pneumonia

Hi everyone! As many of you know, I've been sick these last couple of weeks with pneumonia, but I'm in the recovery stage now and starting to feel much better. I'm still tired and slow, but shwiya b shwiya, I'm getting back to normal. For any of you who's had this, you know that it's just no fun at all and it takes everything out of you. Luckily, I was in the very capable and caring hands of not one, but TWO Peace Corps Doctors here in Morocco, not to mention doctors in Peace Corps Washington, who have been monitoring my case. I spent more than a week in the Capital being monitored and having treatments (anti-biotics) and now I'm finally back in my site.

I'm excited about going back to work tomorrow and seeing the ladies again. We have a lot of work to do to get ready for the upcoming Marche Moroc, which is a craft fair taking place in Kesh soon. I know I haven't been writing about my work here and that Jon mentioned in his last work that I'd be posting something about that soon and I promise that I will. In fact, I've already started drafting the post, so keep your eyes out for it!

Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive since I've been sick, especially Jon, who has taken such good care of me these last couple of weeks, doing everything from shopping, to cooking, to laundry...all by himself! I will miss him greatly this week while he's away at Spring Camp.

That's all for now

Emily

Fresh New Title Image

Same old ratty Kaman's beanie. I'm really sick of wearing that thing, and Emily's probably even more sick of it's smell, but I'm scared to show the world what's grown underneath it. I'm holding out for the spring shear!

I've been nagging...umm, well, reminding Emily to do a post with some of the work that she's been doing with a local co-operative. Expect that soon!

Haha...now that I've said that, she HAS to do a post. Mwa ha ha ha.

Blogger Server Possessed

All,

I've recently been informed that the link to my art blog was not linking correctly, so I've made the changes. Blogger's server is being a bit slow right now, so it hasn't updated the changes I made, but hopefully will sometime within the year! For all of those whose clicking on that link has come up fruitless, here is the link for your convenience:

http://www.cacamamiecritters.blogspot.com/

Enjoy,

Jon

5 Pictures from Chefchaouen

Chefchaouen: a town steeped in a thick, dizzying atmosphere. Maybe this dizziness is from the heights of the breathtaking mountains, or maybe it comes from the kif (Arabic for MARIJUANA - pronounced "keef") that is pressured upon every non-native visitor to the region.

The kif industry is booming in northern Morocco (the regional economy depends on it), and the salesmen who deal it have to hear "no" at least a few times before they're dissuaded. If you include a little sass in your rejection of one of these fine, upstanding young gentlemen, they may even tell you to "go back to your f@#%ing country!"

Other than the kif salesmen, the townsfolk are generally nice, and tend to think tourists are Spaniards (it's very refreshing to have someone call you "amigo," instead of hearing "bonjour" or the ever-irritating "ca va").

The town is predominantly blue (literally), and is as picturesque as the local scenery. I've included a few amazing shots; some of the best views we've seen so far!

Here's a link to another volunteer's photo blog. The pictures are likely to be better because she has a digital SLR.

Thanksgiving reflections...

Thanksgiving in Morocco isn't really the same as it has been in the States alongside our families. Cut and dry: this culture isn't the same as American culture, and doesn't include the specific rules, behaviors, and tendencies of American holidays. Because of our culture's absence, we have to re-create Thanksgiving. However, for many reasons, it fell short of our expectations. Mainly, there wasn't the social chaos/flux that exists in most families' holiday get-togethers:

1) No dogs/cell phones/televisions/other non-human things barking/freaking out/demanding attention, etc.
2) No distracted conversations (half conversations, really), where people really can't take the time to pay 100% attention to you because there's so much else going on around them (this is unfortunate because I feel like most substantive conversations and communication requires most of our attention...if we can't give this level of attention, we're not even really making novel communication with others...just regurgitating memorized, routine pleasantries!).
3) No traveling on the road to a dozen different places to visit all of our family (because everyone lives far away, or people, for some reason, don't want to meet together, perhaps because family members are estranged from one another).

DIGRESSION ON CONVERSATIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AMERICANS AND MOROCCANS: Here in Morocco, it seems people are more concerned with your present condition. They ask you relentlessly how you are NOW, without much concern with the future. Unlike America, very few people here in Morocco ask us "What are you going to do after this or after that (for all of us who are trying to figure our futures out for ourselves, and don't readily have the answers to these pressing questions, the prospect of being in such an "inquisition" is very frustrating, to say the least! Maybe in response to these questions from Americans, I'll just say "I will be doing whatever God wills me to do"). I guess Americans seem to think they have more control over the future than they actually do, so maybe that leads them to dwell on it more than the average Moroccan. I know I'm always thinking of the future, possibly even more than the present. I guess for anyone who knows me, I can appear "spaced" sometimes. It's likely because I'm thinking about what I will be doing later that day/week/year/decade/etc...

In America, since the individual is given more importance, it seems like family is given less priority. We spread out, seeking our own individualistic fortunes in lands far away from our home (i.e. Peace Corps in Morocco). Also, in our egoistic manner, we have a tendency to get annoyed with the deeply rooted behaviors, beliefs, and characteristics of certain family members. This, of course, leads to us seeing our families much less often than Moroccans see their families. Sometimes, we see certain family members only at major holidays, and only out of a sense of obligation!

Gee, I haven't really painted a good picture for American familial social dynamics! More on this later, now we're on to the food!

For this Thanksgiving, we had chicken instead of turkey. This might be a major offense to some die-hard American traditionalists, but I found that this substitution was of minor consequence. Indeed, it had much of the same texture and flavor of turkey, and served it's purpose quite well. The mashed potatoes were great, as always, being lovingly whipped by Emily just prior to being served. I have to say, despite the fact that we didn't use celery or any other herbs, the home-made stuffing was excellent (and surprisingly easy)! Broth, butter, onion, garlic, salt and pepper was mixed with croutons and heated on the skillet...as I said, easier than I ever thought it could be. The cranberry sauce was probably the key ingredient that tied everything together for me (quite literally, I love mixing the sauce individually with potatoes, stuffing, and turkey...I love the sweet/tartness that it imparts upon the other foods). We brought it from the States, as I'm not sure you'd be able to find canned cranberry sauce/dressing here in Morocco. Emily slaved for 3 hours to make an AMAZING carrot cake with a creamcheese/lime zest frosting (delicious for breakfast in addition to an after-dinner dessert)! We'll still be enjoying that for at least 2 more meals!

As far as the food goes, I don't think we were off by that much. We didn't have turkey, or turkey gravy for that matter. We also were lacking pumpkin pie, but despite these deficiencies, I feel like we re-created the food experience to about 80-85% accuracy.

Sharing a holiday with people outside of your culture is a great way of letting people in on the culture of a group, however, it is no substitute for the authentic experience. The lack of our families - despite all of the difficulties we sometimes have with them - is what we truly miss. Family takes us back to our youth, when we were nurtured, guarded, when the world was a warmer, cozier, simpler place. We didn't have complex life situations then, and we were naive to many of the difficulties of adult life. We just knew that adults were in charge and could take care of anything. Holidays are a step backward to those better times, and it allows our memories of youth - and therefore our own youth - to live on.

I can't wait until next year's Thanksgiving when we'll be frustratingly trying to explain our future plans to our relatives, who won't be listening fully because of attention-diverting dogs/cellphones/televisions/people in the background! The flavors and smells of the food will take us back to simpler times with these people that we call family and we can be truly thankful of having them close in our lives.

(sappy, I know...but giving thanks can be that way sometimes...it kinda goes along with the holiday)

THANKSGIVING LEFTOVER UPDATE:

Emily enjoyed a mushy, conglomeration of leftovers just this past hour. In her own words, "Amalgulous (?) mound of marvelous deliciousness."

The Trials and Tribulations of Script

Learning to read and write Arabic Script was not very high on my "to do" list when I came to Morocco. I admired my peers, including my husband, for taking on the challenge, especially the ones that had never studied Arabic before. However, there where many reasons that I didn't dive into this activity myself, and even discounted it completely as something I would ever do.

Upon arrival in country, the Peace Corps gave us trainees a book in which to help us learn Darija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. Although this resource contains Darija in the form of Arabic Script, the book, as well as the subsequent lessons taught by Moroccans during training, focused on transliteration. Transliteration translates the script into symbols that we are already familiar with; the English alphabet with a few extra embellishments. I can see why the Peace Corps sees this is the logical approach. After eleven weeks of training, they didn't expect us to be fluent in Darija. They didn't teach us every nuance of the language. Their goal, at the end of eleven weeks, was to give us enough language so that we could get our basic needs met, be conversational enough so that we didn't feel completely isolated, and have enough working knowledge of the subject so that we could continue our language learning in our new communities on our own. Communication was drilled into our heads. Above everything, the Peace Corps wanted us to be able to talk with Moroccans. This was strike one against learning Arabic Script. I felt that talking was a more important and useful skill than reading or writing.

Being able to write in Darija, even in the form of transliteration, has been very important to me from the onset. It gives me a chance to see the language laid out in front of me. It enables me to learn words without having to memorizes them after a first hearing. It gives me the opportunity to create in this language an alternative fashion, which in turn, helps my oral skills. With transliteration, who needs Script? Strike two.

For the most part, Darija is not a written language anyway. That's not to say that written and even printed Darija is nonexistent, it's just rare. When people write in script, they write in Fusha, which is basically a whole other language. Strike three. Who needs to learn how to read a language that isn't written?

On top of all of this, there is the fact that Arabic uses completely different characters than what we, as English speakers, are accustomed to. So not only is the language itself foreign, but the symbols that accompany it. Even the direction that script is read, from right to left, is the opposite of not only English, but other languages that Americans are typically exposed to, such as Spanish, French, and German. (The symbols used in Spanish, French and German also greatly resemble those of English). This, over everything else, was probably the biggest road block in my mind. It didn't occur to me that I could ever makes sense of all those strange lines and shapes.

Strike four. Learning Arabic Script, out of the question.

And now, the rest of the story...

Ten months into my service in Morocco, with all that is stacked against its favor, I am learning Arabic Script. It happened this week, during the third tutoring session with my new tutor, we'll call her "Melisa" (I wish to not use the names of host country nationals in this public blog). Melisa, by the way, happens to be a very intelligent female in my site, but I'll get into the importance of this fact later. Learning Script came about as a means to better understand the pronunciation of Darija. Many times I hear something and want to write it down, with the purpose of being able to remember it later. The problem is that I sometimes write down words incorrectly, which defeats the whole purpose. Many times the reason for my error is that my ear has miss-interpreted what I have heard. Often, I ask the speaker to repeat herself/ himself, several times if necessary. But the truth remains that sometimes it's just easier and more exact to see something spelled out right in front of me. But if I don't know Script, I can't understand when someone does spell it out for me. Some Moroccans understand this, and thus try to write things in their own form of transliteration, but many times sounds get lost, and besides, it's a different transliteration than what we've learned.

Fusha, and by extension, Darija, are different than English in a very important way; they use a different symbol, sometimes just slightly different, but different none the less, to indicate a different sound. What a novel idea! Now think of all the sounds that our vowels make in English. Even though every "a," "e," "i," "o," and "u" look exactly like every other "a," "e," "i," "o," and "u," they have the potential for sounding very different, depending on the context of the word. Our consonants too are far from immune from this identity crisis. Take the poor "p" for instance. Put a "p" in the words "pan," "apartment," or "cap," and it makes the same sound each time, but follow it with an "h," and suddenly it turns into an "f." Of course, this is just one example of many.

Remember the "strange lines and shapes" that make up the Arabic characters that I was talking about as being what I thought would be my biggest obstacle in learning to read and write? I now see this as Arabic's greatest asset to me. Our transliteration, like Scrip but unlike English, uses a different symbol for each sound. In theory, this should make it easy to sound out the words. The problem that I have, however, is that even though I understand what each transliteration letter is supposed to mean, I still sometimes apply the English pronunciation to it. Seeing a character that is completely alien to me has actually helped me to associate specific sounds with specific symbols. And, to my surprise and delight I have been able to pick it up rather quickly!

On day one, Melisa showed me my first three Arabic characters in isolation and taught me all the different sounds that they are able make by adding little marks and accents, which of course have their own names. Later on that day I practiced writing each new letter and symbol over and over, just as I did when learning to write in English. After practicing writing them out, as well as saying the sounds out loud, I moved on to trying to find these three letters in words in my Darija book. Finding words that contain only the three letters that I had just learned was difficult, but I did find a few, and after I did, I copied them.

The next day, returning to Melisa's house for another lesson, she taught me four new letters, and taking my lead, wrote out some words that contained these letters plus the three letters that I learned the day before. To my utter amazement I was able to successfully sound out and therefore read on that second day! This of course greatly motivated me. I was on my way to literacy!

On the day of my third Scrip lesson (yesterday), I learned four more letters, bringing my grand total up to eleven. One thing that I'm learning however, is that being able to write and sound out words is one thing. Being able to understand what I'm reading is another. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of the words Melisa gives me are in Fusha, and are either very different from their Darija equivalent, or not used at all in Morocco, making it very likely that I have never heard the words that I read and write being spoken in real life.

Overall though, I think this is a good thing. It makes me feel good to learn how to read and write. I can't really explain why. I'm not convinced that this will help me in my work here on a direct level, meaning that I don't foresee it being a necessity to read or write in Arabic to do my job here. But I do see it as a way to supplement my language learning and thus, helping me in that way. That said, I also don't regret not trying to do this sooner. I feel like this is a good time for me to start. I feel like I can now focus on it without too many other, more pressing, communication matters, since after all, I can talk about most of the things that I want to talk about at this point. Before now I wasn't really in a situation where I feel that this kind of learning was possible. For me at least, it's important to have an actual person teaching me this, so that I can hear each sound, rather than trying to learn it on my own from a book. Before two weeks ago, I didn't have a teacher that was interested in teaching me. Melisa is the third tutor that I've had since arriving in site back in late November. My first tutor was an English teacher from the local middle school. The original plan was for Jon and I to study together. That didn't work out at all, for various reasons, but with little trouble I found my second tutor. This one was a younger man, in his mid twenties, and like many young Moroccan men around town, was unemployed. He did have his degree however and spoke English pretty much fluently. We started lessons at the beginning of January and ended right before IST (in service training) in June, when he told me (via text message) that he would be unable to tutor me any longer. I never inquired as to his exact reason for cutting off the lessons. Maybe he got a job or was planning on moving away. Or maybe he just got tired of showing up at the Artisana twice a week in the mornings when he could be sleeping in. I guess I'll never know, nor do I really care. From the beginning it was a strange and uncomfortable situation. As a person he has a very negative personality. I found that I was having to drag myself to my lessons and that I absolutely hated going. After my lessons I would routinely ask myself, "what did I just get out of that?"

Melisa is different. I can tell that she really cares about teaching me. I don't feel uncomfortable and awkward around her, and I have a feeling that this is due largely to the fact that she is a female. Our sessions last for hours at a time. Sometimes her mom likes to come in to help out, which at first I thought would drive me crazy, but I have come to realize that I don't mind it at all (in fact, Melisa is the one who minds). One of Melisa's greatest assets though is that she doesn't speak English. She knows English, at least words, but our conversations are all in Darija. Because of this, I don't feel the temptation of slipping into English, which I admit happened a lot with both of my previous tutors.

Also, Melisa does crochet. As far as I can tell she hasn't done it for very long, though I can see that she's been getting tremendously better in just the span of a few projects. I hope that in the future this will be another way for us to bond and communicate. In short, I hope that this is the beginning of one of the strongest relationships that I make here in Morocco, one that results in both parties learning from the other. I never want to stop learning.

Emily



Sorry this image is sideways.

How I love souq day

Every Tuesday, I have a re-confirmation of my undying love for all that is souq day. For those who don't know, souq is the weekly market that many Moroccan towns host. My fervor is such today that I have to get it all out while it is still fresh in my mind (and under my fingernails).

Today's occurrences at souq:

1) While purchasing some black pepper (lbzar), I was approached by a salesman from a neighboring tent. We chatted pleasantries for awhile, and then he pulled me aside, learning I was a "volunteer." He explained to me that his father had a procedure done recently and that the poor fellow has a colostomy bag and isn't in the best health. I pretty much knew what he was getting at, so I played dumb for awhile, making him finally say that he needed a way to get some money and that any donation that I could spare would be welcomed. Instead of giving him $, I simply told him about Peace Corps, about why I'm here, and that it's not our job to supply people with money. I expressed my sympathy to his father, but he wasn't sour after my rejection. He actually invited me back to his place where he's from, and we parted ways in a true, warm, Moroccan way.

2) I enjoyed the company of one of our artisans, in my weekly indulgence of a ground beef sandwich with onions, cilantro, and cumin, grilled to perfection. The guy grilling the meat actually has a big hunk of cow hanging from a hook in open air and whenever he needs some more, he goes and slices some off, grinds it, and grills it right in front of your eyes. (One sign that I'm starting to adjust to my life here is that I wasn't grossed out when he - fingers and palms smeared with bits of meat and fat, reached into his pocket and made change for my 20 DH note). Me and said artisan also had an impromptu English lesson. A few days ago, he explained, in Darija, a way to say that the prices are really high at the souq. It roughly translates as, "There is a fire at the souq." However, looking for something a little more expressive, I opted to teach him instead, "THE SOUQ IS ON FIRE," which is his catch phrase now. He's awesome.

3) Talked with random friendly, if not gregarious, people that approach me (already knowing my name) and ask about any and all aspects of my life. In the US, I'd be annoyed, but here, I'm just glad to understand some of what they're saying to me! Of course, now, I'm starting to get heckled by people because I don't know Amazight (the Berber dialect here). ONE LANGUAGE AT A TIME, PEOPLE! It's a miracle that I'm even understanding Darija!

4) Bought a cool glass of orange drink (1 DH), that the juice man (mul 3asir) filled up with a ladle from a big pot of the chilled stuff. Taking a minute to savor it's saccharine goodness while surveying the crowds is a good way to take a break. Are the glasses washed after being used? The thought crossed my mind, but didn't faze me!

5) Bought some popcorn to munch on while doing some shopping. Other times, I opt for sugar peanuts, dates, cookies, or peanut bars (kinda like payday).


Jon