Phase 3

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Just don't give up trying to sdo what you really want to do.
Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
- Ella Fitzgerald

Phase 3 sounds so official, but all t really means to me is that I have less than two weeks left in Sefrou with all the friends I've made here. Training is hard and busy, I'm working 12 hour days and my brain is overloaded with the language and everything else I'm learning here. So, it will be a relief for this phase of training to be over, and yet I know it will be very hard to leave. I still don't know where my final site will be, but hopefully they will decide soon.

One thing I have to add here is that when I arrived at the cyber (internet café) it was full so I sat down next to Ali, the owner, to wait. He was looking at Google Earth and asked me where I was from in the States. I couldn't believe how detailed it was, we actually found my parent's house and it was pretty detailed. It was almost scary how much was on there. Sefrou is on there too, but not with such precision. There's not enough detail to see the house I live in or even the streets. I had never played with Google Earth before, but people here seem to like it a lot.

As for my recent adventures, I tried to do some baking here and was reminded of my attempts at chocolate chip cookies and carrot cake in France and the Cambodian pumpkin pies earlier this summer. What I made did resemble the apple walnut cake that was very easy to make in the US, but it was definately not the same. It's going to take some time to figure out how Moroccan ovens work. There is no way to gauge the temperature and the door doesn't stay shut very well. On top of the baking issue, the baking powder here is very different, as is the flour and even the sugar, and there were no Granny Smith apples in the suq (market). But I'm not too discouraged and I think the next attempt will be even better. At least the family here loved it and we ate the whole thing. I tried to double the recipe, but since I was using a tea cup to measure with, I don't really know if my measurements were very close to the what the recipe called for.

Another learning experience has been watching Malika make buttons. These are not what I would really call buttons, but I can't come up with any other word for them. They're used to decorate the front of jellabas - the Moroccan hooded robe thing. She starts with a small piece of tube that she cuts off so it looks like a bead, then she sews thick thread around it to make a little bobbly button kind of thing. They're not easy to make and take quite a bit of time, but she is only paid 5 Dirhams for 40 of them, and that's a good price. 5 Dirhams is about fifty cents US, and doesn't go very far here. Sefrou is known for these buttons and almost every woman (and girl) here makes them at home. The women here work very hard, all the time.

As for teaching, things are still going well. I don't teach every night, because I have to take turns with the others in the group and we can't teach five classes a night. There are enough students to support that many classes, but we just don't have the facilities. The Dar Chebab has two rooms we can teach in, so we can only do two classes at a time. Peace Corps also requires us to observe each other, so even with more rooms, we could only teach two classes. The rooms are always packed, and often unmanagable. There is a lot of interest in learning English here, partly because of the US Green Card lottery, which I will explain as soon as I understand it better. We teach two beginner classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and one intermediate and one advanced class Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I've seen as many as 50 students packed into the bigger of our two rooms. Most of the students are in their early 20s, but there are also many high school students. A lot of them are great and participate and take notes on everything, but some tend to come to classes that are a level above them so they are lost the whole time and disruptive because they're asking their neighbors to tell them what's going on. It's annoying, but not a big problem. These are free classes and they don't have to be there, so if they get too disruptive we can ask them to leave. It's much simpler than dealing with students in the US school system.

I've been getting a lot of great questions from people so I want to take the opportunity to answer some of them now.

My homestay is still going great. The father is there all the time now, I think because it's Ramadan. He's a very sweet person and quite revolutionary by traditional Moroccan standards. I see him help in the kitchen almost every day. He is very welcoming to the other trainees and especially to Mina, my teacher/ LCF. He says that since he works away from home most of the time he recieves a lot of hospitality from other families and he is happy to welcome her to his home. During training the LCFs have to live with the trainees in our town, and most of them are quite far from their families. He is also a help with learning the language and is very concerned about me learning enough now to be able to make it on my own once I leave Sefrou. He actually stopped my fasting because he said I wasn't learning as well when I fasted. He didn't have to tell me twice. I've heard that most trainees don't fast, but that the next year lots of volunteers do, to be culturally sensitive and such. So, now Malika packs me a little lunch, usually a small cheese sandwich and an apple, to eat in the Dar Shebab during the day. So, I'm not really fasting, but I'm not eating real meals either. It feels like cheating, but it's true I was having a hard time concentrating for 4 hours of class when I fasted.

Ramadan has been very educational for me, and it's the first time in my life I've been happy to see the days growing shorter. Breakfast is significantly sooner now than it was when we started since sunset is so much earlier now. Fasting is not easy, but I think since people do it every year, and they grow up with it being such a normal part of the culture, they're good at it. The evening meal is full of sugar to wake us back up and there's always hard boiled eggs so we have a little protein and soup, coffee and water to re-hydrate us. Coffee here isn't what I would really call coffee. It's a glass of hot milk with a little coffee poured in, as if for color more than anything else. They usually put in way more sugar than I can stand, but now Malika knows not to add sugar to my coffee/ hot milk.

I have also been getting questions about gender relations here. It is a traditional country, and an Islamic monarchy, but things are changing nonetheless. I just remind myself of the gender relations in the US in the 50s and how far we have come. There are feminists here, like the professor at the university in Fès who teaches Nathanial Hawthorn's "The Scarlet Letter" and is very outspoken. I haven't met her, but one of my students studies in Fès during the day and told me about her. My personal opinion is that gender relations and the issues surrounding them in Morocco are more a result of the culture than the religion. I think the biggest problems are spousal abuse, harassment in the street and the amount of work that women are expected to do in the home. These are cultural issues, and now that people are talking about them, I think change may happen more quickly.

It has been easy for me to learn how to cook, but I've heard that some of the male volunteers have to really insist to be even allowed into the kitchen. I've learned to cook tajine and some other things, and Malika promised to teach me her version of herrira tomorrow. The food is great and I haven't been sick at all yet. It's nice to be able to eat at home all the time and not have to ever go out. I don't have much time for cooking between my learning and teaching classes, but I do get a little free time. During Ramadan there's more free time in the afternoon since I'm not expected to go home and spent a couple hours having lunch with the family. In the evenings I end upt doing homework, studying and preparing lessons.

That's going to have to be enough for now. It's taken me a few days to write all this. Keep sending me questions though. I never know what things I've left out that you're wondering about.

p.s. Check out Rich Landrigan's travelblog. He's another Youth Development Volunteer, but he's placed in a different town during training. He's the one who bought the blue guitar while we were in Fès and I think his site is called the Rockin' Moroccan.

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