The Couscous Chronicles

Here´s where my Village is

2010-11-14T04:15:00.000-08:00

Since I´m not there anymore, I think it´s now okay to show the exact location of my village, Khoukhate. I´ve marked all the important places, bike trips, running routes, and others, and put up some pictures.

Here´s the link to the map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=es&msa=0&msid=105585629350532448728.000480562f80edd91f676&ll=32.984476,-4.784546&spn=0.433129,0.883026&t=h&z=10

Here are some of the pictures that are shown on the map, that correspond to places I´ve marked:

Three villages, six irrigation ditches, and ten days before I leave

2010-11-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, I began a project to improve some irrigation ditches around the Izzie village. Our valley is fed by dozen of natural springs that gush water all day every day, all year long. Most of these springs are channeled through dirt ditches to get to fields, but along the way, the majority of the water seeps into the ground and never makes it to the intended destination. A few of these ditches have over the years been improved by concrete, preventing loss of water and reducing the amount of time it takes for this water to travel to the fields. My favorite institution the Rural Commune has funded these projects in the past, with the following results:
$6000 constructed a channel 150 meters long
$15,000 constructed a channel 400 meters long
I had a few thousand dollars to improve a major central channel that serves the majority of farmers in the village, or as much of it as we could with these limited funds. My results:
$1500 finished the 400-meter original project (10% of the cost of the project had the Rural Commune financed it)
The other $2500 has financed five other smaller irrigation projects, for a total of probably about 650 meters, almost all constructed within the past week.

This project, though stressful in that I'm about to finish my Peace Corps service, is fun for me because I get to watch these three villages compete for my approval, all three asking about the progress of the other ones every day. It's also fun because it gives me plenty of opportunities to shake my head disappointedly at my favorite institution.

In Memoriam

2010-11-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

My second and final attempt at raising a kitten in Morocco has failed - this one got caught in a glue mouse trap, stumbled around for a day stuck to a piece of cardboard, then probably died of a heart attack or inhalation of glue fumes, I'm not sure. This picture was taken a few hours before the unfortunate incident:

Day One of the Saffron Harvest

2010-11-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a notoriously bad gardener, but finally something that I planted grew! It also just so happens to be among the world's most valuable plants. If things don't work out for me in America, saffron farming might be the way to go. I literally gave them zero attention after planting them, and just about every bulb blossomed. The two kilos of seeds I planted will probably yield less than a gram of saffron, and I'll probably be gone before at least half of that is harvested, but I'm still really excited.

26 Down, One Month to Go

2010-10-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

Some days, it feels like the past two years flew by, other days I feel like I've aged ten years in the 25 months since I wrote my first "Couscous Chronicles" email to you all. I won't even try to sum it all up in one email; you should check out my blog if you want a fuller picture of what I've been doing here in this tiny village for two years. (www.couscouschronicles.blogspot.com)

Top Ten Things I'll miss about Morocco: (see attached corresponding photos)
1. Long, non-hurried jogs down empty dirt roads between plateaus with my dog
2. My dog (even if he is arguably the world's worst dog; his favorite activities appear to all my neighbors to be biting little children and eating kittens)
3. Waking up whenever I wake up, without an alarm, and then sometimes having nothing better to do than sit all day with my baby chicks.
4. Eating fruit right off of the trees, olive oil straight from the stone press, and vegetables right out of the ground
5. Wowing (or at least amusing) everyone with my awesome Moroccan dance moves (a still picture can't really do this one justice. Ask for a demonstration when I get home)
6. Manual labor and its tangible results
7. Camel burgers
8. This little girl who squeals "SEEENTEEEYA!" every time she sees me.
9. Endless village drama over minor things (my under-$2000 projects result in endlessly entertaining drama)
10. Sunsets like this one from Thursday, over these snow-capped mountains

My post-November 12th Travel Plans: I'll be spending a week in Portugal and a few days in Spain before embarking on a trans-Atlantic, 14-day cruise that arrives in Puerto Rico. After a few days in the rain forest, I'll be flying home to Cincinnati, where I'll be until I figure out my next steps. At some point in the near future I'll start looking for a job, but also plan to spend some time visiting friends in DC and my brother in San Francisco. Depending on how long the job search takes, I may have more time to visit more of you in all your random places. My temporary address will be my parents' address: 5556 Nickview Dr, Cincinnati, OH 45247 in case you want to send me anything. Starting December 17th, I'll be reachable by cell phone at 513-504-6680.

Finally, several of you have asked if there's any way you can help out with my projects or if there's anything you can send to people in the village, and after thinking this over and talking with the director of the primary school, I've decided that the best thing would be, if anyone is interested, to provide scholarships for the girls in the village who want to continue their studies past the sixth grade but can't afford to pay for room and board at the closest middle school, a boarding school about 50 miles away. Currently, there are a handful of girls who still come to class at the primary school every day even though they should be in middle school because they really want to be in school. It's sad because the costs only come to about $30/month per student, so approximately $300 for the whole school year, which includes room, board, and transportation back to the village to visit their families for holidays. If any of you might be interested in sponsoring a girl for a month or two (or for a whole year), let me know and we'll figure out logistics.

So, thanks for all of your emails and letters and wall posts over the past two years. I'm sorry that I've been slow to respond, and I'm sure I've over-used the "I don't have internet access" excuse. I hope to see you all and catch up soon!

Marriage Musings Part IV - Jessica

2010-10-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

Danielle's younger sister Jessica is fifteen. This spring she finished her last year of middle school and was preparing to start high school in the fall, when her aunt proposed that she marry the oldest of her cousins, 29. Since she was born, it was assumed that she would marry one of her cousins, as she was one of only a few girls in an extended family of dozens of boys, but we didn't know that her aunt wanted her for her son so soon. In the course of a couple of weeks, she had to decide (at the incredibly unstable age of fifteen), whether she wanted to drop out of school and get married, and move to the city to live with her husband/cousin and his whole huge family.

She had been almost a little project of mine - I was teaching her English and drilling her on her homework, always talking to her about being the first in her family to get a high school diploma and even go on to college, about all the possibilities she had for careers and futures. We talked news and politics and pored over my map of the world. I honestly intended to invite her to spend a summer or a year with me in America someday so she could learn English and see a bit of the world outside of the village. And then came the marriage offer. Her aunt insisted that even though they wouldn't have the wedding until next summer, she would have to quit school and move in with her husband's family immediately, to help out around the house and get used to her new life. The legal age for marriage in Morocco is 18, but no matter how many times I brought this up and tried to argue that there's a reason for this law, the family would just bring up examples of women in the village who had married at 13 or at 14, and they're happy.

My (unconfirmed) interpretation of the situation was that the aunt had wanted this girl as her daughter-in-law from the beginning, and was afraid that if she were to finish high school, she would not be satisfied marrying one of her uneducated cousins. I think her aunt was also getting older and tired, and with only one daughter and a house full of boys, wanted an extra hand with the housework as soon as possible. Jessica had to decide whether to stand up to all the pressure from her aunt and her own family, finish her education and possibly not ever find a husband (since there definitely is a preference for uneducated, young wives), or marry her cousin, who she knows is a good man from a good family, where she would be treated well, not have too hard of an adjustment to make, and she would still see her own family all the time.

Marriage Musings Part III - Danielle

2010-10-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

For the first year I knew her, I never knew that Danielle had ever been married. She never talked about it and I just assumed that she was another of the many unmarried women in their 30s in the village. Her story is that she married young, at I think 16, to a man she had never seen before the wedding. She wasn't married long before it became clear that he was an alcoholic and soon after, began to treat her poorly. She was faced with the choice of staying with him, even if he was a terrible husband, or leaving him and moving back in with her family in the village, knowing that as a divorcee, she may never get another marriage offer. She left and came back to the village. Now, at the age of 30, she's still unmarried, wants nothing more than to be married, but has no real way to go about meeting men, and no one wants to arrange a marriage for their son or brother or nephew with a woman who is clearly not "pure".

A misdialed number led to a conversation that led to a secretive text-message relationship with a man that went on for several months before they agreed to meet. She spent a weekend with him, lying to her family about going to visit an aunt or a friend somewhere, and then later I helped her meet him again by telling everyone she was going with me to Fes and then sending her off to his town instead. Even at the age of 30 and even though she was divorced, she still could not tell her family that she was going to see a man. After their second meeting, he told her that his mother disapproved of his marrying a divorcee (he was almost 40 but still couldn't stand up to his mother regarding whom to marry). But he continues to send her texts, urging her to come visit him. She has to decide whether having a secret lover who will never marry her is better or worse than having no one at all.

Marriage Musings Part II - Heather

2010-10-16T12:34:00.000-07:00

Heather grew up in the village, the very beautiful daughter of a young single mother whose husband had abandoned her a few months after her daughter was born. At eighteen, she decided she was bored with village life and went to live with her aunt in one of the big cities, helping her aunt take care of the children and working occasionally at a call center. Living with an aunt busy with her own children, and having the excuse of work allowed her an enormous amount of freedom to hang out with friends and to start dating secretly. For five years, she dated a man that she was madly in love with, and they had secretly rented an apartment so they could spend time together out of sight of her aunt and cousins, and his four children from a previous marriage. Though he loved her and they appeared to have a wonderful relationship, he claimed he was never going to be able to marry her, because of complications with the children, and other problems I never really understood. Heather accepted this situation and turned down the many offers of marriage that came to her, because she loved her boyfriend.

This past year, however, came an offer from a man who had come several times before to ask for her hand, was a little older and had a well-established small business, and was extremely nice. Heather was faced with the choice of staying in a relationship that would have to stay secret, meaning years of lying to her aunt about where she was going and maybe never being able to have children herself, or leaving the man she loved to marry a man she didn't love but that she knew would be good to her, provide her (and their children) with a nice house and a comfortable life, and allow her to live a life in the open without lies or secrecy. She chose marriage and is now pregnant, but confesses that she still thinks about her old boyfriend all the time even though she knows she has a wonderful husband who loves her more than anything.

Marriage in Morocco - Musings, Part I

2010-10-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

One of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers just got married to a Moroccan and held a completely traditional Berber wedding, which I attended. This got me thinking it's about time I wrote about marriage in this country, and not just a recounting of the different weddings I've been to and how many hours of dancing I participated in. I've been skirting around writing about this issue for two years, afraid of judging another culture's traditions before I fully understood them. And while I don't claim to understand everything even after two years, I don't think my understanding is going to deepen much in the next month, so I'm going to go ahead and write. There are a lot of things that turned me off about Morocco and Moroccans two years ago and that I have since learned to appreciate and even like, but at the end of the day, there has never been a moment when I wished that I was girl born in rural Morocco. The next couple of posts are going to be marriage stories about some of the girls I've gotten to know really well here and who have shared their "boy problems" with me (I've changed their names).

(I fully acknowledge that these girls' experiences are not universal across Morocco and may not even be typical, as cities are quickly evolving and becoming more and more "Western" every day, with more and more liberal values. But it's still hard to listen to my friends tell me these stories and ask for advice, when I have no idea what kind of advice to give.)

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2010-10-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

It's Apple Season in Midelt, the province so proud of its apples that it built this lovely fountain in the center of town:

The month of the year when everyone is employed full-time, and when literally every time I leave my house I come home laden with the sweetest, juiciest apples I've ever eaten, freshly picked from one of the village's orchards. I eat at least four or five apples a day and still acquire them much faster than I'll ever be able to consume them.

I find the apple trade here fascinating - it's well known that the richest people in the area (after the corrupt politicians) are the apple farmers, many of whom have orchards with thousands or tens of thousands of trees. An orchard right outside of my village has 45,000 trees and brings in over a million dollars a year in apple sales. Every morning during picking season, they send trucks out into the surrounding villages at 5am to load up hundreds of workers who then pick apples all day, taking precisely-timed breaks, and then drop them all off in the afternoon, "Grapes of Wrath" style. The richest farmers also build giant refrigerators to store the apples and sell them throughout the year as prices rise.

The perfect, happiest time to be spending my last month in Morocco.

God-Sanctioned Month of Laziness

2010-09-12T04:35:00.000-07:00

Fasting Ramadan would be awful if I had to wake up before noon and leave my house before 5pm and had actual important things to do. But since I don't, I've been accomplishing a lot of lying around and watching TV shows and movies. (Or, "reintroducing myself to American life and culture...") This year's Ramadan accomplishments include:
Season 3 of 30 Rock
Season 3 of How I Met Your Mother
Seasons 5 and 6 of West Wing
The past eight months of Infomania
2 books (making my book-to-tv-episode ratio is about 1:50, embarrassingly low)
At least fifteen hours of Spades, the card game, in its two-, three-, and four-person forms
Seven feature-length movies

In my defense, I start every day at noon, (or one or two pm) by stepping outside and contemplating leaving my house to go do something more useful, but invariably the super hot sun drives me back indoors and back into my nice soft bed. I attempt this venture several times throughout the afternoon, always retreating defeated, to more TV show watching, until 5, my official jogging time (which, in the lazy spirit of the month has turned into a casual walk/jog).

Learning to Pray Well with Others

2010-09-12T04:29:00.000-07:00

The big event of this year's month of Ramadan was the opening of a women's prayer room in the mosque. Previously, the men would pray five times a day in the mosque while the women would have to pray in their own homes because they can't pray with men. So this room was a big deal, and for the past few months, all the women have been looking forward to finally being able to pray together in the mosque, and listen to the (equivalent of a) priest give the sermons. No one had any idea how much drama this room would create, however. Basically, a whole village of women have to figure out a set of norms for how to comport themselves in the mosque. Some women have never prayed in a mosque before, some have only when they've traveled to visit relatives living in cities, and everyone has a different idea for how one should act.

Questions that need to be resolved soon because they're making people upset:
• What should one wear to the mosque? When they pray in their own houses, women usually just wrap a sheet around themselves, but is that appropriate for a mosque or should women dress up in their fanciest jalabas?
• What's the appropriate pace for the prayer? Should everyone pray at the same speed since they're all together, or should everyone follow their own pace?
• Is it appropriate to leave once you're done, or do you have to wait until everyone finishes?
• Is it appropriate to bring your young children with you?
• Is it appropriate to answer your cell phone in the middle of the prayer?
• If you come late, should you just jump into the middle of the prayer or start from the beginning by yourself? Should you greet everyone or try to sneak in inconspicuously?
• Is it appropriate to talk amongst yourselves before/after the prayer, or should everyone leave in silence and not talk until they're outside?
• Are there "assigned seats?" Should you give up your place in the front row if one of the old and prominent ladies of the village comes in and wants it?
• Is it appropriate to correct an old lady who isn't following all the right prayer steps in the right order, or should you let her keep making the same mistakes?

As do most dramatic situations in this village, the mosque drama amuses me, as every single night after the evening prayer, the women come home and then spend the next hour ranting and gossiping about who was wearing what, or saying what, or doing what during the prayer, who greeted or didn't greet whom, who knelt next to whom, who came late or brought naughty children or did other shameful things. I've heard a couple of women swear they're never praying in the mosque ever again because of XYZ that so-and-so did. I suppose any big change requires some time to work out the norms, and for everyone to adjust the way they've been praying privately their whole lives to fit the new norms. This is an interesting time, and would be a fun study for some psychologist, because I'm sure that in a few weeks everyone will be following the new unwritten rules of prayer in the mosque as if they'd been praying there forever.

All of Midelt is Chuckling Right Now

2010-08-27T05:16:00.000-07:00

The biggest news in our new Province of Midelt is that the president of the province (more or less the equivalent of a state governor) got caught on webcam demanding and accepting bribe money. Here's a link to the video, though if you don't understand Arabic, it's probably not that interesting to watch.

The president is the one who spends the whole time shining his shoes, the other guy is his vice president, and the old man on the left is a guy who runs a little carnival. The carnival guy I guess wanted to keep the carnival up and running in Midelt, but every time they get to the agreed-upon closing date, the president makes the guy give him bribes to keep it open a little longer. The video goes more or less like,

Old man "So how much do you want from me this time? I've already given you a million and a half" (about $1200). I'll give you another million."
President "A million? That's nothing, two! Two million or we don't even have a conversation"
Old man "A million is all I have right now. I'll give you each half a million, and give me til the afternoon to go round up the rest." (hands over the money, bill by bill)
President "This stays between us, if I find out you've told anyone. . . "
Old man "Of course! Who would I tell?"

So now we'll see what happens. Once this video got uploaded to YouTube, the president immediately released a response video, denouncing the video as a fraud, that the old man spliced and diced voices that weren't the president at all, trying to frame him, that he's just a humble former Islamic studies professor who's trying to work to make Midelt a better place for everyone. Last I heard he's waiting to be tried in the big court in Meknes, the nation (or at least me), crossing its fingers hoping a big example will be made of this guy, finally starting a serious and long-overdue war against corruption in Morocco.

Ramadan Reflections, Part II

2010-08-27T05:15:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly, the hardest part of the day isn't late afternoon when it's hot and the fast is coming to an end. In my opinion, the worst part of the day is waking up, knowing that you have X number of hours before you can eat or drink. As those hours pass, it gets easier, as I find things to fill that time, and once there's only an hour or two left, I go running, and then sunset comes. The other worst part of the day is right before the sunrise call to prayer, when I'm not hungry or thirsty but feel the need to eat and drink, knowing it'll be fifteen hours before I can eat again. (And knowing that the more water I drink at 4am, the more times I'll have to get up to pee in the middle of the night).

It does feel wrong to be unhappy going to bed every day and then wake up unhappy every morning.

Ramadan Reflections, Second Time Around

2010-08-27T05:14:00.000-07:00

For the whole first week of Ramadan this year, I seriously regretted my decision to fast again this year. I had great memories of last year, playing cards all night and getting invited over to break fast at different houses all the time, and feeling this big sense of accomplishment at the end of the month. I think I'd conveniently suppressed the memories of hunger and thirst and days that seem to drag on for weeks. This year just seemed harder and less rewarding. But then I got back to the village after a week of fasting while traveling, and things got easy again. Almost too easy. I could once again sleep until noon and hang out in my nice and cool mud house in my comfortable bed all day. I think I'll survive the month after all.

Naked Chicks

2010-08-26T20:28:00.001-07:00

The new biggest joke in the family is how my baby chicks are growing up American, just like their "mother". Proof:
The chicks I brought hang out in a group by themselves and don't seem to like hanging out with the village-born chicks
My chicks refuse to eat bread, eating only expensive chicken food
(And the best one, in my opinion), as soon as it started to get hot out, they pulled out all their feathers and ran around almost naked for a month (I'm pretty sure I could hear the other chicks muttering "hashuma!" (shame on them) under their breaths the whole time)

Nice Guys Looking for Wives

2010-07-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

I loaned my camera to some of my host cousins for a couple of days, and when it was returned to me, I found it full of pictures they'd taken of themselves with the express purpose of my showing these pictures to my friends in America who would surely see the pictures and immediately want to marry them. I tried to explain that that's not really how we get married in America, but they were so sure that this tactic would work that I said I'd give it a try. So here are my cousins who are hoping to get married next summer, and are therefore on the hunt for wives. Let me know if you're interested.

Wedding Season Again, and this time I'm Ready for it

2010-07-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Last year I spent who knows how many hundreds of boring hours in hot, stuff, cramped rooms full of women waiting to be served a meal that would almost certainly make me sick the next morning. This year I've decided that wedding season is too short to spend attending the boring parts of weddings, and this year I'm refusing to go anywhere near rooms full of women, and also refusing to eat dinners. The plan is to sleep until about 2 or 3 am, then go to the wedding, hopefully missing the boring parts and showing up just in time for the dancing. We'll see how that strategy works.

Some random wedding reflections I've had this second time around:
Weddings last all night, not because there's anything all that fun happening, just because they're for some reason supposed to. There are often several empty hours in the evening when it feels like people are just waiting for it to get late enough for the wedding to start. The day after a wedding, it's entirely acceptable for an entire village to sleep and lounge around doing nothing literally all day. Sometimes I think maybe just having the excuse to be lazy the next day is the real reason for holding an all-night wedding.
One of my new favorite wedding traditions, which I'd never witnessed until this past weekend, is the public mocking of all the groom's wedding presents to the bride and her family. A representative of the groom's family opens the suitcase full of clothes and gifts, and presents them one by one to the crowd, all the time saying how beautiful each one is, and how lucky the bride is to have such a generous husband. Meanwhile, the men of the bride's family ridicule every article of clothing and the audience dies laughing, except me, since I still don't really understand Moroccan humor.
If you're putting on a wedding, it is extremely important to fairly distribute the wedding cookies. The biggest faux pas in a wedding seems to be accidentally giving one of the guests more or fewer cookies than the other guests. At the wedding my family held for my host brother, we counted and recounted every little dessert plate of cookies to make absolutely sure that everyone received exactly nine cookies, one of each of the nine varieties. At a wedding in Rabat I helped at, the women spent hours the night before arguing about how to arrange the 30 varieties of cookies on trays for each table, so that every guest would eat not only the same number of cookies, but the same number of "fancy" cookies (ones made with almonds). At some point around 3am in the middle of the cookie arranging, I was like, "seriously, guys, are people actually going to get upset about the number of cookies they do or don't get?" The answer was yes.
After a wedding, no matter how nice or fancy or expensive or fun it was, everyone spends the next few days talking about how it was nothing compared to their wedding, or the wedding they just held for their son/daughter/sister/brother, etc. When I got back from this wedding in Rabat, which to this point was the nicest, fanciest and most expensive wedding I'd been to, everyone in the village saw the need to bring out pictures and videos from previous weddings, and to point out all the flaws of the Rabat wedding.
Weddings are supposedly the best place to meet a future husband/wife, and girls get really excited about the possibility of getting noticed by some guy at a wedding. And yet there is zero interaction between young men and young women at weddings. The women and girls sit on one side, and only dance with each other, and the men and boys hover around the edges and also only dance with each other.
I have a Moroccan "kaftan" that I wear to every wedding. When I wear this kaftan in the village, I'm among the best-dressed women there. I wore this same kaftan to the wedding in Rabat a few weeks ago, and felt like a big country bumpkin next to the super fancy, sparkly dresses the women were wearing. I found out later that most people when they go to a fancy wedding rent a really fancy dress just for the night, and they're only like $10-15 to rent. The bride also usually rents her outfits, and throughout the night will change clothes several times, but all the dresses are brought by the wedding planner and returned in the morning. Pretty good system, actually.

Cutest Pastime Ever

2010-07-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

Every spring, souk is full of baby chicks for sale. And everyone thinks the same thing: "this 6 dirham chick will grow up to be a 50 dirham chicken, let's buy a bunch". I decided to do a chicken-rearing experiment, and bought 50 chicks. Within the first two days, 41 of them had died inexplicably. Within the next week, another two got eaten by one of the neighborhood cats. I admit I've become a little obsessed with making sure nothing happens to the seven that remain. Which means several hours a day of babysitting chicks, protecting them from cats. Not as boring as it sounds, actually. My seven hang out with the 12 chicks that my neighbors are raising (all that remain from an initial 37) and each of the 19 has its own personality (one really likes to hunt ants, one really likes to go exploring in my house, one likes to sit in the corner by itself and stare at the wall, some sleep standing up and some sleep like ducks with their heads under their wings, one likes to stretch its legs a lot, a couple like to run sprints back and forth across the courtyard, and they all have their own best friends that they hang out with.)

My favorite little quirk: A few of them think they're turkeys, since one of our turkeys accidentally sat on some chicken eggs until they hatched; neither the turkey nor the chicks have noticed yet that they're not actually related.

What Might Have Been

2010-07-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

I went back to the states for two weeks with the express purpose of not thinking about couscous or associations for two whole weeks. My plans were foiled by an email that arrived the minute I arrived at my brother's house: Williams and Sonoma was in the market for a hand-rolled couscous to sell in their 260 stores across the states, and had found our association through a Google search on hand-rolled couscous. To make a long story short, we didn't end up getting the contract, but for about a week, all I could think about was how I could deliver 1000 pounds of couscous per month (about the same quantity that we made in all of 2009) to the US. Daunting, yes, but I think I could have pulled it off. This is how:

Williams and Sonoma would pay us about $2.50 per pound of couscous (more than double what we normally sell it for in Morocco), packaged and labeled to their standards and delivered to the port in Casablanca. They would then ship it to the states and to their stores, where it would sell for about $10 a pound. In order to crank out a thousand pounds a month, we'd set up at least two satellite rolling-centers, in two of the other villages (the Izzies and the Tabbies), and each group would make 300-400 pounds, or as much as they could. With a group of 4-5 women able to roll about 40 pounds of couscous in an afternoon, they'd have to work rolling 2-3 times a week, for 5-6 hours a day. I'd come gather the couscous weekly on a donkey, put it in huge sacs, and then when we'd finished the 1000 pounds, hire one of the sheep vans to drive it to Casablanca. A handful of my brothers and other guys from the village and I would go to this glass company that makes glass jars, go to the lid company to buy lids for those jars, then probably rent a hotel room and spend a couple of days jarring and weighing and sealing the jars, labeling them, then delivering them to a waiting container at the port headed for America. Since as a Peace Corps volunteer, I wouldn't be able to take any of that money for myself, here's the impact an extra influx of $1200 per month (after you subtract from the $2500 the price of ingredients, jars, labels and gasoline to transport them to Casablanca) would have on this tiny village:

15-20 currently unemployed women would have an income of 400-500 dirhams per month each (more than what my host family of 8 spends per month on food, or enough to pay the room and board and tuition to send two children to middle or high school).

My brother who currently sells dishes in souq would make as much in a weekend of transporting couscous to Casablanca as he makes in several weeks now

A handful of young men who currently do nothing but hang out on the street corner would have a week's worth of work per month

The association would still have some money left over to invest in community improvements or activities every month

And the giant "Couscous" sign we installed at the dirt road turnoff into the village wouldn't be quite so ironic

Vote for my Summer Camp Project

2010-06-05T02:21:00.001-07:00

This will only take a second, and might help me get $500 to hold a summer camp in my village this summer.

I applied for a grant from Kids to Kids, an organization that raises money for kid-related projects led by Peace Corps volunteers. The projects that get the most votes will be funded, so it would be great if you could take a second and go vote for my project.

www.kidstokids.org
click on "vote now". (you have to put in your email address, but you don't have to confirm subscription to the mailing list if you don't want to)

My project is called The First Ever Iztat Summer Camp. You can find it easily if you filter by country and only look at the Morocco projects.

Thanks! I'll let you know how it goes!

Presenting the 2010 Kookie and Izzie running teams

2010-05-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

Some volunteers in nearby Midelt decided to put together a race. Each little village could bring ten little kids to participate in the 1km run. I decided this would be a fun thing to make a big deal out of in my villages, so we started training in late March, and then in late April, a few days before the race, held qualifying races in each village to pick the official 10-person team. The qualifying races themselves became a village event; parents came out to watch and all the teenage boys served as referees or track markers or pacers.
Pictures from the qualifying races:

Painting jerseys for each team:

The Official 2010 teams:

Singing all the way home:

The Camels at Last!

2010-05-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

After more than a year of hearing about the camel herd on top of the plateau but never seeing them with my own eyes, I decided a few months ago to make it a point to go find these camels. I asked everyone I knew where they were, and the answer is always, "take this path, go over those hills and they're right there." Three times I set out in search of them, following those directions and trekking up and down hills and through canyons on my bike, finding nothing, and every time I'd come home unsuccessful, all the people of the village would tell me, "just take that path, go over those hills and they're right there." Then one day, one of my neighbors came running into the house and told me to get my bikes, we're going to the camels. And there they were.

Me milking one

Collecting camel urine (supposedly medicinal)

Playful baby camels

The Land of Rainbows

2010-05-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

Maybe one of the best things about Morocco is its incredibly high frequency of rainbows. They happen all the time, several times a week. Here are a few I've managed to capture on camera; for every rainbow I catch on film, there are dozens that go by unphotographed, but still very appreciated.

And Now I have Two Curly-Eared Friends

2010-05-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

My goat Chantel had her baby! Here are the first baby pics:

Her name is Dolce, because she looks exactly like the cute little girl from my favorite Mexican soap opera:

It doesn't get any more "Classic Peace Corps" than this

2010-05-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

A few days last month, the volunteers in the area and I decided to go into all the tiny primary schools in the area and talk to the kids about tooth-brushing and handwashing, and about not smoking. 7am on Wednesday, I left my village and biked three hours to the big dam/lake halfway between my village and Midelt, where the other volunteers were coming from. Though I'd done this bike trip before, I'd never actually reached the dam, which turns out to be one of the most impressive sights I've seen so far in Morocco, though oddly it's closed to the public.

We biked back three hours to my village, rested for a few minutes, then got back on our bikes to head out into one of the even smaller villages nearby, to a school of 20 kids, backpacks full of toothbrushes and toothpaste to distribute, feeling like we were those classic Peace Corps volunteers from the 70s, biking hours through the brush, dodging mean dogs and carrying our bikes over ditches and through swamps and sand to go help children in places with no roads and taxis. (We of course could have arrived at all of these schools in cars, on relatively nice dirt roads, but that wouldn't have been nearly as fun, would it?)

The resemblance is uncanny

2010-03-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

Chantel and her namesake, Chantel (Carla Peterson):

The official Kookie Cake recipe

2010-03-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

After three attempts at baking cakes that include couscous (the first one tasted great but was too sandy. The second was too bland and dry, the third a little too dense and didn't rise), we'd run out of time to experiment before the big women's day event in Fes. So what could I do but piece together what I'd learned from the three previous trials, throw in some new random ingredients just for fun, quadruple the recipe to fill a huge sheet cake pan, and cart it off to the public oven, positive that the fourth time was going to be the charm. And it was. I think it turned out shockingly good, considering how terrible I'd recently proven myself to be at recipe creation. Here's the recipe. I've named it the official Kookie cake because all of the interesting ingredients (couscous, olive oil, carrots, apples and almonds) are grown or produced in the village.
6 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups mild olive oil
4 cups flour
2 packages of baking powder (2 tsp maybe?)
3 packages of vanilla sugar (1.5 tsp vanilla extract maybe?)
a pinch or two of salt
2 large apples, peeled and grated
3 cups shredded carrots
1 cup dry El Karma hand-rolled couscous, boiled in water until it softens and loses its uncooked-flour smell (or steamed if you have time to kill)
3 cups almonds, crushed (sprinkle on top of batter before you bake it)

Cynthia Berning, Professional Olive Oil Taster

2010-03-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Another random addition to my list of newly-acquired skills, a bit unexpected considering that my first year in Morocco I could not even eat olive oil straight with bread because it had such a strong flavor. And then one day I started loving it. Last week in Fes, my friend Gail and I brought together all the different olive oils we could find to learn how to taste them. Tara, an actual professional, led us through the steps of looking at the color, smelling, feeling, and tasting the different oils. It felt so sophisticated, and the seven oils we tasted were all extremely different. We decided the oil I brought from our village's olives that had been ground on a stone (not electric) press had hints of apple flavor, and most definitely an award-winner. Now I have to find someone who can give that award.

Kicking off Biking Season

2010-03-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

I have long suspected that my site is the perfect place for long bike trips. But the Peace Corps issues just one bike per volunteer, and since my sitemate doesn't ever want to bike with me and bike trips alone aren't nearly as much fun as with someone else, I haven't taken advantage of the fantastic biking trails in the area. I finally acquired a small fleet of three peace corps issued mountain bikes, borrowing them from nearby volunteers who weren't using theirs, so I can finally take my brothers or friends or visiting volunteers on serious bike trips. The first one was a trip to a lake about 30 km away from the village. I knew generally where it was, and had checked out the google satellite maps to be sure that there was a road leading there, but we still managed to get lost several times and had to ask random sheep herders for directions. After three hours of relatively hard biking we arrived at maybe the most beautiful view I've discovered yet in Morocco.

Curly ears are always better than normal ears, right?

2010-03-10T08:32:00.001-08:00

So last week I bought a goat. My neighbors and I had been talking about getting a goat for awhile now, basically, I would make the initial investment, then sell the babies to get my money back, all the while milking it, making cheese maybe, and then leave it with the family when I left. Sounded like fun, since they agreed to take care of its food and everything, and who doesn't need a pet goat? I decided even if I didn't actually end up getting back my investment, just having a goat to milk, and goat babies following me around, and fresh goat cheese was worth the $120. Because the goal is mostly my own amusement, I of course bought the goat with the most ridiculous-looking curly ears. And then I named her Chantel, after the villain in Morocco's favorite Mexican soap opera, Frijolito. At first I was hesitant to name my goat after such a nasty character, but then I realized that getting a goat named after you isn't generally considered to be the best compliment. The village is pretty amused too.

When the cows come home

2010-03-10T08:29:00.001-08:00

I know I already used that cliché once already in my blog, but I can't think of any other cow-related clichés at the moment. All the cows from Izzie-ville get taken out to graze every morning together, and come back together every afternoon, a lot like kids going off to school for the day, and coming home to their houses at night. For a long time this was a mystery to me - how, in a herd of 140 identical-looking cows, could you ever find the ones that belong to you to bring them home every night? The answer is, the cows know where they live, and go straight home. All you have to do is open the barn door at the right time, and the right cows will march right in. And in the morning, you just have to open the door again, and they'll march out and assemble in the open space outside of town to get led out to pasture. Pretty impressive for such a big, stupid-looking animal.

This is some Quality Peanut Butter

2010-03-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

There are two brands of Peanut Butter in Morocco: Jesse's and Dakota. Jesse's is generally considered among Peace Corps volunteers to be the better of the two, and it's not hard to see why. This is the back label, word for word, of the Dakota Delights Crunchy Peanut Butter Jar:

Nutrition Information (values per 100g)
Energy 640kcal
Protein 641kcal
Fat 642kcal
Carbohydrate 643kcal
Sugar 644kcal
Sodium 645kcal
Phosphorus 646kcal
Iron 647kcal
Nicotinicacid 648kcal
Vitamine 649kcal
Cholesterol 650kcal

Ingredients: Roasted Peanuts, vegetables oil, sugar, salt
Produced by (Please insert your company name only)

Hilarious but a little scary. I think I'll stick with Jesse's Peanut Butter.

Caramel Apple Couscous Ball Truffles, Part II

2010-03-05T11:24:00.000-08:00

I trudged up to Fes a few days later, not excited about breaking the sad news that for all of our brilliant ideas, we were unable to come up with a single good recipe for couscous desserts that could be eaten with fingers. I met the woman who had commissioned the couscous truffles in a cafe, along with another of our Fes friends, a professional food writer and recipe-inventer, who was shaking her head before I finished telling her what we'd been trying to do, and immediately said, no, couscous will never roll into a ball. The answer, she said, was to think of what couscous will act like, not what it's made from. So we couldn't just substitute couscous for flour, even though essentially, couscous is 100% flour, but we could substitute couscous into recipes calling for polenta. A quick internet search gave us lots of recipes for polenta cakes and cookies. So the challenge was back on.
I whipped up a polenta lemon cake and a batch of Italian polenta cookies, both using our whole-wheat couscous, and took them off to the public oven in the Fes medina. The oven guy had a huge wood-fire oven full of cakes, cookies, breads and whatever else the people in the neighborhood needed to bake that afternoon. I hung out and chatted with him and watched him shuffle everything around using long-poled oars so that everything was perfectly and evenly baked. In an hour of watching I didn't see anything emerge even slightly burned. When the cookies were done, he shook his head at me and told me that the next time I wanted to bake some cookies, why didn't I just come and tell him what kind I wanted, and his wife would make them for me, because clearly I was not cut out for cookie baking. The verdict: better than the couscous truffles, but they felt a little bit like I'd accidentally mixed a handful of sand into the batter, crunchy, in a way that cakes and cookies are not supposed to be. And thus the list of couscous recipes for my book dropped back down to one.

Caramel Apple Couscous Ball Truffles, Part I

2010-03-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

Our association was invited to prepare snacks that would accompany afternoon tea at an afternoon event celebrating International Women's Day this weekend in Fes. The task: create sweet, small finger-food desserts using products from the association, as a way to provide us with some publicity and provide a novelty snack for attendees. One of the women in charge of the event and I began dreaming of truffles and pastries made from balls of couscous, and we were pretty sure we'd stumbled upon the idea of the century. What if we opened a bakery/patisserie where everything was made out of couscous? And this could be a whole chapter in the (yet-to-be-started) book I'm writing called 101 Couscous Recipes! Some of our fabulous, mouth-watering ideas included:
• Strawberry Jam and Dark Chocolate Couscous Balls
• Apple Cinnamon Raison Couscous Balls
• Reece's Peanut Butter Cup Couscous Balls
• Coconut Macaroon Couscous Balls
• Date, almond and honey Couscous Balls
• Caramel Apple Couscous Balls
• Snickers Couscous Balls
• Chocolate Orange Couscous Balls
• Boston Cream Couscous Balls
• Lemon Meringue Couscous Balls
• Carrot Cake Couscous Balls
• Chocolate Mint Couscous Balls
• Mojito Couscous Balls

So I bought a big bag of baking supplies, including a syringe to inject jam into the middle of these balls, and a friend who was visiting from the states, and my tutor and I spent a long rainy day trying to turn our brilliant ideas into reality. It didn't take long, however, for it to become clear that pastry chef was not my calling, and there was probably a reason why none of these had ever been created before. Couscous, quite simply, does not roll into balls. Refuses to roll into balls, even when combined with things that we thought should make it sticky, like honey, or melted chocolate. Every single combination we tried fell apart in a drippy, crumbly mess. We managed to trick the couscous into making a ball shape only twice: once, we found that if you boil, not steam the couscous, and leave it undercooked, it stays sticky enough to roll into balls that can then be dipped in chocolate. However, undercooked couscous has a pretty distinct, raw-flour taste that could not be covered up no matter how much jam we injected into the middle with the syringe. The second trick was to coat the inside of a tiny muffin paper with chocolate, stuff a tiny pinch of sweetened couscous into the middle, the pour more chocolate into the cup, encasing the couscous in chocolate and creating a kind of Reece's Miniatures. This method was not only a lot of work, but also left us with what was little more than cheap chocolate in a little cup, hardly a very exciting creation. At some point we gave up, dejected, cooked the remaining couscous with vegetables and spices the way it was intended, and resigned ourselves to thinking that maybe the book should be called "1 Recipe for Couscous" since that's how many recipes there seemed to be that actually worked.

School Bathroom Nightmare, Final Part (hopefully)

2010-03-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

Beginning the second toilet project did what we had hoped for the first project: provide some incentive to actually finish it. And sometime near the end of January, we declared the project finished, and began planning the toilet party.
To my disappointment, the toilet party included neither a toilet-shaped cake nor an inaugural use of the toilets by the director of the school. Instead, it was a long program of religious songs, performed by the girls in matching outfits, and a series of skits performed by the boys, including one about swine flu, one about hand-washing, and several other (very relevant) other skits about playing tricks on your neighbors. In all, a good time, and even though my toilet-cake idea was rejected, I still giggled to myself as I poured everyone lemonade, my private little joke with myself.

Could it be??? A neutral party???

2010-01-29T10:43:00.001-08:00

The day before yesterday I walked into one of the little village stores to buy some tea and sugar to take back to my neighbors, and the store owner gets to talking about the Kookie school bathroom project and how it's pretty embarrassing that it took more than five months to finish. I agreed, but said thanks be to God that it is done and the children can use it; that's the important thing. And he went on to talk about the differences between the Izzies and the Kookies, and brought in some drama that exists between the Izzies and the third little village, the Debbies, that I'd never heard before. I kept trying to figure out whose team he was on, so I could be sure not to offend him by saying something bad about his family or friends, and he said, "Whoever is honest and wants to work, I'm with them. I know people from all three villages and I try not to get involved in any politics between any of them." It was the most practical and objective conversation I think I've ever had in this place. He never said anyone was outright bad without giving up-to-date examples of the trouble he or she had stirred up, and I ended up staying for almost two hours with him in his little store, getting as much information as I could about who was fighting with whom and for what reasons, and the history of the politics and election-related drama, until the sun set and I realized that my neighbors were probably waiting for me to bring them the tea and sugar. When I climbed up to the spring the next day, I realized that that little store is exactly in the middle of the three villages, making it not only necessary that he remain neutral but also making him possibly the perfect person to be my informant.

Blank Line Item. . . 60,000 dh. Part III

2010-01-29T10:42:00.001-08:00

Since I can't seem to let this commune budget issue go, I thought I'd start with an easy test. The budget allots 6,000 dh for each of the nine associations in the commune. I asked the president of the association I've been working with if she got that money. She said no. I asked the president of the other association in town, he said no as well. But this started (of course) some more drama, when the association president went to the commune and asked for the money, all necessary paperwork in hand, and they said no, that's not possible - they have to request that money from the office in Midelt, and that office said no. Then of course the brother of the president pointed a finger at me and asked why I showed the budget to her when he told me it wasn't public information. With big innocent eyes I said, "I told her about the 6,000 because I thought maybe she just didn't know that there was money in the commune waiting for her. The commune wants to help associations, right? That's why that money's there." We'll see what happens, but I have a feeling they especially won't be happy when mysteriously all nine associations in the commune find out somehow that there's 6000 dh with their names on it in the commune budget from last year.

Mickey, Vicki and Nicky

2010-01-29T10:41:00.000-08:00

Lest we forget that Peace Corps life isn't all about deeply pondering my role in development, enter Mickey, Vicki and Nicky, three tiny black rabbits that my brother brought home the other day. My youngest brother and I came up with the names, but almost every day we forget which of the almost-identical rabbits with almost-identical names, is which.

Blank line item. . . 60,000 dh. Part II

2010-01-29T10:40:00.000-08:00

Once I had a copy of the budget, the question became what to do with this wealth of information. On the one hand, since I'm a guest in this community and the commune president could probably have me deported if he wanted to, maybe this is none of my business and I should stay as far away from any drama or accusations as possible. But on the other hand, if I could somehow encourage just a bit of transparency and accountability, the people of the commune would benefit from this budget for years to come. Even if my poking my nose into things motivates the commune into doing just one development project this year instead of pocketing that money, that one project could have a lot more impact on people's lives here than my little bathroom-building projects. Or am I naive and egotistical enough to think that I can change the behavior of rich politicians who live in their mansions in the cities and clearly don't care that everyone living in the commune already thinks they're stealing all the money? But maybe all it takes is for one person to refuse to accept a system of corruption and to encourage other people to refuse to continue to accept that system. If I too turn a blind eye, am I giving up on the possibility of a positive change in the system? Maybe it's my duty to stand up for people and demand transparency. After all, what can the commune really do to me? I have the luxury of American citizenship and a family and a life far away from the politics of this tiny little rural commune in the middle of nowhere. The commune can't refuse to sign property ownership papers for me or demand absurd taxes from me because I'm never going to buy a house or property here, will never need to send my children to the commune's public schools, and will certainly never ask for a job in the commune. People here are afraid to say anything bad about the commune because the commune holds a lot of power over their lives. But even though I know that in the grand scheme of things I have very little to lose, being kicked out of the country for involving myself too much in petty local politics doesn't sound like much fun, and maybe I'd rather go back to blissful ignorance, drinking tea and running with my dog and pretending like everything and everyone is great. And let the work of the commune remain the mystery maybe it's meant to be.

Blank line item. . . 60,000 dirhams. Part I

2010-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

The rural Commune. . . Morocco's system of local governance and the single biggest mystery of my Peace Corps service. What exactly do they do in that little office five miles away? Who's right, the villagers who say that the president and all the people who work there are thieves who just pocket the whole budget, or the rich landowner (brother of the president of the commune) who claims that everything is honest and the people just don't understand how hard and expensive it is to run a commune? Every time I'd try to pin down exactly what the commune does for its constituents, I get two answers. The people say, "the president eats all the money" and then chuckle to themselves because the president is in fact pretty fat. The rich landowners say, "the commune doesn't have any money in the first place, and the money they do have goes to pay the salaries of the 24 employees, about five of whom actually show up at work while the other 19 just come to pick up their paychecks." "Why do they still get paid if they don't do any work?" "Oh, Cynthia, you just don't understand this country or the people. It's illegal to fire a government employee because there aren't enough jobs in the country right now. Plus there are 11 villages in the commune, not all the money can go to ours."
So one day last month I took a little trip to the commune just to check things out. The building is practically empty; cold and bare and sparsely furnished with a few super old desks, stacks of hand-written files, a photocopier from the mid-eighties, and one super old computer back in a corner. I casually asked to see a copy of the budget.
"The budget? We don't have a copy of the budget here."
"What? How can you not have a copy of the budget? How do you know how much money to spend on things?"
"Nope, no budget here. We sent that to the provincial office in Khenifra. You have to go there to find it."
"Can I just look for one minute at the files on that computer. Maybe I can find something."
"Oh no, if you want to see the budget you have to file a request, and once the president approves it, you can see the budget."
"Okay, how do I file that request? Maybe since the president is your brother, you could just call him and ask."
"You really need to see the budget?"
"Yes. You're always telling me I don't understand the commune; I just want to understand. Plus, if you're doing anything shady, it's not going to appear in the budget. I'm not asking for your receipts, this isn't an audit."
So they printed me a copy of the 2008 and 2009 budgets. Here are my favorite parts for 2009, keeping in mind my earlier description of the building:
Decorations for commune office 7700 dh ($850)
Uniforms for maintenance staff 5500 dh ($650)
IT and new computers 11,000 dh ($1500)
Office supplies 38,500 dh ($4500)
Window glass 3300 dh ($400)
Paint 11,000 dh ($1500)
Weapons 2200 dh ($250)
Art 2600 dh ($300)
*blank line* 60,000 dh ($7500)

The rest is all pretty small and could potentially be true. Of an almost 4 million dirham budget ($500,000), half goes to salaries. That still leaves 2 million dirham a year that could (and in my opinion should) be used for development. $250,000 doesn't sound like a lot by American standards for sure, but it certainly could do a lot of good here in rural Morocco if it was put to honest use. As Peace Corps volunteers, we can apply for grants to do small projects, of about $2500-$3500, like the bathroom projects we're doing.
That's only 1-2% of what the commune has at its disposal every year to carry out projects.

Am I crazy to be doing this again? Part III

2010-01-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

The best part about working in Izzie-ville is that it's driving the Kookies crazy. Every single person in Kookie-ville knows that the Izzies are building bathrooms in their school, and every single day I get asked by at least half a dozen Kookies how far the Izzies have come, have they finished yet, and are they working well? I love being able to give daily updates on the progress, and confirm that yes, the Izzies are working extremely well. The day we brought three vans full of bricks and cement and rebar home, some thirty-five men and boys showed up to help unload. When we brought the same materials to the Kookie school in August, one man showed up from the Association, and my sitemate and I and a ten-year-old boy unloaded two tons of cement and some 700 bricks by ourselves. Every day that the Izzies work, tea and bread and pancakes appear from at least two or three women in the village, and there's really nothing I can do to help because there are already more people trying to volunteer their help than are really needed. Quite a difference from the Kookie experience, where I personally carried countless buckets of water from the well, unloaded tractors full of sand and rocks, mixed cement, painted, and ran whatever other errands weren't going to get run if I didn't do them.

Am I crazy to be doing this again? Part II

2010-01-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

Within a few hours of returning to the village after spending Christmas in Spain, I was summoned to the school to talk about the progress of the toilets in the Kookie village. Still not finished, of course, but the first foreman had been rehired so I was willing to call that a Christmas miracle in itself and be moderately happy that it looked like the project might soon be finished. The real Christmas miracle was when, as I was leaving the school, someone mentioned, oh, you should go down to the Izzie school, they started their bathroom project. "Wait, really? What? You're not kidding?" "No, really, they started while you were in Spain." "Impossible! I haven't even organized a meeting with them yet to talk about it." "Just go and look."
So I trekked down to the Izzie school, and sure enough, there was a freshly-dug well, clean and deep and full, the sanitation pit, and the foundation for where the bathrooms would be built. My appearance caused an impromptu assembly of all the men and teenage boys of the village, all eager to explain the floor plan, the depth of the well, how they carefully made sure the sanitation pit was far away from the well and downhill from it, and how the very day the director of the school called them together to explain the project they got out their shovels and started digging. They'd have had them built by now, they explained, but they were waiting for me to go with them to buy all the materials. They'd named a good foreman, split up into teams of three to four workers, and written up a list of all the materials they'd need. So we made plans to go into town early the next morning to buy everything. In front of the assembly, I made a short little speech declaring that I would not work with them if this project was going to be like the one in the Kookie school, that they needed to finish quickly and without any fighting, and that they needed to organize themselves because I was not going to come down every morning to make sure they were working and drag them out of their houses if they weren't.

Am I crazy to be doing this again? Part I

2010-01-29T10:34:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the beginning of August, about two days into the school bathroom project (when we were still working with foreman #1), my sitemate and I thought it would be fun to do this again, at the school in the enemy village down the road (the Izzies). So we asked for the money from Peace Corps, it arrived sometime in September, and we decided that as soon as the first bathrooms were built, we'd start the second ones. And then the months passed and the first bathrooms didn't look like they would ever be finished and the thought of starting this whole nightmare over again made me cringe, almost to the point of calling Peace Corps and giving back the money. But the director of the schools promised it'd be better this time around and that he'd make sure of it. So we signed a contract and made plans to start the project after the first of the year.

School Bathroom Nightmare, Part IV

2010-01-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

At some point I stopped being frustrated with this project, and started laughing at it, since taking five and a half months to build two toilets at a school is pretty comical. But it's done! Although I think I'd rather my name not be associated with this project at all, my one personal victory is that the original foreman that the director of the school and my sitemate and I hired way back in August (which, due to some still-unexplained politics, the association refused to allow to work,) was hired for the final touches - plumbing, electricity, and painting the toilets and the entire school a nauseating Pepto-Bismol pink. The association officers will never actually admit that had we kept this guy as foreman from the beginning, the toilets would have been finished according to the 15-day schedule, approximately 150 days ago. But we all know.

Why did this take Four Months?

2010-01-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

Finally, in the middle of December, almost four months after our big summer flood, the road got fixed. And by fixed I mean some trucks full of dirt came and filled in the canyon, making it passable to cars, at least until the next big rain.

Big Holiday Round 2

2009-11-30T12:46:00.000-08:00

Last year Eid Kabbir was new and exciting mostly because I’d never seen a whole sheep slaughtered and butchered and then eaten piece by unappetizing piece. I’ve seen enough things slaughtered and butchered this past year that the sheep business didn’t really faze me. This year was worlds better than last year simply because I chose to celebrate it with my neighbors (who have really become my family here) and their entire extended family, which is a hilarious and wonderful group of people. Last year I felt like I just got shuffled around from house to house, drinking tea and eating meat and feeling awkward the whole time, but this year I felt like part of the celebration. Feeling like a real part of a family makes holidays a lot more fun. My choice to celebrate with my neighbors instead of my original host family (much like my decision to break fast during Ramadan with my neighbors more often than with my host family) definitely was noticed and almost certainly caused some offense. But hey, my neighbors are much more fun.

No Butterball Turkey

2009-11-30T12:05:00.000-08:00

Ever since last Thanksgiving when someone in the village felt sorry for me and roasted some turkey kabobs so I could celebrate Thanksgiving, I’ve been planning a real Thanksgiving dinner for this year. This year Thanksgiving fell two days before the really big Muslim holiday (Eid Kabbir), on a day when everyone is supposed to fast to get ready for the big day. So I took the liberty of moving Thanksgiving up two days and celebrating on Tuesday.

My two lovely turkeys on their way home from the market

Turkey #1 hanging out on the kitchen counter waiting for the festivities to begin

Turkey #2 about to be plucked

Turkey #2 stuffed and squeezed into my neighbor’s butagas oven

My neighbors’ and friends’ first Thanksgiving

Overall, I had a great time and I thought my first ever solo attempt at turkey and stuffing and hot spiced apple cider and pumpkin pie turned out really well. After some discussion, however, my guests all decided that the turkey would have been better roasted on kabobs and the stuffing better if we’d used rice instead of bread. So the verdict still stands that it was cute of me to try, but I still need some serious cooking lessons before I can even think about ever finding someone to marry me.

One Year in and Still Naïve

2009-11-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

It’s now been 12 weeks since the road was destroyed and surprise surprise, it is still not fixed. Every week rumors spread around the village that this is the week it’ll be fixed and I get excited and believe them and then another week goes by and of course nothing changes – the sheep vans still have to take the “village bypass” road (just two tire tracks that run around the outside of the village through the tall grass of the open prairie). And everyone else still has to park at the top of the road and walk the mile and a half into the village. Comical, really, if it weren’t so frustrating.

Possibly the best Halloween pumpkin I’ve ever carved

2009-11-30T10:59:00.000-08:00

People thought this was hilarious though extremely strange:

More great publicity

2009-11-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

For those of you who can't make it out to Morocco to take part in our couscous-rolling workshops, this article is a good walk-through of the process.

http://viewfromfez.blogspot.com/2009/11/making-traditional-moroccan-couscous.html

Another example of Moroccan hospitality at its best

2009-11-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

Last week we had a great group of students come visit the village to make couscous and then do a one-night homestay with some families in the village. The weekend was intended to be a learning experience for the students - both about the art of couscous-rolling and about life in a super rural village - and we expected some discomfort on their part (how will we communicate? will we just sit and stare awkwardly at each other all evening? how do I flush a toilet without running water?). The girls took it all in stride, however, and it was the host families who were the confused ones - this was the first time any of them had ever been offered money in exchange for a bed - they all tried to give the money we offered them back, as it is second nature to let a guest spend the night and no one would ever think to ask them for money. Even when we explained that no, it's okay to take the money, this homestay program is one of the ways the Association is helping its members generate a little more income, they were still unsure what they should do. It was actually really refreshing to see, after so many times when I've felt like I'm being ripped off on everything just because I'm a foreigner. The host families saw these three relatively well-off girls not as rich foreigners but as tired travelers far away from home who needed a place to sleep and a hot meal.

You can read the students' summary of the weekend on their blog, here:

My own great uncle's son-in-law's niece

2009-11-12T14:29:00.000-08:00

After months of wondering, I finally found the missing link connecting my original host family (Cheikh and all his daughters) to my new adopted host family (my fantastic neighbors). Which means I have figured out how I (as daughter of my first family) am related to myself (as daughter of my second family).

My 2nd host father's brother's wife's father's sister's son is my 1st host father. Said another way, I am my great uncle's son in law's niece, or the reverse, my uncle's father in law's great niece.

I'm still working on drawing the family tree of the entire village - it's already pretty overwhelming - but it's fun to see how everyone fits into the picture.

Big Publicity in Fes

2009-11-12T14:26:00.000-08:00

Someone wrote this great article about us on the biggest expat blog in Morocco, A View from Fes. You can see the whole article (with pictures) at http://riadzany.blogspot.com/2009/11/moroccan-couscous-traditional-way.html

Monday, November 02, 2009
Moroccan couscous - the traditional way

Couscous, or seksu as it's know in Moroccan Arabic, is one of the staple foods of the Maghreb. It's made of ground semolina that's moistened and rolled in flour.

Moroccan couscous

These days we usually buy ready-cooked couscous in packets from the supermarket, but there are parts of Morocco where it is still hand-rolled by village women and the difference in taste is remarkable. This is the 'real thing'.

Cynthia Berning, a US Peace Corps volunteer, has been working with a women's association in the small mud village of Khoukhate, some 130km south of Fez in the Middle Atlas, with the aim
of bringing back an appreciation for the art - and taste - of hand-rolled couscous.

Cynthia Berning

"The majority of women and girls [in the village] are still illiterate and thus have few opportunities to contribute financially to providing for their families", explains Cynthia.
"Enter the Association ENNAHDA ('rebirth' in Arabic), an association with the goal of increasing the standard of living for all residents of Khoukhate through the creation of employment for the women of the village."

When the operation started two years ago, it was limited to couscous production. But the business has now grown to include jams made from locally-grown fruit - fig, apple, apricot, orange, carrot and watermelon, there's herb-infused olive oil, almond butter, and the Moroccan high-energy snack 'zmita'. All the products are marketed under the name 'El Karma', which is Moroccan Arabic for fig tree, and is also the name of the natural spring in the village.

Now the association has an eco-tourism project where groups of visitors are welcomed to Khoukhate to learn the secrets of a good Moroccan couscous, and at the same time experience traditional rural life. Visitors roll their own couscous from scratch with the local women, and then cook it and eat it for lunch.

Couscous preparation: step 1

Step 2: sifting the couscous

Couscous ready for sale

The association has teamed up with Fez Food and Cafe Clock and it's now possible to learn this traditional art in Fez - great for people who don't have the time to go out to the village. There are monthly couscous workshops at Cafe Clock, conducted in English, French and Darija. The three-hour session begins with fresh vegetables, wholewheat flour, and water brought from the village spring. It finishes with lunch, and could be the best couscous you've ever eaten.

The next workshop is at 11h30-14h30 on Friday 13 November at Cafe Clock. For details and to book, contact Fez Food. Fez Food also runs excursions to the village.

For a peek into Cynthia's adventures in this tiny village, visit her blog, Couscous Chronicles. Information on the women's association can be found here.

Road Rage

2009-10-23T16:24:00.002-07:00

Five weeks have now passed since our road was destroyed by that last flash flood – five weeks of having to walk half an hour to get in or out of the village, carrying everything on donkeys (including the new computer and nice printer we just bought for the association. I wish I’d taken a picture of the $500 printer on the back of a donkey and sent it to HP.) In those five weeks, people have not stopped talking, and fighting about what should be done. People from the next town down the road, the “Izzies” (who now have to walk an hour to get to the new improvised parking lot at the top) started using the private road that the rich landowners built for their own private access to their fields and mansion, the landowners got mad (after all, those Izzies are “bad people”) and blocked the road with one of their tractors so no one else could use the road. A band of Izzies broke the tractor in the middle of the night, and started ambushing the landowners’ nice shiny cars with rocks every time they tried to come or go. Then they went into town and filed a police report saying the rich landowners had chased them with his rifle, threatening to shoot them (this didn’t actually happen at all, though it’s a quite believable story considering what the landowner said a few months ago about taking that rifle and killing them all if it weren’t for the police.) There was a big police investigation, and every night the men would sit around and argue about what should be done, and whose responsibility it was to do it.
Finally this past week, money arrived from the government to divert the water and fix the road. The Izzies retracted their false police report and slaughtered a sheep in reconciliation. And rumor has it the road will be fixed (and paved!!!), starting this week! I can't even imagine what kinds of drama people will create once the building begins, but I'm sure it'll be fun!

An Honest-to-Goodness Farmer's Tan

2009-10-23T16:24:00.001-07:00

For the first time in my life, my farmer’s tan has come from actual farming. This summer I got into the habit of going to the fields to work with my host brother occasionally if I didn’t have anything to do, and since in all my former lives everything I’ve ever planted and tried to grow has promptly died, it’s exciting to see vegetables growing and being productive. In just the last few weeks, I’ve harvested carrots, green beans, white beans, tomatoes, and corn, planted barley and fava beans, washed, shucked and sorted all of those, and had a great time doing it. Next I think comes olives, then harvesting the new beans and barley, then pruning all the apple trees to get ready for next year. And pretty soon planting all over again. And maybe someday I’ll try gardening again on my own.

Just Kidding about the Cat

2009-10-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

I got back from Fes last week to find that our dog had literally eaten the kitten. From my neighbor’s description of his shredding the cat meat off the little bones, it sounds pretty gruesome.

Newest Member of the Family

2009-10-01T03:18:00.000-07:00

Last week this little thing wandered into my house and into my life:

Road Turned River

2009-10-01T02:58:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago, a storm came through and flooded a bunch of places in Morocco, including, of course, my village. This time, though, the flash flood that came through was worse than anyone had ever seen it, and took down stone walls and parts of people’s houses, and after three days of raging through town, the river had carved a canyon in the middle of the road.

I feel a little bad for complaining for the past year about how bad our road was, when now I would give anything to have our bad, bumpy, rocky road back. Now the village is completely inaccessible to cars, trucks, sheep vans – the only way in and out is by foot or by donkey. Yesterday morning I was coming to Fes for an exposition and had to bring a suitcase full of couscous to sell. I woke my neighbor’s ten year old son up at 5am and we loaded the 88 pound suitcase onto the back of his donkey to make the long, slow half-hour trek in the dark, up to where all the vans now have to stop. Twice, he and the suitcase fell off the donkey into mud puddles and had to be remounted. When I installed running water a few weeks ago, I joked that running water might change my status from a “Peace Corps” volunteer (volunteers who live in the “bled” with no amenities) to “Posh Corps” volunteer (volunteers who live in cities and have internet and hot showers in their houses). But I think my donkey trek out yesterday morning proves I belong in the Peace Corps category.

Ramadan Reflections, Part IV

2009-10-01T02:57:00.000-07:00

So Ramadan is over. And truth be told, I kind of miss it. I miss the structured days, with everything based around breaking fast, and I miss not having to worry about cooking or meal times because my neighbors just took care of me and I ate whenever they did. When Ramadan began, I told myself I just had to fast this year, and then maybe not ever again, but now I think I’ll definitely fast next year, and any year I happen to be in a Muslim country. Everyone I know who didn’t fast hated Ramadan, with the weird schedules and the being woken up in the middle of the night by the guys who walk around banging drums to wake people up so they can eat before dawn, and they hated that all anyone wanted to talk to them about was whether or not they were fasting. The volunteers who did fast seem to really have enjoyed Ramadan. It’s pretty cool, the day after Ramadan ended I felt the same way I felt the day after I ran my first marathon – really proud that I’d completed something that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do, and actually enjoyed myself while doing it. I really did get used to it – by the end of the month I was back up to my normal running distance and pace, even after 13 hours without food or water, I wasn’t getting headaches at all, and one day I took an 8-mile hike in the middle of the day and was fine. It’s pretty amazing, actually. Before Ramadan, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed for the whole month I’d be so tired and hungry, but it really wasn’t that hard.

School Bathroom Nightmare, Part III

2009-09-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

Twenty days into Ramadan (a full month after the estimated completion date), and the bathrooms still aren't finished. The foreman only shows up to work every few days, and then got most of the measurements wrong ("if you didn't want me to add anything onto the plan you drew, you should have told me not to add anything."), meaning we had to buy more bricks, cement and steel. Then he forgot to leave a space for the windows. I've passed the point of frustration and now everything that goes wrong just makes me laugh. Though I do want to somehow (without creating any enemies) make sure that the association realizes that if we'd gone with the original foreman, the bathrooms would have been completed a month ago, to the exact measurements we wanted, under budget, with windows. School starts in six days, and there's still a classroom full of cement, random wood pieces and a duct tape, to-scale drawing of the plan on the floor.

School Bathroom Nightmare, Part II

2009-09-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

Once the 550 bricks, 200 kilos of cement, 175 kilos of steel and everything else we needed were safely in one of the classrooms, the drama began. The association president was upset that we didn't take anyone with us from the association when we bought the stuff. The vice president of the association was upset at our choice of a foreman, other random men showed up who hadn't been at our previous meetings demanding to know why they weren't picked to be the foreman, and everyone was upset that we'd agreed to a daily wage rate that was $3.50 higher than the current going rate for a foreman. We debated for hours, Jed and I saying that we'd been clear from the beginning that we needed a foreman, that if people didn't come to the meetings when they were invited, they can't complain about not being selected as foreman. The association members (for some reason I'm sure I still don't fully understand) were adamant that we not use the foreman we chose. The president claimed that the toilets were so simple to build that we didn't need a foreman, so everyone would work for free. We agreed to this, skeptical but tired of fighting. After two days, they changed their minds and decided they needed a foreman, but couldn't agree on whom, only that it not be the one we'd hired. The guy we hired gave up on us and went back to Midelt to find real work, and the association decided on three different foreman - one would be in charge of the foundation, one the building, and one the roof. This worked until the wall guy decided he had better things to do and quit. Then the association hired a guy I'd never even seen before to be the foreman for the whole rest of the project. Jed and I just wanted to see the thing built, and Ramadan was only a couple of days away, so we agreed.

School Bathroom Nightmare, Part I

2009-09-11T12:46:00.001-07:00

Since my first week in the village, the school director has been talking about the urgent need for toilets for the school. The government I guess is in the habit of building classrooms in villages, but not building bathrooms, so the students have to either hold it all day or use the fields around the back of the school. School bathroom building is a pretty common peace corps project in Morocco, and my site mate Jed is a health sector volunteer who was interested in taking this on, so everything seemed pretty straight forward. We held a series of meeting with the parents starting in April, telling them we would supply all the materials if they agreed to each contribute one day of labor for free. We asked around and found a guy who knew how to build stuff and hired him as our foreman. Jed filed all the paperwork, we involved the association, and received the money from USAID in June. Once we had the money, we arranged with the foreman a day at the beginning of July to go together to Midelt and buy everything we needed and bring it back to the village in one trip. Everything was going great and we had plenty of time to finish building these simple bathrooms before Ramadan started. I was busy getting excited about the blog post I was going to write when it was all finished ("my most concrete project yet").

One year in, and still loving it

2009-09-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

So I've been in Morocco a year now. Good time for reflection, I think, and a mass email to make sure you all haven't forgotten about me.
Favorite moments in the past year of service:
1.Evening exercise sessions with my host sisters - turning up loud techno music and dancing our hearts out until we're pouring sweat and can't dance anymore, we're laughing so hard
2.The day we started construction on the school toilets, knocking down the old ones, collecting the rocks and pieces of wood, and being excited that it was finally underway
3.Riding my mountain bike down the dirt road into the village - all downhill and fast and absolutely gorgeous
4.Sunset runs out between the plateaus with my dog. Even after almost a year of daily runs, I'm still blown away by how pretty it is every single afternoon. Sunrise is pretty too, but I'm not very good at getting up for that
5.Hanging out with my host brothers when they sell kitchen ware at souq - taking over for them when they go off to run errands, and pretending like there's nothing strange about an American selling tea glasses, cheap plastic Tupperware and silverware in a random rural market in Morocco
6.Long underwear dance parties in winter whenever volunteers get together - turning out the lights and setting our headlamps to "strobe" while we dance to last year's now-out-of-date pop music.
7.Daily afternoon soccer games with the boys, especially when my host brothers come out to play and I get really competitive
8.Watching my neighbors/landlords/family slowly climb the social ladder with every month's rent I pay them, and knowing there's not another family in the world that I would rather see succeed
9.Harvesting barley, weeding the tomato fields, pulling up carrots, or doing whatever random agricultural work there is that day with my host brother, even if it's hard and tedious and gives me horrendous blisters
10.The day a friend and I set out on foot to find a path to this lake that, according to Google Maps, was right over the mountains and through the forest from the village. Drinking tea in a nomad tent, then thinking we'd lost ourselves in the middle of the mountains and then seeing the blue of the lake after six hours of hiking. When we were tired and hungry, being invited to eat lunch at the lake with a fantastic family who then offered us a ride home and invited us to a wedding that weekend, and whom I still track down at their stand whenever I'm in souq, just to say hello.

So those are the great parts of Peace Corps life. Needless to say, this line of work has its frustrations too. A year in, and our couscous business has yet to find a major client, or really anyone who can be counted on to buy more than a couple of kilos a month (I thought for sure we'd be selling in every major supermarket by now). All my hundreds of hours of grant-writing have resulted in less than a thousand dollars of grant money (I thought we'd have a brand new couscous-making facility, and goats and rabbits and a cheese operation by now). And as good as my Arabic is compared to the majority of volunteers here, there are still countless interactions a day where I simply fail to understand or to make myself understood. And the speed at which this past year has gone by makes me afraid that the remaining fifteen months won't be enough to accomplish everything I think I should be able to accomplish.

Ways you can help me, if you're interested:
1.Put me in contact with anyone you know in Morocco, especially if they own/work in a hotel or restaurant or supermarket or travel agency
2.Mail me as many broccoli seeds as you can find, literally. No one here grows any winter vegetables so I want to get some of the farmers to experiment with broccoli, not to mention I miss broccoli more than probably any other food.
3.If you know anyone who's planning a vacation to Morocco, suggest that they take a few hours and stop by the village to make couscous with us - it really is still the best couscous I've ever eaten, and people seem to really enjoy our cooking classes
4.Send me any suggestions you have for anything, really: i.e. grant opportunities, online travel forums I should post to, ideas for other money-making projects or places to sell our couscous.

"You know I have an association. . . "

2009-09-11T12:42:00.001-07:00

One thing I find very amusing here is the sheer number of associations there are. Everyone and their mother seems to have their own association, from the taxi driver that drives from Zaida to the village, to the guy I buy vegetables from, to the guys who run the cyber cafÈ. I rarely go one day out of the village without at least one person telling me about their association and asking for my help. It's great, I guess, that this seems to be one area of the government devoid of any and all red tape - one man in the village was talking to me on a Friday about how he was thinking about starting his own association, and the next time I saw him, Monday afternoon, he said he'd started it and filed all the papers and was ready to go. And it's great that people feel like they have the potential to help their communities. But the number of associations that get created and then do absolutely nothing is astounding. Which is why I laughed out loud when the rich land owner told me the other day that he was going to start his own association. "To do what?" I asked. "Everything." "Everything like what? You can't have an association that does everything." "You know, stuff to help the village, like a road and a hospital and whatever it needs." People seem to think that there's just all this money floating around that associations are entitled to the minute they file their paperwork. There is money out there, for sure, but I'm finding that it's really really hard to get.

One Mystery Solved

2009-09-11T12:41:00.001-07:00

I've figured out what all the men and teenage boys do between breaking fast and midnight dinner - this was a big mystery to me the first week of Ramadan, when they'd all disappear to the mosque to pray the evening prayer and then not reappear until midnight or one o'clock. In the absence of coffee shops or cafes or any real place to hang out, the teenage boys all hang out outside one of the village's little hanuts (corner stores), I presume the one that sells cigarettes. The men at the same time drink coffee on the patio of the rich land owner's house and talk business and whatever's going on in the village. I stumbled into this the day I got invited there to break fast, and have wandered up there a few times since just to sit and listen. I'm probably the only woman who's ever attended these informal meetings, and I'm not sure if it's inappropriate for me to be there with all the men, but it's fascinating. Yesterday the topic was a truck load of something (I never figured out what) that somehow on its route from the village to Rabat "lost" sixty crates full of whatever it was transporting, worth several hundred dollars. And no one knows who stole it. I'd never really thought about the village as a place of business - to me it's just this happy place where everyone's nice to me and we eat and play soccer and celebrate holidays and drink tea. It also made me really wish my Arabic was better - I understood most of what was being discussed, but I could never participate in conversations like that - the few times one of them turned to me to make sure I was following I just felt like the dumb little kid that you have to speak to in small words. I have the feeling that when it's not Ramadan, these evenings include beer instead of coffee, which means I should probably not attend them. Unfortunate, really, since it's so much more interesting than sitting at home alone or watching TV with the women, and it gives great insight into village politics and social relationships and all kinds of things I still don't know about this place, even after almost a year.

Ramadan Reflections Part III

2009-09-11T12:40:00.001-07:00

So Ramadan is now more than half over. People are definitely getting used to it - the first few days when sunset was approaching, everyone would gather around the table, staring at the food, waiting to hear the call to prayer and then dive in immediately. Now it's a lot less important to be there right at the right moment - the call to prayer almost seems to catch people off guard, as they're still preparing food, or bringing in the cows, and what's another minute or two if you've been fasting all day? I've noticed I'm eating a lot more now than at the beginning of the month - I guess at first it felt all wrong to be eating in the middle of the night, and I think my stomach would shrink during the day so I wouldn't be able to eat much at break-fast. But my body's gotten used to the reversed schedule and I'm eating normal amounts of food again, just at abnormal hours. I've stopped eating anything at 4am, just drinking water, since it's never really hunger that's bothersome, it's thirst.

Running Water comes to ____ (This is where I would write my address if I had one)

2009-09-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

I've never really minded pulling my water up out of the well (I think the novelty still hasn't worn off, and it makes me feel like a real Peace Corps volunteer). But my neighbors who share my well use way more water than I do, as they actually wash their floors and do their laundry and cook and clean a lot more often than I do. So when I realized that I could buy a pump for the well and set up running water for both of our houses for only about $150, I decided that would be a nice thing to do for the family that has all but adopted me the past seven months since I moved in next door to them. So finally after about a dozen trips to Zaida to pick up the pump, then exchange it for a different one, then buy more tubing, then pick up this or that part that we'd forgotten, I have two working faucets in my house - one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. Living in luxury now.

Ramadan Reflections: Part II

2009-08-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

Five days into the month, I’ve settled into a pretty nice routine:
12pm wake up, lie around until I’m too bored to stay in bed longer
2pm do some work for the association – work on grant proposals or brainstorm for new projects or meet with the president
5:30pm go for a slow, easy 5-mile jog
6:30pm get home, shower, wander over to whoever’s house I’ve been invited to break fast at
7pm (or whenever the sunset call to prayer is heard) break fast with dates, tea, bread and soup, and try not to be annoyed when everyone tells me I am drinking too much water and should eat more instead
8pm hang out there or go home and do some more work
12am eat a small dinner, usually wherever I’ve broken fast
1am say I’m going to sleep but really just go home and work some more or read, trying to stay up as late as possible so I can sleep longer during the day (I usually only make it until about 2 before I fall asleep)
4am wake up to chug a Nalgene and eat a bowl of cereal and brush my teeth before the morning call to prayer, at which point fasting begins again and I go back to sleep

So by the time I wake up, there’s only six or seven hours before I can eat, which isn’t bad at all, considering I just lounge around my house the whole time, distracting myself from hunger and thirst. People seem really impressed that I still run every day, but I have it much easier than most – my host father still has to drive his van around all day while fasting, my neighbors still have to weed and water the tomato fields all afternoon while fasting, and all the women still clean and bake bread and do laundry and then prepare breakfast and dinner while fasting. I’ve spent one day so far awake and active (went into town to get my computer fixed and used the internet), and by the middle of the afternoon I was exhausted and miserable and had a horrible headache. But time passed and I survived another day of fasting. I think it’s going to be a very slow (but also incredibly productive, hopefully) month.

Ramadan Reflections: Part I

2009-08-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

The month of Ramadan, when everyone fasts during the day, began last weekend. I’ve been partly dreading the start of the month, knowing that fasting is something I really should do but will probably be pretty unpleasant. I fasted a couple of days last year, and it really did make “iftor” (breakfast) with people a lot more satisfying, plus I know I could use some work developing patience. The other part of me, after several weeks of travel and weddings and overall stress, was looking forward to just sitting in my house and relaxing for a whole month, taking care of some grant-writing and other work that wouldn’t require me to get dressed or leave my bed. I still think maybe a whole month is a bit excessive, but I do like the idea behind fasting – that for one month, everyone is equal – the poor and the rich are eating exactly the same food and even the king knows what it’s like to be hungry. Outside of the Arab world, I doubt very many kings or other heads of state have ever once really felt hunger. Another thing I really like about Ramadan is that it would be so easy to cheat without anyone knowing, and yet everyone holds themselves to this high standard. Fasting during Ramadan seems to be the one part of Islam that absolutely everyone takes extremely seriously. I know a lot of people who drink alcohol regularly (forbidden in Islam) and a lot of people who rarely pray (5 times a day is required), but I don’t know a single person who doesn’t fast. It seems like for a lot of people, being good for a month during Ramadan – not drinking or going out with girls, actually praying when you’re supposed to – covers you for the next eleven months of doing whatever you want to. Not a bad deal, I guess.

New Housemates

2009-08-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite random things about summer is that all of a sudden there are thousands of frogs everywhere. Two particular ones decided they really liked hanging out in my house, and after a few weeks of catching them and throwing them back outside day after day, I finally gave up and just let them stay. It adds some excitement to going to the bathroom, as I never know where they’ll happen to be hanging out, and seeing how much they love splashing around in the permanent puddle that is my bathroom floor, they give me an excuse to not squeegee or mop the floor as much as I probably should. A win-win situation for everyone.

Windows XP Sweet!

2009-08-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

So my computer crashed last week and I had to reformat the harddrive. I took it to a guy in Midelt who said he could reinstall Windows. Has anyone ever heard of Windows XP “Sweet”? It sounds not exactly legitimate, but it seems to work so far like Windows XP, except that everything on my computer is in French now.

Going to Weddings like it's my Job: Part II

2009-08-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

A recounting of all the weddings I’ve gone to this season:

1. Ifrane: Wedding season got off to a great start with this unexpected and super fun wedding. My friend Kristen and I showed up in her training village hoping to interview her host family for a movie we’re making, only to find that half of the village was missing, gone to a wedding in Ifrane. So of course, because we had to get these interviews in, we went too. After the sheep-and-gift parade around the streets, we spent the whole evening and night dancing and eating the best Moroccan food I’ve had so far (excepting my association’s couscous, of course).

2. “Tabbie” village: I found out about this wedding around 5pm the day of, when my neighbors told me I should come along with them later, even though I didn’t know the couple or really anyone in that village. “Not a problem,” they said, “we’re just going to watch.” So I went over to my neighbors’ house, dressed and ready to go at 10pm, then we ate dinner and all fell asleep until 1am until someone received word that things were getting going. Nothing super exciting happened, since I guess if you’re not invited to the wedding it’s okay to sit and watch, but not to actually dance. Came home around 4am.

3. “Tabbie” village again: This one I should have seen coming and run for my life in the opposite direction. It was the women-only part of the wedding, and I’d been told we’d go and eat lunch, so I was pretty hungry from the beginning. Then we sat with about 60 women in a little, extremely hot room. The five minutes I got up and danced with my neighbor did not justify the four hours of my life I spent in that room, dripping sweat and waiting for the sun to set so it would all be over. I swore I’d never go to another women-only wedding “lunch” again.

4. “Debbie” village: I had a group of other Peace Corps Volunteers visiting me one weekend, and we all got invited to a wedding of yet another person I didn’t know. But I knew the family a little, and everyone I knew was going, and I got about fifteen separate pleading invitations to go, so I figured I should stop by. I thought I’d be clever, though, and use the new trick I’d learned the week before – if you wait until the middle of the night to show up, you don’t have to sit in the super hot room waiting for a dinner you don’t really want to eat. So four of us walked out around 1:30am, sure we’d missed dinner and could just join in the music and dancing. But our plan was foiled, as dinner wasn’t served until about 2:30am and we were forced to eat it. The worst part was the two guy volunteers (who didn’t know a single person in town) had to eat with the men while Kristen and I ate with the women in a completely different house. The men always get served first at weddings, so they finished eating around 2am and then had to wait around an hour outside waiting for the women to finish. By then everyone was exhausted and they all had to leave on the 6am sheep van, so we danced for a few minutes and walked home to catch an hour or two of sleep.

5. Some village I can never remember the name of: I’d been told this wedding was for someone in my neighbors’ family and that we’d go for the whole day to help them prepare, so I waited in my house all day, ready to go, until around 5 when we finally left. The village is an hour away by foot, and turned out to be not too fun at all, since I didn’t know anyone except my neighbors, and most of the festivities centered around the “haydous” (men in a line beating drums and chanting things I don’t understand, for hours). I discovered, though, that every wedding has a couple of sleeping rooms, where people can go to nap if they get tired. Mostly it’s children and old people, but I snuck in a few hours of sleep and woke up again around 4:30 am to catch the end of the wedding. No one seemed to notice and the haydous was still going on, so I don’t think I missed anything. The party broke up as soon as it began to get light out, and we made the long trek home at sunrise. I don’t think I’ll ever get over how beautiful my village is at sunrise, with all the plateaus and random people on donkeys. That walk home (after which I collapsed and didn’t wake up until the middle of the afternoon) made the whole long boring wedding worth it. Turns out everyone went back the next day too for either another wedding in the same place, or just another day of the same wedding. I hear it was way more fun, but I needed a day off from weddings.

6. My village, finally: Ever since I arrived here in November, my host family has been talking about their neighbors’ (and cousins’) plans for a huge wedding this summer. Originally it was supposed to be a joint wedding for a brother and sister, but the sister decided at the last minute a couple of weeks ago that she didn’t want to get married after all, so it was just a big wedding for her brother. I went the women-only lunch reluctantly, remembering how miserable the last one I went to had been, but I guess I was at the fun table this time, because it turned out to be a blast, and I couldn’t believe that when most people got up to leave, I didn’t run for the door, but rather stayed and danced more and hung out until we got kicked out of the room at sunset.

7. My village again: The wedding itself was two days later, and I decided this time there was no way I was getting caught in a room full of women waiting to be served dinner. So I showed up in the middle of the afternoon with an apron on, and planted myself in the garage (converted into kitchen for all the food preparation) and refused to leave. Plucked and cleaned and seasoned and cooked 32 chickens, guarded all the food against flies for a couple of hours, piled into a sheep van with the whole family to go to the town 10km away to bring the bride, and when the wedding finally started, ran dishes back and forth to the various rooms, washed tray after tray of tea glasses, and reported back to the garage every few minutes the eating status of all the different rooms. The work finally ended around 1am and the dancing began. I decided since this was probably the last big wedding of the season, and certainly the one where I knew the most people, I wasn’t going to waste it sitting and watching with all the women who were too shy to get up and dance. So I hung out in the back with the group of guys my age that I play soccer with; I still don’t know whether that was really inappropriate. But it was really fun. At dawn my neighbor and I went back to the house, changed out of our wedding clothes and headed out to the tomato fields, fully intending to put in a good morning’s work weeding. It only took about an hour to realize we were pretty useless having had no sleep, and gave up until afternoon.

8. Reprise: Bzou: I stopped by a good friend’s site on my way to Marrakech and discovered that the evening agenda included a big wedding at her host family’s neighbor’s house. I was pretty sad that wedding season was coming to an end so I happily donned a borrowed sparkly pink dress, learned the wedding chant that I’ve been meaning to learn for almost a year now but never had - “slah slem la rasu llah. Ila jayna ja sidna Mohammed, allah ma ja la-ali” (and then a lot of ululating). We left early, around 2 or 2:30, which I felt a little bad about considering I was pretty sure that this time it was the end of wedding season, but the previous month of wedding-related poor sleeping habits had taken its toll. All in all, a pretty good wedding season. I hear that there’s another month of wedding season after Ramadan ends; I think we all need this month-long break.

Going to Weddings like it's my Job: Part I

2009-08-17T06:32:00.000-07:00

I guess it kind of is part of my job, but I think I can reasonably say that I’ve spent way more time at weddings in the past couple of weeks than I have doing any kind of association-related work. Ramadan is fast approaching, meaning everyone and their mother has to get married right now. If there’s one thing all these weddings have shown me about Moroccan culture it’s the seemingly endless attention span of Moroccans while doing extremely dull, repetitive activities. The main activity at any wedding, baby party or other celebration is several hours (no joke) of call-and-response chanting, each chant accompanied by exactly the same rhythm on these sheep-skin drums. They never seem to get tired of this, and even if I did understand what they were chanting about, I doubt the words are interesting enough to justify several hours of this (in my opinion.). This is also usually done with some 50 women crammed into a room with no furniture, sitting on the floor against the walls and against each other, suffering in very uncomfortable heat. For about five minutes of this, women will get up and dance, which I admit is fun to watch and take part in, but the rest is pretty miserable.

The wedding I went to last night included another version of this same call-and-response chanting, this time with men all in a line, called a “hay-dous”. This is a traditionally Berber wedding ritual, and they stood there in this line, shoulder to shoulder, bouncing up and down a little, for probably seven or eight hours in total during the wedding. The wedding guests joined them at one point, with everyone in this big circle, swaying back and forth and repeating the same chants over and over again for about two hours. It was fun for me for the first maybe ten minutes, then it just got old. But the rest of the guests couldn’t get enough and every time I was sure they’d run out of lines to chant and we could all sit down, someone else would come up with one and they’d keep at it. It almost seems like weddings are supposed to last until dawn (maybe so everyone can then walk home safely in daylight?) and they just have to fill the time, no matter how boring it is or how much everyone wants to throw in the towel and go home. Or maybe they really do all love it. Especially for the women, it must be an excuse to get out of the house and hang out with their friends so they try to stay as long as humanly possible. Every time I go to one, people ask me how Moroccan weddings are different from American weddings, and each time I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying “ours aren’t nearly as long and boring.” And even though I cringe every time someone suggests that I have a Moroccan wedding, I smile and say “inchallah. . .”

The Cows Came Home

2009-07-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

So the first week I moved to the village, in November, the Association was really excited about the herd of cows they were about to get. I got all excited about an ice cream project and a cheese project and all the yogurt I was going to make. And then every week for the next seven months the president of the Association told me that we were really close to getting the cows, just one more piece of paper work that had to be submitted in Khenifra, or Midelt or Meknes or Itzer. Well, after about 30 weeks of waiting, the cows finally came home last week. I wasn’t there to see this production, so it all feels a little anti-climactic to me, especially since it turns out we got the kind that don’t even produce that much milk. The one funny thing that happened though is that two of the baby cows (they brought home 16 cows that each had a baby) got switched as the truck was being unloaded, and the two people whose cows suddenly refused to nurse the babies had to find each other and switch them back.

Update on the Kookie/Izzie feud

2009-07-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

I found out some more of the history behind what still seems to me to be the silliest feud I’ve ever heard of. It turns out pretty much the entire area, for miles on all sides of the village, was the property of this rich Arab guy a really long time ago, who was descended from some important saint in Fes. He settled the area and brought all of his slaves with him. So basically everyone in the village is descended from either that guy’s family (his descendents have the huge house and include the president of the Commune), or his slaves. And all of the land legally belongs to this family, with the rest of the town basically squatting on it. The people of my village get along well with the rich family, know that they’re all descended from slaves, and continue to all work for the rich family. I used to think everyone had their own plots of land that they farmed, but I’m realizing that really they’re all just working for the rich family and only have really small plots themselves. So the Kookies have come to terms with this arrangement, which feels a lot like serfdom to me. The rich family employs most of the men, and everyone more or less gets along.

The Izzies are another story. Their village is on land that belongs to our rich land owner as well, and they’re all squatting too. However that village was settled by a group of Portuguese people a long time ago, and in the beginning the rich land owners didn’t mind since they had so much land anyways. But then the village grew and grew, until now the Izzies outnumber the Kookies almost 2 to 1. And as the village grew, they became more and more insolent and uncooperative, for example addressing the current rich land owners by their first names, instead of showing them the required respect of calling them by their full names. And not immediately pulling their sheep vans over off the road when the landowners want to pass in their big fancy cars. And I guess they don’t show the proper gratitude to the landowners for widening the road all the way down to their village so that sheep vans could drive on it, when before it was just a narrow donkey path. The most interesting – and horribly disturbing - quote I’ve heard on this topic (from one of the current rich landowners) “If there were no police, we’d march down there and kill them all.” There are times when I feel like I’m very well integrated and understand this culture and know these people really well, and then someone talks seriously of wanting to massacre an entire village of people.

This is the second highest mountain in Africa, really?

2009-07-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

A group of us climbed Jbel Toubkal a couple of weeks ago, the highest mountain in North Africa, and second only to Kilamanjaro in Africa. It was surprisingly (and a little disappointingly) easy for being so high, and felt more like an uphill walk than a serious mountain climb. We just set off from Marrakech in our sneakers and whatever clothes we had with us, and walked up almost to the top, slept in the lodge close to the top, got up early, reached the summit, and walked back down and went back to Marrakech.

As easy as the actual hike was, we were not at all prepared for how FREEZING cold it would be at the top. Even in the middle of June there was almost a foot of snow on the ground for the last hour or so of the climb, and the wind was vicious. I survived a pretty cold and miserable winter in the Middle Atlas this past year, but that was nothing compared to how ridiculously cold the top of this mountain was. My fingers hurt now just thinking about it.

Inauguration Day Dance Party!

2009-06-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day that the newly-elected presidents of all the communes took office. Our commune has had the same president for the last 12 years, and he was re-elected again this year for a third 6-year term. I don’t particularly like the guy, and I’m not sure anyone is especially impressed with his work for our commune (still no paved road, running water, or working street lights), but the whole village came out for the dance party in the street that went on (with a few breaks for tea and meals and an afternoon nap) from 8am yesterday to about 4am this morning. It was hilariously fun, especially since I’m getting pretty good at the Moroccan butt-shaking dancing thing. I hear the real party though, is Saturday night, when we’ll get to do it all over again. The first three big parties I went to in Morocco, during training and then right at the beginning of my time in the village, were horribly boring and I’ve been dreading wedding season ever since. But then I went to a wedding last week which was one of the most fun days of my time in Morocco yet – we paraded a sheep around the streets, stopping traffic, with the men blowing these super long skinny horns and carrying wedding gifts on their heads. And then we danced and ate amazing food all night. And now I can’t wait for the next one, or really just any and all random excuses to dance in the streets.

The other thing that made last night so surreal was that we had a big rainstorm (which I got caught in the middle of coming back from a run), followed by the craziest flash flood I’ve ever seen – the road through the village turned into a raging river that continued all night, hours after the rain stopped. Reminded me of the random floods Houston would get, when we’ll all go play in the flooded fields and streets. Except in Houston, when the water recedes you still have roads and sidewalks and life goes back to normal. Our village road got completely washed out, pretty much rendering it impassible to anything but tractors. Even my really good mountain bike couldn’t get past some parts of the road this morning, which has turned into a sea of boulders and gravelly sand. As if getting in and out of the village wasn't already enough of a hassle, it'll be even more of a pain until the commune decides to send people to fix it. And with the busy week of sheep-roasting and dancing that the president has planned, I’m not sure when that’ll get done. But in the meantime, I'm planning to put on my new party jalaba and dance.

New Time or Old Time?

2009-06-19T06:10:00.000-07:00

Every westerner with a blog in Morocco has I’m sure posted exactly this same entry sometime in the last two weeks. The last two years, Morocco has started doing a summer time-change for the same reason most other countries do it: to save a lot of money in electricity bills. The difference in Morocco is that this time change seems to be optional. Probably close to 50% of people I interact with have changed their clocks, while the other half are still operating on “old time”. This of course doesn’t make sense at all to me, as it seems a lot easier to take the ten seconds and move the hand on the clock, than to spend all summer having to clarify whether a quoted time is in “old time” or “new time.” I hear there are entire towns that have just decided not to switch to new time, including the whole old medina in Fes and other big cities. The first couple of days it was funny to have to clarify new time or old time, but now, two weeks after the time change, it’s just annoying and I’m almost looking forward to Ramadan (when the time will change back) just so the country can all be on the same time again. My neighbors, for example, are on old time while I’ve switched to new time. They don’t work in an office or take scheduled public transportation or have meetings, so they just don’t see the need to change their clock. I wonder whether America had this problem when we first started changing the clocks, whenever that was. And how many years it'll take for Morocco to accept and acknowledge the concept of daylight savings. I'm not holding my breath.

On Canadian Radio. . .

2009-06-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

So my handoff of couscous in the London airport made news in Canada! Here's the link to the radio show that features an interview with Kate, the woman I sold couscous to in London at the end of April.

http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2009/05/episode-78-may-20-23-2009/

The part about our couscous starts a little before halfway through the show if you want to skip over the other random (and less interesting, I'm sure) stories.

El Karma Couscous, the Famous International Brand

2009-05-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

True to my suitcase-of-couscous traveling style, I packed about four times as much couscous as clothes and toiletries for my trip back to the states. I had arranged a hand-off in the London airport to a woman who runs a (rather shady looking) business importing hand-made food products from around the world and selling them on her website. I’d barely cleared customs and was terrified I’d get arrested for smuggling couscous into the UK. But the police didn’t even blink when Kate asked whether I’d brought “the goods” and we proceeded to make an extremely obvious handoff right under his nose of a poorly-packaged box that was spilling small brownish-crumbs all over the floor.

So I can check “export couscous” off my list of things to accomplish during my two years here. That made lugging a heavy suitcase across Morocco and onto a different continent, and all the paranoia, all worth it.

Check out Kate’s side of the story on her website: http://www.feraltrade.org/cgi-bin/package/2package.pl?action=format_waybill&edit_id=1483

Another case of an abrupt change of plans, mid-stride:

2009-05-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was on my way to my tutor’s house after lunch for our normal Thursday afternoon tutoring session, walking along, making a mental list of topics to cover with her. Up pulls a truck with one of my (many) “uncles”, offering me a ride for the 200 yards or so to my tutor’s house. Those 200 meters were enough to convince me not to go to Hanane’s house, but instead go with them on some mission to this place where they dig paint up out of the ground, grind it and sell it. They assured me it would be a short and super fun field trip that would only take an hour and I could just go to tutoring late.

Five hours later, I’d:

Climbed this mountain (and then slid all the way down it while all the men watched.)

Colored on myself with this freshly-dug up paint.

Traipsed over a plateau to find and hang out in this nomad camp.

Where we ate this guy’s (“the cheese man”) freshly-made cheese. I wasn’t a huge fan of it – a little too goopy for me. .

Gained a whole lot of respect for this river-fording, mountain-climbing, sheep-swerving, bush-whacking car.

And discovered that views like these exist only a short harrowing hour drive away from my village:

Dance, Monkey!

2009-05-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

My host mother and the other women in the village never get tired of watching me try to dance Moroccan style. I try not to be offended when they’re like, “Dance!” and then I get up and dance for them, while they all fall out of their chairs laughing at me. This happens almost every time my host mother has guests over. I tell myself I'm the comedian and not the laughing stock of the village.

Mmmm... hedgehog

2009-05-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

The other night I was on my way to my house, looking forward to a quiet evening with a book or maybe a movie, when I was intercepted by one of the neighbor boys, excitedly trying to show me something he was carrying in the pitch blackness. Turned out to be a hedgehog, which I think I’ve decided might be the cutest animal in this country. I’d never seen a hedgehog run – their tiny little feet are so comical and cartoon-looking.
Look at how freaking cute he is:

And it turns out the hedgehog is known as the smartest animal here. I got to hear all the hedgehog tales, of hedgehogs killing lions, and how hedgehogs have one and a half brains. But I guess this one wasn’t smart enough to outwit my neighbors - we ate him for lunch yesterday!

Should I Change my Title from “Traveling Couscous Salesman” to “Travel Agent”?

2009-04-18T02:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I was going to Fes for a Peace Corps meeting, and beforehand I took orders for couscous from the Peace Corps office in Rabat so I could bring them couscous. I packed my rolling suitcase full of bags of couscous (about 50 pounds of it) and lugged it across the country, onto and off of half of dozen modes of transportation and up and down several flights of stairs and all around a not-very-roller-suitcase-friendly city to make the hand-off to the Peace Corps staff that had come for the meeting. And after that whole ordeal, I realized that the profit for the Association came to about $5. I discovered that I would have rather just given the Association $5 instead of struggling with that ridiculously heavy suitcase. That was the moment I decided that there was no way couscous could be our answer to the development of our village. It just isn't worth the hassle.

And so I made the executive decision to enter the tourism industry. I linked up with an American travel agent in Ifrane, a city a few hours away, who organizes tours for small groups of Americans coming to Morocco on vacation. The week of our meeting she had some tourists coming through who wanted to do a cooking lesson, and as luck would have it, her normal cooking lesson man in Fes was going to be out of town. So I offered to bring one of the women of the Association to Ifrane and we would lead a couscous-rolling and couscous-cooking lesson for these two American tourists. The president of the Association was a great sport and trusted me enough to come along even though she probably had no idea what was really going to happen, just that we were going to be cooking couscous in the house of a family we didn’t know, in some other town, for random people we’d never met.

Except for a couple of small kinks (one of the tourists was feeling sick and couldn’t really eat anything, and the woman whose kitchen we were using insisted on hovering over us telling us we were doing everything all wrong), I think it went well. And the profit we took home from that was more than we would get by selling 300 kilos of couscous.

The next month is going to be a busy one. . . two girls coming this Monday for a cooking lesson, and then two groups of tourists coming in May to have lunch in Khoukhate, and then maybe a group of study abroad students for a weekend; and I’ll be in the states at a wedding in the middle of all this. So much for thinking I’d have lots of time in the Peace Corps to read books and write letters.

A Moroccan Tupperware Party

2009-04-18T02:57:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago my host sisters and I got invited over for tea to this house in our village where a group of other sisters lives, and I didn’t think anything of it, because I get invited over for tea all the time to random people’s houses. The spread was more elaborate than usual – all kinds of cookies and different breads and oil and jam and nuts and olives and pretty much everything. But even this isn’t really abnormal, because even now, five months into my living here, I’ve found people still serve more and fancier tea snacks when I show up. But then after we were done eating, the women pulled out this big bag of clothes that they then expected us to buy. And it all made sense, that’s the only reason we were invited over in the first place. So this caused quite the moral dilemma for me, which I still haven’t quite resolved: should I have bought something from them or not?

Reasons I should have bought something:

· I’m a small business development volunteer, so I should be encouraging entrepreneurialism whenever I can

· I could definitely afford them, and the women definitely needed the money more than I did

· I did eat a lot at tea-time

Reasons not to buy from them:

· I don’t want to set a precedent for buying whatever people bring to me to sell, even if everyone already knows I probably do have more money than anyone else in the village

· There wasn’t really anything that I especially wanted or needed

This same dilemma is the reason I still haven’t bought any carpets from anyone, even though I need/want some, and there are women who make beautiful ones in the next town that I would love to support. I’m just afraid that people will start coming to me every time they finish a carpet asking me to buy it, which I’ve heard has happened to volunteers in the past. And so far people don’t seem to see me as a walking bag of money. I’m still trying to figure out a sneaky way of buying things, like taking them to a craft fair and selling them to myself.

I’m sorry it took almost two months to get these pictures up, but finally, this is my house:

2009-03-23T04:01:00.001-07:00

My lovely kitchen.

My super soft turtle blanket. Maybe the best thing about my house

My living room. (Actually, just the other half of my bedroom)

My well, right outside my door.

There goes my French

2009-03-23T03:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve felt this moment approaching for a couple of weeks now, but I think I can safely say my spoken Arabic has surpassed my spoken French. The turning point was last week when I was going over this grant proposal with my tutor, who speaks perfect French and was editing out all my mistakes and putting in much prettier language. Even just a month ago, I was regularly using my French to explain what I was trying (with difficulty) to express in Arabic. But last week, going over this or that wording in the grant proposal, I found myself using Arabic to explain what I was trying to express in French. I don’t know whether to be really proud of my Arabic or terrified about my loss of French communication skills. Pretty soon I’m going to need French tutoring, I think.

Release of our newest product – Zmita!

2009-03-23T03:57:00.001-07:00

So zmita is hands-down my favorite food in Morocco (yes, better than couscous!) It’s this mix of ground up nuts and seeds and sugar and oil so it has the consistency of cookie dough, and you eat it with a spoon for breakfast or at tea (or just hanging out in your house like I do, any time of day). It’s one of those things that everyone makes at home but I’ve never seen packaged. Here’s our sweet label (I spent probably an hour setting up the photo shoot for the perfect label picture. Just so there’s no confusion, there are not actually any ground up flowers in the zmita, those are almond tree blossoms, and there are almonds).

The Izzies vs. the Kookies

2009-03-23T03:54:00.000-07:00

One of the goals of Peace Corps Morocco is to spread Peace and Friendship between the US and the Arab world. But that goal is looking to be a piece of cake compared to spreading Peace and Friendship between my village and the one a mile down the road. Because we’re not supposed to post exact locations on our blogs, I’ll use nicknames: the izzies and the kookies. (There are also the debbies and the tabbies in our area, but I haven’t come across any drama with them yet.) I live with the kookies, but I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time with the (evil) izzies, for two main reasons: my tutor/best friend lives there, and there are about twenty times more kids there than in my village, which makes for hilariously chaotic soccer games, hikes up the mountain, and impromptu yoga classes in the mud. Sunday mornings are my favorite time of the week for this very reason. It’s a great little town, and way more lively than mine. Too bad I’ve been expressly forbidden on several occasions from going there by my host father (“izzies are bad!”).

The schism runs deep: there seems to be an invisible line somewhere that no one crosses – my host sisters have literally never been down there, and every time I try to get the boys from my village to come with me to play soccer with the izzie boys, they shake their heads and look at me, shocked like I’m wandering into a haunted forest and warn me about the mean and horrible izzie boys lurking around the corners. The women of the kookie association don’t have very nice things to say about izzie women either, making fun of their southern accents (this is definitely the best part of the rivalry - they’re one mile south of us!!).

Every time I head down south to izzie land, the izzie women ask me about helping them start an association. In my opinion, the best solution is to absorb them into our kookie association, since there are a million hoops to jump through to start an association, and I’m not sure Morocco really needs another carpet-making association. I’m picturing someday in the future when the global demand for our couscous gets to be more than we can fill in our little one-room association, we can have a satellite association campus there, and I’ll go down with a donkey once a week and bring up the couscous they make, pay them by the kilo, and put our label on it. The izzies make way more carpets than we do up here and I think it would be in everyone’s interest to take their carpets along with us when we go to trade fairs and expositions. But somehow I can’t see that idea going over so well with the kookies.

By poking around a little, I’ve come to learn that the feud goes back about twenty years, when there was a land dispute between the izzies and the Cheikh of the whole area (who’s a kookie). The izzies won and the Cheikh has held a (pretty excessive, in my opinion) grudge ever since.

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

2009-02-11T15:19:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

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!.

2009-02-11T14:26:00.001-08:00

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!

2009-02-11T14:20:00.000-08:00

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.

Imaginary Money

2009-01-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

It’s been four months and I still haven’t gotten used to the money system here. So, the printed and coined currency is dirhams (about 8.5 dirhams in a dollar). But in spoken Arabic they quote prices not in dirhams, but in this imaginary currency called “ryals.” There are 20 ryals in one dirham. This is what I go through every time I buy something:

The vendor quotes a price in ryals (e.g. “Elfayn hamsmia u steen”)
I mentally translate that into English (2,560)
Then divide mentally by 20 (128 dirhams)
Decide this is too high and decide I want to pay 80 dirhams
Translate that into ryals (1600 ryals)
Translate that into Arabic (Elf u stamia)
The vendor quotes another price in ryals (Elfayn)
This one is easy to calculate, so it only takes me one translation step (100 dirhams)
I counter with 90, translate that into ryals (1800)
Translate that into Arabic (Elf u tminmia)
The guy holds fast at 2000 so I hand him a 100 dirham bill

I mostly just find it absurd that they don’t think or speak in the currency they use, and if I buy a bunch of stuff at a hanut, the hanut guy will add up this long string of high and complicated numbers (because they’re in ryals) and reach some total that seems astronomically high, which people then have to divide mentally by twenty to figure out which bills and coins to hand him. But even though my sisters and the hanuts I frequent most often have learned to quote prices to me in dirhams, this system is probably not going away anytime soon, so I’m going to eventually stop just thinking how absurd the system is and learn to adapt. I need to train myself to look at a 20 dirham bill and think “400” instead of 20. And be able to ignore the numbers on the 1 and 2 dirham coins and learn them as 20 and 40. This might be the first time in my life when being literate has been a disadvantage. It would be easier to just memorize the blue bill is 400 and the brown one is 2000. Well, after two years of this I am going to be very good at dividing numbers by 20. Useful life skill, right?

Another imaginary currency exists here, called "francs". There are 100 francs in a dirham, but there are only a couple of amounts that are quoted in francs instead of ryals: 1000 francs (Elf franc) = 10 dirhams, and "million", which equals 10,000 dirhams.

Couscous Label

2008-12-31T02:11:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T02:09:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-12-31T00:41:00.000-08:00

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:

2008-12-30T07:54:00.000-08:00

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

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.
Tough-looking men coming into souq wearing huge, heavy wool capes, but riding on tiny little donkeys.
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.
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:

2008-12-30T07:48:00.000-08:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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).
(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.)