Saturday, October 23, 2010

I taught my 1st class at Dar Chabab (youth center) today and 33, eight to eleven year olds showed up. In a town where kids are leaking out of every doorway, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the mob of children pouring toward me with eager smiles, pens and soft cover Aladin notebooks in hand. However, I was so shocked to see them all there, at the previously deserted community center, waiting for me to TEACH them something…that I literally fell off the bottom step of the Dar Chabab entrance and promptly broke my sandal. The kids were so sweet, they were patient and listened to my Arabic phrases and limited vocabulary and participated in everything I tried to do with them. Their twisted and distorted attempts to pronounce all of the English greetings we were studying made all of the stress I have been harboring about my own Arabic studies and anxiety surrounding the location of my final placement melt away ( Well, at least for an hour or so J ) I have a hunch that however much English I try to teach, the biggest smiles are going to come when, like today I stood in front of the room, fist pumping the numbers from 1-10 and shaking my broken sandaled feet in the air while the kids shouted the numbers in a mixture of FrEnbia at the top of their lungs.

With our never ending, rigorous daily language studies, nights full of memorizing new vocab and now the added hours of afternoon teaching at the Dar Chabab I am finding myself tired (or an excessively overused darija word of mine, “anammdigadiga” translating to dying of exhaustion) just about every hour of every day. I ponder daily when my brain is going to just give way and explode from over use and the daily activities involved in the memorization of the numerous vocabulary coming at me from every direction.

I have had to consciously make cutthroat decisions about which words to memorize, and which to leave in the dust and not even attempt to remember. For instance, today I decided that the command form of “to listen” took priority over “mango”. However much I want to be able to buy mangos in the market, the necessity to quiet the screeching kids in my classroom took presidents today. I have recently been wondering if there will be a point of saturation where my brain just won’t be able to absorb anything else! It hasn’t happened yet but I am not sure how much can possibly soak in… So when you read my posts and have no idea what I am speaking about, forgive me. At the level of brain strain I am working with right now, correct English sentence structure is a true challenge…. Hahaha let alone trying to teach it to wide-eyed Moroccan children!!!!

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Life continues at it's slow pace here in training. I have language classes from 8-5:30 daily and then go home to more informal language lessons as well as some tough love in terms of host family cultural/etiquette lessons. This past week I have decided that I really needed to figure out how to make the "3' " sound in arabic. Which as far as I am concerned equates to a roll of an rrr in the back of your throat. It may seem simple, but trust me my throat doesn't work that way. The other day the entire family and neighbors were sitting with me saying word after word that contained that exact sound. The activities resulted in a weird hacking sound and a very sore throat for me, and a hilarious spectacle for them. However, I have found a few muscles in my throat I never knew existed and accept that as a success. I have faith that the hacking may someday turn into something less growly :)

Today our training group learned to shop and cook for ourselves here. It was quite the show. Us prancing around the souq (market place), a far cry from any grocery store I have ever been to in the states. A place where vegetables are haggled for and prices are in ryals (bizzare fractions of our normal Moroccan currency the dirham), things are sold by the kilo (how much is even in a kilo?!??!) and haggling is normal (bizzare when I am supposed to haggle that $1 is too much for 7 tomatos). My favorite stop was when we had to order beef. For those of us in America who get beef in a nice, clean, plastic wrapped container this was a shock! So the meat seller in the souq consists of a shop in front of which two huge carcasses are strung (you can tell which kind of animal is sold at each shop by the shape of the dead meat outside of it... pleasant right?) then the butcher goes and hacks off a chunk for you, depending on which type you want and grinds it up right in front of you!

We decided to cook mexican food which turned out pretty good even though we had to make a few Moroccan substitutes :) Then last night I also learned from a PCV (peace corps volunteer) who has been here for a year already, how to make cookies without brown sugar(which does not exist in morocco). I wish our camera had been working and I could share with you the comical scene of me and Joli (PCV) "blending" the dough with our hands, while all of the Moroccans ( 1 mother, 2 daughters, a young son, and our teacher) all sat on small stools on the floor of the roof we were cooking on watching as we stumbled through the process :)

My host family is still good, and after a week dedicated to the past tense verbs I am now an expert at explaining what I have done, now we just have to tackle those tricky details of how to transition that into present and (gasp) future activities. But as they say... shwiya b shwiya (little by little )


Sunday, October 10, 2010

Let me walk you through my new host home here in small town, rural Morocco. My Moroccan Dar (house) sits about 30 feet off of the one main (nameless) road. Our house is perched on the edge of an open dirt “playground” which is made up of piles of rocks and dirt with little streams of run-off water from the nearby houses that divide up the open territory. When I walk home it takes me a few hundred “salams” (Hi) and a dozen high fives with the kids in this open dirt fantasy world until I can reach my front gate.
Ninety percent of the time when I am within sight of my house, the word has already spread of my approach and my 10 year old host sister is outside waiting for me. I greet her in our front walkway and she always laughs as I stumble to remove my shoes before I enter the house --a sign of respect in Moroccan homes, yet also harder to do than you would think, perched on my dirt front step, unhooking my “cute” but uncooperative sandals.
Then off I go to personally greet everyone in the house. This consists of either a series of cheek kisses for the women; or a handshake followed by a hand over my heart for each of the men. The number of people waiting for my arrival any given day could include anywhere from my 5 host family members to upwards of 15 of the neighbors and relatives of the neighborhood.
After the numerous greetings I slide into my room to drop off my school bags. In my cozy room right off the livingroom I have a bed made of two pushed together couch pieces, a table for my books and such, a bureau for clothes and a cute little couch to entertain my guests on. Most evenings when I’m doing homework my siblings, host mom and the countless other kids I find wandering the rooms of our house find themselves perched on that couch or reclined on my bed. Sometimes they are quiet and try to do homework or crafts while I do my work. However, I must admit, I think that most of them are around for the not so quiet times when we all laugh about my hilarious attempts to say key phrases such as “please don’t feed me anything more or else I will explode”. Many of these sessions include pantomiming…. Let me tell you, although my vocabulary does not yet reach to sophisticated terms such as “to explode” my puffed out cheeks, flapping hands and look of pure distress sure do the trick ☺
I barely frequent the other parts of our house however, I have recently discovered that we do indeed have a second story to the building that is under construction as well as a roof that houses our “pet” rabbits and birds. I use the “” around the word pet because I have been warned that those cute furry bunnies can often times appear in our tajine!!!I haven’t identified one yet, but I will be sure to let you know if I do!
As I sit here scribbling all of this in my journal I am chillaxed on my couch/bed with my little host sister Fatima playing with my ipod touch, under my covers, nodding off for a late afternoon nap. My little brother Marouan has made his way into my room and is sitting on the floor next to my bed trying desperately to unzip my school bag. I can hear the boys outside still playing football (soccer) even though the last streaks of sunlight are fading quickly. And the ever present aromas of the beginnings of another meal are wafting from the kitchen where the hushed voices of my mother and brother can be heard discussing a subject in which I catch just about every 20th word or so. Just another Saturday afternoon in my new home in small town Morocco!