As I noted in the last post, ever since arriving in my final site, I don't have the slightest clue what's going to happen when I wake up. I think I'm going to meet the gendarmes or the commissariat and I end up at the beach. I think I'm going to teach English and I end up at a university ninety minutes away where I swear to God I saw Muammar Qaddafi. It was him.
This morning I decided to fight the trend and take control. So I woke up, put on some running stuff and headed for the hills. Past the Mosque and over the dirt track by the construction site, through some piles of trash, scaring away the chickens. Unfortunately, I went up into the woods and promptly got lost. Wandered around the woods, fell down a few times, managed to lose the entire city before retracing my steps and going to the top of another hill. I found my way after about a half hour and cruised past some sheep on the way home.
Next up I thought we were going to meet the mudira (boss) of my dar shabab (place of work/ youth house). But she wasn't there. I did, however, see a woman helping her little, butt-naked daughter, pee in the street. It's about a forty five minute walk. Next, tried to go to the commissariat (again), ended up at some sort of center of public health perusing horrific anti-smoking pictures. Then found myself in a coffee-shop with a guy who's basically in charge of 'culture'. Not clear what exactly that means. He told us (me, my host brother, krista, and her host sister) to go to the battered women's center for food. The center is awesome, so hopefully more on that later. As usual, everybody assumes that I know french because I'm white and I guess they think french is important (is it?). Next up, heard some music coming out of a sort of trade-school so had to check it out. Hundreds of college-age students were standing around listening to russian techno and watching a group of little kids do music-coordinated tae kwon doe. Obviously. Next up was a parkour group. It's unclear why this was going on. Then came a few soccer games. Then we went to a stadium for a basketball game.
Apparently in this town, instead of pumping people up with presidential-styrofoam-headed races, they watch little kids and not so little kids do tumbling and rhythmic gymnastics. This was hilarious. The crowd, mostly really loud teenage dudes would applause supportively if anybody made a mistake, and the youngest and smallest usually got the loudest applaud. Some of them looked to be about four years old. They put a blonde girl in the middle spot of honor. As far as I could tell, this was due to the fact that she was blonde. She definitely wasn't any better than the others. Next up came a Moroccan drum troupe accompanied by a sort of two-horned shofar type thing.
I am not exaggerating at all. The warm-up for this game was an hour long. Some sort of huge face-off between here and Hoceima. I learned that people play basketball here. Supposedly one of the players was American, although I doubt it. When the other team had the ball, everybody in the stadium (and it was packed because it's free) would whistle as loud as possible and through streamers onto the court. Naturally, the home team went up 27-10 in the first quarter. People went crazy. And by people, I mean guys. There were maybe half a dozen women in the stadium of several thousand. Because Krista and I look foreign, we were granted spots in the VIP section and allowed to simply walk around the court during play.
Then I came home. Getting my energy up for tomorrow.
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