Success!

I recently completed the major project of my Peace Corps service thus far. It was a huge collaborative effort by me, Sean, 7 other Peace Corps volunteers, the Ministry of Health, a local development association, a national AIDS awareness association, 42 high school student leaders, and about 20 medical professionals, teachers, and community leaders from the region. It entailed 5 different peer education and professional trainings, many great discussions about values, religion, society, health, and development, lots of traveling and networking, and countless meetings, emails, and text messages spread out over the course of the last 5 months. It culminated in 2 HIV/AIDS and STI education tents—one for men and one for women—from 8am to 9pm every day for the three days of the Rose Festival. Collectively, our peer educators had discussions with a grand total of 2,560 Moroccan men, women, boys, and girls over the course of three days. I mean, they had real, honest, sometimes controversial discussions. 523 people were tested for HIV. Potentially best of all, though is that we empowered 60 people to do sexual health education on their own and in future projects with all the participating associations. In addition, they gained confidence as public speakers and community leaders. Wow. I think we deserve bragging rights for that. When I say it, I can hardly believe these results are ours.

Okay, I admit this post is little more than bragging, but sometimes I just need that. I am not above the need to feel that what I do with my life is validated by successes now and again, especially because much of this experience has been small and a trying. It is important to step back from your life from time to time to examine the bigger picture. I hope you all can do that, too. I would love to hear about it!

A “Typical” Day

A common question I get from new volunteers or other people who are not in the Peace Corps is, “What is a typical day like for you?” My answer is usually that there is no typical day in Peace Corps. However, if I had to provide an example of the kind of day that I commonly have when I am not traveling, working on a big project, or doing anything else outside of daily life, yesterday would be a pretty good example.

I woke up around 7:30am to the bright sun streaming in through my open window. Summer has already begun. Sean and I made a quick breakfast of homemade yogurt, ground dried figs, bananas, and wheat germ. I had a glass of [unsweetened] gunpowder green tea with lavender while Sean drank an Americano made with his used camp stove espresso maker he bought at souq for less than 3 American dollars and cream made from adding more than the normal amount of powdered milk. While I did the dishes from last night and that morning, Sean did his workout in our “gym” (we converted one of the many empty rooms in our mud house by putting in my yoga mat, a medicine ball made from a pillowcase with small gravel inside, and two empty 5 liter plastic bottles filled with water as weights). While Sean took a bucket bath, I did my morning workout consisting of about 30 minutes of yoga and 30 minutes of weight lifting. By the time we had both showered and dressed, it was about quarter to 10. We biked the mile or so into town to teach our bi-weekly English class for local middle school students. It is a small but dedicated group. No one showed up for the second class, but that was just as well because we had a meeting with our counterpart at the clinic. However, it turns out that he had to take the 4x4 into the outer villages in the mountains at the last minute because the other nurse wasn’t able to, so he wasn’t available to meet with us anyway.

After checking our mail and talking with a few people we knew from town, we headed back home to start on lunch. By then it was pretty hot, and we were glad to get home into the coolness of our courtyard. Sean made a lunch of lentils and cold salad while I caught up on some emails I had copied from the cyber. Afterwards, I read and took a short nap while Sean did some things on the computer. Around 4pm, we went back into town to meet with our friend the hygiene technician at the clinic. It is harvest time right now, and everyone is working long hours in the fields cutting barley and alfalfa by hand. We had tea and cookies before walking about 2 miles through the cool fields to help her harvest. After about 2 hours of harvesting, we loaded up the donkey for the trip home. Apparently, we didn’t do a very good job of balancing the load, or the harness wasn’t on properly or something, because a short ways down the path, the whole load tipped over. A brief side note about donkeys: they are very hardworking and very stupid. This one was actually the neighbor’s donkey that we were borrowing, and he has been taking the same path between house and field for so long that he has memorized it. Once you slap him on the ass, he will just go until he arrives at his destination. So, this donkey was still going, even after his load tipped sideways. Luckily, a group of 4 young boys were coming down the path towards us, and they caught the donkey and stopped him. We tried various ways of securing the saddle and the barley, but we kept being interrupted by the donkey just deciding to walk away and continue on his own path. About 20 minutes and several laughs later, we finally managed to secure the load. We said goodbye to the helpful boys and continued our way home. By this time, it was starting to get dark, so we said goodbye and walked the rest of the way home. Sean made delicious Thai food, and we watched an episode of Firefly before heading to bed. Overall, it was a pretty satisfying day.

Berber Warlords and Secret Prisons

I think I mentioned before that our site is full of old, crumbling Kasbahs. Other than the one that is supposedly haunted, the Kasbahs have mostly just become a really cool backdrop to our life in Morocco. Gradually, I even stopped really noticing them except for every once in a while when the lighting is really spectacular or something. But then, I happened to discover something pretty amazing about one particular Kasbah.

Sean and I were hanging out in the cyber checking our email when one of the guys who works there called Sean over to show him some picture montages he created. One of the montages was of this especially big and ornate Kasbahs in one of the douars (neighborhoods). Despite its decay, the interior and exterior decorations were pretty impressive. Plaster moldings were painted in a style he told us was from early 20th century. There was even a tiled bathroom complete with a bathtub. The craziest part was the prison in the lower level. Apparently, this was one of the many Glaoui Kasbahs that were all over southern Morocco. The Glaouis were a powerful Berber family of warlords that controlled southern Morocco from the 19th century until independence in 1956. They were infamous for their brutality and commonly tortured, killed, and/or imprisoned anyone who threatened their power. The French supported them financially during the colonial period in exchange for their cooperation. In addition to the money they received from the French, the Glaouis demanded “mandatory gifts” from the people under their control in exchange for “protection”. Of course, if anyone refused, they were put into one of their many prisons or publicly punished.

Our friend at the cyber offered to give us a tour of the Glaoui Kasbah, which we gladly accepted. It was amazing. We were trying to guess when it was built, but it is hard to say because it has many different additions. The main central section looks ancient, whereas the most recent area has fairly modern plasterwork and painting. We found a date carved into some of the plasterwork on the ceiling to be 1360 in the Islamic calendar, which translates to roughly 1940. It was inhabited up through independence in 1956 and all the way into the 1970s when it became too dangerously decrepit. The most chilling part was by far the prison, which was basically just a dark hole where they threw people. We didn’t get any good pictures of the prison because there were no windows for light. However, we got some amazing shots of some of the plaster work and the view from the top. Check my Picasa account to see them.

When we got back, we got to talking about how crazy it was that there was an old warlord prison in our site. That led to a discussion about all the other secret prisons that existed throughout the history of Morocco. During the reign of King Hassan II (1962-1999), secret prisons were fairly common. Political dissenters were kidnapped and then released into these places with no idea where they were or how they got there. Many were tortured and killed. If they were released, often years later, they usually never found out where they had been kept. One of the most famous of these secret prisons was actually underneath the famous square of D’Jamaa El Fna in Marrakech. Prisoners who were taken there could hear the noise and music from festivities above them and were later able to identify where they were taken. There is also an old secret prison on the road between Klaa and Errachidia. King Hassan II’s son and successor, Mohammed VI, has turned it and many others into memorials for the people who were abducted.

But Moroccans are not the only ones to have created and used secret prisons. There is a CIA blackout site in the middle of nowhere in eastern Morocco near the Algerian border between Outat el Haj and Guercif that was used to harbor suspected terrorists until 2006. Because it was conveniently located off US soil, many human rights laws were ignored. The site has been closed down, but it is scary reminder that the days of secret prisons are not as distant as history might make you think. Having an old secret prison in our own site is an even more insistent reminder of the past.

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.