The Daily Grind

For the interested, here is a brief synopsis of my community-based training schedule:

7:30am – Wake up. It sounds late, but even after eight hours of sleep I still want more during CBT. I take about 15 minutes to throw on some quasi-filthy clothes and attempt to make my hair loss less greasy. Most days I forgo looking in the mirror; ignorance of my face is bliss!

7:50am- Breakfast! When possible, I run out of the house before my host mom notices and seek out yogurt and fruit. This is not a reflection of my host family, merely of my desire to not eat bread for 6 meals per day. Most mornings I end up eating my first dose of bread with olive oil, butter or jam and a quick glass of hot milk with a tiny dose of coffee.

8:00am- Out the door with two of my training group neighbours, Lindsey and Drew. We head to the local cafe for a quick espresso coupled with a comparison of the previous evening’s success stories and failures. For example, “I understood when my host mother told me to clear the table;” “We didn’t eat till 11pm;” “I did nothing but watch Turkish Soap operas while my host sisters yelled at each other;” “My host brother host an evil glare when I ate the chicken in his triangle, but I was so hungry!”

8:30am- Welcome to Hassan’s language class! The six trainees, including myself, give a brief synopsis of our activities in the past tense before we get down to business. After this, we delve into the meat of the day while lately has been verb tenses (simple present and past, check!) Hussan “squeezes” us hard, but the classroom atmosphere is always positive and engaged.

10:00am –Atay! Drew or Rags normally grab six loaves of bread from the local store (hanut), which ideally will last our group for the day as Fatimizera brings us the first tea break. Since breakfast is fairly small, our group demolishes several cups of tea with our bread, dates, almonds and scrambled eggs.

10:30am- Back to language, normally a combination of practice and application. We play guesstures, draw verbs, write dialogues and role play in the class or head to the market, hanut or cafe to practice our newly acquired vocabulary/grammar.

12:30pm – Lunch time: This is typically the largest meal of the day in Morocco. We begin with a small salad that varies between lettuce and fruit; beets, carrots and potatoes; or cucumbers, tomatoes and homemade dressing. The main course is normally a Tajine (this is basically the Moroccan slow cooker) with veggies and sauce overtop a small piece of meat. Other days we feast on couscous, lentils and fried fish with side dishes of eggplant extravaganza or another bean. The entire meal is eaten with our fingers/bread (or sometimes a fork when we feel super western). After the main course, Fatimizera brings out the dessert; a delicious array of strawberries, apples, oranges and bananas.

1:00pm – Break: Lunch is followed by an hour break; each trainee has their own form of rest including a slow stroll through nature, listening to music, writing family or a simple nap. My favourite break thus far has been a stroll to Immouzer’s biggest waterfall where I found myself wandering amongst goats and sheep. Where was my camera?!

2:00- Afternoon class varies. My favorites include cultural sessions on Islam, indirect communication and collective cultures. I could talk about cultural differences for days. Other topics include Peace Corps specific training (not my fave) and slowly learning standard Arabic Script. Darija (Moroccan Arabic) is not a written language so most signs are written in Script or French. The focus on our training is conversational Darija, so thus far my script is non-existent.

3:30pm- Another Tea Break – this looks pretty much like the first one of the day. Moroccans tend to eat less at major meals and snack more throughout the day. Since food is always accompanied by tea, we are pretty jacked for the majority of class.

4;00pm – Lessons/Activities at the Dar Chebab (Youth Center). This portion of the day is still in development. We initially conducted “Spring Camp” to get to know the local kids/teenagers and are currently working on a Peace Corps directive to get to know the community. Eventually this will transition again to additional teaching practice. When we run out of ideas with the kids, we pretty much play soccer or throw the Frisbee around.

6pm- Done with class! From here, I try to do a short workout; either a run around the outskirts of town where we are hollered at in French, Darija and Spanish or a strength-training workout at the house with the host family staring.

7:30pm – Tea Break with the family. Are you hungry? Not really. Have some tea, enjoy some more bread, eat, eat, eat.

8:00pm – Free time at home. My activities depend on the night. I frequently attempt to practice what I learned in class with my host sisters (exchanging English, French and Darija) or watch the best Turkish Soap Opera on TV with my host mom. Sometimes I get in some additional reading, blogging or simply pass out on the couch.

10:00pm (hopefully) - Dinner time! Dinner is another small meal and typically occurs 15 minutes after my host dad returns from the town center. In the typical Moroccan home, women do the heavy housework lifting. My family is fairly liberal, but the men in the house rarely lift a finger to help with household chores or meals. During dinner, my host dad quizzes me on key phrases in Darija, what we are eating and the whereabouts of another volunteer, nicknamed “Zittun” or “Olives.” It’s a long story.

11:00pm-ish, bed time! If I haven’t already fallen asleep in the living room, I try to head to bed directly after dinner. Moroccans tend to be slower in the morning and bursting with energy in the eve, so I am always the first one to give in to the fatigue. I take one last trip to the Turk, say goodnight to the family and pass out in my room roughly an hour before my host sisters settle in the for night.

Monday through Friday, that is my life. Saturdays are a half day at Hussan’s school of learning, ending in a trip to the local market to purchase the week’s fruits, veggies and beans before heading home for the weekend. Most weekends consist of laundry, trips to the Hammam (public bath house), household chores and maybe a nap.

The schedule is both exhausting and exhilarating. During any given day, I may feel competent and confused, independent and dependent, understood and alone. While I am glad that the community-based training does not last forever (I can’t wait till I have my own room), I feel blessed to have such a positive and challenging first impression of Morocco.

Spring Camp – Getting my teach on

This week, Peace Corps held its annual “Spring Camp” where the Peace Corps Trainees (that’s me) hold an entire week of English classes and activities at the local Dar Chebab. Moroccan kids love it because they get free English from native speakers and Peace Corps loves it because it’s an instant training ground for the newbies. Each trainee is supposed to teach at least one 30 minute English class and lead one small activity; however, since our group has been struck by illness, those of us still standing have been teaching several hours per day.

Starting the week with the “beginner” students, our lessons included greetings, parts of the body, senses and numbers. As the week progressed, we transitioned to the immediate/advanced students, engaging in discussions about pollution in Morocco and the role of women in society. In addition to strict language study, I choreographed and taught a dance to the song “Jai Ho” with a fellow trainee as well as playing soccer, Frisbee and various ‘camp’ games with the students.

Unlike most communities in the Western world, there are not a lot of other activities for kids outside of school hours. Organized sports, musical groups or clubs and other “extracurriculars” are minimal.  The result is that the majority of intelligent, creative and fun-loving children spend their free time watching TV instead of fostering their talents. It’s difficult to know that my host sister’s beautiful voice will be restricted to singing along to her favorite Arab Idol stars on primetime instead of school choir. The positive result is that Spring Camps students are engaged; they have chosen to spend their vacation studying instead of catching up on the best Turkish Soap Operas. The students want to be there and want to learn. Whether they attend out of utter boredom, dreams of a bright future or just to take pictures with the Americans, we have been blessed with enthusiastic students. What else could a teacher ask for? 

After the Rain

10 days of rain, cold and constipation have finally come to an end this week thanks to the return of the glorious Moroccan sun and my friendly neighbourhood laxatives. Anyone can handle a certain amount of miserable weather, but more than a week of hail and sub 40 degree temperatures will literally put a damper on your adventure. By the end of last week, I was feeling mentally and physically defeated. The rain and cold forced me inside, my swiya (little) Darija kept me from interesting host family conversations and the constipation took away my only solaces: bountiful bread and frequent workouts.

While this was not an end of the world/crisis situation, it did make me long for feeling in my toes and salads without added sugar. Following the end of my formal language and culture lessons, I returned home exhausted and would lie in bed for an hour as feeling slowly returned to my extremities. Apparently being cold all the time is hard work for the body and mind, who knew? My new diet had also started to take a toll on my stomach; despite the constant caffeine intake, I was seeing no results in the Turk department. While this didn’t concern me, my stomach solidly freaked out on Friday and not-so-subtly encouraged me to give the Peace Corps Medical Officer a ring. Combined with my “bouche-a-coq” hairstyle and infrequent showers, I looked and felt like the shit that has been unable to escape from my body.

Saturday changed everything. Starting the day with a burst of sunshine, a fiberlicious breakfast and LMFAO, I was on my way! I successfully visited the souq (market) to purchase food for the upcoming week, bonded with my host family and choreographed a number of dance routines for this week’s Spring Camp. And the laxatives? Still waiting on the effect. My new diet is ideal for the 70 and over crowd: minimal bread, a daily dose of Metamucil and as many vegetables and bran as I can fit into my belly. C’est la guerre.

Sunday was a full day with the host family. We started the day with 5 hours at the local Hammam (aka bathhouse); this was my first and ideally longest visit. As my host sisters graciously washed me and scrapped the dead skin from my body, I started to understand why Moroccans believe Westerners are dirty. It had been several weeks since my last good scrub, and I was filthy. By the afternoon I was ornery, dehydrated and my skin resembled a tomato. A solid first attempt at bathing, Moroccan style. After we devoured lunch, my host family took me on a lovely afternoon hike to the local waterfall and into the hills. While we enjoyed the picturesque waterfall and good conversation, I started to sing a praise song. Nature always gets me that way. As I floated away on my own thought bubble, my host dad burst into a round of “Happy Birthday” for no reason. I laughed so hard that I nearly cried; it’s a gift to find a family as quirky as my own.

Life in the Mountains- Bread, tea, sugar, repeat

After saying goodbye to some of my favourite trainees in Rabat, my bus twisted and turned towards Fes on Thursday morning. We climbed to an altitude comparable to Denver, CO before arriving in our final destination in a small tourist town roughly 45 minutes south of Fes. It was exactly what I expected Morocco to look like. Nestled in the mountains lies a small city with a population of 20,000 (but it feels like a few hundred). Everyone knows their neighbours, has lived here forever and attended the same high school- welcome to small town, Morocco! I was greeted by my lovely hosts, my Moroccan family for the next two months. While most of the other trainees have spent the first few days in silence, I have been able to communicate relatively easily with my teenage host sisters and Baba (father) in French. In this part of Morocco, French is seamlessly intertwined into their dialect of Darija, evidence of the colonial past and continued diplomatic ties. My past studies have allowed me to skip some of the initial confusion and focus on slowly replacing my French expressions with their Darija counterparts. Since my host mother (Maman) only speaks Darija, I am constantly challenged to improve both languages. Besides hitting the language jackpot, I have been blessed with a gracious, quirky and easy-going Host Family. I popped the heads off fresh fish with my host mother, danced with my 15 year-old host sister and ended my weekend with a relaxing conversation with the other sister as she decorated my hands, legs and fingernails with homemade henna. Moroccan hospitality is famous for a reason, I have found myself close to tears on multiple occasions for how accepted and loved I feel in less than a week; it can be overwhelming. As a guest in a Moroccan home, I am provided with the best of everything; food, drink, bed, water, etc. After a cold day, my host siblings take my wet clothes and hang them over the heater while serving me hot tea. Most of our interactions occur over the tea ritual (bread, tea, bread, sugar, bread, olives, bread, cheese, more tea?) When it’s too cold and rainy to go on an afternoon community walk with my language class, we sit in a cafe and discuss our host family experiences. I think I drank six glasses of tea or coffee today; my teeth may rot but I will love every minute of it. While I lack some of the conveniences of my American life (a western toilet, my own room, a car, bathing), I feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to know the intimacies of my Moroccan family and culture. Even my Moroccan tri-lingual Language communication facilitator is unable to travel to the USA or Europe because of the red tape and cost involved with a visa. He is in love with the English language and has dedicated his life to teaching it to other Moroccans without ever visiting a country where it is natively spoken. That conversation makes me forget that my hair feels oily, my clothes smell and it’s been raining for five days- I am the luckiest person in the world right now.

From Rabat to the Middle Atlas – Avoid reading with dinner and thank me later

The second half of training didn’t bring many additional surprises to the table: practical methods to avoid theft and assault as well as overviews of the SWEET PCV library in the capital and our community-based training (CBT). There was an increased emphasis on the conversational basics of Darija including how to order coffee without sugar, tell our host family that 10pm is too late for dinner and that we are not yet married (but God-willing, someday!) That’s right; West Michigan doesn’t have the monopoly on older women trying to set you up with their eligible sons. As our bodies recover from the jet lag, they have discovered all the new food and drink that Morocco has to offer (warning, this gets gross). While I have enjoyed the best beets and dates of my life, a number of trainees have started to feel the unappetizing effects of the new dishes. Luckily, Peace Corps is a step ahead and on Monday afternoon we were provided with our “medical kits” for the service. From antibiotics and Pepto Bismal to condoms and a rape whistle, we are ready for anything! There are few things that our guaranteed in life, but Peace Corps promises that I will get hella sick during service. After spending nearly 20 minutes on the symptoms, diagnosis and types of diarrhea, I was reaffirmed that I don’t need to worry until my severe abdominal pain, bloody stool and uncontrollable vomiting have lasted for a few days. While I have always dreamt of collecting my own poo and shipping it off for analysis, I may instead opt to call a PCV friend to make me oral hydration cocktails while I lie in a pile of my own filth. Just a guess. As a final treat, in today’s “gender-specific” training we received an excessive amount of information regarding the details of the Turkish toilet, where to throw our trash and the possibility of being shaven by our host mother while at the hammam. Tomorrow the exciting adventure of community-based training begins in a small town near Fes. Apparently this site is gorgeous, essentially the Swiss Alps of Morocco! I am gearing up for complete immersion, hiking and minimal free time for the next two months- a necessary but difficult portion of my training before I am sworn in as a volunteer at the end of May. Please continue to pray for me as this may get intense, off to the mountains I go!

Staging, Arrival in Morocco and Pre-Service Training

Monday in Philadelphia continued with a long day of staging activities, meeting numerous volunteers and a fantastic introduction to life as a Peace Corps trainee (PCT). For the first time, I didn’t have to explain my reasons for volunteering in Morocco since my fellows PCTs understood and shared my wanderlust. Bonding over our common anxieties, dreams and lack of drawing ability, this group of complete strangers started to feel increasingly familiar as afternoon faded into evening. With a delicious meal of sushi and dishing about former and current loves, my roommate and I enjoyed the final night in the U.S. A fire alarm forced all of the PCTs from the comfortable beds of the Holiday Inn to the street at 7:15am Tuesday morning; I am still convinced it was a ploy to make sure we were all prepared for the 9:30am checkout (sneaky, sneaky Peace Corps!) We loaded into three buses and drove from Philadelphia to New York’s JFK airport for our evening flight. Moving as a group of 120 people through check-in, security and boarding meant that we spent nearly the entire day in slow transit from point A to point B. Prior to boarding, PCT feelings about the impending departure ranged from quiet nervousness to mild intoxication (thanks airport cocktail bar) to euphoria. Following a plane ride of turbulence, a medical emergency relating to another passenger’s allergies and zero sleep, we landed in the Kingdom of Morocco at 6am Wednesday morning. Casablanca’s brisk morning wind and glowing sunrise greeted me as I took my first steps in my new home. On the two hour bus ride from Casablanca, I saw my first camel and compared the countryside to a combination of Sicily and California before passing out until our arrival in Morocco’s capital, Rabat. The rest of Wednesday was a blur of our first meal (they eased us in, providing hamburger and spaghetti along with traditional Moroccan fare) and an overview of the rest of our week. By the end Wednesday’s training sessions, our sleep-deprived group had grown quietly disruptive; it was time for bed. With the aid of coffee, Moroccan tea and pastries, we hit the ground running with three days of intensive training. We were given additional vaccinations, met with the entire Peace Corps staff and the American ambassador to Morocco, and trained on everything from basic Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic) to where female volunteers should sit on a solo taxi ride between small towns (backseat, closest to the door). The mix of formal training sessions, small group discussions, panels of current PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) and informal communal meals has encouraged me to be my own advocate and determine what I need to keep me sane in a conservative Islamic country for two years. As Peace Corps has made abundantly clear, you need friends within the PC community to “make it.” I have already been blessed with strong connections within our training group and cherish the shared awkward moments, dance parties and 4am conversations, As one of my fellow trainees put it ‘we tear off our bandaids, expose our wounds and share a part of ourselves;’ instantaneous friendships are forged in a matter of hours. Today (Sunday), we were finally given a day of rest. I took advantage of long relaxed meals, explored Rabat’s Medina, souks, and beaches as well as running across a small political demonstration. Ready or not, I am heading into another intense week of language before heading to my CBT (community-based training) on Friday morning. CBT is a period of roughly 2 months in which I receive intense language and cultural training while studying and living with a host family. The language facilitator (a Peace Corps staff member/Moroccan teacher) and the six trainees will travel from Rabat to a small town roughly 45 minutes north of Fez where I will complete this portion of the experience. As far as I know, I will spend the morning and afternoon learning conversational Darija and written standard Arabic through class work, field trips and participating in daily life. In the late afternoon, I will head to my host family’s residence for dinner, studying and ideally a lot of sleep. From what I am told, this is an exhausting period of time but essential to my success as a volunteer. All I know if that I can’t wait to attend my first Moroccan wedding! Kyla’s current state is excited with a side of pumped- despite my fatigue from jet lag and last night’s dance party (WOOT), I love this time. I feel prepared to move into the heart of Morocco and get a better understanding of where I have chosen to spend the next two years of my life. Huzzah for life!

I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello.

As my father reminded me during our last chat, life is simply a series of hellos and goodbyes. This week has provided me with a gentle reminder that this predictable cycle doesn’t make the goodbyes any easier or the hellos less sweet. As I sit in the purgatory of this in between, airports and hotels that are neither home nor particularly far away, I can’t help but grieve what I have left behind. 18 months of discovering the beauty of West Michigan through biking, beer, and blossoming friendships- it’s so good to be alive. Whether or not I always succeeded, I sought to find rest and satisfaction in my GR life while working towards the next step. The next step has arrived: 18 months after my initial Peace Corps application and 6 months after learning about my assignment, I have arrived at my staging. After weeks of tears and goodbyes, not to mention some extreme “anxiety belly” yesterday, I am relieved to finally begin the next step of my journey. Sunday’s playlists of Coldplay and indie sad rock have been replaced by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Le Roux. My 36 hour staging takes place at the Historic District’s Holiday Inn in downtown Philadelphia, PA. My roommate, Tiffany, had her own version of anxiety belly yesterday. Hearing about her fears and slight panic actually calmed my nerves. It was a good reminder that I’ve faced these challenges before; this year they are just being presented in a new way. A few added elements have made the last few weeks more stressful than the normal pre-departure worries: I’ve currently got three grandparents in the hospital (or just returning) and experienced my first car accident this week. I’ve got the emotional and physical bruises to prove it. This morning I took advantage of my Western freedom to walk downtown by myself, strange to think that it may be the last time for two years! I sipped on my delicious Starbucks and strutted around in a knee-length skirt, because I could. In an hour I will meet the other 120 volunteers headed to Morocco, receive a more detailed schedule and be able to ask my burning questions, i.e. “will there be ice cream?” It’s all happening. Thanks to my wonderful family and friends who have made my sojourn in Grand Rapids so memorable and painful to leave behind- I am truly blessed. Until we meet again!