Happy Thanksgiving!

A quick hello to wish a happy, warm holiday to those of you with whom I haven't yet corresponded this week!

Last weekend, I said my final, sad goodbyes to my host family in Ait Hamza. A few days later, after a language test, more training sessions (as if I weren't scared enough of the buta gas tanks everyone cooks with here, they had to scare us more!), and a fun mock wedding ceremony with amazing live Berber musicians, my fellow small business trainees and I bade farewell to our little Auberge in Azrou, and headed to the town of Immouzer. This town, less than an hour away from Fez, feels quite suburban, and the vegetation and landscape here appear much like any US town in a slightly mountainous area. Here we joined our youth development colleagues at what first looked like a country club compared to our home in Azrou -- a compound with outdoor spaces, a basketball court, pool table... -- although now I think that impression was highly superficial. I especially miss the owner of our Auberge in Azrou, who was so kind to all of us (he even gave me a beautiful blanket for my birthday, back when he had barely gotten to know any of us)!

Today we officially completed our training, and I am eagerly awaiting a yummy Thanksgiving dinner this evening with 50+ of my newest friends! Tomorrow is our official swearing in ceremony in Fez (too bad they whisk us in and out before we really get to explore anything!), and in spite of my underachieving efforts to prepare for my oral language exam last Sunday (in order to avoid any additional work this week), it appears that I have been commissioned to deliver a speech in Tamazight tomorrow during the event, in front of the U.S. Ambassador, our host families, and everyone. That should be entertaining (and short), to say the least! But with my cape (a gift from my host mom), scarves, skirts with pants underneath, and fingerless gloves (it's gotten to be strictly utilitarian dress these days), I'm certainly getting crap from my colleagues that I'm turning into a Berber woman already!

That's it for now. I leave for my site (which will take two days) on Saturday, although much of the next week will be spent running errands in the cities of Errachidia and Goulmima. (Frankly, my primary anxiety is about the agony of moving all of my luggage around, since Peace Corps has given us so much additional gear and books that I now have another entire large souk bag full of stuff!). Anyway, it looks like I'll hardly be getting settled any time soon! But now it's time to go eat a little bibi!

My new home...

Well, I finally learned where I'll be living the next 2 years, and spent the better part of last week exploring the area, getting to know my new host family, job, etc. -- how exciting!

I am going to be in the High Atlas village of Assoul. As usual -- not in the guidebook and only on a really big map. There is only one "transit" a day in via the closest town. The only other way in and out depends on when the road is passable (not last week, for example!). I have no cell phone service, which will make work a little challenging (we all already knew I'd have to travel out of town for Internet!), and perhaps sanity even more so as I now have to wean myself from my newly-acquired texting addiction. There is a PC health volunteer there working to bring latrines to the area, as only a fraction of houses have any sort of toilet, and the town operates on a generator from 6-10pm each night, with houses alternating 2 nights on, one night off!

Sounds like BFE? Yes, but so far I love it! The drive in is stunning -- perhaps even my new favorite! My host family seems wonderful -- they've hosted a volunteer before, so they seem far more willing to let me be myself than what a lot of volunteers face, and perhaps just as importantly, it doesn't look like I'll have so many dinner table power struggles as I do in Ait Hamza! My host father is fluent in English, as well as (of course) Tamazight, French, and Classical Arabic, so I'll have no trouble getting tutoring in whatever I want/need! I am working with a women's group called a nedi, which does various forms of "tissage," including weaving, embroidery, and knitting. I am glad for the variety, and there are also a lot of potential projects with the group, so I won't be lacking for ideas going in. The harder part at first I think will be simply prioritizing needs. And this is all happening under the oversight of a community association which is highly organized and dedicated to community development projects in education, environment, and health. It's a windy place, facing a bit of a drought -- plenty cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but none of the extremes possible in this country (Azrou, BTW, is f-ing freezing now, and I even had to drive through snow heading back!)

I wish I had time now to go into all of my little (mis)adventures during this trek, which included stops through the provincial capital of Errachidia to meet my government supervisor, and the town of Goulmima, where I'll be spending a bit of time during the next few months with gendarmes trying to finalize all of my working papers. And there was a transit breakdown in the middle of nowhere and a minor bus crash... but this is Morocco and I'm ok, so it's all good!

Just a week of training left. I'll be leaving tomorrow to say goodbye to my host family in Ait Hamza; language test on Sunday; next week off Immisour (I'm sure I'm spelling that wrong) to celebrate Thanksgiving and then to Fez to get sworn in!

Safi sHur

Just got back from 2 more weeks with my host family in Ait Hamza – a place never wanting for adventure, as small as it may be. My host family remains wonderful, but I can see how, on some counts, my standards are quickly dropping. First, I have fleas. More fleas than last time, I mean. And I only had 2 “baths” in 2 weeks – but that’s more than a couple of my fellow trainees there enjoyed! I’m beginning to see additional benefits of head covering now! Oh – and the livestock! My “school” (part of a house our instructor rents out) has an outdoor Turkish toilet, which, while it continues to afford a slightly better sense of privacy than the toilet in my homestay, still has occasional visitors. Twice I had to chase out chickens during times of intestinal distress (and twice a little girl who seems to enjoy watching me in there)! One of the landlord’s chickens also seemed to have a favorite spot on a ponge in our classroom, where we found it (and of course its droppings) a couple of mornings… I can’t complain though – one of my friends had a donkey walk in on her in the toilet at her house in the middle of the night! As for the toilets, well, since the only way to get rid of paper waste is to burn it, I find that, provided there is some water available, more and more I’ve been doing things the Moroccan way (e-mail me if you require clarification – I’m trying to keep this clean!).

Ramadan actually ended this week with celebrations of Eid. I made it through with the fasting, apart from cheating a few sips of water a couple of times when I was sick (when, technically, you don’t have to fast anyway, nor while you’re having your period). But it wasn’t the fasting that ultimately was killing me, but rather the 3:30/4am meal of sHur. That was tough enough at the Aubèrge in Azrou, but at least there it was just a little bread, yogurt, and fruit. But – and even though I knew to expect this, it was still a bit overwhelming – many families here actually prepare full-on meals in the middle of the night. In Ait Hamza, that usually means bread and a greasy tajine full of lamb fat and Allah knows what other body parts. As much as I usually like a good piece of lamb, this was not it, and of course the general nutrition of this diet (coupled with all the sweets of lfdur, the meal you have to break the fast in the evening) is somewhat lacking. I tried to go along with it the first few nights, but couldn’t help but get sick from it, and finally had to start asking to eat mainly fruit, and occasionally just to sleep through the meal. Unfortunately, this is a culture that seems to think that if you are sick, you either need to eat more and/or wear more, so it was hard not to disappoint my host mother – who is definitely a strong willed woman – in explaining to her that I needed a break sometimes, or even simply that I preferred to sleep! I may just tell my next host family that I’m a vegetarian.

And I didn’t get much sleep. Most nights we had lfdur at the home of one of the trainee’s homestay families, which often extended into iminsi, the 10pm-ish dinner. And by about halfway through our stay in Ait Hamza, our late nights were getting pretty filled up as well… (and don’t forget we had classes every morning – even Saturday!). After we’d been there a week, a couple of us were begging to go to the hamman, the public bath (the lone guy in our group had been taken there by his family earlier in the week). Since Ait Hamza is pretty small, there is only one hamman that is scheduled for men or for women at different times of the day. Because women are usually allowed there in the morning, when we had our language lessons, plans were made to open the hamman especially for us Saturday night, after the men were scheduled to leave at 10pm. Of course all the other women in town decided to take advantage of this opportunity as well (and no doubt were a little curious to see the Americans), so the bathing turned into quite an ordeal! I got scrubbed down (to the point of losing skin, as is the norm) several times, and was still exhausted and ready to go after an hour or so. Especially in the innermost room, it’s VERY hot, and who wants to keep sweating when the point is to clean up! But, of course, the point is to socialize, so even when my friends and I had finished, we waited around for our families until around 1am. To me, the most irrational thing about the hamman is that even though you’re in this room full of women scrubbing each other down front and back (ok guys – whatever image you have here, you should trust me that most of these bodies are not ones you’d enjoy looking at), the one piece of clothing you keep on is our underpants. Which weren’t clean to begin with, and now you’re sweating in them more!

The next morning, I went to the souk at the nearby town of Guigou with my family. It was huge – big enough that people come all the way from Azrou (the much larger city that is my other home during training) – and had just about anything a Moroccan could want for his or her dinner, home, or farm. Peace Corps of course compensates our families for our meals, so I took advantage of that, as well as the fact that my host mother seemed to have it in her head that I hadn’t eaten all week (in spite of the fact that my stomach was exploding!) to beg for a couple of vegetables – cauliflower (yum, and they’re gigantic here) and tomatoes. And the souk is also a big social event, so we were there for several hours, in the dust and wind… So much for last night’s hamman!

That night marked the 27th day of Ramadan – when the Koran descended to the Prophet. It is a night when Muslims are supposed to pray all night, reciting the Koran in full, although the reality is that they come and go from the mosque when they need some rest. I was told that elsewhere in Morocco, people take breaks for meals while they are at home, but in Ait Hamza, the women actually bring food to the mosques (there are two) to feed their praying family members right there. In Ait Hamza, the women are also allowed in the mosques to pray – at least on special occasions like this – so even though I was with some trainees at someone’s house, enjoying couscous (which I learned a little more about how to prepare) for the holiday (it’s normally served only on Fridays or special occasions) and just hanging out, as it got later, no one could seem to find my host mother to escort me home, so that turned out to be a rather late night as well!

The following night was the most exhausting of all. Although during my previous stay, I had been taken to pay respects to one new mother, the big celebrations of birth are actually on the day of the baby's birth, and the naming ceremony, the naming ceremony, or ssabia, held seven days later. For this, I was loaned a caftan to wear, and paraded to a house full of women singing, playing drums, and drinking tea. My instructor's landlord, Fatima, was the life of the party, drumming, singing, and dancing, and I continue to be amazed by the lungs on the women here. I'd been warned about all the activities by a fellow trainee, who was on her second ssabia in a week’s time, and sure enough, as soon as the dancing started, she and I – as part of the American circus – were the first people dragged in front of the group to try to shake our hips the way only Berber women can! While it was a lot of fun, I have to say this was also an extremely physically uncomfortable experience, as by then the group of 60+ women had moved into an even smaller room with no ventilation, and with a buta gas (big tank full of gas used for all cooking, etc. purposes – very scary) running to help heat up the drums. I was crouched in a corner with 3 other trainees sweating like crazy thanks to our polyester caftans, drinking hot tea, and the general body heat in the room. And then the food started coming. More sweets, as always, and after several more hours of dancing and snacking, the hard-core musicians left the room while the rest of us were served tajines of lamb that had been slaughtered for the event, and then couscous (approximately 1am). I really admired Kenza – one of the women I’ve gotten to know through the weaving cooperative – who sat next to me and rolled perfect balls of couscous with one hand. I still drop it everywhere, and take full advantage of spoons when they’re made available for the couscous. Everything else – tajines etc. – I’ve gotten used to eating with my hands out of a communal dish, as I did in people’s homes in Ghana. And anyone who visits me ought to be warned – I find this a fantastic way of minimizing dishwashing!


Like the beginning of Ramadan, the exact date of Eid, which lasts for 2 days, is unknown until the moon marking the end of the month of Ramadan is observed. The night before, many women have henna done on their hands and/or feet – and mine was beautifully done by one of our 15 year old neighbors! Like last time, I was then expected to eat and sleep with all that stuff on my hands, but the result is worth it if you don’t screw it up before it dries. Some people continue to fast for those two days, although others return to a “normal” eating schedule on the first day of Eid. Like the rest of the month, there is a festive air that reminds me a bit of Christmas (during Ramadan afternoons, my family played holiday music and baked), and as we sat down to our first daytime breakfast (also called lfdur), children kept coming into the house and kissing me and my family in exchange for a handful of cookies or cake (which reminds me – in spite of all the sugar I’ve been consuming, I really missed the candy corn this Halloween, if anyone wants ideas for care packages after I get a mailbox!). I spent much of the day paying visits to neighbors, and also observed a little holiday spat between my host sister and her parents – so I guess some things about holidays are universal… The following day, we had practice interviews with our language instructor (we all get tested before Peace Corps swears us in), and burned trash for the second time during our stay, but the holiday continued back at home, where I had couscous for lunch, and met even more of my extended host family, many of whom are also named Itto, like my mother, and including two of my mother’s aunts (one with awesome Coke bottle glasses who showed off her full set of gold teeth!) who were the cutest little old ladies ever! We’ve also spent a lot of time with a neighbor named Rahkia, an old woman with only two teeth whose greeting of “labas?” sounds more like “labath,” so I’m never going to understand her… but she loves me (not as much as she loves one of my blonde colleagues though!), and just stares into my face smiling and saying “labath, labath” over and over again because I don’t know what else she’s saying.

So that’s the overview of my last two weeks – even with a journal and a notebook, I bet I am forgetting a lot (as well as censoring a few interesting points with which I’ll tease you into staying in touch!). For example, one person in my group swore her family gave her gunpowder to eat when she had diarrhea, although I think we figured out later what really happened there…

My family has been wonderful in helping me learn the language, and between them and classes, this has been an incredibly intense experience (although as much as we’ve learned, I remain barely functional in real life, and I have to remind myself that I’ve only been studying Tamazight for a month!). Dad is still most likely to give up and use French, although I like that practice too, and having that in common certainly has been useful in getting him to run interference for me at the dinner table. My host mom is a unique woman, but I know she is trying hard to make me happy, and I can pick up enough language to know that she’s been proud to take me to visit other people and tell them how much she’s helped teach me. My host sister is the best though. She speaks fairly decent French (definitely better grammar than mine these days) and is just starting to learn English, so she is definitely the most empathetic and patient when it comes to saying things slowly for me and trying to understand my accent. I’ll be interested to see what happens to her in life. At 14, she’s already traveling to Guigou for school, and I can see that, although the family makes her work very hard around the house as well, my host father places a lot of importance on her education, as does she. She already travels to Guigou for school every day, and to me she stands out, even among her friends and other girls about her age, as being a little less “Berber” in her dress and demeanor. Generally, she’s more outgoing, even with guys, and I’ve never seen her walk around in pajamas or bedsheets, as is the fashion for most of the Berber women and girls I’ve met both in Ait Hamza and in Imilchil. I’ve enjoyed helping her a little with her English (and of course that’s a mental reprieve for me as well), and she’s much more willing than my mother to let me actually participate in the kitchen (probably because it’s helping out with her work) rather than having me sit on a stool and watch.

Speaking of watching, Desperate Housewives was on the other night. Even with a little editing, I was still quite surprised to see that in the midst of all the Ramadan specials (short-run soap operas and comedies; the religious programming was on another channel, which I think some families watch more diligently than others). Some of the non-holiday programming was in French (usually dubbed), but all of this is in Darija (Arabic), so it’s not helpful for me to practice either French or Tamazight. Personally, even if I understood Arabic, it drives me crazy to sit staring in front of the TV for too long, so I’d often make an escape to read, nap, or study in the evenings when the TV got to be a bit much. And rude as it seems, I finally started carrying something to read on visits, in case I got stuck in front of the TV there (because if it’s not the TV, of course it’s people quizzing me on the language or each other’s names, which I’m not even good at in English!!!). There is a Moroccan newscast in French around 9pm, which I can understand reasonably well when there’s minimal background noise, but my main sources of American news are week-old Newsweeks, courtesy of the Peace Corps, and text messages from trainees in other sites that have Internet access…

And in the midst of all this, we did spend more time talking shop with the local weaving cooperative, and have made progress on some of the things they can do to improve their situation. Compared to other things I’ve seen in Morocco, their products are very high quality, as they’ve already benefited from other outside assistance and training. The primary problem right now seems to be their general fear of competitive markets, even while they’re hoping to find a market outside of Morocco. But the bottom like is that they need to get more consistent experience here too! In any event, to be just over two years old, this cooperative is amazingly organized, and the volunteer who is ultimately assigned here will have a lot to work with!

Tomorrow I’ll find out my final site assignment – could be Ait Hamza or could be something new. And the very next day I’m off on my own for a week to scope it out!