§§Ive got pictures for this but the upload function is dragging on too slowly. Next time!§§
Sunday night October 4 09
Its funny how looking at the words Oct. 4, and I think: wow, the month is almost over already, and it just begun!
Spent the weekend so far reading a few, very demoralizing Tolstoy stories that make me question what it is in the world I am doing here. “The death of Ivan Illych” “ The Kreutzer Sonata” “Master and Mind”. It's funny but not.
This week we are halfway through training. For half a week after that we will all be reunited at the beach town Kenitra again to be sworn in. From there, it's 2 months living with another family in Our Town, then another couple of weeks settling into my own home before we are called back all together again for 2 final weeks of technical training. After that I am allowed to go on vacations to nearby countries (it only costs 8 euros to fly to Spain, 30 to go from Spain to Ireland or wherever else...).
Looking at that, it strikes me exactly the same as when I looked at the date, Oct. 4. something like: “darn, one month down and soon Peace Corps will be over.” It's not true, but it sort of is.
In Bolivia I discovered that PC is a revolving door. I have tried to exit once already but I didnt go entirely through the opening on the other side, so instead I walked in a circle, neither wholly home nor entirely free from this great organization, and so I was placed again on the conveyor belt as it trundles through the PC factory. It is a process that is exacting in the length of time needed to complete the service. So, high in the factory above us we see the omnipresent clock telling us how far along we are from completion. We even get charts that describe how our emotional state is supposed to be at each moment, as well as periodic evaluations to see if we correspond to the norm. Two months in, you should feel blindly confident, before the five month low comes. At one month, where I am now, things are mildly irritating, so we are told to think twice before yelling at our host families: “What the f&&& are you looking at?!?” when they are watching us struggle to wash our clothes by hand.
These things are comforting, but for now each experience is so ephemeral that we can only look ahead at what awaits us in the factory. Already 4 in the group have fallen off the belt and swept into a discard pile, shown out through the back door. And I'm perfectly fine with all of the things we must do and are done to us. The resources allow us to integrate more fully than any foreigner ever does outside of becoming a genuine expatriate, rather than a make-believe one as we are now. But the clock also keeps us from fully giving ourselves. After all, some of us timed this so that we'll be back at home in time for the fall semester, 2011, to start.
As it is, I'm 3.6% done with PC, since in Morocco the YD program is just 26 months instead of the stan dard 27. We need a month less because apparently youth development is something that occurs instinctively. One month from now, 2 years will be left. And the day after that in my mind, it will become: one year and some months. It will stay like that a while, but then I wont even need to look up at the clock to see that the revolving door is now rapidly approaching. And I will see that half of the people I've met here are already outside the factory door, on the street corner with their luggage trying to get a taxi ride home. Behind me to my surprise will be 100 or so newly minted volunteers and a group of trainees hoping to be that way. Those in the towns next to me will show the effects of this, as I develop a new good friend, but just for 3 months, then celebrate the arrival of someone new while we lament those that are off to somewhere different.
Because the revolving door turns incessantly. More in my group will have fallen off, and there will be no chance to say goodbye to many of those, since my conveyor belt will have taken me towards a different corner of the factory, a different workshop room or something. At that point, if I dont get medically evacuated for some absurd thing (uncontrollable burping, unexplained arthritis, constant dizziness) then I will be nearly a fully developed product.
I wouldnt be here if I didnt believe in the job, and so I will be glad when we finally get on with it. In some ways I'm more of an idealist than ever. To think that 250,000 people have finished this program, its even more mindboggling than the 1900 that finish each Ironman race, all 20 of them in the world. Yet I wonder if the program had been created in this way, as a program lasting 27+ months rather than 27 months, period. Open ended after a certain point is reached. It seems to me like we are at our most effective once we reach the end of the converyor belt, but there is a direct line to the door. And while we are offered the extra year or very rarely a fourth, it takes a big effort of will to contravene the effects of our conditioning, seeing that clock and our placement in the factory as the belt gradually creeps along at the same pace as always.
Today Yassine and I went to our rooftop to place chestnuts on the ceiling so that the sun will dry them. But as we finished we saw the neighbor has a pomegranete tree and several brances hanging over the fence into our yard. Since they are unable to pick them through the concrete wall, several of them were so ripe that they burst open hanging from the branch. We then tried to devise a way to knock them off without them busting on the floor. He went under the wall with the laundry basket and I stayed on the roof to hit them with a stick. So, after about 10 minutes we had 6 or 7 enormous, bright red pomegranates, and to eat them we went directly up the mountainside to a place he knows overlooking all of Saffron. “Now, we are professional thieves.” Yassine said to me.
We emerged from a pine forest to see Sefrou below, and in the distance a snow capped mountain 35 miles away, the second tallest one in Morocco. I didnt see the snow, but that's what Yassine said is there. We had binoculars, though, from my birdwatching so we were able to point out different landmarks.
This week we have language classes all day and nearly no time at the Dar Chebab. This is done on purpose, since training has been reorganized for our group. Normally we would spend the first month in the hub city, everyone staying at a hotel, then on to Saffron or a small town for just a month. I think the director at the Dar Chebab was happy to see that she'd be getting 6 PST's for 2 months, instead of the usual one, but since we've only been there 3 times since arriving—the Program manager's orders—she is disillusioned that we are actually spending less time there than ever before. Walking down from the neighboring mountain, this was on Yassine's mind since he too feels that we are somehow evading our contract with the Dar Chebab. All I could say was that I am following the orders of the boss, and that there's a difference between PST's and PCV's, that we will have endless hours at our own Dar Chebab's later where we will continue to learn about the 'Moroccan mentality' and the opportunity to make a difference. We just aren't focused on that in regards to his Dar Chebab.
I think our absence there is especially apparent to them because they are feeling the effect of Clark leaving at the same time we do, and no volunteer will be sent to replace him.
I think also that because I learned in Bolivia how 2 years, 3 months starts sounding like not a lot at all-- I got through 1/3 of the service and to show for it all I had done was help dig 20 holes in the ground and plant apple trees-- so to me I have that mentality already at a very early moment in the service. Having been through 30% of the factory already, I'm aware of the size and scope that it takes to get from one end to the other and back.
Yet simultaneously I was aware, too, how long exactly I'd be gone from home. I also have the hope that I'll do a better job this time, but even though nearly everything is easier for me here (though I'm learning Darija for the first time, even the language learning part is easier, because I'm actually interested and engaged, rather than hitting myself on the head trying to sit through Spanish lessons that I've already had), the feeling that I am being a more successful volunteer is elusive. Partly that comes from doing a lot more of the recommended reading on my own, and I kind of have that lost sense of innocence to the culture shock and the pain from that. I see better how little I comprehended of my own strangeness to the people I am around, and I wonder if I alienated many of them without realizing it by doing something entirely American with no Bolivian counterpart in their own culture. Thinking this way, its easy to get embarrassed, thinking for the second time of stuff I did unthinkingly the first time, from rote habit and my own cultural conditioning, rather than a deliberate attempt to filter those actions through a Bolivian mindset first.
I also think I relied too heavily on the other PCVs near me. I'll have to make more of an effort to befriend Moroccan people. It seemed rare to find a Bolivian invited to spend time with us, other than Roxana's friends from the Wasi. Or maybe, it was less rare and more something unplanned, something that happened occasionally without any warning because it wasn't something we sought to do.
Every now and then I find common threads. In Bolivia I had hoped to do the nearby Chile Atacama race, here I have the Marathon des Sables. I will try to write more such things in a later article. I did this again with the belief that I'd be able to more fully encounter the host country and to understand it better. It's disappointing to find myself be harassed by the lesser aspects of culture shock, even while I am better able to identify what is going on. In a lot of ways, Bolivia was less foreign and more inviting, maybe less judgmental. And there exists a greater feeling of isolation here at times. I think Iin my mind I feel that I had a cache of loneliness that fills up and after a sufficient amount of time not being lonely—a year at home—then I'd be able to start from 0 with my tolerance to loneliness, completely cured of the bit I had before. Instead, I feel as sensitive to ever of being lonely. That bin was never emptied but remained. Maybe that's how it feels to go to prison a second time, like the time free never was able to erase the bitterness of being incarcerated and so there's really not a first day the second time, but it's emotionally day 181. More than once so far I've thought : this is really my second year of PC, and I'm doing 3 years. It certainly is that way for my family and for Serena, even if I didnt see it like that until I got here.
Time to hit the books! For lunch we had pressure-cooked potatoes in a mild red sauce, a bowl of ' dried apricot soup' and some of the firm hobs bread, plus a carrot and red onion salad with some spicy, mustard-mayonaise-black pepper type sauce in it.
When I finish the next Tolstoy story, Ill be able to resume reading Zazie dans le metro, the novel in french I brought with me. Samiya found it today under my bed when we organized my room and swept. Somehow a pile of dirt appeared in one corner of the room and it wasn't me that put it there. But I enjoy reading the PC literature. A lot of the meetings and lectures that we have to go cover things in such a generalized way, and they repeat the basic idea in a hundred different ways. This is fine to me, because I realize that with a larger and larger group, they must dillute the message and drive it in as firmly as possible, preaching to the lowest common denominator (a little bit like a Hollywood movie?). So things are tailored to the weakest link, the person that pays attention the least or that doesn't have a lot of common sense.... which is generally all of us, at different times and in different circumstances. But it can be boring.
The Culture Matters book, though, and some of the other are wildly amazing books that are enganing and humorous, fun but informative. Talking to my friend Adriana, who worked with an organization in the Dominican Republic similar to Peace Corps, they said the organization copied Peace Corps' rules nearly exactly, since they were so effective.
If I ever have a bad day as a volunteer, I just think how glad I am to have literally hundreds more resources and tools available that didnt exist before. Speaking to Jack, who is a volunteer in my group but that did Peace Corps in Turkey back in 1965, he said that the medical questionaire was one page during the application, and the only thing on it was the question: “Are you healthy?”
Having my back examined by one of the 3 PC doctors here in Morocco, I was happy that it's not 1965. He said that I needed to take ibuprofin to help reduce the inflamation, even if it doesn't hurt a lot. That way, it will heal faster, he said.
Thursday and Friday I was in Azrou, our hub city, with all of the remaining YD volunteers. There's not much to say except that some people got shots, we got to eat pizza for the first time in a month (tasted good, though the cheese was more like middle-school cafeteria pizza than something that should be served in a restaurant), and those of us who didnt go to sleep at 11 ended up staying awake until 2:30 in the morning.... normal camp type activities, too, like learning how to play bananagrams, and upset that the portuguese word Nua didn't count, even though it was a perfect link between 'Vixen' and 'aqua'.
One of our PCT's, David, gave a presentation about Islam since that was his minor in college, and Aydin from Iran gave us a talk about the Sunni Shia split. He said the Shia's are most like Catholics, in that they feel Muslims need an intermediary between God and people. Aydin later drew a portrait of me lying on the ground, so this whole thing was a nice time away from Saffron, and a chance to debrief in a large group, lick each other's wounds and to share the books that we've finished. It ended quickly, and the next day we were in taxis going back home. But it also helped to teach me more about the people I am sharing space on the conveyor belt with, and to have some special moments with the staff, like walking to the bus station with Fatima our main security person, and hear how she is preparing a PhD on society and morality. Or to play drums at 10 PM with 3 of the Moroccan language and culture coaches. I feel like my rhythm skills were sufficient to keep up with those guys, though the Cuban/conga drum influence I have from home was apparent.
I was able too to download the newest JayZ album, that has quickly become my source of inspiration to get out the door and to engage Morocco without any fear. I'm anxious to buy the new Shakira album, since it seems like her art and actions have consistently mirrored the ups and downs, beginnings and endings in my own life. I feel as if I've matured alongside her somehow. That's supposed to be out by the end of the month... so each Tuesday, you can believe I will be checking iTunes!
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