From MOROCCO #1

Had a safe flight to this marvelous country, enjoying the excellent inflight meal, several games of chess and the kind of conversation that you can only get in Peace Corps. For the past week we were being processed and gradually accustomed to living here, and just like in Bolvia we did so in the lap of relative luxury. Now it will be a gradual reduction in those modern staples until we are living like those modest Moroccans around us while we simultaneously become more accustomed and acclimated.

This morning it was sad to say goodbye. In this culture, it is bad to have any man-woman public display of affection, so the many people that you want to hug in the street and pat on the back you have to wave to or shake their hands.

In the week we've been here (“I'm so sad that we just have 820 days or so left in Peace Corps!” “ I think they should make it an even 1000. Then that one extra night and it'd be perfect”) it was several days of long meetings, but there was also a rest day where we stayed at the beach and got to wander down the road to a carnival that is set up near the water.

Some people had 3 or 4 rounds of shots, but mine were still valid from before, so I just had one shot that I needed. The medical woman told me there is a famous lake near Tangiers where there is a bird watching colony. One day I did Ramadan with the staff and so I skipped lunch so that I could spend the time talking with them. But I soon discovered that lunch is the biggest meal, and the one with the widest variety of vegetables, so I ate the rest of the time normally to get the biggest variety of veggies.

Soon an exclusive club formed, with the hostel staff making us vegetarians sit together so that she could serve us. This meant it was Ana, Yorda, Emily, Ed and me at nearly every meal together. That's fine but it made it difficult to mingle.

Meeting the staff is a special treat, since it is those people that we have given our trust. And considering how many years some of them have worked for PC, that trust has been proven repeatedly. One man, the Moroccan man who is our financial officer, worked for PC for 38 years so far.

Other than this, the thing I will remember is falling asleep on the beach with 10 other vols, the sunset runs on the beach with Cara—who outpaces me greatly, the rooftop yoga, the delightful tete-a-tete of this group of smart, fun and cheeky people getting to know each other for the first time, and discoverin g the overlap in each of our lives, whether that's the same college in Michigan, or a similar taste in nonfiction literature. Discovering that in this crowd, we are no longer the dorks, nerds and freaks but instead the mainstream for the first time in our lives. A PC-style mainstream.

Some things were a surprise. Apparently, Moroccan has been suspended once, and was reinstated much more recently than Bolivia. That was one of my most crucial decisions that led me here, my belief that this country had the 45 uninterrupted years that I thought it had, but it's not true. Apparently in 2003 a congressman pushed very hard to get PC Morocco even larger than ever once it got back into service.

Now we are winding through the Northern tip of the Atlas about 50 or 100 km from Fez (maybe less) in our giant bus, filled to the brim with idealists and their 80 pounds of luggage each. There are donkeys and women going up the hill that we are descending, and tall fir trees lining the mountainside in large patches. One giant surprise has been the weather patterns that the staff says is extremely unusual. It has nearly rained every day since I've been here. Maybe this is related to the El Nino/La Nina cycle that has just begun? It rained the night before I left Tennessee, a very bad storm that took out the electricity, and this morning it was an intense storm around 5 AM that lasted until 8A M. This delayed the bus for an hour.

But nearly every day had some showers as well. Running last night on the beach, we turned around at just the right time, before the bottom fell out.

I felt bad ordering chips today and a Fanta (whose bottle was in the shape of an Orange, to everyone's delight), because the Muslim staff is with us and I thought they are not allowed to eat. But traveler's are allowed to break the fast, so if they wanted to then they could guiltlessly indulge. Though this is their chance to go even further and do it out of their own respect, even though they fall under an exception that exempts them.

A lot of nights were spent doing yoga on the terrace roof, and we had our physical trainer lead a more involved yoga lesson rather than using the tapes (one of which, WEIGHTLOSS YOGA was way too strenuous on everyone).

One great day, yesterday, involved each person discovering where they would be living during Community Based Training, as well as who is in their family at the home, who would be their language facilitator, the other volunteers in their language study group and where on the map they would find themselves. It turns out we are within driving distance from Fez. My plans soon is to go there to buy an oud, maybe after this Sunday. I must be at home then because it's the giant celebration at the end of Ramadan.

I still have a great deal of sand in my hair. The nice moments during this trip came from the unexpected times. The discovery of it all, and discovering who we are with. In my group for CBT we already have a band blossoming, with the tentative name of the Sultans of Saffron. The real name we aren't allowed to say because it's the name of our site, and I'm not allowed to publish that info. But for our web-based followers, then that is how we will go by until after swear-in.

People in this part of Morocco seem to be covered very warmly, so I imagine that when I get off the bus it will be cool. Cooler and cooler until next spring! But luckily I have my Bolivian alpaca hat, that got a lot of good comments this morning.

Time for lunch! Maybe I will be able to find envelopes and stamps soon...

Friday night

This is my 8^th day in Morocco... (about 1% of PC, for those that keep track). In a little while I'll go out to the Dar Chebab 'youth center' and pick up the guitar they have there to practice with at home. I think in about a week I will buy an Oud, but that depends on if I have enough money. It's not very cheap, considering I spend 40 D's on each lunch. But they are totally worth it, when you see the pictures you will know.

Already we have a routine that we've found, but this one will likely change very rapidly once Ramadan is over. Today we had 5 hours of language lessons, with an hour and a half of napping in the middle after our lunch.

For those keeping track, I've found a person that is willing to run the MdS with me. And my vegetarian group got lucky with our sites here, it is very easy to eat vegetarian here, and the people don't give me any crap about it. And I'm especially happy to know that the egg sandwiches filled with french fries and salad exist here, too (even better, in fact, since they make an omelette with green beans that you can put into bread... unfortunately, there's no yaqhwa to give it that Andean heat that I miss).

But not all is smooth sailing. Already 3 people from my group have quit since arriving in country (at this rate, we will be all gone in about 3 months...). Two are Small business volunteers, so I don't have any contact with them about why they left after only 1 day in their site. But I know one girl from Youth development has likely left as well, since she had a very bad feeling in her town and she ran back to Azrou. Talking to her, I said that the best thing she can do is to trust her intuition, since its pointless putting yourself in a bad spot. But her 2 options now are to return to the site or to go home and get a plane ticket home.

PC can be very tough in this respect. Another person in YD is going through something less challenging but equally demanding. It's related to his host family, and if it goes wrong then they may move him. They asked my advice this afternoon and I said that while he has to think beyond himself as a person and look at the bigger picture of the Peace Corps organization, he must trust his own feeling as well. He replied that his intuition said it is likely not a problem, but that his consciousness is telling him something different. I said how that was the conflict that makes The Adventures of Huck Finn such an amazing book. Because the two things dont necessarily always agree. By the end of talking with him, he had decided to tell his Language coordinator about the issue, which I feel is sort of a vaccine against any permanent harm coming back against him, even though he may have to move from where he is.

OK! More in a bit. Time to go find the guitar from the Dar Chebab.

Saturday night:

It's nearly 9 and we are going out now... I wrote a long email to an SBD volunteer, and here's part of that:

It's Saturday in gorgeous, green Saffron::not the real name::, 30 mins from Fez. Our teacher Fatima took us to see a great waterfall, but she told me that in Azilah there is an enormous one that is very beautiful. She said she took a group of EE volunteers there and she said Azilah was her favorite place in all of Morocco. What do you think of it? I don't know much about my hub Azrou other than that they have a huge monkey population. That's Aydin's place so I will get him to show me around next time.

I feel guilty when I go away from everything to journal but I'm always glad later when I do it.

In a couple of hours we are going to a cafe to sit and hang out with the PCV here. There's a YD and an SBD person here, but I didnt meet the other person yet. I could easily stay here, but its almost too nice. I already feel a lot of nice-country guilt and shame from having it too easy.

I heard there was snow already seen in Azilah in the mountains above it. And I saw on the news that Rabat was badly flooded. We had 1 girl drop-out already from YD and I heard 2 people quit from your program. It's hard to judge anyone that feels like they have to leave. There's so many things going on inside each person, and I'm sure that conflict was likely something that was nascent since before arriving in country.. And maybe it's better that they leave before they invest a lot of their time here. I told her that if her intuition was speaking to her so forcefully against her being there, then that's what she should follow. So she went back to Azrou and David said that she can go back to her town or go get a plane ticket from Rabat. Now I suppose she's in the US again. Apparently she looked at the house and had such a bad feeling of doom that she immediately left. What have you heard about the two people from where you are? Has your language group been able to congeal, or do some people seem to be having a very bad time with adjusting? Emily doing ok with the food and things? (for me being vegetarian is extremely easy with my family).

It's only been four days or so but it seems so much longer.

I discovered that driving in the cab, it's better that you dont watch what the driver is doing. I said that to William, because “if you're not paying attention, then you'll be oblivious if anything happens.” But after I said that, my words actually made me feel less comfortable, so I wish I had kept my mouth shut. I could use some dramamine before the next ride like that... coming here I remembered you probably felt the crazy driving worse than me.

I'm working with Aydin on a t-shirt idea I had. So maybe when I see you again we'll have the design ready to send to the silkscreen co.!

Going to language class, I had this weird epiphany: I feel like I'm slowly becoming Manu Chao. If you know him then I'm sure you know what I mean. So, have you had any new, unexplained blotches on your skin? My stomach's been giving me a pretty hard time so far. The strange thing about being in ::Saffron::—which is about 1.5x bigger than my hometown-- is that these are big city kids and when I walked past a group of 60 school students only about 3 of them even bothered looking at me. That was strange since I felt like some of them were going to try to be brave and do something to me to get cool points. I imagine where you are it's 180* the opposite. They say that you are never as famous as when you are in Peace Corps. I'm used to being stared at and I feel a little sad missing that.

Like I said, my only trouble is that I feel as though I'm 'helping' kids that are actually doing just fine. Nice country guilt. But even worse is my feeling that it seems unfair that YD only is sent to the government-funded youth centers in Arabic speaking places. It seems a little lazy on the part of Peace Corps... but the answer that I was given was that there is a hierarchy of needs, and that's why Health, EE and SBD volunteers are sent to the most needy, often Berber and Tuareg places in place of sending a YD volunteer to the same spots. But I feel that a good YD volunteer would be doing much of the same things, a little bit of each of those jobs, as well as fighting the learned helplessness and introducing some vibrancy into the more destitute places. Instead we're playing ping pong with the middle class. And at the same time, it doesn't have to be just one kind of volunteer in a place or another. It can be both.

Maybe I'm overestimating the standard of living in the sites where they put YD volunteers. PC has a method where they gradually take away a person's material comforts so that the person. Maybe it gets worse from here.

There's no tricks from Bolivia that I can share with you to make things easier or better. Integrating is a painful process that can't be avoided in any way. The pain is inevitable, so the only satisfaction is that after some time you can look and see that you've learned to cope with it. It's very similar to a marathon or an Ironman triathlon. When I'm at the starting line of one of those, I look at the people around me and I pity what they will have to go through, but I know the best lessons come from that difficult place where the doubts appear and must overcome them. The positive value of stress, something we don't see a lot of. But it's enough to make you cry just imagining that person's suffering that is guaranteed to await them.

The one trick that I DO have is that when any of the med sessions start, I take my glasses off. It saves me a lot of sympathetic pain. Since we're supposed to be there and to pay attention, I can fool the staff into thinking that I really am looking at the disgusting close-up disease photos when really it's just blurry red and pink lights that I'm seeing. And it's funny to hear the other people react in unison. But it only works for people with bad eyesight.