Sunday night blog

Just finished another English lesson with Hassan. The funny thing is that I'm having trouble typing on an American keyboard! About every few seconds I have to erase a word now because I will try to hit A and instead it writes W, expecting the French style to show up. Then I have to look and see where the M key is supposed to be because I do not remember!

Like before, Hassan gave me a hug and two kisses, one on each cheek after his language lesson. This time, I responded with less embarassment and faster than before. So, according to the EXTREMELY GOOD Culture Matters book that Peace Corps gives us, I know now that I am becoming conditioned to the habits of people here.

It says the five steps of cultural acclimatization are

1- Observation/ Instruction

2- Imitation

3- Positive, Negative Reinforcement

4- Internalization

then my favorite two words ever:

5- Spontaneous Manifestation, where it just comes out.

I remember in Bolivia how we had our own version of that , the 3 – 6 – 9 rule: 3 months in, and you like something about the culture just barely. Maybe before you couldnt stand it, but now you do not want to vomit and/or kill someone when you have to do it. Its not rejection like it was in the beginning. Its a meager form of acceptance. Then, 6 months to one year in.

The same thing that you gave a 3 before, now you like more than you dont. On a scale of 1-10, this is a 6. You maybe dont get hungry for it, but you are happy when its given to you. You're becoming engulfed by this new community, and so now you're more than half way into its mouth.

Finally, your last days as a Peace Corps volunteer, and you find yourself enjoying that thing immensely—maybe Incan flute music, or something culinary sheep's head?--and you can't get enough of it. The cartilage makes your mouth water, and you are ashamed at the idea that in the US you wont be able to slay your own sheep and eat its head (at least not in public). Yes, it's a 9 now. It's even greater than sliced bread. You dont just eat it when its given to you, but you cook it yourself using your

And when you return home those foods that you listed as a 9 before?

3's. Tolerable. Able to stomach them without wretching.

Enough culture theory! Time for the experience of being a PC Morocco trainee.

This weekend alone I had a man throw a punch at my face for the first time while shouting gibberish, then I fell down the stairs, then I got rained on for 3 hours. But if that's all, then I'd be on the first plane home, like the four people so far in my group that have left already. :***(

No, there was more than enough amazingness to keep me here, begging for more. And after all, everyone should expect a rough landing in any new culture.

Instead I had the experience of being invited to the Moroccan bath houses with my host brother Yasin, while he instructed me on the correct way to experience that amazing thing (we are going again on Tuesday with the 2 other guys, Inshallah). Then the next night I was amazed watching an extremely enthusiastic, charismatic and talented magician, Yassin's best friend. He came to the house and we watched and shouted and laughed when he went through 2 dozen card tricks, some of which truly were remarkable. Finally, today I reached a stride with my host family, making jokes with them and marveling in their ability to laugh for an hour together after the dinner table.

As far as food this week, I got lucky when I saw a vendor selling the same style of egg sandwiches that I ate so often in Bolivia. But Yassin was there and said that I didnt want to eat that because they used dirty oil. I said they were my favorite things, then I thought we were going home but instead he led me to his favorite egg sandwich guy, in the dead center of the Souk. I could barely see the man, instead I only could see his hand dip in and out towards me while he reached in to grab his ingredients. There was a kind of vienna sausage in the shape of a piece of bologna that Yassin said is made of chicken, and also a fried potato cake and the eggs, plus hot sauce. So, I said what I wanted: plenty of hot sauce and the potato cakes in my egg sandwich.

Promptly he whipped up a sandwich for me, throwing everything together on his hot iron, mixing it and pressing the potato cakes flat. Then he crammed it into the half moon sandwich bun (like a pita but much thicker and better), and it was even better than the ones I had in Bolivia. Or if not better, then a delicious new version of the old classic that I would buy in trios, egg, french fries, salad and yachwa spicy dressing.

While playing baseball today we got rained on, so a group of us that were only watching left to go to a restaurant to find some food. This city is extremely well groomed, highly developed, it looks like a Swiss dream village. And its not even as good as the city next to it, Ifrane. Later I got an email from my friend Adriana saying she lives in the most rural village of all. So that helped put into context the utter je-ne-sais-quoi of that town.

My belief is that those two towns must receive a lot of foreign investment. Or a concerted effort by the Moroccan government to demonstrate its readiness to utilize forthcoming foreign investment in a big way.

But at the restaurant—all the while walking there telling my MdS teammate Cara that she has somehow gotten the French chic look down perfectly, like Serge Gainsbourg's daughter Charlotte “It's a matter of elegance and simplicity, really”-- at the restaurant I had two glasses of hot chocolate, a giant piece of bread, a pile of green olives and french fries (usually eaten together, how come we dont do that in the US?), plus some vegetables from the tagine. It was scrumptious.

Coming home, I rolled around in bed for 2.5 hours trying to sleep, and ultimately I went downstairs to help Hassan study English. Almost immediately food was brought out and I ate a bowl of vegetable, noodle and onion soup. It tastes very asian, almost like Raman noodles. If I had stopped there, then it would have been great. But then somebody asked if I wanted rice, so out comes a pile of rice with a green salad, heavy on the onion, and with capers, the first time in my life I wanted capers. I had to take half of it back to the kitchen because I couldn't eat it all when, LO!there on the table there was a brand new cake with walnuts on top and yellow icing. Oh my god! So I told Samiya to save the salad for tomorrow, while I began thinking if it would be less painful to go make myself vomit before trying to eat anything else.

And sure enough, when I sat down, Samiya brought us pieces of cake. And they were about 3x larger than I would ever cut on my own, one for each of us. But it was sure delicious. And halfway through Samiya put another piece on my plate. But I had such a look of fright in my eyes that she took it back. All through this meal, I kept hitting Yasin on the shoulder, saying that he should ' mange! Mange!'

Another funny thing I did was I felt Yassin next to me raise his hand to pat me on the back, and though my back is much better I decided to overreact when he touched me there. So down comes his hand and then I put on my painful face, saying : don't touch me there! Don't touch...”

And I looked out of the corner of my eye while he realized what he had done, and his whole body flinched and he quickly took his hand away as if he had been scalded. IT WAS DAMN FUNNY. But I had done the same joke in the cab with William, and a couple of others (Fatima maybe?) who had known that I had hurt my back but had forgotten long enough to try to touch me there.

I thought back and I remembered a French song that I now decided I will sing everytime that someone presents me an insane amount of food: La decadense by Serge Gainsbourg

(See the post before)

Can't complain! I eat more food here than I ever did at home.

I think that's all I can do now. My brain just locked up. Where to begin?

One nice thing today—besides playing baseball with Moroccan people, where they were immediately good enough to hit the ball and run around the bases. Juan said after 30 minutes: “OK, I give up, they are already better than me!”-- I met a man who spoke to us in English about living in the US. He was a Yellow Cab driver, and he lived in Boston. So he asked us where we came from and he knew the places we were talking about. Then he asked if any of us new Spanish, so I went forward and we spoke in Spanish. He said in spanish that he married a Colombian lady from Cali, and then he started talking about Dominican girls being the sexiest. How strange to be from such different places : Sefrou province vs. Jackson ,TN, and yet to have so many common points of interest, even so far as what languages we speak that are not native to our home towns. And to have our lives changed by the same types of people.

Tonite watching the video I put on Youtube of Sam hitting the baseball inspired me to be more firm in my resolve to learn Darija as fully as possible by the end of training. Because the more I push my self, the more we can push each other since we are in the same class.

A funny thing today is that William shared with me his enthusiasm for the band Ween. The songs were fine, well-done, a bit hoakie, but then I asked him to play another song 'to cleanse my pallet' . So we listened to Simon and Garfunkel, and I told how I had played the star spangled banner during evacuation a year ago this week!

Wednesday night

Im having trouble again using the American keyboard, the same one I've used my whole life. But can't complain.

This morning I called my grandmother on her 84th birthday. It was 830 their time so my granddad didnt understand who I was when I first started speaking, and it sounded like he wasnt enthused to speak to me, but then his whole demeanor changed and he started hooting with excitement. Then on we went talking about what my work here is, who things are and of course the weather. Id had the same conversation with my mother 20 minutes earlier and then with Wilson throughout the time that I was speaking to them. This cyber is just across from the balcony where we spend all of our time in class, so instead of spending the 90 minutes of lunch asleep in the corner, some days I can go there and call home!

But this blog entry I'll call: Back into the blender

Things haven't changed much but I nonetheless feel as if I've somehow been removed from my certainty. After class was over on this splendid, gorgeous day, we had to go to do a Youth development exercise using what's called our PACA tools. This one was to draw a community map. It doesn't seem extremely helpful for our sector compared to the other tools, and it was nice when things got underway and these people started discussing with each other their communities, comparing the map the girls made with the one the older boys made.

But it was also a wakeup call into how far we have to go still before we are in the position of someone like Clark. The drama of this seems deflated on paper, and its nice to see it reduced to human size after translating the experience into words, but while it happened it was slightly bewildering and I felt incapable of anything other than admiring the work that was happening and adding the cascades into the top frame of the map.

And the best thing was having 1-1 conversations with those people that came to the English club. It doesn't help that they all dress nicer than me and that I've suffered from a lack of deodorant. But I was able to spend some time with the young people and learn that this one is interested in heavy metal music, and this one is trying to learn Spanish.

Yesterday our program managers came to Sefrou and interviewed us, talking about what we will do and where we may live after training. I impressed the woman (one of the most awesome Moroccan people that I've met.... extremely attractive and fiery lady who radiates charisma and calm) when I said how some people are hung on the idea of learning arabic, when really there's no advantage of that over the other 2 national languages, the Berber dialects. The reason is that you have to go to Morocco to speak any of those 3 languages, so kif-kif, it's all the same. No one in any other country will know what you are saying, so its not important which of the 3 you learn. And I feel inclined to the Berber because its something more unusual and that has roots in that region long before the Arabic influence came. Not even the script is the same!

I will learn plenty of arabic, but it seems apparent that after saying that, then I will likely go to a Berber site. Sounds great, they are supposed to be great fun, and more open a society than their Arabic peers. And there's the mystique, and they have had to struggle to keep their culture strong, even until today's times. But while that sounds great (I told them that I wanted Tata, without them explaining anything more than that it is the Southern most site in Morocco for YD... “wow! You're just like this other volnteer that pointed to the map and said : that's the one I want” But unfortunately its designed for a woman to go there)--while that sounds great, it means I'd be starting over with the language. And that's exactly like what happened in training with Spanish in Bolivia and getting a Quechua site once I left there. But maybe if they seem inclined to send me to a Berber site, then there's the chance that I might get Fatima to train me on her down-time in Berber, since she knows how to speak it.

It was sure tough to try and get Quechua on my own when I was alone in Candelaria! It seemed insurmountable, and I'd hate to run into the same problem here but I feel more confident and capable.

OK, enough PC process things (though it was fun to listen through the door while William had his John McCain moment “ The longest I've been in one place was my time in Hanoi, but I call Arizona home”, William was born in Stockholm and his parents are Foreign Service).

The fun thing tonite was that I visited Sarah's homestay family. I walked her home, and I got too close to the house's front door : it sucked me in. So soon I was ushered into the expansive living room and after 20 minutes of talking in French with the 12-year old girl in the family and aiding her brother Mohammad to play games on my cell phone (7 years old), we were taken into the dining room where we watched the Obamas on TV, a travel commercial about Secilly in Italy, and we ate our bread and cookies with 3 or 4 kinds of oil, condiments, ' sable du Sahara' and chocolate. The strange thing was that this was the first time that Sara had a person that could communicate fluently with her host family, so I was able to see first hand the struggle to understand and be understood without knowing Arabic or French. In 30 seconds I was able to say and do the things that it had taken her days to achieve, and who knows if they ever really understood what she had tried to say, or vice versa.

It's soooooooo strange. PC. A blender . I felt bad today, overwhelmed, and writing like this now has helped. There's a lot more but I dont have the energy to continue, so goodnite.