An apple a day...

The newest updates: Last week Justin and I returned from an "In-Service Training" (IST) in Marrakesh for the newest group of Peace Corps Volunteers, where we gave a presentation about our awesome Job Skills training workshops. After IST, I participated in my very last meeting with the Gender and Development Committee in Morocco and was able to sit back and really appreciate how far my efforts have gone in the last 2 years to promote gender equality activities in Morocco.

So all in all a productive week! However, my excitement faded quickly upon getting back home last Tuesday, as that evening I managed to slip in the shower and bang my chin against our bathtub, breaking open a pretty deep gash all the way to the muscle. 

But this blog post is not to complain about the injury - Rather, I want to gush about the medical treatment that I have received in the Peace Corps, which is better than I  have ever experienced! As soon as I banged my chin, I called the after-hours Peace Corps medical duty phone. Within a minute I was connected to a doctor who told me immediate actions to take with supplies from the medical kit that Peace Corps provided us with. First thing the following morning, I went to Rabat where I met with the same Peace Corps doctor, who brought me to an amazing plastic surgeon for a quick consultation followed by stitches in my chin. All within about 18 hours of my injury.

From my fractured leg bone to now this, I have been so impressed with the medical attention that I've received in the Peace Corps. Before we left for Morocco, there was some negative press about medical problems with the Peace Corps, but for me I have had nothing but positive experiences. Even so, I have promised myself that the chin injury will be my very last medical issue, because I need to return to America in 1 piece! :)

In other news, we are finalizing most of our projects and beginning the packing process. I can't believe that our return to the US is getting closer and closer! Over the coming weeks we plan to spend lots of time with our Moroccan friends and family and do some final sightseeing too. More to come soon!

Things I Wish I Knew

I just spent 3 days with a group of 96 excited, apprehensive, eager, and motivated Peace Corps trainees! They just arrived last Wednesday and have been thrown into the grind with 2 months of intense training to learn everything from Moroccan culture and language to figuring out how to assess community needs and develop an action plan to lectures on Peace Corps policies and procedures. My time in Rabat was spent in sessions talking about gender-specific programming, volunteer diversity, and harassment, and out of sessions talking about everything and anything on these trainees' minds - how to manage language learning, volunteer experiences, the kinds of programming we do, what the food is like, you name it.

Sharing some of my experiences with them was really exciting, and in return I soaked up so much of their energy and motivation. Watching a group of individuals who are about to embark on this amazing adventure, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic about those first few months when everything was so scary and overwhelming, but at the same time incredibly new and exciting. I have now been living in this country for over 16 months (scary!) and while I’m no expert, I certainly feel I’ve come a long way from those scary initial months. So I thought it might be fun to make a quick list of some of the things that I wish I knew (or wish I understood) about this experience at the very beginning, for better or for worse!

1.   My job might will be ambiguous

My official title is a Youth Development Volunteer. What that means in Morocco can vary from being an English teacher to running sports teams to doing job skills trainings to developing health activities to cleaning up neighborhoods to teaching about citizenship to training teachers to supporting cooperatives and artisan groups to promoting cultural exchange to working with people with disabilities… and pretty much everything in between. What’s awesome about this is that Volunteers truly have the opportunity to match their skills to the work that they feel is both important and needed in the community – but what makes it difficult is actually determining what those are.

2.   Making mistakes is okay

I very distinctly remember on day 2 of our training, my Moroccan Arabic language teacher sent me out of the classroom and into the street to have my first “conversation” with a Moroccan. He picked out a girl near our training center, asked if she wouldn’t mind speaking with me at a 1st grade level, and then pushed me towards her. I consider myself an outgoing and friendly person but I remember feeling more scared of this encounter than anything I could remember… mainly because I wasn’t confident in my language skills (pretty reasonable after only 1 day!) and I was practically paralyzed with fear about making mistakes. But I sucked it up and went into that conversation, and laughed with her as we worked together to construct a very broken conversation. And this spills over into so many experiences that I’ve had – I can only improve from learning and I can only learn from doing and if doing involves making some mistakes, then it’s an important part of the process. 

3.   Morocco gets COLD!

Yes, I know that Morocco is on the edge of the Sahara Desert. But there are mountains and forests and large bodies of water and did I mention ski resorts or that homes are generally not heated? And I’m fortunate to be in an area that’s not even the coldest part of the Morocco by far.

4.   Everyone’s experience is different

Peace Corps staff teach that we shouldn’t compare our experience to any other Peace Corps Volunteer’s, because every person’s situation is so different – varying communities, backgrounds, attitudes and perspectives contribute to totally different experiences. But it’s certainly hard when we’re all trying to figure out our ways at the same time.

5.   Relationships take time to build

Just like making a good couscous here, relationships take time to develop, build, and nurture. It has taken me until just a few months ago to develop strong relationships with young women in my community. Part of this comes from cultural restrictions – these women just don’t spend as much time out of the home, so there’s less opportunity to create relationships – and part of this comes from me being with Justin and spending less time on my own developing individual relationships. Regardless, I have been patient and I am so happy that I have done so, as I’m now being rewarded with some wonderful friends and potential partners.

6.   I am stronger than I think

I am truly proud of what I have been able to do here – not just in terms of programs or classes or partnerships but for the personal leaps that I have been able to make: living in an unknown place separated at an enormous distance from friends and family and the comforts of the U.S. that we are used to; learning a spoken language for the first time (other than English) in my life (regretting that choice to study Latin in high school); figuring out how to understand, appreciate and respect a new culture, religion, and way of life; dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity (see #1); and taking new experiences and adventures head on and with drive and positivity!

7.   Time will fly.

Cliché but very, very, very true.

Happy anniversary to us!

It is officially one year since Justin and I were sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers! As I enter into my second year, I am truly beginning to understand why Peace Corps is a two-year commitment and not just one. Over the very recent months, I have gained a new level of comfort with my language skills, with my community, and with the ability to confidently try (and maybe fail) in developing new projects. And beyond that, we've started to develop incredibly strong friendships with women and men in our community, friendships that simply can't just grow in a month or two, but have been cultivated over time and with a lot of effort from both sides. With improved language, confidence, and growing relationships, I am so excited to see where the next year will take us.

Here's a photo from exactly one year ago today, with our training group and language teacher at our swearing in ceremony in Rabat:

As we get closer to the new year, I'll write a bit more about my thoughts on the last year and my plans for the coming one. But for now I'll just be thankful about how far we have indeed come!

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!

Regional meetings and GAD

Apologies for the delay since my last post! Lots has happened over the past few weeks which I will cover in posts over the coming week or two. So, what has happened? A little bit of work and a little bit of play - So for today's blog post we'll start with the work. Just days after we finished our last English class and as some of our Baccalaureate students were sitting down to take their English exams, Justin and I set off for Azrou to attend regional meetings. Peace Corps Morocco is divided into 8 different regions, and the groups gather together once a year to discuss updates from the field, share ideas, and generally plan for the coming year. 

The regional meeting was a great opportunity for me to both learn from others and to share helpful advice and ideas. I discussed a lot of ideas for future projects in my site, and I'll be planning much more on this over the summer. For today, I wanted to talk about a new initiative that I helped to launch with Peace Corps Morocco's Gender and Development (GAD) committee and shared with volunteers during the regional meeting. For the past few months, the GAD committee has been soliciting ideas from volunteers on a yearlong gender-related theme - The idea behind this was to find a gender-related issue that a large number of volunteers might be interested in and might relate to their work, and then our committee would develop resources to help teach volunteers more about that issue and give them potential projects that they could do in their communities.

The committee gathered 7 different theme ideas from volunteers across Morocco, ranging from parental relationships, to notions of beauty, to education around health or computers. Once themes were gathered, we posted them online and asked volunteers to vote on which theme they would be most interested in. The winning theme received over a hundred votes (pretty good since we only have about 250 volunteers in country) and was developed totally by youth from Ouarzazate (a city in the south of Morocco). The youth named the theme "Pssst... I Protest! Stop Sexual Harassment."

Screenshot from the GAD website, with the winning theme

What I was so pleased about is that the winning theme came from youth themselves - So it's not just an idea that Peace Corps is pushing on a community, but rather an issue that youth feel is both pressing and important. During regional meetings, the GAD committee presented a short one-sheeter to educate volunteers about the context of sexual harassment in Morocco and gave them some simple discussion questions in both English and Arabic (developed by the youth from Ouarzazate) that volunteers could use to help start one-on-one discussions in their site. Over the coming months, the GAD committee will develop a toolkit of projects related to sexual harassment that volunteers can do in their sites. 

So that's the highlight from our regional meetings. Right after the meetings ended, Justin and I headed to Casablanca to meet... MY PARENTS! More in the next post :)

The Week in Photos

Last week was spent in Mehdia (north of Rabat) for training sessions -
bundled up but still on the BEACH!!

Moroccan surfers

Can't get much good fish in our site,
so I made a beeline to the nearest restaurant -
here's today's local catch!

Justin jumped off a ledge and landed in a big pile of sand,
and I caught a funny moment on camera :)

Moroccan surf school - Mehdia is apparently
a big surfing town in Morocco

Lots of old-looking buildings that are
abandoned during the non-summer months

The ceiling in our training site - beautiful!

Sunset over the rocks and water in Mehdia

Back home from Mehdia and we celebrate Valentine's Day with pizza!
Third time I've made it and the best so far.  Recipe will be posted soon!

The day after pizza, we craved something hot as we are in the dead of winter and
no heating in the house! So it was time to break out the matzah ball soup mix,
courtesy of Mom and Dad (THANK YOU!!).

Vacation time!

Justin and I have only been teaching for a month, and now with our students' winter break comes a 2-week vacation. If the pace of life in Morocco is wrong, I don't want to be right!! 

We are happy to have the break, though - It's been an adjustment jumping into the role of a teacher. Each night, we scramble to review the lessons from that day and to adjust and create new lesson plans based on the students' progress. We are teaching 7 different kinds of classes: Beginner Adult, Beginner Kids, Beginner High Schooler (Moroccans study English in high school), High School English Exam prep (high schoolers here take a major exam at the end of their last year - like an SAT on steroids - and English is a big part of it), Intermediate, Homework Help, and Advanced Speaking. While some of those classes have similar lesson plans, we have to adjust the content and nature of the lesson for each audience, and of course, make sure we know how to say it in Moroccan Arabic! Needless to say, it's been a little nuts but our students are all very patient and respectful and we are learning just as much (if not more) than they are! 

Other than catching up on lesson plans, I'm trying to spend more time working on new recipes in the kitchen - recent successes have been falafel, tortillas, lentil chili, and cornbread (all fully from scratch!). I'm planning soon to put up a page on the blog detailing my cooking extravaganzas, so keep an eye out for that. 

And next week, we will travel to Mehdiya (northeast of Rabat, just on the coast) for a week of training with the Peace Corps - we'll be reviewing the things that we have learned in the few months in our community, and beginning to talk about future projects that we may want to implement. I'm looking forward to the chance to step back and think a bit more about my goals for the upcoming two years, and a change of scenery for a few days will be nice too!

Those are all the updates for now! Enjoy the below photos, from a recent excursion to the nearby countryside with our Moroccan friends (notice the essentials for any Moroccan picnic - tea (a lot), bread (even more), and don't forget your drums, or a device that can double as a drum). And Justin and I spent an afternoon being tourists in Rabat last week, which was a fun change!

our friends leading us into the countryside..
you can't see it, but at least 3 drums are being carried along!

Surprisingly the area was full of people. We found out that people were trying to hunt
wild boars (not to eat, just to kill). Didn't know that they had them in Morocco, and enjoyed
watching people spending the whole afternoon running back and forth after these guys.

Important Moroccan picnic items: Don't forget your tea glasses, your teapot,
your tajine pot, 10 loaves of bread, and a pound or so of sugar :)

Tajine success! Pretty impressive for cooking over a fire... beats my Girl Scout days!

Justin and I pose in the countryside

And the last important element of the Moroccan picnic is
the drum - any object that you can beat on will do!

Justin and I touring Rabat - this is the door to the Kasbah.
I love having the guy in the photo to get a sense of how big it is!

Inside the Kasbah. To me it looks like pictures I've seen of Santorini in Greece!

the water! Justin looks out in the direction of New York (we think) :)

Tiflet and bum foot update

For those who have been following updates on my Facebook page, you may already know the news of my latest adventure in Morocco; for those unaware yet, I have had the unfortunate luck of learning firsthand about the Moroccan medical system:

Yes, that is my foot. Last Wednesday - on our last day of training in Fes before leaving for Rabat the following morning - I bounded down the stairs into the breakfast area and managed to skip the very last stair and land with my left foot twisted underneath me. I heard a crack at the time and while I tried to convince myself that it was a sprain, I was pretty sure it was worse than that.

Fortunately, our medical staff was walking into the building at the same time as my little fall and they were put right to work. Within 2 hours, I was taken to a medical clinic, where x-rays indicated that I had fractured a small part of the tibia in my left leg (a bone just above the ankle), and I was immediately put into a cast and given crutches. It was a FAR quicker process than I have ever dealt with in the U.S. (and completely free), so I was pleased about that! But as you can imagine, it has caused a lot of challenges in dealing with day-to-day life (as it would in the U.S. too, but I would know a lot more about my surroundings back home).

Justin and I were taken to Rabat a day early with our medical staff and I met with a specialist there who confirmed the fracture and gave me some medicine. The following day (last Thursday), we were sworn in as official Peace Corps volunteers! We met the U.S. Ambassador to Morocco and his wife; he asked me where I was living before joining the Peace Corps and I told him Brooklyn – he looked down at my cast and said that if I’m a New Yorker I shouldn’t have any problems dealing with a broken leg :) I took that as a compliment!

Our full training group and staff at Peace Corps Headquarters in Rabat

The U.S. Ambassador to Morocco and his wife at our ceremony

We all tried to wear traditional dress; photos of me coming soon I promise!

On Friday, Justin and I left Rabat for our new home, Tiflet. We are only a 45 minute taxi ride from Rabat, so fortunately the travel was fairly easy. We met our new host family and they welcomed us into our home where we will live until the end of the year while we look for a place to live permanently. And I breathed a sigh of relief that our bedroom is on the first floor of the house!

Since then, we have been moving pretty slowly given my casted leg. Fortunately, the expectations for us between now and early next year are not too major - mainly to get to know the community and the Youth Center where we will work, to look for a place to live permanently, and to find a language tutor. Even so, it’s been really frustrating for me to not be able to fully explore my new community. I am excited to be in a new place and it’s hard to not just be able to walk around and see as much as I can. I’m trying to remind myself that we’ll be living here for 2 years and I will have plenty of time to see and learn everything.

And Justin has been a saint in the last week, amazingly patient and understanding and willing to walk slowly next to me as I hobble along in the crutches. I hope that in the coming weeks I will be able to put some more weight on my foot which will allow me to walk further, and based on the current calculations, my cast should be off by December 30th (fingers crossed!!). So I hope to enter the new year healthy and excited to fully learn about my new home. I imagine that the next month or so will be both physically and emotionally difficult for me, but like I said I’m trying to remain as positive as possible. More to come soon!

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