Though we live on the US dollar, you and me we've got our own sense of time

Welcome back to the old blogeroo. Thanks for being patient with me and checking in on my site here and there. I just want to take the first paragraph or two of this blog post to address my absence from the virtual communicative world.

Peace Corps really made it clear to us at the beginning of our services that we should "blog on our good days, journal on our bad" so as to not blog in anger and perhaps misrepresent the country to which we are trying to serve. I guess I sort of took that to heart and really wanted to make sure that I didnt talk about Morocco in any negative light. Nothing against Morocco specifically, but I just dont think that my personal experience can be expressed without some sort of critical look at this country. It took me a while to come to terms with this, and in the meantime, I decided staying "dark" so to say was better than sharing my experience with friends of the blog. Furthermore, a lot of my "good days" were those spent travelling with friends, camping in Morocco's beautiful nature, integrating with Moroccan families, breaking fast during Ramadan with friends, or any myriad of other things I was doing without access to the internet. My blogs kept getting pushed further and further back.

I think that some of you should know by now that I had to move from my previous site. There was a safety and security issue there that caused my country director to ultimately pull the trigger to get myself and my sitemate Jenna moved. My late summer into early fall was extremely hard. I had to live out of a backpack with no site for about a month. I had no work because I had no site. I just felt like my original reason for entering Peace Corps--to work with youth and to learn from host country nationals-- was all taken from me. All the work that I had done in my old site was ended abruptly, with no explanation to the community members. I had, and still do have, a lot of guilt to my old community. My host family didnt know what happened. I recently spoke with them and they thought that I had left for America. They didnt deserve that.

If anyone would like to know more precisely why I left, it is not too sensitive to talk about. Feel free to call, email or fb message me.

But alas I did move, and I now reside in the Atlas Mountains nearby to Beni Mellal (about 3 hours from Marrakesh directly east). It is already such a vast difference from my service in the Rif mountains. This town is 10,000 people and as a whole was so completely welcoming to me. There is a rich history of Peace Corps presence here, including the late Ambassador Chris Stevens who died in the attack on the Benghazi embassy in Libya, who served in this community. The day after I got here, an NGO was setting up a computer lab in the local boarding home kids who live in extremely small villages an come into the town during the week to go to school. Ive been teaching introductory computer classes there as well as an English class at the youth center. Life here, although not as fast pace as a city, is so much more fast pace than my old village. It seems like things get done here far easier. The first day I moved into my own place, my electricity wasnt working yet. The next day, the LQaid (basically the mayor) called me into his office because he heard I didnt have power and was going to personally handle it. Within 3 hours, my lights were working.

That story leads me to the hospitality of the Moroccan people. I have never been a part of a culture where people are this generous to help out another human being. This has nothing to do with me being a girl or me being a foreigner and everything to do with the nature of the moroccan people to help others out. Just within the past couple of hours I have examples of people here going out of their way to help me. So my oven and stove both run on propane canisters and the tubing for them was damaged during my move so I needed to get that fixed. I went downstairs to talk to my Mul-Hanoot (store owner) about the problem. He immediately got up, shut down his store, and told me he would help. He came upstairs with me and completely installed the whole thing, checked everything to make sure it worked, all the while giving me safety tips for handling the gas lines. Afterwords he said "May God bless you" took no money and said if I ever need any help in my house to ask him. I had only ever bought 1 carton of milk from him before. About 5 minutes after that, I was heading into town to buy an extension cord. As a general practice, I make it a point to say "hi" to as many women and little kids as I can. A group of 3 women pass and I greet them "Peace be with you, I hope you are all fine." One lady starts speaking in rapid french to me and I tell her in arabic that I dont speak french. She asks in arabic if I am from England and I tell her that I am from America but speak english. She gets very excited and says come with me! She takes me inside a pharmacy and introduces me to a woman there. She is a moroccan female doctor who speaks fluent english! She was asking me more about what I am doing here and said she wants to help with projects that I have. So cool! These both happened just earlier today.

There are a lot of really hard things about service. I feel this constant pressure around the clock to be doing something for/with the community. Every time I leave, I feel extremely guilty. I feel selfish so much of the time, especially because I know that almost no one in my community can travel their own country like I have the liberty to do (especially as a woman). Moroccan culture is very family driven, and once you are friends, you are family. I get invited to people's houses very regularly and it is pretty tiring on top of my regular schedule so I feel guilty and selfish saying no. And then I have some bad days too. The bad days mostly come from the men. Across this county, the public spaces are male-spaces. Some men feel very comfortable harassing women in the street. I find that I am a target of this harassment a lot. On my good days, I feel like I can handle it, and their words slide off of me like nothing, but other days, it can be extremely depressing and demoralizing. People touching me, people saying extremely vulgar things to me, people following me.... its something that I dont know how to handle. I dont know what the correct response should be. Ive run the gambit of publicly shaming people very loudly to saying nothing. I still dont know what makes me feel the best.

This site is helping me fall back in love with Morocco. My Peace Corps friends are also a big help. I have a phone-full of numbers that I can call on my bad or good days to talk to. For the most part I really like my life here. The problem that I had back in America (as I probably discussed in my blogs last year) is that everything becomes predictable and routine. My life is just so much more exciting when I am abroad, and to me that adds meaning to what I am doing. Even the mundane becomes exciting.... like talking to a store owner. Communicating with others is an exciting challenge. Friendships with Americans becomes much stronger due to our shared experiences and shared goals.

Im going to try to be more consistent with the blogs coming up. I hope this blog gave a kind of window as to why I wasn't blogging. Ill leave you all with some pictures of the last few months:

I have such a new and different (much like the blog title) relationship with food. I love creating something out of very very basic ingredients. We have a lot of access to spices and a limited amount of fruits and vegetables and it is such a creative reward for me to cook now.

Above is my old sitemate/roommate Jenna. We spent a lot of time together..... 

This was the first time things got really really HOT at the beginning of the summer

This is in Akchour nearby to Chefchauoen. On this particular day I was there with Brendan... but I had also gone with PC friends and camped out next to a huge waterfall. It was one of my best memories of Peace Corps so far and the people who I went with continue to be my biggest support system

Chefchauoen from above!

Birthday party for Weam

Brendan riding a donkey in the village

My host family from my village!

My host brother from training. Brendan an I went to visit them and Mohammed kept saying "Sawrni, Sawrni!" (take a picture of me, take a picture of me). He is growing up so fast!

Brendan, my real brother, and Mohammed (not the same Mohammed as above) my host brother, playing soccer together. A really meaningful picture for me

Me and Brendan before a wedding goofing off

This is another one of my favorites. This is Brendan eating lunch with my first host family. My host mom in the middle calls me all the time to see how I am doing. I told her around the time this picture was taken that I was going to have to move. She called Peace Corps to try to get me moved there to live with them.

Camel trek with Brendan in Merzouga!! The dunes were unbelievable unlike anything Ive ever seen. I could not stop laughing

DUNES!

The docks of Essauoaria

Also Essauoaria with Brendan

....sorry if this picture is too graphic. Last month I celebrated 3id LKbir, which literally means "The big holiday" and is the most important holiday in the Muslim calendar. If you look up the story in the Quran or Bible, this holiday commemorates Abraham's willingness to kill his son in the name of god. At the last minute, and angel came down and replaced his son with a ram (sorry if I got any details of that wrong, Im going off of memory). So every year, Moroccans across the country slaughter a sheep to eat over the next week. That morning, I saw 3 slaughters and ate so much sheep I am still a little bit traumatized. Everything is eaten. First, you eat the liver, lung and heart wrapped in the stomach fat and bbq-ed over a fire. It is not too bad in all honesty. From there it is tagine after tagine of sheep. Sheep ribs, sheep leg, sheep stomach, sheep brain, sheep face, sheep innards... you name it, we ate it. Because I did not have a home at this point in my service, I spent it with two of my friends and one of their moms. It was nice to celebrate it with them and we spent it on the countryside. 

One of my favorite weeks of peace corps so far was last week. We did a 100 km hike into some of the most remote parts of the countryside to do health workshops alongside 12 moroccan doctors, nurses and social workers. We got to camp for 7 days in places that I can only call paradise. Then during the day we would hike and work with some great kids to teach them about health. The doctors and nurses would give the women of the community a more in-depth health seminar on things as simple as brushing teach and hand washing-- to things more complex like AIDs awareness and how to do a breast examination

One of my favorite days of the hike and one of the most beautiful pictures Ive seen yet of this country. Watching the sunset while swimming in the ocean.

4 Months in Morocco

So today marks the 4 month that Ive been in country serving with Peace Corps. Ive been in my new house for nearly 3 weeks now (its a slow process getting settled in) and Ill give you a brief photographic tour of the house and the village before diving in:

So here is my house! and my PC issued car....just kidding, that is my neighbor's. We share this "compound" so to say with 2 other apartments--two lycee teachers and an elderly couple. I share my apartment with my site mate Jenna, whom I am sure you will hear a lot about over the next 2 years of my service.

Safety! look guys, multiple locking doors and a wall. The window you see on the upper left is our kitchen. 

This is my street! That dairy co you see ahead of you is Jenna's host family cow named "Shakira" --Our youth center is towards the hill on the right side of the picture.

This is probably the room in the house that I get the most questions about... so here it is. Although we have a shower, we dont have any hot water so we bucket bathe (although on some hot days I dont care and go for the shower), this is also the laundry room. The toilet that you see is our turkish toilet and it flushes with the bucket beside it.

Here is our kitchen. It is well stocked with a fridge, stove, oven, blender, and toaster oven. We have to drink boiled well water and make all of our food from scratch, which will definitely take some getting used to. Ive been reading blogs and forums about people in the US who make all of their food from scratch to get some tips. Making the most basic thing can take forever here. I decided that Mondays, because the dar chebab is closed, Im gonna experiment with food. I made some handmade potato chips last monday that took about 2 hours to make a batch and it was gone within 20 minutes. Ive been experimenting with good pizza and tortilla recipes and will continue that tonight. Ive been drinking smoothies galore both because of the heat and because the fruit is so fresh and delicious here. Ive been virtually a vegetarian since living on my own and I find myself really enjoying this experience of cooking, albeit frustrating at times how long the process takes.

The two pictures above are my bedroom. The top picture is a sort of collage that I made with gifts people have given me both in morocco and right before and little mementos. 

Here is another picture of my house with the blue doors on the left and then my street and Jenna's host family looking after Shakira.

Here is the front of the Lycee, mere feet from my doorstep.

Here is the view from the front of the Lycee. (Lycee btw is the high school and it is a french word so you bilingual Menschen out there might have already figured that out)

Here is the courtyard between the Lycee and the College (high school and middle school, respectively) and a soccer game going on in the distance with a crowd of fans.

This is one of the buildings in the college with the mountains in the background and the Misqua village behind that. We went on a lot of hikes up there and there is a reservoir about 25 minutes walk away.

Here is our home away from home: the dar chebab. This is the youth center that I work at. It has an office and then a classroom and a big auditorium hall where events are held.

Here is the view from the dar chebab ^^^

In the left in this picture you will see the largest store in town and then to the right you will see the people slash animal pharmacy of my village.

This is the "beb" which just means door in arabic but its considered an important part of the village

This is the post office slash bank slash private residence. Me and Jenna took this picture yesterday when trying to pick up an envelope. The director of the bank/post office as still eating lunch so we were told to wait a little and so I went over to play with the two goats in this courtyard, at the bank of course, and the attendant came over and grabbed the goat's udders and asked me if i wanted any milk. Another day at the post office!

This is the police station. Its pretty nice, and it has a western toilet. We go there a lot. They give us free coffee or orange juice and stuff and we just talk to them about ho we are doing. The like it because we are information sharing and we like it because we get fed!

This is the main street in the town, not much to say about it other than its pretty much full of men all the time

This is the mosque of my village, its really pretty, but we cannot go inside because we are omen and we are not muslim.

So I hope that answers some questions about the village and my life here. If you all have any questions or want me to take pictures of different things just let me know, i got two years. 

So one thing that Ive been thinking a lot of the past few weeks is about the concept of developmental work and what role I play in that. I feel like lately there has been self reflection by the west as to how much "change" should be implemented by the developmental projects. Me and Jenna are constantly faced with women who dont know basic things about their bodies like what their period is. There is a belief by some here that if you shower when on your period that you will bleed out and get cancer. As Jenna says, knowing how your body works is a basic human right. Her host sister is 20 years old and pregnant with her husband's baby. She has no access to information guiding her through this process. We live in a small village where if children want to go to college they will likely be the first in their family and need to navigate convincing their family that moving to a different city and spending a lot of money on education is the right step.I dont know really how to end this paragraph. I have a feeling that "development" is going to be something that the west continues to examine, but I can say that with my own eyes Ive seen very basic things that I personally believe should be helped.

More on that later I suppose.

Life is good. I have a post box so message me if you would like to send me anything!  

Another day another dirham

As I was walking around my village yesterday, I was reflecting on my life up until this point. It occurred to me that Ive had a lot of "Freshman" experiences that have really affected who I am as a person. What I mean by that is Ive had a lot of different experiences that have allowed me to have a fresh start with new people in new places. Be it my actual freshman year of high school, my year abroad in Bonn, my time in Hamburg, or now in Morocco, I think it is such a humbling experience to have to start afresh without someone in your corner. So many of the people I now consider my closest friends are those people that have gone through these journeys with me and I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to do it all over again.

So this past week has been filled with a lot of trying times, the weight of three months with a host family is starting to really sink in. Not to say that I dont appreciate my host family, but somethings so basic as wanting to drink water makes me the subject of scrutiny here. Last week was one of the most mentally trying weeks of my life, not only did i have an 8 day long spring camp at the dar chebab with all new kids teaching english every morning, but also didnt really have the access to normal stress coping mechanisms. I feel like i was really tested and came out of this week with an even better reputation and relationship with the people of my village.

First things first, I want to rewind to a few weeks ago when I officially swore in as a Peace Corps volunteer. You may be asking yourself why Ive been here for several months and only just swore in as a volunteer. Well before this event, I was actually referred to as a "PCT": a Peace Corps trainee. There are certain criteria that you need to do in-country; such as learn the language, learn more about the culture, learn more about protocol, etc... before you can officially become a volunteer and start your service. That happened for me on April 4th, and I just happened to be sworn in by Secretary Kerry himself, which was, of course, a great honor and I feel was another stamp of approval that PC Morocco is exactly where I should be.

I am the one in the front row on the right hand side in all white

So after this ceremony we were officially volunteers and as someone joked, its called "Peace Corps" because once you're a volunteer they say "Peace Out" basically to comment on the amount of things you have to start figuring out on your own immediately. So at 6 am the morning after this ceremony, I awoke and headed to the train station with all of my belongings, including a recently purchased toaster oven ;), and set out with my site mate Jenna and a couple of other volunteers heading in the same direction. 10 hours later and we finally reached our home for the next 2 years. 

Ive now been in site for a little over two weeks. The first week was primarily getting to know the people and the layout of the village and settling in. I honestly feel like I havent had a single relaxing day since coming to Morocco, there are always classes or sessions or something to do. When picturing Peace Corps, I kind of assumed there is a lot of down time, which I have been told there will be, but right now the pace is really fast and the host families are really deterring any chance of alone time that might otherwise be available. So last Sunday my village started their spring camp. Students across morocco are out of school for their "spring break" this week, and the Ministry of Youth and Sports has determined that every town should also have a spring camp of which I was a part. Me and my site mate were given a group of older girls (13-18 ish) to have english classes with and do camp activities. The director of the camp was very unclear with us beforehand as to exactly what we would be doing so we had to prepare a lot of filler or backup activities to plan for any sort of requests we might be given. Im glad we did this because we were really caught off guard when all of the sudden we were taken into a classroom and told to "teach a little bit of english." It turned out okay and I felt like as the week progressed it became easier and easier to make things up on the fly. It is really stressful being constantly asked to come up with camp games then translate them on the spot and hope everyone would understand but for the most part it went by without too much flaws and I feel like I really established myself as a good, reliable english teacher for the village. 

One interesting thing that we did with the girls was a Peace Corps project where you have the students draw a map of their town without priming them for anything and see what they put as the most important places. One interesting thing about that for my town was the fact that if you were to come to this village as a tourist, one strip of the road would probably stand out as the most active and the highest concentration of people. You may be tempted to call it the center of the village. The girls completely left this out of the drawing for a reason that I predicted in my head beforehand. This part of the town is completely filled with coffee shops. Girls are not allowed to go in the coffee shops, thus they did not include it at all. Another thing that we did was their "wants" and "needs" for the village. Their "Wants" were: coffee for girls, a hotel, a hospital, a swimming pool, a park, a garden, restaurants, a sports complex (specifically for tae kwan doe and yoga)... their "Needs" were: trash cans, a supermarket, help, tolerance, transportation (to school), english club and technical help with computers. 

On friday of camp, we did a fake souq day in the morning where kids could pretend to buy products. Some odd things that were sold at the souq, to little kids i might add, were lacy thongs. There were probably around 10-15 camp counselors during spring camp and then some adult volunteers. I was told that the counselors were children from the high school who were picked because of good behavior so it was really good people to network with so to say. They all kept showing me the lacy thongs which was really awkward but whatever. Later that day they held a fake wedding which was quite the production not just for the camp but for the entire community. All of the girls, myself included, wore caftans or jellabas or cinderella outfits with tons of makeup (not me) and glitter. One of the little girls was chosen to be the fake bride and it is tradition for the brides not to be seen so she had a blanket over her and then was carried to a cocoon-type-contraption on a horse. The fake groom was also on a horse but instead of in a cocoon he was encased with flags. As we paraded around town, the crowd continued to grow with villagers who had heard the music and decided to get themselves dressed up and join the procession. I was a big attraction in this procession and people kept coming up to me with flowers or wanting me to dance or wanting me to explain to the 3 tourists on motorcycles who had stopped to take pictures what was going on. People were shocked that i had a kaftan and I think i took pictures with everyone in the community. It circled around town that I am a very good dancer, Im not sure why, and now a lot of people like to tell me that i dance very well. 

The next day it was overcast which made it a good day to play soccer as the heat wasnt unbearable. The girls had all told me that they want a girls soccer team in town bc that doesnt exist right now. I feel like I definitely have the background to facilitate this so I took the girls to the soccer field, which was empty at the time, and brought an NGO/Peace Corps-provided soccer ball. Within 5 minutes of the 10-ish of us playing, the field was surrounded with guys staring at us. They werent trying to play, but they just wanted to watch all of the girls playing. You would have thought it was girls gone wild at the soccer field. I got really angry and stopped the game, I yelled at them telling them to go away there are plenty of other places. My darija obviously isnt the best so I couldnt say most things I was really wanting to say. Luckily another girl was enraged too by our guests and yelled at them more and physically moved one of them who had encroached upon our game. The head of the youth center also helped us a bit but it was hard for us to play and then about 20 min later the mudir told us to stop playing bc camp was over for the day. I really want to figure out a way to prevent this and its really eye opening to see the obstacles that these girls face when they want to do something as simple as play soccer.

So on the final day of camp it is a big to-do. The camp ends with a talent-show-like ceremony. As the leader of the english group, I was supposed to be in charge of the girl's performance. Earlier that week I taught them the lyrics to "One Thing" by One Direction (again, yes) and since I had already done this during my training period, another volunteer had come up with choreography so I asked them if they would like to sing that song and do a dance. they all agreed and so the rest of the day I listened to that song about 85 times. The girls really got good at the lyrics and the dance moves. Some of the other counselors (who were about the same age as my group) seemed to get jealous or excited about the dance and one of the males actually decided that he wanted to participate in it as well and quickly memorized the dance moves. I was told by the camp director that we would actually be the finale. it was just so surreal. When they called us up to the stage they introduced us as "Christen's group" which was even more ridiculous. So the who camp was there as well as many of the adults in town. The girls were extremely nervous so i kept trying to calm them down saying they know it and they are gonna do great. After the performance everyone seemed really relieved and excited at how well it went. I was really proud of them bc a lot of them dont even speak a full sentence of english yet they memorized about a minute of the song completely in english. After camp I was really relieved and there was a big dance party and everyone seemed to let loose a little. It was such an exhausting week but I definitely feel like a part of the community. I was invited to the high school on Wednesday to shadow the kids which I am very excited about. I will; leave you with some pics of the week