Monday, July 31, 2006

Nobody works in the summer...

...except for Peace Corps volunteers.

It has been quite a week, and I've been stumbling all over town in spite of all sorts of digestive distress (and subsequent lack of nourishment), fever, etc., just trying to find a few pockets of motivation among the women of Assoul. Why? Because tomorrow marks the first day of their first really big craft fair, in Saidia -- a town on the Mediterranean coast next to the Algerian border. Two months ago, everyone seemed really excited about the prospect of possibly selling a thing or two, someone getting to go on a pretty big trip... But last week, only the new president and vice-president of the cooperative seemed motivated. How disappointing! Most days, the nedi was locked up tight, and the vice president, Fatima, and I went around knocking on doors (many of which weren't being answered) just to see if anybody had any products to sell ("any" meaning not dirty and not ugly). Mina, the president, had been working hard weaving, even trying out some new product ideas that we had discussed. Everyone else was either "occupied" (sleeping, due to the afternoon heat), or "waiting for the cooperative to start" (I keep explaining that we are in the process of starting it, so they need to work now!). Somehow, we miraculously ended up with one large souk bag full of stuff very late in the day Saturday. (All this was echoed in my attempts to complete other work as well this week -- no one was answering phones at any office I called! My understanding is that I can expect this through the end of August).

Sunday morning, Fatima and I left for Meknes, where we stayed with her uncle's family. I still didn't have much of an appetite, and was opting for starvation over possible intestinal distress during two rather long bus rides (been there, done that), but I nevertheless sampled a couple of the blander baked goods that the women of the house were preparing in bulk, as they were catering a wedding -- delicious! Today, we had one more long haul for Saidia. And, en route, I spoke with our regional delegate from the Ministry of Artisana, who told me that the women of Assoul have now been formally invited to hold their General Assembly meeting to begin their cooperative. Does this mean their next craft fair (at the end of August) will cause less stress? One can only hope, but...

In the meantime, I am excited to be here with Fatima. Regardless of what she sells, she is super-smart, and I think she will get a lot out of this experience (in addition to selling, she's going to be able to attend a number of training sessions). So I will be working ("working"?) here at the beach for a couple of weeks before I take a proper vacation. More on Saidia as our stay here progresses... By the way, it turns out it is hot and muggy here.



My other excitement this week was that my host family has a new baby boy! I paid a few visits, but unfortunately, I had to leave before the big naming ceremony. Although given the last such party I attended was in the winter, and remembering how hard I sweated then, I'm not sure it is such a bad thing to miss one in the dead of summer.

Besides, I had a vicarious party the night before I left Assoul -- someone had loudspeakers going at a wedding in town until 4am (when my alarm was set to catch the morning transit -- ARGH!). Even though it was on the edge of town, they might as well have been blasting straight into my window! No sleeping in the summer either, it would seem.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Goat Feet and Keeping Cool

For only the second time since I have been in this country, I had to tell someone not even to bother asking me to eat something (the other time was a sheep head during Lﻉid). One common dish served here (in rural areas, at least) is plain couscous in buttermilk. People here drink buttermilk straight and like it. It makes me gag. But even that I have choked down before, most recently at Mina’s house where, no matter how many times I tried to explain that it was the buttermilk that I didn’t like (I’ve learned that, while I should be polite, I actually do better to set boundaries early when it comes to foods I don’t care to consume in large quantities), she and her sister kept offering me more buttermilk, thinking it was the couscous I didn’t like. So, last Friday, I was there hanging out at lunchtime, and Mina began frying a couple of eggs while her sister Aicha went to get the main dish. “You can eat eggs,” Mina explained, “if you would rather have that than couscous.” “I love couscous.” I told her, “It’s the buttermilk I don’t care for.” “We’re not having buttermilk,” she replied, and I was thrilled! Sure enough, as Mina and I were snacking on eggs and bread, Aicha walked in with a platter of delicious looking couscous, with zizaw (cabbage-like greens that are often used in soup here – no clue if such a thing even exists in English, but they are pretty bitter raw). We all dug in.

Normally, with both couscous and tajines, the meat is in the center of the platter, often buried under vegetables (if there are any). Apart from my host family, who all have a healthy respect for my minimalist meat-eating habits, I often worry about what I may or may not have to politely pick over when I eat at someone else’s house. The meat is the prime part of the meal, and it is rude for me to refuse it, especially when someone else picks it apart and places your serving directly in front of you (it’s a little easier for me during meals where everyone just tears at the same pieces in the center of the dish). Well, as the zizaw started disappearing, what began to appear were two goat legs. The lower leg, to be specific, so I couldn’t make out where there was any actual meat – just skin and hooves. There was also some unidentifiable long, slimy thing. I didn’t understand Mina’s explanation of what it was, as she was pointing at her head, but it definitely was not brains. It hardly mattered – I was already not enjoying my couscous and zizaw any more, as I was looking at the goat feet with a combination of nausea and fear. When Aicha finally went to divvy up the meat, I immediately said I couldn’t eat meat today (I have, in fact, done a pretty good job of convincing people that I really do feel sick if I eat too much in this heat). I took advantage of the presence of the remaining eggs, and said I would be happy to finish those. Thankfully, they didn’t fight me (a lot of people here would)! Still, lunch wasn’t over, and I had to keep eating, and looking at those things, and then listening to them crunching, crunching…



So, the heat is getting pretty bad around here! Even so, I know not to complain too much. Last week, in Errachidia, I was dying because it was so much worse than Assoul, but I was staying with a friend from even farther south in the desert who was rejoicing that he was somewhere cool enough to potentially sleep through the night (demonic cats notwithstanding).

Another friend living near Marrakesh recently posted to our volunteer web group a list of tips for staying cool without air-con. It left me thinking about what exactly it is that I do, in my world where an electric fan is not even an option (and believe me, that will be one of my first purchases if and when they finally do hook up the electricity in Assoul… I see the poles going up, really!).

The answer is, simply, water. Wet rags, wet towels, wet bandanas, wet newspapers. Buckets of water. Anything wet. Although this in itself can be a challenge in our world of massive drought and water flow regulated to an hour a day (and that can sometimes be a rather pathetic hour when it does come). Not to mention that, no matter how much insect repellant I wear, I suspect that all this standing water in my kitchen and bathroom has something to do with the fact that I walk around itching to the point of near insanity.

I sit around my house with wet bandanas tied around my pressure points. (Unfortunately, although tank top and shorts are my indoor clothing of choice, I have to keep long sleeves and pants handy to change into quickly whenever someone knocks at my door. My friend Najat has already teased me after seeing me – from someone else’s house – up on my roof improperly covered!).

Likewise, we have something called a “bled fridge” (bled is the term we use for rural areas). I am too lazy to do that, but it involves a clay jar wrapped in a wet towel, sitting in another bucket full of water. Not the same as a real refrigerator (a decent one at least), but it works. My m.o. is to eat my produce as quickly as possible (I never prepare my own meat anyhow), with no leftover prepared food. Any beverages I want to keep at a tepid (as opposed to warm) temperature I wrap in the wet towels or newspapers, and try to keep them near a draft (although the wind situation here remains rather all-or-nothing). I use a lot of powdered milk, but when I can’t resist the real thing (i.e. when I am treating myself to real coffee as, alas, the Nescafé mystique has now worn off, and I see it more as a necessary evil), I buy the specially treated milk that is available at our local hanut, and again consume it as quickly as possible. Anyway, this works all right for me. A real fridge would be nice, of course, but that’s a pretty big purchase, and it looks like now I’d only have it for one summer here… maybe not worth it.

Also, there is very little exercise, apart from uber-lazy yoga, so I am getting mushy yet again, in spite of what an appetite killer the heat is.

One upshot is that I do engage in some sort of bathing on a daily basis. And these days, even my awesome solar shower gets too hot, so I often just squat in my banyo (like a “low-rise,” wide plastic bucket, where I normally do laundry) and dump cool-ish water on my head or wherever else I need it). I may feel sweaty and gross all day, but let’s compare that to the winter situation when being naked is so unbearable that the bottom layers of clothing don’t even get changed more than once every few days, and being naked and WET is such a horrible thought that a weekly hammam visit is all many of us can bear. (The alternative is potentially killing myself by turning on every gas device I own and shut myself in a room with them while I bucket bath). So I know that I really am living a more hygienic lifestyle, courtesy of the heat.

So STILL, it beats winter, when I walk around wearing all the clothes I own and cursing out loud about the wind and the cold. If anything, this just forces you to relax a little. And no one else is doing much of anything either in the heat of the day, so I could actually aim for all-out laziness if I chose to do so, and probably face little criticism. (The reality is that I stay in and read a lot, so some people think I am inside sleeping… I don’t care…).


In other news, the women of our soon-to-be-cooperative have finally selected their initial officers! It may sound like a small thing, but it is a huge hurdle for them (and for me, as it is hard to make things happen when there is no clear chain of command). Next week, in sh’allah, one of them will travel with me to attend their first big craft fair. And, hamdullah, it’ll be up on the Mediterranean coast, away from this oven!!!

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Sweltering Summer Camps

Well, as much as I like chilling out (please don’t take that term literally – it is July!) in my own house (where I have mastered the art of opening and closing different windows at different times of day so as to maximize ventilation while minimizing extra heat from the sun), and tearing through my numerous self-improvement, social science, and just plain fun reading during the heat of the day (thanks again Em for Love in the Time of Cholera – I LOVE it!!!), I still keep going to hotter places, where projects tend to come and go a little bit faster than my attempted work in Assoul often does.

Of course I make my daily appearances at the nedi when I am in Assoul, reminding them of the next steps they need to be taking in preparation for the official formation of their cooperative (even though they’re in bureaucratic limbo at the moment, that’s no reason to put the organizational discussions on hold!), and lately, trying to get them focused and prepared for going to their first big craft fair in a couple of weeks (let’s hope that all comes together!). But I still have various GAD (Gender and Development) projects going on – some little and some bigger. One evening this past week week, as I was preparing for an early morning departure for some meetings in Errachidia, my neighbor Fatima, who has one of the stronger business minds among members of the new cooperative, dropped by for one of the one-on-one troubleshooting chats she likes to have with me. I explained, yet again, that among other things, I had a GAD-related meeting to attend with other community leaders in the region – perhaps a little too apologetically noting that this work requires some extra travel and that women and development (I don’t know how to say “gender” in Tamazight) issues are really important to me too. Rather astutely, Fatima echoed a thought that I have often had as well, saying “Well, you need to develop the women at the nedi.” Indeed. Some are more prepared than others for the responsibilities of running a small business, and more and more, I see my “Small Business Development” work as being more of an extension of my GAD work – not only teaching basic business skills, but also pushing them to take initiative, risk new opportunities, and build confidence and leadership skills. In the end, I’ll be happy if even just a few of the women with whom I am working come out a little stronger, because right now I am not sure they will see too many financial rewards from our efforts until after my Peace Corps service is over.

As far as other GAD projects go, last week, I stayed in the town of Rich with several colleagues. There, we partnered with a local association to host a GGLOW Camp, with a variety of educational and recreational activities ranging from nature walks, hygiene and nutrition sessions, English lessons, discussion of gender roles and issues, and world music, dance and yoga! I still hate that I don’t have enough confidence in my Tamazight to be very effective in large-group discussions in that language (but it just didn’t seem right to use French when only half the students understood that), but I was fine helping out with small-group work. Of course at my nedi I have mastered the art of yelling out made-up yoga pose names in Berber, so that worked out all right, and for African dance and group sing-alongs I just used what God gave me. Oh, do I miss doing all those fun artsy things sometimes! Other sessions were led by volunteers with better substantive/educational expertise in those areas anyway, although I was a little disappointed that all the gender discussions were held in Arabic. Some of those girls really got into it, and I would have loved to have understood more! (The upshot of that is that we passed along resources to local association members to allow them to facilitate the gender sessions, fulfilling Peace Corps’ “capacity-building” goals by encouraging the association to hold similar programs on their own in the future!).


As I noted last time, Rich isn’t my favorite town in Morocco, but since I am there so often, it is nice to have had the opportunity to forge some new relationships there, both with members of our partner association – who were remarkably enthusiastic and open, often getting up on stage and dancing and singing along with the children – and with some of the young girls who enjoyed talking to some of us one-on-one, some inviting us into their homes… I really fell in love with one girl in particular, named Nadia, who had a genuine sense of joy about here, discernible in a huge smile that never left her face. Nadia has a clubbed foot, but seems to refuse to let it drag her down either literally or figuratively. Even though we were exhausted from all the invitations we’d received by the end of the week, Nadia had put in her request for our company very early in the week, and it was a pleasure to spend the final evening of the GGLOW camp eating couscous at her house, meeting her family and talking with them about their efforts to improve Nadia’s situation. My thoughts will stay with her, and sooner or later, I have a date to go back to her house for henna.

Also, as I had a whole week in civilization, I got to watch both of the semifinal matches for the World Cup. Even if no African teams were left, as one of my friends reminded me, France was basically an honorary African team. But then again, another friend was happy to see Italy’s success due to their, um, aesthetic appeal (she was actually hoping for an Italy-Portugal final on those grounds). So I felt a little like a real person, watching the sports! Of course there are a couple of cafes in Assoul with solar panels where I could have gone to watch other games if I had really felt passionate about that, but like most cafes in Morocco, those tend to be male turf. As an American woman, I could probably get away with it, but that’s just one of those judgment calls where I prefer not to stir things up too much. I get enough extra attention already.

Right now, I am on my way back from hot hot Errachidia, where I sweated all night while my friend’s crazy cat kept trying to chew off my toes! It was my first opportunity in a couple of months to talk with my government supervisor face-to-face. He is incredibly helpful and encouraging with our efforts to form the cooperative in Assoul, and he seems genuinely interested in making sure that the volunteers under his supervision (he works with all the Small Business Development volunteers in this region) get a lot out of being here. Even though he knew I was primarily in town to help facilitate an evaluation session for a previous GAD conference (a first step towards planning our next one, to be held this fall, in sh’allah), he made sure that my colleague and I knew about a cultural festival going on in Errachidia this weekend. So that evening, after the sun went down, I went with another volunteer and Houssein, a Moroccan friend from the town of Tinjdad who is super laid-back and speaks great English, to Errachidia’s main square. There we checked out some local crafts and live “Moroccan” music ranging from Ganoua (which I love for its strong West African influences) to perhaps the worst rapper I’ve ever heard and some guy dancing and lip-syncing to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” (that’s about the time we left). Then we went to Houssein’s house to grill brochettes on the roof. Turns out, Houssein is actually in the process of building the house, so here I am in a real city with real infrastructure (i.e. electricity), and it feels just like Assoul, with buta lamps and flashlights. But it was pleasant – more like camping when you’re out in the open air (and it’s not your own, somewhat furnished house that you are tripping around in the dark).

One thing is for sure – I must buy a fan if and when our electricity ever gets hooked up!

Monday, July 03, 2006

Fez, Home, and Things I don't Want Crawling On Me

“To do good is noble. To teach others to do good is nobler still, and less trouble."
- Mark Twain


I’m exhausted. Never been happier for a week back in my own house, in spite of the near absence of electricity (still not connected!) and water. If anything, I was even glad for the lack of communications infrastructure, having been massively overexposed to the institution that is Peace Corps Morocco over the previous two weeks.

Anyway, I don’t get my full respite just yet, as I am now back in Rich for a week working on a GGLOW (“Girls and Guys Leading Our World”) camp with some local students. Rich isn’t my favorite town in Morocco, but it is my home-away-from-home once a week, and the communications lifeline for a number of us volunteers who live out in the bled (rural villages) in this region, so a few of us thought we’d try to give a little back. More on that another time…


As I mentioned last time, I didn’t exactly make it straight home from Agadir. So on my way home from Rabat two weekends ago, I made an overnight stop in Fez, mainly to hang out with a friend, but also because I hadn’t yet had the obligatory experience of getting completely lost in its medina. Turns out we did a great job of that, winding our way past numerous shops and interesting architecture until suddenly we were stuck in a maze of almost empty streets! These photos are both not too far from the entryway, before it really gets confusing (I refrained from taking photos as we got buried deeper and deeper, so as not to entice further the groups of little boys who seemed more than willing to extort money in exchange for “guiding” us).

Just from sitting in a café and observing the passers-by, I’d have to say that, in terms of the people, Fez has proven perhaps the most extreme Moroccan city (in my observation) in its mélange of contemporary with conservative – girls in skimpy tank tops followed by women covered in black with only their eyes showing…


So, in spite of my accidental grand tour of Morocco (ok, that’s an exaggeration, as there are still plenty of places left to visit), I’d say that my biggest smile of the month of June occurred last week, as I was finally on my way home, when a cow got into my transit. Good thing I was sitting near a window… It did, in fact, smell like a cow, which is all the more noticeable inside of a hot Mercedes van driving along the winding road that leads to Assoul.

(Aahhh… my beautiful ride home)

I have definitely gotten used to the ubiquitous livestock, although I do blame them (and their excrement) for the swarms of flies that attack me at my nedi and in some of my friends’ houses. My own house isn’t too bad, as I finally chopped up my mosquito net and used it for the more practical and less claustrophobic purpose of covering all the screen-less windows in my house. However, the place is hardly sealed up, and I did have to capture and liberate some sort of 5-inch long insect the other day. I didn’t think it was going to bite me, but in it’s apparent desperation to escape (it kept flinging itself against the white portions of my walls), it was making a ridiculous (and rather aggravating) amount of noise. Besides, I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to find the thing on my face. I also have to keep replacing the fragile, carbon cloths that are the light source for my buta lamp. They keep disintegrating, thanks to the smaller, kamikaze flies and moths that don’t know better than to try flying directly into a burning ball of gas. But still no scorpions (yet).

As for other supposedly domesticated animals, I still think the donkeys are cute, although much as I used to experience with goats on city streets in Ghana, I still can’t help but laugh out loud at the unbelievably hilarious yet creepy (and earsplitting!) noises they are capable of making. Especially on the morning of souk day (Wednesday), when there is an entire chorus of them not far from my bedroom window. The feral cats that have the run of people’s houses here have done nothing to win me over to their species, while the packs of wild dogs that run around at night are certainly no ambassadors for theirs. I hold them at least partially responsible for my inability ever to get a full night’s sleep anymore, as they usually wake me up (seemingly in the process of killing something) well before the roosters do!


So it is getting pretty hot here. I’ve again given up my running regime. The sun – which had been my only reliable source of heat in the winter – is just way too much to take these days! So on those lucky days when I don’t have to travel, I stay inside my house and read as much as I can. (The problem with being social is that, as a guest in someone’s house, you get served copious amounts of sugary, hot tea, which is especially unpleasant this time of year!). Still, it beats winter. Besides, we still have the occasional wind/dust storm to keep things bearable, even if that means my furniture and floors will never be free of their layer dirt!