Swinnnnng and a miss.

Swinnnnng and a miss.

Hiding in my house and blasting “My United States of Whatever”

Today I tried to officially start my exercise club with some women I know in the neighborhood. Yeah, about that…

You might say that attempts to exercise in Morocco and I are star-crossed lovers. True love doomed to be destroyed by the external whims of our cultures, our neighbors, our finicky forecast.

I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. The plan was to meet my host cousins at 7:45 am and walk together to the running track at the other end of town for some run/walking. Alas, it started raining last night as I fell asleep, and I KNEW that would cause me some problems in the morning. To name a few potential problems:

1. I wouldn’t want to wake up
2. It would still be raining
3. My host cousins wouldn’t be awake
4. My host cousins would be awake, but not motivated at alllll to go running because:
5. Everything would be muddy

I was faced with most of these issues when I woke up this morning. I laid in bed until 7:30, telling myself over and over again that, even if I got to their house and they didn’t want to go anymore, I could still say that I was the one who made the effort and that I would have at least made the point that I was committed to getting the women here exercising and practicing healthier routines.

Anyway I managed to get my ass out of bed and out the door and found myself in front of my host cousins’ front door a mere five minutes later. The house, like the entire street, was eerily quiet. Not wanting to wake the WHOLE family, I decided to beep* my older host cousin instead.

Fabulous, her phone is turned off. At this point I am CERTAIN she is still asleep, and part of me thinks I should just go home and follow her example. But then the proactive, uppity, slightly OCD voice inside my head piped up and said, “No way. You two agreed on meeting at 7:45 am at her house and you are NOT backing down, Missy.” The proactive, uppity, slightly OCD voice inside my head is also a bit of a sass muffin.

Okay, so then I went into problem-solving mode. How do I get JUST Fatima-Zahra and Nouria to wake up? Bing! Idea. I stepped back onto the street to examine the layout of the house, then made a mental map of the inside of it to figure out which was their bedroom window. Then I—you guessed it—started throwing rocks at their window. I really did.

Alas, no answer. I was about to give up again when Sasspants inside my head let out an exasperated “Oh NO you di’nt.” Okay, okay. Having tried everything I could think of to discreetly wake up the girls, I finally mustered up my courage and rang the doorbell. A few minutes later my slightly grumpy host uncle came to the door, mumbled something half-heartedly in response to my profuse apologies and led me into the house.

As I suspected, Fatima-Zahra and Nouria were out cold. FZ woke up when I came in, immediately remembered our agreement and started getting dressed. Nouria never even moved the whole time I was there.

I sat on the bed while FZ got ready to go. She gathered all her clothes then quickly rolled out a carpet in order to say her morning prayers. I thought it was odd, at first, that she didn’t ask me to leave the room while she prayed, but then I remembered how many times my host father would go to pray when I lived at his house and the kids would be running all around him, playing and screaming. I think maybe prayer is both very sacred and very routine at the same time: the person praying concentrates only on the prayer and blocks out external noise, and the people contributing to external noise have seen people pray countless times (five times a day, every day, for instance) and therefore no longer find it interesting or worthy of reverance. Maybe. I really have no idea.

Anyway, once prayers were finished FZ and I were on our way. With Nouria in a coma we were one member short of what I had hoped, but no matter. Even starting with just one Moroccan woman is SOMETHING right? Right.

We got about halfway to the track when the skies opened up. Honestly, it wasn’t raining THAT hard, but enough to make the track really muddy and possibly dangerous. After about ten minutes of hanging out and chatting under an awning we decided to just call it off for the day, reasoning that we’d sort of power-walked, so we did actually exercise.

I’m not totally down-trodden. The fact that FZ popped out of bed and made good on our agreement to exercise is really encouraging. She also assured me that in a few more weeks we won’t see rain anymore. I can wait.



* Note: I don’t have a beeper. Beeping is a common practice here in Morocco where you call someone, let it ring once, and hang up. While this would be incredibly annoying and frustrating in the States, it serves two important purposes in Morocco. First, it lets the person you beep know you are thinking about them/miss them, and second, it’s a great way to get someone to call you back when you are low on credit and phone calls are like 6 dirhams a minute or something like that.