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.

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.

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.