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)

On little boys and throwing rocks, on time and food and wearing socks

current jamz: "gethsemane" from Jesus Christ Superstar, seriously. I'm making you proud, momma.

Funny story, I once almost killed my sister and I because we were too focused on singing the entire score to JCS at the top of our voices, and not so much focused on how I was speeding like a maniac through rush hour traffic.

Anyway, on to the blogging.

First time a kid threw a rock at me at close range: COUNT IT. I was walking my host siblings back to school after lunch and this toddler was chillin out max and relaxin all cool with a rock the size of his FACE in his hands. It was the weirdest experience, his facial expression didn't change at all and yet I saw the rock and knew exactly what was going to happen. Luckily the kid throws like a girl and it just sort of fell at my feet. Kind of anticlimactic...I guess I could have said something like "he hit me smack in the jugular so I junk-punched him and now we are best friends."

Moving on.

Perhaps it's fitting that most houses I've visited for tea have two or three clocks that don't work on display. Morocco runs on a completely different schedule, a concept I was briefed on but didn't quite grasp how it might affect my life until really experiencing it. Sometimes lunch is on the table at 12:30, sometimes my host mom isn't even back from the community oven with the fresh-baked bread (amazing) until 2:30 or closer to 3. What's funny is I am already starting to have trouble getting places on time, and as many of you know I'm usually chronically prompt. Yesterday, for instance, I KNEW my friend was coming over at 4 pm to go walk around/hang out in the village-sort of the center of town-and yet when my host mom asked me at 2:45 if I wanted to make American cookies, I said "sure, why not?" Poor time-management+misreading a recipe+being afraid of my mom's oven= I was over an hour late meeting my friend. But the cookies were delicious.

And speaking of food, wow do I eat a lot here. I need to just suck it up and deal and be happy I'm not in a PC country where there's a lack of food, but my goodness am I expected to eat a lot. My host mom looks physically pained if I refuse a fourth piece of bread or respectfully decline a third cup of tea (even when I explain that I had tea with the family of a kid from the dar chebab less than an hour ago). Even when I do try to eat more, I still do something wrong. If I go for another piece of bread, I'm scolded for not putting butter on it. As soon as I finish the portion set out for me, someone semi-yells at me to take more. This evening, I was given bread, butter and tea, and was trying to eat all of it when my host mom gave me an apple, too. I didn't immediately eat it, so she ordered me to eat the apple. When I put down my glass of tea to take the apple, she told me I need to drink tea. When I picked the glass back up she said I should take more bread. How do you say "Go go gadget arms" in Arabic?

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.

tcob.

Typed at 10:12 pm on November 23

Currently listening to Ben Folds, Way to Normal album

Many things were accomplished today. In a related story, today was the first day I didn’t feel like a complete retard from dawn to dusk. My province-mate and I planned to meet up in our province capitol in order to meet our delegue for the Ministry of Youth and Sports here in Morocco, then I needed to buy a special stamp for my carte de sejour, then we needed to pick up some bags we’d left at the Peace Corps office. I’m sure none of this sounds particularly ridiculous, but these three errands involved:

1. telling Peace Corps 24 hours ahead of time that I would be leaving site today
2. leaving my house at 6:45 am
3. going to the gendarmes (fancy-pants police that follow PCVs around) to tell them I would be out of town all day
4. taking an hour-long car ride with 6 strangers
5. wandering around to various tobacco stores looking for a place that sold 100 Dh stamps (hopefully I bought the right kind)
6. teaching the delegue how to pronounce my name, then just telling her to call me Amal
7. taking another hour-long car ride to the Peace Corps office, but with 5 strangers this time (good ol’ province-mate was with me this time)
8. trying to remember where in the city Peace Corps is located
9. taking a 90ish minute car ride with six strangers, plus two backpacks, a large suitcase and a mosquito net
10. lugging said backpacks, large suitcase and mosquito net into a petit taxi when I got back to site and trying to explain to the driver where I live in a town with no street names (I literally just told him what section of town I live in then said to go to the top of the hill and I live by the mosque.)

All that and I managed to be home before the sun set, just in time for my host brothers to roll around on my bed then start touching everything that I brought back from Rabat and asking me what everything was. Ay caramba.

I must say, I’m pretty pleased with myself right now. So far in site, the people of my town have been helpful to the extent that I can’t do anything alone (I just recently was able to leave the house without my host mom making sure I had an escort). It’s difficult to adjust to that when you are used to handling most things by yourself. Today was different though! I did everything I needed to do, and I didn’t need a Moroccan to translate for me. Today was exactly what I’ve been needing—a sign that I’ll be able to handle the next two years. I felt so in control that I came home and started making excel spreadsheets and planning lessons. BAM.

“3awd 3afak? Mafhhmts walu.”

That means “Can you repeat, please? I didn’t understand anything.” Basically it’s the story of my life these days.

Let’s see here, it’s been awhile. I spent a week at the beach/Rabat finishing up training. The hotel we got to stay in in Rabat was super-zwin: western-style toilets! Continental breakfast! Free internet! Hot showers! Too bad we were only there one night.

The morning after the swearing-in ceremony (by the way, I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer now) I made my way to site—a seemingly simple grand taxi ride. Of course, we got a flat tire about halfway there and I got to chillax on the side of the road with five randos while the driver exchanged the flat tire for a somewhat less-flat spare. Nevertheless I made it to site in one piece!

I have a new host family now: mom, dad, gramma, three little brothers and one little sister. Everyone is so, so, so, so overwhelmingly nice I barely know how to react. Gramma won’t let me sit anywhere unless I have a sheepskin rug under my feet, and the other night we were walking somewhere and she randomly picked a flower and gave it to me. I wish I could understand anything she said.

It’s not just my host family that’s been incredible so far, either. Everyone keeps trying to claim me as their kid—people either refer to me as “bnti” or “mskina” which mean “my daughter” and “poor kid” respectively. I take a little offense to being called mskina all the time, but I also can’t help but admit that it’s basically true.

I think I’ve found a bizarro me in my host dad. Last Saturday I needed to get ID photos taken for my carte de sejour—basically my Moroccan ID—but none of the stores were open yet because everyone was still eating lunch or napping (oh, Morocco) so we went and sat at his favorite café for a bit. We just sat and drank coffee and I didn’t think it could get any better, but then he pulled out a—wait for it—CROSSWORD PUZZLE. Of course it was in Arabic, but just seeing a crossword puzzle was like a little taste of my old routine.

So I guess I could talk about some potentially interesting information. I haven’t really started WORKING working yet, but I’ve gone to Dar Chebab pretty much everyday to hang out with the kids. The site I was assigned to already has a very active Dar Chebab, so it’s difficult to figure out where I fit in and what I can do to help them out, especially since my language skills are so weak. I can’t believe I actually scored HIGHER on my Peace Corps language exam than what I needed in order to go to site without any problems. Luckily, the guy that’s been helping me out a lot around town says my accent is very good, so I guess when the vocabulary and grammar comes along I will be in good shape. Swiyya b swiyya.

Thus far this post has been very upbeat, but I want to note that community integration is freaking difficult. I thought training was difficult, but now I’m going to go ahead and say that this past week (my first week in site) has been one of the most difficult times of my life. As scary as training was at times, I had five Americans and a patient Moroccan on hand for support 24/7. I don’t mean to imply that the people in my site haven’t been amazing, but at the end of the day I only have myself to rely on. Swiyya stress.

Thursday—

Current tunez: “Just Got to Be” –The Black Keys

Current literature(z): Fun House by Alison Bechdel, a graphic novel that is somehow more depressing than Maus. It uses a ton of needlessly big words, which normally is a huge pet peeve of mine, but I think mixing cartoon images with SAT words makes the book enjoyable.

This week is going by super fast. I’ve got a little over a week left at CBT, then the ol’ gang gets back together on the beach for a bit before swearing-in in Rabat. Intense.

Good thing: I learned today that the volunteer I’m replacing will be in town for a little over two weeks after I move in, so I will have ample time to bother her and maybe even buy some of her stuff for my own place.

After language class the other day my CBT group and I went out to kick it at a café for a bit. I ran into my host dad at the café and said hey, but my group didn’t stay much longer after that because we had to get some veggies, etc. at the market. When I got home later that night my host dad basically called me a man for being out at a café and drinking tea and then my host uncle told me I should be wearing a veil when I’m in public. Cool story, Hansel…way to wait until now to tell me my behavior is problematic. I think they were joking with me, but then again I have no idea. Either way, not really how I wanted to end my day.

By the way, if I look horribly disfigured the next time I see you all it’s probably because trying to understand how to use the conditional in Darija is like getting round-house kicked in the face repeatedly and with a level of accuracy akin to that of imperial stormtroopers. Assuming the Empire has a training sesh on round-house kicking. I’m not really sure what their training program is like.

Well that was really weird. What can I say, it’s late.

Saturday--

Currently listening to “Omaha” by Counting Crows

Happy Halloween! I’m closing in on my last week of CBT…we had a farewell/Halloween party at Dar Chebab tonight that was really, really fun. Bzaf snacks, bzaf kids and even a live band. One of the girls braided a green thread thing into my hair so now I look really cool and I received little gifts from two of the other girls! A teddy bear (we named her Melissa) from one and a little “best friends forever” charm from another. It was really touching. I can’t believe how warmly we’ve been received here…the kids in my new town have a lot to live up to!

Other news: language is coming along, swiyya b swiyya. I can understand almost everything my baby sister says, which means I’m almost able to communicate like a 7 year old. I’ll take it.

Tuesday—

A few interesting things. I made a new friend today! My cell phone ran out of credit so during lunch I ran down to the market to buy a carte de recharge. Instead of cell phone plans, you buy recharge cards that have a special number on them. You dial 555 then enter the card number and voila, you can call and text. The amount you can call/text depends on how expensive of a card you buy. The girl working in the store was really sweet, and really excited that I was learning Arabic. Out of nowhere she gave me her phone number and declared that I was her new friend in Morocco. So that was nice. Of course, the universe evened everything out by making some punk bark at me while I walked home. Yes, he barked at me.

Tonight my CBT group had our family party. It’s our last week so everyone got together to say thanks/ eat a lot. I’ve never been on so ridiculous a sugar high; I actually felt my heart spasm a couple times. Pretty sure I caught diabetes. It was really great to get everyone together one last time, especially the host siblings. Brahim has two awesome kids in his family that I only really got to see at Dar Chebab, so it was fun to hang out with them in a different setting.

Tomorrow I have the dreaded LPI (Language Proficiency Interview). It’s not technically an exam, but you find out what level you are speaking at. Peace Corps provides volunteers with funds to get tutors in their sites, but if after a certain amount of time you aren’t showing improvement from your first LPI score, they can pull your tutor funding. So it’s a little stressful. At the same time, though, I can’t study anymore. Ay caramba. By this time tomorrowwww (love me some Kinks) it’ll be over with. However, unlike a final exam in school, I’m unfortunately (fortunately?) not finished with Darija.

Mixed feelings about leaving CBT. Excited, sad, terrified, relieved, ready, not ready. I find my mood depends on how much caffeine I’ve got pulsing through me. For example, around 9:45 am (i.e., right before my 10 am coffee break) I’m about ready to burst into tears and go fetal, but by 10:45 am I feel like the Biggest Little Girl in the World. A ballet teacher once told me that no matter how small I was I had to dance like I was the Biggest Little Girl in the World, and for some reason that image always stuck with me.

Random final thought: the souk is basically the Island of Misfit Toys from the Rudolph claymation movie.

Wednesday:

Real quick, I think I did okay on my LPI, but won' t know for sure for a few more days.