A Country of Forced Language Nerds

Ojala que Llueva Cafe en el Campo ; If only it'd rain coffee out in the country

I suppose if Morocco didnt have it's advantageous position at the head of the Mediterranean, everyone here would speak one of the many Berber dialects. But as it is, t'aint so. And starting a long time ago, with each year it becomes a smaller country. The Arabs took the country and later the French did. You can walk in Southern Spain and not be sure if you're in Morocco, just as you can walk in Northern Morocco and think you're in Europe. You walk down my street, and after you shake each of their hands and ask how their families are doin', the people sometimes then point at each other and say , “Sudan”, and that is an attempt to explain their extremely dark skin.

Anywhere you get that kind of overlap, you'll never stop being surprised at the strange things that emerge from it. Which is precisely what makes America so unique, whether you look back to see what emerged from the 5 Corners in New York a hundred years later, or you find the life of pre-modern Midwestern life and desolation of immigrant communities unable to reach out to others not-like-them that you get when you read Willa Cather.

But this is all stuff that has nearly always been a part of their life here. So where does one influence begin and another stop? I feel like the closer you look the harder it is to distinguish them. Is this thing European, or is it something that Morocco gave to Europe a long time ago that was forgotten here and is now coming back again from the other direction?

Or similarly, you cook with a dozen different ingredients, and you mix it and cook it, it stops being sugar and butter and stuff you don't want to eat by itself, and it's given a soul. Writing this, it reminds me of my favorite part from Swann's Way , where he is sitting listening to music, and he says how the musicians were

The consequence of there being 4 national languages, and then the emergence of a strong desire for English—or even to put it more exact, that every town speaks a different Arabic, speaks a different Berber, speaks a different French—is that when people sit together, the one continuous topic of choice is language. Im sure I bring this out in people when I sit among them, but I know that long after they've forgotten I'm there they continue to talk about it. And you see it in how hard they work on improving. So, I see more clearly each day just how much of a nerd these Language Nerds really are.

At the same time, these people have just enough resources to get them started learning a language—and close enough proximity to its speakers to keep their interest up—but they are necessarily autodidactic. To put it in perspective, it's a largely different experience than what we go through in the U.S., where you study a language for years and never meet a person that actually speaks it fluently. For us it's solitary, mind-numbing, rote learning. You hardly make progress, and you fight to just remember the things you've already studied. You don't know ever how the words are supposed to sound, because you've never hardly heard anyone say them out loud, and the teachers focus on pronunciation last, or never.

Last night gave me an even greater appreciation of these people. It's amazing when you find a surprising talent that's done a lot more than you with a lot less. It's even more astounding when you continously find such people.

I'm wide awake at the moment and feel fine but this post feels like a life-or-death struggle to get to the next word! So I will just say what my experience was yesterday:

My program staff visited my town yesterday, and just in time. After one of the many crises weekends I've had here, he came on a scheduled visit to see things and offer feedback. Which I didn't foresee, but as always it was a great opportunity to feel proud of my town, share my life here and my favorite people and places here with those that are paying my way.

He was here a total of three hours, we saw my Dar Chebab, met with the Gendarmes to check on my Carte de Sejour, sat with my director Hassan for half an hour and then enjoyed tea while we filled some forms. Drove the Landrover threw the ancient part of town alongside the palmerie, and even picked up Islan and Mhmed on the main drag as they walked home from class. A couple of minutes Abdelghani came back to the car with three packaged ice cream cones, one for each of us.

Much of the time Abdelghani spoke Arabic and I caught only bits and pieces. It felt good to not be the only Peace Corps person in my town, to have someone that represents the heart and the official face of what we're doing, someone that can easily converse with all the people around me, that can explain what it is that is trying to be done here.

As I type this, I get very weary and wish I could take a shower and wash that ambiguity off. Tennessee I could do that. But Abdelghani's since gone and I'm still here.

Continuing the story: Abdelghani summarizing how he felt the day went, said : It's really special here, I think it's really great what you're doing here. Both Hassan and Zaid said that this is an especially difficult town here to meet people, to be accepted. People aren't open. They don't share themselves and only when they strust you do they let you into their lives. But once you're there, you're like equals with one of their family members. That's what Zaid called you. Hassan said he can count on seeing you zoom past on your bicycle before class, only to hear 15 people along the way calling out Addi! (My Berber name).

I agree completely with what he says, especially since I had the idea last week about who it is that interacts with me. Someone was asking about the women that come to study with me, and I said : for the ones that come, it's no problem that I'm a man teaching them and they are women. It's only a problem for the ones that don't come, that's why I never see them. Just like that, then, I go up and down a dozen streets in my town and it feels as though I interact with everyone and they are all bright and open, but it's partly because the ones that would not wish to do so with me, already don't. I don't see them, so it could be 5x more of them, but my day is full with those people that do reach out to me.

The past two weeks I've desired to get out more and see other such people in the town, those that have a personal relationship with me, but one that is still superficial. Name-only. But even beyond that, even if my world stays the same size, I'll be kept busy the entire time I'm here. Unlike my past job as an Ag volunteer—where the experience of trying to find work was constantly interrupted—I've got no shortage of things here I can be doing.

*One strange thing is that Abdelghani is the first Moroccan man I've met that identifies exclusively with being an Arab. I saw Zaid ask if he had any Amazirgh in him, and he said no, Arab only. I wondered what each person thought at that moment.

After Abdelghani had left, going now towards Christa's town, I cooked again my Thai Coconut Curry recipe, this time with Potatoes, pasta and corn for the base. The day before, I ran 20 miles for the first time this year, and on the way from my house to the palmerie I'd seen a Dutch family that came through. When my food was ready—I've called this Thai curry with its hundreds of calories and feel-goodness as my Recovery meal once each week after my long run—I wandered through the home to where the woman and her son sat eating. When I saw them, they asked where I should go to eat. I pointed to my home, and was happy the day before to finish the run and to have known that they had stopped there to eat.

And it was funny to find that they were still here! The lady said they were traveling in Morocco for two months until the school began again. She said they decided to come here partly because 20% of their students are Moroccan in Amsterdam. This also helped me feel pride for being here, after talking to her for an hour and a half. “It's great to be here because usually people find this place by accident. But then many of them either don't want to leave or else they leave and change their plans and come back.”

She said she'd been here hardly at all, but that they'd felt the same way. They had their room at the nicer hotels but said they'll stay in Nkob for 4 days in order to relax. Not only that, but said they'd rather have stayed at my Casbah. Taking in the grand sweep of my life here in this short morning, I saw how blessed I was. If I'm going to be away from home, then I'm glad this is where I will be.

This was lucky because after our time together ended, I had a new friend that had invited me to possibly stay at their place, to hook me up if I come to Amsterdam. And as a language nerd myself I learned the correct way to pronunce Van Gogh's name, as well as learned where to go to find where Rembrandt and Van Meer's paintings are found there. We both reminisced about Normandy, Lille, the Ch'ti culture and our favorite places in Belgium, as well as learning about a town in the Alps in North Italy where her sister lives, in a region near Austria that has fought for autonomy from Italy because they feel closer to their historic Austrian roots.

The afternoon had my usual tutoring with Dar Chebab girls. I turned half of them away in order to have a good session with the 3 best students, though some of them remained and so I fed them English words while they wrote a transliteration of what I said in Arabic script.

The three girls that are intermediate level wanted a dialogue. Instead, I said, how about I write a story and then we talk about it?

OO, yes! Tell us a romantic story!

So in five minutes time I wrote a reduced version of my favorite Romantic Story. It went like this:

ATONEMENT

There was once an English man named Robbie. He was in love with a woman named Celia, but her family was very powerful and they did not like him being with her. When someone got hurt, they blamed him. He was sent to a prison in France. His one chance to escape twenty years of being in French prison was to fight in World War II, and so he took it. He would be able to see Celia again if he survived fighting the Germans...

After reading this four or five times and describing words and grammar things they didn't know, they were hooked on these two characters. I followed it with questions, like “Who was the poor person and who was the rich person, Celia or Robbie?” “The prison was a safe place and he could stay there and knew that after many years he'd be able to go back to his home. Fighting was not safe but it was his chance to see Celia. He could die before he sees her again, or he stays safe and gets to know her later in life. What would you do?” Then, “If she loves Robbie, which is one person, but she also loves her family, which is 10 people, is it fair of Robbie to take her away from them, if he has to choose? Is it better for Robbie to say, no, be with them and forget me?” They thought, some of them nodded, and I said : “But that is an extremely hard thing to say.”

It felt like Love is something they almost never discuss, and were eager and encouraged to see me so at ease talking about it. I thought people were finished at this point, but I said : Zit shwiya? A little more?

They nodded and I wrote another story.

Samuel the Pirate

“Samuel was a man that was extremely handsome. He lived before movies were invented, but was as beautiful as any movie star. People called him Camel Eyes because his eyelashes were nearly as long and his eyes as nearly as big as those on a camel. He had government friends and could have respectability if he wanted, but he didn't. He sometimes wished to have a family, but instead he liked to take money from boats in the ocean, and to leave the people on deserted islands far from everything. One day, however, he found a boy hidden in his boat.

Before, Samuel would not have waited. Of course, the boy will become a pirate like me! But for the first time, he had questions about whether the boy should become a pirate as well. If he wasn't sure, then that meant he himself didn't feel comfortable with what he did. So maybe he had chosen the wrong life for himself...

–

After this story, I asked questions but I also looked at the themes. Respectability vs. Freedom. One goes up and the other goes down, and vice versa. Family vs. travel. Love of self versus love of another person. People that learn how to do things that they don't like, and you need an outsider with fresh eyes to come and show you how much you've changed, how much you've allowed yourself to fall.

This was my first literature lesson that I've had with them!

After this I found myself headed to my usual 6PM hangout, the nearby Cafe facing the mountains towards Teftchna, where Lahcen works. I'd try to give him a Spanish lesson the week before, but he told me he was hungover and could not begin to think in Spanish. So it'd been awhile, but this ended up being so good today that our Spanish work continued for nearly 2 hours.

Next thing you know, Mhmed had spotted me on his bicycle, reminding me that I'd promised to start hour long English lessons each night. Instead i'd been sitting with Lahcen, drinking tea and practicing sentences like : Five years ago, I was 20 years old: Hace cinco anos, tenia 20 anos. El ano pasado, tenia 24 anos. Ahora tenemos 25 anos.

So I ended that—not sure how long we could have kept going, as the sky changed colors about us and the sun migrated beyond the mountains before our eyes.

Next thing you know, we ran into my host Grandma and my host aunt. It's the house next to mine, so we parked our bikes, and one of the ladies handed us a pile of dates and bread to eat, along with a chilled bottle of water. My work day, I found out, was nowhere near finished for the day!

“Speak Italian!” Ilhem said, pointing to the host aunt. I knew she'd lived in Italy, and I said the introductary phrases that everyone knows. But like I mentioned at the top of this article, I shouldn't have been surprised when we had a half hour conversation in Italian about who we both where, the shared experience of ours of living in another country alone and far from home, how glad she was to be back, the fact that she works at the Milano airport. I happened to have my Super Brividi book in my bag and I handed it to her, then I showed my Spanish-Italian dictionary, and she demonstrated the Spanish she knew, before repeating the same in Italian to demonstrate to the 4 others around us how close the two languages are. Le lingue sono come fratelli. I said. The languages are like brothers, the same family and look the same but with their own personalities.

We had a lot to say and could have continued, but Ilhem now wanted us to switch back a language that they knew. Oh, oK, 'il faut parler en francais pour le respet des autres”. We should speak French in order to show respect to the others here.

The next hour then became an English lesson for Saida and Mhmed. I gave Saida her first English lesson the week before, and she came last night with all of the words memorized, plus a dozen more words for the different parts of the body. Our group of three soon became 6 as people crowded around the desk to listen in.

Mhmed needed to learn how to describe the weather : It is raining, it is foggy, it is cloudy. My explanation was that fog is like a cloud, but it's not above us, it's around us. Saida simultaneously studied prepositions, so I drew a picture of a cloud, and showed her wonders like, we are below the clouds (in this picture) but in this one we are “in” the clouds. Then I switched it, saying that the clouds are above us, the clouds are around us. Same drawings, different ways to explain it.

While this went on, Ilhem tried to follow us, and they all spoke in Tash and Arabic trying to interpret for each other what it was that I was saying. The aunt took out a pen of her own and began writing down new words that she heard, while repeating them in Italian to connect in her mind what I said and what she already knew. “Ah, le nuvole.” Clouds. When they got to the question about Nairobi being 25 degrees C, I asked where that was. They didn't know so I ran to my room and got the new world map that Mel had given me. But halfway down the stairs, I saw I couldn't show them this map as it is. I had to go back, grab a marker and draw a thick line over the part that says : Western Sahara.

“Here it is! Nairobi's in Kenya!”

Finally it was time to sleep, though I was invited for a bowl of soup first. A minute or so in, and they asked me how many books I had in my room.

“60, I think.”

“How many have you read?”

“Of those, only 2 or 3. Because I get them and when I finish I pass them on. So all of the ones there are new.”

They wanted to know if I had any in French, so I showed them my “100 Most Beautiful Poems in French” volume, my LeClezio book about nomads called Desert, and my Quineau book Zazie dans le metro. I hid my Baudelaire book in my room because it had a painting of a naked woman on the cover. The last one, Paul Bowles' Un the au sahara, I bought 3 years ago at a FNAC store the last day I was in Lille, long before I'd be living in the Sahara!

Just for fun, I showed them my copy of 1001 Arabian Nights that I have in Portuguese. I explained how the D sounds like 'gee' and the T sounds like 'chee' in their alphabet. They were happy when they figured out what the book was. “You know, Ali Baba, like that.”

Im not sure American people would listen as enrapt as they did during my whole spiel last night. There are those of us, though, fellow language nerds that get off on that kind of thing. But this country is unique and special in that everyone (especially younger people) are language nerds, even if they don't particularly want or chose to be so.

One last thought : Listening to Waka Waka (Shakira's FIFA anthem for the World Cup this year in South Africa), and aware of Africa's need to make a lot more progress on human rights and environmental issues, I'm thinking how many people there are that live and study these places but never visit them. there's a tendency to say, 'That post-card image is not the real country. You have to remember X,X,Y,Z.' As a person that's been here, no, that is not the real country, either. Reading Nick Kristof's book about China with Sherryl WuDunn, they say how “It's difficult to live an existence where we love China, where we think it's an incredible place and then when it comes time to turn into work for the NYTimes, then there's only enough space to write the worst stories that we found. The other things, great as they are and as much Chinese as the other thing, never make it there.”

Oh yeah, why did I call this post: Ojala que llueva cafe en el campo?

Z called me to say that she had her iPod on random while painting her room with coffee. Something about, you rub it in and then the next morning you take a stick to knock off all of the beans and the color stays. But while this happened, Juan Luis Guerra's song of the same name came on : I wish that it'd rain coffee in the campooooo... And she stopped, listening to it and making the connection between her and the song, all the while that coffee beans showered down to the ground around her. I was proud that she called to share that with me. I asked her if she'd heard much about the Arizona immigration laws, but she replied that she's too much in a cocoon where she is, just that she knows it's a real depressing mess.

Do I even try to make a connection between that kind of experience and being here? Hm... I'll let you think of something. Goodnite!