cloud lurks just beyond the outer limits of my vision. I can sense its existence, its inexorable approach. It is composed of millions of indistinguishable particles of ennui, and unless it dissipates, it will soon surround me and fill my lungs and settle in my pores and precipitate more indifference.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">- Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In September of 2012, I attended a library-building workshop in a strange and beautiful coastal town called Agadir. Installing a library in the local youth center was one of the many goals for my service. The workshop required I bring a counterpart, so in the weeks leading up it, I worked the idea on the youth center director, Mostafa. He was unreservedly enthusiastic. We discussed the installation of shelves and other necessary preparations, smiles all the way. Days before the scheduled workshop, he backed out, citing obligations to remain in town while the youth center was to be repainted. The next day, I discovered hidden away in the back room of the youth center a shelf full of French and Arabic books - novels, history, poetry. He had never mentioned them in all our discussions. As I stood there, bemusedly picking up one tome after another, he entered. He looked embarrassed; I was apparently not meant to discover his hoard. "Oh, Eugene. Oh!" Then he assured me that while he was not coming to the workshop, he was still excited about the prospects of a library accessible to all the youth. "We can incorporate these books into the books that you bring," he promised.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I attended the workshop alone. When I returned to site, Mostafa was wrapped up in how nice the youth center looked with a new paint job and couldn't be bothered to learn about that which I brought back from the workshop. Some weeks later, my regional manager brought with her two large boxes full of Arabic books for children and teens. The director couldn't have cared less. Currently, they are in my "office," a spare room in the youth center without chairs, tables, or shelves. The director's hoard is still in a dusty corner in another unused room. Over a year has passed since the workshop, and despite constant petitioning, I cannot arouse the faintest trace of interest in putting all of those books in a place where kids can access them. From time to time, a student of mine will borrow one from my office. This is my library.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">- Jesus</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In November of 2012, I signed up for another workshop, part of an international curriculum to teach youth "life skills." The director again swooned over the idea and promised his full support. Mostafa would be the educator for groups of up to thirty youth as they learned how to manage their emotions, live healthy lifestyles, prepare for life in the workforce. The day before departure, he backed out, and again, I attended sans partner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That same year, I tried to start the program anyway, using the only counterpart I could find, a fifteen-year-old student from the local high school named Salah. Though full of enthusiasm, and though exceptionally in attendance at our meetings, he was simply too young to take on the burden of leading<i> </i>the class. We tried, and fell short, of completing a session for the 2012-2013 school year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This year, we tried again. I stayed in touch with the two English high school teachers in my community via email. Both were practically giddy with enthusiasm. Neither have made good on that enthusiasm. One was Salah's teacher. "Eugene, I have really good news, man. My teacher said she would lead the life skills course this year. She will meet with us on Friday here at the youth center." She did not meet with us on Friday, nor did she call to cancel. She simply and without explanation didn't show up. Next week: "She said she had business in El Jadida. She says <i>for sure</i> she will be here this Friday." She shouldn't have been so sure. The next week I gave up on her when Salah admitted that she didn't even show up for class that day. "What did the students do?" I asked. "We sat there for two hours and then we went home," he said. The other teacher didn't feel the need to deceive me through a living person; she stuck to email, and for this I am grateful, for I took it far less personally. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This last November, I participated in "Bike4SIDA," a volunteer-led HIV/AIDS public awareness campaign. It was overwhelmingly successful (as things seem to be when they aren't concentrated in my site). I returned to my site reinvigorated. Evan, Carly, and Alex came down to revel in our triumph. Mostafa found them at the taxi stand and informed them that he and Salah had started the Life Skills program in the youth center without me. When I heard the news, I couldn't believe it, but at the youth center, Mostafa showed me the sign-up sheet with something like 60 attendees and happily recounted his role as teacher. Salah explained that he had rounded up a bunch of students from the high school and that we were well on our way to a good year. I was impressed and pledged my support, while reminding them that we had to pack at least two lessons into each week in order to finish before baccalaureate exams in June.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next weekend I was again out of site, but they continued without me. For a few days, I wondered if they just might be able to pull it off. I was feeling a new kind of feeling towards members of my community. <i>Pride</i>, I think it was. On the third week, I was to be in attendance. Still we had no set list, because the group was expanding week-by-week. Close to 70 youth piled into the youth center. The director was nowhere to be found. Salah came up to me and said, "Last week, we didn't finish the lesson. We should do it again this week."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"What lesson are we on now?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"The first one."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"What? This is the third week. We should be on lesson five."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I know, but the students don't listen to me. They talk a lot and don't listen. We should do it again."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Okay, well it shouldn't be hard, since all you have to do is what you did last week."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Oh, sorry man, I didn't get to read the lesson."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />"But you read it last week? Surely you remember it."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No, I actually didn't do it last week. You'll have to do it by yourself."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'll leave it to your imagination the surprise, anger, and frustration I then expressed. We limped through the lesson using my insufficient arabic skills and Salah's insufficient assistance. The mass of students in attendance was impossible to control or quiet down. In truth, they weren't there to learn at all, but to hang out and flirt with their sweethearts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then came a long-awaited and much-deserved vacation. I spent over two weeks in the greatest country on earth, enjoying family, friends, and so much holiday food.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Morocco again. Back at the youth center.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Eugene! We missed you! The students in life skills ask about you every week. We are still doing the class every week. There are 80 students! We have three classes a week."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Wow, Mostafa, that's literally unbelievable. I'll be in Sidi Ifni this weekend. I hope it goes well. Then I'll check in again on the next Saturday to see where we are."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sidi Ifni. Fun and laughter and friends. Tafraoute. Heaven.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then Al-Aounate again. I arrived on Friday and met with the director in his office. Mostafa launched into his self-aggrandizing lectures on the success of the life skills program and his heavy involvement therein. I interrupt:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Which lesson are we on now?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Understanding emotions."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Mostafa, that's lesson two. You've been doing this for eight weeks."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*shrug*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*anger* "Okay, I'll prepare some stuff at home tonight and bring it in tomorrow for the class. Some video and audio stuff, to catch their attention and keep their interest. Will the projector be available?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Yes, sure. I am sure. See you at 10."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Next day, 10AM at the youth center.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Salah, have you seen Mostafa?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No. So bad news, Eugene. I didn't read the lesson, so it's all you today."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Salah, how many times do I have to go over this? I can't teach the lesson."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Just teach it in English, man. This is interesting for them. They'll listen to somebody who is speaking in English, because it's new for them."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Salah, maybe two students will be able to understand me. You are one of them. The rest will tune me out. You have to at least translate for me. And by the way, what the hell have you been doing for the last eight weeks that you haven't taught a single god-damn lesson?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Okay man, I'll help."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I went for the projector, which was in use by the computer skills volunteer in the youth center. He must have felt sorry for me, because he gave it up. The discomfort I felt in inconveniencing him was dwarfed by resentment towards the director, who was still missing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Salah, why is the sound cutting out on these speakers?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"The wires are all broken, man."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Fucking Moroccans don't know how to take care of their shit." I was obviously angry, and taking it out on Salah. But I was right, and he deserved it, so I felt no compunction.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">*15 minutes passed as we waited for the director and wrestled with the wiring on the sound system*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Okay Salah, I'm going to run to my house and grab some other wires. It'll only take 10 minutes. You're in charge while I'm gone."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Okay man, but hurry. And call Mostafa and ask him where he is."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>On my way across town to my home, I call Mostafa. It is now 45 minutes into class time.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Oh hi Eugene!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Mostafa, where are you?!"<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I'm at home!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"...Well I need the markers in your office, and the paper. You need to be here!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Okay, I am coming."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I grabbed the cord from my house and headed back. With each step the outrage mounted.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Back at the youth center, the kids were still at their big tables, playing cards, taking pictures on their cell phones, flirting - you know, teenager things. I hooked up the new cords. Success. I also noticed that there were markers and paper left out, and that the director was missing again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Salah, did you see Mostafa come in?"<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No man, I haven't seen him. Did you call him?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Yeah, he said he was coming. He must have came and left. Damn it, let's just start the lesson."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Eugene, wait. This guy wants to sing a song."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"What? Who? What does this have to do with the lesson?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Please. Eugene. He's been asking for three weeks to sing. Just let him sing one song."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By this point I had ceded control to hysteria, so it sounded like a fine idea to me. The boy clambered up onto the stage and sang his song, and I found myself laughing, irrationally silly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When he finished, I attempted to regain control of the situation by introducing the topic - emotions - and asking the students to provide some examples of common emotions. One student - Yassine - fittingly offered "angry," and I asked Salah to write it on the board. "Good. What else?" Yassine raised his hand again, but I was looking for a different student to volunteer an answer. A vain attempt it was, as Yassine was apparently the only student in the crowd interested in what I had to say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Soon, I noticed that Salah, my translator, had slipped out of the room, and I was left completely alone. The remainder of the class (by this point, we didn't have an awful lot of time anyway) was chaotic and disastrous. I dismissed the students at twelve and immediately thought about going home and smoking an entire package of cigarettes. Mostafa showed up at the tail end of the class, and as the students were filing out, gave me a big thumbs up and, with a goofy grin, exclaimed, "Good! You were the director today!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I gave him a thumbs down and scowled at him. "No good, Mostafa. Bad. Very bad."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We then had the same conversation that we've had dozens of times. Commitment. Preparation. Competency. All things that were required to run this curriculum that both he and Salah, the alleged leaders, lacked. We have given up on Life Skills, due to our mutually exclusive approaches to implementation (the right way vs the lazy way). But it's not all bad. Saturdays and Sundays are now activity days for the kiddos. They like hanging out at the youth center, and I like that they're there. You win some and you lose some.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The saying goes, "Get used to disappointment." This exhortation has no better-fitting place than in the Peace Corps. I'm not unhappy or unsatisfied with my time in Morocco. I have had quite a few successful projects, and several good youth camps. Only one has been in my own site. My English classes (and students) also bring me respite from my troubles. Mostafa and his wife are both wonderfully personable, generous, and kind, and I enjoy visiting them for a meal every once in a while. I wouldn't trade this experience for two years in a well-paying office job. But it <i>is</i> rather disappointing. Nearly every job-related interaction with a Moroccan turns out to be a major let-down. I find myself mistrusting them from the very first words of any conversation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But like Jesus warned, I ought not kick against the pricks. It would go badly. So I laugh. It may sound like flirting with madness, but it's the only way I know how to cope with near-constant frustration. I say to myself, "That's the way the cookie crumbles." I <i>make</i> cookies, and then eat them, or just the cookie dough. I visit Carly and Evan, and the three of us laugh together. I call Kyla and laugh with her. I yell at my downstairs neighbors in funny voices and laugh at myself. Our time here is a 2-year-long episode of <i>Curb Your Enthusiasm </i>with Larry David's role being replaced by the Jack from <i>The Shining</i> as played by Jack Nicholson. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mining for the humor in bad situations is my favorite Peace Corps pastime, and I'm damned lucky that I have friends who laugh with me, because what a sorry service it would be if I surrounded myself with humorless mopes. So this post goes out to the fellow crazies, the nuts, the loonies, and the weirdos. I would never have survived without you.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-64698669452284169232013-11-30T17:13:00.000-06:002013-11-30T17:13:29.640-06:00The Crazy Folk<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The crazy folk. Not the most sensitive term, but admittedly the one I use with other volunteers. Every community has them. They are by turns amusing, tragic, and terrifying.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">---</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My first was The Top. I met him in my first week of service in Aounate. At that time, I had no internet access in my home, so I lugged my old laptop, Lappy, to the sole wi-fi-enabled cafe in town. Sipping my bitter brew, I saw him there, in the cafe patio, deftly spinning in place. He must have been in his early 40's, in good physical health, by all appearances. Upon his head, a dark, curly quasi-fro, and on his face, intense concentration. His eyes focused on no man, and through his lips passed nothing intelligible. He simply spun. Spun and mumbled.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another caffeinated patron noticed my interest and alarm. In a most reassuring tone, he said "Hania, hania. Mashi Xatir. Thnna." - "It's fine, it's fine. He's not dangerous. Don't worry about it." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That night, long after my neighborhood had checked in for the evening, I climbed onto the top of my roof, so as to get a feel for PAM, the compact residential neighborhood to which I had recently moved. I surveyed my surroundings. Late into the night, after the toddlers have been wrangled up and the children have tired of street-ball and the rebel youth have smoked through their last cigarettes, PAM is almost serene. I saw some chickens poking around in a trash pile three stories below. I saw dusty alleyways, empty and dark and strangely inviting. I saw the last few electric lights still burning in half a dozen windows throughout town. And turning to the south, I saw The Top. He was standing in a well-lit street several blocks down, all alone, going through his bizarre ritual motions. His voice was barely audible, but as far as I could tell, his words (such as they were) were not meant for others, nor were they meant to be understood. They just were. Like his movements, or his curly hair, or his unobjectionable presence in public places, The Top and his strange language were just ambience, a thread in the tapestry of everyday life in Aounate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He spoke to me once. I was at the cafe again, sipping the same bitter coffee that I always order, and The Top walked over and sat at a nearby table. In perfectly coherent Arabic, he began to ask me where I was from, what I was doing in Aounate, how I learned the language - the same battery of questions that will forever be the mainstay of PCV-to-HCN smalltalk. "Come to my house," he then said, after satisfying his curiosity. "Come have tea."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What followed was an picture perfect exercise in the disintegration of polite conversation. The Top was persistent, and fellow patrons offered no assistance, though they followed the conversation with inquisitive, un-averted eyes. My tactics necessarily shifted from the gracious refusal to regretful excuse-making to outright rejection. At this point, he was pleading with me, confusion all about his face. "Why won't you come to my house? Come have tea with me! Come with me to my house!!" I had run out of ideas, so I stood up and walked away, awkwardly apologizing as I went. This wasn't the first time one of the crazy folk had invited me to their house.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">---</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The first time it happened from the post office. I was setting up my PO box when a skinny, bald-headed skeleton of a man approached, speaking perfect English. Deadeyes Dick, I call him, because when he talks to you, his eyes are as distant as if he were in the thralls of a powerful hallucinogenic drug. He offered assistance in translating my needs (assistance which was absolutely un-needed) to the postmaster. He ran through the usual questions, explained that he used to be an English professor, and offered to show me where he lives. As he spoke, he wore a perpetual sinister grin, and spittle and drool constantly escaped his mouth. He took me a few streets into PAM and showed me his house, making sure I remembered all of the landmarks and right-hand turns. With characteristic politeness, I thanked him and took my leave.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next day, Deadeyes Dick came into the youth center where I was working. He did not stop to address the director in his office, but made a bee-line for me. He told me to come to his house that evening for a tagine. "Sorry," I replied, "but I have couscous with my host family tonight." Deadeyes left, and as I prepared to do the same, the director hushedly ushered me into his office. In a low, barely audible tone, he warned me: "Do not have lunch with this man." If my own misgivings weren't enough, that did it for me. I exited the youth center to make my way to my host family's house, but Deadeyes was waiting for me. "Come to my house now and have tagine with me," he demanded. <i>I must rid myself of this man</i>, I thought. <i>Something about him is not right. Maybe another adult can scare him away.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So I led him into the office of my host father. Giving every indication that I wanted no part in this man's invitation, I explained to my host father that this man wanted me to come to his house, but could you please explain to him that we have a couscous date tonight. "Mashi mushkil, sir m3ah. Kul tagine m3ah u rj3 3la kusksu. Mashi Mushkil!" - "It's no problem, go with him! Eat tagine with him and then return for couscous. No problem!" <i>Damn, this did not go the way I wanted it to go.</i> Minutes later, I was trapped with Deadeyes eating an extremely suspect tagine under his oppressive stare.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I guess it could have gone worse. He could have torn my throat out with a fork or tried to kiss me, I suppose.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One day, about two months in-site, he disappeared. I no longer saw him at the post office. He did not come into the youth center. People I asked suggested his mental health had gotten worse and he was in some hospital in some other town, but no one seemed to know. I forgot about him for nearly a year.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then, this last summer, I saw him again. Understand that in the summer, nary a soul ventures into the youth center, and on this day, I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude out in the courtyard. I looked up from my book to see Deadeyes standing in the foyer and looking around as if he were lost. His glazed look slowly drank in the scattered papers pinned to the bulletin board, and then slowly turned its way to where I was sitting. He slumped towards me with a look that bespoke fear, confusion, and rage all at the same time. Inside, I was terrified, but I'd be damned to reveal that to a crazy man. "Hi! How are you?" I queried in the cheeriest voice I could muster. His facial expression didn't change. He arched his neck steadily so as to meet my eyes, as if for the first time realizing I was there. When he saw me, he cocked his head a little and his upper lip twitched a little, and I was in turn filled with not a little disquiet. I tried some other simple English greetings, and when none of those earned a response, I tried again in Arabic. I seemed to be angering him, so I turned my concentration to thinking of all of the best escape routes from my desk.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Finally, he spoke. "Where are we?" It was an angry tone, almost accusatory. I smiled nervously and said, "We're in Aounate, of course!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No! Where are we?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Umm... why, we're in the youth center in Aounate. Arbaa Aounate. How are you?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No!" At this point, he was practically shouting. "Where are we exactly?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I.. uh, I don't know what you--"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I'll tell you. We're nowhere. Everything is air."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I then heard what I can safely call the most ominous and unsettling laugh ever uttered by man. <i>Damn. I'm in a tight spot</i>. <i>I must not let the fear show. Oh god, why has his hand been in his pocket this whole time? What does he have in his pocket? Will my family only remember the good things? I hope Peace Corps pays for the funeral.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Do you know where Osama bin Laden is?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Dear god. What have I done to deserve this? </i>"...What?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I said, do you know where Osama bin Laden is?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"He's dead. Osama bin Laden is dead."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"NO! He's alive. He lives here in Aounate."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"..." <i>breathe deeply. keep it together. </i>"Oh really? How do you know that? Have you seen him?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No, nobody can see him. He's invisible." *grin*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I have to go to the director's office. I need to talk to my director."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I can assure you that as I stood to leave, I kept a close eye on that pocketed hand. Deadeyes followed me to the office with the same angry look on his face. To my director, I raised as many red flags as possible. Even a child could have understood the subtext from my body language and tone: <i>this guy is really fucking creeping me out and I don't want him in this building or around me anymore. please help. </i>It all bounced off the director's head. "Safi, Eugene? Ready to go home? I'll see you at 4."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So then I was stuck walking home with Deadeyes in tow. In broad daylight, I felt marginally safer, but when I got to PAM, he demanded I come to his home. I did not bother with politeness, but said, "No. I'm going to my home now." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"I will come with you."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No. I will go to my house alone and you will go to yours."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He made no reply but began to focus intensely at my feet. Alarmed, I looked down too, but saw nothing unusual.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Look out! Look out for the cockroach!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"What? Is there a cockroach down here?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"NO!!" His anger flared. "In the kitchen!" More sinister laughter. I hurried to my door.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He has been into the youth center one other time, when a fellow PCV was visiting. She immediately picked up on the creepiness and started to squirm in her chair. Deadeyes was sucking on an unlit cigarette butt and asking nonsensical questions. That time, the director escorted the man out. Apparently, it is unseemly to let a crazy man harass a guest in the youth center, but for me it's A-Okay.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Later, I had a talk with the director about Deadeyes. Despite his assurances that the man is not dangerous, I told him, "You know, Mostafa, sometimes, people can become more dangerous. Maybe he wasn't dangerous before, but maybe his health is getting worse. We don't know."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That seemed to do it, for Mostafa has not let him back into the youth center since then, and hopefully never will again. These days,</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> when I see Deadeyes, I pretend I don't. When he calls for me, I pretend I don't hear him. This is for the best.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">---</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They are not always menacing. The last man I will describe always greets me with boisterous joviality and goodwill. I call him Brother Smokes, because every time he sees me, he smiles, shakes my hand, calls me brother, and asks me if I want to smoke hashish with him. Needless to say, I have never taken him up on his offer, and he is never affronted by my rejection. It is a peaceable relationship, ours. Brother Smokes always reminds me that we are friends, and amiably keeps his drug-sharing offer on the table. "Do you know Mr. Robert?" He repeatedly asks me in perfect English, referring to a volunteer who served a brief stint in Aounate in 2003 before being evacuated due to the Iraq war. He pronounces Robert's name in the French fashion, for reasons I cannot understand. "Mr. Robert smoked with me. He was a good man. He was my brother. Do you want to smoke with with me?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I doubt whether the last volunteer would have willingly smoked marijuana with this man, but crazier things have been known to happen in Peace Corps.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Usually, Brother Smokes grabs my attention from a great distance, shouting my name across crowds or traffic or herds of sheep to get my attention. But one time last summer, around the same time as my run-in with Deadeyes Dick, Smokes was waiting for me on the oft-empty little street that runs in front of the youth center. I had just turned the corner on my way to work, when suddenly he was beside me, grinning and shaking my hand and releasing a torrent of speech - only this time, his fluency in English was completely gone. He was rattling line after line of <i>English-sounding</i> words that had no decipherable meaning. Thrown off-guard, I tried to re-rail the conversation by throwing Arabic at him, but a few words in, he cut me off in equally incoherent <i>French-sounding</i> words, which eventually shifted to some French-English para-language fusion. He did not pause for response or check my level of comprehension; he just continued in garbled nonsense for the entire length of the street, holding my hand and smiling all the while. I walked with him right past the door of the youth center, knowing he'd follow me in if I only gave him the chance. Instead, I got to the end of the street and feigned obligation towards the left. Mercifully, he had his own plans on the right, and we parted ways. Only then did he stop talking. I circled the block and went into the youth center unaccompanied and prematurely exhausted.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">---</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Crazy people are a frequent topic of conversation here in the Doukkala region, where they thrive in inordinate numbers. One question that is often on the minds of volunteers is: Why, in a country where so few people speak English, are almost all of the crazy people fluent in it? One theory is that they exported mentally-ill people from the bigger cities, where English education is much more prominent. This has been corroborated by some Moroccans who claim that the city folk don't want to deal with them, so the countryside serves as a kind of exile. Another theory is that those with enough education to learn English must also necessarily come to appreciate the vast material divide between the English-speaking world and their own society, and some fraction go mad out of frustration or hopelessness. My favorite theory, albeit the least likely, is that there are a great many more crazy people than we realize - that if we could only understand Arabic fluently, we'd see that, for instance, the chatty men sitting across from me in the cafe right now are actually speaking in nonsense on par with Deadeyes or Brother Smokes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Whatever the reason, the crazy folk are here, part and parcel of life in Aounate. Street vendors often give them free meals, and people here treat them with a decent measure of respect. I often hear from folks that this is a good example of why Muslim communities are superior to Christian communities, where these folks would be confined to a hospital building. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let's nevermind that there are about a thousand things wrong with this comparison. It <i>is, </i>however, interesting to imagine a community in which mentally nonstandard persons are not only accepted as a normal part of life, but allowed to wander into coffee shops, restaurants, and Wal-Marts, shouting or staring at customers, or spinning like tops. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe it's better that we treat our mentally ill citizens with health care rather than spare pieces of chicken.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-64809331747146713432013-09-02T11:05:00.001-05:002013-09-02T13:33:29.673-05:00A Haunting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was during my 14th year of life that I decided to start doing more with my time than play video games. That I had wasted so much of my burgeoning adolescence on electronic entertainment is only slightly less disturbing than that which came to replace it: fervent religious fundamentalism. With high school came devotional readings, bible camps, youth group, and a strong conviction that I had a duty to warn Sterling High that we were all balancing on the precipice, in danger of eternal hellfire. I suspect that this preoccupation made me somewhat awkward throughout high school.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was then that I transformed from a shy, mild-mannered, sometimes-clownish kid into a terrifying spiritual force, constantly harassing foul-mouthed students, refusing to read Catcher in the Rye, waging war against the teaching of evolution in biology class (a battle which I took all the way to the superintendent's office). I once persecuted my economics teacher for handing out an article that included the word "ass." I rode a particularly high horse. Besides that, my best friend (another fundamentalist) and I started an early morning Bible-study club in the band room called S.O.S. (Serving Our Savior), a weekly meeting in which we would berate fellow SHS Christians for not being serious enough about their relationship with God. My reputation preceded me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I took great satisfaction in my apartness. Indeed, through church I was led to believe that it was a great virtue to be totally aloof of whatever circles "the world" ran in and instead set myself apart for God. Hence, I didn't believe in dating, drinking, secular music, or any other kind of pop culture or "worldly" entertainment, really. You know, an all-around fun guy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Briefly, I considered skipping college and diving right into missionary training school in Oaxaca, Mexico, but a very dear woman menaced me into giving college a shot, so I went to The Master's College, a Christ-centered "liberal arts" college in Santa Clarita, California. For the first time in my life, I surrounded myself with a community of like-minded people and escaped the Satanic swamp that was the public education system.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nonetheless, I soon felt disconnected from this new student population, which was pretty homogenous in their John MacArthur psuedo-fundamentalist brand of low-church evangelical Calvinism. I was going through some spiritual changes, and instead associated with a high-church, baby-baptizing, Eucharist-eating, decidedly non-fundamentalist Reformed congregation. Now to you non-church-goers, this might seem like the difference between Maille Dijon and Grey Poupon, but let me tell you, these crowds take their mustards pretty seriously. Every time my collar-sporting pastor gave me a ride back to campus, the eyes of just about everyone around popped out of their heads: "Sweet Jesus, what is a <i>Catholic priest</i> doing on our campus?!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The upshot of all of this is that I was once again a separate species from my peers, and I made just about all of my friends extremely uncomfortable whenever we talked about theological things (i.e. every moment of every day). Oh, and I still didn't believe in dating. Go college.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ahem, so after a year, I transferred to a Presbyterian college - very mainstream, very safe. They accepted all kinds of Christian (we even had a few Catholic students and one Eastern Orthodox guy) and taught things like literature and psychology, which TMC apparently regarded as demonic. Regardless of the change of environment, I was still not satisfied with where my journey had taken me. It was then that I lost my faith. For the remainder of my undergraduate program, I was a lonely non-believer surrounded by very earnest believers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Imagine what terrific sense of purpose must have filled Frodo and his crew in Fellowship of the Ring. What grand sense of direction! What meaning! What moral certitude! Until my de-conversion, this was what life had been like. Throughout my mission trips, school chapels, and youth group meetings, I was made to feel like that hobbit. God had a supremely important mission for me, and I could do nothing better in life than to bend every desire and impulse to the purpose of fulfilling this mission. I had been pouring my studies into theology and missionary theory and Biblical Greek and apologetics. I had fashioned every friendship, every mentorship with the aim of sharpening my faith to a fine edge. And then the doubt began.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After so much certainty, doubt. Imagine, all of my past ambitions, my identity and anchor and source of emotional sustenance - I had to come to terms with the fact that I no longer bought any of it. All my friends felt I had rebuffed them. Those from my first college stopped talking to me. The people from my churches stopped talking to me. Certain professors eyed me with suspicion. Things became extremely uncomfortable around my sister and mother. That sense of direction vanished. The moral certitude gave way. The low ceiling of my little world shattered, and suddenly I was standing in a great expanse.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How could I have been so certain and yet so wrong? How is that possible, from a bright young student, the valedictorian? I had kept myself so narrowly aligned, lived so particularly, alienated so many other students, alienated myself -- for what? To eventually dismiss it all as a grave error in judgement.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I was accused of many things during that transitionary time - that I was running away from God, that the carnal flesh looks for ways to excuse wrongdoings, that I was merely in a phase, that I was really just deeply sad and confused - but I was never accused of being brave. Not one friend or family member congratulated me for taking a positive step. Only I did this. (Later, I found support, especially in a certain professor and a certain friend. You two know who you are.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm writing all of this in order to better understand why, to this day, I carry with me the nagging suspicion that I make people uncomfortable, that something about me is so often off-putting. But now I'm beginning to understand. Since becoming a real person, I've had only three peer groups that have lasted longer than a few months: my fellow students and teachers at Sterling High School, my fellow students and professors at The Master's College, and my fellow students and professors at Sterling College. Other periods of my life have been too ephemeral (summer jobs) or too lonely (AmeriCorps, post-college jobs) to give me a sense of a loving community.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now I have a family that is finally okay with who I am. Peace Corps is filled with wonderful people. Most of them are either non-religious themselves, or are entirely okay with those who are. I've never felt uncomfortable around a PCV for being an atheist. The irony is that, with the exception of my very few close-neighbors, this family is scattered over an entire country; I see them rarely. What's more, a great majority of my time is spent in a community that is more religiously fervent than I had ever been even as a little rabble-rouser. Every day, I am reminded that I do not belong here; I am decidedly not a product of Morocco.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And so the question I've been asking myself is, "How much longer will the ghost of awkwardness continues to haunt me?" I believe this experience is the beginning of the end of that chapter of my life. With each day in-site, I become more comfortable with who I am, and with each PCV meeting, I feel more and more like I belong with these very precious people, my fellow brave, tenacious, pig-headed volunteers. I love them dearly.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-81253792316514581772013-08-17T13:03:00.001-05:002013-08-17T13:03:35.099-05:00A Transition<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Saturday marked the end of my summer vacation, a much-needed respite from the doldrums of Ramadan. This was my second trip to Europe. The first was to Italy in the spring of 2005. I visited Vatican City and a pope died. This year I came to London and a prince was born. Make of that what you will. Some highlights:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">morning jog along the Thames in London; no feral dogs chasing me</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">biking through London's parks with North Carolinians/NPR lovers Jake and Eric</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">evensong at St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Merrily We Roll Along at the Harold Pinter theatre in West End; more talent than you could shake a stick at</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">beautiful, beautiful music at the Royal Albert Hall; clapping only <i>after</i> music stopped</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bruges - all of it, from beginning to end</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">walking through the castle at Ghent</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">biking in and around Amsterdam (and serendipitously discovering the goat park); no feral dogs</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">taking in the view of the cathedral at Cologne</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Black Forest hiking; nature without garbage</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">organ concert (and gargoyles) at the cathedral in Freiburg</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">peoplewatching at the apfelwein festival in Frankfurt</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As much as I wanted to stay in these places for the rest of my life, it was surprisingly easy to accept the end of my journey and the return to Morocco.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Unfortunately, some of the discomforts of life here smacked me in the face immediately after disembarkation: the villainous heat and the scoundrels running the taxis outside the airport.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When I arrived in Aounate, I discovered that a wasp had built a rather large nest in The Beach. I stood cautiously at the door with a broom in my left hand and the door handle in the other. <i>I'll tap it first to see if it's full of wasps, </i>I thought, <i>and if they swarm violently out towards me, I'll slam the door shut. Maybe they will become nervous and leave my house.</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I knocked on it a little. Nothing. I poked it and prodded it and became disturbed at how strong the damned thing was, and finally I was thrusting at it with all my might until the lower left side collapsed and dozens of larvae scattered all over the floor, leaving disgusting green smears wherever they landed. I resisted the urge to scream and/or throw up. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A few grisly minutes later, I was cleaning up the last of the corpses, shoveling them into a dust pan and throwing them unceremoniously over the ledge of my roof. All that remained on my wall was the sad outline of what was once a nursery.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next morning, as I was answering nature's call, the mother flew in. She was big. My reptile brain must have kicked in, because without even thinking about it, I went right into a crouch-run towards the door, my pants still around my knees. I knew there was a possibility that my neighbors might be on the roof or in the stairwell, and therefore the possibility of a rude run-in. That wouldn't have been so bad, I guess; considering Hamou once waded through my poop, he probably wouldn't be too terribly scandalized by my panicked, pant-less escape.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But nobody was there. I slammed the door. Only then did my capacity for conscious thought return. <i>She's not going to be happy about the destruction of her young, </i>I reasoned. I cracked the door and found her hovering unhappily around the spot where the nest once was. <i>Oh no - she's caught on. </i>Briefly, I considered and dismissed the broom; the handle would prevent the door from closing in the event of a retaliation. </span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Happily, my mom is awesome, and when she visited a few months ago, she brought me two very precise water pistols. I loaded one of them and returned to the door of The Beach. I cracked the door and took aim. Then I noticed a fallen soldier: F. Scott Fitzkindle, my beloved e-reader, was lying vulnerable on the floor. In my panic, I must have set him down in abandonment. <i>Stupid! </i>Clearly, the stakes had been raised.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I shot the Queen-Wasp several times, until she turned and headed straight toward me, at which point I took shelter behind the door and regrouped. Again, I peeked in, first at F. Scott Fitzkindle, and then at the enemy, who was again surveying the smoldering remains of what was once the babies' house. I felt no guilt about it. Fitzkindle's life meant to much to let sentiment get in the way. I shot again, and with great accuracy. Again, the adversary made her charge. The third time I opened the door, I dashed in and rescued Fitz, pistol ever at the ready. Success.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My nemesis appeared to have been driven out, and I finished my chapter in <i>1776 </i>feeling pretty good about my campaign. <i>Maybe today won't be so hard after all</i>. The adrenaline rush had certainly been nice. In good spirits, I practically bounded down my stairway to head to the big city of Sidi Bennour. I threw open the heavy metal door to the outside, and it groaned and shook on its old rusty hinges. As it turns out, another wasp family had built its home right above the door. When I stepped out into the dazzling sun, dozens of small wasps and a couple of really large ones immediately began swarming around my head and torso. I ran out of my alleyway, arms flailing wildly and terror in my eyes.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the grand taxi, I struck up a conversation with a man in the front seat. He spoke english and was interested in why I was in the area. Of course, I gave him the whole Three Goals of Peace Corps gospel, and he was duly impressed. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Would you like a rabbit?," he asked.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"What?" I answered.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"A rabbit. Do you want one? I will give it to you."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"That's very kind of you. No thanks."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Are you sure? It's no problem, really."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I laughed nervously. "Thanks, but no. Maybe next time."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The man nodded and smiled at me, and then told the taxi driver to stop the taxi (we'd arrived at the man's village). He then told the driver to wait, and amidst much grumbling and shouting on the part of the driver and other passengers (who were crammed into this little taxi on a very hot afternoon), the man did the following: ran across the street; spoke a little with a shop owner; entered a storage garage; emerged from garage with live rabbit; spoke some more with shopkeeper, who procured a cardboard box; stuffed rabbit in box; ran across the street; handed box to man in taxi; waved goodbye; ran away.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It all happened so fast, and before I could protest, I had a box of live rabbit in my lap. The man sitting to my left smiled knowingly at me, which I found unsettling. The guy to my right pointed to the box and then said "Sidi Bennour," while running his index finger across his neck. The driver was just mad at me for delaying the trip and shot me the evil eye through the rear view mirror.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">15 minutes later, I was standing in Sidi Bennour with a really heavy bag (full of wine and gin) and a box that was bouncing and rattling under my arm. <i>This requires advice,</i> I decided, and called Evan. Pretty soon, we were at his apartment, freeing the rabbit into the neighbor's garden. I felt pretty good about this.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And reflecting on the transition from Europe to here, I thought, <i>there are many differences between the developed world and Morocco.</i></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-20919754586149549542013-08-08T15:31:00.002-05:002013-08-08T15:31:42.711-05:00A Surprise in the Park<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The goats were a complete surprise. To be sure, I plainly saw the large goat symbol on the map, but I expected something more like a monument to a special goat, a local hero perhaps, or maybe just a peculiarly goat-shaped rock. Instead, I rode into an alarming situation: dozens of little children with goats - playing on teeter-totters, gallivanting through grassland, climbing wooden structures. With goats, I said. As many goats as children.</span><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I had been cycling just outside of Amsterdam on a rented bike, following a rough plan to ride through some of the biggest parks. At the entrance of this, the Amsterdam Woods, I found the trail map that had so piqued my interest with its depiction of a goat squarely in the middle of an otherwise run-of-the-mill green field. No explanation or legend to suggest its meaning - just a cheerful, bearded bovid.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The park was beautiful. The first part followed the long side of the Bosbaan, which is the oldest artificial rowing course in the world. Afterwards, it plunged into thick green forest. It was a rainy day - perfect for riding. The clouds scattered the light just how I like it, and in the heavily-wooded area, I felt I was lost in a dream-land. I could have ridden like that forever, but my bike was due back at the rental office in three hours.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When I arrived (and after recovering from the amazement of what I had come upon), I locked up my bike and went into the little hut which served up various foods and drinks. I got myself a nice frosty drink and stepped outside to find a picnic table.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The families were adorable. The children were so happy to be playing with goats that I couldn't help but be happy with them. After all, is there anything more joyful than a pen full of primates and cloven-hoofs getting along so famously? The surrounding land was interesting too - small gardens, some pasture, a little pond, and of course forest all around. I decided to stay a little longer, so I went back inside to find a snack. I picked up what looked like a traditional filled pastry.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The woman at the cash register smiled pleasantly. "Is this all?" she politely asked. "Yes, this is all. Say, what do you call this, exactly?" I pointed to the alleged pastry. She made some sounds that are for me impossible to replicate with the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I nodded thoughtfully, as if I better understood her culture for hearing the name of my food spoken aloud. "And what <i>is</i> it, exactly? A traditional dessert?" She looked a little embarrassed. "Oh, no! It is savory. It is, how do you say-" she waved her arms vaguely around the room a little and consulted with a co-worker. "Yes, it is goat," she finished, and then looked around somewhat abashedly: "You know, from around here." She smiled a nervous smile.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I returned to my picnic table with a profound sense of guilt weighing upon me. Suddenly, the cheerful, squealing kids and balancing teeter-totter goats took on a baleful significance which did not escape me as I bit into my goat-snack. It was delicious. This made me feel worse, but I finished it anyway, along with a cup of coffee.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And maybe it was the infectious giggles of the children or maybe the stimulants in my coffee, but I decided that if the goats were to die anyway, it was best they died in this condition: presumably happy, bathed in a climate of mirth and youth. I imagined these goats had no regrets about their fate, and this cheered me up considerably. Wiping my smiling mouth, I stood up to bid the place a fond farewell. Then, I hopped back on my bicycle and rode out of the woods, along a stunning lake, past an old windmill, and and right on by a sign welcoming me back to Amsterdam.</span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-81989589651714528472013-07-11T17:13:00.001-05:002013-07-11T17:13:35.262-05:00The Story of Saida<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The following is derived from a correspondence I sent to a former sociology professor (and present friend) regarding a student in my community. After sending it, I decided to tell her story (with a few changes to protect her identity) for a wider audience.</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to tell you about a student of mine named Saida. In Arabic, her name means "happy," and it suits her somewhat, as almost every time I chat with her, she is smiling. Saida is an outlier among her peers. In a culture built upon clan identity, she prefers to keep to herself. In a culture that stresses the importance of religious devotion above all, she shows no signs of piety (at least, not the conservative Muslim kind favored in Aounate). Saida enjoys reading books and online articles, especially in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and astronomy. In short, she is curious and full with questions. She tells me the greatest thing she can do in life is to discover herself and discover the world. I have not met a student in all of Aounate who possesses this thirst for discovery like Saida.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She has no Facebook account. This is not so unusual. Facebook (more specifically, the idea of <i>girls</i> having an online presence of any kind) is viewed as an impropriety at best, anti-Muslim at worst. Only a little more than half the students in my community have an account, and those that <i>do </i>have an account never post pictures of themselves or even use their real names (which makes it next to impossible to tell who is who online). Anyway, Saida's refusal to sign up is not founded in any religious sentiment or desire to abide by cultural norms. Saida simply doesn't have friends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is astounding, really, that a bright, smiley, curious 17-year-old has no friends, but such is the degree of adherence that rural Moroccan society demands of its boys and girls. Girls like Saida are social lepers. Her teachers, too, dislike her. She asks too many questions, challenges their authority. Some teachers have accused her of atheism, which of course serves to further alienate her from her peers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Saida lives with depression. She often talks about violence, death, and the absurdity of living. She hates her country, and particularly Aounate. She adores Hitler. "The world would be a better place if he had succeeded," she tells me. I remind her that Hitler also hated the Arabs, that had he exterminated the Jews, Arabs might have been next. "This would have been a <i>great</i> thing. We have not done anything good for the world. It would be better without us."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I felt like I needed to invest in this girl's development by encouraging her, by praising her inquisitive propensities. We agreed to start a book club after she finished her studies for the year. I picked out <i>The Plague</i> by Albert Camus, in the hopes that the story would instill in her a conviction of life's goodness. For a time, she was coming into the youth center almost every day just to chat, usually about ideas - philosophers we like, the value of questioning authority, things like that. She told me that I am her only real friend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Last month, Saida came into my office to tell me goodbye. It was the day after the tests had wrapped up at school. She explained that she is no longer permitted to come into the youth center; the sexual harassment in the streets is more than her family feels she can handle. It <b>is</b> a lot to deal with. Even emotionally-stable volunteers are driven to hysterics by the flagrant hostility towards women which they experience on the streets. So I reluctantly accepted her goodbye, but I made her promise to at least get an email address, and I gave her mine. I have not heard from her since.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To those who say that we should accept Morocco's attitude towards its women, I say rubbish. The plain truth is that any society can rob us of our humanity. Sometimes it throws up impossibly high barriers for its women or its indigent poor. And we must not hesitate to scorn that which oppresses and kills.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This country has a lot of work to do. It must alter its attitude towards curious, introverted girls, for one. Behavior change is the hardest part of my job, and the primary reason I have stayed in country. Until I leave next May, I am going to do everything in my power to change the way Aounate regards its girls. I will especially concentrate on men, as they seem to be the only part of the population who believes that gender issues don't factor high on Morocco's priority list. God help me, but they will when I'm through here. At least a few more will, and that's a start.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-40045712319973873782013-03-20T03:59:00.000-05:002013-03-20T03:59:22.132-05:00Troubled Waters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My bathroom has a name: "the beach."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's called "the beach" because of how it is, with sand and water and strong sunlight and a nice breeze. Most of these things are a direct result of the combination that is 1) a dirty village and 2) the hole in my wall masquerading as a window. The water is from bad plumbing and a sadly-dripping shower-head. The shower-head does not produce any more water than can be dripped, sadly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let me tell you a story about the beach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some months ago, I noticed that whenever I flushed the toilet, a slow-creeping puddle would hazard forth from it's rear. An ominous portent. A harbinger of future troubles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I harbor ambivalence toward the toilet. When I was Dar-shopping back in June, the landlords were showing it off to me, complete with a simple flush-with-the-floor turk. They insisted they could put in a Western toilet for me, and I insisted that the turk was just fine, thank you, and kindly stop talking so loudly. I'm standing right here. Just talk to me like a normal person.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When I moved in a week later, I received a rude surprise. Entering my bathroom, I was assaulted by an unwanted guest, crouching in wait for me right over the spot where my turk should have been: a western toilet. <i>What a crock of shit this is, </i>I said, perhaps to the loudlords downstairs, perhaps to the porcelain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The posterior leakage increased in volume over a matter of weeks, and eventually the flushage rate suffered as well. <i>Something big is coming,</i> I thought. I asked the head loudlord, Hamou, for a plunger. What he produced resembled a plunger that Matell</span><span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'; font-size: xx-small;">Ⓡ </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">would have designed if playhouses had bathrooms. To humor him, I plunged the plastic toy down into my nemesis' gaping hole, but alas, it produced no measurable effect, other than the effect of making me feel dirty - dirtier even than one normally feels after plunging a toilet. I blame this on the awkward size of what I can only graciously refer to as "the implement."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hamou eventually asked for the implement, which I unceremoniously returned. For a time, I put off buying a real plunger. I thought that as more water made it's way through the pipes, the clog would eventually unstick itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Part of me hoped, too, that the whole mess would resolve itself by collapsing my bathroom onto the heads of the loudlords below, but this is Morocco, and nothing quite works out the way you hope.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A volunteer friend visited, staying over for several days, contributing both to my day-to-day happiness and my day-to-day sewage. Each flush drained just a bit more slowly and with just a bit more leakage. Additionally, when using the bathroom sink, water would leak out of the pipe where it entered the floor. Sometimes, water would actually <i>gurgle up</i> out of my floor drain when I used the bathroom sink. My anticipation grew. My friend asked, "Why don't you buy a plunger and fix that? Or tell your landlord?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What I wouldn't give to avoid that fate. Interactions with the neighbors happen on an emergency-only basis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I bought a plunger and began a prolonged campaign of pipe warfare. First, I tried some acid. This I came across quite by accident, and I'm sure I'd need some kind of safety certification in order to acquire it in the US. Anyway, the men at the store assured me fearfully that it was very effective and <i>very dangerous</i>, and so I took it home. It's a green bottle with a simple label featuring an angry tiger. When the lid is removed, a putrid smell and visible gas effervesce from its orifice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I poured the tiger acid into both of my floor drains and a little into my toilet for good measure. They bubbled and brothed and filled my bathroom with a terrific odor, but clear my pipes they certainly did not. Another friend visited. Button-flushing became unthinkable. We flushed with a bucket. I shifted my strategy to a baking-powder and vinegar blitzkrieg, which seemed to help somewhat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At this point, I decided that until the problem was righted, I would no longer be using the toilet for solid waste disposal. This I took care of in other locales, and it was not uncommon to find items like "poop in cafe" in my daily to-do list. Bound and determined I'd wind up a winner in this doo-doo debacle, I sallied forth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A mixture of Holidays and Peace Corps workshops took me out of my site for quite some time, and though by this time I had begun inquiring after a plumber with my Mudir, the timing never worked out in my favor. After returning from a New Year celebration in the desert, I finally bit the bullet and talked to Hamou. He said he could get a plumber in there that Friday.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Friday came and went with no plumber. The beach festered.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Saturday morning, Hamou showed up at my door in his pajamas. "Are you ready? Let's get to work on your toilet!" He said this with a preternatural eagerness that only reinforced my misgivings towards him. I realized he was the plumber he had in mind for the job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We stepped into the caution zone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now, before I share with you what transpired next, it is important that you have a clear picture of what the beach looked like before he started, so you appreciate the magnitude of the transformation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I had made sure to clean up any excess sand that had settled on the floor, squeejee the water off the floor, and clean the toilet nicely. Besides a slightly upsetting smell, the bathroom and toilet all looked and behaved normally. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This quickly changed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hamou began by running a stiff black hose from the roof's water faucet to my bathroom. He fed the hose deep into the toilet and turned on the water. Immediately, the toilet began filling with an opaque broth that smelled like Death's taint. With onsetting panic, he tried jiggling the hose in a desperate attempt to dislodge whatever it was that was keeping this unholiness above ground.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is important to consider that the matter coming up from below was not fresh. Between my travels and toilet-fasting, it had been damn-near two months since anything but liquid had gone into that sad, hopeless hole. What was being unearthed had been there waiting for an impressive period of time. It was a mixture of acid, toilet paper, and the human waste of three U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers. And Hamou had on this day the singular pleasure of becoming acquainted with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Realizing his plan was bootless, Hamou ditched the hose and ordered me to retrieve a plastic bag. I did. He wrapped his hand in it, grabbed the plunger, and <i>entered</i> the muck with which the bowl was now brimming. Like a boss, he worked that plunger with all his might, leaning into each thrust. Unfortunately, due to the rear-end breach which foreshadowed this whole disaster, each plunge only forced the viscous excreta to shoot out the back of my toilet and onto the wall, like blood splatter in a bad horror film.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The rhythmic repetition of this escaping shit, the spattering effect, the sound of it all - it gave me the impression that my toilet was actually a dying creature, a smelly dragon in its death throes, vanquished by the plunger. I grabbed the squeejee, for I could see that the situation was deteriorating.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Between the extra water my loudlord had introduced into the toilet and the volume of matter he was bringing up due to plunging, the toilet was now overflowing with the repellant stew. Moreover, what had escaped the back was making its way toward us. I fended off the encroaching puddle as best I could, but the floor drains were backed up too. I noticed Hamou was wearing sandals. <i>Poor bastard. It's too late for him, but I can still save my shoes.</i> Knowing I could not drain off the liquid, I busied myself keeping it from reaching my feet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hamou next laid his hands on the plumbing coming out of the back of the toilet, a large pipe that bent this way and that and connected to the floor. He manhandled the apparatus until it broke completely free of the toilet and the floor, and by so doing, he released the foulest wave of filth ever to crash on the beach. The smell was unbelievable, and the disgust factor couldn't be registered on any earthly scale. In that moment, Hamou and I shifted a few degrees closer to animal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The panic broke. I could hear it in his voice. No longer could Hamou afford to patiently pronounce each Arabic word to the squeejee-weilding American. In an extremely agitated tone, he cried out: "Mohammed! Mohammed!" Hamou's son ran up the stairs to see what was the matter. As soon as he rounded the corner, he stopped dead in his tracks. I imagine the smell registered first, probably in the reptile part of his brain, triggering all kinds of primal alarms associated with such abhorrent odors. After his movement was arrested, I imagine his body naturally directed all of its resources to both sound and vision, the better to ascertain the surrounding landscape and to avoid whatever nasty end was surely awaiting him. In those heightened moments, this poor young boy was treated to the picture of his father, feet awash in a shallow shit-sea, eyes popping with trepidation, walls covered in what Jackson Pollock's studio might have looked like, had Jackson Pollock been either institutionally insane or a poop-flinging monkey.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What followed was machine-gun fire Arabic, far too garbled and emotion-filled for me to comprehend. The boy ran onto the roof, as per his father's instructions. In the meantime, the father moved to the floor drains with the plunger. He plunged these drains vigorously, covering two more walls with spatter-patterns (I'll never know what was in <i>those</i> drains that could have left a mark on my walls). For the first time, his actions were ameliorative, and I began to drive the ocean of depravity back into the pipes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mohammed ran in with a length of rebar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Oh my, this is the end,</i> I thought. <i>Surely, Hamou is going to use this rebar to bash me over the head, so he can forget about this whole mess.</i> As it turns out, Hamou had a much less creative use for the rebar in mind. He tried sticking it down the hole in the floor to free up the clogged pipe. Of course, the pipe runs less than a foot vertically before twisting to the side, and rebar is singularly unfit for the flexibility demanded by our situation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">More orders were shouted. More running. This time, Mohammed dragged in a comically large spool of clothes line wire. Hamou took one end of the spool and fashioned a hook. Driving the wire down into the floor, he jiggled with all his might and, in the process, successfully liberated my sewage system from its oppressive blockage. The sound was marvelous. We practically burst with relief. Eye contact was made for the first time. <i>Congratulations, </i>it said. <i>We did this. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Minutes later, the floor was squeaky clean, the walls wiped down, the toilet reassembled, and a light aromatic disinfectant sprinkled onto the tile. Hamou looked at me and said, "Safi?" And then he marched downstairs, just another day in the life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nowadays, the beach is open and peaceful and operating on its normal schedule. But I'll never forget the days of the tsunami, the days of darkness that threatened to swallow us all and permanently stain our souls.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-84575329796827823822013-02-14T18:38:00.000-06:002013-02-14T18:38:22.758-06:00Love in the Peace Corps<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bW1VFlN53gw/UR2CosacLSI/AAAAAAAADHQ/vC7WL-DxgkM/s1600/cupid1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bW1VFlN53gw/UR2CosacLSI/AAAAAAAADHQ/vC7WL-DxgkM/s1600/cupid1.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I joined the Peace Corps because I wanted to connect with the rest of the world, to see life from the perspective of the oppressed, to spread joy and wonder and curiosity to new places. I did not join, in other words, to find a girlfriend.</span><div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why was it then, that as soon as I walked into my hotel in Philadelphia, I felt like a college freshman? I couldn't get through my first elevator ride without my heart-rate increasing and my breath shortening.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The feeling returned during our introductory meetings: the nervousness, the flurry of disordered thinking that accompanied moments of eye contact.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Damn you, body. Why must you sabotage everything good in this world?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I talked this over with my friend Ted on day one in Morocco. I was prepared for the bugs and dirt and cultural difficulties that come with Peace Corps, but nothing could prepare me for the onslaught of charming, independent-minded, attractive girls that I would be meeting throughout those first weeks. He agreed. It was eerie how many quality girls Peace Corps brings in. And here we were just a couple of dumbstruck schmucks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nearly a year into the experience, and I've managed to avoid a relationship. <i>Yes, avoid</i>, because saying that I've <i>failed</i> at finding a relationship is too gloomy. In some ways, I'm happy for this arrangement, as it has afforded me the opportunity to really sink into my community, to invest my surplus emotional currency in folks right here in my village. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On the other hand, I still hang onto those crushes from PST and CBT phase. I cannot deny it - there are a few women who, when they call, give me that chemical rush: <i>O love, thou makest a fool of the wise, a lunatic of the levelheaded, a besotted booby of a Peace Corps Volunteer.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I love it that they exist, really, because it provides an extra incentive to do something really awesome with my service. Never miss a chance to showboat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To all of those PCVs out there pierced by Cupid's darts, happy Valentine's Day.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-74045238011795371802012-11-15T15:44:00.001-06:002012-11-15T15:44:57.609-06:00Between Rivers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6U7E3Vq97OI/UKVeovKoQMI/AAAAAAAACWY/yJnCbUF__tQ/s1600/bin_ouidane_group.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6U7E3Vq97OI/UKVeovKoQMI/AAAAAAAACWY/yJnCbUF__tQ/s640/bin_ouidane_group.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Before</b> and <b>after</b> are words that define a thing relative to another thing. Two events or objects, sequential or spatial. These words are powerful because they limit. But their limits are incomplete. They leave an open end in what is at least a two-dimensional world. Much more powerful is a related word: <b>between</b>. Yes, now, assuming there are only two dimensions to our subject, we have real limits. We have contained an idea. Now we can wrap our minds around the possibilities, see the whole potential spectrum, as it were.<br /><br />Anal retentiveness and indecisiveness are inconvenient bedfellows, but both seem to sleep comfortably within me. It's frustrating. I get very frustrated sometimes. And this is why the idea of <b>between</b> comforts me. <i>Ah, I can control this more easily. There are parameters. It's manageable. Maybe I'll even come to a decision.</i><br /><br />This last week, I took a trip to a place called Bin El Ouidane, "Between the Rivers." The Bin (pronounced like "bean") is the result of a damming project completed by the French in the 50s. Although it undoubtedly flooded a lot of good land, the resultant lake is a sight to behold. A group of us descended upon Leah's site up in the the Atlas mountains, which we used as a base of operations for the kayaking trip and the election party thereafter. Allow me to biograph each of them briefly:<br /><br /><b>Leah</b>: Our hostess is actually the first PCV I met. I ran into her and her older sister in a hotel in Philadelphia. We rode the elevator together and chatted briefly about what we were getting ourselves into. The next day, we sat in adjacent rows on the plane to Casablanca, and discovered in each other our mutual love of books. Later, we stood in line at customs together. For one reason or another, I was at first somewhat nervous in front of Leah. Perhaps this was due to her obvious intelligence and quick-ticking alertness. Perhaps because she is a beautiful woman who evinces control and confidence. In any case, ever since our first elevator chat, I've been drawn to her personality, and I've found in addition to these qualities, she's also quite sweet and laid-back. I hope our friendship continues to develop and that I get to spend much more time in her company. Oh, I should also mention that she makes terrific cinnamon rolls.<br /><br /><b>Evan</b>: I'll talk about Evan and his wife, Carly, a lot over the next year and a half, partly because they're my closest PVC neighbors, and partly because they're just really cool people. Evan and I didn't know each other very well until our first regional meeting, shortly after site placement. Immediately, I felt I could trust him. Few people have won my trust so quickly and easily, but everything about Evan reinforces my instinctual trust. He's a man of great character, a man who proves his mettle. On top of this, Evan has a terrific sense of humor. He speaks candidly, sincerely, and with just the right kind of perspective and humor that you'd expect of a really good guy.<br /><br /><b>Carly</b>: In many ways, Carly reminds me of my dear sister, Whitney. Both are wonderfully thoughtful individuals. What I mean is they devote more time to considering everyday experiences and decisions more than most people. If I ever needed a mediator for a situation between PCVs, Carly would by my first call. She genuinely cares about understanding all sides of a situation, and she never rushes judgment. Carly is a invaluable friend, and I can see myself relying on her for advice whenever I find myself at a difficult juncture, somebody to speak her mind and to give me pause, to remind me to fill myself with consideration. I am extremely fortunate to have two such wonderful individuals living so near.<br /><br /><b>Melanie</b>: Let me mention it up front and get it out of the way: Melanie has a <a href="http://postgradmel.com/" target="_blank">fantastic blog</a> recounting her experiences in the Peace Corps, and in that blog, she posts many wonderful, beautiful pictures of her experiences in country (the pictures of the Bin are hers). There is, of course, much more to Melanie than these things; these are just manifestations of some really beautiful qualities that Melanie embodies. First, she is a true pilgrim, a seeker -- roles which dovetail with her boundless and innocent curiosity. Melanie gives me the feeling that she experiences the world with the type of fascination and wonder that most people foolishly cast off in adolescence, believing it to be a "childish" trait. The fact that Melanie still embodies this spirit - well, it fills me with hope and optimism, as tacky as that sounds. Creativity and curiosity coalesce in a magical, infinitely charming way in the person of Melanie.<br /><br /><b>Lizzy</b>: The first time I got to know Lizzy, we danced. Well, it was more of a group dance. You see, we were staying with Evan and Carly and to celebrate the end of their summer camp, the kids put on a talent show. We wanted to show off talent of our own, so we learned the choreography to "A Million Ways" by OK Go. We pulled it off marvelously, by the way. Anyway, Lizzy is a fellow Kansan, and if I had to reduce her essence to one word, it would be "fun." It is just impossible to be bored when Lizzy is around, so uplifting and entertaining is she. I was fortunate to see her interact with Moroccan adults during my stay in Leah's site, and I was surprised and impressed by her willingness to insert herself into situations with Moroccans. At Leah's host family's house, Lizzy jumped right into the kitchen to chat with the ladies and help out with the <i>mlwi</i>. The women were immediately endeared to Lizzy, and it's not hard to see why, what with the strong pull of her magnetic personality and the living energy that is her laugh.<br /><br /><b>Ted</b>: I've written about Ted before, but I want to reiterate the strength of his character, because I've grown even closer to the man since CBT phase. First, he is easily the most knowledgeable PCV I know, and if I were ever to place a bet on a Quiz Bowl competition, I'd put all my money on whatever team he was on. Ted has been my confidante on several occasions, helping me talk through my own difficulties and anxieties, setting me straight when I needed it (often), and making me laugh when I don't expect it. If I were to somehow find a way to alienate every other PCV in Morocco, Ted would still be there for me, reassuring, offering amusing anecdotes from his life, and baffling me with his esoterica.<br /><br />In short, these are just the kinds of people who need to be serving as role models. On a less important note, they also make some wonderful synergy for an election day (night) party. I don't know if I've had that much fun since coming into the country, and I can credit that completely to the quality of friends with whom I was surrounded.<br /><br />They say that PCV friends will be friends for life. Our shared experience is enough to maintain that bond (and what an experience!) for life, so they say. Still, there will come a day when we all split and go our separate ways. I am no stranger to the process. It happened the first time for me when I worked at Yellowstone National Park. Especially traumatic was this fracturing, because most of my friends lived in far-flung parts of the world, like Beijing, Helsinki, Chișinău, and Bogotá. It happened again with the end of my work in Wind Cave National Park. A third time, it happened with college graduation. (They also say college friends will be friends for life, but this didn't minimize the violence of the separation, including that of me and my last girlfriend, Jennie).<br /><br />Some astronomers think the universe is in a constant state of expanse and collapse. Each cycle ends with a massive explosion that throws off matter in every direction; all things begins anew. How like the universe are our social lives! How violent are the fluctuations of human relationships! The dark augury of the explosion to come matters far less than what exists in between: that stretch of time in which stars ignite, planets form, life appears, and relationships give us meaning.<br /><br />One of these days, the dam at the Bin will fail, and a massive wall of destruction will tumble through the Atlas mountains. In the meantime, the between-time, let's enjoy the beauty of the lake.</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EB6_3gfeAfA/UKVeq2wEQEI/AAAAAAAACWg/9CfdikF1KXs/s1600/bin_ouidane_me_and_leah.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EB6_3gfeAfA/UKVeq2wEQEI/AAAAAAAACWg/9CfdikF1KXs/s640/bin_ouidane_me_and_leah.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-64120301549201316392012-10-31T15:42:00.002-05:002012-10-31T15:42:28.661-05:00Electric Autumn<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GAM48rU1UZ4/UJAx1LXxwVI/AAAAAAAACWA/QqTa-M7QzBc/s1600/IMG_1270.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GAM48rU1UZ4/UJAx1LXxwVI/AAAAAAAACWA/QqTa-M7QzBc/s640/IMG_1270.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Often, on those electric Autumn evenings, I would wrap up my work and, finding myself unwilling to sleep, step out into the night. I liked to observe the town late at night, when most students were in their dorm rooms and most other folk asleep or reading a book in bed. Getting away from people was important. Away from people, <i>things</i> would acquire their own vitality. Sterling itself seemed to hold its breath, and I drifted about, aimless and content.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Oddly-lit structures drew me. I liked to observe the various moods Cooper Hall took on at different angles by moonlight, liked to see it in motion, walking the length of the sidewalk across the street, the contrasting motion of foreground and background.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Parks, too, drew me. As a child, the swings were dearest, and even today they lure me. I could swing for hours, ruminating, tracking the motion of the stars, taking in the gravity, the silence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">These moments are therapeutic. More than that - enriching. How often I've sought somebody with whom to share them. How often I've been disappointed in the search. Is it possible to share an experience which is essentially, profoundly inward? From stories, I've come to hope in that possibility.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">For the time being, however, I live in a society for which this activity is wholly alien, even suspicious, most definitely unhealthy.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-frLtirzGbQ8/UJAmZB1YOII/AAAAAAAACVA/mL_XqT-9XEU/s1600/looking+at+the+house.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-frLtirzGbQ8/UJAmZB1YOII/AAAAAAAACVA/mL_XqT-9XEU/s400/looking+at+the+house.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">my building - I live on the top floor (with the tiny windows)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Though I yearn for those kinds of quality moments, Morocco has made me adapt to a surfeit of socialization. This year's holiday season ("the big feast," they call it) began five days ago. Knowing I would likely be invited to more meals than I could conceivably digest, I was careful in how I responded to invitations. On the day before festivities were to begin, my mudir called to say <i>he</i> had arranged that I would "pass Eid with mister Mosa," a man I had known only through the mudir and with whom I'd spoken only a handful of words.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As it turns out, "pass Eid with" actually means "spend every waking moment with." Over the next four days, I would take breakfast, lunch, dinner, and afternoon and midmorning tea with the Mosa family. I would return home (accompanied by Mosa and his three-year-old son) well into the night.</span>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hsWqYFwfm14/UJAmc8BKBfI/AAAAAAAACVI/Sy9ujFoqR3I/s1600/main+road+sunset.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hsWqYFwfm14/UJAmc8BKBfI/AAAAAAAACVI/Sy9ujFoqR3I/s400/main+road+sunset.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">sunset in a typical street in the PAM section of town, where I live</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Happily, Mosa & Co. are a delightful bunch, and not a moment of my time with them was begrudged. I even managed to capture a pretty intimate video portrait of a goat slaughter (send me an email if you're interested). </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Poejoi7LBfs/UJAmfFxwcxI/AAAAAAAACVQ/7Tf8VSnH2As/s1600/mountain+view+from+roof.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Poejoi7LBfs/UJAmfFxwcxI/AAAAAAAACVQ/7Tf8VSnH2As/s400/mountain+view+from+roof.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">my rooftop "mountain view"</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nonetheless, the memories of that calm, introspective peace which visited me on those nights haunt me, moreso because they have an air of unrepeatability, like a piece of history lost forever. Or perhaps they haunt me because they seem impossible. As life puts more distance between myself, my current context, and my past experiences, I grow increasingly suspicious of the authenticity of those memories. An older volunteer once told me that as our Completion of Service date nears, volunteers start to experience a good deal of anxiety, because we've forgotten what is normal in American terms. <i>What if we don't remember how to act in our own country?</i> </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-83ZCreB6pSA/UJAmhVpaPSI/AAAAAAAACVY/U_IqCf1CQuo/s1600/northwest.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-83ZCreB6pSA/UJAmhVpaPSI/AAAAAAAACVY/U_IqCf1CQuo/s400/northwest.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">many neighborhoods exhibit a mix of colorful and dilapidated</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tonight is Halloween. More than anything, I'd like to be with friends tonight, engaged in all sorts of waggeries and mischief. I want to dress up and go to the Halloween dance, to be raucous and outrageous and laugh a great deal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And this is the duality of life in Morocco: I want those quiet, solitary moments and those goofy moments surrounded by friends, and neither are readily available. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MZTWJ6SOP3k/UJAmkJk6KvI/AAAAAAAACVg/7O7PT3k4DXU/s1600/storks2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MZTWJ6SOP3k/UJAmkJk6KvI/AAAAAAAACVg/7O7PT3k4DXU/s400/storks2.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">these storks are often spotted atop the water tower early evenings</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Could it be that an important life lesson is waiting for me in this contradiction, in this tension? Likely. Likely. I'll be searching for this lesson, possibly for the better part of a year. With any luck, I'll find it - along with the companionship of a fellow seeker.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y7JUc_ZBmtM/UJAmqNEs8eI/AAAAAAAACVo/Zat_2c1z6Ns/s1600/sundown.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y7JUc_ZBmtM/UJAmqNEs8eI/AAAAAAAACVo/Zat_2c1z6Ns/s400/sundown.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">the sunset from my roof</span></td></tr>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-21366606735592015452012-10-01T15:15:00.000-05:002012-10-01T15:50:31.275-05:00Around and Around<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JH0NB40PQRs/UGnrrTthmqI/AAAAAAAACSs/LppLb1xSZL8/s1600/2012+IST+Marrakech+104.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JH0NB40PQRs/UGnrrTthmqI/AAAAAAAACSs/LppLb1xSZL8/s640/2012+IST+Marrakech+104.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">my staj at In-Service Training (most of us, anyway)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">They say that you only appreciate the value of a thing or a place or a person after it is taken away from you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bull, I say. Often enough, you know just how much it's going to hurt even before the separation happens.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take a look at these people. Do you see them? Do you see me? Well I'm near the back, center-left. Now, stop looking at me and look at the group again. These are most of the people that came into Morocco with me back in March.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I like many of them, but I love only a few. Undoubtedly, I would love more if I only had spent more time with them, gotten to know them better, but things work one way and not the other, who can say what would have happened if etc etc.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I'm thinking about these people because I have been remarkably lucky this past month to have spent so much time with them. The above picture is from a week of In-Service Training (IST) conducted in Marrakech with my entire staj.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After IST, I ascended Jbel Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa (13,700 ft).</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hu4hCt9b_js/UGnrs2tUvlI/AAAAAAAACS0/d814kDFoqwo/s1600/Me+and+Charlotte+on+Toubkal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hu4hCt9b_js/UGnrs2tUvlI/AAAAAAAACS0/d814kDFoqwo/s400/Me+and+Charlotte+on+Toubkal.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">me and my best friend - the highest couple in North Africa</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before these two things, I was living the life in Agadir for a library workshop. Besides learning how to make a library happen in my site, I spent lots of fun times on the beach with the people closest to me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And before that, long ago, I coordinated a summer camp in Azilal along with three of my favorite people in the country (the fourth showed up for the last couple of days).</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hHxVFjapVCA/UGnr95uVaaI/AAAAAAAACTE/QX-94w1vlUg/s1600/Teaching+in+Azilal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hHxVFjapVCA/UGnr95uVaaI/AAAAAAAACTE/QX-94w1vlUg/s400/Teaching+in+Azilal.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">teaching the kids about neat nature stuff</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After the camp, I saw some beautiful cascades with these people.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F6wQTQzb-lE/UGnr_t0tJ2I/AAAAAAAACTI/6d2GiFAe1QY/s1600/With+Zouhair+at+the+Falls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F6wQTQzb-lE/UGnr_t0tJ2I/AAAAAAAACTI/6d2GiFAe1QY/s400/With+Zouhair+at+the+Falls.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">3/8 of our CBT group</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I love these moments. When you hear me say I like being in Morocco, what I mean is that I like these kinds of moments. Honestly, the love hasn't struck me where it counts yet - in my site. With the Host Country Nationals.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Things could change. School is in session now, and I have an excellent chance to make some friends in my site. (God how I need friends in my site.) I'll start with some English classes this month, maybe a little tech club.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to put a library in my Dar Chabab. These kids have no library close by.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to start a CLIMB program. It's an outdoor education program culminating in the ascent of Toubkal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to start an astronomy club. Easy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I want to start a media club - radio, video, journalism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Eventually, I want to start something like a debate club. If I could pull this off, this would be my big legacy in PC Morocco. I want it to happen in multiple sites, and I want to see a debate tournament happen before I leave country. I have at least one friend who is interested in pursuing this idea with her kids as well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the meantime, I'm going to shed the weight that I've gained and reclaim my fitness. Despite being chased by a pack of feral dogs, I still run regularly in my site, and I still do Mullers. And I'll be damned if I don't learn French while I'm in a French-speaking country.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then there are the times that I think, "None of this will happen. I won't be in this country long enough to do any of these things."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those of you who have talked with me know that I am struggling. Emotions are at once our salvation (for they remind us of our humanity) and a curse (for they threaten our sanity). Since coming back to site, two feelings have been playing in me: sadness and a panicky fear.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The good news is that neither of these is depression, which is what I felt a good deal of the time before September. The bad news is that I'm sad and fearful. Sad because I know I'll be away from the people I care about most for a long time. We can think that we'll see each other a lot throughout our service, but in reality, we'll probably only see each other nine or ten times before we split apart and go back to the United States. We have maybe twenty or twenty-five days of togetherness to look forward, separated by vast stretches of loneliness.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Panic because I suspect my emotions are going to turn on me at any moment and cut me down, strip me of my vigor, and leave me in a state of lethargy and depression.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Until that happens, I'll try to get some pictures of my town posted on this blog. And I'll try dancing. Dancing usually helps. And here's one last picture to lighten the mood.</span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OVfZGNP306E/UGn3qIiXJbI/AAAAAAAACTk/Zw0AxoAHSSk/s1600/Freddy+Mercury+IST.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OVfZGNP306E/UGn3qIiXJbI/AAAAAAAACTk/Zw0AxoAHSSk/s400/Freddy+Mercury+IST.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">this is how I auction myself off</span></span></td></tr>
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</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-32920352244312485752012-07-21T21:16:00.001-05:002012-07-21T21:16:50.178-05:00Morocco, Land of Ambiguity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-joDRSb9aIag/UAtbGoJauRI/AAAAAAAACSA/oZSOAbXsPmc/s1600/socks.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-joDRSb9aIag/UAtbGoJauRI/AAAAAAAACSA/oZSOAbXsPmc/s320/socks.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The sun was pummeling me. On my shoulders and on the back of my skull. When Moroccans catch the sniffles, they say "The cold hit me." On this particular afternoon in Sidi Bennour, as I wandered from street to street, that bully Sol took no mercy, and as my fragile frame absorbed each blow, I could feel the scorn from the sun, the mocking and scorn, and not just from celestial bodies, but Arab bodies as well, from behind their piles of watermelon and cactus carts, straw hats and tooth-ish grins going "What is this white guy doing wandering around here in the middle of the afternoon?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What I was doing was looking for a damned pair of socks. Eventually, I found a guy selling piles of used clothes. There appeared to be no order to the mess, so I just asked him if he sold any packages of socks. Hell, I didn't know. I've witnessed butchers selling toothbrushes on the side. Anyway, I might as well have asked the man if he had any poisonous snakes for sale. He couldn't even tell me where exactly I could buy socks in town, except maybe by going down the road "a long ways" and looking around in some shops down there.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Classic Moroccan. Send a poor fellow down the road. Glad to be out of the sun and semi-curious as to his clothing selection, I perused some t-shirts in a pile near the front of the store. After I was satisfied that they were all stained with sweat and/or assorted tajine sauces, I thanked the man and headed back into the ring.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At a loss, I ducked into a hanut and got a cold drink and a nasty pastry for the equivalent of 80 cents. It didn't make me feel any better about my failure. All I could do on my walk back to Evan and Carly's house was notice the feet of every Moroccan I saw. Every one of them were sandal-clad.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Later in the afternoon, Lizzy and I had a mission: find a place that could print a file from a USB drive. For the kids, naturally.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After trekking through half the city and receiving contradictory directions from a legion of assorted street-peddlers, pedestrians, and restaurateurs, we finally found a place. Only took about 45 minutes. Pretty good time for Morocco.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But we weren't done. Now we needed to find a photocopier.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was on this important leg of the journey that I spotted them - clean, white, cotton gems, neatly packaged. I snatched them up, the thrill of victory coursing up the back of my neck and pooling behind my ears. Into the tiny storefront, I took stock of the situation: one man behind the counter, top 4 buttons unfastened, smacks of early 80s porn star. One man in front of the counter, rascally smile, fat but muscular, carrying two crutches.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I trot out all of the usual niceties. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Hello. Is everything good? How are you? Are you fine? Thank God. God bless you. How much are these socks?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"30 dirham."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lizzy was not impressed, and she'd be damned before she let me pay that much for socks. After some minor commotion and a strong assurance that we were not tourists, she took me by the arm and started to drag me out of the store while I shot an apologetic look at the porn star.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The patron and/or friend (you can never be sure if people in shops are there to shop or to be social) tried to reason with us: socks are rare in Morocco. They are always pricey. Finally, the man came down: 25 dirhams. Good enough for me. Desperation cares little for a pretty bargain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The man held my socks ransom and demanded of me my reason for being so far from any tourist spot. Lizzy and I rehearsed our all-familiar lines about volunteering and Dar Chababing and so forth, and the two men, visibly impressed, set about trying to win us over with their kindness.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The owner would not let me have my socks until I heard him out about all variety of benefits of prayer and fasting and converting to Islam. After much polite nodding and no agreement on my part, he decided it was time to show me the Muslim channel on his little t.v. Meanwhile, the man in crutches was working on Lizzy. She had apparently spotted some lotion or hair gel or something in a squeeze bottle, and our new friend was offering to purchase the item for her. She of course adamantly refused, but the gentleman matched and trumped her stubbornness. The mul hanut refused his friend's money, however, effectively giving away his merchandise. Then, they asked if there was anything else we'd like from the store.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"No, but thank you very much."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Come have tea with us then!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What could we do but acquiesce? After all, they had just purchased a bottle of product and showed us the religion channel on their t.v.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fortunately, in Morocco, there are never more than four shops in a row unbroken by a cafe. A hop, skip, and a jump later, we were sitting in a cafe, the four of us, being served mint tea. Yunus, the patron-socialite, told us about his work: president of an Association for the handicapped. He even had his registration card to prove it. "Do you know the mudir here? How interesting! What a nice card this is! Thanks for the tea!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And then trouble stood up across the room and made his way over, red-faced, passion in his eyes. He abruptly approached Yunus and the storekeeper. The vein popping out of his head matched his accusing finger, sometimes pointing at Lizzy, sometimes pointing at Yunus, always accompanied by some furious rant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not satisfied with yelling at us, he proceeded to air his grievance to all others in the cafe, and at one point I thought he was going to grab the garson by the collar and clock him for letting things be as they were.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lizzy and I tried to make sense of the confusion. <i>Is this guy really so worked up because there is a woman in the cafe?</i> This was the obvious interpretation, for such a thing is hardly ever seen in this part of the country. I was becoming furious. Watching the fool spout off to somebody by the bathroom (all the while still pointing at Lizzy), I felt my control leaving me. I wanted to get up and confront the man. I wanted to give him a minty mouthful of my tea.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then the man looked at me and addressed me personally. He said, "Pay attention! Pay attention! He tries to fool you with his bad legs. He wants to steal from your friend! He's a thief!"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My brain backed up, flipped around, and rebooted.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Lizzy, he's saying this guy sitting next to you is not to be trusted. He says the guy wants to rob us."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"What! ...Do you think what he says has any merit?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"...I don't know."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It occurred to me then that the two men who brought us there were acting rather strangely in response to this vociferous cafe-dweller. After the initial verbal assault, Yunus promptly rose from his seat and visited the bathroom. Afterwards, hardly a word was spoken between them and us. We left with all our money and a pocketfuls of confusion besides.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nothing is clear in Morocco. When you think you've nailed a situation, it shifts from under you. Nearly everything that happens happens indirectly; the good Muslim professes to follow the straight path (Nishan), but in their actions, Arabs are about as straight as Oscar Wilde.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Was this man crazy? Was he simply trying to find a way to expel the woman from the man's domain? Was it prejudice against Yunus, against the handicapped? Or were these men really untrustworthy?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Devil take them, for all I care. For that night I lay in a hammock on the roof, above Yunus and the porn star and the man jacked up on caffeine, and I think to myself, "None of that made much sense, but some day I'll look back on this and make some kind of meaning out of it, fit it into some kind of comprehensible mold, something tight and cogent and maybe even socially poignant. And I have new socks"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And maybe that's what Morocco is for us: two years worth of confusing experiences ripe for the reinventing, reimagining, reinterpreting. And I guess that wouldn't be so bad.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-19112418603561043502012-06-21T06:56:00.000-05:002012-06-21T06:56:41.156-05:00First Impressions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wIrf9UXuCBI/T-MIAKzEIJI/AAAAAAAABsE/7T9Sd2fMpyg/s1600/Cofee+Table.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wIrf9UXuCBI/T-MIAKzEIJI/AAAAAAAABsE/7T9Sd2fMpyg/s640/Cofee+Table.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">my wonderfully floral coffee table, surrounded by short Moroccan couches</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">To avoid the mistake of trying to outline every major thought, development, action, and reaction that has taken place since my last post and thereby invoking tedium in every reader, I will aim at making the opposite mistake: of painting my experience in strokes far too broad. The impressionistic effect this will have should by no means be taken as a summary of my experience to date, but rather as one moment in time, one in a series of many, changing moments.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />And so now it is quiet, early afternoon, just before the air begins to chill and the streets begin to fill with the Moroccan socialites and children come out to throw rocks at dogs and -- well, tonight, I just want to be in my apartment to write a little.<br /><br />So here goes:<br /><br />Arbaa Aounate. Arbia Lawnate. 3rba Aownat. These are just three ways (of many) to transcribe the name of my little town into English. It is located not far from the ocean, two hours by Souq bus (read: 40 minutes by car), and in the other direction, about three and a half hours away, there are mountains - the High Atlas.<br /><br />Aounate is in some ways similar to my home town in Kansas. It is about the same size, surrounded by farmland, in flat country. About 30 minutes to the West is a larger town, called Sidi Bennour, a similar size to Hutchinson, which is about the same distance from home.<br /><br />Yes, home. I've been feeling quite a bit of homesickness, an odd feeling for someone who travels a lot and has never had it before. But you know, this is different from my other travels. For instance, I'm not exactly in love with Moroccan culture. No no - let me be honest with you, will you? There's no debating taste, it's no crime, etc etc.<br /><br />I find the art quite boring. The complex geometric patterns can only capture my imagination for so long; I'm over it. The music is drone-like and rhythmic, with some interesting beats, but it is repetitive and unimaginative, and anyway, I'm not a rhythmophile. And so on with their movies (awful), literature (what literature?), fashion (lots of head scarves). The food can be pretty good, but with as much time as the women are made to spend in the home (i.e. nearly all day), it is no surprise that Muslim cuisine is quite delicious. And it's hard to really enjoy the food, knowing that a decent woman has been slaving away most of the day in order to prepare it, and even if she wanted to, for instance, go into town instead, society wouldn't permit it.<br /><br />To make matters worse, almost every conversation with a stranger goes like this:<br /><br />"Hello. How are you?"<br />"Thanks be to God. Are you fine?"<br />"Everything is fine."<br />"Thanks be to God. Is all well?"<br />"All is well."<br />"Very good. Thanks be to God. You speak Arabic?"<br />"A little. I'm a volunteer from America. I'm working at the Dar Chebab."<br />"Oh, from New York!"<br />(<i>sigh</i>) "No, from the state of Kansas."<br />"..."<br />"...right in the middle of America. I'll be here for two years."<br />"Wonderful! You are welcome here always. How do you like Morocco? Is it nice?"<br />"Yes, it's nice. I'm glad to be here."<br />"Do you pray?"<br />"...what?"<br />"Do you pray? Are you Muslim?"<br />"No..."<br />"What are you?"<br /><br />Yes, this happens all the time - nearly every day, in fact. And at this point in the conversation, I want to smack the person in the head and say "NONE OF YOUR GOD-DAMNED BUSINESS!" But I don't. I play by all the rules to ensure a decent, civil close to the conversation (meaning I lie).<br /><br />In other news, I now have a place of my own. Bittersweet, since my new host family has been so warm and caring and loving and hilarious. Plus, my host father speaks Arabic more clearly than anybody I've ever met, making communication so much easier.<br /><br />That being said, I was ready to regain some control over my life again. For two months and two weeks, I had been making almost no decisions regarding my daily plans, nutrition, topics of conversation - hell, it's a miracle my town lets me pick out my own clothes, so bent are they on running my life for me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NTZQ93MCcIk/T-MJIT11kiI/AAAAAAAABsM/MXVgwC8zdj8/s1600/first+of+room.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="128" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NTZQ93MCcIk/T-MJIT11kiI/AAAAAAAABsM/MXVgwC8zdj8/s640/first+of+room.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">get a load of the pink; as you can see from this and the above picture, <br />Moroccans love patters, and don't necessarily care if they match</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />I must seem to them completely incompetent. Since I can't understand even moderately complex sentences, I must also not know how to, for instance, use a key. Or cook. Or do laundry. Or buy simple items from the Hanut. Or unpack my own luggage.<br /><br />So, when I finally managed to get all of my stuff moved into my apartment, just as I was opening my suitcase and taking out a shirt, I heard my name marching up the stairs, followed by a line of women intent on unpacking for me.<br /><br />"Dear God," I said, "I can do this alone. There is no problem. Alone. Please."<br /><br />But they paid no heed to my pleas. Nor would they let me choose where to unpack my things. In one illustrative instance, after I had placed my shoes in a closet adjacent to the living room, my host mother spouted off some nonsense about the kitchen. My impression is that she wanted me to store my shoes there.<br /><br />"I must not have interpreted her correctly," I told myself. No sooner was I reasoning thus, and there my mother is, taking my shoes from the living room and marching across the landing to the kitchen. She places them below the pots and pans and spouts off more Arabic and a blinding rate. Obviously, she means to make it clear to me that shoes belong in the kitchen, stupid, and that's just the way it is.<br /><br />But enough bitching. These situations are bound to be frustrating. The host country nationals are bound to frustrate us more than we frustrate them (having gone through cross-cultural training, we know how to avoid stepping on culturally-normative toes, and how to pretend like we don't mind when they do things that would be unacceptable in America). I understand this well, and I well understand that one day, this will all be wildly funny.<br /><br />Here, I must pay due respect to my mudir and host family, all amazing individuals, supportive and generous. My mudir is especially supportive, and if I didn't know better, I would think that he's been through this experience himself, so keen is his perception into my day-to-day stresses.<br /><br />We've made it through CBT, through swearing in, even as if in a crazed, horse-drawn cart with square wheels. And now we've made it over the crest of the hill and must see how the lay of the land appears from on high.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-13940480940808556092012-05-28T11:14:00.000-05:002012-05-28T11:14:39.095-05:00Moving On, or: Why I love the Peace Corps Phone Plan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My Alleyway in Fes</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Swearing-In took place on May 24th. My official acronym has changed from PCT to PCV.<br /><br />This may not seem too significant, but it's importance cannot be stressed enough.<br /><br />Firstly, it means that I'll now be living on my own. Until now, the Peace Corps has held my hand (and looked over my shoulder) at every moment of every day, tracking my whereabouts, calling me, sending me emails and phone-calls and visits from administration.<br /><br />Now, nothing.<br /><br />After swearing-in, Peace Corps took us to their compound in Rabat, fed us lunch, and said, "So long. Good luck finding your way back to the hotel and then to your site."<br /><br />I possessed piece of paper with a name and a phone number, along with a limited vocabulary. Despite the circumstances, I managed to make arrangements with my new host father. In addition, I was expected to arrange transportation on my own, which to my general astonishment, worked without a hitch. Perhaps my Darija is better than I thought.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1HqCMnFpz_w/T8Oj4fli7AI/AAAAAAAABpo/LyHe051MEJ0/s1600/IMG_2688.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1HqCMnFpz_w/T8Oj4fli7AI/AAAAAAAABpo/LyHe051MEJ0/s400/IMG_2688.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">check out this Moroccan sofa<br />it has nothing to do with this post; I just wanted you to see it</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><br />Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the T-to-C transition package includes a good dose of isolation from my friends - much more than during training. Now, instead of seeing only 5 other Americans on a daily basis, I see 0. I have nobody to speak English with on a daily basis, nobody to translate for me, and significantly, nobody with whom to share frustrations and/or laughs.<br /><br />Which is why I love the Peace Corps phone plan.<br /><br />We get unlimited calls to and from others in the plan, which includes all Volunteers, Trainees, and Staff. They even give us a little credit each month for text messages (but not much).<br /><br />Let me introduce you to some of the people I can (and do) call at any time, the people with whom I've shared many precious memories, the people with whom I'm honored to be friends.<br /><br /><b>Ted<br /></b>I must start with Ted because he was my first substantial relationship in the Peace Corps. I first saw him at the hotel in Philadelphia, but at that time, I just thought he was a boisterous New Yorker. Well, he is a boisterous New Yorker, but also much more. I had the privilege of rooming with Ted both times I was in Rabat, and I had the luck of being stationed close to him for CBT. Ted is very bright, sometimes esoteric, always surprising in his choice of vocabulary. He makes me laugh, keeps me on my toes, and exhibits impressive leadership.<br /><br />Now, he is 4 or 5 hours away, tucked in a mountainside village northeast of my site.<br /><br /><b>Kirsten<br /></b>I first got to know Kirsten well one day in Rabat, making the site-seeing circuit. I first saw her in Philadelphia, and when she spoke of women's issues, I thought to myself, "She would make a valuable partner. She cares about the oppressed."<br /><br />I was right. And in addition to showing great concern for the down-trodden, Kirsten is very well-read. She's into feminist theory and post-modernism, and she loves a good discussion. In short, she's one of the most interesting girls I've met. Although Kirsten knows much more than I do, I've never felt belittled or patronized; she is the kind of person to share interesting information with excitement and a touch of nerdiness, just the way I like it.<b></b>Now, she is living hours away to the Southwest.<b><br /><br />Charlotte<br /></b>When I first saw Charlotte in Philly, I judged her by her glasses. I am ashamed to admit this, but it's the truth. I simply took one glance and thought "Hipster." Done. Safi. She ended up being in my CBT group, but even during our preliminary language sessions in Rabat, I didn't get to know her.<br /><br />It wasn't until moving to Fes that we became close, both in a manner of speaking, and literally, for we lived right across from each other. Charlotte probably knows me better than anybody else in this country, and I've spent many hours blowing off steam, making jokes, and having coffee with her. I can't imagine my CBT phase without her, and when we said goodbye - I must be honest - I teared up quite a bit.<br /><br />A mountain range and many, many hours of travel now separate us.<b><br /><br />Jenna<br /></b>I think of Jenna as a searcher. Always asking questions, always probing into the meat of the matter. Because of this, whenever I'm with Jenna, I find myself having novel thoughts and insights into myself and my service. One could almost say she's a muse of sorts. Jenna has a way of making me feel completely safe about sharing my thoughts honestly and in a straightforward kind of a way. I never fear judgment or disdain, two sentiments I think she's incapable of housing.<br /><br />Luckily for me, Jenna is relatively close, maybe only a couple hours away. I get to see her at least once every three months for regional meetings.<b><br /><br />Libby<br /></b>Libby is the only one on this list that wasn't in my CBT Hub, so I didn't get to see her as often. Even before CBT, though, I spent a good deal of time with her, walking and talking about ourselves. In a word, Libby is chill. She's a good hang-out buddy, and whenever I was in her room, I found myself spread out across a bed, staring at the ceiling, relaxed and chatty. Some friends are exhausting, high-energy, intensive people and others are like a recharge. Libby is the latter. She keeps my sanity in check and helps me keep things in perspective. Another thing I admire about her is her no-nonsense, frank personality and her ability to just roll with whatever comes her way. If anyone can make it through two years without going insane, it's her.<br /><br />Now, Libby is way up north, half a country away.<b><br /><br />Zouhair</b><br /><br />This list wouldn't be complete without mentioning my LCF Zouhair. Although I'd always thought of him as my elder, Zouhair and I are the same age. At first, I thought of him as my enemy, because he had displaced my first LCF, Said, whom I'd already gotten to love. Zouhair broke through my emotional barriers, though, with his goofiness and amiability. He always makes me smile, laugh, shake my head in amusement, and laugh some more.<br /><br />Also, he is outrageous. His actions, reactions, blanket statements, confabulations, and perversions of reality are a constant source of frustration, thrills, and fodder for jokes later on. All in all, he made CBT what it was: fun and filled with tender memories.<br /><br />Although Zouhair is in my region, he won't come to regional meetings (as an LCF, his job with PC is over for now). He is still several hours away, up in the mountains. I will make it a point to visit him in his shop when I have vacation time. <br /><br />He is not on the phone plan.<br /><br />------<br /><br />Another chapter in the emotional roller-coaster that is Peace Corps. And with the closing of that chapter, another one begins. Soon I'll post about my permanent site.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-42813553785272952882012-05-15T09:21:00.003-05:002012-05-15T09:21:30.225-05:00Ifrane and Azrou<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">During training, I had two getaway weekends. One was in a little place called Moulay Yacoub, and I've already mentioned that trip. The second was a double-whammy trip to a French Garden Town called Ifrane and nearby Azrou, situated in the Middle Atlas mountains.<br /><br />Ifrane is a completely different world from Fes and its proximal towns. First, it's new. The French created it during the protectorate period as a Hill Station, a summer retreat for French citizens wanting to escape the oppressive heat of North Africa. Therefore, it is very European. It looks like somebody transplanted a Swiss town right into the middle of the Atlas Mountains (it's nickname is "little Switzerland"). The houses are very European, and one might think they were in Europe if it weren't for the giant stork nests perched atop the chimneys around the city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /><br />Next we went to Azrou and checked into a hotel. Azrou is also fairly new, though it has an old section. It has very few tourists, especially compared to Ifrane, and is mainly used as a hub for hikers. My group set out early on Sunday for a long hike through the tree-studded alpine landscape. Our goal was twofold: to find the oldest tree in Morocco and to see monkeys.<br /><br />We were successful in both. I was the first to spot a wild monkey (a Barbary macaque, which according to the Oxford Dictionary of English is "a medium-sized, chiefly forest-dwelling Old World monkey which has a long face and cheek pouches for holding food), about a hundred yards away through a patch of trees. The group stopped to look, and within seconds, we spotted two more. Soon, other monkeys were appearing here and there, eager to see if we would give them any food. We gave them some peanuts.<br /></span><br />
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<br /><br />After seeing the monkeys, we stopped at a tourist-heavy spot (which had more monkeys and lots of dogs and donkeys) and had a picnic: bread, fruit, and cheese. I approached a European-looking girl who was holding some bulky gizmo and a little net with a plastic bag and asked her in Darija what she was doing, which was met with a frightened stare like I'd never seen before. I tried English, and it worked. The girl was French, and she graduated from college just recently, but couldn't find a job. She is working for a graduate student, she informed me, as volunteer work for one year in the Azrou area. They are studying the impacts of tourism on the monkeys. Her little pouch/net thing was being used to collect samples of pee, so they can analyze the stress levels of the poor things, and the boxy gizmos were used to record various data relating to the monkeys' behavior and numbers.<br /><br />After our lunch, we hiked on, into a very large cedar forest planted by the French. The French, by the way, introduced a number of European flora and fauna into these places to make it feel more like home for the administrative officials who chose to vacation there. The cedar forest was naturally beautiful and beautiful, naturally. Plus, it was quiet - I dare say serene.<br /><br />Through the forest, we eventually stumbled onto the oldest tree in Morocco, which was admittedly disappointing, as it was covered with graffiti and barren of any green. Plus, there were tourists galore. Oh, well.<br /><br />That about rounded out our weekend. We caught a grand taxi back to Fes (about an hour drive) and I slunk into bed, sore from hiking but thoroughly pleased to have spent my last free weekend in training with people I love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The other day I was ricocheting slowly<br />off the blue walls of this room,<br />moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,<br />from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,<br />when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary<br />where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">No cookie nibbled by a French novelist<br />could send one into the past more suddenly—<br />a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp<br />by a deep Adirondack lake<br />learning how to braid long thin plastic strips<br />into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I had never seen anyone use a lanyard<br />or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,<br />but that did not keep me from crossing<br />strand over strand again and again<br />until I had made a boxy<br />red and white lanyard for my mother.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">She gave me life and milk from her breasts,<br />and I gave her a lanyard.<br />She nursed me in many a sick room,<br />lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,<br />laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,<br />and then led me out into the airy light</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">and taught me to walk and swim,<br />and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.<br />Here are thousands of meals, she said,<br />and here is clothing and a good education.<br />And here is your lanyard, I replied,<br />which I made with a little help from a counselor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,<br />strong legs, bones and teeth,<br />and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,<br />and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.<br />And here, I wish to say to her now,<br />is a smaller gift—not the worn truth</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">that you can never repay your mother,<br />but the rueful admission that when she took<br />the two-tone lanyard from my hand,<br />I was as sure as a boy could be<br />that this useless, worthless thing I wove<br />out of boredom would be enough to make us even.</span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-29753168969493711682012-05-07T14:50:00.002-05:002012-05-07T14:50:32.646-05:00Food Matters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some of you are wondering, no doubt, about the food situation here in Morocco.<br /><br />You can be sure of two things:<br /><br />1) It is nothing like American cuisine<br />2) It is nonetheless delicious<br /><br />I've posted about food before, but now that I've been living here for two months (and eating with Moroccan families), I can update you on the chow-down sitchiashun.<br /><br />The first thing a newcomer will notice at the Moroccan dinner table is that the times are quite different. Moroccans have breakfast, of course, when they wake up, but lunch is typically served later than noon - maybe 2:00 or 3:00. At 7:00 or 8:00, a mini-meal called kaskrout is served, typically consisting of sweets, bread and jam, tea, and occasionally a treat like mlwi or bgrir, things I will describe later. True dinner is served very late, sometimes 10:00 or even as late as 11:30.<br /><br />Once the meal times are adjusted for, the visitor will next notice the preponderance of bread. Moroccans treat bread reverently, as they believe it is a gift from God. They have it at virtually every meal, and besides being consumed with jam and butter or dipped in olive oil at kaskrout and breakfast, it is also the primary utensil for scooping up the main dish, whether it be beans, lentils, rice, a tajine, or even salads. The upshot of all this is that for an American not used to so many Carbohydrates, the body is shocked by the amount of bread consumed.<br /><br />Mind you, the bread here is absolutely delicious. My host mother makes her own bread, many loaves at a time, and her fresh-baked bread is some of the most delicious I've ever tried. I've even grown accustomed to the quantity. It is normal for me to eat an entire mini-loaf in one sitting and feel totally satisfied.<br /><br />In my house, tajines are common, which is perfectly fine with me, as my mother's tajines are killer. Think onion medallions, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, olives, and lemon all cooked in a thick sauce. Scoop it up with some warm home-made bread - simply delicious. Aside from the main dish, we typically have smaller dishes with mixed salads, some consisting of finely chopped mixed veggies with a salt and vinegar dressing, and some with a mix of cooked veggies - usually tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant with plenty of spices. Olives also show up at meals on their own little dish. All in all, mealtimes are exciting times for my palate.<br /><br />Aside from little utensils for the various salads, there is typically no silverware for the main dish. The notable exception would be couscous, by far my favorite dish and also the one most difficult to consume sans silverware. For all of the talk about couscous being "Morocco's national dish," it isn't cooked very often. Rather it is considered a treat, usually to be eaten on Fridays for lunch, after mosque.<br /><br />What about drinks? At the dinner table, you will find a bottle of water which is poured into and sipped from a communal cup. At meals like kaskrout or breakfast, the drink is either tea or coffee and milk (a lot of milk and a little bit of coffee, by American standards). Both drinks are sweetened a lot, something that really threw my body off for the first several weeks in country. I found a French press in a shop around the corner and decided it would be a worthy investment, so for breakfast I've been preparing my own personal stash of black, unsweetened coffee.<br /><br />After the meal is over, cleanup begins. Personal plates aren't the norm here like they are in the U.S., so the table top is treated as a surface for bread or discarding olive pits, seeds, or bones of any kind. At the end of the meal, all of the food is wiped off of the table, but any pieces of bread are picked out separately, because it is a sacred thing and should not be thrown away with the other trash.<br /><br />One last thing: all meals begin with the phrase "bismillah," one of a plethora of Arabic "God phrases" which are peppered through day-to-day speech liberally. Bismillah means "In the name of God," and besides being used to begin meals, is uttered when one starts off with any task: getting into an automobile, starting a project, stepping through the doorway of a house, exchanging money for merchandise at the local hanut - you name it.<br /><br />Now, some highlights of Moroccan cuisine:<br /><br />mlwi - Mlwi is one of the many kinds of Moroccan bread. It is flat like a pancake, has many layers, and is fried so that the outside layer is somewhat crispy and the inside is delicious and chewy. They can be found at many Hanuts scattered throughout my neighborhood (and anywhere you go, really).<br /><br />bgrir - This is kind of like a pancake with little holes that wasn't turned over. One side is kind of like a pancake and the other has a catastrophic geography, positively covered in ridges and bumps. Moroccans might drizzle some oil and honey over the top (which tends to leak through the holes and all over my hands) or a little butter or mild cheese (ricotta, possibly?). It is really good.<br /><br />atay lwiza - This is a sweet tea made with an herb called verbena. When I order tea, I tend to order this one. With a little bit of sugar, it reminds me vaguely of the taste of fruit loops, and Moroccans say the herb has many health benefits. Just so you know, there are three main types of tea here: all are made <b>very sweet</b>, and all have a different taste. Besides lwiza, Moroccans also drink their tea brewed with what we call mint leaves in the U.S. and a third variety brewed with the leaves of absinthe (wormwood), which makes for a very bitter-sweet tea.<br /><br />tajines - I mentioned the tajines my mother has made above. All of the tajines I've tried here (and I mean ever single one) have been phenomenally delicious. They can be cooked with beef, chicken, goat, or no meat, with onions, sweet fruits, hot peppers, tomatoes, potatoes - everything. The only common factor is that all tajines are prepared in a conical dish and the ingredients are cooked down so that there is a rich sauce in the dish, which I eagerly mop up with my bread.<br /><br />maqoda - So here is how it works. First, you mash up a bunch of potatoes and add several things - garlic, cilantro, parsley, and many spices - hot pepper, saffron, salt, cumin. Mix it all together and form cookie-sized medallions. Coat the medallions in a batter and fry them in olive oil until the outside is browned and the inside is gooey potato goodness. In a separate pan, stew some tomatoes along with several spices. Once all is prepared, cut open a mini-loaf of bread and stuff it with the medallions, along with a healthy dose of the tomato sauce. It makes a super-delicious sandwich. Seriously yummy.<br /><br />harira - I've mentioned this soup before. It is loaded with flavor, and my family has made it several times, always for dinner. I love the soups here, because they are so much more flavorful than the soups in the United States. Cooks here know how to use their spices.<br /><br />One added benefit to the cooking here is that I live literally right on the edge of the major souq for my town, so right outside my house are cart upon cart upon cart loaded with every conceivable fruit and vegetable, along with fish and red meat. Every morning, live chickens are delivered to the store right around the corner. Everything is fresh.<br /><br />That's it for now. I'm going to get some food.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-16722736986121222952012-05-07T14:46:00.000-05:002012-05-07T14:46:31.007-05:00Around Fes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fes is a big city. It is the 4th-largest in Morocco, after Casablanca, Rabat, and Marrakech, with a population of about 950,000. It contains a huge royal palace, and an absolutely enormous Medina.There are basically three parts, Fes el Bali (the old, walled city), Fes-Jdid (or "new Fes") which includes the old Jewish quarter (and which is only "new" relative to Fes el Bali), and the Ville Nouvelle (the really new part, created by the French). Fes el Bali is considered the world's largest contiguous car-free urban area. It is absolutely packed with shops and people and merchandise and from what I'm told, lots and lots of poverty. All of the old city is considered a UNESCO world heritage site. Included are beautiful mosques, countless artisans, museums, mysterious relics. The oldest continuously-operating university in the world is here as well - University of Al-Qarawiyyin (founded 859).<br /><br />Fes is an old city, established in 789 by Idris I. During three separate periods in the distant past, Fes was the capital of the country (as much as it is possible to refer to Morocco as a unified country in those days). Fes played a major role in the sciences and arts, especially during the Middle Ages, when Muslims, Jews, and Christians all came to enjoy the flowering intellectualism.<br /><br />Fes is a neat city. I have spent several days with my friends happily wandering through the complex maze, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the Arab world. We have seen beautifully-carved calligraphy in the Bou Inania Madrasa, a 14th-century mosque/college and one of the few religious places in Morocco that non-Muslims can enjoy. We have seen the Merenid Tombs, ruins from the same time period. From the hillside of the tombs, we have looked over the entire city. Just outside the walls of the Medina, we have walked through beautiful royal gardens.<br /><br />If you, reader, ever come in Morocco, I will take you to Fes.<br /><br />Finally, I want to share an amusing passage from my guidebook. Of Fes, it says:<br /><br />"The <b>Berber pharmacy</b> in the Medina has hundreds of jars of twisted root and twig neatly lined up along the walls. <i>Don't eat the seed-pod like things the proprietor offers you.</i> Although he is eating them also, they are <i>very</i> high in estrogen and can cause a man's nipples to be sore for several days afterwards."<br /><br />Duly noted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-57237289307071824882012-05-07T14:29:00.003-05:002012-05-07T14:29:57.737-05:00A Moulay Yacoub Kind of Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;">Fes is big.</span><br />
<br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Too big.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I need a break from big.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Actually, I needed a break from big, and I got it (come to think of it though, I could use another). </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Weeks ago, several of my friends came together, and we traveled to a nearby town called Moulay Yacoub. Built on a hillside, Yacky looks out over rolling hills blanketed with dill, cereal grains, and shepherds with their flocks. Underneath the countless stairs and hills, trapped in the earth is a simmering cauldron. These hot springs have been diverted into the Hammams of Yacky and provide a sizable stream of tourism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Members of my group walked through the Hammams, but we weren't interested in what was below as much as what was above. After a quick walk through the town and the procurement of picnic items, the group set off over the hills. It was a muddy adventure, and the wind was constantly thwarting our attempts at finding quietude, but the view was absolutely gorgeous, and we couldn't help but enjoy ourselves immensely.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Highlights included:<br /><br />Getting ripped off by the grand taxi driver at the train station in Fes: he told us the price to Moulay Yacoub was set by the government at 200 DH for a car. On the way back, we paid only 54 DH. Ouch. By the way, grand taxis are regular-sized cars that are driven long distances. Two passengers share a single seat in the front, and four share the back seat. Personal space? Forget about it.<br /><br />The view.<br /><br />Many boys with their donkeys offering to transport us through the hills (for a price, of course).<br /><br />The majesty of the natural world.<br /><br />Walking through the fields. Hopefully, I didn't destroy any peasants' livelihoods.<br /><br />Walking amongst the flocks.<br /><br />Being not in Fes.<br /><br />The view (are you seeing these pictures?)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><br />What I found most intriguing is what lay beyond the hills. We walked most of the day, and once we were far into the hills, we could see scattered throughout the horizon little villages with their own flocks and makeshift shelters and their own backyard of yawning hillscape. What is life like for these people? Do they see the same beauty in these hills, or do they see only the necessity of survival?<br /><br />We escape Fes in order to relax in these undulating fields. Do these shepherds want this life, or do they dream of escaping these hills surrounding Moulay Yacoub in order to make a living in Fes, to lead a life with a cell phone, a computer, a big television? What are there schools like? Do they have teachers? Medical care? I wish I could have asked them these questions, and my hope is that in my permanent site, I will have just such an opportunity.</span>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-25968725666455915742012-05-03T08:39:00.000-05:002012-05-03T08:39:02.801-05:00My Moroccan Family<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Like I explained in my last post, the Peace Corps pairs each volunteer or volunteer couple with a host family.<br /><br />For the sake privacy, I'll shorten their names. We'll call my host family <i>the Zs</i>. There are five Zs in my host family:<br /><br /><b>Mama Z</b> is always very considerate and kind. She treats me as if I were her own son, and she is always finding ways to make me feel welcome in the house. Additionally, she is a very devout woman, soft-spoken, and hard-working. Her cooking is tremendous and generously portioned. When she laughs, the whole room brightens.<br /><br /><b>Mus-Z </b>is the oldest brother and hence the oldest male in the house. He rides to the city center on his motorcycle every day to work. He is a man of fashionable taste and few words, and he often wears a serious expression. Mus-Z took me on my very first Hammam trip and oriented me to the layout of the community.<br /><br /><b>Mou-Z </b>is the middle brother in the Z household. He goes to school every day and seems to be a serious student. He is especially interested in learning English, and talks to me more than anybody else in the family. We exchange little language lessons with each other once every few days. Our conversations have ranged from poverty in Morocco to religion. Unfortunately, I have a long way to go with my Arabic, so these conversations necessarily have to remain pretty simple.<b><br /><br />Mer-Z </b>is my host sister. Like her mother, she works hard around the house cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. She also goes to school. Mer-z knows more English than she speaks, and I sometimes get the feeling that she understands a great deal of what I am saying, but is refraining from using English. She obviously has a very kind heart, just like Mama Z and will grow up to be a very kind woman.<b><br /><br />Ham-Z</b> is the youngest son. He can be wild and crazy, yipping around the house and making people laugh, and he can focus his energy into tasks like repairing his bicycle. He works as a mechanic during the day. Ham-Z is full of electricity and introduces a kind of uncertainty to the household. In other words, he keeps us on our toes.<br /><br />In short, my family is wonderful.<br /><br />I have talked with many other volunteers from all of the HUB sites - Fez, Azrou, Immouzer, and I am fully convinced that I have the best family situation. They give me plenty of privacy when I need it, they don't interfere with my studying, and they give me lots of freedom in going out in the community and doing my own thing. On the other hand, I always feel welcome joining them in the living room, they are always happy to brave a conversation with me, and they show interest in and concern for my day-to-day. I would bring them with me to my permanent site if I could.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7746341943032369968.post-40512239567450265892012-04-29T12:42:00.001-05:002012-05-04T13:56:32.896-05:00CBT Phase<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In my last post, I offered you a little glimpse into what Peace Corps calls pre-service orientation. Now, you will be granted an equally unsatisfying glimpse into the world of <i>real</i> training, the 2-month phase Peace Corps calls <i>Community Based Training</i>, or CBT.<br /><br />Here is how it works:<br /><br />After the trainees have had enough time to form intense emotional bonds in Rabat, Peace Corps cruelly separates everybody into groups made up of six trainees each. These six people, plus a Language and Cultural Facilitator (LCF) (a Moroccan, of course) are the trainees' new family. All of the CBT groups are divided into three Hubs: one around Fes, one around Azrou, and one around Immouzer. As mentioned previously, my CBT landed in the Fez Hub.<br /><br />What this means for me is that after nine wonderful days of togetherness at the Hotel in Rabat, 2/3 of the group will be largely out of reach to me. Of the remaining 1/3, about 40 trainees, I will see only my five site-mates on a daily basis. However, three times during CBT, all 40 convene in downtown Fes for "Hub day." We have had two Hub days already. <br /><br />Hub days are really great for me, because while I love all five members of my CBT group (and my LCF), I have many other good friends who are in other Fes groups. Besides the two Hubs, I have managed to connect with them for several outings (which will be mentioned in later posts).<br /><br /><b>The Point of CBT</b><br />CBT is meant to accomplish a number of things: first, it immerses the trainees in the language (Darija) by sticking them in a Moroccan home with a family that doesn't speak any English. In addition to the endless confusion at home, we are treated to more confusion for several hours a day in the classroom as our LCF attempts to learn us some real good Moroccan Arabic.<br /><br />Secondly, CBT introduces the trainees to a Dar Shebab (house of youth). All six members of my CBT meet in a Dar Shebab here in Z------- nearly every day. Ours held a Spring Camp recently, which attracted a modest group of youngsters, and so my colleagues and I put some English classes together, and we put some activities together, and we did our best. During Spring Camp, I was able to teach a class about the planets in which I took the youth on a 1 km walk through town, placing scaled-down planets at appropriate intervals. I was also able to work in a line dance lesson on one afternoon. The Moroccan youth learned the Virginia Reel, complete with old-timey music and calls.<br /><br />The third overall goal of the CBT is to introduce the trainees to cultural differences. Our LCF has taken us out on several "community walks," in which we drop in at a local shop, police station, or what-have-you and start talking to strangers. Other times, cultural training means sitting in the classroom and placing cultural features on a drawing of an iceberg. Despite Peace Corps' best efforts, I do manage to learn a meaningful thing or two about Moroccan culture.<br /><br /><b>A Typical Day</b><br />Now that you are intimately familiar with the essence of CBT, allow me to lay out a typical day:<br /><br /><i>7:30</i> wake up; think to self, "Oh my God, I'm in Morocco."<br /><i>7:35</i> wonder how bad I'll smell later in the day<br /><i>7:40</i> get out of bed; imagine taking a shower; get dressed instead<br /><i>7:45</i> go into kitchen and start coffee; wash face; brush teeth<br /><i>7:50</i> sit down in kitchen to breakfast of bread, oil, olives, oil, and bread<br /><i>8:30</i> head to dar shebab with fellow trainee who lives down the alley<br /><i>8:40</i> learn language; become frustrated; learn language some more<br /><i>10:30</i> coffee break at sketchy place across the street; then, more language<br /><i>12:30</i> head home to review language and eat lunch (and more bread) with host family<br /><i>2:00</i> head back to dar shebab for afternoon session: usually culture<br /><i>4:00</i> coffee at that freakin sketchy place again (I swear to god, they've got ties to the mafia)<br /><i>6:00</i> head home for awkward language times with family<br /><i>8:00</i> a meal of sweet tea, sweet-cakes, and bread<br /><i>8:30</i> think about all of the sugar I've put into my body that day; study; try to communicate with host-brother; fail<br /><i>10:30</i> dinner; perhaps soup or fried fish, always bread... dear god, always more bread<br /><i>11:30</i> sleepytime<br /><br />I keep this agenda every day except Saturday, in which classes end at lunch, and Sunday, which is either a free day or a day of being with my host family.<br /><br />As you might have ascertained from the above schedule, I don't take showers at home. Moroccans generally don't shower every day like we do in the USA. I'm told the typical Moroccan might shower once every 3-4 days, or if they go to the hammam, they might go once a week. Judging by my family, this is a pretty liberal estimate. I've been running on my family's hygienic clock, and I've been the public bath only three times since March 29.<br /><br />All in all, CBT is effective. My language skills are improving dramatically, I'm getting a good feel for the way I should be assessing my community needs, I'm integrating myself into Moroccan culture, and I'm doing it all without losing too much of my mind.<br /><br />Soon, I'll post about my family, friends, food, and fun around Fes. Jesus, what a lot of alliteration.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1