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

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

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!

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

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)

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. . .