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29 May, 2009

The Revolving Door

In a white plastic lawn chair located at the lonely end of my 40ft long, skinny, adobe room, I sit listening to the strange, drawling, voice of “The Tallest Man in the World”. A musician not born of America, but nonetheless belting sounds forged in Americana folk, he both stokes and mirrors my mild homesickness. I have just tumbled out of the back of a vegetable laden beige taxi, back in my village after having spent the last 24 hours in the provincial capital of Ouarzazate seeing off 5 Peace Corps volunteers who are finishing their service and going out into the world they now know much more thoroughly. Even for me, this was an emotional event. A group of maybe 25 volunteers from near and far managed to attend our scheduled 2 o’clock lunch celebration at the extravagant (for Morocco) restaurant Phoenix, which oh so uniquely offered dishes featuring numerous cheeses, alcohol, and even ham (hashak). In company were the 5 exiting volunteers, 6 from the newest group including Amber and myself, and a smattering of other volunteers in various stages of their service. As the food came and went, emotions slowly mounted. All of us at the table have been sharing with each other, for various lengths of time, an experience that can not easily be understood of replicated. As Josh Marshall put it while toasting the service of his fellow volunteers, “There is something strange about a person who makes a conscious choice to leave their life and home behind and spend two years living with perfect strangers”. While the variety of that group was stunning, we all had this significant trait in common and we will always share this strange and wonderful Moroccan experience. For the new additions to the Moroccan team, we have been awed and succored by these parting individuals who interact with their alien surroundings so seamlessly as to bolster our confidence even while we wonder how it could ever get so effortless. But while our relationships with these wonderful people is just beginning, we also witnessed 6 month, 1 year, and 1 ½ year relationships which seem much older and stronger because of the deep connections that going through this process create. And while I watched the emotional goodbyes I realized, this will be me before long. Over the course of the evening I continued to make friends with the people around me, all of whom, I will have to say goodbye to in 2 years or less. I will also have to say goodbye to the local communities, culture, language, friends, and coworkers that I grow to love. In a year, I will be saying goodbye to another group of amazing people, but I will also be saying hello to a new group of frightened beginners. Thus is the wonderful, if not slightly painful, revolving door of the Peace Corps. In the meantime, I am wowed by the impressive accomplishments and grace of the exiting volunteers, and looking forward to doing my job here well enough that when I leave, I have a community who will miss me and whom I will miss; a second home! Still listening to the poignant drawl of “The Tallest Man in the World” (given to me by one of my new Peace Corps fast friends) I begin to wonder how this globetrotting artist can speak to my American heart with an American voice, and what provokes the sadness hidden in his words? Perhaps his nomadic nature has left pieces of his heart in many places around the world. Maybe each piece he gifts is replaced and he is therefore more heartfelt. Maybe it easier for his to love and communicate and connect. Yes….I think so….I think so!

18 May, 2009

Dining With Strangers

In the Peace Corps, the name of the game is “Talk to Strangers”, particularly in the first few months in your site. Lucky for us, Moroccans are renowned for talking to strangers despite the dichotomy of often being shy. One must be careful however, because a simple greeting in Morocco can and will quickly turn into an invitation for tea. Amber and I have been invited for tea numerous times since arriving in Morocco and most of the time we except regardless of how much teeth decaying tea we have already consumed (note: Moroccan tea is so sweet and minty, its like drinking toothpaste. Still though, it can be enjoyable and the coffee w/milk is fantastic with sugar or without). Most of the time, in fact, the invitation will come before or in lieu of a salutation. Amber and I: Hello, how are you today? Moroccan: Come to my house and have tea and bread! Its only once your shoes are off and you are eating their homemade bread that they ask you how you are doing and if you have a name. For a shifty-eyed, standoffish American like myself, this can be a bit hard to get used to. Still though, we have been taking every opportunity to meet our community by excepting these invitations whenever we have the time. Last week, one such invitation caught us off guard when we visited our local post office to open a post office box and were ushered through a magic door into a plush back room. The man doing the ushering was the local post master who actually lives in the house connected to the post office. As a result, the magic door had taken us into his living room, which was complete with mahogany furniture, gold-guilded cups, and a green velvet tablecloth. Waiting for us in the room were the director of the local high school and a teacher who is the president of one of the local Associations. Somehow they all spoke English and were very excited to meet us. Soon tea had arrived accompanied with fancy plates of nuts, cookies, and pastries, and fresh picked mint sprigs to add to our glasses as needed. As we ate, more people arrived; another school director from our duwar, our nurse and counterpart at the hospital, and eventually, one of our new language tutors who works at the cyber owned by two of the men previously mentioned. When the tea was gone, we all got up and started saying our goodbyes, but before we left, the postmaster gave us a tour of the rest of his house (not the post office part). We thanked him again and made our way to the door, but then awkwardly asked, “is it okay if we finish getting our post office box before we leave?“. One of my favorite Moroccan experiences occurred on a walk from Tanant to my training village of Ait Majden. Along the path between the two towns, there is an old building where olive oil is made, hidden in the trees like something out of Hansel and Gretel. One day while walking by, we noticed a man standing outside the hut. We said hi, and he motioned for us to come to him. With a grin, he proceeded to show around the dim shack to each stage of the oil making process. When we had seen the whole process, he grabbed an empty coke bottle from the floor, knelt to the ground and carefully filled the container with fresh, first press oil from a box in the ground where the oil gathers as it is pressed. He handed me the bottle and refused payment. “This is a gift“, he said as he motioned us back onto our path. Not all encounters have been this pleasant however. Last Friday I had one of the strangest experiences yet. Friday in Morocco is a holy day of celebration, which generally means people will be more likely to go to the Mosque for the special Friday prayer, and that they will probably eat a traditional couscous meal. Though my host family is unique in that they do not eat couscous on Friday, they do eat lunch at roughly the same time as other families which falls around 1:30 or 2pm. On this day, I found myself unwittingly walking home alone (Amber was at home feeling under the weather) at around 1:15pm, trying to make it home in time for lunch just as the midday mosque service was getting out. This meant that I looked particularly foreign walking through all the white robes, and that I probably looked like a man without a home in which to be served couscous. Having passed the majority of the group, my thoughts turned else ware until I heard an old man yelling behind me. I assumed at first that he was talking to somebody else until he said “Bonjour”. I turned to see what he wanted and said “Salaam“, to which he gestured for me to walk back to him. When I got near him, he invited me for tea and bread, and though I tried every way I could to tell him I was already running late for lunch, he would not take no for an answer. I literally would have had to have turned my back on the old man with the white robes and pious hat and walk away while he called to me to come back. Instead, I bit the bullet and prepared myself for a glass of toothpaste. His house wasn’t far off the road, and when we entered his eating room, he shooed his wife (or daughter maybe?) into the other room and offered me a seat on the rug at the knee-high table. A few moments passed by with some incoherent utterances, and then his wife/daughter arrived with a huge platter of couscous. This is not tea?! I thought, but it was too late and he pointed to a crusty spoon, which had been on the table when we got there, and said “Eat”. Luckily, his wife reappeared long enough to bring two fresh spoons before disappearing again. The man offered me my choice of spoon and we began our feast. Moroccan couscous is made with a generous bottom layer of the grain, which is then piled with well-cooked vegetables and crowned with meat in the center of the dish. Then juice from the cooked vegetables and meat are drizzled over the top. Traditionally, it is eaten with the hands, but this is a skill that takes years to master, so spoons are used by foreigners and the less adventurous locals. The meat in the middle is saved until everybody is done with the rest of the food and then it is dispersed by the head of the house to the people eating. As I ate the couscous and vegetables (which were excellent), I couldn’t help but notice the unfamiliar shaped hunk of meat sitting in the center of our meal. I still don’t know what it was! When I put my spoon down, the old man collected the meat from the middle, and with a knife, carefully cut equal chunks to disperse between the two of us. It looked like skin, but it was thick and chewy, and had a mild fishy taste. It also reminded me of a foot, but I can’t actually say why. In any event, I ate two chewy bites before offering the rest back to the communal center. I insisted that I was full, which was enough for the old man, but didn’t stop his wife from bringing a plate of sliced melon and banana. The truth was that I wasn’t full, so I enjoyed some fruit and tried without luck to make small talk with my host. When the fruit was done, he asked if I wanted tea, and when I refused, he said “okay, you can go now” and we both stood up. I thanked his wife, said goodbye and the door was soon closed behind me. In all, the encounter took about 30 minutes, and though I was a bit late, I made it home just in time for lunch. Lucky me right!?

03 May, 2009

Witnessing Our Site

We left Beni Mallal for our new site in the Ouarzazate Province (Oz for short) armed with our new official Peace Corps titles. We took a taxi of 5 passengers from Beni to Marrakech, grabbed some fruit and bread from a tahanut and caught another taxi of 5 to the Provincial capitol of Oz. The road from Marrakech to Oz, which traipses over the high atlas mountains, maps out like intestines, which is ironic because that is the part of your body you begin to pay attention to as the driver zooms around endless winding corners with changing elevation like a heart monitor reading. Over the mountains, the road finally flattens out, but now we were on the edge of the Sahara desert and hot gusts from the open windows act like a convection oven. Still, the fresh air was crucial among our cramped seats. When we pulled into Oz around 3pm, we were met by some local currently serving volunteers who stayed with us in the conveniently located Hotel Gazelle and the next morning we caught a taxi our new site.

The road to our site from Oz undulates through vast desert foothills dotted with great worn Kasbahs and unique sand formations. The sandstone mountain walls change color with each ripple of the earth so that warm tones from khaki orange, red to purple can all be seen overlapping themselves along the countryside. Large salt crystals from this area are sold in souqs all over the country, and for a stretch, all the roadside formations are striped bright white, reflecting this abundant commodity. The road then crosses a bridge over a wide empty riverbed green with palm trees. This is where the camels can usually be found grazing. Soon the trees are gone as the desert again takes over. At times, it seems as though nothing could live here in the dunes and sun. The most breathtakingly beautiful thing about this area however, are the oasis. In a sea of sand, a lush, bright green oasis will appear from behind a dune, complete with date palms, towering Kasbahs, and rose gardens. My town is one such oasis. Built snuggly into the foothills of the High Atlas Mountains, along a wide riverbed, emerging from the peaks, our lush, verdant, village fields go on for acres and yet are surrounded by completely sterile sun-baked sand valleys and peaks. From our site, the mountains ascend dramatically, and though it is fairly hot here already (maybe about 85-90 most days), there is a clear view of the snow-capped mountains looming above us. In many ways, the dry, warm weather, desert scenery, and mountains remind me of the places I’ve seen and lived in, in the American Southwest (New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah), but the vastness of this place, and the silence, make it seem unfamiliar and even mysterious. Then of course there is the culture to consider. The Kasbahs, the cramped screaming taxis and busses, the fruit stands, hanging skinned goats and chickens, solo bikers in the desert wearing turbins and pedaling huffy’s, loud Arabic rap music, men praying on personal tote prayer rugs on the sidewalk, donkeys carrying huge decorative metal doors, patient sheepherders crossing busy streets with their full entarage, women wearing richly patterned colorful jallabas (like a really fancy night gown), trash piles in front of tahanuts waiting to be burned nightly, and of course the calls to prayer echoing off the mountain sides. This is not the southwest; but it is fascinating and beautiful beyond words.