The group flight back to the States is tomorrow morning. I'm sticking around by myself for three days to hang out with my host family, then flying to Paris next Tuesday. I am beyond thrilled to see Europe, and Stephen...not to mention meeting up with Lisa and David in Paris. And I'm really excited about going HOME after that!! I have never appreciated Midwestern America more in my life. Milwaukee, Chicago, Twin Cities...I miss all of it.
Some of the things I miss are obvious, like real cheese aplenty (go Wisconsin) and showers and my friends and family, but some of them are strange. For example, I desperately miss orderly lines. Lines do not exist in Morocco. You can be standing at a hanut, ready to buy some bread, thinking you're obviously next in "line," and then someone will come and shove in front of you. Or in my case, because I am foreign and can't bring myself to shove Moroccan-style, ten people will take advantage of my passiveness and force their way in front of me. Even though I know it's a cultural difference and it's not considered "rude" the way it would be at home, it still makes me mad.
Okay, but. Despite the annoying lack of lines, and despite missing home, I also don't really want to leave Morocco. I wish I could have the best of both worlds. Or I wish I at least knew when I would get to come back here. I don't. That's life.
But to backtrack:
My ISP research got done, obviously. Then I spent a week (last week) traveling with my friends. First we spent a couple of days back in Northern Morocco, in Tangier. Then Essaouira, where we wrote our papers--we camped out daily at the one cafe that had outlets for our computers (we were an absolute spectacle; no one studies or uses computers at cafes here) and used the beach, the souk, and ice cream as a reward system. It was very effective. By Friday our papers were pretty much written and we had a few days before we had to be back in Rabat, so we hopped over to Marrakesh for a day just because. We went there during Southern Excursion, and I like it. I mean, yes, it's ridiculously touristy and the monkeys tied up in the main square make me want to cry, but it's fun and crazy, and the square has THE BEST orange juice and spiced tea. Marrakesh is just...an experience. It was fun to go back.
Now it's "disorientation" week and we are back at Hotel Majestic, the hotel just outside the medina where we stayed during orientation. It's funny, I remember being completely disillusioned about this place during my first week in Morocco, thinking it was a pretty crappy hotel. Now it seems positively glamorous.
Tuesday and Wednesday were our ISP presentations, attended by the other students, our academic directors (Lahcen and Abdelhay), and our ISP advisers. It was a bit nerve-wracking because we each had to present for 45 minutes, and a lot of people on this program are both ridiculously smart and ridiculously intense...but I was also genuinely excited to share my research. During my research, I got to talk to some really fascinating women and activists about what the new Mudawana means for this society--a lot, basically. In many ways it means real progress for women's rights--women no longer need their father's permission to marry, women who suffer domestic violence or other harm in their marriage can get a divorce more easily, men are no longer able to repudiate their wives on a whim, etc. Still, implementation and education (not to mention legal loopholes that still exist in the law) are major problems, so there is a lot more to be done. Which makes Moroccan family law an awesome field to study.
So yeah, my presentation was Wednesday. It went well, but as is the case with any academic semester, it was also just a huge relief to be DONE. For the past few days we’ve just been hanging out, relaxing, shopping for last-minute souvenirs, running errands, saying goodbyes…today we’re going to the hammam for the last time, then having a final group dinner at this restaurant/bar that serves excellent pizza. I can’t believe that people are leaving tomorrow.
I don't really feel like reflecting on what it means to be leaving and what I've gained from the semester. I've certainly been thinking about it enough, but that and ISP together have left me mentally exhausted. I'm just going to let my last few days be what they are.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
livin it up in the ville nouvelle
So I’m actually not living it up by anyone’s standards, but ISP has been pretty great so far. We moved out of our home stays about a week and a half ago. As expected, it was sad to leave, but I’ve already been back twice, once for tea and once for lunch, and I’m going again this Friday for couscous—sorry if I’ve mentioned Friday couscous about a dozen times already, but it bears repeating that it is probably one of the best meals known to mankind.
I spent the first week of ISP living in a cheap hotel in the medina with some of the other students. The first few days were pretty unpleasant because a) everyone was freaking out about their research and b) I got really sick, I think because my home stay family fed me sketchy cheese the weekend before. Also, there was a mosque right next to the hotel, which became a problem because the loudspeaker projecting the call to prayer was right outside our window (they have these loudspeakers all over the city). The call to prayer is extremely loud and happens five times throughout the day, the first of which is around four in the morning. At my home stay the call to prayer was audible but more distant, so I never woke up during the night. In the hotel it was positively blaring.
Still, it was a lot of fun to stay in a dirt cheap place with friends and eat what I wanted when I wanted and not feel obligated to be home by seven for tea time.
Last Friday we upgraded to a hotel in the Ville Nouvelle. By upgraded I mean that I am now paying 65 dirhams (about 7.5 dollars) a night. The walls here are a pleasant off-white rather than bright blue and pink like the first hotel, the rooms are bigger, and there’s a shower downstairs that you can pay extra to use. Plus the room I’m sharing with Elizabeth has a really nice view of a café terrace and Avenue Mohammed V, the main boulevard though the city. The Ville Nouvelle is right next to the medina, so still within easy walking distance of the school, the souk, and my home stay family, but it’s a very different feel. This neighborhood was built by the French during the colonial period (early twentieth century), so the architecture is more European and the overall feel is very different. Lots of cafes, restaurants, open space, big streets, parks…more modern. A very different and nice place to stay, and I’m glad I’m experiencing a new neighborhood, but I kind of miss the craziness of the medina.
As for what I’ve actually been doing…some work, lots of play. Lots of going out to different restaurants and to our favorite ice cream stand, lots of wandering around, lots of time spent watching bootlegged DVDs from the souk. But yes, also research. Like I mentioned, I’m studying the mudawana, so I’ve been doing a few different things for that. Some library research, but mostly I’ve been conducting interviews. I did a few interviews with women who live in the medina to see what they think about the family code and whether they agree with the changes that were made in 2004—really interesting discussions, but I had to get English-speaking acquaintances (Moroccan university students) to act as translators, because none of these women spoke English. I also visited two different nonprofits and did interviews with English-speaking employees. I went with my academic adviser (Souad, who is a gender studies professor and speaks excellent English) to this thing called the “Caravan for Equality” that one of the nonprofits was hosting, where volunteers set up camp in a poor neighborhood on the fringes of the city and talked to local women about their legal rights, leading workshops and group discussions. There was also a free medical clinic, which drew a huge crowd, because most people in this neighborhood never have the opportunity to see a doctor.
I also got the chance to interview a woman who wrote an Arabic book about divorce in Moroccan society. She went through a really awful divorce before the mudawana changed—her husband was abusive, but before 2004 it was really difficult for a woman to get a divorce (whereas a man could just kick his wife out of the house without prior warning and that legally constituted divorce, for women it was both legally difficult and socially unacceptable to ask for separation). It took her four years to finally get her divorce, and then her husband ran off with her son for five years. She went to the courts time and time again to get her son back (she had legal custody all along, but custody isn’t always enforced), and she finally did, but from when he was three to when he was eight, she didn’t see him. This is the sort of thing that is incredibly difficult for me to confront here…things are definitely better now that the mudawana has been revised, but change in legislation does not mean that everyone is cooperating with or enforcing that legislation, and deeply engrained patriarchy does not disappear overnight. I feel like this is one of the difficult things about striving to be the perfect anthropology major…in theory, I want to look at things from a distance and examine them for their cultural significance before I make judgment calls. And I know that universalist principles of human rights do not perfectly apply in every situation. But on a basic emotional level, I can’t distance myself from the things that women deal with here.
Back to the lighthearted and fun side of things, on Friday I am heading north to Tangier and Asilah for the weekend. I’m excited to see more of Northern Morocco, because Chefchaouen was splendid. Right after that we’re taking a bus all the way south along the coast to return to Essaouira and spend the last week of ISP writing and relaxing.
Then our last week as a group back in Rabat, and then the program is over and I fly to Paris. I really can’t process how soon I’m leaving.
I spent the first week of ISP living in a cheap hotel in the medina with some of the other students. The first few days were pretty unpleasant because a) everyone was freaking out about their research and b) I got really sick, I think because my home stay family fed me sketchy cheese the weekend before. Also, there was a mosque right next to the hotel, which became a problem because the loudspeaker projecting the call to prayer was right outside our window (they have these loudspeakers all over the city). The call to prayer is extremely loud and happens five times throughout the day, the first of which is around four in the morning. At my home stay the call to prayer was audible but more distant, so I never woke up during the night. In the hotel it was positively blaring.
Still, it was a lot of fun to stay in a dirt cheap place with friends and eat what I wanted when I wanted and not feel obligated to be home by seven for tea time.
Last Friday we upgraded to a hotel in the Ville Nouvelle. By upgraded I mean that I am now paying 65 dirhams (about 7.5 dollars) a night. The walls here are a pleasant off-white rather than bright blue and pink like the first hotel, the rooms are bigger, and there’s a shower downstairs that you can pay extra to use. Plus the room I’m sharing with Elizabeth has a really nice view of a café terrace and Avenue Mohammed V, the main boulevard though the city. The Ville Nouvelle is right next to the medina, so still within easy walking distance of the school, the souk, and my home stay family, but it’s a very different feel. This neighborhood was built by the French during the colonial period (early twentieth century), so the architecture is more European and the overall feel is very different. Lots of cafes, restaurants, open space, big streets, parks…more modern. A very different and nice place to stay, and I’m glad I’m experiencing a new neighborhood, but I kind of miss the craziness of the medina.
As for what I’ve actually been doing…some work, lots of play. Lots of going out to different restaurants and to our favorite ice cream stand, lots of wandering around, lots of time spent watching bootlegged DVDs from the souk. But yes, also research. Like I mentioned, I’m studying the mudawana, so I’ve been doing a few different things for that. Some library research, but mostly I’ve been conducting interviews. I did a few interviews with women who live in the medina to see what they think about the family code and whether they agree with the changes that were made in 2004—really interesting discussions, but I had to get English-speaking acquaintances (Moroccan university students) to act as translators, because none of these women spoke English. I also visited two different nonprofits and did interviews with English-speaking employees. I went with my academic adviser (Souad, who is a gender studies professor and speaks excellent English) to this thing called the “Caravan for Equality” that one of the nonprofits was hosting, where volunteers set up camp in a poor neighborhood on the fringes of the city and talked to local women about their legal rights, leading workshops and group discussions. There was also a free medical clinic, which drew a huge crowd, because most people in this neighborhood never have the opportunity to see a doctor.
I also got the chance to interview a woman who wrote an Arabic book about divorce in Moroccan society. She went through a really awful divorce before the mudawana changed—her husband was abusive, but before 2004 it was really difficult for a woman to get a divorce (whereas a man could just kick his wife out of the house without prior warning and that legally constituted divorce, for women it was both legally difficult and socially unacceptable to ask for separation). It took her four years to finally get her divorce, and then her husband ran off with her son for five years. She went to the courts time and time again to get her son back (she had legal custody all along, but custody isn’t always enforced), and she finally did, but from when he was three to when he was eight, she didn’t see him. This is the sort of thing that is incredibly difficult for me to confront here…things are definitely better now that the mudawana has been revised, but change in legislation does not mean that everyone is cooperating with or enforcing that legislation, and deeply engrained patriarchy does not disappear overnight. I feel like this is one of the difficult things about striving to be the perfect anthropology major…in theory, I want to look at things from a distance and examine them for their cultural significance before I make judgment calls. And I know that universalist principles of human rights do not perfectly apply in every situation. But on a basic emotional level, I can’t distance myself from the things that women deal with here.
Back to the lighthearted and fun side of things, on Friday I am heading north to Tangier and Asilah for the weekend. I’m excited to see more of Northern Morocco, because Chefchaouen was splendid. Right after that we’re taking a bus all the way south along the coast to return to Essaouira and spend the last week of ISP writing and relaxing.
Then our last week as a group back in Rabat, and then the program is over and I fly to Paris. I really can’t process how soon I’m leaving.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The blue city, my city, and other cities
As the title implies, more traveling! I spent last weekend in El Jadida, a coastal city a few hours south of here. That was a very spontaneous trip. My friend Jessica and I decided at noon that Saturday to go somewhere. An hour later we were at the train station, boarding a train. We arrived and found some random (cheap) hotel, then spent that night and all of Sunday wandering the crazy souk, seeing the Portuguese ramparts on the oceanfront, and sitting on the beach. The return trip was a nightmare, because the train was overbooked and we wound up standing for three hours. Besides that, awesome.
This weekend was a better-planned excursion to Chefchaouen, which is in the northern Rif Mountains. It's a small city literally built into a mountainside...amazing, amazing, amazing. It's so cool to wander through the medina and climb steep cobblestone streets and look up and see mountains all around you. Plus the entire medina (pretty much) is painted sky blue. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's lovely. Oh, AND there's a lot of Spanish influence in Northern Morocco, which thrilled me because I could actually communicate--most people in that region speak some Spanish. Jessica, Janks, and I befriended this artist/shopkeeper who sells all of his work in a small store in the medina, and between a bit of English, Spanish, French, and Arabic, we talked with him for a good chunk of the afternoon--about his paintings, about what Moroccans think of tourists, about what we think of Morocco, etc (and we bought things, of course--I love the conversion rate here).
In short, I fell absolutely and completely in love with Chefchaouen. I think it's my favorite place in this country so far.
As for school: Lectures (Culture and Society Seminar, Field Studies Seminar) are over. This week is the end of Arabic, the end of our home stays, and ISP preparation. I won't be permanently saying goodbye to my home stay family, which I'm really happy about because I've come to completely adore them...I'm going to be in Rabat for the first part of ISP, and while I won't be living with them, I'll definitely visit. When everything is said and done and the other students fly out on May 16, I have three extra days before flying to Paris to meet Stephen, so I'm going to spend that time with my host family as well. Like I said, I'm relieved that I don't have to say a final farewell so soon. Despite all the difficulties of living with them (and there have been plenty) it has been a wonderful experience overall, and I can't get over how nice they have been to me. Hind seems really upset that I'm leaving.
Actually, part of why I feel so close with them right now is that I had a kind of hard week last week. Not for any one particular reason...I was just homesick, a little stressed about ISP and other things, and one of my friends had some personal crap going on that I was trying to help her deal with. Just a rough couple of days. Plus there were plumbing problems at Hind's house (they didn't specify, I didn't ask), so when I got home from school last Monday I was promptly asked to pack up a backpack because we were going to spend the week at Hind's friend's house. I'm learning to go with the flow in terms of living arrangements (you really have to here), but this added some strain to my life because I got absolutely nothing done all week. I don't get much done at my home stay in the first place because of the kids, the lack of alone time, etc., and when you're a guest all over again you have zero time to yourself. You hang out and drink coffee or tea at every waking moment.
The point being, at one point last week I had one of those moments when lots of little things stack on top of each other and you get upset and just need to let it out. Hind realized I was in a bad mood and immediately asked if I was okay, and...I guess this is kind of embarrassing, but whatever, I have no sense of embarrassment anymore...I just started to bawl!!! She was so, so sweet to me, hugging me and kissing me and saying that I could tell her absolutely anything, "like an older sister." A few of her friends were there, too (of course I couldn't break down on my own or just in Hind's presence, I had to do it in front of like six acquaintances--and in the middle of the souk, did I mention that? so actually in front of dozens of people), and they were so supportive. Even though I couldn't really communicate why I was upset, they kept telling me that I was part of their family and anything I needed, just to tell them. It was really touching.
So since that episode, and also just generally, I'm feeling really good about my home stay and really sad about the prospect of moving out. Although there are things (like privacy) that I will be happy to regain.
What else...like I said, preparing for ISP. My topic, once and for all (I've flip-flopped too many times to count), is the Moudawana, or family law. The king revised it a few years ago to provide more comprehensive rights for women, like giving them more say in matters of marriage and divorce. My research will focus on how much difference the revisions have made on the ground, in peoples' lives. My academic directors have mentioned that one issue is that not all women know very much about the changes and may not be fully aware of their new rights. I want to investigate this by interviewing married Moroccan women here in Rabat, seeing what they know and don't know about Moudawana, seeing whether they think their lives are different because of the changes. From there I'm hoping to gain some insight into what more could be done to improve the livelihoods of Moroccan women. It should be great.
This weekend was a better-planned excursion to Chefchaouen, which is in the northern Rif Mountains. It's a small city literally built into a mountainside...amazing, amazing, amazing. It's so cool to wander through the medina and climb steep cobblestone streets and look up and see mountains all around you. Plus the entire medina (pretty much) is painted sky blue. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's lovely. Oh, AND there's a lot of Spanish influence in Northern Morocco, which thrilled me because I could actually communicate--most people in that region speak some Spanish. Jessica, Janks, and I befriended this artist/shopkeeper who sells all of his work in a small store in the medina, and between a bit of English, Spanish, French, and Arabic, we talked with him for a good chunk of the afternoon--about his paintings, about what Moroccans think of tourists, about what we think of Morocco, etc (and we bought things, of course--I love the conversion rate here).
In short, I fell absolutely and completely in love with Chefchaouen. I think it's my favorite place in this country so far.
As for school: Lectures (Culture and Society Seminar, Field Studies Seminar) are over. This week is the end of Arabic, the end of our home stays, and ISP preparation. I won't be permanently saying goodbye to my home stay family, which I'm really happy about because I've come to completely adore them...I'm going to be in Rabat for the first part of ISP, and while I won't be living with them, I'll definitely visit. When everything is said and done and the other students fly out on May 16, I have three extra days before flying to Paris to meet Stephen, so I'm going to spend that time with my host family as well. Like I said, I'm relieved that I don't have to say a final farewell so soon. Despite all the difficulties of living with them (and there have been plenty) it has been a wonderful experience overall, and I can't get over how nice they have been to me. Hind seems really upset that I'm leaving.
Actually, part of why I feel so close with them right now is that I had a kind of hard week last week. Not for any one particular reason...I was just homesick, a little stressed about ISP and other things, and one of my friends had some personal crap going on that I was trying to help her deal with. Just a rough couple of days. Plus there were plumbing problems at Hind's house (they didn't specify, I didn't ask), so when I got home from school last Monday I was promptly asked to pack up a backpack because we were going to spend the week at Hind's friend's house. I'm learning to go with the flow in terms of living arrangements (you really have to here), but this added some strain to my life because I got absolutely nothing done all week. I don't get much done at my home stay in the first place because of the kids, the lack of alone time, etc., and when you're a guest all over again you have zero time to yourself. You hang out and drink coffee or tea at every waking moment.
The point being, at one point last week I had one of those moments when lots of little things stack on top of each other and you get upset and just need to let it out. Hind realized I was in a bad mood and immediately asked if I was okay, and...I guess this is kind of embarrassing, but whatever, I have no sense of embarrassment anymore...I just started to bawl!!! She was so, so sweet to me, hugging me and kissing me and saying that I could tell her absolutely anything, "like an older sister." A few of her friends were there, too (of course I couldn't break down on my own or just in Hind's presence, I had to do it in front of like six acquaintances--and in the middle of the souk, did I mention that? so actually in front of dozens of people), and they were so supportive. Even though I couldn't really communicate why I was upset, they kept telling me that I was part of their family and anything I needed, just to tell them. It was really touching.
So since that episode, and also just generally, I'm feeling really good about my home stay and really sad about the prospect of moving out. Although there are things (like privacy) that I will be happy to regain.
What else...like I said, preparing for ISP. My topic, once and for all (I've flip-flopped too many times to count), is the Moudawana, or family law. The king revised it a few years ago to provide more comprehensive rights for women, like giving them more say in matters of marriage and divorce. My research will focus on how much difference the revisions have made on the ground, in peoples' lives. My academic directors have mentioned that one issue is that not all women know very much about the changes and may not be fully aware of their new rights. I want to investigate this by interviewing married Moroccan women here in Rabat, seeing what they know and don't know about Moudawana, seeing whether they think their lives are different because of the changes. From there I'm hoping to gain some insight into what more could be done to improve the livelihoods of Moroccan women. It should be great.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Village!
Oh my. Where to begin?
On Friday I got back to Rabat after the rural village stay, and I was completely right in predicting that it would be one of the more intense things I’ve done. I don’t even know what to say about it. I have never encountered that kind of poverty before, and I’ve also never had to live that simply before. I got a lot out of it, but in the end I was so, so relieved to come back to Rabat, which seems normal and easy to me in comparison. And I was thrilled to see my host family here again--I appreciate them about ten times more now.
The village we were staying in, Feryat, has only a few hundred residents and is just west of the Middle Atlas Mountains. It’s a farming village—the houses are very spread out, with a gorgeous hilly landscape in all directions and herds of cattle everywhere you turn. I lived in close contact with donkeys, sheep, cows, dogs, cats, etc. It was wonderful to spend so much time outside and wander in enormous fields of wildflowers, but it’s a very, very isolated place. The nearest town that has any actual stores or modern amenities is Boujad, which is about twenty kilometers away.
So you can imagine how loud our presence was—-thirty American students, roaming around and shouting in English, living in practically every house in the village, and constantly doing bizarre things like brushing our teeth and reading. Everything I did was a source of endless fascination during the week; when I got up in the morning and went outside to crouch on the ground, splash some water on my face, and brush my teeth, my host siblings and cousins would crowd around to observe. Even going to the bathroom sometimes involved an audience whether we liked it or not (no bathrooms or toilets, just nature).
I was living in a relatively large housing compound with an extended family. Granny is the honored elder in the household, and her four sons all live there with their wives and families. (It’s a patriarchal system; granny has three daughters as well, but they all moved away to join their husbands’ families when they got married.) Each nuclear family unit has its own room to sleep in, but most everything else is shared—-kitchen, animals, the open central area, etc. My immediate host family consisted of Salah (my host dad and one of granny’s sons), his wife Naima (very young, very sweet), and their two kids, Halima (1) and Yassin (5). One of the other SIT students was living with one of the other sons and his family, so we were in the same larger compound and saw a lot of each other. This made things easier, because whenever one of us was really upset we could seek each other out to talk, and when Elizabeth got sick I was able to help her convince our family (using very, very broken Arabic) that they should stop trying to feed her and let her get some sleep. A difficult feat, since they didn’t really understand that the food was probably what made her sick to begin with.
I’ll just ramble off some of the interesting things I did: I rode a donkey, milked a cow, shook cheese, tried the local buttermilk (and pretended to like it at first, but then I thought I would vomit and had to hand it back to a very upset granny), ate the intestines and lungs of an animal I couldn't identify, had tea about twenty times a day in addition to numerous and huge meals, unsuccessfully tried to help my aunt make bread, learned to weave, helped plant an olive tree, helped plaster cement on the walls of the new village community building, did not bathe all week or change clothes more than once, did not have a one hundred percent happy stomach (although I never got actually sick, unlike some of my peers), and got “traditional” henna. Traditional means that the palms of my hands, soles of my feet, and nails are all bright orange. The stuff on my hands is starting to fade already, but my feet will be neon for some time.
There were some extremely difficult things to deal with in Feryat. Probably the biggest thing for me was gender dynamics. My host mom and aunts worked around the house from dawn until dusk with little acknowledgment from their husbands, which was really difficult for me. They would prepare dinner, set it out for the men, granny, and me (because I was a guest I got to eat with the men and elders), then wait until we were finished and eat the leftovers at a separate table. The men work hard too, don’t get me wrong, but at night they would mostly just sit around and watch TV (something every Moroccan household has, no matter how poor) while the women continued to clean, cook, prepare the bedding, whatever. Even my ten-year-old cousin, Fatima, was treated like a servant in some ways. She would go to school in the morning, but all afternoon and night she would help the women or serve tea and meals to the men. During a discussion that our academic director translated, the villagers told us that the local school is really bad, and besides minimal literacy, a lot of kids like Fatima are hardly getting an education and don’t have good chances of having a “better life,” as the women we talked to put it. They said that they want things to change for their daughters, but that those changes are only happening very slowly.
Once again, I can’t pretend to have any sort of “objective” perspective on this. I have a hard time dealing with the gender separation in urban Morocco, and having seen what things are like in a rural village, I feel even more strongly that things ought to change for women in this society. The depressing thing is, I’m not sure how that can happen. My ISP is going to deal with some of these issues—I’ve settled on researching women’s access to family planning services.
To wrap up about the village, another thing that was difficult was that my host dad was constantly asking Elizabeth and I to take his kids back to America, to help him get a visa, etc. My family was so welcoming and wonderful to me, but these moments were really uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure how much he thought I could actually do. It forced me to recognize the distance between us. Most people in Feryat have never known an American on a personal level before, and they knew, and I knew, that I have things that they probably never will. I left not knowing how to feel about this, and I still don’t.
Needless to say, I had had enough intensity when I got back from the village. Saturday was my 21st birthday, so I made it a particularly un-intense day. I went to have lunch at a pizza place/bar with my SIT friends, then went shopping in the souk, hung out at Janks’s house to watch “Mad Men” for a while, and had a party at my home stay that night. Hind and Hassan had their friends over, I had two of my close SIT friends stay the night, and we ate, drank, danced (I will never be able to dance as well as Moroccans), and made merry. It was exactly what I needed.
On Friday I got back to Rabat after the rural village stay, and I was completely right in predicting that it would be one of the more intense things I’ve done. I don’t even know what to say about it. I have never encountered that kind of poverty before, and I’ve also never had to live that simply before. I got a lot out of it, but in the end I was so, so relieved to come back to Rabat, which seems normal and easy to me in comparison. And I was thrilled to see my host family here again--I appreciate them about ten times more now.
The village we were staying in, Feryat, has only a few hundred residents and is just west of the Middle Atlas Mountains. It’s a farming village—the houses are very spread out, with a gorgeous hilly landscape in all directions and herds of cattle everywhere you turn. I lived in close contact with donkeys, sheep, cows, dogs, cats, etc. It was wonderful to spend so much time outside and wander in enormous fields of wildflowers, but it’s a very, very isolated place. The nearest town that has any actual stores or modern amenities is Boujad, which is about twenty kilometers away.
So you can imagine how loud our presence was—-thirty American students, roaming around and shouting in English, living in practically every house in the village, and constantly doing bizarre things like brushing our teeth and reading. Everything I did was a source of endless fascination during the week; when I got up in the morning and went outside to crouch on the ground, splash some water on my face, and brush my teeth, my host siblings and cousins would crowd around to observe. Even going to the bathroom sometimes involved an audience whether we liked it or not (no bathrooms or toilets, just nature).
I was living in a relatively large housing compound with an extended family. Granny is the honored elder in the household, and her four sons all live there with their wives and families. (It’s a patriarchal system; granny has three daughters as well, but they all moved away to join their husbands’ families when they got married.) Each nuclear family unit has its own room to sleep in, but most everything else is shared—-kitchen, animals, the open central area, etc. My immediate host family consisted of Salah (my host dad and one of granny’s sons), his wife Naima (very young, very sweet), and their two kids, Halima (1) and Yassin (5). One of the other SIT students was living with one of the other sons and his family, so we were in the same larger compound and saw a lot of each other. This made things easier, because whenever one of us was really upset we could seek each other out to talk, and when Elizabeth got sick I was able to help her convince our family (using very, very broken Arabic) that they should stop trying to feed her and let her get some sleep. A difficult feat, since they didn’t really understand that the food was probably what made her sick to begin with.
I’ll just ramble off some of the interesting things I did: I rode a donkey, milked a cow, shook cheese, tried the local buttermilk (and pretended to like it at first, but then I thought I would vomit and had to hand it back to a very upset granny), ate the intestines and lungs of an animal I couldn't identify, had tea about twenty times a day in addition to numerous and huge meals, unsuccessfully tried to help my aunt make bread, learned to weave, helped plant an olive tree, helped plaster cement on the walls of the new village community building, did not bathe all week or change clothes more than once, did not have a one hundred percent happy stomach (although I never got actually sick, unlike some of my peers), and got “traditional” henna. Traditional means that the palms of my hands, soles of my feet, and nails are all bright orange. The stuff on my hands is starting to fade already, but my feet will be neon for some time.
There were some extremely difficult things to deal with in Feryat. Probably the biggest thing for me was gender dynamics. My host mom and aunts worked around the house from dawn until dusk with little acknowledgment from their husbands, which was really difficult for me. They would prepare dinner, set it out for the men, granny, and me (because I was a guest I got to eat with the men and elders), then wait until we were finished and eat the leftovers at a separate table. The men work hard too, don’t get me wrong, but at night they would mostly just sit around and watch TV (something every Moroccan household has, no matter how poor) while the women continued to clean, cook, prepare the bedding, whatever. Even my ten-year-old cousin, Fatima, was treated like a servant in some ways. She would go to school in the morning, but all afternoon and night she would help the women or serve tea and meals to the men. During a discussion that our academic director translated, the villagers told us that the local school is really bad, and besides minimal literacy, a lot of kids like Fatima are hardly getting an education and don’t have good chances of having a “better life,” as the women we talked to put it. They said that they want things to change for their daughters, but that those changes are only happening very slowly.
Once again, I can’t pretend to have any sort of “objective” perspective on this. I have a hard time dealing with the gender separation in urban Morocco, and having seen what things are like in a rural village, I feel even more strongly that things ought to change for women in this society. The depressing thing is, I’m not sure how that can happen. My ISP is going to deal with some of these issues—I’ve settled on researching women’s access to family planning services.
To wrap up about the village, another thing that was difficult was that my host dad was constantly asking Elizabeth and I to take his kids back to America, to help him get a visa, etc. My family was so welcoming and wonderful to me, but these moments were really uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure how much he thought I could actually do. It forced me to recognize the distance between us. Most people in Feryat have never known an American on a personal level before, and they knew, and I knew, that I have things that they probably never will. I left not knowing how to feel about this, and I still don’t.
Needless to say, I had had enough intensity when I got back from the village. Saturday was my 21st birthday, so I made it a particularly un-intense day. I went to have lunch at a pizza place/bar with my SIT friends, then went shopping in the souk, hung out at Janks’s house to watch “Mad Men” for a while, and had a party at my home stay that night. Hind and Hassan had their friends over, I had two of my close SIT friends stay the night, and we ate, drank, danced (I will never be able to dance as well as Moroccans), and made merry. It was exactly what I needed.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
A post that is actually about Rabat
I think it's about time to provide a short update on my life in Rabat. I don't feel as much of a need to write when I'm "home" (meaning, not traveling) because most days are similar...Arabic from 8:30 to 11:45 every morning, lunch at the CCCL, and afternoon lectures on cultural issues or field studies. After that, we run errands or hang out at the cafe or just walk around. I usually head home by 7, have tea with the family, do homework, try to be interesting for my host family's sake, have a very late and large dinner, then eventually break away (always a struggle) and force in a little alone time before bed to just read or listen to music. Not always possible, but it's a treat when it does happen.
Actually, I think that so far my home stay is the single element of this program that is teaching me the most. I hardly know where to begin in terms of talking about living with Hind and company...I adore them, they are wonderful people and so, so welcoming and indulgent (to the extent that they can afford to be), but there are difficulties on a daily basis. Not only is limited communication an issue, but coming from such different cultures, we have verrrrry different mindsets, so a lot of the time I don't understand their motivations and they don't understand mine.
Case in point: This weekend I was gone most of the day Saturday with SIT friends, exploring the Kasbah, Agdal (a suburb and a completely different world--we had lunch at TGI Friday's, my first burger and fries in a month and a half), and the Hassan II tower and mausoleum. Basically just catching up on some touristy things we hadn't had the chance to do before. Anyhow, because I was away all day my family insisted that I make merry with them all evening. Normally I'd be all for this, but I started getting sick towards evening on Saturday, and by 9 all I wanted to do was take a shower and sleep. I was not allowed to take a shower, because my host mom told me that I would get cold and even sicker. Then I was not allowed to go to bed because Hind and Hassan's friends were coming over with food, shisha (hookah), and beer. (Sidenote: Technically Muslims are not supposed to drink alcohol, but since I have younger host parents they sometimes do anyhow. This goes for a lot of Moroccans.) Moroccan hospitality/sociality demanded that they keep me around until one a.m., feeding me more Moroccan barbecue than my stomach could really handle. When I finally did get to bed I could barely sleep for coughing, plus quarters were cramped because about a dozen people stayed over that night.
This whole situation--sickness, exhaustion, not being able to recuperate and rest in a familiar and comfortable way--made me more upset than I've been in Morocco yet, very homesick and dubious about being here for two more months. I got over it once I started feeling better, but it really exemplifies that nothing here happens quite the way I would want it to, and I'm largely at the whims of my host family. Now that I feel fine again I recognize this as a good thing, because it forces me to immerse myself even when I'm not necessarily willing. Even if it's a good thing, though, it makes for hard moments.
It's funny, before I got here I thought that after a week or two culture shock would hit as one big wave of frustration and unhappiness, but that hasn't been true at all. It's more something that comes and goes, usually when I get frustrated about specific things--feeling gross and not being able to shower, having no alone time, eating more than I want to for the sake of making my family happy--and these things lead to an overall frustration, to the point where I want to yell at the men who try to follow me on the street or demand that my family leave me alone for a while. It's not that these emotions have been overwhelming me or anything; because they're not constant, I can keep them in check. But they're definitely present.
BUT don't think for a second that I'm miserable or anything like that. I'm continually happy to be here, excited by the rest of the semester, etc. I just wanted to feed you a dose of reality, because I realized that my past entries were mostly excitable posts about travels and whatnot. It's not always easy to be here, especially as a girl. Hopefully this gives you a fuller picture of what things are like for me day-to-day, both the good and the bad.
P.S. We leave for our rural village stay on Saturday, which will probably be the most intense week of the entire semester. I'll write promptly about that when I get back.
Actually, I think that so far my home stay is the single element of this program that is teaching me the most. I hardly know where to begin in terms of talking about living with Hind and company...I adore them, they are wonderful people and so, so welcoming and indulgent (to the extent that they can afford to be), but there are difficulties on a daily basis. Not only is limited communication an issue, but coming from such different cultures, we have verrrrry different mindsets, so a lot of the time I don't understand their motivations and they don't understand mine.
Case in point: This weekend I was gone most of the day Saturday with SIT friends, exploring the Kasbah, Agdal (a suburb and a completely different world--we had lunch at TGI Friday's, my first burger and fries in a month and a half), and the Hassan II tower and mausoleum. Basically just catching up on some touristy things we hadn't had the chance to do before. Anyhow, because I was away all day my family insisted that I make merry with them all evening. Normally I'd be all for this, but I started getting sick towards evening on Saturday, and by 9 all I wanted to do was take a shower and sleep. I was not allowed to take a shower, because my host mom told me that I would get cold and even sicker. Then I was not allowed to go to bed because Hind and Hassan's friends were coming over with food, shisha (hookah), and beer. (Sidenote: Technically Muslims are not supposed to drink alcohol, but since I have younger host parents they sometimes do anyhow. This goes for a lot of Moroccans.) Moroccan hospitality/sociality demanded that they keep me around until one a.m., feeding me more Moroccan barbecue than my stomach could really handle. When I finally did get to bed I could barely sleep for coughing, plus quarters were cramped because about a dozen people stayed over that night.
This whole situation--sickness, exhaustion, not being able to recuperate and rest in a familiar and comfortable way--made me more upset than I've been in Morocco yet, very homesick and dubious about being here for two more months. I got over it once I started feeling better, but it really exemplifies that nothing here happens quite the way I would want it to, and I'm largely at the whims of my host family. Now that I feel fine again I recognize this as a good thing, because it forces me to immerse myself even when I'm not necessarily willing. Even if it's a good thing, though, it makes for hard moments.
It's funny, before I got here I thought that after a week or two culture shock would hit as one big wave of frustration and unhappiness, but that hasn't been true at all. It's more something that comes and goes, usually when I get frustrated about specific things--feeling gross and not being able to shower, having no alone time, eating more than I want to for the sake of making my family happy--and these things lead to an overall frustration, to the point where I want to yell at the men who try to follow me on the street or demand that my family leave me alone for a while. It's not that these emotions have been overwhelming me or anything; because they're not constant, I can keep them in check. But they're definitely present.
BUT don't think for a second that I'm miserable or anything like that. I'm continually happy to be here, excited by the rest of the semester, etc. I just wanted to feed you a dose of reality, because I realized that my past entries were mostly excitable posts about travels and whatnot. It's not always easy to be here, especially as a girl. Hopefully this gives you a fuller picture of what things are like for me day-to-day, both the good and the bad.
P.S. We leave for our rural village stay on Saturday, which will probably be the most intense week of the entire semester. I'll write promptly about that when I get back.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Just returned from Southern Excursion. It would be pretty much impossible to spell out each one of the zillions of things we did during the week, but here are some highlights:
1. The desert. We did the typically tourist thing and rode camels up the sand dunes, which was uncomfortable and so worth it. But the best part of our time in the Sahara was waking up at five a.m. to trek up the highest sand dune and watch the sun rise. It may have been the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done, but again, so worth it.
2. Driving through the High Atlas mountains. The fact that we were packed into an enormous tour bus made the tizis (mountain passes) terrifying, but it hardly mattered for the view.
3. Staying in a dorm in Ouarzazate. The organization that runs the dorm gives rural girls who don't get much education in their home villages the opportunity to live and learn in the city. We had dinner with the girls. One of them (age 18) had just gotten married and asked why we didn't have husbands yet. What can you really say in response to this?
4. Marrakesh, every bit as crazy and touristy as I anticipated. Monkey handlers, pushy vendors, snake charmers, all of it. The men here were particularly aggressive with their call-outs...they kept assuming we were English and shouting "fish and chips" when we walked by. You're supposed to just ignore this sort of thing, but sometimes it's difficult not to laugh.
On our second night in Marrakesh, our entire group went to a massive club just outside the city. This club did not close at 1:00, unlike the one in Casa.
5. Essaouira!! This is a city on the Southern Atlantic Coast that is ridiculously laid-back and friendly. We wound up staying an extra night because we just couldn't get enough of it. Time on the beach, shopping in the souks, and befriending a shopkeeper who sells Gnaoua (traditional Berber) music CDs and instruments. He gave us a personal concert.
So, in short, fabulous week. Now I'm back in Rabat and ready to spend a few weeks here. I think I'm going to stick around this weekend, explore some things I have not yet seen (Hassan II Tower, the Chellah, etc), and just hang with the family. Also, this Tuesday is the Prophet Mohammed's birthday, a big holiday for Muslims. My host mom is taking me to a festival in Sale, the city just north of Rabat.
Also, as of today, our time here in Morocco is one-third of the way over (five weeks down, ten to go). This weirds me out. I feel like I'm just getting started seeing and doing things here, learning about this culture and figuring out how to communicate in Arabic (in the most basic way possible, of course--but I can now read and write with the Arabic alphabet, which is progress!). It's not something you can do completely in three and a half months. It's not something you can do completely unless you live here in a more permanent way, I guess.
1. The desert. We did the typically tourist thing and rode camels up the sand dunes, which was uncomfortable and so worth it. But the best part of our time in the Sahara was waking up at five a.m. to trek up the highest sand dune and watch the sun rise. It may have been the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done, but again, so worth it.
2. Driving through the High Atlas mountains. The fact that we were packed into an enormous tour bus made the tizis (mountain passes) terrifying, but it hardly mattered for the view.
3. Staying in a dorm in Ouarzazate. The organization that runs the dorm gives rural girls who don't get much education in their home villages the opportunity to live and learn in the city. We had dinner with the girls. One of them (age 18) had just gotten married and asked why we didn't have husbands yet. What can you really say in response to this?
4. Marrakesh, every bit as crazy and touristy as I anticipated. Monkey handlers, pushy vendors, snake charmers, all of it. The men here were particularly aggressive with their call-outs...they kept assuming we were English and shouting "fish and chips" when we walked by. You're supposed to just ignore this sort of thing, but sometimes it's difficult not to laugh.
On our second night in Marrakesh, our entire group went to a massive club just outside the city. This club did not close at 1:00, unlike the one in Casa.
5. Essaouira!! This is a city on the Southern Atlantic Coast that is ridiculously laid-back and friendly. We wound up staying an extra night because we just couldn't get enough of it. Time on the beach, shopping in the souks, and befriending a shopkeeper who sells Gnaoua (traditional Berber) music CDs and instruments. He gave us a personal concert.
So, in short, fabulous week. Now I'm back in Rabat and ready to spend a few weeks here. I think I'm going to stick around this weekend, explore some things I have not yet seen (Hassan II Tower, the Chellah, etc), and just hang with the family. Also, this Tuesday is the Prophet Mohammed's birthday, a big holiday for Muslims. My host mom is taking me to a festival in Sale, the city just north of Rabat.
Also, as of today, our time here in Morocco is one-third of the way over (five weeks down, ten to go). This weirds me out. I feel like I'm just getting started seeing and doing things here, learning about this culture and figuring out how to communicate in Arabic (in the most basic way possible, of course--but I can now read and write with the Arabic alphabet, which is progress!). It's not something you can do completely in three and a half months. It's not something you can do completely unless you live here in a more permanent way, I guess.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Casa and contemplations
Back from another weekend of traveling, this time to Casablanca, which is only an hour south of Rabat. Leaving on weekends is definitely becoming habitual—this Saturday my entire group leaves for our week-long “southern excursion” to Essaouira, Marrakech, the Sahara desert (riding camels and camping), and a few other southern towns. I think I like this trend, because honestly, there are not exactly endless options for weekend activities in Rabat. I would probably wind up watching television and eating perpetually with my host family, which I do enough of already.
So anyhow. I spent the weekend in Casablanca with five of the other students. We took the train down from Rabat early Saturday morning and found a really cheap hotel to stay in—and I truly mean cheap, it was about 8 dollars per person. The rooms had sketchy tiger-print comforters and no toilets--you had to go down the hall to use the nasty general one. But we did specifically ask for rooms with western-style showers, and amazingly, we got them.
We spent most of Saturday just wandering around, stepping into cafes to see what looked promising, and lazing on the grass in the Park of the Arab League (lovely). Also, we’ve all gotten to a point now where we really miss American food, and within a few hours of arriving in Casa someone mentioned McDonald’s. We promptly determined that we wanted nothing more than to eat lunch at McDonald’s. We couldn’t find one just by wandering around, so eventually we hailed a cab (cabs are absurdly cheap here) and told the driver to take us to the nearest McDonald’s. Three of us had gotten into the cab, and a fourth person was about to squeeze in next to me (she had the door open and one leg partially in), when the taxi began to DRIVE AWAY. Terrifying. We had forgotten that Moroccan cabs never take more than three people, and rather than politely telling you that they can’t accept a fourth person, they simply start driving. So we got angry, and the driver got equally angry, and we wound up getting out and giving up on McDonald’s. In retrospect the whole thing was pretty hilarious, especially the fact that we got desperate enough to take a taxi. I hope I never hit that low again in my life.
Moving on. One of the girls I was traveling with, Teresa, goes to Yale, and she knows a Yale alum named Amam who grew up in Casablanca and returned there after she graduated. This proved a verrrry valuable connection. Saturday night, Amam and her friends picked us all up for dinner at an amazing Indian restaurant, and afterwards we all went dancing together—although this part of the night only lasted for an hour, as it was already midnight when we got to the club and it closed at one (way to go, Morocco). It was an incredibly fun night, not at all intellectually stimulating and exactly what we all needed.
On Sunday we slept in, checked out of the hotel, went to a cafe for brunch, and then met up with Amam and her friends again—talk about hospitable. They invited us to an acquaintance's beach house for the day, and we obviously had no objections, considering it was cloudless and 70 degrees outside. When we got to the house, about a block from the beach, we were kind of shocked by how enormous and nice it was. Nicest house I have yet seen in Morocco. Not many people here can afford to live that way. We lounged in the backyard for a few hours, had a Moroccan barbecue, then spent a gorgeous early evening hour on the beach.
So yes, it was a wonderful weekend, but it also forced a lot of reflection. For example, there I was, spending my Sunday at an upper-class beach house, when back in downtown there were street kids accosting us at every corner and asking for money. (I should mention that whether all of them actually need the money is another question entirely—one problem with begging in this society is that some people do it because it is lucrative, even if they don’t need to. Still, some of them desperately do need the money, so it’s impossible to pass judgment.) Not to mention the extensive slums that we passed on the train on our way into the city. The point being, when it comes down to it, there is really no way to balance the two in my mind. Things are just plain unequal around here, and everywhere, and being confronted by it so openly is uncomfortable.
Okay, sorry, I don’t want to bog everyone down with intense contemplations. But I guess it’s honest to include some of them, because not everything that I am participating in or thinking about here is pretty. A lot of it is extremely difficult. Another example: Coming from the culture that I do come from, I am having a hard time coping with the role of women in this society, especially compared with the relative freedom of men. Although educated and upper-class women have a little more mobility, women here in the medina are by and large still inferior to men in the public eye. They are expected to answer to their husbands, ignore the whistling from men on the street, and dress and behave “modestly” (whatever exactly that means). This has to do with customs, it has to do with interpretations of what Islam and the Koran command in terms of women’s behavior—it has to do with a lot things. Even within my SIT program, there are major differences for male versus female students. The girls (the majority of us) are uncomfortable walking around by ourselves after dark, are expected to return home early in the evening, and deal with street harassment at every waking moment. The guys are constantly going to pool halls or bars at night, and they head home at any hour they like.
As an anthropology major and an outsider who does not fully understand gender dynamics here, part of me wants to keep judgment at bay. But it is impossible not to form opinions, and so far my opinion is that change would be a good thing for women here. The alterations to Moroccan family law that the king made a few years ago were a major step in the right direction, but they were not all-encompassing. I’m curious as to how different demographics of Moroccan women feel about this, and I’m thinking about writing my independent study project on this topic.
Okay, to sum up and leave off: I’m still having a wonderful time and thinking pretty deeply about a lot of things, which ultimately augments my having a wonderful time, because it’s exactly what I wanted out of this semester. I am learning a lot both explicitly and implicitly.
This is it for a few weeks, since I’ll be traveling all of next week. Also, I should mention that I’ve given up on loading any more photos to facebook for now. Some are already there, so you can see those if you’re interested (let me know if you’re not on facebook, I can give you a link), but our internet at school is dreadfully slow. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll try again. For now, you will have to subsist on my beautiful words.
Love!
So anyhow. I spent the weekend in Casablanca with five of the other students. We took the train down from Rabat early Saturday morning and found a really cheap hotel to stay in—and I truly mean cheap, it was about 8 dollars per person. The rooms had sketchy tiger-print comforters and no toilets--you had to go down the hall to use the nasty general one. But we did specifically ask for rooms with western-style showers, and amazingly, we got them.
We spent most of Saturday just wandering around, stepping into cafes to see what looked promising, and lazing on the grass in the Park of the Arab League (lovely). Also, we’ve all gotten to a point now where we really miss American food, and within a few hours of arriving in Casa someone mentioned McDonald’s. We promptly determined that we wanted nothing more than to eat lunch at McDonald’s. We couldn’t find one just by wandering around, so eventually we hailed a cab (cabs are absurdly cheap here) and told the driver to take us to the nearest McDonald’s. Three of us had gotten into the cab, and a fourth person was about to squeeze in next to me (she had the door open and one leg partially in), when the taxi began to DRIVE AWAY. Terrifying. We had forgotten that Moroccan cabs never take more than three people, and rather than politely telling you that they can’t accept a fourth person, they simply start driving. So we got angry, and the driver got equally angry, and we wound up getting out and giving up on McDonald’s. In retrospect the whole thing was pretty hilarious, especially the fact that we got desperate enough to take a taxi. I hope I never hit that low again in my life.
Moving on. One of the girls I was traveling with, Teresa, goes to Yale, and she knows a Yale alum named Amam who grew up in Casablanca and returned there after she graduated. This proved a verrrry valuable connection. Saturday night, Amam and her friends picked us all up for dinner at an amazing Indian restaurant, and afterwards we all went dancing together—although this part of the night only lasted for an hour, as it was already midnight when we got to the club and it closed at one (way to go, Morocco). It was an incredibly fun night, not at all intellectually stimulating and exactly what we all needed.
On Sunday we slept in, checked out of the hotel, went to a cafe for brunch, and then met up with Amam and her friends again—talk about hospitable. They invited us to an acquaintance's beach house for the day, and we obviously had no objections, considering it was cloudless and 70 degrees outside. When we got to the house, about a block from the beach, we were kind of shocked by how enormous and nice it was. Nicest house I have yet seen in Morocco. Not many people here can afford to live that way. We lounged in the backyard for a few hours, had a Moroccan barbecue, then spent a gorgeous early evening hour on the beach.
So yes, it was a wonderful weekend, but it also forced a lot of reflection. For example, there I was, spending my Sunday at an upper-class beach house, when back in downtown there were street kids accosting us at every corner and asking for money. (I should mention that whether all of them actually need the money is another question entirely—one problem with begging in this society is that some people do it because it is lucrative, even if they don’t need to. Still, some of them desperately do need the money, so it’s impossible to pass judgment.) Not to mention the extensive slums that we passed on the train on our way into the city. The point being, when it comes down to it, there is really no way to balance the two in my mind. Things are just plain unequal around here, and everywhere, and being confronted by it so openly is uncomfortable.
Okay, sorry, I don’t want to bog everyone down with intense contemplations. But I guess it’s honest to include some of them, because not everything that I am participating in or thinking about here is pretty. A lot of it is extremely difficult. Another example: Coming from the culture that I do come from, I am having a hard time coping with the role of women in this society, especially compared with the relative freedom of men. Although educated and upper-class women have a little more mobility, women here in the medina are by and large still inferior to men in the public eye. They are expected to answer to their husbands, ignore the whistling from men on the street, and dress and behave “modestly” (whatever exactly that means). This has to do with customs, it has to do with interpretations of what Islam and the Koran command in terms of women’s behavior—it has to do with a lot things. Even within my SIT program, there are major differences for male versus female students. The girls (the majority of us) are uncomfortable walking around by ourselves after dark, are expected to return home early in the evening, and deal with street harassment at every waking moment. The guys are constantly going to pool halls or bars at night, and they head home at any hour they like.
As an anthropology major and an outsider who does not fully understand gender dynamics here, part of me wants to keep judgment at bay. But it is impossible not to form opinions, and so far my opinion is that change would be a good thing for women here. The alterations to Moroccan family law that the king made a few years ago were a major step in the right direction, but they were not all-encompassing. I’m curious as to how different demographics of Moroccan women feel about this, and I’m thinking about writing my independent study project on this topic.
Okay, to sum up and leave off: I’m still having a wonderful time and thinking pretty deeply about a lot of things, which ultimately augments my having a wonderful time, because it’s exactly what I wanted out of this semester. I am learning a lot both explicitly and implicitly.
This is it for a few weeks, since I’ll be traveling all of next week. Also, I should mention that I’ve given up on loading any more photos to facebook for now. Some are already there, so you can see those if you’re interested (let me know if you’re not on facebook, I can give you a link), but our internet at school is dreadfully slow. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll try again. For now, you will have to subsist on my beautiful words.
Love!
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