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.

and the real Peace Corps begins

So now that CBT is over, I've spent about a month at my final site, where I'll be for the next two years (inshallah, or "God willing", as I am often reminded). A little about my site:

town from above, taken in April--it's much greener now

It's called Ain Leuh, situated on the north side of the Middle Atlas Mountains, in Ifrane Province. When I told people in Ouarzazate where I was going, every Moroccan person had the same reaction: "That's the most beautiful province in Morocco, and you are going to be very cold." It is indeed beautiful, in a similar way to home in northwest Connecticut, but much more mountainous. The elevation is a little under a mile, which is what makes it colder than the surrounding Mediterranean and desert climates. When I first got here in the beginning of June, I was sleeping under three blankets in a sweatshirt and long underwear, although now it's far warmer. This is in contrast to the days that almost always topped 100 in Ouarzazate, beginning in April.

sworn in!

So this is it! PST is over, and all of us now PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) have dispersed to our sites.

The last few weeks at CBT were sort of strange--the fact that we were leaving kept sort of creeping up on me, and didn't seem real until we actually left. We wrapped up our training activities in the village with two environmental education lessons at the elementary school. We conducted almost the entire thing in Darija (with help from our LCF obviously), which was satisfying, and got some good feedback from the school. The lesson focused on being able to talk specifically about the effects of trash on the environment, and the kids seemed to enjoy it. They were remarkably engaged, and much more … energetic than I remember 3rd graders being during school at home.

letting go & food struggles

One day, during the wedding week, I went home after school to find that my host family was gone, and was told to go over to Kristin's house and hang out there. Kristin's host sister, Habiba, told us we were going to get henna and then go to the big house for more wedding celebrations. Henna is sort of a big production, involving someone very carefully drawing on both sides of your hands with a syringe full of smelly paste, so we sit down on the couch and wait for Habiba's friend Aisha to do all of our hands. Normally, you just sit and let it dry, while also patting sugar water on it that helps the color set, but we had to go to the wedding and didn't have time to finish putting the stuff on my hands.

When we got to the wedding, Kristin and I went in to sit in the bride's room with a bunch of women, and are chatting (in English) about adjusting to life in Morocco. We were both agreeing about how to a certain extent it involves letting go of control over a lot of little things during the day, like eating dinner before 10:30 pm or not ingesting a pound of sugar each day. Meanwhile, the henna on our hands is still drying, and Habiba asks one of the women for sugar water. The woman comes back with a cup of sugar water, but Habiba is gone, so the woman goes to hand the glass to me, but my hands are all sticky with henna, so I put my hands up to indicate that I can't take it and could she put it on the table. However, instead of putting it on the table, she holds it up to my face and pours the water into my mouth. Habiba walks back into the room at this moment, sees the woman pour sugar water into my mouth and me spit it out in surprise, and just about dies laughing.

the wedding, cont.

So an abbreviated version of the rest of the wedding, since that was about a month ago now (oops):

Though I thought I had understood that the wedding would last three days, and I would be missing the third day since we were going to hub, we came back to find that the third day hadn't happened yet, and Kristin and I were whisked away to a celebration that lasted until at least 4 am. Unless we missed it (which is possible), there was no actual ceremony, so no particular moment at which the bride and groom became married. Instead, the party basically lasted for about ten (!) days in total.

It took me until about three days in to realize that it was actually a double wedding: my host mom's brother and sister were both getting married. I was confused because, unlike in the U.S., where the bride and groom tend to be the center of attention at their own wedding, the two couples were essentially hidden in two different back rooms. For the first half of the week, the brides each had their own room, and then another room housed the two grooms together, with a bunch of other men. I had only been sitting with my host mom's sister, and had never met the other bride, so I just didn't realize she existed. Sometimes the brides would be literally hidden, as on one night, when Kristin and I were ushered into the bride room and realized she was literally huddled in a corner, completely shrouded in white except for red gauze over her face. Unclear.

Though there wasn't a real ceremony, there were a few different rituals that happened at different times. On the third night, the two grooms were dragged out of their room completely covered with a hooded robe that came all the way over their face and made to kneel on pillows in the middle of the big room. My host grandma then washed each of their heads and put what I think was kohl on their eyes, which apparently burns a lot, since they looked like they were both sort of crying. The grandma also did the same washing and applying kohl thing with two other young men, but no matter how many times and different ways I ask my host mom, I can't for the life of me figure out what it means.

Another tradition I saw was that every night for the last week of the festivities at 9:30 or 10, tons of women would show up for dinner. First everyone would get tea and these sweet wafers that I haven't seen anywhere else here, and then the brides would go around and greet every woman in the room. Greeting in general in Morocco is no joke, and for women generally entails at least three kisses on the cheek, but wedding greeting was particularly intense, so the brides would spend about half an hour stooped over and kissing every woman about seven or eight times. On the last night, my host grandma spent about two hours getting the two brides dressed up. Each of the brides had on several undergarments, followed by a fancy white caftan, several sparkly and gauzes shawls, a regular head wrap, the traditional Berber red and yellow head scarf, metal bangles that go over the scarf, and a white sheet that went over everything and affixed a small mirror to the forehead. (See picture below!)

All of this was to get ready for a literally 5 minute long parade from the back room to the street, just outside the front door, where someone washed their feet and everybody sang. Then as they walked back inside, their new husbands threw water on them, and then they went back to the room and changed. It seemed like a lot of work.

Anyways, the wedding was fun because I got to meet a ton of people (mostly women) and hear a lot of traditional music. I was sort of glad it was over, because it was exhausting constantly being around so many people that I didn't really know, and I never had any time to study or do homework we were supposed to do for class. I kept thinking how different it was from the two weddings I went to this year, that of a close family friend in the Adirondacks in September and my cousin's in Jamaica in November.

Some pictures:

traditional Berber dancing

Kristin's grandpa and the father of the bride and groom 

one of the brides being dressed by my host grandma

the brides in full get-up for the last night of the wedding

the short parade into the street on the last night 

some of the extended family, with the two brides in the middle