-10 Days

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SboRijhWFDU

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Message from the White House for Ramadan

Stories of Service from Serve.gov

http://www.serve.gov/stories_all.asp

A crucial desire of mine for my Morocco "service"

In Bolivia I became repelled and the people around me became confused when I used the language of Peace Corps around people that were not Peace Corps. In Morocco I plan to forego that misstep in favor of a more clear, understandable vocabulary that doesn't demean the people and exaggerate what I am there to do.

An example is about money, jobs, work. According to Peace Corps I am a volunteer, living on a stipend with my loyalties divided between the bureaucrats that 1) pay me and 2) decide from afar PC's role in intl development--and those friendly locals that surround me.

Now, read that paragraph again. In Candelaria I made 2x more money each money on my PC salary supporting just me than the teachers who commuted 20 hours each month from Sucre, many of them supporting families of 4 or 6. Those were middle class people. In contrast, I likely made 4 times the amount of money each month as the farmers who sold their potatoes to a big conglomerate each week in Tarabuco. But for the first little bit, I called myself a volunteer. If you look at US standards, making 200 dollars a month is being a volunteer (minus the 6000 dollar stipend at the end, which made my salary really 125% higher, or 450 dollars a month... so maybe I should say I made 5x more than the teachers and 10 times more than the farmers). And they looked at me bewildered when I called myself a volunteer while being paid that much for 6 months for trying to FIND what job I was going to do, regardless of what I actually did.

And what about the word service? Does it count if I get more out of it than the people I am around, do? Doesn't that denigrate them further? Is it a sacrifice, really? Yes, it does and no it's not. The only possible way to call it a sacrifice is by the fact of being away from home. But you're around great, hospitable people. In a beautiful place. Likely with a DVD player and a Kindle and iPod (for the long bus rides that hurt soooooo much since you can't move your legs freely) and then you go back and have internet access on your Tablet PC. And for two years you are your own boss, more or less. If not that, then at least you aren't a slave to conditions beyond your control. In less than a day you can be back home. So don't puff up your mind with false notions of sacrifice, of service. The ideals can remain, but you are only making a barrier between you and the people. And when you think about it the way I do, you will be even more proud to be there, even more humble, more understanding and--especially if you eliminate the PC talk, i.e. calling yourself a worker in a town, not a volunteer in a site--you will enjoy it more.

It's counterintuitive at first but ultimately the more accurate perspective allows you to fully feel what there is, rather than what there is not. Sort of like how rejecting God allows you to live according to your own successes and failures, and to enjoy the real natural beauty of the world rather than putting all of those things in the hands of a God unknown that is unknowable. A flower smells as sweet (or even more) when you believe it exists independently of a divine power. Peace Corps is the same way, once you strip away the bombast. At the end of the day, I choose to be there. Noone forces me. I shouldn't use words that make it seem that way to the people who still will live there long after I have gone back home.

So, there you go. The language habits that PC used did not help me at all when I translated them and used them like other people understood what those words meant. In the final 6 weeks in Bolivia, I called myself a worker. I started calling Candelaria my town, since it sounded a lot better than an assigned site (a Cold War sounding phrase, if you ask me).

And I'll tell that to other people once I'm there. It doesn't help any, unless you're talking with another American.... maybe.

Good email from a friend

Heya, all:

Some of you might know that Peace Corps Mauritania was evacuated a few days ago. My friend Shelby is among the volunteers who are leaving. After a recent consolidation she wrote a very compelling email about why she stayed when many chose to take the offered "interrupted service". It made my heart sing.

Now the remaining volunteers are in the same boat we were nearly a year ago, stuck in some hotel waiting for information on their options, running out of cellphone minutes and kleenex. Wondering how to explain to their host families that they might never see them again, and how to explain to their real families that they're not overjoyed at the prospect of coming home and in no hurry to get there. So, they are very much in my thoughts during this tough decision-making time.

I can't tell you how much I think about you all -- at least daily -- and become frustrated about our inabillity to finish the work we started in Bolivia. I have always believed everything happens for a reason but find myself impatient. I have yet to find something that feeds my soul the way Peace Corps did, even a little bit. I write this from my job answering phones at a law firm. I will go home tonight to my mother's house. I will probably go to bed early. Life took a giant belly flop, and it still stings.

But as I see you all off on your new adventures I am so proud to know you, especially the many of you who have re-upped or gone to work for organizations that support your goals, and those of you who have stayed connected to Bolivia and each other through the major life change we've all endured. We have more in common than Bolivia, or even an evacuation from Bolivia; it is the kindred spirit that brought us all there in the first place for which I am most grateful. You inspire me keep searching for my own destiny; you my heart sing.

Much love,
Erika

PS: Leona is doing great! My host parents in Bolivia are still trying to marry me off, and I passed the Foreign Service test ... still waiting to hear if they'll interview me. I would love to hear from any and all of you.

Mark Twain describing Morocco in THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

l!  Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it
--these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well
enough.  We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the present.
Tangier is the spot we have been longing for all the time.  Elsewhere we
have found foreign-looking things and foreign-looking people, but always
with things and people intermixed that we were familiar with before, and
so the novelty of the situation lost a deal of its force.  We wanted
something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign--foreign from top to
bottom--foreign from center to circumference--foreign inside and outside
and all around--nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness
--nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun.
And lo!  In Tangier we have found it.  Here is not the slightest thing
that ever we have seen save in pictures--and we always mistrusted the
pictures before.  We cannot anymore.  The pictures used to seem
exaggerations--they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality.  But
behold, they were not wild enough--they were not fanciful enough--they
have not told half the story.  Tangier is a foreign land if ever there
was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save
The Arabian Nights.  Here are no white men visible, yet swarms of
humanity are all about us.  Here is a packed and jammed city enclosed in
a massive stone wall which is more than a thousand years old.

-------

Tangier has been mentioned in history for three thousand years.  And it
was a town, though a queer one, when Hercules, clad in his lion skin,
landed here, four thousand years ago.  In these streets he met Anitus,
the king of the country, and brained him with his club, which was the
fashion among gentlemen in those days.  The people of Tangier (called
Tingis then) lived in the rudest possible huts and dressed in skins and
carried clubs, and were as savage as the wild beasts they were constantly
obliged to war with.  But they were a gentlemanly race and did no work.
They lived on the natural products of the land.  Their king's country
residence was at the famous Garden of Hesperides, seventy miles down the
coast from here.  The garden, with its golden apples (oranges), is gone
now--no vestige of it remains.  Antiquarians concede that such a
personage as Hercules did exist in ancient times and agree that he was an
enterprising and energetic man, but decline to believe him a good,
bona-fide god, because that would be unconstitutional.


---

What a funny old town it is!  It seems like profanation to laugh and jest
and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics.  Only the
stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet
are suited to a venerable antiquity like this.  Here is a crumbling wall
that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the
Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first
Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted
castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden
time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where
it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and
sold in the streets of ancient Thebes!

The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all have
battled for Tangier--all have won it and lost it.  Here is a ragged,
oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling
his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by the
Romans twelve hundred years ago.  Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge
built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago.  Men who had seen the
infant Saviour in the Virgin's arms have stood upon it, maybe.

Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships and
loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the
Christian era.

Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the
phantoms of forgotten ages.




-

Perfect Day

So far there's been many of them on this trip!

Staging, soon! #1

Staging will be in Philadelphia!
Tuesday sept 8th to sept9

Now I have to start picking what to include in my 80lbs of luggage

Love Coldplay! I was there with my Piccolina after not seeing her for 9 months