5pm Exercise Class (and 7pm, and 10am)

Before I got to my village I had prepared myself for moving into a situation where I was going to be the only woman in the village who was ever going to do any sort of exercise. And then I arrive and within two months I become THE expert on exercises of all kinds, for all people in the village.

Every day at 5pm, after the women's literacy course at the Association, I lead an exercise class for the same women. This is definitely one of the highlights of my day every day. We've renamed all of the easy yoga poses I know, so here's a typical yoga progression (you can probably guess what poses these are):
Mountain
Fallen mountain
Mountain
Fallen mountain
Monkey
Frog
Monkey
Frog
Cat
Snake
Cat
Fish
Cat
Snake
Cat
Fish
Cat
Snake
Cat
Warrior 2
Triangle
Cat
Snake
Cat
Warrior 1
Airplane
Cat
Snake
and so on...

My 7pm class (usually only 2-3 times a week) is a private class for my host sisters, one of whom is working in the hanut during my 5pm class, and one of whom is just really serious about exercising and isn't satisfied with the 5pm class. This one is really fun, and we end up dancing our hearts out for half an hour and then doing half an hour of intense ab exercises.

I just started my 10am class this morning. I've been adopted by the pack of 7-year-old boys in the village, who love to come along with me when I run, and like to take me on random excursions to nearby plateaus and springs. I promised them a soccer ball last time I traveled, so this morning we all went out to the mini soccer field (with big rocks as goal posts) and played 2-on-3 until they were exhausted. But then I guess they'd heard from their mothers about my 5pm exercise class and asked me to give them an exercise class of their own. This one was really fun too - we did a lot of sprints, leap-frogging, and kick-boxing, all the things you can't do with a group of women in a 10x12 foot room. It was just so nice to be outside in the best weather I've seen in months, in a grassy field surrounded by three plateaus and the high atlas, snow-covered mountains.

Urban Legends and the Dentist

So a couple of weeks ago my teeth started hurting and I was pretty sure the super-sugary tea (aka "cavity juice") was finally taking its toll. Even though I brush my teeth at least three times a day, every time I drink tea I can just picture my teeth dissolving. So I went to the dentist only to learn that I did not in fact have a single cavity, but instead I had been brushing my teeth TOO much, and was basically brushing away my gums.

So this is definitely something I'm not going to tell my host family. I've still never seen anyone in my village brush their teeth, and if they found out that it was possible to brush too much, that's the one story everyone would tell for the next decade whenever the subject of teeth-brushing came up.

Kind of like the [what I think is probably an] Urban Legend about the American woman who came to Morocco and married a Moroccan man, converted to Islam, and still lives in Morocco, wears jalabas and head scarves and never intends to leave. I think I hear this story just about every day.

First Hanut Sale!.

So last week I took a few kilos of couscous with me to Midelt to my tutor's house, and it turns out her brother knows all the hanut owners in Midelt, so he set out with the couscous and came back an hour later with orders from three hanuts who wanted to start carrying it.

So that was exciting, and we packaged up the couscous and sent it along the next day to the hanuts, only to find out that afternoon that one of the hanut guys weighed the couscous and discovered that what we were selling as a kilo was really only 920 grams. So I at first thought that might have killed our business with those hanuts. But luckily they said if we take them back to Khoukhate, make them a kilo, and bring them back to Midelt, they'll still sell them, but for some reason that fixing hasn't happened yet. What's the holdup? I've been traveling a lot the past couple of weeks, so maybe next week we'll sort everything out and get things moving again. A very Peace Corps cliché observation, I know, but I guess things move a little more slowly here than I feel like they should. . .

New Website!

I stayed up all night the last time I was in Itzer with fast internet and put together a website for my Association: www.associationennahda.org

It might remind you of another website I made recently, but I am going to blame that on the limitations of Google Sites not on my lack of creativity. Let me know what you think of it.