Sheep Slaughtering and spiked hair

*I wrote this last month on Eid but couldn't post until today. enjoy :)

Morocco is a country floating between the traditions of the past and the incentives of the waves of modernization. Today, the biggest religious holiday of the season was an amazing display of this dichotomy.

A quick intro: Eid Kabir is an ancient religious festival based on the story of Ibrahim and Ishmail. Ibrahim was about to sacrifice his only son to demonstrate his faith and submission to God when a goat / sheep appeared in the thicket and God spoke to Ibrahim telling him to sacrifice the goat instead (the same story as Abraham and Isaac in the Bible and Torah).

My first eid kabir in Morocco started at 7am when I was awakened by the constant calls to prayer from the local mosque. I stumbled out of my room around 7:30am in my normal jeans and T-shirt and was greeted by a bustling living room where all of my host family were puttering around in completely new and shiny clothing. Upon greeting me and praising me over and over again in numerous religious phrases, which I had no idea how to respond, I was ushered into the salon (formal living room)-where we NEVER eat and my host mom, siblings and I had a breakfast of lmsimum (fried bread), skuta (cake) and many varieties of cookies. YUMMMM

Then my sister, baby bro and I went from house to house to meet the mother's of all of my sister's friends. I was asked to eat and drink at each house and my "No"s just weren't a good enough answer, nor was " I've already eaten 5 times." So, before 10am that morning I had been forcefed six breakfasts and nearly ten classes of tea.

Then back to my house around 10:30 when my host father came home from mosque in his formal, white, jlaba (formal robe attire in Morocco) and around 10am it was announced that the king of Morocco had slaughtered his sheep and the people of the nation should start their own religious sacrifices.

The deed went down on our 2nd floor, the ram was held down and my host father prayed over the animal before he slit it's throat. Then bled the ram, skinned it and removed all of the innards. Then I went next door and watched the neighbors do the whole thing over… boy were those six breakfasts close to coming back up again after the 3rd showing.

In Islamic tradition the liver and stomach are eaten the 1st day, then 1/3 of the remaining meat is preserved for later consumption, 1/3 is given to close relatives and 1/3 to the poor.So, I know you are wondering… did I eat the ram my brother and I had played with the day before the sacrifice? The answer is.. YUP! I proudly ate 4 pieces of sheep liver kabob (not that bad) and to my host mother's disgust, only 1 piece of the sheep stomach stew we had for dinner. BUT I tried it, I did it and I haven't thrown up yet :) So I consider it a success.

Then, in the afternoon I went with my host cousin/neighbor Fatima Zara to the salon she works in in the neighboring town. Little did I know, after prayers, over eating and animal slaughtering the Moroccan thing to do is to put on new clothes, do your hair (or have it done) and prance around town. WHAT A SHOW!

After 2 hours or so at the salon seeing the dozens of girls prepare for the days "display" I moved to a downtown cafe, prime viewing spot, with another host cousin and PCV. We sat at that cafe for hours with our coffees watching the sparkly, over accessorized girls prance in their fancy boots and high heels and we gawked at the strolling guys in their too-tight jeans, neon shirts and spiked hair.

I came home to a normal, comfortable night cuddled on the couch under piles of blankets with my family as we watched the jarija dubbed, horrible Mexican soap opera. I fell back into my comfort zone, after a bizarre day began to wonder if I could have experienced a day like this one in any other culture in the world…

And I have won a United States government sponsored, two year adventure to… “X” a city nestled between the High and Middle Atlas Mountains. Population: 40,000+. It is the regional capital and boasts of it’s beautiful mountain views, waterfalls and cold, possibly white winters!

I have a youth center, woman’s craft group, girl’s dormitory and many more wonderful resources and contacts to tap into and work with. I will be the fifth Peace Corps volunteer in this sector in this town which has it’s advantages and disadvantages. 1. My town counterparts, officials and police are used to working with Americans and speak uber slowly and in as many languages (Darija, standard Arabic, French, and even English) to get information across to me! 2. It is going to be a challenge to differentiate myself or truly integrate into the community and people around me, when they see me as simply, another American leaving in two years.

My youth center director is slightly crazy and was out of site the whole week I was visiting except for the last night of my stay. On that night I went to meet him in our empty, newly renovated, “Dar Chabab” (youth center) in which the walls have been drenched in cartoonishly bright wall colors, in which rooms scream “kids area” with there polka dots and multi-colored striped motifs. My director sat me down and proceeded to give me an hour-long lecture in Darija about how our youth center is a part of the FIST that helps children “punch their problems in the face”. (hahaha… I find it a true testament to the effectiveness of my intense Arabic classes of the past month, seeing as how I was even able to understand ½ of the bizarre conversation!)

I am happy with the placement and am looking forward to finding my own apartment, furnishing and decorating it (my very first solo apartment!). Living in a city with daily cheese, chocolate and wireless Internet access also has its draws.

In other news, I found out I have a sitemate who is an environment PCV and has been here since last spring. She and I will be living in X together until my last 6 months of service, which is a huge comfort! I definitely didn’t assume when I signed up for Peace Corps that I would have constant, daily English and American interactions, what a lovely little perk! I have also talked to a few other current PCVs and staff members and already have 2 project ideas I am excited about getting involved in. All in all, life in the cold country of the hot sun is good! One more week of training, in which we are celebrating the eid . aka the big “sheep slaughtering” holiday of the year, then swearing-in in Rabat. Then I will become a real life, true, legit Peace Corps Volunteer!

P.S. For all of my future visitors, good news! I am approximately 2 hours from Marrakech, a supposed $30 flight away from Spain and $50 jump from other Euro destinations. SOoo, get your passports ready, pack your bags (inshallah) after January 1^st I will have a guest room ready and waiting for you all!

I taught my 1^st 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!!!!

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 )

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!

Me: Smitee Nikki, shnuu smitk ?

Cute little girl: SmiteefatimazarauminnFmintaka……..

Me : Shnuuuuuuuu?!?!?!?

And so it goes! I and four other Peace Corps volunteers have found ourselves in *Atown where everywhere I turn there are people ready and waiting to talk, walk, greet and mainly stare at me. From the moment we arrived in *Atown we have been a spectacle. In a small countryside town of 300-450 people we are the only foreigners who have ever lived here and we cause quite a scene everywhere we go.

Over the past few days, as we have been exploring the city, I have tried to say hi to everyone we pass and slowly the stern stares are turning into smiles. As I walked the streets today I could hear my name being whispered between groups of kids. The brave ones were even coming up and slapping me five… a move I taught 3 little girls on the side of the street this morning and which has been spreading faster than wild fire.

Everywhere I go my smiles, “hellos” and simple phrases of “how are you” are getting me into linguistic calamities, which usual end in me, completely red faced, cracking up over my inability and confusion. I am living in a world of confusing expressions, questions and comments that follow me everywhere. Language and culture classes are for about 9 hours/day but that’s not where it ends… then off I go to the streets of screeching boys and giggling girls and eventually to my cute house on end of the street where a whole other sector of learning takes place.

My host family here is completely different from my study abroad family in Rabat, however they are perfect in their own way, and are really helping me advance my skills. The relationship definitely isn’t as easy as my bi-lingual family in Rabat, but the challenges here are definitely pushing me and making me appreciative of the small amount of Darija I already know.

This family consists of a father: who is a soldier (still haven’t determined what this means for sure… I need a few more military vocab words to explore it further J) A mother who is from the country-side and actually speaks one of morocco’s other 2 Berber dialects (which makes communication even more of an adventure). She is also illiterate so I think that she is intrigued by my countless Peace Corps text books and literature that seem to becoming glued to me everywhere I go.

Then I have three adorable host siblings; Mohamed (14), Fatima (10) and Marouan (1). They are always smiling and playing and they make the stressful parts of my day melt away with their games and laughter. They are constantly wandering and/or tottering into my room and my adorable, techno colored comforter is becoming the hub of afternoon games!

No one in the household speaks either French or standard Arabic so it really forces me to try to use my Darija (Moroccan Arabic) and the kids are in love with teaching me words and phrases which expands my ever growing vocabulary… who would ever have thought that within the first 3 days of classes I would learn the word for worm….dooda. You have to love that, and man is it easy to remember such a fun word J

Over the past few days the community has opened it’s arms to us. It is pretty crazy to think that so many people are pulling for us to succeed at what we are doing here! They are teaching us new words and crazy cultural customs everywhere we go. Neighborhood girls are literally barging into my room to help me with my Arabic, do my hair, paint my nails and even teach me how to cook! One week down, and although it has had it’s challenges, like getting back into the swing of going to the bathroom in a Turkish toilet without peeing on myself, I am so lucky to be in this rural, 1 street long, no internet, no restaurant, town of mine! Can you even believe that just came out of my computer?!?!? I know, me neither !

*Peace Corps has asked us not to disclose our exact town names, for security reasons.

Family Invasion of Kenitra

Well I am heree :)

The past few days have been crazy busy with all kinds of "summer camp" icebreakers, bonding with my fellow 67 new volunteers and an overload on information about the next few years! During this process I have splashed around on the beach in Morocco, introduced my amazing and giggly roommates to snails and also to their first Moroccan cafe experience and have been asked countless questions about Morocco from my fellow site mates (having been dubbed the resident American-Moroccan "expert" around here after studying abroad here). Unlike many of my counterparts who are freaking out about turkish toilets, host families and other oddities of Moroccan life, this time around I have the pleasure and privilege of calm nerves, relaxation and pure excitement for what is to come! I just can't wait to get out there :)

Tomorrow I leave for a CBT (community-based training) site about an hour southeast of Fez. There I will be living with a host family and studying Moroccan arabic about 5 hours a day and technical lessons for the other 3 or 4 hours of class a day. Then in about 9 weeks I will be assigned my very own, Moroccan dar-chebab (youth house) in a community where I will not only teach english but also create and execute youth and women's activities in the area.

So far I have been loving being back in el-maghreb! I know there are rough times to come (they have told us this only about a billion times these past few days) but I also have already found such support in my Moroccan connections here! Today my old host family from study abroad surprised me and everyone in the family came to say a quick "hi" to me in Kenitra! We were quite the scene... I sprinted across the busy souq (market street) and flung myself at Amine, Soukaina and Simo when they arrived, and then when my moroccan mama arrived right outside of the bus we PCV (Peace Corps Volunteers) were taking, I caused quite a spectacle cheek-kissing, hugging and shrinking into her amazing motherly warmth. I was so happy to have them there and just the ability to give them all a hug and feel absolutely at ease, knowing they are people who truly know me and love me made the hugest difference in this week of adjustments. Just hearing my mom call me "habiba" (sweetheart) and ask if it is okay for her to call me once in a while, or Soukaina hugging me every few seconds saying how excited she is to have her sister back makes me beem with an unstoppable smile! I truly am one of the most blessed people having them in my life!

I will write a longer, more appropriate, detailed and entertaining entry later when I get to my CBT but until then, know I love you all bezzzzzzzaf (a lot, duhhh) ;)