Finding Purpose and Making Progress: My Work in Morocco

Even though my official job title is Health Educator, my job description is very vague. Peace Corps and the Ministry of Health in Morocco came up with a project framework that outlines the major health concerns that they want Peace Corps volunteers in general to address, but they don’t expect or even want every volunteer to address every concern. So, it is up to each volunteer to decide (based on a set of loose assessment tools they gave us during training) what the most appropriate and pressing needs are and then figure out how to address them. It is about the most unstructured job I can think of, and it has taken me nearly all the time I have been in site (about 8.5 months, not including the 2 months of training before we got to site) to figure out even what I should be working on.

It’s funny, but I feel like just in the last few weeks all the gradual growth and progress I have been slowly working on without many noticeable changes have all of a sudden exploded into a very noticeable difference. For example, I am getting compliments on my language ability, which is something that I have struggled a lot with here. Not that I am great yet—I still only understand about 80% of what is said to me—but I lately seem to have gotten a lot better all at once. Our Moroccan friendships are starting to feel more like real friendships rather than forced ones, and we have started taking daily 1.5 hikes into the mountains with our host mom. She had a health scare and is taking the doctor’s advice for dealing with her cholesterol pretty seriously. It has been great for our relationship with her as well as our position in the community. Work has also recently gotten a lot more productive. We have been having weekly meetings with our local associations to plan a project design and management workshop for some other not-so-productive associations. We also hosted 16 other volunteers at our house last week for a regional meeting to collaborate on projects and share information. We are planning a huge HIV/AIDS and STD risk awareness campaign for an annual festival in May. We are hoping to put on separate tents for men and women to educate about the risks of infection and transmission. The town where the festival is going to be is notorious for its prostitutes, so we are also hoping to work with an association to do a risk awareness and condom usage education session for the prostitutes a few weeks before the festival. We hosted an HIV/AIDS and STD training for volunteers this week and we got some really productive planning done. We also are working on establishing a women’s association in our douar (neighborhood). It’s hard to say whether or not all this is related, but I almost feel like I have an “open for business” sign on my forehead and things are just coming together all at once for a lot of unrelated projects. It is pretty exhilarating after several months of slow going.

So, right now I am on a high. The timing couldn’t have been better because we were not really doing well for a while and I was pretty stressed out about a lot of things. I guess that is how it goes. They say that Peace Corps just exaggerates the natural highs and lows of life, and so far, it has been pretty true. I am just taking one thing at a time right now, and I am doing what I can to make this trend continue.

Some new pictures

I just wanted to post a quick note to let you know that I posted a few pictures from Christmas. There are a few from L3id Kbir, but I didn't get a chance to finish uploading before my battery ran out. Next time, inshallah.

Christmas in Akka!

Christmas in Morocco in the Peace Corps is unlike anything I have ever experienced before. The most immediately obvious difference is that we weren’t with our families. However, there were lots of other differences, too. For one, Moroccans, being an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, don’t celebrate Christmas. Some of them are vaguely aware of its existence, but they tend to blend it together with New Years and many of the traditions we take for granted they are simply oblivious to. It has been fun explaining the concept of a Christmas tree, stockings, gift giving, and the nativity story.

Another unexpected and very nice aspect of celebrating Christmas in a country that does not traditionally celebrate Christmas has been the complete lack of commercialism that normally proceeds the actual holiday for several months. I almost forgot that it was the Christmas season until a week or so before when we began making preparations for our Peace Corps volunteer community celebration. Imagine for a moment: no traffic, no commercials, no whiny kids, no incessant Christmas music. What is left when you strip away all this is just pure and simple Christmas.

To celebrate this year, Sean and I and 9 other volunteers gathered at a fellow volunteer’s house near Akka, which is in the far south of Morocco surrounded by sand and date palms. The old part of the village is actually dug out of the side of a mountain and there are several ancient cave painting sites not far away.

We did a simple secret Santa gift exchange under a small, Charlie Brownish Christmas tree. Nicole, who’s house it was, did an admirable job decorating the house with some garland and photos of snowy scenes her family sent her from America. We spent the majority of the time sitting around and cooking various delicious meals and sweet snacks. For Christmas dinner, we had Indian food: daal, vegetable byrani, naan, rice, and a side of camel steak. We also had a steady stream of sweets like shaped honey cookies, cardamom orange biscotti, cinnamon rolls, spiced cider, and hot chocolate with cardamom and chili. Our Christmas Eve dinner was fried chicken, stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes and gravy all mixed together in communal tagine platter. It was very messy and fun to crowd around the small low table and eat the dripping feast with a combination of spoons and hands. There was an excess of gravy, and through some combination of dares and Christmas cheer, Sean and a couple of the other guys ended up doing “shots” of gravy, which we all thought was disgusting, but they claim was delicious. We were all just so happy to be together and were having such a good time that we thought the whole thing was just hilarious.

Even though our families were not there, people were constantly dashing off to some quiet room to receive a phone call from home. Some people were even able to arrange conference calls on Skype, so we got to meet each other’s families. As we took turns sharing our family’s Christmas traditions, I felt as if we were somehow mixing them all together along with our experiences here in Morocco to create our own version of Christmas.

Later in the day, we went to the elementary school and helped Nicole with a nutrition education activity, although we certainly hadn’t been following any of our own advice the past few days! The next day we went on a hike through the palmeries and then caught a bus to the beach town of Tiznit. We spent the next few days hanging out with our friends from training. We had calamari on the beach, bought some beautiful silver bangles from the silver souq, and made a birthday pineapple upside-down cake. By the time it was time to go home, we were ready!

Happy Big Holiday!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Except, in Morocco, they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. However, they do have a holiday that is sort of similar and happened to fall on the same weekend as Thanksgiving in America. It’s called Laaid Kbir (literally, “Big Holiday”) and families travel from all over to be together to have a big feast. Sound familiar? Well, it is, sort of, except that instead of eating turkey, each family saves money all year to buy as big of a ram as they can afford. In the week or so before Laaid, you see people walking around with big sheep all over the place. We happened to be traveling through Rabat and Marrakech, so it was pretty funny to see people riding motorcycles with sheep in big, modern cities. We saw them waiting at lights to cross the street with all the normal people, in the trunks of taxis, and on top of transit vans. It was pretty amusing. After all these sheep get to their final destinations, they wait in anticipation for the big day. After the king has killed his sheep on national television, everyone in the neighborhood brings their sheep out into a communal area and proceeds to slit its throat and skin and gut it. Meanwhile, everyone is out and about in their fanciest new clothes greeting, kissing, and talking to each other. It’s pretty festive.

The rest of the day is spent cutting and preparing the meat. I didn’t realize until now how much meat a whole ram can yield. It is a lot. Sean and I and everyone else in Morocco have been eating delicious sheep kebabs for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner for about a week now. There are other less savory parts of the sheep to eat as well. Actually, I say less savory because I don’t find the head and intestines to be very good, but Moroccans consider them the best part. I am developing a taste for organ and gristle kebabs, though. Even after all this, there is still a lot of meat left over. What is left after a week or so is dried and turned into a form of jerky. I haven’t had the pleasure of trying that yet, but from what I’ve heard, it is the best part. Moroccans sure do love their meat!

Laaid Kbir is not just a Moroccan holiday; it is a Muslim holiday. The whole thing with the ram is done in remembrance of when Allah (God) told Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his only son to prove his devotion. At the last minute, Allah told Ibrahim to sacrifice a nearby ram instead. This and many other stories are shared between the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic faiths. It’s pretty interesting, actually. Of course there are definite notable differences, but I am really grateful for the opportunity to understand another culture and another faith so thoroughly, especially one that is so misunderstood by a lot of the Western world.

New Posts, Finally!

Okay, so it turns out I kind of suck at keeping up a blog. I don't really have any good excuses, except that I seem to be keeping surprisingly busy at my job. That doesn't mean that I have necessary accomplished anything yet, but I like to think that I am laying a good groundwork. Despite all this, Sean has somehow managed to be pretty good at keeping up his blog. Don’t tell him, but I secretly think that is because he doesn’t do as much work as me. That being said, I am currently holed up in a hotel in the nearest big city with a bit of a cold and two days of wireless internet. I guess that means I have no excuses now.

I just noticed that my last post was in June. Yikes. Well, there really isn't any way that I can catch everyone up on the last five months or so of my life in a foreign country doing a very loosely defined job, so I will take two approaches. The first approach will be to give you all a general idea of the major things that I have been doing. The second will be to tell you about a single day event that happened recently. The last one sort of simulates what a post would look like if I were actually doing a good job of keeping up with this thing. So, just use your imaginations here. Oh, and I also managed to post a bunch of pictures. There are also a few pictures up on my facebook account. And now, with no further ado, updates!

The General Idea

I think technically according to the table they gave us when we swore in, we are supposed to be wrapping up the “integration” phase and getting into the “real work” phase of our service. That just means that while we definitely still spend a lot of time drinking tea and talking about the weather, we are spending a lot more of our time doing things like having meetings with school directors, teachers, association presidents, and random other people who think that we will give them money.

During our first few months here, we have gathered quite a list of problems that need solving and potential ways of doing so, but after running around like silly chickens for a few weeks, we decided to narrow the list. We also discovered, as we suspected all along, that we will be working in slightly different areas. My main projects are probably going to be doing a women’s wellness conference in which women from all over are taught about a variety of issues by local health professionals, association members, and lawyers. This is still very much in the planning stages, but some of the sessions we hope to cover include nutrition, maternal and child health, exercise, mental health, Mudawana rights (the new Muslim Family code in Morocco), HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and family planning. This list will undoubtedly change over time. Another thing that I started working on a few months ago is teaching women’s yoga classes. Believe it or not, this was actually an idea that the women asked me to do, and it was going really well until the holy month of Ramadan kind of put a stop to it because no one had the energy to do anything while fasting. It never really picked up after that because, apparently, Moroccans fast intermittently the whole next month after Ramadan ends in order to get extra heaven points. The plan is to restart those after I get back from another week long training in Marrakech and a vacation with my Mom (Yay, Mom! I am excited to see you!)

Meanwhile, Sean is working on organizing a first aid training of trainers. What that means is that select community members will be trained in basic first aid, and then they will go and spread this information throughout the community. His idea is to train transit and taxi drivers who go out into the remote mountain villages that don’t normally have access to health care so that they can act as a sort of ambulance service. Of course this is sticky because of liability issues, but the idea is to educate them so that they can know when it is important for someone to go to the hospital and then have the means to take them there. They can also provide basic first aid in the case of roadside accidents, of which there are many in Morocco.

We are both also working hard to get into the schools and youth centers to start health clubs. The idea here is to teach lessons about basic health issues--like HIV/AIDs, nutrition, hygiene, sanitation, exercise--in the context of what Peace Corps calls the Life Skills Program. The Life Skills Program is a set of activities that teaches a variety of communication, relationship, and decision making skills to youths. Just like in the States, just because people have access to information about how to live healthy lives does not mean that they will actually be healthy people. Currently, we are in the process of working through the red tape and figuring out who our Moroccan allies are in getting these clubs going. We have one at the Dar Shebab (youth center) in the neighboring town, and we were supposed to have our first meeting last week, but even though we had three teachers and 12 students show up, the doors were locked because the director unexpectedly went out of town, even though he knew about the meeting. We are also trying to get clubs going at the local middle school and at a dormitory where kids who live too far up in the mountains to make it to school and back stay during the school year.

So, that’s basically what I am up to as far as work goes. As far as non-work goes, I am trying to do a regular exercise schedule every day. We are issued Trek mountain bikes, and our site is fantastic for mountain biking, so we are trying to get out at least once a week for a big ride. My dream is to take multiple day trips around Morocco on my vacations. I have a few planned out, mostly in the south where I am. I am also doing yoga decently regularly. Let’s see, what else? I am trying to knit a scarf. Nothing fancy, just something to keep warm during the winter. My language is getting a little better. I am able to communicate basic concepts to most people, but when it comes to anything sort of complex, I still struggle. Like anything, there are good days and bad days.

Okay, I think that is a pretty good general idea of how things are going. I promise to try and be a better blogger in the future. I miss you all, and when you get a chance, let me know how things are going!

Cat in the Bag

So, we got a cat. When we first moved to our site we told everyone that we wanted a cat because we thought that it would keep bugs down and would be fun to have around. Some of our friends had a pregnant cat, and they promised us one. We went to their house to pick one out right before we left for training in July, and they said we could pick it up when we got back. When we got back, they said it was “sick” and that it would “make a mess in our house” if we took it now. A month or so went by and we didn’t hear from them. We figured that it had died or run away and that they didn’t have the heart to tell us (Moroccans are pretty indirect communicators). But then, a little while later, after I got back from Volunteer Support Network training, Sean told me that he had a surprise for me. Out crawled a scrawny black kitchen with giant ears and big green eyes from behind our refrigerator. We christened him “Igli” after the big black beatles that awkwardly patrol the paths in the fields. He seemed to like the name, and so we kept it.

However, we soon realized what our friends meant when they said that our cat was sick. He had hopeless diarrhea. I called around and found out that there was a vet somewhere in Ouarzazate, the nearest city an hour and a half and two taxi rides away. I decided to try my luck. So, early one morning, I took Igli wrapped in a towel in my lap to the taxi stand. I got a lot of attention from the people I passed, and as it happened to be souq day, there were a lot of people. Shortly after climbing in the back of the taxi, I discovered that Igli hates taxis. He meowed loudly the entire 30 minute ride to the next town. The other passengers didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I think they were pretty tickled that the American was taking her cat all the way to Ouarzazate to see the cat doctor. Luckily, by the next taxi ride, he had calmed down a little and only meowed about half the time. My story proceeded me, though, because before I could even ask the driver if he knew where the vet was, he and the man sitting in the front were already discussing where the best place to drop me off would be.

At this point, Igli had made a mess of the towel I was carrying him in, so I put him inside a large woven bag that we use to buy vegetables with. His head was poking out, and several passersby did a double take a smiled. I asked for directions a few times before I finally arrived at the farming association. I walked in with my cat in a bag and explained very eloquently in Tashlheit that my cat had diarrhea and that I had come to get some medicine. After looking at me for a second, he said in good English, “Good morning. Please have a seat in the next room while I finish up with this person.” I felt a little silly, but also relieved that I wouldn’t have to risk misinterpreting instructions on how to give medicine to my cat. A little later, he came into the room and examined Igli. He prescribed a medicine for worms and gave me a powdered packet of antibiotics intended for cows. He said that normally a cow gets the whole packet and a sheep gets half, so for a kitten, maybe a tenth. We then had a friendly conversation about the time when they filmed the movie Hidalgo in Ouarzazate and the animal protection agency had offered him a job making sure that the horses were well treated. He said that he loved Americans and that I was welcome anytime. He said that I should come back in a few weeks to get a rabies shot, and that if I wanted to get him fixed, I could do that too. All this was free, except the cost of the worm medicine, which I had to get at the local pharmacy.

On the walk back to the taxi stand, I put Igli inside the bag again. He was pretty tired, so he just laid down at the bottom. Every once in a while, to the surprise of passersby, he would meow. One woman was so surprised and delighted that she followed me on the street for a little while laughing and telling everyone that I had a sick cat in the bag. It was pretty great.

Igli slept pretty much the rest of the way back home. Now, about a month later, he is totally healthy and happy, although he is starting to “come of age”, which means that is he meowing constantly and desperately searching our house for a lady cat. I think I am going to have to pay my cat doctor friend another visit soon to get this little problem “fixed”.