6:30 AM
It’s a Saturday morning; about 3 hours after the time that I would have passed out after a fun night out in the 1st world. I would have had at least 6 more hours left of sleep and would not have already begun to ponder about how I would deal with the day’s inevitable frustrations, which, since I was now awake at 6:30 in the morning with the inability to go back to sleep, had already begun.
I let out a groan, close my eyes back shut tightly, and roll onto my side, trying to remember if I had any milk left for cereal. Another minute goes by until I decide that I don’t, and curse myself for finishing it the night before. This means that I’ll have to go to the hanut down the street and deal with the Saturday morning hanut(box-like convenient store) guy, who is my least favorite of hanut guys. Once the reality of the day is starting to set in, several flies land on my face and confirm its presence. It’s looking like a long one.
I throw on some clothes and stumble down the stairs, passing underneath the doolbell from hell and begin my door opening process by slamming my body against and turning the lock. Despite the freshness of the day, the sun hits my face like an open-palmed smack , as if it were to say “Wake up man! Your in Morocco!”
And so it goes...
The last three weeks here have been relativley uneventful, but good. I have started up my first club; a journalism club in which we will come out with a monthly newspaper called The Tinejdad Times. It will start out as an online publication, until I can get funding for it (InshaAllah) in order to make hard copies. It will be in both Arabic and English, and will have sections on the enviornment, education, sports, current events, and local culture. The first issue is scheduled to come out on May 18th, and I will obviously post a link for it on here once it's ready.
I am now the busiest I have been as far as objective work goes since I have been here. Objective meaning work other than time spent drinking tea and hanging out with locals, which can still be called work here. I am teaching English in 4 different locations (not including a friend who I tutor a few times a week), working on two projects, and am still facilitating girls basketball. The locations for English class include the 2 Dar Chebabs(youth centers), the Neddy Neswi(woman center), and The Dar Taliba(girls center). My English teaching methods have altered slightly since upon working a busy schedule, classes have varied enourmsly in size and the English level of students. I can have a Dar Taliba class one week with 40 young, hyperactive, giggly girls who don't know a word of English, and the following week have only 3 girls show up for the same class, who have studied the language for 2 years in highschool. Hence, my new method consists of not over preparing for a specific lesson, yet having a few options to choose from, all of which are easy to improvise off of in class. The girls do not seem to care that I am a man and that I wear shorts to class (something that many men do not do in my town, despite the blaring desert sun). These classes also require more animation on my part since I teach them almostly exclusivley in Arabic and often times need to act out words I do not know. Me acting ridiculous does seem to be an effective temperory cure for their apparant ADD, since despite their energy, I always seem to hold their attention.
The world mural project is comming along slowley but surley. A few weeks ago I managed to get about 15 students to help out with the outline at once. They all seemed very into it, and appeared to be enjoying learning about all the countries that exist in the world- many of which they had never heard of before. The only problem was that I had a little too much confidence in their ability to follow the grid correctly, and countries ended up in interesting places(ie-The Czech Republic and Morocco are neighbors). Oh well, all part of the learning process (somthing I must tell myself about everything here).
In my free time I have been riding my bike a lot. A few weeks ago me and some pcv neighbors went exploring in the mountains behind my house and found several old, tiny Berber villages.
Along our way we stopped to examine the crystalized rocks and fossilized trillabites, and were approached by a man who was eager to show us his fossil collection and try to sell us some of his goods. Instead of buying anything anything, we went with him to his village for tea (you can never drink enough tea in Morocco). In his village we were able to check out a pond with giant carp, which was an amazing site in the middle of the desert, and were also showed the primary fossil dig site, which appeared to be the only source of income for the small community of about 100 people. He even let us dig with his equipment and search for ourselves. It was amazing to see how many prehistoric shells and crustations could be found in a place so deprived of water.
Another good note is that I have finally found someone nearby to jam out on my guitar with. He is a young yet very experienced painter and guitarist, and oddly enough we have almost the exact same taste in music. I shall keep you posted on the release our first album.
Until next time.
