Transitions

09/06/2010

Four short days from the end of Ramadan, and I am sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee. I allow myself liquids during the day, although by rote I am not supposed to. The agonizing smell of sugar cookies which fills the room is my penance; emanating from the small butane oven under my counter. Outside, rain drips slowly and softly from the roof and afternoon storm clouds rumble above the folded mountain above the village. It is a about an hour until evening call to prayer and lfdur, break-fast, which I will share with my host family tonight, as well as with Allen, another volunteer visiting from a village 2 hours to the north. The cookies are for them.

I spent the last two hours alone on my roof, burning trash and cardboard, much of it remnants left by the previous volunteer who left here in May. As each scrap burns in the rusted woodstove on my roof, I feel another step closer to really being here in the village as the current volunteer; transitioning from the former which has now moved on, to the current and future. Each day I feel a little bit closer to actually living here than having just stepped off the plane in Casablanca. Some days I feel as if I have been here for years, other times I still feel as I just arrived; it is frustrating, but expected.

Looking out from my roof I could see west up the valley, past the old fortress of mysterious origin, to the sun illuminated mountains far away near the Azilal region. Storms moved across the dun-colored landscape then, and their shadows, as well as the shadows beneath the pale, striated cliffs, are dark and shifting. A fresh breeze blows out of the river canyon to the east and bends the poplars like deep green flags. There is a crack of thunder above and I look up to a dark and brooding cloud, roiling around the summit of the folded mountain. Brilliant white, almost glowing against the dark back ground, flew a lone stork; one of the minaret dwellers from atop the mosque. The stork was not moving; soaring in place in the face of the east wind, it was stationary before me. I could make out the details of its powerful orange bill and white plumage, bordered by pinions of deepest black. And then it banked out of sight, gone as suddenly as it had come.

I jabbed at the fire with a stick, flipping over an issue of the Christian Science Monitor and watching the pages curl and contort before finally succumbing to flames. Above the hiss of the wind in poplars, I listened to a program that I had downloaded from BBC: Radio Wales, about farmers and their lives in the Welsh countryside. Strangely comforting, though incongruous, I thought that maybe this was a taste of what Peace Corps used to feel like, back before the technology of mobile phones and internet became readily available to PCVs worldwide.

~

In a program on NPR about a week ago, our former Program Training Officer, Gordie Mengel, who is now stationed in Rwanda, spoke of how technology has changed the face of the Peace Corps. He mentioned how many volunteers can access the internet and call home whenever they wish, the connection with home is never broken; it remains there like a tether.

I am certainly in this category; I have internet in my little house, and I can access services such as Skype or Facebook at any time of day or night. Sometimes the net goes out for several days, but it is to be expected; nearly everything here works about 80% of the time. It’s not a problem; Gordie mentioned that his village in Zaire, now Congo, didn’t even have a post office and letters to months to arrive. Let alone care packages filled with coffee, peanut butter and chocolate that arrive every so often. I remember him telling me how he was without water and power his entire service, both amenities that I am used to here and try hard not to take for granted. Gordie’s argument makes a lot of sense, that having this technology available so readily does not just make the Peace Corps less brutal and challenging than it was in the 60’s, but it actually eliminates the need for community integration at our sites. All of us have social needs and back in America those needs were met by our friends and family. But in Peace Corps, before the advent of lightning-fast communication, those needs were met by your friends that you made in your community. You didn’t just feel obligated to get out there and learn a new language and culture; you had to learn the language and culture, because if you did not, you could (would) go insane. On clear nights you could turn on a shortwave to receive news of the outside world, sometimes weeks old, and learn that the rest of the world is still there and that life is going on without you.

In some ways I crave this sort of disconnect, it’s not that I don’t miss you, my friends and family, but I need to be here in order to be most effective in this place for this short time period I have been given. This will likely be the only time I will ever live on the African continent, or anywhere else abroad, for so long a duration. I need to absorb all I can, and let this experience teach me and shape me as it surely must. I have shelves of books to be read; some left behind, some borrowed, most from care packages. I have pages of material begging to be written, including my work for the Canyon Country Zephyr (the first article will come out early next month), and I have projects to plan, both for the Eastern High Atlas National Park and for the village of Imilchil. Add to this working on my house, preparing for winter, and just surviving day to day in a land of squat toilets and parasites, I have no time to spend holding on to connections and threads that will simply slip from my grasp regardless. If I have learned nothing else from moving five times in the last 3 years, it is that life goes on without you. I hate to let go, but I know that the truly important threads will still be there for me to pick up on my return in two years; it is the way of things.

In think in some ways our version of Peace Corps requires more self-control than the Peace Corps of yesteryear. I think that the “classical” Peace Corps was a gauntlet of mental and physical anguish with shining moments of success and deep wells of failure. But once you stepped off of that plane and rode for hours through the savannah, finally getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere, the things that began to happen to you could not be controlled. The disease, the social barriers, and the lack of amenities were just a few of these things. You didn’t communicate with your family and friends back home, because you couldn't.

But now, a lot of things in my life here in Morocco are still far beyond my control, and there is still plenty of disease and mental and physical hardship. The amenities are all there though, most of the time. Granted, I do miss western toilets and real showers that aren’t from an aluminum teapot. However, I think that having these things, and having the internet readily available, is a slippery slope. To not have these things available to you is one thing, but to have to choose when and how you use them is another. Did my friends and I come to Morocco to live like Americans? I don’t think so, but it is incredibly easy to get sucked into the comforts of your house and the line of communication that is always available there. The outside is still dark and mysterious, the people speak Berber and dress differently from you. They watch you wherever you go and kids laugh at you when you pass, some occasionally throw rocks. It’s uncomfortable and, as Gordie mentioned, if integration is optional thanks to your social needs being filled from that communication lifeline. It’s simply more comfortable to stay home and bury yourself in America. That mystical place where toilets can be sat upon, showers are hot and actually drain, dogs do not want to eat you on sight, and where you can understand everything that is said and everything that happens around you. Some people still dress funny, and some still may throw rocks, but it’s home; a place where life can be summed up multiple times a day in a Facebook status consisting of a song lyric of some kind.

The malaria-riddled and shell-shocked volunteers of Peace Corps’ golden age may have acquired higher pain thresholds by the end of their service, but they never had to choose to let go; they were forced to. It seems I have a choice to make regarding my time here, do I choose to be here in Morocco, mentally and physically? Or do I continue to hold on to my tether as tightly as possible hoping that nobody back home will forget about me?

09/07/2010

I put the internet modem in a box on my shelf two days ago; I’ll bring it out in a week to post blogs and answer emails. I have read a great deal and spent a lot of time out in the community socializing. The day Allen was here, and I spent all that time on my roof burning remnants and watching storks, we enjoyed our l-fdur, break-fast, with my host family and then went to the Café to sit and drink coffee. It was l-ayd al-kadr , the night of power, the night close to end of where the entire Quran is read cover to cover at the mosque and when people are to make their peace with Allah. It is a day of repentance and celebration. Allen and I just sit in the Café with our coffee, my host father sits down nearby, telling me earlier that he does not pray or go to mosque, no matter what Rkia, my host mom, says. I suppose he has been around too many Americans and Europeans. There were many other locals about as well, and all were fascinated by Allen and I, who were playing cribbage and shuffling the cards very fast (this is a skill many Moroccans have not been able to master).

My good friend, Khalid sat down with us and, after Allen butchered me in Cribbage, we played several hands of Gin. The conversation was mostly Tam and I was pleased with my language performance; not simply being able to get things accomplished, but to actually enjoy the conversation is a new level I am not used to. I look forward to more time spent like this.

Allen went to wait for the taxi to his site and I went off to run errands for a while. It was another glorious fall day with a crisp breeze and high clouds above the mountains. Laundry flapped on the lines strung on the rooftops and blankets hung drying from the windows of many of the small hotels. I stopped to talk to several of my friends, snoozing in the shade beside the smoke shop, and realized that my language was excellent today, at least compared to its normal quality. I made my way down to the commune, which is the county government, to ask about the upcoming wedding Festival. For an event so significant, it is amazing how few people actually know when it is. I nailed down dates as well as I could, and then spoke with the men at the commune for about a half-hour, they filled me in on environmental woes in the area, and told me a fascinating story about the tribes that were here before the Ait Haddidou; the people who took away the trees. Leaving that meeting I met up with several more of my friends in the street and spoke with them as well. My errands continued, I made a trip to see the Gendarmes to renew my Cartes de Sejour receipt, since I still don’t have the physical card yet, and that was carried out without a hitch.

That evening, I made a chicken stew from stock I had frozen and fresh chicken. I spiced it more with Rosemary, sage, and salt and sliced fresh carrots, onions, green pepper, and potatoes into it and simmered it for a couple of hours. I also made another batch of sugar cookies and ate a few myself, after call to prayer, and sent the rest home with my neighbor Molly, our mutual friend Naomi, and Molly’s Mom, who is visiting from the states. They stopped through on their way to Molly’s village; I will see them tomorrow as well. The stew turned out amazingly well, and I gulped down three bowls of it. I really love being able to cook, it is a skill I will put to good use after this is all said and done.

Later that night, I put on my warm clothes and my Jelaba and walked up the street away from town, climbing the stone fin that the Qaid’s palace sits on. I sat down on the top and looked up at the stars. The Milky Way was a brilliant silver splash crisscrossed with shooting stars and floating wisps of nebulae. Off to my left, another duwar, small village, sat illuminated by a single street light. The village did not have any power and no lights shone in the windows of the mud houses, save for the pale, wavering flicker of the occasional candle flame. The folded mountain loomed above, an inky silhouette against the star flecked sky, untouched by the lights of my village. Behind the fin lay the isolated section of the fields where I had walked a few days before. The river sang softly, unseen behind its screen of poplars and the patchwork of fields was cloaked in the darkness that only comes when there is no moon. As my eyes adjusted, I began to see lights in among the fields, small ones, of a cold, wavering blue almost the color of ice. They pulsed and flickered silently and I knew they could not be fireflies. Then I realized what they were; they were stars. Stars reflected in the still waters that still sat in the fields from yesterday’s storm and the flood that followed. I looked out into the darkness, filled with river-noise, and looked long at the twinkling lights of the fallen stars.

Walking back to my house, I realized again something that I realize at least once every week; how lucky I am to be here, in this deep, mysterious, and ancient place. This place where strange fortresses loom against the sunset sky and storks hover motionless on the winds of coming storms, truly this is a place of beauty and wonder and, while I may not get Malaria or spend months at a time not hearing a word of English, I think the experience will be incredible just the same. I believe that with each passing day this strange place will become more real to me. My paradigms are shifting slowly but I know that one day soon, Morocco will seem more real than the home I left behind. The Southwest will still be there, in the back of my mind, like a wisp of juniper smoke, so faint as to be nearly imperceptible; a dreamlike reminder of a time now passed, and a land far away on the other side of the world.

a Ramadan Entry

I took a long walk today. Strolling on the dirt road up the Melloul valley towards the fortress on the hill, I felt very content with my site. The tiny apple trees in the orchards beside the road are heavy with green and ready fruit; almost ready to harvest. Many of the trees down the valley toward my souk town of Rich are not bearing any fruit this year, as an unseasonably warm spring followed by a sudden snowfall in mid-May killed off their crop of blossoms. But we are lucky here I my village and many of us here, including myself, thank God for sparing the trees here. Turning off of the road, I walked between the tiny family plots toward the river. The wheat has been harvested already, and fields formerly filled with waist-high swaying stalks of golden grain, are now just closely cropped stubble. Most of the alfalfa and clover has been cut and dried by sickle-wielding women, ready to feed their sheep and goats through the long, and swiftly approaching, winter months. I saw a flash of movement off to my right and recognized the retreating gold, black, and white form of a Hoopoe; the first I had seen up here in the mountains.
There are still crops of potatoes being carefully tended while the tubers swell to unknown size underneath the meticulously kept earth. Most of the produce from these fields stays in the community and I buy it every week at the vegetable souq. Even the wheat is threshed and ground in the courtyards and homes of the farmers and made into flour. It’s amazing to think that the local bread that I buy every few days was growing in the fields just last summer. I was walking beside the river now, underneath a spreading canopy of poplars and huge weeping willows of unknown age and origin. It is sometimes easy to forget where I am in this cathedral of massive trees, but the dry slopes of the Atlas are readily visible between their trunks and I simply accept the strangeness of this juxtaposition. I was walking through a portion of the fields that I had never seen before; a place hidden from the village by the fin of gray stone on which the Qaid’s (mayor’s) palace sits.
There were few people back there, just a woman cutting grass with her sickle; her young son sitting next to her in the weeds, talking to himself in fast, childish Tam. This is the floodplain back here, and not much of it is cultivated; for good reason too. Just last week, I watched the river burst its banks and flood all of the fields and orchards that were within its reach. I walk past a field of sad, drowned potato plants, completely smothered in silt and look over at tiny orchard of apple trees; the high water mark is half-way up there trunks.
On the day of the flood, I shrugged on my red raincoat and joined a crowd of onlookers on the cement bridge that crosses the creekbed that runs from the nearby lake. Normally dry in the summer, it was bursting its banks and sending great jets of flood water high into the air where it hit the pilings of the bridge. In the distance I could see the floodplain, where I was now walking, entirely drowned in coffee-colored water.
I passed another woman cutting grass with her sickle, I waved and she waved back smiling, unguarded; looking at me not as a strange foreigner but merely an everyday passerby. I wish I could have talked to her, but talking to a woman alone in the fields is considered a breach of etiquette. Although here in the Berber lands of the High Atlas, that line is much fuzzier than down below. I just have not figured out exactly how much. On the rock fin, the sprawling structure of the Qaid’s palace and offices sits perched on the top, a wide balcony overlooks the field, river, and mountains behind; I am sure that it is very pleasant view indeed. I may have to work at acquiring a dinner invitation sometime in the next two years. Below the balcony was a grove of old growth Walnut trees, huge and spreading. They are beautiful, but then any tree is lovely when they are such a scarce commodity.
I came out from around the back of fin and was suddenly back in sight of the village. I took a trail toward the road, stopping to talk to a farmer working in the irrigation ditch next to his potato field. I am still amazed at the complexity of hand irrigation in Morocco, everything done without the use of hoses or pipes. Just ditches and hand tools.

~

I am hungry, but that is not a surprise considering that I am now halfway through the month of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. Yes I am fasting, a question I answer at the beginning of every conversation that I have with people in the village. Except for many of my friends, who already know this. I am cheating somewhat though, as I drink water during the long days. My body is not used to dehydrating for 15 hours a day. I tried it for about a week and got quite sick; I decided that my health was more important than ceremony and I now drink enough water during the day to keep my organs functioning, although sometimes I do throw in tea to shake things up. But I still do not eat during the day and I have changed my schedule like everyone else here.
People wait until about 7:00 in the evening for the “Call to Prayer” to echo through the village from the minaret and then break-fast in large meals called l-fdur. I try to alternate between cooking my own food and breaking the fast with Moroccans in the village. At my host family’s house, break-fast is an extensive affair with dates brought in from the southern oases, large fluffy flat breads drizzled in butter and honey, schebekkia—a honey soaked pastry like baklava, olives, and a roasted spiced flour called zimitta. The main course is a meat and chickpea soup called harira; this with tea, coffee, and fresh tangerine juice makes for a good way to refuel. You just have to pace yourself during this first meal of the night; many nights, especially in the first few days of Ramada, I saw lots of otherwise rail-thin berber guys staggering around the streets after l-fdur clutching their visibly swollen bellies. Pretty hilarious.
All of the cafes open after l-fdur¬ and I sit with my male friends, and any PCVs that happen to be visiting, drinking coffee or tea and talking about anything within the boundaries of my language skills, which are expanding more every day. Sitting on a stoop with my friends Mustapha and Bassou, I was told an Arab proverb—that even the small, slow drops of water will form a mighty river in time. I said that I hope that my river will be like last week’s after living here for two years.
After café sitting for an hour or so, I go back to my house to read and catch up on things that need my attention, such as a blog that I have been neglecting, and then stay up until the wee hours of the morning. I eat my last meal around 3:00am, just before the morning call to prayer, and go to sleep until noon the following day. Then the Ramadan cycle begins again. Every night is new and different. Tonight I broke fast in the cafe of my friend Aziz. I sat outside with Aziz and watched the streets empty as the call to prayer echoes died away. I ate a wonderful bowl of harira and chased it with bread, chilled dates, and fresh black figs. We drank tea and talked about the village and life in general, my friend Mustapha joined us after awhile and he and I sat out talking for an hour as the town came back to life.
Ramadan. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either; it’s just a different experience. However it will be nice to be able to eat during the day in 11 more days; how this month has flown by! Fall is just around the corner, I can smell it in the air some days, when the wind is crisp and the clouds are high. Snow will be falling before I know it, but you know what? I feel like I am ready for it. I was riding down to the site of another volunteer a little while ago and was looking out on the barren mountains and the green fields from the transit I was traveling in. The villages of mud-huts that clung to the hill sides around the minarets of their mosques no longer seemed quaint or strange, but rather beautiful and normal. Wind swept the valley that day and stirred the poplars along the river. Taking in the scene, I realized for the first time that, not only was I not the least bit homesick, but that when I did go home after two years, I would truly miss this place. I don’t know what sparked the change, but it felt like a thread breaking somewhere in my chest; a slight letting go.

Ramadan is almost over, but I feel that the adventure is still only just beginning, I wonder what comes next?

Thanks for reading, please don't forget to comment!

-Charlie Kolb