Strange Comfort

I have now been in this country for more than 20 months. I know this because I have a calendar that helps remind of what it’s like to have a real schedule, and to live in a world where time is more than just a concept, indicated primarily by calls to prayer and the rising and falling of the sun. Yesterday, while I was leading stretches (in Arabic) for a group of 20 young women as part of our basketball practice warm up, I was hit with a realization. It struck me that at this point in my service I have become so comfortable with the foreign milieu that encompasses me that it has reached a point of sub consciousness, in which I pay no mind to just how different my life is to that of the average American. Allow me to illustrate with the other events that made up yesterday for me:

I wake up at 8:00 to a donkey braying right outside my window. I turn to my side, doing my best to go back to my now-hazy dream involving a Boy Scout camping trip from my childhood. Just as the wood-licking flames of the campfire begin to cascade into view, the fly arrives. That fly. The one that always lands on the most inconvenient place possible, at the most inconvenient time possible, and is just as adamant on staying there as I am on killing it. After doing my best to cover my head and other parts of my body, my efforts are deemed futile against the incessant fly asshole, so I figure it is time to get up.

After a breakfast of eggs, cheese, and instant coffee, I get my papers together for the computer grant I am working on and head out to the post office to send them off to PC headquarters in Rabat. After a final meeting with the association I am working on the grant with the previous evening, it appears as if I finally have all the materials together for grant approval. This is good because it means all I have left to do for this project is wait; something I have gotten very good at in my time here.

As I pull up to the post office on my bike, I see one of my hanut(small store), Tijani, and walk up to greet him. Him being one of my better friends at the local market, I decide to go in for the classic cheek kiss greeting, starting with the right cheek “Allah aslamtik!” (Praise be to God for allowing me to see you again). Move on to the left. “Labas alik?” (Is everything good with you?)Move back to the right “Labas” (it’s all good. Back to the left again, completing the 4 kisses, which completes the standard greeting. “Wesh unta labas?” (is it all good with you?) “iyea, labas, lhumdullah” (yup, its all good, praise be to God).

Once we had finished our minute long greeting, Tijani was quick to remind me that later that day, in fact just a few hours from then, was going to be a soccer practice that he had been trying to get me to come to for months. Despite the fact that I hadn’t played soccer in 10 years, I had promised him that I would come out and practice some time just for the fun of it (or, moreover, to provide entertainment for the others who I would be playing with).

After killing the hours in between with reading on my roof (an aspect of just about every PC work day), I threw on some shorts and sneakers and took off. When I arrived to my towns soccer field (which is essentially a giant field of dirt, yet one of the best in the region nonetheless), I quickly realized that this was going to be no picnic. Once greeted by the coach, who was followed by a dozen other athletic guys in their early 20’s, it occurred to me that this was actually the practice of my town’s official soccer team, who, it turns out, is one of the best in the region. Despite the town’s size, this team often competes against large cities like Meknes, Fes, and even Rabat, so they indeed mean business.

Before getting a chance to back out, the coach threw some cleats and a jersey at me, and insisted that I get dressed immediately. I reluctantly did as he said (not that I had much of an option at that point), and started running laps around the giant dirt field with the rest of the Berber muscle machines that composed the team. The hour and a half that followed consisted of what was most certainly the most physically intense workout that I have experienced here in Morocco. Like basic military training with a soccer ball. Never while in this country did I expect to do so many pushups, sit-ups, stretches, and ball busting drills while being yelled at in French. However, once the soccer ball drills began to get beyond my point of feasible completion, I had to check out. As I said I was leaving, and turned toward to the grimy locker room, the whole team communally turned to me and said “bsha!” (to your health!), and the coach yelled after me to come back again next practice.

After taking a cold shower and making a tuna sandwich for lunch (tuna makes up about 90% of my lunches here) it was time for basketball practice with the women from the neddy (women’s house). I rode up the front door on my bike, walked inside, and found all the women in their sweats and sneakers, ready for athleticism. This is always a great site to see, in that before my presence working with them, many of these women never got a chance to play sports or do anything athletic at all, given that all the sport areas in my town are very male dominated. The mudira (neddy director) greeted me and asked if I could lead some stretches for the women before heading out to the basketball court. This kind of request leads me to believe that the women I work with here see me as more than just a regular guy, in that normally doing stretches of any kind in front of men is considered to be highly shuma (forbidden). Perhaps they see me as the awkward adopted American brother they’ve always wanted.

After the brief aerobics session, which they appeared to be very receptive to (fortunately, given that I had just been led in stretches earlier that day, knowledge of what to do was still pretty fresh in my head) we meandered over to the basketball court. I know about as much about coaching basketball as I do about coaching rugby...not much. Fortunately, given that the neddy women are all neophytes to the world of sports, this is pretty easy to cover up. My usual drills consist of lay-up lines, dribbling, passing, and shooting exercises, followed by a brief game. Despite the fact that the exercises vary, at any point these girls are viewed during practice it looks about the same: loud, giggling, head- covered girls running around aimlessly like chickens with their heads cut off. Clearly, this makes it difficult to be taken seriously by the hoards of guys who flock to watch like a heard of hungry and critical hyenas. Yet fortunately the point is not to be taken seriously, yet for the girls to enjoy themselves and get a workout that they otherwise could probably not obtain.

Basketball practice was followed by my English class for beginners. Without time to change out of my then sweat covered clothes, I had no choice but to carry on and teach parts of the body, starting off with “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” as a warm up.

Class was followed by a meat sandwich, which was then followed by reading the rest of the night away. And so it goes. This day, despite the irregularity with the boot camp soccer practice, was not different from most days I spend here. It is what I have come to know of as life at this juncture, and, as with all routines, I have come to go through these motions without really thinking about them. If it weren’t for the point of reference given to me by the internet and speaking intermittently with friends and family back home, then I might even forget just how unusual my life has become shwya b shwya (little by little).

Until next time...

Spring Camp 09!

I cannot remember the last time I have been so excited to write a blog entry. Given the recent success of the spring camp coordinated by yours truly, I cannot help but boast.

Errachidia spring camp 2009 was indeed disaster free and full of positivity. I can't say that everything went as expected(this is Morocco after all), yet I can state that out of the 4 camps that I have now worked at in Morocco, it was by far the most cohesive and well put together. With a killer staff of pcv's (most of whom had never worked a PC camp before, yet seemed to make up for their lack of experience with an extreme eagerness to help) and a highly devoted Moroccan staff, we managed to create a rewarding experience for the local youth (and ourselves)that only comes around once and awhile.

Perhaps part of the appearance of success has to do with the fact that the camp began with conditions that upon first glance seemed pretty problematic. The staff(Moroccan and PCV) was short 5 people for 96 kids, and 4 of the 8 PCV’s helping had no knowledge of Moroccan Arabic, and could only rely on the chance of kids attending who understood the respective Berber dialects they had been trained in in order to communicate. Given the short staff, every PCV had to both teach an English class and help to lead a club(we had guitar, leadership, theater, art, and journalism) despite the potential problems in communicating abstract concepts. Luckily for us, PCV’s are some of the best charades players on the planet. As the only 2nd year youth development PCV I was put in the position of having the best Darija skills out of our group, which is something I have never experienced before, in that I was one of the slower language learners in my stage. This gave me the daunting obligation of translating everything that could otherwise not be interpreted. Needless to say, it was incredibly tiring for everyone, breaking from our typical lackadaisical and diffuse PC lifestyles and being on the go from 7am until about midnight every day.



Another factor that contributed to my initial concern about the camp’s well being was the planned field trip to Merzouga, a.k.a. the Sahara Desert. When I first heard the plan for this day it consisted of nothing more than taking 4 busses of kids into the desert and releasing them. However, to my relief, the day before the trip I learned that the plan was in fact more organized than this and thus less likely to result in lost, cannibalized-turned children in the arid vastness that is the Sahara. While the trip did in fact involve taking 4 buses of kids into the desert, it was surprisingly smooth(despite the incessant drumming and singing that followed us everywhere- yes, kids here carry drums with them everywhere, and yes, the human wave can be done in a moving vehicle). With the additional stops added to our trip by the Moroccan staff we were given only an hour and a half to roam the dunes, which turned out to be a perfect amount of time for kids to burn off energy by climbing a massive dune. We naively thought it would be a good idea to race up this dune, and were quickly humbled by Mother Nature’s intensity. As it turns out, running up a sand dune is comparable to running up a mountain with water pouring down in the opposite direction...difficult, yet an excellent outlet for youthful energy. Just to ensure that every last breath had been taken out of me, on the top of the dune I was challenged to a wrestling match with a member of the Moroccan staff who just so happens to be a 3rd degree black belt in Tai Kwon Do, and has been teaching the art for 15 years. Again, a humbling experience (yet apparently very entertaining for the kids-I do what I can).



The dunes were followed by a trip to the Dar Chebab in a nearby town, where we had a lunch consisting of a boiled potato, a small cheese packet, bread, and tea of course...probably my first and last potato and cheese sandwich. This was followed by a trip to a fossil museum, which was then followed by a failed attempt to visit one of the kings palaces (we were promptly kicked out), and then followed by a visit to the nicest hotel that I have ever seen in Morocco.

Another aspect that contributed to the success of the camp was the amazing relations between the PC and Moroccon staff. While in other camps I have attended, relations between these two groups has never been more than functional and professional, this time around the feeling was more of that of a family. This became evident during our stop for lunch during our field trip, when two PCV’s asked some campers of the price of a giant pizza-like food that we discovered in a town store- something that we had never seen the likes of in our southern region. After informing us of the price(which was pretty steep given our PC budget)and reassuring us that the store owner was not trying to rip us off, one of the Moroccan staff members rushed up to us and insisted that we didn’t buy it. While this confused us initially, it all came together later when I was approached that night by the Moroccan camp director and asked when we wanted to eat the pizza-like feast they had bought for us. Accustomed to typical Moroccan frugality, it was hard for me to make sense of this at first, before it hit me that they really liked us. We reciprocated the act of kindness of the end of camp when we had copies of the whole staff together made for everyone.

So all in all, it was a great week. Now I have time to rest, have my voice catch back up with me, and look onto my next big project which is getting a grant for 6 computers for a local association in my town (inchallah). Until next time...