A lesson in Moroccan culture: Hospitality

Although I know I just posted a blog something happened today that I felt like I needed to share: we had company come over to the house. This was some sort of family; I didn’t quite catch the sons/daughters of someone’s brother. But nonetheless they were family, family from Casablanca (so they were doing pretty good in the social standings). There was a young couple, with a young child (about 2 years old) and an older woman (my grandpas sister, maybe?) The husband also spoke a little bit of English, so they come from a little bit of money. Well I was beckoned out of my room at about 5pm and brought into the parlor upstairs. We have a very nice house upstairs, painted beautifully and really pretty tile but downstairs is another story. If you go into the bottom part of the house its mud walls, a few ponjs (Moroccan couches) and rugs thrown over them. It's not quite as fancy as upstairs. We do everything downstairs, we prepare meals, make bread, cook and everyone but me, grandpa and grandma sleep downstairs. So when I was filtered from my room to the upstairs parlor I knew we must have someone visiting.

After the older woman requested I prepare the tea I knew I was in for a treat. I have had tea very often in this country and I have watched it be prepared many times but I have yet to make it. And what better time then when we have guests from Casa in town? Well you can imagine how entertaining this was for them because it’s quite a process:

• First you boil water over the butane gas
• Then, put a small amount of tea (looks like little black seeds) into the tea pot
• Pour a small amount of hot water in the tea pot and swirl around
• Dispose of the liquid in one of the many tea cups on the platter
• Pour more water into the tea pot, swirl and pour out again
• Fill the tea pot until it is ¾ full, add a ridiculous amount of sugar and place over the flame on the butane
• Allow the water to begin boiling and then add the mint (n3a n3a) or shiba (don’t know the English name) and remove from flame
• Allow to sit for a few minutes and then pour into a tea cup. The farther you can get from the cup the better, you want at least a foot between the tea pot and the cup (the more bubbles the better)
• After you fill the cup pour it back into the tea pot and repeat once or twice more
• Pour a very small amount into another cup and taste to see if it tastes like sugar water, there is no such thing as too much sugar in this country so you should probably add more
• Pour everyone an equal amount and distribute saying “bismila” so you hand off the glasses

So- as you can see, quite the process I had to go through with about 6 people watching my every move laughing if I did something right (they like to laugh when you know what you’re doing, makes you rethink everything). After the tea was distributed- they said it tasted good, but I thought it was WAY too sweet and too strong- we had cookies and sat and talked (I listened) until about 8. Things started winding down so I though it was time for them to leave, but I was wrong. Out comes a tagine and bread. Dinner at 8 o’clock you say? UNHEARD OF! We don’t eat until 11 at least, so I was not expecting food. When the tagine was opened I noticed a large amount of meat. Here is Morocco what would typically be one serving of meat in America is what my entire family of 10 spilt. Three bites of meat is what I usually get and I get the most since I am the guest. I noticed not all the meat got eaten (my family that lives in the house with me didn’t touch the meat- I suspect there will be another dinner at 11 and we’re eating that). After I ate just as much as everyone else (yet still got yelled at for never eating) out comes a tray of fruit. We NEVER have fruit for dinner so that was quite a shock. After fruit, things started winding down and the family left.

What I found interesting about this whole festivity is the fact that these people are from Casablanca, they have a little bit of money yet my family offers them the best they have and leaves what’s left for their own children. I have found this a lot in this country, being the guest at everyone’s homes, I am always offered the best and what I don’t eat goes to the rest of the family. This amazes me. Even if a family has little to nothing they will offer me some of the precious meat they do have or break out the almonds for tea while I’m there. The hospitality of the Moroccan people continues to amaze me everyday I’m here… I think everyone can learn a little something from their generosity.

Sbitar visit: safi, Tutor: safi, Language: tssnt waloo

safi= done
tssnt waloo= read on....

Oh Morocco.

Everyone asks how it is here. And the best way to put it is simply this

“Sometimes its great and sometimes it sucks.”

But thats to be expected when moving to a new country, learning a new language and trying adapt to a new culture. My mood will literally change by the minute, I will wake up dreading the day ahead of me, walk downstairs talk to my family and remember what I’m doing here.

Great example: Since we have now gone from having structure and schedules to nothing some days It's really tough to be ‘productive.’ The other day, I was tired and really not wanting to go out and talk to people but I made myself go to the sbitar to say hello to the nurses. On my way to the sbitar I met Rachid, who is now my Tashlheet tutor. This is great because I was really beginning to be worried about not finding a tutor. After scheduling to meet the next day I then had a great conversation with my nurse, Mohammed who is really beginning to open up to me. And then, on my walk home I met two teachers in my dowar. So a day I would have rather just stayed in my room turned out to be super productive. I walked home smiling, feeling great about my language and just really pumped for the next day :) After tea I then walked around with my younger sister, Aiesha. She has one friend in particular who I am rather unfond of….she likes to tell me “tssnt waloo.” If you were in America and talking to someone who was genuinely attempting to learn the language would you ever say (to their face) you don’t know anything? Well, I never would. But apparently it’s ok for some of the woman here to say that. Not all of them, of course. Most of the people here are absolutely thrilled I’m attempting to learn Tashlheet but there are a select few who loooove to tell me “Tssnt waloo” (you know nothing) :( And those two words are how my day went from being fabulous to not so fabulous… welcome to my life.

The next day I went to the sbitar to talk with my nurses and observe people at the sbitar. Mohammed told me to be there at 8 am the next morning… 8 am!? This wouldn’t be such a problem except for the fact we don’t start eating dinner until at least 11 every night so by the time I get to bed it’s about 12 and I’m exhausted. Anyway, I woke up early that morning to chat on skype and then was off to the sbitar bright and early. I knew I was going to be at the sbitar for a while and I knew it was going to be exhausting with language and I was shiwya dreading the whole day. (again, back and forth on the moods). The day ended up being very eventful at my 4 hours at the sbitar I saw a premature child who was one week old and weighed a little more than 1 kilo, a woman who was hit by her husband by afraid to go to the gendarms, some people from the city trying to sell the nurses medical encyclopedias and was asked if I was doctor by every single person that came into the sbitar. Our jobs are very difficult to explain. Can you imagine a foreigner hanging out in our hospitals with the doctors/nurses who doesn’t yet know the language, isn’t a nurse, isn’t a doctor and that says they are here to help with health?! Quite confusing. At about 1 I decided I was exhausted and ready to go home so I started the 2 K walk home (with a hill that still takes my breath in the middle) for lunch.

After lunch it was hid in my room and nap, read, get online time. I had to leave the house again and head back toward souq (main town) because I had told Rachid we would meet at 5:30 so he could tutor me for an hour. In the middle of our tutoring session I heard a lot of noise so I looked up to see what it was. Turns out a bull had escaped from the butcher and was running through the streets but the poor thing still had ropes tied around It's legs so it kept falling. People were throwing things at it and hitting it, I had to go inside the café because I was getting really upset with how they were treating the poor animal. The way all animals are treated here just breaks my heart. It's not uncommon to see the kids throw rocks and kick the cats and dogs in the streets, It's awful.

The goal for this next week: Find a house!!

Snow in May? What is this... Colorado!?

Having internet at site has been one of the best investments I’ve made while here in Morocco. It's so nice being able to connect with everyone at home, chat on skype (when it works), email and post blogs for the outside world to read. So far my schedule for myself has been coming along shwiya (sort of). Some days are a lot tougher than others and I constantly have to remind myself that just talking to new people is indeed work. Everyone in my family of 10 (seriously, I live with 10 people: my grandpa, grandma, mom, dad, 3 sisters and 3 brothers) is currently sick so I’ve been trying to keep to my room when I’m home to avoid having to touch or be around all the germs in the air. The idea of covering your mouth when you cough only seems to be important during meal times and washing your hands with soap only happens AFTER eating so it’s quite easy to get sick here. I'm attempting to lead by example with covering my mouth and explained that I wash my hands because of germs but I’m still a novelty in the house and everything I do seems weird, so they have yet to follow.

We got snow in the mountains last night and I got my first taste of what winters going to be like. I don’t really like winter in America when I can go from my heated car to my heated house so I’m really nervous about how I’m going to get through the winters in the mountains of Africa with one small heater that Peace Corps will reimburse (I’ll probably end up buying at least one more from my money) and mud walls. Other volunteers have told me you literally just wear as many layers of clothes you can put on and do as much work as you can in your home in the winters so that’s my game plan. I also decided I’m going to pick up baking, especially in the winters since the ovens here are just metal boxes with fire, and that will hopefully heat my kitchen where I will hang out like the little brother on A Christmas Story not being able to put my arms down.

I’ve learned I have quite a few people close to me as far as PCVs go so that’s been really exciting. There is my site mate, Andy. He's 28 and from Ohio. A little more on the quite side than I am but he’s collected a TON of information about our site so I’m excited to start working with him on some stuff. And I think he’s finally starting to open up to me too, so that’s exciting (I think I scared him at first). It's also nice that I’m a female so I can do a lot of work he wasn’t able to in the village. Steve is an environment volunteer about 25 K away (off-roading). I met him briefly during one of our first hubs in Ourzazate but he sent me a text welcoming me to the ‘hood’ so I think we’re going to get along just fine. Anna is 20 K away from me, in the town I switch taxis to come to site. I had coffee with her a few days ago and she seems super nice. She's 26 from St Louis and a Small Business Development (SBD) volunteer. Finally there is Linda, she’s about 30 K away, in the town where my post office, caid and gendarms are. She’s my PCV mom, had me over for lunch twice (with cookies) and helped me through the awkward marriage proposals at the gendarms. She’s 60 and absolutely FABULOUS! Overall, I’m SUPER lucky to have such fabulous volunteers within an hour away and cant wait to hang out with all of them soon (I’m hosting a 4th of July bash, inchallah)

With that I’ll leave you the advice not to try and nap/sleep in on Fridays in Morocco because It's absolutely pointless- It's the holy day if you couldn’t tell from the prayers and songs BLARING from the mosque. (which happens to be only a house away from my bedroom windows!)

So I'm a real volunteer... now what?

Since last post I said goodbye to my wonderful host family in Tazentoute, officially swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer, got my papers from the Ministry of Health that I’m indeed a health educator in Morocco and returned to Tidili with half of my baggage.

The last two weeks have been crazy because we went from having complete structure in our days to absolutely nothing. We are now responsible for furthering our language, meeting people in the community and integrating ourselves into our communities. To do this I plan on learning 5 new words a day, 2 new verbs a day, 2 new helpful phrases a day, have tea with 4 new families a week, visit 1 new dowar a week (quite unrealistic, but hey, I’ll try) and do 30 minutes of yoga, stretching or something a day to keep myself sane. I created this ‘agenda’ for myself in the first day of complete boredom and I’m following it shwiya (sort of). It's more of a plan B if I feel unproductive for the day.

The last few days have given me a lot of time to think about this experience of living in a new place with new people and a new culture. And one thing I think about a lot is how fortunate we are to be Americans and how blessed I am to be an American FEMALE. I have never seen people work as hard of the woman do in rural Morocco. These woman wake up at about 7 am to work the fields until 10 when they return home to clean (without vacuums and with lots of dirt blowing), prepare lunch at about 2 then nap for a little if they are lucky then go out to work the fields again. The women in Morocco are very strong people and I am constantly amazed at their strength.

The idea of alone time here in Morocco is also very interesting. Being here as a single female the people automatically assume I’m lonely since I have no husband or family beside me and are always trying to sit very close to me, in my room or hold my hand. This was great for the first day when I was scared out of my mind and it reassured me but it’s gotten old-fast. The idea of sitting alone and reading or listening to music is unknown to them. I’ve learned to treasure and appreciate whenever I can sneak away to my room to be alone for a little bit.

Oh yes, and phone boyfriends. Quite an interesting thing- since the idea of dating, touching, kissing, holding hands is hashuma (shamefull) here in Morocco the youth have found another way to have boyfriends/girlfriends. These would be phone boyfriends. Let me explain this to you, males dial random cell phone numbers hoping for a young female voice. If they hear a young female on the other end they speak for a little bit and then become phone lovers. What does this consist of you ask? Well text messages and beeping of course. (Beeping= calling and hanging up before the other person answers.) This can mean a range of things from “where the hell are you” to “I miss you” to “thinking of you” to “call me back”- I have yet to decipher the codes of this beeping but I’ll keep you posted as I learn more

Another glory of Morocco I would like to share with you- public transportation. Since we are paid close to nothing as volunteers we take public transportation to get from place to place. There are several types here in Morocco:

• Petite taxis: small taxis that travel within cities;
• Grand taxis: these are old Mercedes cars, usually with a broken speedometer, crushed velvet seats and no window rollers in the back seats. These taxis fit no less than 6 persons, 7 including the driver. The driver and two passengers up front (the seat near the shifter is really uncomfortable as a female when the male driver is shifting into 4th), and 4 in the back. As I said earlier, most of these don’t have the rollers in the back seats so you practically cook in them. And most of the time, females don’t travel, so the taxi is full of men. Little ol me and 6 men…. Quite an adventure;
• Souk buses: these are buses that travel between towns, if you get a seat on one they are quite nice. If you don’t get a seat, they suck. Animals (like chickens, turkeys) also travel on souk buses so it can turn into quite the zoo sometimes. The windows don’t usually go down in these either because a lot of Moroccans believe they will get sick from the air outside. Combine the closed windows with very hot weather and people who don’t wear deodorant and It's a pleasant ride to say the least. Oh yeah, and the little fact I gave you earlier (females don’t usually travel)- combine THAT with windy roads and no air and you get….well I think you can guess what happens;
• CTM buses: I have yet to ride these but if I plan on traveling anywhere more than an hour away this will be my form of transport, you are assigned a seat. And that alone is worth the price.
  
  

Address

My final site address:

Angelica Polen
BP 9 Inghrom N Ougdal 45253 P
Ourzazate, Morocco

This will be the address I use for the next two years, no worries if something was sent to the other one- it will forward for a few months.
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Wrong host family...huh?

April 27th/30th
The last week has been crazy. We traveled to Ourzazate to find out our sites, visited them, traveled back to Ourzazate to debrief and then returned to our CBT sites. As I said a little earlier, I’m going to be living in a site named Tidilli. It's a HUGE site, about 50 dowars. A dowar is a small rural village in Morocco. There is a total population of about 17,000 people in the area. Tidili is in the middle atlas mountains in Morocco, so it doesn’t get too hot (compared to the 145 degrees some places get) but we do get snow, as much as a foot from what I’ve heard. The town in pretty high in elevation and they just paved the road to the main dowar (souk- where we have our market once a week) about 2 years ago. Most of the dowars have running water, which to the best of my knowledge is just mountain spring water- I don’t think It's filtered but I’ve been drinking it and have yet to go sick so we’ll see how that goes. And only about 5 dowars currently live without electricity. When I look for a house I will only be looking in the dowars with both running water and electricity, I was willing to live without if my whole site didn’t have such amenities, but I don’t see a point in doing so if It's available to me.

The main point of our site visit was to visit the site, visit the sbitar (which is a hospital in the rural areas of Morocco) which we will be working at (inchallah=god willing), tell the gendarms (the local police) that we have arrived and what our plans were for leaving, check in with our caid (the mayor of Tidili and a few other towns) and set up our post office situation.

What I learned on site visit:

• The Moroccan people are extremely welcoming and will let a complete stranger eat dinner with them and stay the night. Story behind this? Well, turns out I went to the wrong host families’ house the first night and not only ate dinner with the wrong family but also stayed the night. How did I know I was in the wrong house? Well, the first sign was when the two little girls laid their blankets down on the floor to sleep in the same room. This was bad, but the thing that really made me realize something was wrong was when my host aunt crawled into bed with me. Needless to say, I didn’t really sleep well the first night smashed up against the wall next to a complete stranger.
• Moroccans eat askeef A LOT. Not only have I eaten it everyday for breakfast but I’ve also had it for first tea and kasqrut (tea between lunch and dinner). Askeef is a warm soupy goo. It is basically just water, salt, milk and wheat cooked in a pot and served in a bowl- don’t love it but don’t hate it either. I have a feeling I’m going to have to learn to like it.
• Morocco has A LOT of bugs. I was ready to live with them and most of the time it’s alright, but sometimes it really just gets to me. The amount of flies in this country is UNREAL. As I'm sitting inside typing up this post I can count 10 flies sitting on my body at this very moment. And when you’re outside the flies, bees and gnats are just ridiculous. I haven’t been getting too many bites, a few here and there but nothing like some of the other volunteers that are covered. I’ve also been lucky enough to not have to deal with bedbugs which other volunteers have had some issues with.
• Working in my sbitar is going to be very difficult. Like I said earlier, Tidili is home to 17,000 people. And how many doctors and nurses do they have? Zero doctors and two nurses. ZERO DOCTORS! Currently I have two nurses at my sbitar, Mohammed and Khadija. Khadija has been at the sbitar for almost 10 years and speaks Tashleet and Darija while Mohammed has been at the sbitar for only a few months, speaks English, French and Darija. When meeting with Mohammed he refused to speak to me but spoke to Andy about me since I was a female. That was super frustrating but it’s just something I’m going to have to try and work with. The biggest obstacle with Mohammed is going to be the fact that he could do some really great things at our sbitar but he doesn’t want to be in Tidili so he’s requesting a move and hopes to be gone in a few months. This is really unfortunate because the sbitar will go back to one nurse for 17,000 people.
• Home births and children dying at home are a HUGE problem in Morocco. Currently woman in Tidili choose to have their children at home since there are no doctors in the area. This is usually done by either a member of the family or a traditional birth attendant who has very little training in the birthing of children. An example of how large a problem of this is my new host mother. She currently has 7 children but has lost 5 children due to home births-5 CHILDREN!!! This number is just outrageous, but I think a project I want to get started is getting some more training for these traditional birth attendants and also more awareness and possible transportation to a new birthing center that has just been built about 30 K away.
• Elf pasta is real! Spaghetti can be eaten a variety of different ways, including with sugar, yogurt and fruit (think the movie “Elf”). It's not terrible but It's defiantly not something I will be making at my new home. They do have a great recipe for Spaghetti that tastes like fancy ramen noodles that I’m learning from my family in Tazentout though.