oh my

current sap-fest of a song" "dreaming with a broken heart" by JM (hi candice)

Today started the way most Hunter S. Thompson pieces do. No introductory sentence, no set-up, just bam.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'” (the opening paragraph of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

It occurred to me today that my Dar Chebab is what Hunter would call bat country.

There was a teacher's union strike today, which meant the kids in my town had nothing better to do than go to Dar Chebab and harass me. In other words, I walked through the big green gate, turned the corner, and was greeted by 50 or 60 screaming kids, all wanting something different. "basketball!" "english!" "ping pong!" "water!" "hi alli hi alli hi alli! labas 3lik? hamdullah! kif dayra? labas? nti labas? mzyan?"

Honestly it's really great to have such enthusiastic kids. It really is. I swear.

With the help of my boss's son I was able to get them all separated into groups to play basketball or study English. The ping pong table broke last week (see earlier posts) so that was out. I only had to scream at them once, and I didn't have to kick anyone out of the building (just out of my classroom), so I'd say the morning ended up being successful.

Moving on, because I actually sat down with a specific topic in mind.

Whenever you move somewhere new, you inevitably notice commonalities in your new neighbors. I'm pretty sure "commonalities" is a word. At least, I've heard a smug anthropologist or two say it. When I moved to DC I noticed how no one can be bothered to say full words. Instead they use acronyms: it's not Au Bon Pain, it's ABP. It's not the Department of Justice, it's the DoJ.

In Morocco I've noticed how reluctant everyone is to make a promise, or any sort of statement of solid fact. Any talk of the future usually concludes with an "insha'allah" (if God wills it). For example:

"Okay so I'll see you at four for the meeting?"
"Insha'allah."

Nothing is certain, anything can happen, we don't have control. I thought this concept was pretty interesting since I tend to be hard-headed and convince myself I can make things happen when I want them to happen. (Morocco has already started making me a little humble in that sense.)

So I realized how far this idea that nothing is certain goes this past Tuesday. In the afternoons I open up my classroom for some informal tutoring, and whoever wants to come and read or go over grammar or whatever is welcome. A couple times this week, an older guy came by to work on verb tenses. I wasn't sure where to start with him, so I started at the beginning with simple present tense. We were practicing things like "I eat lunch everyday" and "she watches television at night." Easy peas. TOO easy peas. So I stepped it up a notch and started asking him questions that he could answer using the simple present. We talked about daily routines and habitual actions, then I started explaining the concept of general truths, because those are good, simple statements to practice.

But oh my god did this guy not get the concept of general truths.

I said to him, "a general truth is something that is always true. For example, 'the sun is hot.'"

"No, not always. You can't know that the sun will be hot."

Well, sir, I'm pretty sure the sun is always a gigantic ball of super-hot gases. You can count on that. But whatever, we'll let it slide. So I says to him I says:

"Okay. How about, 'Moroccans eat couscous on Friday."

"But it's impossible to know if every Moroccan is eating couscous on the same day."

At this point I started having 'Nam style flashbacks of my days in sociocultural anthropology lectures when you couldn't get a sentence out without someone raising their hand to point out that your statement could be misconstrued as stereotypical, and decided it would be best to move on to the simple past tense.

Something completely different: today marks the start of my fourth month in country. Three months down, twenty-four to go! (Insha'allah)