Monday, April 27, 2009

Even Though We Ain't Got Hats Or Badges...

Transport unions in Morocco staged a nine-day strike earlier this month to protest proposed changes to national traffic laws.

Citing the damage the strike had done to the national economy, the unions decided to suspend the strike for 15 days, hoping the government would take the time to repeal the proposed changes. It didn't work. The unions will be going back on strike this Wednesday.

...transport professionals have, since its presentation, voiced concern over many of its provisions that place hefty fines of between 200 and 4,000 US dollars, along with imprisonment terms in cases of road accidents causing deaths or serious injuries. -MAP

Imagine you live in Gunns Corners (or better yet Depauville). No one in your town has a car, and for transport to the grocery store, pharmacy, doctor, and gmail, you need to rely on taxi drivers whose job it is to shuttle people back and forth between cities and towns. Once the taxis are taken away you have little to no access to just about anything, and once you get to town prices have shot up so high that you can't buy half the things you meant to in the first place.

Morocco is considered to have some of the most dangerous roads in the world. The statistic I usually see is 10 deaths per day. Whether or not the new laws are a positive step, the strike is making things hard enough for most people that they'd be more than willing to see the new proposals go out the window.

But most of the time I just think of this:


They Wanted Scarves

Two of the kids in my Environment Club working some tandem friendship bracelets.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Makin' Bagels







If you ever miss America, make a bagel. It helps.

(Note the creative use of quick dry camp towel).

Monday, April 20, 2009

Hiking to Erin's House

I'd Never Dream Of It

Duck and Cover

All cooking in Morocco is done on stoves powered by small propane gas tanks, meaning said tanks are available everywhere you look. Even the smallest shops have walls of them hidden away in the corners. And since people are so used to them, they tend to treat them a bit more freely than someone who still sees them as cylinders of highly pressurized, highly flammable gas.

Whenever I see someone toss a buta tank, I cringe. Then I take a deep breath and repeat the mantra I’ve held since training, when our cook tested a tank for leaks using a lighter held inches from our quivering faces:

“It’s only a small bomb.”

If You Can Read This, You Are Literate


I came across this sign on a recent hike. I know the Arabic alphabet, so I could sound out bits and pieces, but the only word I knew for sure was mamnua: forbidden. Since I was standing next to a small reservoir I figured out I shouldn’t go for a swim, but none of the words seemed close to what I know means ‘to swim’. Or ‘enter’. Or even ‘water’. Maybe it’s written in Modern Standard rather than Moroccan Arabic. Or maybe its something else entirely– a warning against climbing an unstable slope, or to watch for a man-eating Yeti. If so, I was totally unprepared for a possible rockslide caused by a rampaging Yeti as I swam in the reservoir. This leads to a TRUTH: Being functionally illiterate is not good times.

Transport unions in Morocco just ended a nearly two week long strike against a proposed change in traffic laws. I was in Agadir the day before it started, trying to get home. It was late in the afternoon, and I knew making it all the way would be a stretch, so I decided to go halfway and stay with another volunteer for the night. Had I been able to read the signs plastered around the taxi stand, I’d have tried a bit harder to make it home. But I couldn’t, so I didn’t know there was a strike beginning the next day. A strike of indefinite duration.

I was able to figure out a way home after three days, but I know more than one volunteer stranded away from home for over two weeks. And none of us had a clue, because we can’t read.

Did I mention I’m a teacher?

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

We Will Be SO HAPPY



Excellent.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Tagoudiche


More photos here.

"I am a librarian!"

Last week I created a small library in the village community center. Here’s a peek:




With any luck we’ll get more books soon, but for now I’m having fun devising some type of card catalog system so the books can actually leave the building. Right now I'm mostly trying to convince people the books are indeed not for sale, but free!

Don't TashlHate the Tarumit

Standing out like a sore thumb is stressful. Outside my village men often harass me. Simply being female is enough to elicit stares and calls. I once saw a crowd of men, happily chatting, fall silent as a women passed them driving a car. They tracked her down the street, staring and dumbfounded, until they broke into palpitations over the fact a woman had just passed them driving a car. Were I a blonde it would be even worse.

Cheesy pickup lines and shouts of ‘gazelle’ and ‘zwina’ are standard. Occasionally there are folks that follow you attempting to hold a one-way conversation. One day in Agadir I was followed for eight blocks by a guy who wanted to chat me up, and then just started talking at me. Some people just stare.

And then there is the non-pickup line-y side of it, the part where you know people are talking about you but you’re not sure exactly what they’re saying, which in many ways is even more uncomfortable than that ‘zwina’ business, because at least there you know what the game is. I can’t get too wigged out, though, because whenever I pick up the signals that I’m being gabbed about I just space out and grin. It’s not every day people call you a Roman. Unless you’re a foreigner in Morocco, that is. Then they call you a Roman every day.

I’ll back up here a minute. In both Tashlheet and Arabic, the word ‘arumi’ means either ‘foreigner’ or ‘christian’, though 95% of the time its meant the first way. In Tashlheet, as with most words, you feminize it by adding ‘t’ to the front and back, giving you ‘tarumit’. When I hear it being batted about as I sit down for coffee or kick an errant soccer ball back to a pack of kids I know I’m the object of discussion. But ‘arumi’ is derived from ‘Roman’, as in the Romans, who had an empire, and what good did they ever do for us besides the aqueduct and sanitation and the roads and irrigation and medicine and public order and all sorts of crazy things that all seem far too abstract until somebody calls you one. And then I just think it’s about the coolest thing ever.

So there are these rifts between men and women and Moroccans and foreigners, which have always been plainly visible to me. Then there are these other rifts you hear about but don’t quite believe in until one of them hits you in the face.

There is, we are told, a constant low-level animosity between Arabs and Berbers that has a tendency to boil over, but I honestly never thought it was real. Sure, I live in a place that’s probably 90% Tashlheet, if not more so, but I’d never seen or heard evidence of anything one way or the other. Yes, people would give a little fist-pump when I said I was learning Tash rather than Arabic, but five seconds later they’d ask if that was really the smartest thing to do, because can I even watch tv that way? It honestly seemed a non-issue.

Then one day another volunteer in my market town recounted a story from her recent trip north. As the baggage man at the bus station asked where she was going, she smiled and told him Fes. He sighed as he lifted her bag. “Arabs,” he said, and walked away.

This was weird, but one man does not a schism make. This next story, however, does.

One day last summer, two other volunteers (call them M and H) and I took a weekend trip to Agadir. We were days away from moving into our own homes and eager to pick up all the last minute items we knew we couldn’t live without. On our last night in town we walked along the beach, taking in the scenery and looking for dinner, when we came upon a Lebanese place. It should be noted that, unlike Lebanon, Morocco does not do hummus, baba ghanouj, or falafel. We were excited.

We sat down on the patio and after a few moments a man approached. We greeted him in Tashlheet and he burst out laughing. “That’s hilarious,” he grinned, speaking in slightly accented English, ”why on earth do you speak Berber?” We chatted with him a few moments and he giggled some more. He turned out to be the owner and head chef, and explained that, though he may speak five languages, as a Lebanese guy most of the time he had no idea what Moroccan Arabic speakers are saying, forget about Tash, but good on us. With one last laugh he gave us kudos and went inside.

A few moments later our waiter, obviously sent over by the chef who was gauging our language needs, walked up to our table. We happily greeted him in Tash but were stopped short. “Don’t you speak Berber at me,” he said, putting down a menu. H and I locked eyes. This could not be good. M, however, decided to poke. “Oh, why not?” she asked sweetly. “Because the Koran was written in Arabic,” he replied, placing down the last napkin, “not Berber.”

We were silent. What had just happened? And what on earth were we supposed to do now? This fellow had just said something wholly inappropriate to us (and in perfect English, make of that what you will), but in some strange way we felt at fault. What horrible injustice had this man suffered to cause him to hate Tashlheet people so?

We were petrified of angering him further, and all through dinner (it should be noted he was a very large man) we tried to be as polite as possible. We were the post professional trio of diners a waiter could hope for. Throughout dinner he not once smiled or broke his curt facade. After hoping, fleetingly, that he would notice we were finished, we waived him over (courteously!) and asked for the check. As he set down our change he paused, seemingly weighing the pros and cons of whatever it was he was about to do. Finally, he spoke.

“I have some information for you,” he said. Oh, no. “Just so you know,” he began, pausing long enough for us to run through the thousand different diatribes he could launch into on religion and race, “we are open until 3 am.”

Ha!

H and I locked eyes across the table. Was this real? M, again, decided to play this for all she could. “So, if I wanted a falafel at 2:30 in the morning I could come here,” she started, glancing back at us, “and I could come back again for breakfast at 10:30?”

He stood there a moment, looking past us. Surely he caught the twinkle in M’s eye, or at the very least the fact that H was hiding her face and I was trying not to let my giggles escape my napkin. Then, as if to himself, he nodded. “That is entirely possible.”

And then he walked away.

Now if we’re honest, an ornery waiter and a bored, pretentious baggage handler do not a culture war make. But they do lend some credence to the notion that tensions still exist between Arab and Berber populations here in Morocco – and probably in Algeria and Mauritania as well. The Romans conquered the Berbers, then the Arabs conquered the Berbers. Then the French and the Spanish conquered both. And now Morocco is a single country, not conquered by anyone (save the two Spanish enclaves – we call them ‘Fake Spain’), but still sniping about things that happened ages ago. Like pockets of the US South where you still find the Confederate flag, or when some Hatfield decides post something stupid on a McCoy’s blog, or when you fight about the superiority of Star Trek over Star Wars.

Its conflict for conflict’s sake, so far removed from the original cause that nobody knows what their actions mean anymore, only that it seems like the thing to do, so we might as well carry on doing it, because it makes me feel better about my own situation. It doesn’t matter that at one point we all got conquered, because you conquered me first. And you conjugate things silly.

The Arab/Berber divide is just one of these rifts, like male/female, Moroccan/foreigner, rich/not so much, white/back, that I’ve seen here firsthand. At one point there may have been a real grievance, but now it’s the Springfield/Shelbyville feud, only I’m not sure there’s even a lemon tree.

It’s this kind of animosity that makes development more difficult, because there’s nothing you can do to fix the problem. People have to take the step and get over themselves before they can get on with things. This holds for most of life, really, not just socio-linguistic and cultural relations in southern Morocco, but is one of the major blocks to progress and productivity I’ve come across in my projects and those of other volunteers. It’s the same thing I saw in my hometown between local and summer people, those with college degrees and those without, the moneyed and not so much so, and the two people who happened to hate ice hockey and everyone else in town. Just because you think a certain group of people are annoying or out of place has no bearing on whether you should fix the pothole on Main Street. There is still a pothole that needs to be fixed, so just fix it.

I don’t want to get all senior thesis on you, so I’ll stop it here. I just wanted an excuse to show off the cross-stitch we believe will bring peace, love, and understanding to the souss.


We are planning t-shirts.

XOXO

Maggie Introduces an American Holiday to Her Host Family, pt. 5

Easter! This was a fun one to keep secular. With Christmas I could easily remove the religious bits and still be left with plenty of gift giving and togetherness and cookies. Take out the churchy bits and all Easter has left is a man-rabbit holding a basket of fluorescent eggs. Which, along with the purple tinted egg salad that sits in our fridge for days after holiday, is the reason I love it.

I got an egg-coloring kit in the mail last week. After nixing the idea of somehow bleaching my brown eggs for fear of later poisonings, I set to work. They came out well, if I do say so myself. The yellow was rather understated, but the orange and greens were pretty spectacular. I brought my bounty to my host family’s house for brunch the next day. They were expecting me, but what they weren’t expecting were the amazing Technicolor tiglay (eggs, in Tash – isn’t that a good one?).



My thirteen year-old host sister opened the door first. She greeted me, excited, and became even more so when she spotted the gift in my hands. “Candy!” she squealed.

“Nope,” I smiled, lifting the lid, ”eggs.” Her face fell. Then contorted. Her mother came up behind her and barely said hello before she caught a glimpse of them. “Are those eggs?” she asked, trying hard to keep smiling.

“Yeah, I made them,” I said. “It’s a big holiday tomorrow, and this is what we do.” This made her smile. Most of my holiday talk does.

“Well happy holiday, then!” She ushered me in, where I helped set the table and make the last preparations for brunch. Then we sat down to eat.

There was some hesitant nibbling while we all stared at the eggs. I was curious to see who would reach for one first. I think they were nervous that I might want them to do just that. My host mother finally broke the silence.

“So show us what you do with these,” she said, picking up a bright red egg.

“It’s just like a normal egg,” I explained, choosing a small blue one. My host sister asked if there might be chocolate inside, and was saddened when I explained that only golden eggs laid by golden geese are chocolate, which are besides very hard to come by so close to the holiday; these were normal. The eyes of the room were on me as I cracked the shell and rolled the egg on the table, removing the skin. My host granny giggled. Then I took a bite, and with a breath everyone relaxed and started in on the eggs.

As people began eating I explained that, technically, a rabbit hides the eggs at night, and when children wake they are supposed to search for them in and around their homes. It’s a game, and whichever kid finds the most eggs wins. That no one asked for clarification is a testament either to my high level of Tashlheet (so, not that), or the fact that at this point nothing that comes out of my mouth startles anymore. The troubled looks of pity I got, though, were enough.

“And what’s this holiday for?” someone asked.

“Oh, its kind of religious,” I answered, squishing my egg and bread into a makeshift sandwich. “But mostly it’s about being with your family and all that.”

“Oh, good heavens,” mumbled granny. She turned her egg over, holding it up to the light. “Can I still eat it if the color got on the inside?”