Back where it all started...

On Friday and Saturday, Justin and I attended a Peace Corps planning workshop in Fes, held in the same site that was used as a training hub during our first 2 months in Morocco. So the building brought back a lot of memories - especially the second to last stair on the staircase, the scene of my majestic slip the day before we were sworn in as volunteers. Here's a photo to jog your memory (newer blog followers, you can read all about the incident here). Crazy to think that was almost a year ago!

 

Onto much better memories - After our meetings ended on Saturday, Justin and I hopped in a taxi to head to Moulay Yacoub, a town about 20 minutes outside of Fes where we chiefly spent our time during training. For 2 months, we lived with a host family, attended "school" along with 3 other volunteers for language, cultural, and technical training, and tried to do some of the work of Peace Corps volunteers in the community - meetings with community members, assessments of youth needs, and English teaching and other activities at the Youth Center.

Teaching kids a dance at the Youth Center

A "quilt" that girls created in an activity

Overlooking MY with our training group

With our host family

Justin and I spent 2 days catching up with our host family in Moulay Yacoub, and more than anything, being back where it all started made me realize just how far we have come. Whereas before we could only have basic conversations with our family, now we were able to talk about an incredible range of topics - politics, culture, travel, future plans, youth in Morocco, marriage, school, careers, I could go on and on. And whereas before I walked around taking everything in for the very first time, now I have a year's worth of living in Morocco to give me a more confident manner and a trained eye. Even the cultural side has come so far - knowing the appropriate phrase or response to say, understanding the roles of women and men, being able to relate better to our family's way of life - all of these things seemed to come so much more naturally now. 

Sometimes I get caught up with the daily struggles and challenges, and experiences like this help me to step back and truly appreciate how far we have come in our first year in Morocco - which can only lead to so much more for our second!

Ch-ch-ch-chaaaanges...

When it rains, it pours! A lot has happened over the past week. I’m happy to say that all of the things that I wanted to get accomplished within our first month or so in our site have now been ticked off of my list. You see these lovely things??

These are keys to our beautiful apartment!! A narrated photo tour can be found at the bottom of the post, but in short,it's better than anything I ever got living in Manhattan! :) As you’ll see in the photos, it’s mostly tile (which seems to be customary in most Moroccan homes) but the apartment is fairly new so the tile is beautiful and very bright. We are less than a 5 minute walk from our Youth Center where we’ll be spending most of our time, and the neighborhood is really nice – lots of very friendly neighbors, a preschool right across from us, beautiful trees, hedges, and flowers right around us, and several small bodega-type shops nearby (called hanuts, as I mentioned in a previous post) for any quick needs. When I joined the Peace Corps, I never expected to have some of the amenities that this apartment has (hot water, a bathtub, a western toilet, a lot of space) but it’s within our budget so I won’t complain! We will have to buy furniture but will probably do that bit by bit. 

Another big update is that we have a new volunteer who has joined us in Tiflet. She came from another site (it actually happens to be Moulay Yacoub, the site where Justin and I lived during our 2 months of training). We didn't get much notice on the addition but she is one of my favorite people from our training group, so I’m happy to have her company for the 2 years. We are still working out the kinks of how to work best together without being 3 Americans around each other all the time, but I’m confident that in time we’ll be able to figure out how best to each work within a pretty large town.

Also, Justin and I now have a Darija tutor! He is an English teacher at one of the local high schools so it’s a perfect match. We have already met with him twice and have been so relieved to get answers to many questions that have come up as we have been trying to learn on our own this past month. We’ll be meeting with him twice a week for the next year, so I hope in time to improve my language so that I can impress everyone when they come to visit – that means YOU!

And lastly, but equally as exciting as the other parts – Justin and I finally got a PO box! We were waiting until the apartment was secured as there are 2 post offices in town and we wanted to make sure we got a box at the one nearest to our apartment. Below is our address, so get out your quills, inkpots, and wax to start writing me some good old-fashioned letters!  

Justin and Lauren Bernstein

Boîte Postale N^o 739

15402 Tiflet Medina

Tiflet

MOROCCO (MAROC)

You’ve made it through all of the updates (phew!). The biggest one will hopefully be coming one week from now because next Friday at 3:30 PM Morocco time (10:30 PM EST time) this friggin cast will be coming OFF and you might hear my sigh of relief across the ocean.

Without any further delay, here are apartment photos – enjoy!

The opening in the center is the entrance
to our apartment from a flight of stairs. To the
left is a bathroom and then the bedroom.

A sink just outside the bathroom, to the left of the entrance.
At the bottom left is a buta, a gas tank that we have to light
in order to heat up water.

The view of the apartment from the entrance. Bathroom/bedroom are on the right,
straight ahead is what Moroccans call a "salon" (basically a living room),
to the left is what will become a kitchen space.

Justin and the kitchen area (right now has a rug and pillows in it)

a view from one end of the salon

Looking back at Justin and the kitchen area from the salon

in the bedroom - an awesome dresser/shelf set into one full wall

Looking at Justin through a window in the bedroom

Onto the bathroom. We have a bathtub and shower with hot water.
Seems like a good amount of people in our town have hot water
but this is the first bathtub I have seen.

And we have a western toilet. I haven't talked much
on the blog about squatting toilets, we have gotten used to them
but I definitely would choose otherwise if given the option!

Turning out of the bathroom

Going up the steps

Ahhhh Moroccan sun in December! This is our beautiful roof.
Home to what I hope soon will be flower pots and herb gardens!
And also lots of drying laundry.

A quick view of our neighborhood from the roof!

One door closes...

Today marks exactly 2 months since Justin and I joined the Peace Corps, and it also marks the end of one phase of our time here and the beginning of a new one. This morning, we left our training community in Moulay Yacoub and exchanged tearful goodbyes with our host family who has done so, so much for us. They sent us off with jllabas (pictures forthcoming!) and a slew of other memorabilia that we will cherish and think of our time here. In just a short time we have truly connected with our family and with the Moulay Yacoub community and it will always fill a donkey-shaped place in my heart. Justin and I are absolutely planning to go back and visit, hopefully when our language is even better and they might understand what we are saying :)

A "quilt" from a program that I ran with girls in our community. Thought it looked cute :)

While we are sad to leave, we ended our time in Moulay Yacoub with a bang – this week was L-3id L-kbir (also known as “the great feast”), one of the largest holidays in the Muslim community. The holiday is held on the tenth day of the month of du l-Hijja in the Islamic calendar (the last month of the year) and is derived from the sacrifice story of Abraham and his son Isaac. For those who don't know or need a reminder – the holiday honors when God (or Allah) told Abraham (for Muslims, he is called Ibrahim) to sacrifice his son Isaac (for Muslims, Isma'il) as a test of his faith. As Abraham was about to kill Isaac, God stopped him and gave him a lamb to sacrifice instead. *16-Nov: Clarification at bottom of post!

For 3id, each household purchases its own sheep (those who cannot afford a sheep buy a lamb or a less expensive animal). Then, the head of the family kills the sheep (or in some families, a butcher comes to the house and performs the ritual). Over the days following this, the family eats all the different parts of the sheep. And when I say all I mean ALL. They also eat a TON of sweets at every meal- cookies, cakes, candies, the works. I am refraining from posting some of the more graphic pictures and descriptions of the week but I’m happy to share upon request! In addition, families buy new clothing to wear for the holiday, usually get haircuts, and women use henna as cosmetic and as a means of protection against evil influences. For us, the week was overwhelming but a really interesting experience and allowed us to spend a lot of time with our family, which we really appreciated. 

Our friend the sheep who is no longer...

A sample of our typical non-meat spreads last week

So we’ve said goodbye to the beautiful Moulay Yacoub with its mountains, hammams, donkeys, steps and steps and steps, and the amazingly welcoming people who took us in and allowed us to be part of the community for our short time. We are now in Fes where we will spend 4 days, then 1 day in Rabat in which we will be sworn in as official Peace Corps volunteers. My host sister sewed me a beautiful purple jllaba for 3id which I will be wearing again at our official swearing-in ceremony on Thursday, so you will be seeing it soon. Then, on Friday we head off to our new community (Tiflet) to begin our 2-year adventure. More to come over our next few days the next door opens!

* Clarification on 16-Nov: I realized that one piece of my description of Abraham's sacrifice may have been unclear. While Ibrahim is of course the Arabic version of the name Abraham, I did not mean to suggest that Isma'il is just the Arabic equivalent of Isaac. As you may know, Abraham had 2 sons by different women: Isma'il (or Ishmael) and Isaac. In the Torah and Christian Bible, Isaac is the son that Abraham was about to sacrifice, whereas in the Qur'an, Abraham was about to sacrifice his first son, Isma'il, when Allah sent the ram. The theological importance of the distinction is that Jews trace their descent from Isaac and Christians believe that Jesus was a descendant of Isaac, whereas Muslims believe that the Prophet Mohamed was a descendant of Isma'il.

A training update

The weeks are going by faster and faster! It has now been 5 weeks since Justin and I arrived in Morocco, though it feels like months with all that we have done and learned. In 2 weeks, we will find out our permanent site placement for the next 2 years, and in 1 month, we will (hopefully) be sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers and leave for our final site. 

I’m very much looking forward to having my own space and exploring a new community, but there’s a LOT to do in our training site between now and then. Every 2 weeks a new “Phase” of training ends and a new one starts (there are 4 Phases total). Right now I am in Fes with our full training group to mark the end of Phase 2 and the beginning of Phase 3. In Phase 2, we conducted in-depth community assessment work to try to understand some of the issues that youth in our community are facing (we are Youth Development volunteers, so all of our work is very youth-focused). We had a number of interviews and meetings with community leaders along with creative exercises with youth. 

The 2 most pronounced concerns for youth that have come out of our assessment work are education (primarily English education) and empowerment of women. In our community, students are only required to go to school through the 6th grade. We have a school for students from the 7-9th grades but many students in the community are not able to continue going to school, typically because they must work outside or inside of the home to help the family. There is no high school in the town, so after 9th grade, students have to take a bus or taxi every day to Fes to continue their education. For most families, this is a financial strain and there are also concerns for girls’ security, so few students in the community continue their education after 9th grade. Particularly for women, there’s not a lot of encouragement for education or the pursuit of their skills and talents. In my host family, I have two sisters age 16 and 17 who are no longer in school but are working in a women’s center in the community that is helping them train to become dressmakers… but in many families girls don’t even have these opportunities. 

Our group is planning a program at the end of our training to help address the issues of education and female empowerment. I’m planning an activity geared toward young girls, helping them to think about and discuss their individual talents or talents/skills that they would like to learn, in an open and supportive environment. It’s a bit frustrating that we are only in the community for another month and as such there is only so much that we can do for them, but at the same time I’m happy that we’re able to give something and to gain lessons that will help us in our permanent site.

 More to come on our training and the program planning as the weeks go by! I’ll end with a few more photos from the past week:

View of our community from the mountain - so beautiful!

My host sisters dressed me up on
Sunday in a traditional Moroccan dress!

Then they paraded me around town
and got me some henna - on the side
of my hand is "Layla," my Moroccan name here :)

An example of a daily "traffic jam"
in our community :)

your weekly allotment of food photos!
This is a tagine with kfta, onions
and olives... soooo good!

I miss everyone very much, and hope all is well!

Lots o Learning

Before coming to Morocco, I read a book called “Culture Shock” which is geared towards Americans coming to Morocco and some of the many adjustments to expect in daily life. Almost every aspect of Justin and my lives have changed, from the type of place in which we are living (4,000 people total is a big change from 8 million!), to our 6 meals a day (if you missed it, you can read all about our MANY meals in my last post), to even the process of showering and using the restroom (public baths called hammams and squatting toilets have taken some getting used to but have quickly become a routine part of our lives). But the most significant, and definitely the most interesting adjustments for me, have been learning about cultural norms and values for Moroccans. Some I have been fortunate to learn from our “Language and Cultural Facilitator” Malika (or LCF as we call it – Peace Corps has a LOT of acronyms); others have been discovered through a faux pas or two on my end… but all have been an important part of learning and respecting all the aspects of our home for the next 2 years. There are many, many cultural lessons that I have learned and I hope to pass them all along in time! For now, just a few…

Greetings

One of our first language lessons upon arriving in the country focused on Moroccan greetings, and it was a very long lesson! I was absolutely amazed at how many different ways we learned to say “How are you?” but once we got into our training community and began to have conversations with family and friends, it made much more sense. Here’s an example of a typical greeting and the translations – and I am seriously talking about just a walk-by hello with our local shopkeeper (abbreviated SK):

Me: Salaam Ealykum! (translation: Peace be upon you, i.e. Hello)

SK: Wa Ealykum Salaam! Kif dayra? (translation: Peace be upon you too! How are you?)

Me: Labas, Hmdullah. Labas? (translation: Good, thanks be to God. Are you good?)

SK: Labas, Hmdullah. Bixir? (translation: Good, thanks be to God. Are you fine?) *Here’s where the conversation gets funny. They start to ask about 15 ways if you are SURE that you are fine, and if everything is fine, and if you are absolutely certain that everything is great.

Me: Bixir, shuqran! Cinq cinq? (translation: Fine, thank you! Are you all good?)

SK: Cinq cinq, Hmdullah. Swiya ulla mizyan? (translation: All good, thanks be to God. A little or very good?)

Me: Mizyan, Hmdullah. Unta? (translation: Very good, thanks be to God. And you?)

SK: Mizyan, Hmdullah. Kulsi mizyan? (translation: Very good, thanks be to God. Is everything very good?)

Me: Kulsi mizyan, shuqran, kulsi bixir? (translation: Everything is very good, thank you, is everything fine for you?)

SK: Kulsi bixir, Hmdullah. (translation: Everything is fine, thanks be to God.)

Sometimes they will even repeat the same word over and over just to be absolutely certain that everything is okay... such as (him) Labas? (me) Labas. (him) Labas? (me) Labas. (him) Labas? (me) Labas, I promise!!!! (I don’t actually say the last part but I definitely think it!)

That’s before asking anything else – And once you ask about their family, it starts ALL over again! This is a very standard way of greeting people and I find that I need to leave extra time to get somewhere to allow for long greetings along the way. There are many other cultural norms with greetings – For example, when coming upon a group of people, even if you know only 1 person in the group, you greet each person with the same level of friendliness and enthusiasm, and you greet from right to left. Women typically kiss, sometimes 1 on each side, sometimes 1 on the left and 2 on the right, sometimes 3 on the left and none on the right. Once I even got 5 on the left side. All of this as you can imagine is a BIG change coming from New York, but I’m happy to say that we have adjusted well and have embraced 20 minutes of saying hello :)

Hospitality

Similar to the warm greetings is the amazing hospitality that the Moroccans we have come across have shown us. I read in my “Culture Shock” book that you should be careful about complimenting something of a Moroccan or he/she will try to give it to you. Well, I am reporting that this is very true and has already happened to me! I complimented a small sculpture hanging on the wall in one of my host brothers’ rooms, and he immediately took it off the wall and tried to give it to me! Justin and I pleaded for a while and finally got him to put it back on the wall, and now I try to restrain my urges to give too many compliments out!

I have a long list of other cultural lessons that I have begun to pick up on here and I’m sure you will be learning along with me as the adventure continues! I’ll end with a few unrelated pictures so you can see what we’ve been up to.

A place called "Lalla Shafia" on top of the mountain near us; I will tell the whole story about it another time!

Our town is well-known for their mineral water, so lots of cool looking bath products are sold here

The Blue Gate, the entrance to the Old City in Fes

There was a lot of love for the food pictures so I will keep including them!

Beautiful tile design on the wall in the home that we use for training

The "Dar Chabab" (House of Youth) where we work

A sheep being brought through town on top of a donkey

Quick update

Just wanted to get an update out to everyone! It's been a busy but incredibly fun time in our training site in Fes. We had one day off and was able to do some exploring around the city. This is Justin and me in front of one of the King's palaces in the center of Fes, along with some gorgeous tilework on the sides of the palace.

 

 

 

Justin and I are leaving our training site in Fes this afternoon and heading into what the Peace Corps calls "Community-Based Training." We'll be spending the next 2 months or so living in a small community with a host family, and engaging in intense training to prepare us in the language, culture, and youth and community development work to give us a strong foundation for the next 2 years to come :) If all goes well, we'll be sworn in as official Peace Corps volunteers in late November. 

I'm not sure what my internet access will be at our new site, so I wanted to make sure I gave everyone the updates now! We'll be living in Moulay Yacoub, about 20 minutes outside of Fes. It's a moderately-sized town (about 13,000 people) and it's right on the side of a mountain. Our training house is near the bottom of the mountain, and all the facilities that we'll need (post office, grocery store, bank, etc) are at the top of the mountain - which means I'll finally get the chance to burn off all the good Moroccan food we've been eating!! Justin and I will be living with a host family with 6 siblings - 3 boys and 3 girls, ranging in age from 8 to 19. I'm hoping the younger ones will help us practice our language skills, though they will likely be FAR beyond us even at a young age!

We're both really excited but very nervous/anxious to be living in a new community and particularly with a family.. but looking forward to more adventures and more to learn! I hope to be able to post more soon, along with some photos of our new community. I looked online and here's all I could find - not sure if it's accurate but it looks pretty!