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

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

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

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

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

Urban Legends and the Dentist

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

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

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

First Hanut Sale!.

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

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

New Website!

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

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

Imaginary Money

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:

1. The vendor quotes a price in ryals (e.g. “Elfayn hamsmia u steen”)
2. I mentally translate that into English (2,560)
3. Then divide mentally by 20 (128 dirhams)
4. Decide this is too high and decide I want to pay 80 dirhams
5. Translate that into ryals (1600 ryals)
6. Translate that into Arabic (Elf u stamia)
7. The vendor quotes another price in ryals (Elfayn)
8. This one is easy to calculate, so it only takes me one translation step (100 dirhams)
9. I counter with 90, translate that into ryals (1800)
10. Translate that into Arabic (Elf u tminmia)
11. 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

Happy New Year!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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