Wednesday, April 21, 2010

April's ending, what's next?

Hi Ya'll! Love to all my people supporting me, far from South Morocco!

Today has been good so far : the last week, I've been taking my Tashleheet book to all of my lessons, getting everyone there a chance to look at it. Many of them have never seen their own language written down before, even though there is a Berber alphabet and a Berber TV station—still, it's not quite THEIR language, in many cases different enough that they don't understand it. And my book is not quite their language either, the book has what's called Souci Tashleheet, the version of it spoken along the Souci Valley near the coast. To make it easier, then, for the volunteer that comes after me to Nkob, I'm getting people to help me translate this copy into Nkob Tashleheet. So that person will already have the Tash book changed into the correct forms. Many times it's just changing one letter in the word, a K into a H, or something.

But the surprise doing this was that Ilhem my 12-year old host sister seems to be taking this on as her own thing. She wants to help me do that, in exchange for English. Great! Well, I'd offered English just to her already, but it didn't catch on as a habit. Maybe this will make it more cherished to her, since she's putting in her own effort, greater “ownership of the lessons” and “buy-in”. I'm also hoping to take her with me to the Cyber after class today, get her hooked up with an MSN and Gmail account. She's the smartest person in Nkob, and the only class that prevents her from being No1 in the school is that she needs help with Music class. So that's on the Agenda, too!

I'll have to get a second guitar before too long so that I can have real classes, and there's a Korean girl that will sell me a violin (I want to take lessons while I'm here with the Music Prof at the lycee, he's an amazing violin player... I've seen better but he's really dramatic and focused on it).

There's a lot of things to look forward to the next 2 months, the next 6 months. I was upset last week, thinking that my laptop had something fatally wrong with it. I had it leaned on its side, watching while I had my head on my pillow when it started to make a wretched noise. So I turned it off immediately, let it set there for 3 days and luckily now it's started again several times without any trouble. That makes me happy because all of my creative work and my blog I can resume working on, plus just being able to charge my iPod and my Kindle.

WHAT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO
Thursday I go to Agdez, where we'll have a bike ride the whole weekend through some of the offshoot towns around Zagora. It's sponsored by an NGO and it will be half PC volunteers, and half Medical staff giving check-ups and med supplies to people along the way. They've done it for four years or so. When we arrive to these towns, we will have our PCVs giving small presentations, English lessons, Small Business skills, games and activities plus health topics. Then there's a thing where these towns will host a celebrate us

It's just like what we did when we went to Mhmid before, though it's larger and better organized. But those PC English weekends I think we will try to do again before too long. I liked the first one we did and so I anticipate doing it again (plus I always cherish the times when the people in our region get together).

A few weeks after the bike ride and I'll take my first vacation, hoping to spend a week going from here to Agadir and back, seeing people around Tata and Taroudant. Especially before it gets way too hot. Anyone I see after the end of May will be as far North as possible, towards the Mediterranean coast.

The big thing that I'm doing in my free time –other than my usual Patience practice : marathon training and reading Proust—is that I'm researching to make a book for Peace Corps volunteers to use. Nothing too complicated, it's called Positive Psych & Brain Busters for PC Vols. So I'm summarizing all the things I know about that, and I'm going through the books that the PC library has about that. That means I'm reading things like : Understanding Youth, and STEPPING FORWARD Child Participation in Development. The main part will be activities that promote critical thinking, which is the biggest challenge and the greatest reward that we can cultivate during our service.


Other than that, May will bring its own surprises. I'll be spending that month getting ready to go back to Rabat to see all of my staj mates again. Finish the books that I borrowed from the library (the ones for my research on Youth dev, and Kundera which I really want to put down and never look at again, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus edition, and a few books I borrowed from other volunteers).

June : a week in Rabat doing more training, and several days spent going there and coming back. I'd like to go to the Gnaoua festival but I heard it's too many American PCVs, too much drinking, too much everything. That makes it more dangerous and I don't think I'd get to enjoy the music.

July : hopefully I get to fly across the Way, visit Switzerland for a night or two at the Montreux Jazz fest, Brazilian night. And I have a sneaking suspicion that Sade might perform there since her album came out this past February. Other than that, it'll be 4 weeks doing Summer camp in Ejjadida, the end of July and the first part of August.

Then, Ramadan! I'd rather disappear for the entire month this goes on. A couple of days with my host family would be nice, to break the fast together. It's a really REALLY big deal to wait until the moment the sun has set, and then wait for the Sunset call-to-prayer. It's like you can close your eyes and hear 6 million spoons, forks, bowls be picked up at the same time and carried to their mouth. And it's the best cookies and treats of the entire year. But this will be the hottest Ramadan in 10 years, since it moves forward and back, since it's based on the lunar calendar and not the Western one. And hot enough that, when noone is allowed to eat or drink anything—except the youngest and the sickest people—it's a real marathon to get through the month.

September, I'm trying to see if I can go to Madeira for a race. Any PC people want to go with me? It's the Coffee capital of Europe, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, a 70 dollar, 1.5 hour plane trip from Lisbon. I'd be willing to translate for you! I'm hoping this would line up well with Eid Kbir, so I have a good excuse not to be around for that.

October, December-- There's stuff I hope I can do. It's coming quickly, but it's too far around the corner, so no point showing my cards too early. The sad thing is that November, all of my Regionmates. Literally, ALL of them, will be replaced. We'll get maybe 10 newbies that I'll have to nurse to health. And when they arrive, that's it : I'll have done all of the systematic Peace Corps stuff one time, and each thing I do I won't be repeating any more. We'll have a thing called Mid-Service Med's, then three months before going home we have our Close-of-Service conference. My regionmates will be doing that this summer. Then, the do their victory lap months, revisiting all the people and places that they liked the best before the end. I've been there at the Stamping-Out ceremony in Rabat (for the people that we replaced), and they give you a big stamp, Moroccan-style you know, that you stamp next to your signature in their Livre D'or. Then some are headed South through West Africa with Zach, my Spring camp coordinator. A couple of them will head to Brazil for the holidays. Jeremy's going to either Northern South America through Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, or South through Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru. Man, I'm jealous! Rachel is planning to go to Sao Paulo for awhile. The past two weeks especially I've been very pensive, remembering my first time in South America on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, tierra querida. Barranquilla, Santa Marta.

MISC Stuff to look forward to :
Once in Rabat, I'll join the Portuguese “Camoes” cultural center. So that means I can get a handful of books from their library to read, so long as I'm willing to come back a few weeks later by bus and drop them off again. I'll do the same with the Cervantes Institute. I realize for the same amount of money I can fly to these countries, going back and forth from Rabat or Marrakesh. But traveling there AND having the money to buy 4 or 5 books, that's trickier and more expensive than the travel. And I have the benefit of grabbing more books for free from the PC library while I'm at it. Until then, I have 4,500 pages of Proust in French, A la recherche de tempus perdu, which I'm reading on my Kindle and that I only payed $0.99 for! Plus, every now and then I spend $0.75 on an issue of O GLOBO, the biggest paper in Brazil. One click, and it downloads to my Kindle and I get to practice that language that I hope to teach and study one day at universities in America and Europe.

Peace and love!

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Proustian Pleasures
by Marcelle Clements
from Oprah magazine July 2006


Some readers are lucky: they fall in love with Proust on page one and enter a sort of rapture that transports them through all six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Others struggle, resist, quit in a huff. My guess is that many readers are alternately smitten and outraged by Proust's prose style, especially in theopening pages, when we are in the dark-or rather, in a room where the drapes are drawn- and the only thing we can figure out with any certitude is that the narrator is unable to get to sleep and that this reminds him of many other sleepless nights.

Alas, many readers never get past the first 50 pages. They drift away, perhaps persuading themselves that they have read Proust. But you can't understand the beginning of In Search of Lost Time if you haven't read the end. And every volume is different from the last. The spirit of the work seems to change, expand, even to mutate as we ourselves evolve, if only because it takes us so long to finish it that we are no longer the person we were when we began. Certainly, we are no longer the same reader. We are seized with a strange, deep affection for long sentences, for precisely articulated aesthetic judgments, for witty illuminations about cruel duchesses and crazy barons, for portraits of divine, self-deciving men and the deliciously ambiguous women who torment them, and we probably no longer even remember our original reason for beginning In Search of Lost Time.

This- how all is ephemeral in ourselves, especially desire- is one of the great themes of Marcel Prout's masterpiece. Indeed, if you make it to the end, you may well find yourself picking up the first volume and rereading the opening pages with something resembling bliss- your biggest regret that you no longer have the whole experience ahead of you- and thereby demonstrating once again how right Proust is when he declares that the only true paradise is paradise lost.

If you want to finish Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, here is the secret: Read fast. Read for plot- though you won't understand what the plot is until the end. Don't be frightened by the size of the novel. Critics scare readers off by talking of it as a cathedral. Everything about it is big: its size and reputation, its ambition, the chunk of history it encompases. But 4,500 pages isn't much, considering its prodigious cast of characters; its unparalleled metaphors, allusions, digressions (an army of parenthetical remarks); its sinuous paragraphs; its unbelievable sentences (sometimes several pages long)- profuse, infintesimally detailed descriptions alternating with bald statements of huge ideas- that sum up the previously unarticulated, ineffable relationship we have to love, loss, death, truth, nobility, vulgarity, culture, prejudice, ideals, art, women's fashion and military fashion, flowers, smells, names, words, places and the idea of place, memory, desire, and regret.

All you need to start is that this is, in Proust's words, a story told by "a man who says 'I'." This narrator, an educated man with a great memory, has trouble sleeping. In the opening pages, in the dark, we are bobbing about on the surface of his consciousness. Soon he is remembering, as a little boy, yearning upstairs in bed for his mamma's good-night kiss while, down in the garden, his parents, grandparents, and two zany maiden aunts converse with the wonderfully elegant Monsier Swann, a family friend. Night deepens. The blooming hawthorn bush releases its bittersweet scent. And now is when you, the reader, inexorably drawn into Proust's beautiful sentences, are mightily tempted to pause and admire the metaphors, the music of the language. No! Don't stop reading! Don't lie down in the snow! You can read Proust for the poetry of his prose, but not if you want to read all of In Search of Lost Time. You must do violence to yourself and keep going. Don't forget: You can always return. If you do as I suggest, before too long the narrator's recollections are so intimately connected with yours that you can't always distinguish between them. Then you're truly on your way.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Some not bad but not good news





Well, Development is all about finding common ground between what you want/can do and what the people want/can do.

So today was my international cuisine cooking class, but at lunch time Ilhem (she's my host sister, 12 years old and the smartest person in town), she said that most girls come on Tuesday not because they want the cooking class but because they don't have class that day.

This means that I thought there was a surplus of students because they liked the cooking class, but instead it's just because they came wanting English on their day off. And then I have food, and very little English, and that's OK but not what they want.

So now it's 2:30, I'm trying to find something in the next hour and a half to do for them. My hope to teach them French Toast --in order to find a recipe they don't know, I explain to my family what the recipe is like... so it was funny when I used all kinds of gestures trying to explain what French toast is like--has now evaporated, and while I'm glad to save money I'm sad that my favorite part of the week did not have the cult following like I had hoped.

But it's not about me, and it's not about what I want to do. And maybe it's less that they were anti-Cooking class, and more that their free day, where there's no school, they wanted 100% English. So maybe this means the cooking class can be an end of the week celebratory-type thing.

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Other stuff: two weeks until the big weekend bike ride around my region. And it'll be a hot one. I'm still wearing wool : the strange thing about staying a long time in Morocco is that you learn to forget short sleeve everything. I learned this is partly the bugs, but also because most people are not in the sun for long, they are nearly always hiding in shaded places. And this country is called : the cold country with the hot sun. So a lot of layers and you cover up every inch of your body even when it's 100 degrees outside. The third reason to stay like that is because of the miniscule mosquitos that cover your body in bites. It's bad, but it's not so bad if the only thing showing are your eyes.

Man, I only go to the internet once every three days now, so looking at my GMAIL I have almost 700 unread messages.

Glad to see Mohamed Ahansal won the 25th Marathon des Sables! And a woman named Monica Aguilera. Mbruk! Congratulations

It's interesting to go there and look at the Dessins du jour :

I like it because they basically illustrate my life here each day. This week I'll try to write a series on my blog called 'five years ago today..." Check for it! Bye, love you all

Friday, April 9, 2010

Cous cous day

Well! I've been given 5 minutes notice to leave the cyber. Normally, Friday is the best day to go to the cyber because all over Zagora region noone is at a cyber except me and a couple of others. In the whole region. Why? They all go to the mosque instead. So I can get online and in a matter of minutes I've downloaded hundreds of megabytes of new podcasts, emails, all the good things that normally take forever. So Friday at lunch time is always a happy day, I get an amazing amount of bandwith and then I go home to eat Cous Cous, like all good Muslims do on Friday.

But today is different, there is not the young helper at the cyber but instead the owner. So he said :

"Excusez-moi, Addi, cinq minutes? C'est vendredi."

So I'll have to save my good blog posts for next time. Bsalama!

Monday, April 5, 2010

First few pictures of camp






Looking like Glen Hansard a bit in this picture... a steely, Irish musical warrior. The next pics are from Faguig and the beach at Saidia, it's me in the front with my face down in the sand. Pretty hilarious. I was really tired (and hairy). thanks to Shawn for all these photos!
That's why I left my camera at home











Friday, April 2, 2010

Camp is over, nothing too major bad, a lot of very good things.

I'll give you the scoop as I evaluate everything and let it ferment over the next few days of travel back to my town, some distance to see what lessons I have to extract from this. But it was nearly all pretty amazing, and our performance of We are the World was a good experience for everyone involved.

Eager to get some rest and enjoy a day off tomorrow before traveling to Faguig on Sunday. Tomorrow, visiting the Oujda medina and maybe the hammam after going to the beach again tomorrow afternoon in Saidia. Peace and Love.

Thursday, April 1, 2010



Going to sing these two songs tomorrow now at our Spectacle.
It's a moving experience to sit on a park bench with four Moroccan youth and listening to them sing these words while I strum my guitar. That made all of camp for me!

But there's been a lot of great moments: the 3 different dance parties--and doing the Tennessee square dance with them, which they all already knew-- going to each of the Clubs with my English class, the times when you sit and talk with a young Moroccan person and they reveal a depth of personality and a height of ambition. It is the best part of Peace Corps, and I'm glad that it will only be three months before I get to do it again.

P.S. Zach says 'hi Mama. Miss you tons!' He's very busy because he gets surprise announcements like : we're not doing our thing, so find something to do for the next hour for the campers. Or when we do have something prepared, we learn that our activities are canceled in order to have time for the delegue.


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PEACE CORPS OR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT**
This blog is mine alone, and I am responsible for all content.