Figuig Christmas

We took a couple days away from Berkane and headed for a desert Christmas. If you look at the map below, of places I've checked out in Morocco, Figuig is the most South-Easterly. It is surrounded on three sides by Algeria, maybe 400 km away from Berkane, most of which is an endless, perfectly straight road with nothing but broken rocks stretching out to either side as far as the eye can see. Maybe every 40 kilometers you can spot a nomadic herder. It's way out there. And absolutely worth the trip.

Figuig is an incredibly beautiful place. We stayed with friends who live in an 800-year old, mostly mud-brick neighborhood set in the middle of a date palm oasis. Paths wind between small plots of land, protected by high mud-brick walls, sometimes up to 10-12 feet. There are countless dark tunnels, with wooden crossbeams supporting houses above. I'll collect some photos from others who were there.

Christmas was celebrated in the right way, with eggnog, carols, cookies, good food, and good friends. Visiting a community so much smaller and more relaxed than my own makes me supremely jealous of other volunteers. I hope to go back there as soon as possible.

I'll need to step on it, as there's less than 5 months to go.

Apple

Every once in a very long while, for a couple of hours, I almost forget that I am in this weird place. Many things are weird about Morocco. Everybody stares at me. I see sexual harassment in the street at least once a day. It's 65 degrees in the middle of December. But the strangest thing, for me at least, is Islam.

And not just Islam, but the fact that 99.9999% of the people around me actually believe in the literal reading of the Quran. The stories are not parables; they are not lessons. They are iron-hard scientific facts and prescriptive rules. No interpretation necessary or allowed.

I don't mean to hate on Islam, (although I hate, hate, hate the sexual harassment and suffocating patriarchy which is, in a very real way, tied up with religion). I'm sure that I would feel out of place in any homogenous religious society.

Anyway, yesterday I was invited over to eat lunch with a local teacher who works very hard and who helped me a number of times last year. K and I went over there and we'd been speaking English for a couple of hours and I was starting to feel comfortable. Danger sign.

We were eating some pomegranates and talking about the word in various languages. In German, it's apfelgranate or granateapfel or something like that. Anyway, it has apfel in it (apple), and this reminded me of something I had learned.

Me: You know, many people think that, in the Adam and Eve story, it wasn't an apple-- it was a pomegranate.
the teacher: What?
Me: Well, there were no apples in the region where the story comes from, but there were pomegranates, and I think the words in the ancient language are the same, or very similar.
the teacher: what do you mean where the story comes from?
Me: What, I think it was in Syria or Iraq or something
K: Yeah, Syria, I think.
the teacher: No-- we don't know where it was- of course, they were in Heaven or some place like that, not here on Earth.
Me: Oh. okay...

Whoops. I managed to forget for a minute where I was.

Guests

On Thanksgiving, the entire PCV community congregated in Rabat for Turkey and flu shots. In some ways, it was a stereotypical Thanksgiving- some people in the extended family opted not to come, some made great food, some started drinking in the late morning, and some brought their decades-younger, locally-sourced wives/fiancees. It was great. It's always great to go to Rabat, which is starting to seem like a real city. As we travel West on the train, things start to get fancy. And when we travel East of Fes, it's like going back in time.

After the big celebration, we had a mini-thanksgiving at our apartment with 8 guests. The food was outrageous- lamb stew, roast chicken, cranberry sauce, cornbread stuffing, green beans, nutella cheesecake, pumpkin pie, cinnamon ice cream. We drank mulled wine and played classic Thansgiving games like pick-up-sticks.

While it has warmed back up since then, it was 43 degrees that day and raining. Since we had the oven and burners going, and 10 people's body heat inside our bathtub of a house, condensation was streaming down the walls. The next day we had puddles of water on the ground and everything in the house was damp. I'm hoping this doesn't mean we'll get another mold infestation like last year.

It's great to have people come visit. Everybody gets sucked into the problems and issues they have with their own towns, and seeing it through other volunteers' eyes can be refreshing and uplifting.

Thanksgiving Round 2

eyum alshukr - Day of Thanks

I am thankful for family, and their unflagging support over the duration of this insane thing I'm doing.

I am thankful for visitors--old friends, uncle & aunt, dad & mom & grandmom, and other volunteers who make it to my town.

I am thankful for Krista, without her, I don't think I could have lasted this long.

I am thankful for having 6 months left-- it's enough.

I am thankful for America -- friends, bourbon, trash bins, traffic laws, green spaces, English speakers, diversity, religious tolerance, dish washers, washing machines, central heating, warm water, foreign food, sports, and higher education.

I am thankful for Morocco -- my work counterparts, my peace corps brethren, my local friends, cumin, coffee, my stove, cooking gas, the illegal food market, the contraband clothes souk, oscar pizza, my bike, the roof over my head, the abundance of sweaters, the peace corps library, my students, how I feel like what I'm doing is appreciated, hot tea, socks, long underwear, my phone plan, my internet connection, electricity, my fridge (and freezer!), the generosity of strangers, my food stipend, and Krista's cooking.

3/4

I just returned from Paris and visiting my parents, which was amazing. I want to live there and read important books and drink coffee and eat cheese. Now I'm back in country and headed into the final stretch.

If the Peace Corps were college, I just started my senior year. After the two month training, K and I were sent to our site. We've finished 18 months of peace corps service, and we have 6 months to go. I'm not sure how I feel about it. My goals are still evolving.

Even a few months ago, I envisioned myself trying to build large, physical things. Doing projects that require sweat- digging holes and building churches and stuff. Just kidding about the churches. I thought, now that I've found a few good partners for development work, I can finally construct something 'real'. That may have been foolish.

Many people apply for grants at some point during their service. I don't really expect to do so. Using money almost seems like cheating to me, at times. Why should this town or this group of people get an injection of capital, but those others not get anything? Randomness. Living itself is to rage against randomness. Why work in development? Why put efforts towards any end?..

If I were to raise money from home, and then use it to create a physical thing, where does that leave me? People might thank me, but in many ways, I would just be increasing their sense of dependence upon financial help from others, and possibly exacerbating the feeling of victimhood/helplessness that comes with living in a developing country that has easy access to information. Building things with money from abroad, in a sense, simply extends and strengthens the same instruments that are responsible for the randomness that has left Morocco poor and America rich. Connections to wealth create more wealth. Connection to my randomly being dropped in this town, would lead to an injection of wealth, however small.

I am probably overly-rationalizing my own failure to identify a good school that could use some new toilets dug out. But what I really think I'm doing is coming to grips with the fact that it's perfectly okay to 'develop people', rather than build objects. That kind of 'aid' seems less capitalistic and insidious.

Over the last 18 months, the thing I am most proud of, isn't a thing at all. We have inspired a few people to help others. There are people volunteering in this town, leading workshops in middle schools, cleaning and looking after the youth center, and teaching English, who had never reached out and helped their community before. They are doing so because of us. I can only hope that they continue to do so once we've gone.

I don't dream anymore of digging the foundation for a new center for social enterprise in town. Instead, I think about leveraging the people in my classes to volunteer themselves and their time.

Newest idea: Add an hour of English a week for the adult beginners at the youth center. However, do so only on the condition that each pledges an hour of teaching, whatever their area of knowledge may be.


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Apologies for any pretension - and no offense intended towards volunteers who are building toilets and computer rooms and so forth. Any improvement in health, freedom, and access to information is a net positive, in my opinion.

god and death and stuff

I've started teaching a 52-hour life skills curriculum with two groups of 16-28 year olds. The classes are in fancy Arabic and K and I have been leading the classes along with two or three local counterparts. One of whom is the director of my youth center, the second is the president of an association that helps out street kids, and the third is some guy named Mbark. We just had the first two over to our apartment, to eat dinner and to prepare for some upcoming lessons. We served up some fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw and cornbread. Told them it was southern food. While it was all damn good, I fried myself when some air got trapped under the chicken liver and the oil exploded onto my wrist.

Worth it.

Anyway, just like last time they came over, they managed to direct conversation towards a favorite topic: Allah. Let me be clear, they are not aggressively pressuring us to convert; it's more like they're curious about what the hell we think is happening with the whole universe/life/death thing. The director of my youth center, Z, asked me a sneaky question first off (we were talking about how insane climate change is now and how he can't remembered any November as warm as this*). He asked the old "what do you think happens when you die? You just become soil or something?" As usual, I didn't want to get too involved in the topic, as I'd prefer not to think about the end of myself, but I went along with it, telling him "it's impossible for me to imagine what I am after I die." So then he took off on descriptions of heaven and hell and how Muslims have various levels of the two and you can move up levels and everything in the afterlife is operating on a different dimension, one that isn't necessarily physical, and so on. Oh and he pointed out how our cat is very well-designed, and something that could create our cat can probably create some pretty crazy higher-dimension stuff. Our cat seems to mostly be made out of fat, so I told him it doesn't seem too complicated. In the end, he extended an invitation to convert which we turned down.

I'm not sure what I would be converting from. How do you explain to somebody that Islam, Judaism, Christianity, I see them all as slight variations of the same story-- the only reason why I don't get much religious harassment is because everyone assumes I am Christian. I'm not even sure what I am, maybe I'll leave that for another post. But how do I explain, without insulting Z, that I think it's more than a little bit insane to let a possible afterlife be the primary factor in all currentlife decisions. How do I explain that evolution gives a damn convincing answer to the question: why are cats so complex? Above all, I think it's borderline solipsistic to think a greater being has the slightest interest in what I do with my day.

And the fact that 99.99 percent of people in this country all share the same religion makes it even less compelling for me. Talk about unoriginal.


*As a side note, every high-school educated person in Morocco seems to know and understand (somewhat) about global warming. Why is it that every high-school educated person in America doesn't know or understand?

Environmental Club in Action

While the first half of the week was cancelled, due to the Islamic New Year and the celebration of something called "The Green March", the second half is turning out to be fairly productive in terms of work output. Yesterday the new environmental club at the run-down dar chebab kept the momentum going and pulled-off another event. The adults got a pretty good workout, tearing out all the crap that's accumulated in the garden over the past 5 months, while the kids helped out with sowing some seeds in used yogurt cups, to be transplanted once they sprout. Then the small ones created wallets out of used juice containers. After that, they picked up some trash, while the adults finished with planting some bigger trees. The last move of the day was a simple mural and the obligatory cookies and soda. Today I've got 4 straight hours of teaching, including class #6 for the IYF program, which I will describe in an upcoming post. While I'm doing that, Krista will be running a Halloween party at the old dar chebab; hopefully she has enough candy.

seeds 

wallets