ups n downs

At the swearing-in ceremony, some two months after landing in country, another volunteer performed a 'dramatic reading'. The piece focused on how the peace corps experience is, essentially, an accelerated maturation. When you first arrive with your host family, you are sort of like a baby- unable to communicate, unsure of how to use the toilet, and probably crying a good deal. Then you move up to child status, teenager, and so forth. The PC administration's hope, I believe, is that the volunteer reaches the level of young adult by the end of the first two months. The expectation being: you are able to survive on your own. At the time, I thought the reading was poignant and disturbingly accurate. But I also thought I'd made it to adulthood. I suppose most people sincerely believe they've matured into fully functioning adults at a number of times throughout their lives: 13 years old, 16 years old, 18 years old, 21 years old, and so on. And what I felt may be similar to that. But anyway, I thought I had made it to what I'd always considered the lengthy, flat plateau of being an adult.

Not so! At the age of 25, men's brains have finished filling out the frontal lobe (I think this happens at about 18 for women). This means, in theory at least, they are directed more by reasoning, rather than the fickle dictatorship of the emotional lizard brain. This is the hallmark of adulthood: no more radically fluctuating emotions.

But, over the last 8 months I've had more emotional ups and downs than perhaps at any other time in my post-12-year-old life. Simply put, the two months training before swearing in was not enough to even me out. One day is fantastic, and the next is miserable. One hour in the classroom is exhilarating, and the next hour of teaching is painful.

Yesterday we celebrated Thanksgiving in Oujda with 4 other volunteers and another American. Krista heroically made a 4.5 kilo chicken, a cheesecake, gravy, cornbread stuffing, and buns. I competed as well as I could with some green beans and pumpin/ginger soup. Somebody else made mashed potatoes, and we washed it down with cheap wine and Budweiser. We decorated a plastic tree and listened to Christmas music. We played Boggler, Settlers of Catan, and Cards Against Humanity. It was  like heaven.

Today, we caught a grand taxi back just after the sun had set. Krista was sufferiong from severe back cramps when we got stopped by border patrol for the first time. At one point the driver stomped on the break at 90 kph, and went into a controlled skid-swerve around a donkey that was standing placidly in the middle of the road. We got the best seats in the house for that show as we were smushed into the passenger seat (also known as the 'death seat'). That was a bit of a downer.

The great news is, the highs are really high. The bad news is the lows are really low. And I'm still trying to decide whether or not the mercurial emotions of my Moroccan teenage self are a good thing.

thanksgiving

eyum alshkr: "day of thanks"

I am thankful for my family who allow me to go live abroad without cutting me off, who support me from afar, and who I miss every day.

I am thankful to have the opportunity to embark on a 26 month adventure, on Uncle Sam's dollar.

I am thankful to have regular work that isn't overwhelming.

I am thankful for a good meal, and because of Krista, I've been having plenty of those.

I am thankful for Krista. Without having her here with me, I would surely go insane. She is a constant source of support, fun, encouragement, help, food, and I am incredibly lucky that I found her.

I am thankful for the cats: Anton and Mina, especially when they don't poop where they're not supposed to.

I am thankful for America. We have everything: diversity, every type of food in the world, widespread tolerance, secularism, pork products, education, money, travel, seasons, energy, creativity, and endless drive. We are the mixing pot of the world, and, as it turns out, when you mix everybody together you get some damn good values: freedom, equality, individuality, hard work, and the ability to laugh at oneself.

I am grateful that my country thinks it worthwhile to send thousands of people like me all over the world to help with whatever we can. I am here, not to convert people, not to suck money out of people, not to kill people, but simply to improve lives; to open minds and hearts. I am grateful that I have this chance.

And I am thankful for those Moroccans who have welcomed me: the families that have sheltered me, fed me, and taught me; my students who choose to show up at my classes; the store owner on the corner; and countless people who've invited me to share food and tea.

I am grateful for my education. I am grateful for the internet, for books, for towels, for running water, for shelter, for my stovetop, for my fridge. I am thankful for my friends nearby, for my Peace Corps brethren, for my friend Sam, for my cellphone, for my gradually strengthening immune system, for my roof, for Tide, for music, for my computer, for socks, for long underwear, for clementines, pomegranates and yogurt. I am thankful for sandals, t-shirts, and contraband. I am thankful for cooking gas.

I am a very lucky person.

Vacation

This blog service is really terrible with photos, but hopefully I'll find the patience to put up some photos of Paris. Which is, without a doubt, the nicest place in the entire world.

If you are a peace corps volunteer, I highly recommend visiting terrible, ugly places. It's the philosophy of the dad in Calvin and Hobbes: you have terrible vacations so work seems nice. What other time in life can you visit South Sudan or Eastern Europe and think: "Well, that wasn't too bad at all?"  Unfortunately, the less-glamorous neighbor destinations for PC morocco, Algeria, Western Sahara, Mauritania, are all closed off to us and everywhere else in Africa costs at least 600 bucks to get to. So (poor us), have to go to Europe.

Ah, Europe. A beautiful place. Parks, drinking chocolate, art/museums, diversity, restaurants, no trash, things you would actually want to buy, cheese, cheese, good bread, cheese, beer, beer, beer, beer, wine, restaurants, indoor heating, hot water, working infrastructure, and not getting stared at. And seeing my parents for the first time in 8 months. Wow. It was all I imagined and much more. So much more, in fact, that it's a little bit tough to come back.

Given that I went to Paris for 6 days, I thought I could go a week without being asked if I was Muslim. No chance. Made it 20 minutes after landing. I just interrupted writing this to kill half a dozen flies before they drive me absolutely insane (the dripping water in the bathroom isn't helping).

But, there's nothing I can do about it. Just got to grit my teeth and get through the next few days- hope to even back out. Thank God I've got Krista with me or I'd really go nuts- start screaming at people in the street.


Today, while trying to buy some thick blankets (85 dirhams a piece), we met an interesting man at a shoe-repair shack. He wanted to talk about Morocco and America's long history of friendship. This is actually true, and fairly common knowledge here: Morocco (or at least the king of the area at the time) was the first to recognize the United States. He was telling this to us while smoking hashish and holding a closed bottle of some sort of alcohol. Then he played the flute for us and gave us some tea. Typically weird experience.

November 7th, 2012

As they say here,

Alhumdilillah

الحمد الله

"Praise to God"

Nothing in particular

It is November 4th and it's 87 degrees outside. Teaching has begun in earnest just in time for me to go on vacation. To Paris, where I believe it's about 40 degrees cooler. But it's not the cold I'm looking forward to.

Imagine a magical land, where people don't stare openly at you constantly, or, every day, ask if you've become Muslim yet. A land where you can eat pork products, and it's not a big deal. A place with regular trash collection. Toilets that you can sit on. A city with hot water and internal heating. Parks. Green spaces inside a city. The possibility of outdoor exercise. Low risk of contracting dysentery.

Yup, looking forward to it; I'll be there in just a few short days, and then I'll be back once again. By now, I've pretty much established my work schedule-
Sunday-Monday is my weekend.
Tuesday, 3-5 pm, beginners English class at the nearby Dar Shebab; 5:30-7:00 pm, class of undetermined level at the far Dar Shebab
Wednesday, 2-4 pm, high school English extra classes at a french institute (co-teaching with a Moroccan college student)
Thursday, 3-5 pm, intermediate English class at the nearby Dar Shebab; 5-6 pm, another intermediate class
Friday, 4-6 pm, high school English extra classes at the french institute (co-teaching)
Saturday, 10-11, beginner class; 11-12, intermediate class at nearby DS; 3-4:30 beg. class, 4:30-6:00 advanced class at far DS

Excepting Saturday, my mornings are free. This is awesome. It means I can wake up when I want to, prepare for classes, and relax. Nearly all of the classes at the DS I co-teach with Krista, which helps ease the pressure and make class preparation easier. I have a total of 15.5 hours a week at the front of a class. Which is exactly what Peace Corps Morocco recommends. And it's enough. It's tough, and it's draining to deal with the boss's crap, but it's going well so far. After three months (sometime in mid-January), I'll be resetting this schedule with the aim of subtracting some hours of teaching and adding some hours of other development work (no doubt initially with something simple like a health club, environment club, and/or exercise club at one of the DSes). So things are pretty good.

With the one unfortunate fact that I don't really know English. I don't know the grammar. I don't know the types of conditional sentences, and, according to my students, I don't pronounce things correctly. It may or may not help if Peace Corps were to supply us with lesson plans and a curriculum, or a textbook, but they don't. We do have countless resources thanks to the incredible library we have in Rabat, but sometimes even that won't cover certain questions from the students.

For example, 2 days ago, one of my older 'youths' (he's 46) came up to me after class to ask my help and advice. The problem is that he was fired from his position as a postman some 11-odd years ago, accused of stealing 200,000 dirhams, and sent to jail. He says this was all a fabrication and he didn't steal anything. Surprisingly, I couldn't come up with a solution. I'm not sure what about me yells "international lawyer" (maybe the flip flops?). What am I to do? I suggested he write to the national online newspaper in Morocco, got on my bike, and rode to the other dar shebab. Kids threw rocks at me on the way there. I wonder if there are a lot of rock-throwing kids in Paris?

Linguistic Realizations

If you have no interest in linguistics, language history, or dialects of Moroccan Arabic, read no further.

As I've mentioned before, in the east of Morocco, the people speak a subdialect of Moroccan Darija. It's called Sharqiya, and is spoken in Oujda, my town, Al'eiun, Taourirt, and a number of other smaller towns in the area. Of course, from town to town there are variations within the Sharqiya dialect. The term Oujdiya is alternatively used for Sharqiya. Sharqiya means 'of the East', and Oujdiya means 'of Oujda'. (I'm not sure how to translate any of this stuff exactly).

Since it's a dialect, I generally assumed that it's some sort of pidgin Darija, backward, non-grammatical, and nonsensical.  However, I have heard that some of the Arabic dialects tend to have more classical underpinnings, while others are closer to contemporary modern standard Arabic. For example, while I have found the verb Arad-a, conjugated to 'ureed' (meaning 'I want'), in the Quran, I've also read that the verb Bgha is a classical alternative (conjugated here to 'Bgheet' for 'I want').  And although many people claim Moroccan Arabic is not really Arabic, it appears to be the only modern dialect which retains this classical oddity in its most basic lexicon.

This brings me to Sharqiya. I've noticed over the last few days as I slog my way through the Quran, that there are a number of distinctly classical words that Sharqiya has retained, while the rest of Darija has let them slide. 'L'afiya' means 'fire' in the West, but over here, people say 'nar'. They claim it comes from Algeria, and that they're speaking Algerian Arabic, which may well be correct. However, I've also noticed that 'nar' appears repeatedly in the Quran- always associated with hell (the fires of hell, the fire of punishment, etc.). Next up, 'sxhoon' or 'Har' means 'hot' the the West, while the Berkanins say 'Human' for hot weather or 'Hamii' for hot water. The root of that must be H-m-m.  And I just found it in the Quran as well, so that's another point to my local lingua in terms of classicalness. Lastly, 'Gu'ud'. This means sit as an imperative (hard G-ayn-dal with two dummas as vowel markings). The rest of Morocco says 'Gliss'. This term appears in an account of American sailors in 1815 who washed ashore on the western Sahara (now Western Sahara/Morocco), so it appears the term has been around for quite a while, and over an extended area.  But... I was very excited (geeky, I know) to have recently found q-ayn-dal in the Quran meaning 'to sit'. Our people tends to turn the Qaf letter into the hard G sound (Qlb, meaning 'heart' in the rest of Morocco is pronounced Glb here). So, it turns out, 'Gu'ud', what I thought to be a true hallmark of the madness that is Sharqiya, turns out to actually be quite close to the classical verb. (Those who have studied FusHa know that m-qaf-ayn-dal is still used for seat/chair/couch, and if you're a volunteer in Morocco you know that you were supposed to visit your local Qaid- same root?)

I've reached my nerdiness limit of the day, so that's enough for now.

sacrificing the sheep

I think I prefer Christmas. 

As I said last time, Eid is a special (and weird) time.  I woke up in the early morning two days ago to the sounds of screaming sheep. Or maybe it was just the neighborhood donkey, I'm not positive. I got on a bike and headed out of town to where my old host family lives. 

Just like on Christmas, Eid has its own last-minute shoppers so I saw a few people with sheep in little carts attached to the back of their mopeds. There's definitely a charge to the air- nearly every family has their own sheep, and they're all killing it at the same time.  Smoke billows up from all areas of town as people grill on their roofs and in the streets. I could look down from the top of my host family's house and see half a dozen different sheep being slaughtered. 

I got to my house, and we killed a sheep. There was a lot of invoking Allah's name and 'God is Great's right before and as the sheep's throat was being slit. I believe that the Koran says Abraham was about to kill Ishmael (not Isaac), because God demanded it of him. But at the last second, God sent down a sheep to be sacrificed instead. I'm not sure what God was trying to get out of this, but anyway, that's the story behind Eid.

 The father of the family is usually the one who does the sacrifice. The neck is cut open so it bleeds almost entirely out (the Koran says you're not supposed to eat blood), often spraying everywhere, onto the wall and rushing out of the sheep.  Then, less than a minute later, the mostly-headless animal starts to kick violently, almost running in place while on its side, for about 30 seconds. Once this stopped, my host father cut the head off, then cut open the skin near the back legs, and took the skin off. He snapped the front legs off (it was impressive), and then we hoisted the sheep by its back legs and hung the carcass upside down. Next up was removing the skin/organs. Organs are really nasty. The strategy seems to be you pretty much root around in the animal with a knife and pull everything out- being careful not to rupture anything. When taking off the skin, they're careful to leave the layer of fat, which is then removed and stretched out to dry. Then the women got busy cleaning the organs while Kamal and I grilled the liver. We cut the fat into strips and wrapped smaller pieces of liver and grilled them. Then we ate it. At about 9:30 am.  It was pretty good, but I think I'd prefer to eat that kind of thing a bit later in the day.  Meanwhile, at her host family's house, Krista was served sheep testicles at 8 in the morning.

Then, you sort of sit around for a few hours, and then eat some more sheep- for lunch we had a tajine which included heart, liver, throat, stomach, and some other stuff I don't want to think about.  I wasn't a huge fan of this. I left as soon as possible, went home, and avoided eating anything at all.  The next day, woke up early, went back to their house, and had some more early morning sheep, this time the ribs. Really good, but again, wrong time of day, and I was starting to get overwhelmed.  Then we had a late lunch of sheep. I left as soon as possible to go meet with a potential counterpart who runs an environmental association and museum.  He treated Krista and I to a second late lunch. Which was also lamb. Oh my god. I avoided eating anything for the rest of the day, and am pretty sure I can feel my arteries thickening, hardening, cardiac arrest lurking on the horizon.  I have eaten almost exclusively sheep for the past 60 hours. 

As for my feelings while the sheep was dying, I honestly felt a fairly strong adrenaline rush. It's a bit contagious, and everybody is ecstatic that they're fortunate enough to have their own sheep and are going to eat richer food than they do at any other time of the year. And everybody's joking about the sheep. I told my host sister, "poor sheep. He knows what's coming." and she responded "yes, he can feel it". I do feel bad for the sheep.

One unfortunate part of l'Eid is my continuing awkward relationship with my host mother. This started when I was staying with them and she gave me a note in English, which she can't speak or write, requesting help for her children to get to the US. Before Eid, she asked me indirectly for money for the sheep (a good sheep runs you more than 200 us dollars). She'd do this through her oldest daughter sending text messages to Krista, or talking to Krista over the phone. I responded at one point that I would be willing to help with the sheep, since it is expensive and I would be partaking in it, but that I couldn't help very much, could only cover maybe 10-15% of it. There's the old peace corps budget constraint, but furthermore, I'm not here to be in the business of helping people individually with financial obligations. Peace Corps doesn't give us much money because we're not supposed to be making these kinds of donations. Then at the door when I was leaving yesterday, I tried to give her that money and she refused it. What the hell. And I don't know how insistent you're supposed to be in the culture, so that adds to the confusion.  So I got to feel bad about it twice- when I didn't know what to do, and then when I got turned down for trying to help. Shit.

Also my host grandmother told Kamal he shouldn't be hanging out with me because I'm an unbeliever (aka not Muslim). I picked up on this because I recognized the word from the Quran. In one of the chapters I read recently, the book was quite explicit about not taking as friends non-Muslims, if you have potential Muslim friends. So maybe that's where she gets that. 

Anyway, happy EID! 

sorry sheep friend, you're about to go down that drain

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PICTURES ARE TOTALLY NASTY- PARTICULARLY IF YOU DON'T LIKE EATING MEAT. LIKE, IT'S REALLY REALLY GROSS. WATCH OUT...

These are organs. I'm not sure which ones. But we ate all of them.  That thing on the ground is the skin. Now I know how exactly a sheepskin rug is removed.

Organ cleaning party. The little girl, my host sister, is cleaning all the food out of its stomache. That's the kidney and testicles in the brown bowl closest to me. The heart, throat and other stuff is in the smaller bowl over by the pole, and the disembodied hands to the right are picking through the intestines.

pretty nasty

blood

upside-down head. That's not a smile. I didn't stick around to eat this one.