Finally in site

11-26-2007 SWEARING IN
Today was the big day. Finally, after almost 3 months of language, culture, safety and education training—after countless PowerPoint’s, frequent traveling, and rarely being unpacked physically or mentally—we are becoming REAL Peace Corps volunteers.
Our swearing-in was held at a ridiculously posh hotel next to Roman ruins that overlook the whole city of Fez. It was a gorgeous hotel, with a canopy, an outdoor pool, and immaculately dressed wait-staff. The whole thing had sort of a "This is your last experience with fancy Europeanized luxury for a long time, so enjoy it while you can!"
During our swearing in, there were speeches from the PC Morocco director, the US ambassador, a representative of the Moroccan government, and three of our trainees gave speeches in the local dialects we’ve been learning. The whole thing culminated with us taking the oath to defend the US constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and to serve the Moroccan government to the best of our abilities. Then there we were! It was like graduation, but we didn’t have any hats to throw, so we just kind of stood there and smiled a lot.
Then we had a fancy dinner with lots of little French snacky things (another one of those "this is your LAST" moments). Some of our Moroccan host families even made it to the event!
We were all very excited to be done with training, but didn’t feel much different than we did before the ceremony, probably because it’s hard to be thinking "All right! I’m a REAL PCV now," while you’re in a swanky hotel eating French pastries. I’m sure that feeling is yet to come.
11-27-2007 TRAIN TO BEN GUERIR
It was a very spiritual journey on the train today. A lot of us were headed in the same direction, so we piled into train cars—a bunch of Americans with 2 years worth of luggage—and watched as one by one, our numbers narrowed down as people got off at their sites. While PC training was essential in preparing us linguistically and technically, we all agreed that, mentally, we were more ready to be a PCV before training. When you sign up for something like this, you usually have the mentality of, "Oh heck yeah. I’m gonna move off by myself to the middle of nowhere. I don’t even want to see another American for 2 years, and I’m gonna change the world!" But then, you meet your training group—a bunch of strangers who soon become your closest friends within a thousand miles, and the only people who really understand what’s happening to you. Then, all of the sudden, you realize you don’t want to leave them. And you’re tempted to count the months to your next training workshop when you’ll get to see them all again.
But, we all also agreed that the life we had during training is not what we signed up for: Classrooms, presentations, English, written tests, Americans, Americans, Americans, and frequent runs to the McDonalds in Fez (because even though you’d rather drink chlorinated butter than go to McD’s in the states, here, it feels like home). That’s not what we wanted, and that’s not what we were about to get.
As a PCV, when it was your turn to get off, as you watched the train pull away, you couldn’t help but feel that this was not just a train. It seemed like some magical chariot that just dropped you off into a completely different world, a world where you’re basically done speaking English. You’re done being understood. It’s a world where you’re no longer "The guitar player, the student, the person down the hall." Nope. Now you’re "The American." You’re "The English teacher," Now you’re "that foreign guy who lives in town who’s white but stares blankly at you when you say ‘Bonjour!’" Now you’re a symbol. Now you’re the stars and stripes. Now you’re the go-to for information on anything from George Bush, to Metallica lyrics, to phrasal verbs—none of which you really know that much about.
And you wonder if your view of yourself will change, as you spend 24 hours a day representing something of which you never considered yourself to be a representative. Suddenly, you’re dropped off in a world where "the American" is what defines you—not your name, not your hobbies, not your favorite food—your Americanism. And you didn’t even think "Americanism" was a WORD before this moment! But spell-check says it is, so apparently someone on the Microsoft Word programming staff has done the Peace Corps too….
11-28-2007 ARRIVAL
Got off that good ol’ spiritual train to Peace Corps glory, and my wonderful host brother, Karim, was there to meet me. He’s 24, splits his time between working at a cyber café and being the Vice President of the youth club I’ll be working with. He’s been my saving grace ever since I visited Ben Guerir. Just like most everybody else, he doesn’t speak English, but he’s got this miraculous talent for making me understand him, no matter how long it takes. I don’t know what he does (probably just talks to me like I’m a four year old and uses a lot of hand-gestures), but I’ve somehow been using him as a translator. Whenever some fast-talking Moroccan runs some intelligible Arabic by me, I just reflexively look at him, and he translates speedy Arabic into 2nd-grader level Arabic until I understand. He’s also been taking the time out of his day to take me around to the hundreds important offices I need to visit, as he guides me through the laughably bureaucratic process of getting me a Moroccan work permit (Plenty of jobs are generated by making sure you need to get at least four different stamps from four different people and four different signatures on at least four "essential" copies of four different documents, all of which need at least four 2x1 pictures of you stapled on top. It really does make work for people who need it, but by the time a person is standing in the fourth line for the fourth hour on the fourth day of attempting to APPLY to work, one begins to question which is the bigger monster: Unemployment or bureaucracy…). So I have to give a shout out to Karim—who’s probably currently reading this with the use of Google Translator (another fun trick he taught me)—because he really has been saving my sanity on a daily basis. Thanks Karim!
As Karim and I left the train station, the weekly souk (giant market) was just winding down. Sellers were packing up their crates of fruits, veggies, and live chickens, taking down their canopies, and packing up carts and donkeys. As always, the souk had left its mark of trash, peelings, and rejected goods all over the ground. We walked through the garbage and my newly graduated PCV mind thought "Wow, someone should come up with a wildly creative way to do a souk cleanup every week. Maybe that can be my first project with my youth center!" About that time, we turned a corner, and ran into a giant heard of at least 150 goats and sheep all running right at us towards the souk behind us. I looked at Karim with that "Is this normal or something I should be afraid of" look that I’m sure he’s already used to, and he just pointed at the goats, then at the soiled souk, then wiped the souk clean with his hand. The goats were the souk cleaning crew! Dinner time—it’s brilliant!
That’s one of the most important things they try to teach you in PC training—when there’s a problem you want to fix as a volunteer, there’s a good chance the locals already have a good way to deal with it, considering they’ve been living with the issues for generations. The idea of development is not always to bring in some new revolutionary idea that will fix everything—ask any PCV—those projects are usually the ones that fall flat on their faces immediately. The idea is to work within the local structures that are already there. Don’t reinvent the wheel, or in my case—the goat.
11-30-2007 ISN’T AFRICA SUPPOSED TO BE WARM??
What’s the deal here?? I’m wearing 3 shirts every day, and burying myself under 4 blankets every night and my teeth are still chattering! Isn’t this AFRICA?! I really feel like I shouldn’t be complaining, because I’m sure it’s much colder back home. But it’s a different kind of cold here. It’s not THAT cold, but the difference is, here there’s really no escape from it. All of the buildings here are giant, drafty cementy things that are designed to block out sun, and retain cold. I’m sure they’re wonderful in the summer, as they block out any sun, or even any THOUGHTS of warm—I swear they somehow AMPLIFY the cold and it’s actually warmer outdoors.
I remember winters in the US—I’d be absolutely freezing and frigid walking outside, or starting the car, but then I’d get home and crawl into a toasty warm house, or crank up the heat in the car, and life would be perfect. Here, in my concrete icebox, I can only replicate that feeling if I crawl under four blankets, cover my head, curl into the fetal position, and wait for my own body heat to create this little pocket of warmth that will stay as long as I don’t move an inch. Of course, I wake up in the middle of the night with my legs all cramped up, and have to weigh which one feels worse, cramping or frigid night-desert air. The cramps usually win. But I try to tell myself that it’s reminiscent of Tibetan monks folding themselves into the lotus position and meditating in the mountains. I just pretend I’m dealing with the pins and needles for higher spiritual purposes. If I’m lucky, I’ll hit Nirvana by 5:00am, reaching some other-worldly plane where my mind, my limbs, and the cold don’t exist—and I’ll be able to get some sleep.
I’d probably be fine if I could stay in my little blanket-womb all day, but unfortunately blanket forts aren’t conducive to youth work, so I have to get up and face the cold in the morning. Since the sky is always clear, during the day, I can usually catch some warm rays between the shadows of buildings outside (I swear there’s a tangible 10 degree difference between the sun and the shade). The only problem is, a lot of Moroccans I’ve met are fully convinced that the sun is bad for you. Yesterday, I was reading a book out on the roof of my host family’s house, basking in a glorious ray, when my host mom came up to hang some laundry out to dry. She immediately walked over to me, smiled, dropped a shirt on my head, and told me the sun was bad for me.
Ah well, when my own mom called me that night, I was able to tell her not to worry about me since there was still a woman in my life who was worrying about me in a highly irrational way as only wonderful moms can.
12-2-2007 OBLIVIOUS PUPPY
I’m in what I’ve now decided to call the "Oblivious Puppy" stage of my work and language learning. Mostly because, like a puppy, when I listen to people conversing around me, I perk up every time I hear my name, so I’m aware that they’re talking ABOUT me, but not what they’re saying. It kind of sounds like "Dadada dad a dadadadadadada CHRIS da dad a da dad dad a da ad AMERICANI dadadadadadadadadad CHRIS (lots of laughter) ad adadadadadadad CHRIS!"
Also, like a puppy, I spend my days understanding, and thus gladly following simple commands like sit, go, eat, sleep, eat, drink, eat more, youth center, eat, go, go, eat more. I have certain "masters" who I follow around whenever I need to go somewhere, and they show me off and people smile at my little Arabic tricks. It’s actually a rather enjoyable, oblivious life once you resign yourself to it for a while.
As far as communication goes, I’ve developed my own filtering system where I kind of decide from the gist of what people are saying if it’s something I actually NEED to understand, or something I can just smile and not my way through, feigning understanding. As days go by, a lot more conversations are starting to filter into the latter category, simply out of necessity and courtesy. It’s usually a much more pleasant experience on both sides if I just nod when they nod, smile when they smile, laugh when they laugh, and shake my head and say "God forbid" when they do. It’s amazing how much one can understand of the general mood and theme of a conversation without understanding a word.
I was actually just reading a book that talks about some mythical language in which all humans can understand each other without language, which under normal circumstances I would write off as BS, but here, I’m really starting to believe it. Mostly because there’s no other explanation as to how I’ve understood as much of what’s been going on in my life the last few days as I have. In the US, I’ve been so used to the simplest, surface level, communication that common language offers. I feel like here, with so many languages floating around, people are a little more attuned to communicating through other mediums. I can’t really explain it, you just sort of start to feel the conversation after a while—like when you watch the Spanish soap opera channel—you don’t actually comprehend what’s being said or what’s happening, but you still understand the human drama—who’s bad, who’s good, who’s hurting who, who’s in love with who, who needs something, who is longing, who’s sincere, who has good intentions, who truly cares—these are all concepts that don’t need words. We just recognize them.
But personally, I’ve spent my whole life relying on spoken language to convey all of this. Here—understanding little to nothing—I’m actually enjoying the very pure form of communication on which I’m forced to rely. Words are tricky. They can be misunderstood, said the wrong way, or just plain lies. When I can’t rely on the all-too-easy satisfaction of understanding someone’s words for their face value, I notice the hundreds of other things that are conveyed during communication (like in the Daredevil comic books where the guy goes blind but then all his other senses become superhuman!)—things that are often more true than the words themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of simple things end up taking a lot longer than they should to figure out. But Moroccans are miraculously patient. When I’d just as soon give up, and say "I just don’t understand you. It’s fine. Let’s just move on." They’ll always keep on me until I understand. Surprisingly though, usually if we give it just a little more time, try for just a little bit longer than we want to, we’ll figure each other out. I can honestly say I’ve never had a single incident in which I absolutely could not understand or communicate even a complex subject when both parties gave it enough time.
For example: The other day, I was watching TV with the family, when out of the blue, my host-sister jumped off the couch next to me and yelled something. Suddenly the entire family was on their feet looking at where I was sitting, and yelling something at me. I was really confused, trying to think of what I could have possibly done wrong. They were still pointing at me, so I just decided to join suit and stand up with them. My father pulled me towards him and pointed at the couch I was on, as my sisters tried to lift it up, and my host brother was holding on to the cat, trying to push him under the couch. They kept on saying some word and pointing at the couch. I could tell it was French, cus that’s what everybody tries when I don’t understand what’s going on—and it never works—but they do it anyway, because somewhere, deep within my whiteness, I MUST have some instinctual understanding of the French language.
They tried words, they tried acting something out, but I was still just staring blankly. Suddenly, Karim lit up like a light bulb, grabbed me by the shoulders and said, "Thome and Geeery." I said, "Huh?" He said, "Thome and Geery!" and pointed at the TV, then at the couch, then at the cat. I stared blankly as usual. My sisters were still yelling, and my Dad was still pushing the cat under the couch. Karim grabbed my head, turned it the cat and said, "Thome." Then he pointed my head at the couch and said "Geery." Then he pointed at the TV. Then, the world stopped and the gods of linguistic comprehension descended upon me, and it was my turn to light up like a light bulb. I grabbed Karim by the shoulders and said "Tom and Jerry! The Cartoon!" There was a mouse under the couch! HUMDU’ILLAH!!
I can’t put into words the feeling two people get when they FINALLY understand what the other is talking about. No matter how little of a thing they were talking about, it’s like the whole world suddenly makes sense. Like when you’re lost, driving around downtown with absolutely no clue where you are, then you turn a corner onto a street you recognize and suddenly you know exactly where you’ve been the entire time. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s seriously an orgasm of understanding (Sorry, there’s really no other way to explain it).
I’m floored by how much it’s possible to understand, how much I can accomplish, and how much I can bond with people on a truly human level without understanding more than a few words they’re saying. I don’t know if I’d call it a mythical language that all humanity understands, but trust me, there really is something more there—more than words, more than body language—there’s just something else there that allows people to communicate if they just have the time and patience to wade through all the words we throw around every day.
12-10-2007 3 MONTHS
Well, tomorrow is going to mark three months I’ve been here in Morocco. It’s crazy, if this were a semester abroad, I’d be almost done. I’d feel comfortable. I’d feel like I’d mastered the country, and be ready to go back. But now I feel like I’ve barely started. It’s like the last 3 months have just been preparing me to begin. Now I’m in my site, and it really is like starting all over in a new program. Unpacking again, adjusting again, culture-shocking again—it’s all just more constant this time—because during training I went to Arabic class for four hours a day, then went and English-ized with a bunch of Americans until I felt like studying again. During training—a hopped into a Moroccan community for a few days at a time, learned about it, worked with youth, then went back to Amercian-ize about it with the other Volunteers.
Here, it’s Arabic class all day. Every time I want to speak or understand a sentence, it’s like balancing an Algebra equation in my head. And anyone who’s taken an algebra class knows that there’s a point where the numbers just stop making sense. Unfortunately, I usually reach that point in the middle of a community meeting, or at least when I’m at home eating dinner, spacing out, when somebody asks me to "pass the salt." Then it’s like, out of the blue, I’ve suddenly been assaulted by a verb and a noun in a dark alley way and I first have to wrestle with "pass" and then with "salt" and then kick-box both of them at the same time so I can decipher the command I’ve just been given. By that time someone else has usually just grabbed the salt from in front of me, cus I’ve been too busy kickboxing, and I just want to yell "No, wait! I understood you perfectly! It just took me a minute!" But that would involve more wrestling, and with adverbs to boot, so I just keep chewing—cus you don’t have to conjugate to chew.
However, even if I’m mentally bloodied and bruised from all the linguistic cage fighting, I’m truly having a good time. Those little "Peace Corps-y" moments when your neighbors start saying "Salaam" instead of "Bonjour" as you walk by seriously make it all worth it. Just like anything else, it’s all about recognizing the small victories, and forgetting about the small defeats, because none of the defeats will matter 5 years from now. In fact, surprisingly few things that we worry about on a daily basis ever will.