I saw WILD MONKEYS

April 9, 2009

My training is finally winding down. I got a chance to go on a pretty decent hike (2 hours out, 2 hours back, 12 km total) to a pretty sweet place. I went with 3 other trainees and my host sister-in-law’s brother. We thought we had gone the wrong direction to get to a protected area that we had heard was close by, so one girl suggested stopping for a rest about a two minute walk from what we eventually found was a really great vista. I would have been so disappointed if I found out that we had barely missed seeing it. I guess ignorance is bliss, so I never would have known what I had missed. The next day I went with 4 other trainees to a big waterfall in our province. It required an hour and a half in a “grand taxi”. Those things are sweet if you are traveling with a bunch of people you’re close to. I’m imagining it’s kind of hell if you’re riding with “strangers”. I’ll find out shortly what that’s like. Anyway, the waterfall was amazing, and I can now cross off one of the things on my list of things to see before I die: WILD MONKEYS!!!!!!! We had heard that there are monkeys at this waterfall, and the whole walk down, which was a giant tourist trap, by the way, we only saw some tree’s rustling. On the way back up from the falls: yep, you guessed it, we saw 3 monkeys. The first one was a momma and her baby, who clung tightly to his/her mom’s belly as she picked through scraps that tourists were giving her. The other monkey was doing the same thing farther up the path. I guess these weren’t really “wild monkeys” but rather park-like monkeys. The ride back was tiring, and I found out that cyber café’s are sometimes open on Sundays, sometimes not. I did, however, get a chance to call home from a pay phone in my town. Pretty good weekend I’d say.

April 11, 2009

Tonight I went to the local Dar Tlib, which is a dorm for children from the surrounding areas that go to school in my town but live too far to realistically travel to and from home every day. There is a national system of these, and it is run pretty efficiently. The two local Peace Corps volunteers and a group of area volunteers were going to do a tooth brushing lesson, but a nationwide transportation strike put a hold on that. It has apparently been going on for a week now. My town was supposed to have a horse festival this Monday and Tuesday, but that has been pushed back a week. The Saturday market was also really affected. Not many people showed up to sell their goods, so it was pretty slim pickings for our weekly food. The prices have also gone way up, so we didn’t buy a lot of what was actually there. Pretty crazy. Anyway, back to my original story. All of the trainees, or teacher, and the two volunteers showed up for a possible talk by the Kaid, who’s a local official appointed by the King. He didn’t show up, so the director of the Dar Tlib provided entertainment for the night. The session started with a reading from the Quran, a religious chant from a group of three girls, and a song by 5 girls and one boy. Then we played a series of games. We started off with a version of musical chairs which was really fun. The director taught the group a song to sing. He would sing a verse, and everyone would repeat. He gave a broom to one person who would go around the room (the seats were all around the walls of the room) tapping people who would then have to get up and conga-line around the room. When the person with the broom dropped the broom, everyone would have to try to find a seat. The last person standing would have to then lead. It was a lot of fun. I’m guessing half of the 143 kids (ages 8 or 9 to 16) attended. The director then had our language teacher do an ice breaker song that we learned when we first came to Morocco. It was kind of a complicated thing, so it didn’t go over extremely well, but it served it’s purpose. The next game was my favorite. The director picked 4 people (including 2 trainees) to leave the room while he explained the rules to the rest. He had a whistle, which he put in the bottom of the back of his jacket. He would then bring one person in at a time and tell them to find the person with the whistle. He would stand with his back to a group of kids and tell the chosen person that someone in the room had a whistle. As he was talking, a child would blow the whistle dangling from his jacket. The acoustics of the room made it hard to tell where the noise was coming from. He would then point at someone across the room and say that they had the whistle. He’d then tell the chosen person to pat down the supposed perpetrator. It would happen 4 or 5 times before the chosen victim would figure it out. Lots of fun. The Americans then did a round of “Row Row Row Your Boat”. It was a mini-semi-disaster. It was too hard to teach the kids an English song, so we just did the round with our group of 8. The night ended with a group of boys leading a huge dance circle. The 5 boys had telunts, which are a round drum, kind of like a tambourine without the bells. Moroccans all have great rhythm. About half of the people got in a circle and started a slow dance around the room. Everyone else clapped. It was fun, but kind of tiring. The pace is really pretty slow, but the drumming is nice. Apparently this is the common dance at weddings all summer. The dancing starts around 8 and sometimes goes until 12. The men and women usually do it separately. This summer is going to be a lot of fun. Our teacher’s sister is getting married in May, and there’s an open invitation for all of us trainees. I can’t wait. A lot of volunteers go to a lot of weddings during the summers. I’m trying to suss out the appropriateness of some American dance moves so I can expose the locals to my horrible dancing.

April 12, 2009

So I guess this makes two pretty amazing weekends in a row. I went back out to the protected area near my town. This time I went with a pretty big group. Four Americans went out with 4 Moroccan guys (all under 20 years old). Our “guide” for this trip was a classmate of my host sister-in-law’s brother. He lives at the top of the protected area and his grandfather has a farm near the river at the base of the valley. The day was perfect for hiking, and I now realize why they call this country the cold land with the hot sun. It was pretty cool in the morning but once exposed to that sun for about 10 minutes I was pretty warm. I found out that I have been saying a pretty common phrase wrong the last 5 weeks. I’ve been saying “Mushi Mushkil“, which means “no problem”. The only problem with that is that I should be saying “Mashi Mushkil”. What I’ve been saying really is “cats (plural) problem”. Huge difference. Luckily a lot of people in my town kind of slur their speech a little, so everyone sounds like they are saying “cats problem”. Our guide took us down to his grandfather’s farm, which is near two really cool old 3 story buildings. We got to the river, where we learned we’d be crossing it 4 times to get to a point where we could head up the mountain to our new friend’s house for lunch. I was not prepared for fording the river. I was wearing my logger boots and long underwear, so I had to take off the boots and string them over my shoulder and hike up my pants and long johns past my knees. That apparently wasn’t far enough, cause my pants were soaked. I may have feet that look like long thin hobbit feet, but that’s as far as that comparison goes. I had to be helped across because I’m not used to walking on rocks without shoes. The hike up was pretty burly, and by the time I made it to the top, I was ready for tajine and some swunfu (rest). Our host gave us some mint tea with bread and fresh honey. I will probably only eat fresh honey from now on, no more stuff out of the bear shaped bottle. Our tajine was chalk full of olives and raisins, and therefore was very delicious. The 6 kilometer hike back to our town was very enjoyable, and I realized that berber people travel faster than anyone I’ve ever met. While talking to one of the local volunteers he confirmed that realization when he said that he calls it berber speed. I got a chance to talk to family tonight (thanks for answering Sarah, and sorry I missed you Adam), which always makes me very happy. I get a little motivational boost every time I talk to someone from home. That said, I’ll probably be calling some people this coming weekend (that means you mom and dad and Adam/Sarah).

April 16, 2009

The transportation strike is over. They came to an agreement last night, so it was a really pleasant sight to see all the grand taxis at our local taxi stand. That means the horse festival is on for this Sunday thru Tuesday. The town was pretty much out of chicken meat, which meant I had a couple small dinners, which suits my small stomach just fine. My teacher loves chicken, so he was pretty happy that we could have some for lunch. My training group gave our environmental educational lesson at the primary school and at the Dar Tlib. We had to change things around quickly several times. We found out we’d be presenting at the school on Monday, and presented on Tuesday. Our teacher was brilliant by coming up with a non-verbal skit to do before our lesson (two fellow trainees and I were seeds that turned into trees, two others planted and cared for us, and the last one cut us with an axe before being chased off by the caretakers). He also taught the kids a song about a little bird and a tree. We presented the lesson in front of a class of first year students (6 year olds), but they didn’t quite understand the skit, so the principal had them leave and brought in a class of 6th year students (11 and 12 year olds), who were much more responsive. We taught a lesson on how to plant little herb seeds in used yogurt, milk, and butter containers. They seemed to really enjoy the hands on demonstration (what kid doesn’t like to play in dirt, I know I STILL do). They also loved the song that our teacher taught them. After our presentation we worked on improving the lesson before giving it last night at the Dar Tlib. The second time around was great. We gave the lesson in front of a larger audience, so we brought up four volunteers to demonstrate the planting with the help of their peers in the audience. The association (community group) we worked with helped out a lot and played a quiz game with the kids after we finished our part. Today we got the feedback from the association and Dar Tlib people, which was very positive. I will be learning where I will be living and working the next two years tomorrow afternoon. I’m so excited and anxious to know.
Here are some things I’ve learned the last month and a half: I really can eat a lot of bread and drink tons of tea, two year olds are hilarious everywhere in the world, being able to laugh at yourself is key in life, sugar rice/pasta (a dish with rice or pasta, powdered sugar, and cinnamon, and sometimes raisins) sounds and looks awesome at first, but halfway through you realize eating it was a mistake, I really love hiking, not knowing the language everyone around you speaks is fine as long as you can utilize humor, and I can get by without a lot of “stuff”. Oh yeah, I still hate bananas, and monkeys are awesome, even though they tend to love the thing I hate most in life (refer back to the start of the sentence if I lost you on that one). Yeah, I can easily say I hate bananas more than anything else in life so far. Enough about that. This might be the last time I get to post before getting sworn in as a volunteer, so enjoy.

I still hate bananas!

March 31, 2009

The title starts to tell the story. Those of you who know me well know that I absolutely HATE bananas. I was forced to eat a banana in first grade (thanks Mrs. Woodfill), and I’ve avoided them ever since. The smell nauseates me, so I’ve stayed away from them for about 19 years. That all changed last week when I was given an orange and a banana for my post dinner “snack”. I didn’t want to turn it down, which is silly because the Peace Corps people said that it won’t insult your host family to turn down food you don’t like, so I ate it. I can honestly say that I had no idea what they actually tasted like anymore. I can also say that I still don’t like ‘em. I surprisingly kept it down, smiled, and excused myself towards my room. I think that my worst nightmare would be to be forced to participate in a banana eating contest to save a loved one’s life. I would probably have to say my goodbyes to that loved one, because there’s no way I could stomach another damn banana. The next night was interesting, because I had to use my very limited language skills to try to convey that that one banana was the first one I had eaten in 19 years. I’m now 6 days banana free.
Anyway, enough about my psychosis regarding the devil fruit. Things have been going really well here in central Morocco. I’m still enjoying everything that I’m learning, and am finding that I can actually excel at learning a new language. That said, I’m probably going to plateau on my progress at some point in the next 3 or 4 months, but that’s to be expected I guess for Peace Corps volunteers. Peace Corps Morocco is trying out a new format for training, so we are the lucky group that gets to deal with the frustrations that come with being the first set of trainees. I am liking, however, the chance to give lots of feedback. Past training groups had every other week with a host family for the first 11 weeks of training. We are staying with host families for 8 weeks straight, which will give us a better opportunity to learn the language, and then we are sworn in as volunteers. We have 4 hours of language a day, a big delicious lunch, 2 coffee and tea breaks, and then 4 hours of technical and cultural lessons. There is a lot of technical stuff to go over, so at times it feels overwhelming, but I think we’ll benefit from it. After we’re sworn in we go to our assigned sites (home, if you will, for two years) for a couple months before meeting up at a central location for 2 weeks of technical training. This will allow us to integrate a little bit into our new communities and find out what sort of projects we can participate in. The 2 weeks of training after early integration should allow us to tailor our training to fit our needs and the needs of our new communities.
Ok, story time. This past weekend we weren’t allowed to go out of town, which meant more family time. It turned out to be a really cold and wet weekend. It snowed for about 24 hours straight, but nothing stuck. On Sunday I went to my language teacher’s house with another trainee and that trainee’s 20 year old host brother. The other guy and I taught the two Moroccans how to play cribbage, which delighted me, because they both like it, and we were able to practice counting in Tamazight. Another trainee came over and we watched a couple episodes of Arrested Development, which is still my favorite show. After that I was invited to a trainee’s house for tea and cake. My host family is next door neighbors to 2 other trainee’s host families, and they are really close friends. It was apparently the 17th birthday of the trainee’s host sister, so she made a zucchini bread cake with orange curd frosting. That was probably the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here. It was basically a big dance party. We watched Tamazight music videos while we drank tea and ate sweets. Eventually the girls all started dancing, and my host brother’s daughter Rabab, who is two years old, provided laughter for all. She is adorable, and watching her get excited about dancing is so funny. The 4 teenagers forced the three of us trainees to get up and dance. I will be the first to say that I can’t dance, but it’s easy to dance to Tam music. We even got the host mothers to dance. Watching my 60 year old host mother dance and correct all of our mistakes made my day.
Well, it’s probably going to be another 2 weeks before I can post again, but I’m sure I will have plenty more stories to share. I am going to try to post some more pictures. (http://picasaweb.google.com/CDReim/Week3And4?authkey=Gv1sRgCIypssD-w7b8NA#)