Couscous Label

Happy New Year!

This will be an account of the many recent holidays here and how I celebrated all of them.

Thanksgiving:
I spent a lot of the day trying to explain what "Holiday of the Turkey" was all about to my family and other random village members. They surprised me by actually cooking turkey for dinner (on a stick and grilled over a fire, but it was still turkey!)

Eid Kabbir (lit. "big holiday"):
This is the really holiday for Muslims, when they celebrate Abraham slaughtering the sheep instead of his son Isaac. Every Muslim family in the world has to slaughter its own sheep and then eat it piece by piece until it's gone. So that was pretty exciting. Ate some random sheep parts that I'd never eaten before, and photographed the whole thing. We spent two days beforehand making dozens of varieties of cookies, and then spent the day of Eid visiting other houses in the village and eating cookies and drinking tea. A bunch of relatives came in from out of town, so it felt a lot like Christmas.

Christmas:
I didn't do anything special on Christmas itself, but the weekend before a bunch of us went to Fes for a little holiday party and gift exchange. The weather was gorgeous (and has been every day for a couple of weeks here) so it didn't really feel much like Christmas. And then last weekend a couple of my closest friends, volunteers in other sites kind of near me, came up to my site to visit and we cooked dinner and watched some movies and took a long hike up a volcano.

New Years (Muslim year 1430):
This was about two days ago, I think, and not much exciting happened except we baked a cake and then ate it. We drank some apple-flavored soda and I tried to pretend it was champagne. I explained the custom of New Year's Resolutions to my family, but they didn't want to come up with anything, because everything is "God willing", everything, and I guess it's maybe presumptuous to feel like they can really change anything themselves.

New Years (2009):
Well, I guess we'll see what they do tonight, though I'm not expecting too much. Maybe some more apple soda.

So about the Couscous business: we're just about in business. I made labels and got them printed, found a machine to seal the bags, and am about to start constructing the website (hopefully this morning). The goal for the next month or two (or, really, the next two years) is to figure out where and how to sell it. I'm hoping to do some traveling to the nearby cities that are big enough to have grocery stores to see if they want to carry it. And maybe a couple of restaurants in the touristy cities. We'll see. I think there might be some paperwork we need to do to make it exportable, I'm not sure yet, but I'm planning to meet with the Ministry of the Artisanat next week to find out.

How you can help my couscous business if you want to:

• If you happen to secretly own a grocery store or international handicrafts store and want to carry couscous, you can order a bunch from me. Or if you know someone who does, put me in touch with them. It's good couscous.
  
• If a store near you sells couscous, check it out for me - see if you can find any couscous that is made by hand, not by machine, or imported straight from Morocco. Let me know how much it sells for.
• If you have any other ideas for how to sell couscous, let me know! Our goal is 10,000 kg a year eventually.
  

And of course my address if anyone is still sending out Christmas cards:
Cynthia Berning
BP 6, Itzer 54250
Province de Khenifra
MAROC/ Morocco

Happy New Year!

This will be an account of the many recent holidays here and how I celebrated all of them.

Thanksgiving:
I spent a lot of the day trying to explain what "Holiday of the Turkey" was all about to my family and other random village members. They surprised me by actually cooking turkey for dinner (on a stick and grilled over a fire, but it was still turkey!)

Eid Kabbir (lit. "big holiday"):
This is the really holiday for Muslims, when they celebrate Abraham slaughtering the sheep instead of his son Isaac. Every Muslim family in the world has to slaughter its own sheep and then eat it piece by piece until it's gone. So that was pretty exciting. Ate some random sheep parts that I'd never eaten before, and photographed the whole thing. We spent two days beforehand making dozens of varieties of cookies, and then spent the day of Eid visiting other houses in the village and eating cookies and drinking tea. A bunch of relatives came in from out of town, so it felt a lot like Christmas.

Christmas:
I didn't do anything special on Christmas itself, but the weekend before a bunch of us went to Fes for a little holiday party and gift exchange. The weather was gorgeous (and has been every day for a couple of weeks here) so it didn't really feel much like Christmas. And then last weekend a couple of my closest friends, volunteers in other sites kind of near me, came up to my site to visit and we cooked dinner and watched some movies and took a long hike up a volcano.

New Years (Muslim year 1430):
This was about two days ago, I think, and not much exciting happened except we baked a cake and then ate it. We drank some apple-flavored soda and I tried to pretend it was champagne. I explained the custom of New Year's Resolutions to my family, but they didn't want to come up with anything, because everything is "God willing", everything, and I guess it's maybe presumptuous to feel like they can really change anything themselves.

New Years (2009):
Well, I guess we'll see what they do tonight, though I'm not expecting too much. Maybe some more apple soda.

About the Couscous business: we're just about in business. I made labels and got them printed, found a machine to seal the bags, and am about to start constructing the website (hopefully this morning). The goal for the next month or two (or, really, the next two years) is to figure out where and how to sell it. I'm hoping to do some traveling to the nearby cities that are big enough to have grocery stores to see if they want to carry it. And maybe a couple of restaurants in the touristy cities. We'll see. I think there might be some paperwork we need to do to make it exportable, I'm not sure yet, but I'm planning to meet with the Ministry of the Artisanat next week to find out.

How you can help my couscous business if you want to:

• If you happen to secretly own a grocery store or international handicrafts store and want to carry couscous, you can order a bunch from me. Or if you know someone who does, put me in touch with them. It's good couscous.
  
• If a store near you sells couscous, check it out for me - see if you can find any couscous that is made by hand, not by machine, or imported straight from Morocco. Let me know how much it sells for.
• If you have any other ideas for how to sell couscous, let me know! Our goal is 10,000 kg a year eventually.

And the opposite list:

Things I get a kick out of but are perfectly normal here:

1. Several families will share a washing machine, but instead of bringing their clothes to the machine, they carry the washing machine from house to house.
2. Tough-looking men coming into souq wearing huge, heavy wool capes, but riding on tiny little donkeys.
3. It is perfectly acceptable to wear your bathrobe and slippers all day, every day, anywhere in the village. And then when women leave the village, they just put on a jalaba over their bathrobes (still wearing their slippers) and consider themselves dressed. I bought a great (but ridiculous) floor-length leopard-print bathrobe and the whole village thinks it’s the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen.
4. You have to add “God willing” to the end of every sentence that takes place in the future, which seems normal for things like “I’ll be here for two years (god willing)” or “Next year I want to take a vacation around the rest of Africa (god willing)”. But it feels so ominous when to say, “I’m going to the bathroom, I’ll be right back (god willing),” or “Good night, see you in the morning (god willing)”.

My family’s sense of humor:

Recurring jokes in my host family and village that I don’t really think are funny at all but everyone else gets a kick out of:

1. The first week I told them that I liked all Moroccan food except olives. Now whenever I’m introduced to someone new in the village, the fact that I don’t like olives is part of the introduction. And invariably, if olives are on the table at a meal, someone will jokingly tell me to eat the olives, and everyone will laugh. I thought this would get old, but we’re a month in and it still appears to be pretty funny.
2. My family found out that I knew the word for “butt” in Arabic (which I know pretty much only because it sounds a lot like “zucchini”) so now they love to point to their butts and ask me what it is, just to hear me say the word.
3. They taught me the word “mismuma” which means something like “trouble-maker” or “bad kid”, and they love to hear me call someone this. So several times a day, whenever one of my sisters does something even remotely mischievous or mean to another one, my host mother will turn to me and ask “Who is mismuma?” And no matter who I answer, they think it’s funny.
4. One of my host sisters is named Noura, which happens to be my Moroccan name as well. So people love calling out “Noura!” and watching both of us turn around. And they love coming up with adjectives to put after “Noura” to differentiate us: (old/young, new/old, one/two).
5. (This one I actually find pretty funny too:) They like to wait until after dinner a lot of the time to tell me what I just ate. Probably a good idea, since I might not have been too thrilled about eating brains, testicles and udders. (Surprisingly not that bad - they all taste and feel like mushrooms.)
   

The quest for a package sealer in the Fes Medina:

I went to Fes last weekend to run some errands that can only be run in a big city here: printing of labels for the couscous, scoping out grocery stores to see if anyone is selling hand-made couscous like ours, and finally purchasing a machine to seal the couscous packages. The printing went smoothly and came out beautifully, but finding a package sealer (which you can buy on Amazon for $30) turned into quite the quest:

1. Friday night: I asked the girls I was staying with for ideas, they asked one of their American friends who’s lived in Fes for years. She gave me directions to a hanut that sells only plastic bags.
2. Saturday, 11am: I went to the plastic bag hanut. They didn’t have anything the right size or weight. They give me directions to another plastic bag hanut around the corner.
3. 11:15am: I buy a few hundred plastic bags at the second hanut and ask them where I could find a sealer. The hanut guy sends his son with us through a maze of alleys to another plastic bag hanut.
4. 11:30am: I explain what I’m looking for to this plastic bag hanut guy, who sends his two sons out to scour the neighborhood. I sit outside the hanut and chat about the Peace Corps.
5. 12pm: The sons return and say they know a guy who has one to sell. One of them leads me through another maze of alleys to a random unmarked door that’s closed. The guy standing outside making snail soup in his cart tells me the man isn’t there and I should come back at 3pm.
6. I spend several hours wandering through the medina, getting lost, finding my way again, watching the tanners treat sheepskins, stumbling into the tourist circuit and fending off vendors who thought I was a tourist.
7. 3pm: I manage to re-locate the unmarked door of the man who supposedly has a sealing machine. The snail soup man tells me he’s still not there and I should come back at 4pm. I go back to the plastic bag hanut and explain that he’s still not open and I can’t wait around the medina all day.
8. 3:30pm: The hanut guy sends one of his sons off again, this time to locate the key to the man’s shop (or house, maybe, I’m not sure). I’m told to sit down and wait. I repeat my explanation of who I am and what I’m doing and what the Peace Corps is a few dozen times to the random people who wander past the hanut or have gathered to try to figure out what was going on.
9. 4:30pm: A random guy I’ve never seen walks out of an alley with what he says is a bag sealer. It plugs in and heats up, and was clearly constructed in someone’s garage, probably in the past hour while I waited. Not exactly the bag sealer I’d had in mind when I’d come, but I bought it. Success (only to get home and realize it's pretty finicky and over-melts half of the bags it tries to seal. Still working on that step.)
   

Real Volunteers Now!

November 21, 2008

Yesterday we all took the oath to uphold the constitution so now we're officially Peace Corps volunteers, no longer trainees. Now we're all heading to our permanent sites, and it turns out that the Association in my site makes couscous, traditionally, by hand. So it looks like my Couscous Chronicles may actually start including talk of couscous.

So it's been an eventful past month and a half:

• First big Projects: We finished up the five weeks of Community-based training in Itzer by completing individual projects to help the association there. I made a website as my project: www.afcmaroc.org. The Arabic site isn't quite finished yet, but you should visit the French and English sites and let me know what you think, and whether you have any suggestions. We also spent some time putting links to the website and reviews of the treks all over random travel forums and Wikitravel, to try to advertise a bit for them. Let me know if you have any suggestions for other websites where I could post links or reviews.
  
• We learned our site placements about three weeks ago and immediately went off for a week-long visit with our new host families, whom we'll be living with for two months while we get to know the community. My village, "Khoukhat" is super small, about 400 people.
• My new host family: the father is the Cheikh of the village (I guess kind of like the mayor for a small town) and he drives the daily transport to and from all the cities nearby, and he owns the one "hanut" (small convenient store) in the village, and his daughter is president of the Association. So it looks like I'll be pretty well-connected in town. They're by far the richest family in the village, and the only house with running water. (Though no hot water, and they only heat up the bathing room once a week, so I think I'm going to start commuting into the next town to bathe too).
  
• US Election: I really missed being in DC during the whole election - election coverage was pretty much the only thing on the news here for weeks before the election, and it would have been fun to be in the States for this, but it was also pretty cool being in the middle of nowhere. Wednesday morning after the election I got up with my family at about 5am at the first call to prayer and immediately turned on the news and saw the results. I was going to town with my father that morning to run some errands, which means leaving the house before dawn and driving through the village to pick up everyone who needed to go to town for whatever reason, and every time someone climbed into the back of my host father's van he would announce that Obama won, and the passenger would cheer. I can't even count how many "congratulations!" i got that day from random people on the street. It was cool to think about people in tiny villages all around the world who don't have running water but still cared passionately about this particular election in America.
  
• Language Test: We all had to take this Language Proficiency Test in Moroccan Arabic ("Darija") I guess for our own knowledge of our level as well as for the Peace Corps' own self-assessment. Six of us tied for the best with a score of "Intermediate High".
  
• Sweet Talent Show Performance: As if this whole training time didn't feel enough like summer camp already, we ended it with a talent show last night. A handful of us created this dance team and performed. You can watch our act on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnYZzepF8nM
• What Happens from Here? The only real goal for the next couple of months is "integrate" so I'm not exactly sure what I'll be spending my time doing. A lot of studying Darija and wandering around the village and chatting with people, I guess. It might be kind of hard not really having much to do all day, so write me emails and send me stuff in the mail, so I have an excuse to commute to town for internet and the post office.

A couple of random surprising things that I've found interesting:

- There's this word, "hashak" that you're supposed to say whenever you talk about something embarrassing like the bathroom or garbage, but you also have to say it every time you say the word "donkey."
- Our town doesn't have running water, so everyone bathes at public bathhouses. These are pretty surreal places - ridiculously hot and steamy and crowded with mostly-naked women scrubbing themselves and each other. We go every couple of days and it's definitely a social event too.
- Everyone wears these long hooded robes called "jalabas" everyday. We find them pretty hilarious - when we're walking around town at night, our shadows in the streetlights look like Death or the Grim Reaper or something. I just bought some nice warm fleece to get a winter coat jalaba made. I'm pretty excited about that.
- My Arabic name is Nora. I was named after Itzer's first Peace Corps volunteer. I think I like it.

One month of Peace Corps down, 26 months to go. . .

October 9, 2008

So a month ago today we landed in Casablanca and began what has already been quite an adventure and will undoubtedly become even more interesting. We're almost halfway done with Pre-service Training and I think I've already learned more Moroccan Arabic (the dialect is called "Darija") in these four weeks than I learned Chinese during my entire year in China. We spent the first two weeks all together in a hostel in Azrou, this relatively small town in the middle Atlas mountains. Azrou is a great town with nice places to run and hike, and even though we're pretty busy with information sessions and language classes and everything else that goes along with training, we manage to have Yoga and Pilates on the roof every morning, and I go running with a couple of other volunteers every evening, and just about every minute of free time we have during the day is spent throwing a frisbee outside or playing some pretty intense games of doubles Ping Pong. We usually have a couple of hours free after dinner every night when we'll head up to the medina (the old, commercial part of town with little alleys and lots of little shops) or to a cafe somewhere in town.

But as pleasant and fun and sports-filled as Azrou was, our "community-based training" in this tiny town called Itzer was so much cooler. I spent the last two weeks in Itzer as part of a small group of six volunteers with one Moroccan language teacher. My host father is the president of the town's association of carpet weavers, and is basically THE man in town - seriously everyone in the region knows him. Our town is two main streets and a bunch of back dirt alleys, and is right next to a really cool plateau that we climbed one afternoon. We spend five weeks there total and are supposed to use this as a mini Peace Corps experience, where we implement little projects to help the town's association after we do all these community needs assessments and interviews. Our projects include making a website for the association so they can advertise their rugs and crafts and also a trekking company that they're trying to start up, other marketing and advertising activities, working with the weavers to make some improvements in product quality, documenting the motifs and colors and making a catalog and order forms. Should be fun.

Peace Corps Morocco, 2008

This will be my blog for all of my exciting adventures as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. I'm in the Small Business Development program (SBD) and living in a tiny village in the Middle Atlas mountains.

Please feel free to post comments or email me at any time if you have suggestions about how I can sell more couscous or otherwise help my community!

Thanks,
Cynthia