Life as a Sponge

No, not that kind of sponge.

It's the best metaphor I've thought of for our current position in the Peace Corps life cycle. With our Dar Chabab closed for repairs for the foreseeable future, we've entered an unglamorous phase focused on the patient work of community integration. A lot of the work of community integration is "show up, see what happens," and by your presence and participation around your neighborhood and town you gradually earn trust and build connections that allow you to contribute meaningfully to your community.  You can learn a lot from being a sponge (that you should have been studying Tashelheit instead of Darija; or that you're mispronouncing a staggering number of words, including your Moroccan name). Only for us -and I suspect for a lot of PCVs- community integration also means "show up, see what happens, understand nothing, and feel maddeningly passive and utterly useless." So a lot of what you're absorbing doesn't mean anything at all to you.

Here's an example. Since we arrived in site we've been participating in weekly meetings and activities with a local chapter of the Scouts (surprisingly, a unisex operation here in Morocco). It's an impressive group with active young leaders who seem genuinely committed and a consistent attendance of about 50 or 60 engaged kids. And I don't understand it all. Literally, I don't understand the Darija (and Tashelheit) words that are spoken. I don't understand who is in charge (and maybe they don't either, because I also don't understand the arguments the leaders get into every week). I don't understand the drills (in French this time) they make the kids do. I don't understand how they can spend so much time singing, or the way they teach the kids songs. And I sort of can't comprehend how the kids keep coming back every week when we always seem to do the same thing.

Well, except for a couple of weeks ago when the Scouts organized this big day hike. Over 100 kids came, and so did Britt and I. We met at the Dar Chabab at 7:00am. Well, between 7:00am and 8:30am. My contribution to the day was to lead English songs ("Baby Shark" and "Father Abraham") for about five minutes. That left 12 hours and 55 minutes to fill just sponging it up.

See the mountain back there? That's where we're headed.

One of our Scouts pals.

It's getting harder for you to feel sorry for me, isn't it?

I admit, it was picturesque. And incomprehensible.

One of us is making the Scout salute correctly. I won't embarrass the other person by saying whose is right.

It was a lovely day, as you can see from the pictures. It was also just an agonizingly long day, made longer by not understanding my role, or what I was there to learn. Ultimately we're choosing to have faith that life as a sponge will be meaningful; that putting ourselves through some cultural and intellectual discomfort (but not without some griping about it!) will lead to some very rich new cycles in our Peace Corps life.

Agadir, take two.

We are back in Agadir, scene of the epic, infamous Spring Camp, for a regional meeting with other volunteers in these parts of Morocco. Returning to the city and getting to see more of it besides the spring camp facilities is a real treat. We get to hang out with really cool volunteers while staying at a hotel with a fantastic view of the beach. We're soaking up a few days away from our rural site, but we will be back soon with more news and stories from our town. In the meantime, enjoy the view:

Happy Mother's Day!

Because we couldn't do it without our moms, and without all the women in our lives that have encouraged us, loved us, and made us brave.

As our friend Buster Bluth says, "Yeah.  Mom's awesome."

dar luby: home sweet home

We’ve missed you.  And we are sorry it has taken us so long to give you a little update.  Where did we leave off?

Oh yes.  Spring Camps.  Those were two long weeks, those two weeks of Spring Camp.  Instead of celebrating Pete’s 28^th birthday with a night on the town in Marrakech, we were bed-ridden with a case of Salmonella.  Luckily, we were still staying with another Peace Corps Volunteer at the time.  The three of us suffered together.  We couldn’t ask for more than working WIFI and a clean restroom, and we are grateful to have suffered in solidarity with another volunteer. 

But Pete still got to celebrate!  After returning to our home city, we were delighted to find some birthday packages that had made their way to us all the way from the USA.  Filled with peanut butter (!) and books and treats and clothes and peanut butter and surprises and kindness and peanut butter.  If you want our address, shoot us an email and we'd be more than happy to share it with you.

Birthday Boy!

Once we made it home after Spring Camps, the countdown to finding Dar Luby began.  Dar is the Darija word for house, and we needed to find a place of our own in less than 10 days.  With the help of friends and strangers, we saw about eight different apartments in our town before choosing the one that we will call home for the next two years.  House-hunting in a new country where you barely speak the language is hard.  Really, really hard.

Less hard when this is your hometown, though.

Can you believe this handsome young man is 28 years old?!

I spend my last few days with our host family baking bread, like a good Moroccan woman.

How did we find Dar Luby, just how did we do it?  The news of open apartments in Morocco spreads by word of mouth.  We asked some of our new friends if they knew of anything.  Then they would ask their friends.  We went up to hanut (small store) owners and asked if they knew of places because hanut-owners are pretty plugged into their community.  We consistently relied on the kindness of strangers to help us navigate neighborhoods and negotiate rents.  Once, after a stressful day of looking at places, one of our new friends invited us into his home for a snack.  Over soda and cakes, he and his family made us feel so welcome I wanted to stay forever.  

And now, thanks to everyone's kindness and lots of hard work, we have a home!  For the first time in three months, we are not living with a host family.  We promise to post more photos soon.  Right now, it's pretty empty. 

Pete in our new home.

I also clean like a good Moroccan woman.  Luckily, in Dar Luby, Pete helps.

Now, we are filling our days trying to fill Dar Luby.  Once again, we rely on our new friends and strangers to help us out.  Our host mother here was sad to see us move out on our own, but she isn’t done helping us.  She gave us boxes of plates and pots to use in our new place.  She also has been helping us buy things in the souk (the weekly market).  She is a tough negotiator and can usually get the price down a little bit for us.  Today, another friend we just met, a young man who takes the bus to Marrakech every day for university classes and also lives in our neighborhood, came knocking on our door.  He wanted to see if we needed help buying anything from the souk. The answer, of courses, is yes.  We always need help.  With everything.  He came along with us and helped us ask for prices of things, and he insisted on carrying our bags. 

Cooking in Dar Luby, right on a buta tank.

Reading in the courtyard at Dar Luby.  I'm actually starting to notice a gender pattern in these photos that I'm going to have to address. ha!

The highs are so high here, and the lows are so low.  I’ve heard this about Peace Corps before, and it’s strange to see my own emotions play out so drastically.  Yesterday morning, we woke up to no water in the house.  Our landlord had been working on the plumbing, and we simply didn’t know the water had been shut off.  I wanted to cry with frustration.  Having a landlord is hard enough when you DO speak the same language, so this has been a tough week as we get settled into our place--- for every step forward, it seems like we take about seven steps backwards.  But today, the young man that helped us at the souk knocked on our door again in the late afternoon.  He delivered a bottle of homemade olive oil and insisted it was a gift.  I wanted to cry with gratitude.   

 

We buy most of our groceries at the weekly souk.  Here's what this week's load looked like.

View from our new roof.  Come visit!

Highs are high: snack on the roof at sunset.

Little by little, Dar Luby will become our home.  Little by little, we will get to a point where we don’t have to rely on other people to take care of us all of the time.  Little by little, we will begin to repay the kindness that has been shown to us.

The Toughest Job You'll Ever...Something Something

"Love" might be too strong a word. I wouldn't say "love."

We survived Spring Camp in Agadir and took a bus out of town under cover of darkness while the children slept so that we could get to our next Spring Camp, an appropriately-staffed adequately-supplied day camp where the average work day is just nine hours shorter than in Agadir.

It all looked so good on paper.

I'll say this for overnight camp: it just matters so much more. When you're spending 19 hours a day with each other, a camaraderie forms. You find a couple of "Sponjboob Sceor Pintce"'s lying around and you feel a strange tightening in the muscles of of your face, lips pulled back stupidly around your teeth. Then you're on the beach and one of the little snot-nosed twerps tears you off a huge piece of his svinge, this unholy Moroccan sugared donut, and you just have to sit there eating it and staring at the ocean, while your brain tries to weasel out of your heart's pathetic Grinch-in-Whoville conversion.

Two of the campers who wormed their way into our hearts.

The kids for their part were properly Stockholm Syndrome-d by the end of the week. The last night of camp, teens thanked us with trembling voices, children wept -one girl fainted- and the campers milked their last opportunity for melodramatic hysterics during the aptly-named end-of-camp "Spectacle."

Just a hint of the ritualistic madness that was the Spectac.

Did you ever see Hearts of Darkness?

 One of the marks of Agadir I'll carry all my days.

We had a camp prom; every bit as excruciating as the genuine article.

The kids sang "Deep in the Heart of Texas" on the way to the beach and endeared themselves to us against our will.

Me with Camp Director John at the end of the Spectac, and our wits.

One of the campers interviewed me the last day of camp -for a camp newspaper, I guess, or else just for her diary- and asked for a quote. I didn't even have to think about it. "I'll never forget my time with you all at Camp Agadir."

The toughest job you'll ever simultaneously repress yet feel nostalgia for? I'll keep working on it. I bet I'll recycle that joke a thousand times before it's all said and done.

Spring Camp!

Hello from the beautiful city of Agadir. We are in the middle of Spring Camp, a week long English camp that the Ministry of Youth and Sports puts on with the Peace Corps. It's Spring Break in Morocco, and all across the country these immersion camps are going on in local youth centers. The camp we have volunteered for in Agadir is about 4 hours from our home, and it is an overnight camp. Each day looks something like this:

6:45: We wake up and quickly gather materials and draft a lesson plan for our English classes
7:30 : morning rally
8:30 : breakfast
9:00 : English class
11:00 : walk to beach and play (!)
2/2:30/3:00 : lunch/clean/"rest"
4:00: American clubs (we are teaching a health club, and other volunteers are teaching theatre, science, and journalism)
6:00: snack
6:30: Moroccan clubs (dance, art, and music)
9:00: dinner
10:00 : evening activity (these Moroccans love to perform and basically put on a talent show every night
11:30 : quick meeting with staff
12-1:00 am : bedtime

Each day is very, very full and very, very exhausting. Here are a few key things to know:

- instead if 50-60 campers, there are 90
- instead of the kids being age 13-17, they are age 8-17
- instead of this being an English immersion camp, most of the kids have actually not studied English at all, so they don't understand us
- we have very limited supplies. I spent 15 minutes digging through a plastic Baggie of crayons and broken pencils trying to find at least 10 crayon shards that were longer than half of my pinkie finger.
- meals are frequently served 1-2 hours after the scheduled time. In fact, last night the staff ended up eating dinner around 11:00pm.

I have said to Pete more than once that I think this might be the hardest week of my life. Everyone is giving as much as they can give, but it is hard, exhausting work.

But there are a few highlights:

- the kids are divided into teams, and our team of 23 kids is team Texas. They have SO much Texas pride, just like real Texans! They can sing "Deep in the heart of Texas," and last night they performed a line dance to Boot Scootin' Boogie that we taught them.
- some of the kids are so very sweet. They shake our hands after English class and share their snacks with us.
- Lastly, this drawing, which made me laugh so hard I cried (out of genuine happiness and sheet, delirious exhaustion). It was drawn by a beginning English student. More pictures and stories to come.




I'd be lying if I said these highlights made it all worthwhile, and I don't think I will ever volunteer for an overnight Spring Camp again. But we are trying to see the good where we can, and Sponjboob Sceor Pintce is good.

a different kind of holy week

“Lent has flown by this year!” I told Pete a few weeks ago once I realized how quickly Easter was approaching.  He laughed and noted that yes, in fact, Lent does fly by when you aren’t giving up anything.  We weren’t sure how to approach Lent in Morocco, which is 99% Muslim, so we simply focused on trying to adjust to our new lives.

And yet, somehow, the season of Lent found its way into our lives, especially this week, this very holy week.  On Wednesday, the US Ambassador to Morocco swore us in as official Peace Corps volunteers.  Our ten weeks of training are complete.  On Thursday, Holy Thursday, we made our way to our new home. 

Mr. Ambassador and his wife at the swearing-in ceremony.

For the next two years, we will be living in a mountain town outside of Marrakech.  By train, we (us and the other volunteers assigned to the same region of Morocco) made our way south to Marrakech.  Upon arrival, we were greeted by current volunteers who happily helped us find our luggage and the right bus.  They went above and beyond as they dragged heavy bags, negotiated with taxi drivers, and patiently helped us navigate our new community. 

volunteers!  everywhere!

As I sat on the bus from Marrakech to our new site, the sun started to set and the roads became narrower.  The bus had been crazy crowded, but now there were just a few of us waiting to get to the last stop (our town is a little over an hour south of the big city).  As the bus made tight curves, I thought it might be smart to pray to the patron saint of safe travels.  But who is that, anyway?  Forgetting, I decided to hum the Litany of Saints to myself instead.  And before I knew what was happing, I was softly singing Ubi Caritas to myself on the dark bus.  The same song I sing every Holy Thursday surrounded by people I love very much in our spiritual community.

As exhausted as I was after a long day of traveling, I knew that Moroccan food and Moroccan kindness awaited us in our new host family, and that gave me great comfort.  Instead of a Last Supper, we had our first supper with our new host family in our new community.  And it was delicious.

On Good Friday, we explored our new town.  It is beautiful.  It really is.  And though I already find myself homesick for the family we left behind near Fes, I am also incredibly excited to make our home here for the next two years.  As we hiked in the gentle mountains surrounding our town with new friends, exhausted and hungry and confused and happy, I thought that it was, indeed, a very Good Friday.  Communicating is still incredibly challenging right now, and we are muddling through with a combination of Darija, English, and French.  And yet, the word I hear the most is simply this: welcome.  

View from the bedroom window.

From the roof---so, when are you coming to visit?