A Musical Interlude

The days are going by very quickly and Justin and I are excitedly planning for our upcoming return to the US! To get us in the mood, we compiled a thematic playlist. The list of songs is below and you can click here to listen to the full thing.

If you have other song suggestions, please leave a comment!

1. Rock the Casbah, The Clash
2. Stop, Pink Floyd
3. The Letter, Joe Cocker
4. Wait, The Beatles
5. Coming Home, Diddy feat. Skylar Grey
6. Homeward Bound, Simon & Garfunkel
7. Home, Cowboy Mouth
8. America, Simon & Garfunkel
9. Empire State of Mind, Jay Z feat. Alicia Keys
10. America, Neil Diamond
11. Homecoming, Kanye West
12. I'm Going Home, Tim Curry from Rocky Horror Picture Show
13. Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans, Louis Armstrong
14. New York Groove, Kiss
15. Walking in Memphis, Marc Cohn
16. Sweet Home New Orleans, Dr. John
17. L Train, Shootyz Groove
18. New York State of Mind, Billy Joel
19. Closing Time, Semisonic
20. We'll Meet Again, Johnny Cash

Women and exercise

Yesterday, I held my first women-only aerobics class at our Youth Center. In my community (and in many others in Morocco) women do not seem to have access to enough exercise opportunities. Boys and young men play soccer morning and night everywhere you look, and while younger girls run around outside playing with friends, older girls and certainly married women seem to get very little exercise. I run several times a week and rarely do I see any females running or walking, and based on what other Peace Corps Volunteers have told me, in some communities it does not happen at all. There are several gyms in our community, but all are men-only, either by rule or in practice, as far as I can tell.

Now don't get me wrong, women work quite hard in the home - cooking, cleaning, taking care of the house and the family - but they don't have the opportunity to do cardiovascular exercise. The top reported cause of death in Morocco is coronary artery disease - with the most common risk factors including obesity and lack of exercise. And a recent study reported that 67% of chronic diseases in Morocco are due to unhealthy nutrition, lack of exercise, and smoking (though this affects mostly men as women seen smoking are, in many communities, presumed to be prostitutes, so few do), with only 20% of Moroccans exercising regularly and 40% not consuming adequate amounts of fruits and vegetables. In comparison, 50% of Americans report that they exercise regularly, and think about how much we hear about Americans' health problems!

So I think exercise and nutrition for women are both really important areas to which I can contribute during my time in Morocco (and hopefully I can discuss nutrition more in conjunction with the aerobics class). The reason I chose to make this a women-only class is simply to help women to feel comfortable. We have women-only gyms in the U.S., but I think even more so in Morocco, for many women to be willing to come to classes, they need privacy and a separate environment from men. For my first session, I had 7 girls and women show up, ranging in age from 16 to 35. It's great for a start, and hopefully in time that number will increase. The class went really well - all of my years doing aerobics classes at gyms paid off and everyone loved getting the chance to move around and listen to fun pop music. After the class was over, 3 of the girls stayed around and danced to the music for a while because they enjoyed it so much!

In case you are curious, the playlist from the class is below. I spent a LOT of time finding the latest "cool" music that Moroccans like to listen to, some American, some Moroccan, and some international. A lot of the songs are available on YouTube if you don’t recognize some and want to know what is popular with the youth here, but for the next class I got requests for more Pitbull and Celine Dion!

1. Warmup Song: Moukana Wein, Myriam Fares
2. C'est La Vie, Khaled
3. Rain Over Me, Pitbull feat. Marc Anthony
4. On the Floor, Jennifer Lopez feat. Pitbull
5. We Found Love, Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris
6. Mr. Saxobeat, Alexandra Stan
7. Love you Like a Love Song, Selena Gomez
8. Glamorous, Fergie feat. Ludacris
9. Run the World (Girls), Beyonce
10. Waka Waka (This Time for Africa), Shakira
11. Cooldown song: Inas Inas, Mohamed Rouicha

I'll post more updates as my class continues!

Moroccan Travels, Part Four... Essaouira

After regional meetings and a visit from my parents (if you missed those, you can read about them here and here), Justin and I headed west to Essaouira for our last round of travel adventures for a little while. 

Essaouira is a beautiful city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, about 3 hours west of Marrakech. The town consists of a heavily fortified 18th-century old "medina" (city) along with a more modern new medina. Remains of those 18th century towers, gateways, and bastions can be found throughout the old medina and look out upon stunning views of the Atlantic. Lots of great fish caught fresh and sold in Essaouira's port, along with really interesting art, fun shopping, and great restaurants. And a beach, of course!

We visited Essaouira during a famous annual music event that has taken place for 15 years now - the Gnaoua World Music festival. Gnaoua music is a mix of religious songs and rhythms pulled from sub-Saharan African, Berber, and Sufi influences and is both a blend of music as well as Islamic rituals and prayers. Gnaoua music today is mainly concentrated in Morocco and Algeria. The festival included plenty of Gnaoua music but also other popular music for Moroccans - we heard a band from Mali for instance, as well as a ska band from Casablanca. It was a crazy time to be in Essaouira as the town was packed full of people there for the festival, but that lended to a really fun and vibrant atmosphere and an interesting experience. I'd like to visit Essaouira when it's a little less busy to get a better feel for the town - hopefully we'll get the chance again!

Now Justin and I are back in Tiflet and making plans for the rest of the summer, which will include some travels, visits from friends, planning for the fall, and hopefully lots of cooking and new adventures! More to come soon :)

A view of the Atlantic coast from a tower

One of the Gnaoua Festival stages

Justin and I with the Atlantic peeping out behind us

An old tower and the city's port (with lots of fish, which explains all the birds!)

An Essaouira sunset

A fishing boat coming into the port

Camel riding on the beach!

Fresh, wonderful fish

Haven't had much fish in Morocco, so I was veeeery excited :)

Some of our Peace Corps friends, enjoying Essaouira with us

Our time in Tiflet so far

I realized that in between complaining about hobbling around in crutches (the cast comes off in NINETEEN days and counting the minutes!!) and teaching about Moroccan life here and there, I haven't talked much about what Justin and I have actually been doing day-to-day the past month in our new community.

Even though I only have 1 good leg, it feels as if we have been able to do a lot in a short time. Here are some of the things we've done:

• We are Fa-mi-ly: We have spent lots and lots of time with our host family, even taking a trip out to Khemisset to visit our mother's brother and sister-in-law's family (I talked about this in last week's blog post a bit).
• Top Chef Morocco: We tried our hand at cooking our family pizza (if you recall from a previous blog post, it's our second time, after cooking it for our family in Moulay Yacoub). Not quite as good as our first time but pretty decent – hopefully we will improve with more practice!
• Keeping up with the Joneses: Beyond our family, we have gotten to know the people in our neighborhood. Our host family runs what is called a “hanut” here (similar to bodegas in big cities in the U.S., just small little shops that sell necessary household items such as soap, canned foods, etc). So we've spent lots of time sitting with our family next to the hanut, chatting with people in the neighborhood and either impressing them with our vast language or making lots of mistakes and listening to them laugh at us (depending on the day). Lots of kids play in front of the hanut, so it keeps the area pretty lively.
• Meeting the Yoots: We've been spending lots of time at our Youth Center (here it is called a Dar Chabab – Dar means “house” and Chabab means “youth”, so House of Youth). We've been really fortunate to be placed in a community with a Dar Chabab that is well-stocked with amenities (it has a computer lab, a library, an auditorium with a stage, 2 classrooms, a pool table, a ping-pong table, a TV, and lots of musical instruments), and with a really committed director and group of youth who spend lots of time there already. So we won't have to work too hard to get people to actually come there in the first place. The areas that are most active in the Dar Chabab seem to be music, theater, and computers – every afternoon when we are there, we sit in on the Music Club's activities which usually involves guitars, keyboards, drums, violins, tambourines, singing, and dancing. And a theater group has started rehearsing for a play in January and they let us sit in on rehearsals. Sometimes we just play pool or chat with the youth and watch football (soccer) games on TV. The center is a great place for the kids to go and they seem to really enjoy being there and being around each other.
• Getting Ready to Teach: We've started to prepare for teaching English classes in January. Another really fortunate thing for us is that people are REALLY eager for English classes – almost every day, we have a new group of people ask about when classes are starting. Our biggest problem may be having too many people (which is a good problem to have). We have just posted an announcement around town (a small version is below, you can see our pictures on it!) that says that we are doing small assessments at the end of December to determine individual English levels, to allow us to create classes to address all levels/ages. Then we post a class schedule on January 3 and start classes week of January 10. If it were up to everyone here, we would be starting immediately, but I'm glad to be taking the time and getting to know the community a bit first.
• Meeting the Gals: I visited a Women's Center in town (called a Nidi Niswi) and spent some time with the girls there. It's kind of like a Dar Chabab but gives some more technical assistance to women in sewing, dressmaking, etc. A Peace Corps volunteer living in Tiflet in 2007 taught them aerobics which they seemed to LOVE, and they really want me to have a class with aerobics, yoga, dancing, etc, so assuming I am cleared to use both legs early next year, I might try to start some classes with them and get some good exercise and new friends out of it!
• Where to Live: We have talked to people about helping us to find an apartment for January. We've seen 2 apartments so far, not sure yet what we'll do but I'm glad that things are available and very much looking forward to having a place of our own!
• Forgetting our Newly Learned Language: The director of our Youth Center has been helping us to find a Darija tutor, to continue our (slow) progress. He just gave us a number for a teacher who is willing to help us, so hopefully it will work out.
• What Else: In between this, Justin is taking a lot of walks around the community (me, a little but ever so slowly) and reporting back on all of the things he is seeing and learning. And we are trying to study language a bit but not as much as we should be. We sometimes go to the cyber cafe near our house to catch up on emails and to Skype with people back home. We hope when we get an apartment to get an internet connection there, which should make things a bit easier.
  

our poster advertising English classes!

That's about all of it – otherwise, just starting to make plans for the upcoming months and reading a lot of books. My parents gave me a Kindle as a birthday present before leaving and while I was a bit hesitant about moving away from real books, it's been a much easier way to read books here where we don't have a lot of space or places to buy them (so thanks Mom and Dad!!). If anyone has recommendations on good books to read, please leave them in the comments; I have 2 years so looking for lots of suggestions!

I apologize that I haven't posted photos of our new community; the truth is that since I'm on crutches, I just don't carry around a camera very much. But hopefully come January when I have 2 workable feet, I will post lots and lots and lots of photos... so just hang tight for now!

I miss everyone back home. This time of the year I'm thinking about New York all lit up in Christmas lights, the tree in Rockefeller, the beautiful holiday window displays, music on Steinway Street in Queens, generally how happy people get during the holiday season. I fired up my holiday music mix on my iPod to hopefully keep a little bit of the feeling here with me, and I smile when I listen to it :) Please enjoy it a bit extra for me!

More to come over the coming weeks as we (hopefully) secure an apartment and a tutor and I very soon get this cast OFF!!! Hope that everyone is doing wonderfully!

A History Lesson

Happy December everyone! I have been looking forward to this month for several reasons – it’s the last month that (hopefully) Justin and I will be living with a host family, as we are looking for a place of our own to move into in January; I am excited to see how Moroccans bring in the New Year; and most importantly, I am counting down the days until I get this friggin’ cast removed from my leg! I am in Rabat now for a check-up tomorrow (Monday) morning, so I’ll give more updates after my appointment – but right now the countdown has me getting the cast off on December 30th or 31st, so keep your fingers crossed that all goes according to schedule and that the doctors work that day!

It’s been a fun few weeks spending time with our new host family in Tiflet and getting to know the town. Last weekend, Justin and I went with our host mom and sister to visit our host mom's brother, sister-in-law, and sister-in-law's family in Khemisset, which is the next city over (only about a 20-30 minute drive). I soon found out that the sister-in law and her family are Amazigh and I spent Saturday evening watching beautiful videos of Amazigh dancing and music, and learning some dance moves from my new extended family. As I was thinking back upon the weekend, I realized that likely most of you don’t know what Amazigh means (I did not before coming here) so I thought that today’s blog post could serve as a quick history lesson for everyone! I will commence with putting on my teacher hat now :)


Who:
The Imazighen people, plural of Amazigh. You might recognize the word "Berber" as a term used; however, "Berber" is believed to have been derived from the word "barbarian," whereas the word "Amazigh" is believed to mean "free people" or "free and noble men" and to many the word "Berber" is considered offensive.

Amazigh jewelry

When:
Archaeological evidence suggests that Morocco’s first settlers (known as the Capsian people) arrived between 10,000 and 6,000 B.C.E., after the end of the last ice age. It is from these earliest inhabitants that the Imazighen people (plural of Amazigh) are believed to have descended.

Amazigh pottery in Marrakesh

Why:
Following the ice age, Morocco’s landscape was largely made up of grassy savanna, particularly on the coastal plains, which drew inhabitants with an extremely fertile land that are well-suited to cultivating crops and rearing cattle. The Imazighen people developed into numerous groups and inhabited most of the land that makes up present-day Morocco (in addition to other parts of Northern Africa), although in the years following many of the groups moved to mountainous regions as precautions against foreign invaders.

An Amazigh silk hanging; also designs are reminiscent of
tattoos that many Imazighen people have

What:
Today in Morocco, about 40% of its people acknowledge an Amazigh identity, though likely many more have Berber ancestry. Imazighen are identified primarily by language but also by traditional customs and culture – such as the distinctive music and dances.  

A book that I am hoping to read soon!

 
Amazigh Language:
The language of the Imazighen people has many dialects, but the 3 main dialects used in Morocco are called Tashelhit (spoken in southwest Morocco), Tamazight (spoken in the Middle Atlas region) and Tarifit (or Rifia, spoken in the Rif area of northern Morocco). In our town, it seems like a good number of people speak Tamazight so I may try to learn at least some basic words.

Sample Tamazight text - what it means is
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience
and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. "
(Article 1 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Amazigh Music:
From what I have read, Amazigh culture is extraordinarily rich and diverse, with a variety of musical styles that range from bagpipes and oboe (kind of like Celtic music) to pentatonic music (reminiscent of Chinese music), combined with African rhythms and the use of oral storytelling. These traditions have been kept alive by small bands of musicians who travel from village to village to entertain at weddings and other social occasions with songs, tales, and poetry.

To hear some of the more traditional music, here's a sample website (not a lot in English but you can click to artists and watch videos). To hear some more modern takes, here's another site to try.

A moussim, or traditional festival, in a small town in the Middle Atlas mountains

Imazighen People Today:
While the Imazighen people have a storied past in Morocco, their heritage was not always recognized by the state. After Morocco won independence in 1956 the King sought to solidify a unified national identity and banned Tamazight in schools and public places (such as hospitals and the courts). Eventually there were 2 major Amazigh revolts, one in 1973 and a second in the 1980s, both of which were suppressed by the Moroccan government and for years, Imazighen people who continued to assert their identity were jailed. By the 1990s the Imazighen movement had built up momentum but little was done until the current king took over (Mohamed VI - whose mother is Amazigh). He reintroduced Tamazight in primary schools and commissioned a research institute to develop a curriculum and promote study of the language. And in the recent constitutional changes Tamazight became an official state language.

 

Below is the official Amazigh flag, adopted by the Amazigh World Congress in 1998. Each color in the flag symbolizes a territory inhabited by the Imazighen people:

- blue symbolizes the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean;

- green symbolizes nature and the green mountains;

- yellow symbolizes the sands of the Sahara Desert

The letter in the middle of the flag is a yaz, which symbolizes a "free man", the meaning of Amazigh, and is in red, the color of life and also the color of resistance.

 

There are so many parts of Amazigh and Moroccan culture that I have yet to learn so this is just a small sampling – hopefully, over 2 years, I’ll be able to impart lots of new lessons as I learn more myself! Lots more to come on Moroccan music in general – Justin and I have been spending time at our Youth Center where they LOVE playing music and singing and dancing together, and last week we went to a concert at a local high school with about 95% Moroccan music - the remaining 5% was a small rock band who seemed to really like Bob Dylan :)

And by the way - if there are any aspects of Morocco or Moroccan culture that you are particularly interested in learning, just leave me a comment and I’ll try to address it in a future blog post. Sending everyone best wishes for a great month, and more to come soon!