family visit and a workshop

The past month has been a pretty busy one, which has been a nice change. In the middle of March, my family arrived! We had a really great time all over the country, including Casablanca, Marrakech, Essaouira, Ouarzazate, Azrou, and Fes. Highlights included lunch with my CBT host family in Idelssane, outside Ouarzazate. I hadn’t been back since we swore in almost a year ago, and it was really nice to see them. My host mom had gotten pregnant and had a baby girl since I left, which I somehow managed to never understand on the phone. It was also nice that my family got to see what I think of as “real Morocco”, since I live in such an abnormal Peace Corps site. I also celebrated the year in country mark in Ouarzazate with a few other PCVs who were around—almost unbelievable to think I’ve been gone for that long.

Lily, Ayoub, and Hamid

two families

            Another highlight was bringing my mom and sister to my English class in Azrou. At the end of the class the women all of a sudden whipped out complete a complete Moroccan teatime, including lemonade, banana smoothies, and about twelve different kinds of cakes and cookies, all of which had been coordinated as a surprise. My family also ate dinner with my two favorite Moroccan families in Azrou, my landlord’s and my former tutor and now friend Aicha’s, so there was no shortage of Moroccan hospitality. It was great to have my family meet some of the people that are important to me and understand a little better what my life is like here.

Mom and Lily come to English class

Right after my family left, the cooperative that I work with attended a two-day workshop, funded by a grant through Peace Corps. The workshop was conducted by a professor from an agricultural school in Meknes, who taught the women how to make shampoo, lotion, and two different kinds of soap. The cooperative currently makes a few different kinds of couscous and herb waters (essence of lavender, peppermint, chamomile, poppy, thyme, lemon balm, and other herbs,) which are cool but don’t sell all that well with tourists. The idea behind the workshop was natural herb bath products would sell better both with Moroccans and with tourists, so the co-op would be a little more profitable.

            I was expecting the processes to be more along the lines of traditional and all-natural, so I was surprised when the professor whipped out his containers of lauryl sulfate and potassium hydroxide. The workshop was also more technical than I would have liked, which is difficult since only one of the women in the group is literate. Some of the others don’t understand numbers longer than one digit, meaning they can recite phone numbers but can’t read a scale when weighing out ingredients. (They also can’t total prices or make change for customers.) The shampoo and lotion processes were simple enough that I could follow them in Arabic, but the soap was way more complicated and involved calculating proportions of different ingredients to get the right “indice de sabonificacion” (one of several French terms that I never really figured out.) Another obstacle is that the chemical ingredients are pretty expensive and have to be bought in bulk, so the initial costs are high. Despite all this, the women are excited and have high hopes for the products.

the professor demonstrates part of the shampoo-making process

Laziza (the cooperative president) tries it out

the women try out the lotion they just made

            Since the workshop, I’ve mostly been working on lesson plans and teaching, planning the next steps for the cooperative, and exploring a few other project ideas. This week I’m taking two women from the co-op to a craft fair in Fes, so right now I’m helping out with that. Almost immediately after, I’m taking my first out-of-country vacation, to Madrid for a week with three of my friends. There are no words to express how excited I am for that, except: Tapas! Sangria! Grocery stores! Hot showers! I can wear a t-shirt in public and not be hassled! Also, hopefully we’ll get some nice weather, since did I mention it snowed last week in Azrou?

            And that brings me pretty close to May 25, which besides being my sister’s birthday and the date of my college commencement is also our Swearing In date, and therefore the exact halfway mark of my service here in Morocco. As I’ve said often here, the days are often slow but the months are flying by.

            Let me end with a reminder of how happy it makes me to hear from family and friends at home. Every email and letter I get makes my day, so, please, send me an update or just a hello. Love from the Maghreb.

contradictions (and a last minute visit)

It's been a pretty busy few weeks here, which has been a nice change. In addition to some real work days (!), a last-minute trip covered at the end of this post, and some brief visits with new and old PCV friends, I've been gearing up for my first official vacation in the country: my family's coming tomorrow! I'm very excited to see them, and show them a few of the places I've been in the country. Pictures to come after they leave ...

In the meantime, I thought I'd share a random Morocco anecdote.

I've thought many times that Morocco often feels like a country of contradictions. It's deeply conservative Islam mixed with European cosmopolitanism, traditional Berber life mixed with Arab pride, unbelievable hospitality competing with aggressive harassment, jellabas and skinny jeans, veiled hair and high heels, proper French and slangy Moroccan Arabic, people who grow up speaking three languages fluently but can't read or write any of them, I can't hug my male friends in public but I have to tolerate practically sitting under three strange men in the back of a taxi ... I could go on and on.

I don't really want to touch the subject of "women in Morocco", because, really, there's too much to say and I don't understand enough of it. But there is one particular contradiction that fascinates me more than all the rest. Because the vast majority of Moroccans are Muslim, and Islam prescribes that women be covered to a certain extent, women here don't show very much skin. There aren't too many chadors and face veils, and lots of women don't cover their hair, but even in relatively liberal Azrou, you almost never see a Moroccan women show even a forearm in public, much less a sternum or calf.

There is one and only one exception: it is completely acceptable to breastfeed in public. The first time I saw it, I was on the way back from souk in my old site during the summer, which involved a mile-long walk entirely up a steep hill in 100 degree heat and direct sun carrying a week's worth of food in my bag. Needless to say, I took the tranzit, or gutted van meant to hold maybe 15 people that instead carries about 35, so everybody is squished in shoulder to shoulder, men and women. And to my surprise, the woman next to me adjusts her jellaba, whips out a breast, and feeds her baby, in full view of all the men around us. Nevermind that she can't show them her hair.

I've heard this and similar stories from all my friends here (think awkward male PCVs staring at their tea cups while their host sisters breastfeed.) The best explanation I've heard for it (from another PCV, not from a Moroccan) is that a mother's breast is completely desexualized, as its purpose is to feed the baby, and so it's not offensive for others to see it. This is backed up by how many female PCVs have told me about having their own breasts evaluated, either with looks or a few squeezes, by the women in their community, with judgments about how well they're suited to breastfeeding.

Anyway, I've always thought we're way too squeamish in the States about breastfeeding, so I certainly have no problem with it. It's just another contradiction to wrap my mind around here.

And on a totally unrelated note, here's a picture from Secretary of State Clinton's last-minute visit to the U.S. Embassy in Rabat a few weekends ago.

She only spoke for about three minutes, but she did say the following: "I also want to thank the Peace Corps volunteers, because wherever I go, they always can bring a crowd of enthusiasm. When in doubt, bring on the Peace Corps and we'll get the energy going."  She was right--we were almost half the crowd. The "meet-and-greet" was a little anti-climactic, but given that she's more or less who I want to be when I grow up, so to speak, it was worth it.

Stay well, family and friends, and enjoy the beginnings of spring. Love from the Maghreb.

long-overdue update!

Hi all,

I've gotten pretty bad at this blog thing recently--I would say I've been very busy, but that's not really a good excuse. It's more that I've been waiting for something exciting to write about, but with most of the cultural adjustment and major holidays out of the way, nothing has come up recently. So, I'll give a quick update about a few developments in my service, and then I'll try to just post random thoughts and anecdotes about life here, even if nothing big is going on.

The major change in my life is that I moved at the beginning of January, from my mid-sized town to a small city called Azrou that's only about half an hour down the road. All of my work has been there, and all of my potential work is centered around Azrou, and I was essentially commuting, so it made sense to just make Azrou my home base instead. My new house is small but much cozier than my old one (and not infested with roaches, spiders, and centipedes, which is a plus) and I have more friends and contacts in Azrou than I had in my old site. All in all, it's a positive change, and worth the several months that it took to make happen.

As far as work goes, things are picking up a tiny bit, with not much happening now but a number of things in the planning process. Starting next week, I'll be teaching English to a group of female elementary school teachers from the school across the street from my house. I hadn't really intended to be teaching English here, but it's a good in at the school, which will hopefully make it easier to do some environmental education there (which is technically my program description, even if I haven't done any of it yet.) I'll also probably start working an orphanage/youth center soon, teaching English a few times a week and maybe doing other things as well. Things with my medicinal herbs and couscous co-operative are coming along, and we're planning a workshop so they can learn how to make shampoo, soap, and lotion, which is what they decided to spend the rest of the grant money on to expand their product selection.

On a slightly humorous note, I was contacted in January by the U.S. embassy in Rabat, whose media outreach program was doing a series with the national TV station on American aid projects in my region, and they sent a crew to film my cooperative and me. It aired across the country a week ago, so we're famous now. It's in Arabic, but you'll get to see a few of the women I work with, and some amusingly staged shots of me fiddling around with herbs and equipment. Also, the comments on the YouTube page for the video demonstrate an unfortunately persistent view about Peace Corps volunteers, but don't worry, my real name isn't in the video, so the "sleeping lion" won't be able to find me all that easily.

That's all for now, but I'll try to be more diligent and post again soon. A very belated Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year's to all!

Love from the Maghreb.

PS: to all the wonderful, wonderful people who send me snail mail sometimes, I have a new address:

[My full name]
B.P.332
Azrou, Province Ifrane, 53100
MOROCCO

If you sent anything to my old address since Christmas, let me know, since I'll be closing that box soon and I'm not sure I trust Moroccan forwarding services. 

and to think I used to be a vegetarian

view from my front door on a particularly foggy day

Happy early Thanksgiving! This week marked 8 months in country, and by and large it's gone by quickly, but spending the holidays here and without my family will be strange. It's pretty cold here, as measured by my very precise assessment that I can see my breath in my house at all times. Last week it snowed down the road from Azrou, but so far all we've had here is a lot of very chilly rain. My neighbors all have their little wood stoves going, but I don't have one, so I mostly just wear a lot of clothing and huddle under blankets (and occasionally invite myself into people's houses to sit in front of their stoves, which is totally acceptable here.) I don't have big plans for Thanksgiving, because we have a week-long training near Rabat at the beginning of December, and I'm looking forward to going south (to warmer regions!) for Christmas and New Year's, which is a lot of time out of site. (Side note: if you send me your address within the next two weeks, I'll send you a Christmas postcard!)

Speaking of holidays, last week was a big one here: technically called Eid al-Adha, usually translated as the Festival of Sacrifice, most people here just call it Eid l-Kbir, or the Big Holiday. (Eid l-Sghir, the Little Holiday, comes at the end of Ramadan.) Eid is based on the story in the Quran (which will sound familiar) when God commands Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismail, then stays his hand at the last minute and tells him to sacrifice a lamb instead.

To remember Ibrahim's devotion to God, every Muslim family that can afford it must sacrifice a sheep on Eid. The wealthier the family, the larger the sheep, partially because they're supposed to give some of it to poor families that can't afford their own sheep. (Supposedly some super-rich families in Fez slaughter a whole cow.) For two weeks before Eid, there were people with lone ewes and rams everywhere, even crossing city streets. (The TV news showed someone loading a ram into the luggage compartment of a bus.)

he definitely knew what was coming

I spent the holiday with my friend Kristin and her host family, since she and I were both a little nervous about all the blood and guts. The day started early, when the men said a prayer and cut the ram's throat in the field next to their house. The animal made some awful noises and thrashed around for awhile, but it wasn't quite as gross as I expected. After cutting off the head, they cut a small hole in one of the back legs and blew into it to make skinning the ram easier. After the skin came off, they hung the body from a tree to drain the blood, and took out all the organs. The women were in charge of cleaning all the organs out, which included squeezing the poo out of the colon and scooping the half-digested grass out of the stomach. Yum.

All the edible parts are cooked and eaten or preserved within a few days, usually in a traditional order that reflects how quickly each organ will go bad. For lunch and afternoon tea on the first day, every family grills kebabs of chunks of liver wrapped in fat. We also ate heart and what I think was spleen, although my internal organ vocabulary is a little limited. Most of it was surprisingly good, although I eat so little meat in general that it was kind of overwhelming. Then, for dinner, we were served the head, just cooked in oil in a pressure cooker. I ate a few bites of cheek (I think), which was fatty but tolerable, but then came the brains. I ate one bite, immediately felt like I was going to vomit, and politely declined any more, to the great amusement of all the Moroccans present. I think of myself as an adventurous eater, so hey, at least I tried it ... but no more brains for me any time soon.

Here are some pictures of the whole process. WARNING: they are a little graphic, so don't look if you don't want to see blood.

Hi folks,

It's been awhile since my last post, but not too much has changed. Work has been appearing, slowly but surely, which has been good. I've gotten a little more involved in the project I mentioned in my last post--besides the soil testing, a large component is developing a training program that will be taught by Moroccan employees of the Park Office to the owners of the land in the park to change their grazing practices. The goal is to implement a program that has been used very successfully in Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and other states in the west to restore soil and vegetation quality that has been damaged by overgrazing. I'll likely be helping revise the curriculum that the U.S. Forest Service team taught to the Moroccan trainers to make it more Morocco-appropriate, and helping to organize the actual training sessions when they happen. Some pictures of the park:

the famous Atlas ceder! old one on the left, babies on the right. this is in a fenced area, otherwise babies get grazed

digging some holes--my PCV colleague on the left, our counterpart from the Park Office, Lahcen, on the right

digging more holes, in an unprotected area of the park (notice the lack of vegetation)--see the culprits in back 

I've also started working with a small cooperative based in a tiny village outside Azrou that's been working with a small business development volunteer for two years. She's about to finish her service and go home, but they just got a grant, so I'm going to continue working with them after the other volunteer leaves. Their products are medicinal herbs (rosemary, thyme, verbena, and a lot of others made into oils and waters) and amazing couscous that's dried with herbs already in it. Part of the grant is paying for a solar-powered couscous drier that's being designed by a nearby university class, and part of it will go towards product development to help them reach a broader market. They're lovely women, a small group and mostly middle-aged, and it's nice to collaborate with a group of women that has the freedom to work outside the house.

There's a couple other little things that will hopefully come together soon, but that's about it work-wise. I've been doing some traveling, to Marrakech for a peer-counseling training in September and to meet my friend Kristin's parents. I'm at site now, though, and it's COLD. I don't have a thermometer, but I'd guess that midday temperatures in the sun outside are low 50s, and much colder when it's cloudy or stormy, which is often. My lovely basement house holds in the cold, and generally it's colder inside than out. I haven't woken up to frost in my house yet, but I'm told it will happen soon. Seriously.

The past few months have been very quiet otherwise; living without a computer made me appreciate a little more what Peace Corps service used to be like (okay, I still have my cell phone and occasional internet access in the city,but still ...) I'm almost embarrassed by how many books I've read, and I've also done things like make peanut butter with a mortar and pestle. But now I do have a computer again, which is a relief for work reasons and also means I can read the news and respond to emails a little more regularly. I am determined to be a better snail-mail correspondent, though, and I finally found envelopes and stamps, so write me letters!

Some pictures from Casablanca:

This is the Hassan II mosque, built by and named after the current king's father. It's the third largest mosque in the world, and the largest that non-Muslims can enter. (The largest two are in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia.) It's only about 20 years old, and has a capacity of 25,000 inside. It was beautiful.

This was touristy but worth it--the movie was actually filmed in Tangier, on the Mediterranean Coast, but someone recently build a replica in Casablanca, and we had a fancy drink there. Sadly, there was no one playing the piano.

on Ramadan and the park

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know I'm still alive--the unfortunate demise of my computer a month ago has made it a lot harder to write blog posts in the leisurely fashion to which I'm accustomed. Here's a quick update from my past month and a half:

-The month of August was Ramadan here, which was probably the most challenging cultural experience so far. Fasting consists of not eating or drinking water (or smoking or engaging in sexual activity) between dawn and sunset. Ramadan follows the Muslim lunar calendar, so it gets about two weeks earlier every year; everyone says late summer is the most difficult Ramadan, because the days are long and it's so darn hot. Basically all Moroccans fast, and Moroccans can actually be arrested for eating and drinking in public during Ramadan. Occasionally you'll see a tourist insensitively eating or smoking a cigarette during the day, but even PCVs who aren't fasting generally don't do that. I chose to fast, to see what it was like and because I guessed, correctly, that it would go a very long way towards helping me integrate into the community.

A typical schedule involves sleeping late (until 11 or so), reading, working, or spending time with friends during the day, and breaking the fast with a family at about 7:30 pm. Iftur, which literally means breakfast, involves dates, tea, honey cookies called chebakia, delicious soup called harira, and assorted other things depending on the family. Dinner follows at midnight or 1 am, and then some people take a nap until about 3:45 am, when they wake up to eat suhor, the pre-dawn meal. Some families eat a big meal then, but most prefer some fruit, milk, tea, or bread. Then they go back to sleep. Most people (but not me, obviously) spend quite a bit of time praying or at the mosque, during the day and after breaking the fast.

The best part about Ramadan for me was breaking the fast with assorted families in my site and in Azrou. I made a few new friends and enjoyed some good food and company. The hardest things were the messed up sleep schedule, which generally meant I could only get a few hours of sleep, and not being able to drink water. Especially difficult were the days I had to wake up early to work, and couldn't eat or drink for 10 hours or so, which leads me to ...

-I've finally started working a little, which is nice. I'm helping out on a project, partially funded and assisted by the U.S. Forest Service, that's working with the Park Service in Azrou to try and fix the damage done to the soil by years of over-grazing in parts of the park. I've been working with another PCV and someone from the Park Office to do soil analyses and establish baseline soil quality in a few different areas of the park, so that they'll be able to tell if the project is successful a few years down the line. Next week, a team from the USFS is coming here, and I'll be able to sit in on trainings conducted by the Park Office with local shepherds about how to graze their herds responsibly. While the work isn't exactly my specialty, I am learning quite a bit, and it's been really nice to be out working in the sunshine in the park.

-Other than that, life has been pretty quiet at home. I had company on my birthday, which was really nice, and I'm heading to Marrakech next week for a training, so I'll be able to see some friends then. Hopefully, I'll have a new computer by the middle of October, so I should be a better blogger and email correspondent by then. In the meantime, it's always nice to hear from people at home.

Love from the Maghreb,
Gussie

on late-night community

This is another post about a celebration. Unsurprisingly, many of the noteworthy events have to do with family milestones (weddings, births, etc), since life revolves around family ties. This one was of the baby shower variety, for lack of a better term. Instead of celebrating during a pregnancy, like in the States, here the party comes a week to a month after the birth, with a little tiny ugly wrinkly baby that generally doesn't look ready to be fussed over.

A few weeks ago, I went with my host mom and sister at about 10 pm on a Sunday up the hill to a very small village called Tichoute that's perched on a hill overlooking Ain Leuh. Tichoute reminds me of Idelsane (our training village) in that all the houses are in one clump, and everyone is extraordinarily friendly.

The initial part of the festivities was no surprise: waiting for hours to start dinner, then more courses than anyone could possibly actually eat. This time it was three entire roast chickens for our table of six or seven adults, followed by a huge plate of beef with eggs and prunes, followed by sffa, which is a traditional Moroccan dish consisting of angel hair pasta with powdered sugar, cinnamon, and usually some kind of nuts on top. This time it had what was more or less peanut butter on top (which does not exist here--I was SO EXCITED. Small pleasures.)

When my host sister finally gestured to me that it was time to go, I figured 1 am was practically early for something like this to end. I was sadly mistaken. Instead of leaving, we went up onto the roof of the house and sat on folding chairs for another 30 or 40 minutes waiting for everyone to come up. The women of the family were busy cleaning and bringing plates of leftover food to neighbors. Finally, two men with a violin and a drum, and two women dressed up in traditional Berber garb come up onto the roof, and the music starts.

On a chilly, totally silent June night on the roof of a house in a tiny village, it is very quiet. During the day, you can hear all sorts of animals (sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, dogs), TVs, music from cell phones, and kids playing in the street, but at night, there's no ambient noise. That made the violin, steel frame drum, and (occasionally sort of screechy, sorry) singing seem incredibly loud, at 1:30 am, in this tiny but densely populated village where cement and dirt walls are always thinner than they seem.

I cringed a little, and thought back to the time I came this close to calling in a noise complaint when our neighbor's music at 4 am in Flatbush was rattling the change off my shelf last winter. I wondered if it was socially acceptable to be annoyed at your neighbors for being loud in the middle of the night. I also wondered if staying up all night and listening to loud music in a large group of people were the most soothing activities for a newborn and her (doubtless exhausted) parents.

But then, to my amazement, over the course of the 40-minute first song, people started to materialize out of the nearby houses. Instead of sitting inside fuming, like I probably would have done, they came out to enjoy the music. Teenagers, adults, grandparents, mostly men but some women, too, all dragged out plastic stools to their front stoops or perched on the edges of their own roofs and sat silently watching the dancing. I have no idea if they were actually happy to have some music, or just making the best out of a sleepless hour or so, but it struck me that I can't imagine a similar situation in any place in the United States that I've ever visited.

We left early, after 2 am, when the musicians were only taking a break between songs, and the young children present were finally starting to fade. The night left me wondering if I would feel differently the next time music from next door kept me up late, and if the increased tolerance would transfer back to Brooklyn. Even though the music itself wasn't my favorite, I do love a community that appreciates and gathers around music, and it made me miss my many musically-inclined friends from back home (though our late-night singing was usually of a different sort).

Keep the emails coming! It's really nice to hear from people. And I have a mailing address now, so email me if you would like it. Love from the Maghreb.