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

the wedding

So far a lot of CBT has been boredom interspersed with intense activity: sitting with my host family and watching Turkish soap operas or Japanese cartoons dubbed into Darija that I don't understand at all; endless hours of drilling numbers or verb conjugations; waiting several hours for someone to show up to meet with us (we have to adjust to "Moroccan time"); followed by 10 hour days at hub packed with information, our weekly trips to the insanely overwhelming souk (market) in Skoura to buy vegetables and fruit, meeting tons of people who all want to greet us and try and speak to us.


Nothing has epitomized the mixture of excitement, confusion, and boredom more than the wedding. The first week we were here, Kristin and I were inexplicably taken along to with Zahara (technically my host mom, but she's only 28, which is my sister's age) and Habiba (Kristin's host sister, 27), to this big house on the other side of the village to make cookies with about five or six other women. No exaggeration, we went three nights in a row, and each night they made a few hundred cookies, mostly varieties of sugar cookie, some with coconut, almonds, chocolate, all different shapes. We were utterly confused, thinking maybe the women were selling them, but we weren't sure where, and there were solidly a thousand cookies.


Finally I heard a word I vaguely remembered from my college class four years ago, and we realized there was a wedding coming up. One Thursday, Zahara somehow communicated to me that Zakaria, her 10-year-old son, would pick me up from school at 5:30 and take me to the big house, because the wedding was starting. I went straight to the big house, which turned out to be her parents' house, where her older sister also lives with her husband and three kids. From 5:30 until about 11:30, I just sat surrounded by dozens of women, either in the big main room (which has trees and no roof in the middle, or in a side room with the bride and whomever was keeping her company at the moment. No one speaks any English, and my Darija wasn't good enough to ask useful question yet, so I was just perpetually confused.


The festivities seemed to consist mostly of food (couscous, hunks of beef with dates and sesame seeds, tea, and the endless cookies), talking, and singing and dancing. The music consists of one massive cow's hide bass drum that gets whacked with a hollow pipe, and a bunch of tambourine-esque hand-held drums, with chanting and singing over it. I went home straight after dinner (which was served at about 10:45 to the approximately 40 or 50 women there) and went back the next morning at 8:30, since we only had school in the afternoon. Zahara and her sisters, cousins, and assorted female neighbors seemed to have all been there since dawn, making batch after batch of bread from scratch, constantly preparing platters of tea and cookies, and washing used tea glasses coming back into the kitchen.


Besides being at school from 2 until 5:30, I stayed at the big house until about 12:30 am. This time, dinner was served at maybe 11:30 or midnight, and there were about 70 or 80 women and children. This doesn't even count the men, who I think were in the sort of courtyard section of the house away from us. The amount of food required is unbelievable; the one saving grace is that there aren't too many dishes, since groups of 8 or 10 people all eat out of a communal plate using bread instead of utensils.


This night was particularly overwhelming and confusing; I was introduced to the inexplicable tradition of spraying every person in a room with bad perfume. Zahara's sister-in-law is really into this tradition, and used several different bottles, which filled the entire room with a mixture of awful perfume. I happened to be coming down with a cold at the same time, and the perfume induced this coughing fit that wouldn't go away, to the point that there were tears running down my cheeks. Everyone was VERY concerned, and were trying to get me to drink sugar water to make my cough go away. (This is typical that they would think sugar was a solution, and is also important for a later story that I'll post.) 


I felt bad at this point, since I had been told that weddings last three days, and the next day was a hub day (meaning we were leaving for Ouarzazate), so I would be missing the last day of the wedding. I tried to apologize to my host mom, who just looked confused.


.... to be continued later when I have more time to write!

lost in translation

I've spent the past week at the double wedding of my host mom's brother and sister. Wedding festivities started last Thursday and will still be going on when I get back from hub tonight. I'll write a full post about it another time, but let's just say it's insane and awesome and pretty exhausting (I haven't been able to study at night or really sleep since it started.) I'll write a full post about it later when I have some time and post some pictures of the brides and grooms.

Our CBT group: Alex, Lena, Kristin, me, Conor, and Ikram

Anyways, here's one story that exemplifies the many difficulties of communication here, even with our designated educators and English speakers. Last week in class, Kristin asked our LCF (our language teacher, who grew up in Tiznit and has never left Morocco) how to say chapstick in Arabic. Ikram didn't know the English word, so Kristin pulled out her chapstick. Ikram told us the word was "l-saq", and we spent a few minutes practicing pronouncing the Arabic q, and comparing it to "l-sak", which means purse. We all diligently wrote the words down in our notebooks.

About a week later, we were on break and Kristin couldn't find her chapstick, and said so out loud. Ikram immediately searches around in her office supplies bag and hands Kristin a roll of masking tape. We just stared blankly at her--Lena pulled out her red shimmery chapstick and Ikram writes a new word on the board that we haven't seen yet. Finally we realize that Ikram thought Kristin was showing her a gluestick, and "l-saq" just means "adhesive". In the meantime, Lena's practicing her new vocabulary at home and her whole host family thinks she's putting glue on her lips. Just one example of the many, many miscommunications, even with the people that it's supposed to be easiest for us to communicate with ...

CBT

Yesterday was our first hub day, which means the first day back from our training site. We're not allowed to post the exact name for security reasons, but it's about half an hour east of here off the main road. It's very sleepy and small. My host family is a couple in their 30s, the dad's mother (who's the same age as my mom, but looks about 80), and three boys, age 3, 8, and 10. The level of hospitality is completely overwhelming sometimes--they stuff you full of food at every meal, and if you walk past someone's house and say hello, they will probably invite you in for tea, even strangers.

Language is going pretty well, but it's still frustrating to be back at such a basic level of communication. My family speaks no English at all, but I have been able to communicate some amount of information through a combination of my limiting Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and hand gestures. There's a lot of laughing (mostly at me).

I started helping out in the house right away, partially because I wanted to and partially because silence is less awkward when you're doing something. My mom would be proud--I've become the designated dish-washer for every meal that I'm at home. There's no running water or drain or sink in the kitchen, so dish-washing involves sitting or squatting on the concrete floor with a bucket of soapy water and a bucket for waste water. I consider myself pretty competent at domestic tasks like cooking and dish-washing at home, but my host mom looks at me like I'm an idiot when it takes me more than three minutes to wash all the dinner dishes.

I'll post more about the house and family later, and once I feel comfortable I'll take pictures of them. (The little boy especially is so adorable.) We're going back to CBT today, which means no internet for another 10 days or so--a strange adjustment.