Thanks Mel

The past two weeks I've been on an Up-tick. I feel that for many, it's the happy moments that are the hardest to write about. When there's no drama, how do you keep someone interested? It's the same thing that happens when your favorite team wins every match, and there's never a good team to give them a good fight. Why even watch?

As I finish the first volume of Proust, I see that part of what makes his work so special is that he's able to keep a writer interested for several hundred pages while using very few negative, or dramatic passages. Seemingly there's no plot points. And after reading it, it's tough to remember what has happened, because instead it just feels like you're in this wash of feel-goodness, marveling at being alive.

These past two weeks in Peace Corps have felt the same way. Even with plenty of drama and a lot of plot points, twists and turns in my story here, it's been happy and so when I sit to update my blog, it feels instead like I've been lounging at a Caribbean beach resort, and I'm unsure if 2 days have gone by or ten.

The drama for today is that we have found a baby bird in the street on the stone steps. My job for the coming weekend is to find a bird nest in the palmerie that will accept it. They wanted me to leave it on the concrete steps, and I said no. If you do that, then the bird is history. At the moment it's in an open tupperware container with a quarter inch of water, on top of the roof near where the other birds live.

,Prior to that, though, I was lying on the upper step, my bike helmet on top of my satchel, propping my head up as I began reading Keats' 1820 poems. In my mind, I was comparing Keats and Jeff Buckley, especially the introductary biography, which begins : “A common mistake for people that read Keats is to focus on his lost potential, while forgetting to look with amazement at what he actually accomplished.” Other than this, my day consisted of an hour-and-a-half run followed by a 55 minute workout in my room, doing the P90x plyometrics tape.

Last night was special: having two guitars now for the first time, I spent 30 minutes teaching my host brother the C scale on the first two strings, and then teaching the same thing to his sister in about 5. So this morning, I heard Ilhem singing a song below my window, and I went out with both guitars to find her studying one of her notebooks. She remembered exactly the scale from the night before without me showing it to her again. This is an early indication that it'll be a good summer! If we keep up this pace, at least, and if they keep up their interest in playing music. I hope to point the two siblings at each other, so that their rivalry keeps them motivated to learn guitar..

The way people address me and interact with me has changed a great deal this month. There's a familiarity there, and an openness. I also have a greater sense of the different worlds I'm moving through here, the families and who belongs where. And I've got the taste of these people's humor, and the little buttons that you can press to elicit a happy response. Also, when to back off. It's a lot more fun than when you are so extremely afraid to step on other's toes, doing the wrong thing in their different culture. At the same time, I'm aware that this is the most dangerous position, since I'm relaxed enough to make a mistake more easily than before.

Other things have changed a lot, just in this past week: my room has become much more comfortable, especially since I got boxes and boxes of the things from the soon to return Volunteer that lived near me in Teftchna. Now I have a trunk full of canned food, boxes of different flavored herbal tea. Some asian ingredients like seaweed for california rolls, low-sodium soy sauce, 3 or 4 bags of dried beans, twenty packs of apple cider. I even have a drawer devoted to Christmas decorations!

Instead of pale yellow walls, Mel gave me three maps : Spain & Portugal, the United States, and a world map. Alongside those, Christa when she came through Nkob last gave me a giant map of Morocco. That's up there now, right across from my bed. Soon I'll write in the margins the dates and the towns of each volunteer from my staj that I visit.

Mel gave me a giant handful of thumbtacks, so I finally put up the photo organizer that Serena sent me for Christmas : inside it now, there are hanging the cards that people have sent me here, pictures I took in New York City, postcards from Sefrou and a photo of Andrew porter way back in Sopachuy. Serena standing outside the door of her old apartment in Milano. There's also a small 4 x 6 that is a miniature poster of Clark Gable's IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. Finally, the photo of the Sucre folks before being evacuated. I'm unrecognizable in that photo and as I am now, except for the freckles.

Finally, thanks to Mel I have a full list of summer reading waiting for me: she gave me 12 or 14 books that I've wanted to read for some time now. Another volume of Isabel Allende, the Richard Pevear translation of THE BROTHERS K, a volume of Oscar Wilde plays and another one of Nietzsche 101. From her I've got PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, just in time for the release of its sequel, and there's a book of third wave feminism. I'll also be able to revisit a top-favorite that I discovered last year, thanks to the Penguin Classics bookclub: ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner, and I've got three books on Afghanistan awaiting me: A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, fiction, and THREE CUPS OF TEA and its sequel STONES INTO SCHOOLS, nonfiction.

If that doesn't last me all summer, I'm happy too that she gave me one giant envelope of her Tashlheet Berber note cards—in case you were wondering, (I was haaa) the Berber word for Camel is ilgram—and a second envelope, just as important, with all the note cards she made for vocab words for the GRE. So if I get tired of feeling like a two-year old, learning how to say 'in front of' and 'behind' again, then I can open the other bag, and pull out a card with all the symonyms of “hostile” : antithetic, churlish, curmudgeon, irascible, malevolent, misanthropic, truculent and vindictive. That'll make me feel like a educated 25-year old person again, I hope!

A dozen packs of Swiss Miss hot chocolate, to enjoy while I stargaze seated on my new ponj that I bought from Mel. Even those fun, great guitar lessons that I gave last night I owe to her: I paid her 25 dollars to get her guitar.

Finally, I also changed my Dar Chebab schedule. Now, I have an open tutoring routine instead of a set class that I do everyday. This means that I nearly don't have to spend time preparing a lesson, and I dont necessarily have to go everyday. Just whenever someone wrote their name down on a card for a certain time slot, that's when I go.

So, the days really slip by now. I follow my longer and longer days of exercise with marathon reading sessions—right now I'm near the end of Proust 1, the first third of Harry Potter 1 (Portuguese), and the middle of Dickens' OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. The days when I go to buy something at the store, at this point in my Peace Corps service, I've already tried all the different flavors and I have my favorites. There's a checklist for the summer that will keep my focused, and I've handled the heat a lot better than I thought. I used some of Mel's thumbtacks to put up a screen on my window, so now I can pass the day in my room with the window open but without being picked to death by the mosquitoes here. I've finalized the race schedule that I'm going to use to qualify for the Ultra Trail Mont Blanc next year, and I'm on track in my preparations for the two Italian races I picked. Ten weeks until the first one, a 50k called the Ultra Sky Marathon (2 points for the Mont Blanc race) and a 65 mile race in October, 20 weeks from now, that will get me the other 3 points I need to qualify.

Having been here months and months, I know now the bike trails that are the most fun, and my running is improving enough to the point where in another 2 or 3 weeks I can run or ride my bike to the next town, 18 miles away and then carry on to see my friend Will on the morning bus.

But all of this wouldn't mean anything if the people here weren't nice and fun, smart and witty, eager to make their lives better and share their town with me. Now, I just have to find what I can do to save that bird. I'll take it inside tonite, make some sugary broth that it might be able to eat, and then head early to the palmerie (palmerie = where the palm trees are) to find some bird willing to call it its own. Hope it makes it that long, at least. Such drama!

Quick Peace Corps lesson: Jeremy was trying his best to get his basketball goal fixed. And I was there when his hopes for doing so got dashed by the half-hearted workmanship that this guy laid on him. But the big news when I saw him at Mel's place was that his Dar Chebab was one of a handful chosen in the whole country that will become a newer, better, state-of-the-art model Dar Chebab. This means, the one-year old 'old' Dar Chebab will be torn down and rebuilt into a new complex 4 times bigger, that will include a skate park, a different field for each of the most popular sports, several rooms spread over several stories and a media lab. Not quite sure if I remembered that correctly, but he listed more and more amazing things this would have. Which, we had our customary pull-apart of what they were doing, why they do it, what are their priorities., etc. But it took a burden off his shoulders and he's happy to know that the future vol and his/her students will have even more amazing opportunities than his already bustling Dar Chebab offered.

The last thing that I got Mel to do when I went back the second time was this :

It was pretty amazing to sit down with her host family. I'd already made the remark that this was the first town that was off the main road in Morocco that I've been to. Isolated, cut-off. Noone coming there unless they live there. A real insulated experience. It's the closest thing that I've experienced to how Morocco was at the turn of last century. No land lines, no internet, no processing for the water. And we all sat eating watermelon together, and I joked with her host father about how there is a 'place' for me, just like you'd say when you're trying to pile into a taxi and unsure if there's a seat left for you. Then I heard him say: “The automobile, it's a great invention, barakallah.” It was cute.

And I heard Mel practice English with the two ladies, one of whom left her husband after he beat her badly. Because she was not going to carry her dried packaged food home, we were lucky to be there and feast on a couple of meals : one was pure Tennessee-style goodness, real Jiffy corn broad with a half-pound each of dehyrdated mashed potatoes, brown gravy mix and Spinach dip. The other was curried noodles that she said she made with coconut milk, soy sauce, vegetable buillon, curry powder, salt and pepper, plus a liberal amount of veggies, sprinkled with re-hydrated black mushrooms and crushed peanut specks. And all that tasted as good as it sounds.

The next morning the nice, charming host father waited at the edge of the road with my things so that I wouldn't miss the bus as it came through. Mel seized the opportunity to teach the three children who also sat on the same dirt ridge how to clean their teeth properly with a toothbrush. The one girl was extremely adorable and it was fun to see their small hands clasped around the miniature toothbrush.

Last thing: thanks Mel for the giant 2 lb jar of JIF Extra Crunchy peanut butter! I'd just run out on my bike trip to see your town, so this was perfect timing and it's soooo much better than the generic Senor Cacahuete one that they sell here. And, as I wrote that all down, now I have inspiration for what I'll do to cook tonite, after having worked out so hard earlier! (Curry coconut Thai potatoes! Extra hot...)