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

End of CBT, onto the next one....

Well readers, I am sorry for the month-and-a-half absence. I promise that you were not forgotten. One of the things I have realized about the Peace Corps process is that you have to advocate for yourself a lot. Seeing as Ive been living with 2 separate Moroccan host families over the past few months, any time that I got to spend by myself I cherished. This language and cultural immersion is extremely taxing Ive found and the blog had to get put on the backburner. No offense reader, but you can be a bit demanding.

All joking aside though, the Peace Corps prides themselves on being “the hardest job you’ll ever love” and Ive found that to be extremely appropriate and fitting to my service so far. Ive been in my permanent site (aka the site I will be for the next 2 years) for exactly one week. For safety reasons Peace Corps does not want me to say the exact name of the site but I can say that I am in a remote village in the Rif mountains. Population 2,000. The site already seems to be more progressive that my CBT site. Girls are allowed to walk around, even go running, by themselves. A higher value seems to be placed on education here, my host sisters are extremely smart and my host mom is going to classes a couple of times a week to learn how to read. It is, of course, not devoid of its own flaws, gender roles are still very strong and the coffee shops in town are exclusively for men (here they seem to spend most of the day), but the discussion of gender roles and higher education for girls seems to exist here in a way that it did not in my CBT site. The village that I live in is a farming community. I have never eaten so well in my life. I feel so lucky that I got a site like this and get to experience such a beautiful place that very few Americans, if any outside of Peace Corps, have gotten to experience.

To rewind a bit, I was in my CBT site from the end of January to the end of March, during which I had language and culture classes 6 days a week from 8:30 to 6. Of course you know that I lived with a host family during that time. It was a very exhausting time because pretty much ever experience I had was brand new. I created a safety net for myself in the form of my CBT group and my host family and my language and culture facilitator. I never expected to feel such a deep connection with my community, but it was really hard to say goodbye. One of my language goals for CBT was to have a conversation with Aya, my host sister, about her future. Aya comes from a family that places a higher value on marriage than education. Her mother, father and sister all dropped out of school to get married. Aya wants to be a doctor one day inshallah, and I wanted to have the language skills to have a conversation with her one how to make that possible. In morocco there are no career centers or guidance counselors to help you get into college, you are just expected to figure it out on your own. So the last week of CBT I finally got to have this conversation with Aya. Even though university is free in Morocco, Aya told me that her family probably wont be able to afford the cost of her having to travel the 45 minutes each way to the nearest university. She said that she definitely wanted to finish high school at least though, which is more than can be said for the rest of her family. I tried to talk to her mom about this subject later and she just kept saying “inshallah” which hopefully means that she wants for it to happen as well.

Other highlights of CBT came in the form of:

Siarah. So one of the biggest windows into the life of a PCV came through Siarah, a 3^rd year volunteer (meaning she extended her service) who stayed with us for 2 weeks to help us prepare for spring camp, which was a government-organized day camp that is run several times a b at every dar chebab. Siarah is an extremely upbeat person who completed a lot of our goals and aspirations over the course of her service. She gave us a lot of practical vocabulary for ever-day-use, including phrases to say to harassers (like I say, for every day use) and she really taught us how to structure our classes at the dar chebab. Her darija is extremely fluent and it was really nice to see someone who is sort of on the other side of the service. She really embraces life in Morocco and her skills in the language were a real inspiration for me personally because I got to witness her having deep conversations with nationals that I only dream of having.

Spring Camp. So spring camp was extremely interesting and posed as a window for how the Ministry might operate here in my permanent site as well. So one day in class, my LCF got a call in class saying that we had to attend some sort of meeting in 15 minutes. We walked to where this meeting was going to take place and it was filled with people from the delegue (unclear exactly what these people do other than work for the government). They then told us that they wanted an exact schedule of what we were going to do in spring camp and it was to be completed in 10 minutes. I found myself extremely infuriated, I felt like I was doing the ministry’s dirty work and was really given no notice that this was happening (on top of classes all day long and being with a host family all night). This was the first time that I felt true frustration in Morocco. The ministry was extremely unclear as to what exactly they wanted from us as well. We threw together a schedule and presented it to the delegue. A few days later, we met two Moroccan men who turned out to be our Moroccan counterparts to spring camp. They disliked much of our schedule and wanted to implement their own. Again, frustration. There is so much beurocracy for literally deciding who should lead hide and seek (we didn’t play hide and seek but you get the point). We decided who should lead certain activities so a lot of what we originally had planned was cut. Again, frustration. The week of spring camp was very fun but very exhausting and again frustrating. Most of the things that I led were on the first and second day and then towards the end of the week. One of the most rewarding things I actually did was I taught the lyrics to “One Thing” by One Direction and I was amazed at how excited the whole camp was to learn this song. People volunteered to do solos, lots of people wrote down all of the lyrics and then later in the day two of my other CBT friends taught people a choreographed dance to it. On my last day at the dar chebab in my CBT site someone came up to me and showed me the lyrics written in his day planner and he said that every morning he reads them and tries to memorize them and he thinks of me. It was really touching. Although everyone in my CBT was extremely good at spring camp and teaching our assigned tasks, the same could not be said about our counterparts. Every time we played a game, they would try to cheat. They were rude to us, and it just didn’t seem like they were really there for the kids. They were disorganized and came up with terrible games at the last minute. One of the most revolting of those games was when we had to site in a circle and one person was picked to sit in the center of the circle and had to answer a question from everyone. Completely confrontational and completely inappropriate. One of my fellow CBT mates was picked and was asked by people if he was going to marry a Moroccan, if he was muslim, etc… Siarah was picked and was asked by someone what she plans to do with her life after she leaves Morocco and she said that she wants to travel around the world. Our counterparts did not like this and asked her how will she get married if she is always traveling. Spring camp in general was a very interesting experience and I am glad I got to go through it with a group of people my first time. The kids (ages 9-30) seemed to have a great time and I will actually be starting a new spring camp in my perm site tomorrow.

Teaching. Peace Corps suggests certain topics that we can hold seminars or classes on, and even writes us a lesson plan. During CBT we each got a chance to teach one class in the topic “Lifeskills” and one in “Work of Work.” My lifeskills class was on having positive values and I really enjoyed the discussions that it caused. One chebab actually apologized to me for the harassment I get in the street and to the rest of the girls. It was a very important moment for me because it is easy to generalize that all Moroccan men think a certain way about women. It was extremely heartwarming to feel like someone on the street has my back because sometimes in my CBT site the harassment got really bad. I was not really expecting that to be said in class at all and I am so glad I got to facilitate that sort of discussion and make that realization at such an early stage.

I was often referred to as the muskina American. Muskina means like “poor thing”. Mostly after not understanding what was happening in a conversation everyone would just laugh and call me muskina. An interesting feature of me learning Moroccan darija is that the Moroccans don’t really have a context for people learning their language. In America we are used to people learning English and different accents within our own language and that context does not really exists in morocco. People don’t really learn this dialect of Arabic and maybe choose to speak French if they are in morocco. Especially if some of the people, especially the older women, have never learned another language, they cannot really relate to how much of the language I should know after 1, 2 or 3 months. It is sometimes frustrating if someone tries to tell me something and then I ask them to repeat it slowly and they speak just as fast or quietly and I still don’t understand. This really confuses some people as to why I can only understand some things and not others. It kind of gets frustrating especially at this point in the process because my darija is good enough to come across as competent but still definitely not good enough to navigate every conversation and people don’t really know what to make of that. It is kind of disheartening for me if I keep having to ask people to repeat themselves and they say something to me like “you don’t understand anything” or something like that. Another common interaction is someone speaking to me in French throughout an entire conversation even if I tell them several times that I understand zero French they still insist of speaking it to me, probably because in their experience of people who look like me they always speak French. Ive definitely learned to laugh through a lot of conversations and have fun with some of the mistakes that I have made with the language. It seems like the Moroccans love to joke around and I think that’s how Ive been able to charm a lot of people is to just make silly jokes about the language to show that I understand. Some examples: I was walking to the dar chebab one morning and my host mom told me that we were passing my host sister’s school… to show that I understood there was a dog at that moment entering the school (there are a lot of feral dogs around morocco) and I told her that the dog wanted to learn with Aya. She thought this was hil-lar-i-ous.

Another thing that people are very confused about me is the fact that I am so young, with a college degree, without my family, in morocco by myself. In my CBT site it was common for people to go to college for a very long time and not really go to class, just when they feel. A fellow CBT mate had a host brother who always told us he goes to university and studies biology but he never went to class once during the 11 weeks we were in this town. People have a really hard time understanding that I have completed college and that I have a degree. On that note, people also don’t understand how I could possibly leave my family as a single female. My LCF told me that it definitely raises some eyebrows when a female lives by herself in this society, we get a little bit of a break since we are American, but there is a feeling that we cannot do very much for ourselves. Myself and the other females in Peace Corps have felt some frustrations in terms of never being left alone by the host family that the males don’t necessarily have to experience. The “hovering” of the host families, although extremely endearing, is starting to get a little old at month 3 into the process, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but being a female in a Moroccan family is a lot to deal with from an American context. In terms of family life, Moroccan families are extremely close. My host family in my CBT site chose to all sleep in the same room together and there really is an expectation to live at home until you are married. After talking to some of the youth at the dar chebab it would appear that the idea that the “parents are always right” is much more strongly believed in morocco that Ive experienced in America. Because of this strong family structure, I feel like the Moroccans I have been around are very sensitive to the fact that I am probably homesick or would like to talk to people back at home.  

My site was described to me as “one of the last remaining stereotypical “peace corps” sites in pc morocco.” That thought is both extremely exciting and challenging. It is absolutely beautiful here and I feel like very few Americans have lived in a village that produces nothing in a quick google search of its name. I will be living off of the map for the next 2 years, drinking well water and driving an hour and forty-five minutes away to reach the nearest restaurant. I am very excited with my site placement but Im gradually taking note of the challenges that I will also face.

In case you have the will or the $$$ to call me in morocco, I would love to hear from you as I don’t really have wifi here (I have a modem stick that I can pay 10 dirham for 1 days worth of internet, but as I get a minimal budget and minimal time to use the internet, Im trying to use this resource sparingly). If you want my Moroccan number just send me a message on facebook or email and contact your local provider to see how much that would cost before you get mad at me when you see your phone bill ;) (innocent plug). 

Just because I want to represent my experience here correctly, if any of this sounds negative, I just want to be clear that I am having a really rewarding experience here already. Everyday comes with its share of surprises and challenges and rewards and connections. I have no doubt in my mind that this is exactly where I should be right now in my life.