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.