at least i'm not a goat

Currently Listening to “Little Queen” by Heart

Currently Reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (if you currently live in Morocco and want to read it, let me know and I’ll send it your way when I finish)

My goodness, it’s been a week. So much stuff went wrong that I ended up freaking out a little bit. Had a good wig-out/crying session on Wednesday and now I feel like I have some perspective. Maybe. Ha. Anyway I’m going to outline some of the shiz that went down so that at least someone can laugh at my current situation.

Earlier this week, something went wrong with the bathroom at my host family’s house and they had to have a man come and dig out a new sewage pipe thing for the Turk toilet. We were without a potty for like three days…instead there was just a dirty hole with a pile of dirt next to it. Still usable. No biggie, right? I am in the Peace Corps, after all.

I took the situation in stride, until Tuesday night when I got violently ill after being force-fed couscous (it wasn’t even Friday!). I was up every couple hours either booting all over the place or shitting into the little mudpit. Awesome. My host mom was really sweet, she came and sat with me on my bed for a little bit and got me water and stuff. I finally was able to get to sleep around 5 am, just in time to be woken up by the early morning call to prayer (we live across the street from a mosque).

Naturally, I was dehydrated and exhausted in the morning. I had made plans to go to souk, but I texted my friend to tell her I needed to sleep. Not that this happened—my host mom tried to make me eat breakfast (wtf?) and then the kids were being crazy loud and I couldn’t rest at all. Then my host mom left to go food shopping and I was alone with all my host siblings, ranging in age from 2-11. To sum up the experience, my toddler host brother took a shit on the concrete outside our house and all I was able to do in reaction was watch in horror. It’s actually really funny now but at the time I literally wanted to die.

I should mention that my host mom was totally shocked when I didn’t eat a big portion of couscous on Friday for lunch, as if the Couscous Incident from Tuesday never happened. She kept saying I didn’t like her couscous, and I couldn’t get the point across that I like couscous, but after almost dying three days ago I don’t want to eat a ton of it.

Thursday I went to the hemmam. It’s old news these days, but this time was a little different. Usually when I’ve been to the hemmam I don’t reallllllly need a bath, but in this case I hadn’t showered in 5 or 6 days (bathroom broken, remember?). Other factors that made this experience different:

-my 5-year-old host brother tagged along and has now seen my boobies

-I didn’t wear my contacts, so when I took my glasses off (it’s too steamy to wear them) I had no idea where I was.

-a strange woman I’d never met before scrubbed me from head to toe, then bathed me and shampooed my hair. Usually someone I go with will scrub my back or something but after that they let me clean myself, because, you know, I’m an adult.

Also! My cell phone in Morocco broke this week. It stopped sending text messages, and when my friend tried to fix it he accidentally locked me out of my phone. I didn’t even know you needed a pin number to turn it on, so we were sort of stuck. I ended up having to get a new sim (which my friend very kindly bought for me) which means a new number. Swiyya stress, but everything worked out.

Speaking of breaking things, some of the boys at Dar Chebab broke the ping pong table on my watch. Go me. I went into one of the rooms to grab a ball and came out just in time to watch the table come crashing down. Now the parents of Morocco will trust me with their young.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, right. So today was L3id Kbir, which one of my host relatives was explaining to me celebrates when Abraham almost sacrificed his son. Naturally, families here sacrifice goats in commemoration. It was…an experience. My host uncles slit the goat’s neck right in our front yard! Not as much blood as you’d think. Afterward they stuck a bicycle pump in its leg and filled the goat with air. You read that correctly. I think it makes it easier to skin? I don’t know. All in all it was a super-interesting process to watch. My family started cooking right then and there and we ate liver, heart, intestine and something else I didn’t know the word for. Apparently I’ll be eating parts of the head later…I’ll keep you posted.