You will let me know when the lambs stop screaming, won't you?

A photo post. Mabrouk L'Eid!


Youngest host brother with the sheep.


The family


Some tasty innards, waiting to be cooked


Relaxing with tea

You probably work in development if:

After seeing a used condom discarded in the street, your reaction is to think "good for them!"

Slow children crossing

I swore in as a Volunteer one year ago. Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day I arrived in my site.

After a full calendar year, there's still a crazed young child that runs after me in the street yelling "HAWAII! HAWAII!"

It took me a few months, but I finally deduced that he thinks "Hawaii," a popular brand of orange soda here, is the same thing as "how are you."

Something clever that I didn't write:

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him,

"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

"She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be an Obama Democrat."

"I am,"replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

I'm kind of an idiot.

Andy: oh my god are you ready
for how excited i am right now
you aren't
is the answer
because I am about to watch the first episode of this new show
me: what show?!
Andy: it's called
The Walking Dead
me: is it about zombies??
Andy: YES
me: wait
like fiction?

A Big Thank You to Matt and Tanie

Yeah, it was the batteries.

You need muscles.

Hi.

There aren't many people who speak English in my town. Most of the people that say they "speak English" actually know a few key phrases like "you're crazy!" and "I eat couscous." It's like how you can convince someone you speak a Berber dialect if you know how to say "bread" and "tea." The point is, it's always very surprising when someone I've never met throws out a new string of English words that make sense in the given context.

FOR EXAMPLE.

I've been troubleshooting, sort of, what's wrong with my water heater over the past few weeks. It stopped producing hot water this summer, but I was hardly bothered by it then. Who takes hot showers in June? Lately, of course, it's been a bit of an issue.

Not wanting to admit that there might be something wrong with the actual water heater, I decided there was a problem with my buta. Buta, for those of you who are not aware, is what we call our huge butane gas tanks that power our water heaters, stoves, and ovens if we have them.

Butas are very heavy. I had an inkling that mine might be empty, but the tank itself is so goddamn heavy I can't tell if it's got anything in it or not. Last week a friend was visiting and he confirmed that it was, indeed, empty.

I sat on this information for a couple days, but tonight I was feelin' sassy. I decided to deal with this buta once and for all. After eating cookies and watching a terrible Mexican soap opera with my host aunt, of course... and after stopping by my landlord to borrow a wrench, making sure I dropped some hints that I'd be carrying my buta tank down to the shop to have it filled and trying to look as weak as possible so that maybe he'd just do it for me. No dice.

Once I got the empty buta into a comfortable position, I found it was sort of easy to waddle down the hill from my front door to the shop. The fact that I live on a hill becomes important later (foreshadowing!).

The shop assistant filled up my buta very quickly and then just kind of looked at it and at me, as if to say "I can't wait to see how this is going to go." I smiled down at my buta as if it were a loyal pet or something and nudged it. Except it didn't move. This was supposed to be the shop assistant's cue to offer to carry it to my house, but once again, no dice. So I asked to borrow his buta cart and started trying to roll it up the hill to my house.

Some tips for dragging a full butane gas tank up a gravelly hill:

1. carbo-load.
2. don't wear ballet flats. Serious work requires serious footwear.
3. get someone else to do it. The common term for this in Peace Corps Morocco is to "small boy" it, referring to the Moroccan tradition of making a little kid run your errands for you, but I think that regarding buta, you might need to "large boy" it.

After about five minutes of huffing and puffing and dragging my buta uphill, I looked up to see that I'd moved about three feet, and sort of more sideways than up. At this point I also noticed a group of teenage boys staring at me. I may have disobeyed tips 1 and 2, but it wasn't too late for 3:

Alli: Yimkin y3awni? (Could you help me?)
Boy: You need muscles! (<--note the English here)
Alli: Haha, yep.
--awkward smiles all around--
Alli: ...Iwa...y3awni? (So...help me?)

The boy very nicely (and effortlessly) dragged my buta up to the alleyway where my house is, allowing my poor little arms to recuperate for the last hurrah--getting the buta off the cart and into my house. He said nothing else in English, leading me to believe that the one phrase he's picked up in life is "you need muscles!"

At this point I'd like to point out that my water heater still doesn't work.

15 Books in 15 Minutes

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books/authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

Winnie-the-Pooh/ The House at Pooh Corner - A.A. Milne

Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

Skinny Legs and All - Tom Robbins

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

The Thornbirds - Colleen McCulloch

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Calvin and Hobbes (comic books count, I decided) - Bill Watterson

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

The Lorax - Dr. Seuss