Wednesday, December 15, 2010

And so my life begins

So I’ve been in Morocco for three months now. Some things have become familiar, some Darija has become second nature and my cultural integration is progressing. However, everyday there are new unfamiliarity’s and new challenges. Nothing has quite yet become routine and I have learned that I can’t expect anything out of one particular day. My days are filled with highs and lows successes and challenges. Within five minutes I can go from feeling confident and assured about what I am doing here to feeling completely defeated and lost and wondering how I am gong to survive the next two years (23 months). Everything continues to be a whirlwind as I get accustomed to my new site and I am exhausted all the time.

Since I have arrived I have been immensely busy, hence the reason I haven’t posted in a while. In the last three weeks I’ve had to do a ton of stuff such as:

1) Get my Carte de Sejour (legal residency in Morocco) which over the course of a couple days required, 30 photocopies, 12 pictures, 30Dhs worth of notarization and an hour-long visit with the Chief of Police while he filled out my form. After receiving my receipt I became an official legal resident of the Kingdom of Morocco and cant be deported for staying past the 3-month visa that I was issued upon entering the country.

2) Visiting my local officials. When I first got here, I was avoiding doing this until on about my third or fourth day a man showed up at my host family’s house demanding a photocopy of my passport and my Carte de Sejour saying that he was from the government office. So I decided I needed to get on that asap. The next day I visited my Belidia (gov office) to go introduce myself to the government people. It took me about 10 minutes to communicate that I was not there to get something notarized and instead that I was the new Peace Corps volunteer working at the Dar Chabab. After this was finally understood I was told that they at the office were happy to meet me but that I was in the wrong place and needed to go to the Quaied’s (kind of like the city Mayor) office, which was 2 km outside of town. Luckily, they told me to return the next morning so that someone could drive me there and introduce me to the Quaied. The next day everything was taken care of, I successfully introduced myself to everyone considered important and they had the copies of all the various documentation forms that they needed. Thank god there have already been Peace Corps volunteers in my site otherwise I would have had to explain to them what I was doing there and what the Peace Corps was. Also, my knowledge of the French language helped a lot with this whole process.

3) Find Work. The three major places that I have decided to split my work between for now are the Dar Chabab, Netti Newsi and a women’s health clinic that’s in my site. I hope to expand later to maybe include some environment or agricultural activities. Beginning work at the Dar Chabab and the Netti has basically involved me going to these places and introducing myself in broken Darija to the Moudirs of the establishments and them telling me what they do and asking me when I would like to start teaching English. So far I have only been tutoring a fairly decent sized group of seniors in high school and helping them prepare for their Baccalaureate test. This has proved to be extremely challenging since my formal knowledge of English grammar is pretty nonexistent and thus it is hard to explain things like the passive vice and future progressive. This group has been meeting twice a week since my first week in site and with every meeting there are more and more students who show up from different levels of English asking when my other classes will start. Next week is my Moudir is going to formally introduce me as the new volunteer and I plan on making an official schedule which includes beginning, intermediate, and advanced English as well as Bac. I really don’t want to just be teaching English for the next two years but it’s in high demand, so I plan to start with that first, then do other stuff like health and environment sessions and maybe an art club. As far as the Netti, I’ve basically been too intimidated to go back to since I first went because my Darija isn’t very good yet, and most of the women there speak Shilha (Berber) anyway. But thanks to my grandma I now have knitting needles and yarn so I have something to bond when the women about and I plan to go back soon. And lastly the woman’s clinic… the former PCV here told me about the clinic, and one morning I asked my mom to help me go find it, after about a 30 minute walk and asking a dozen people we finally found it. The clinic has been around for about 50 years, is run by mostly women from the UK and serves the local women of Tejda village, which is part of my site. The clinic does pre-natal care on Wednesdays and post-natal care on Fridays. I have decided to go on Fridays and help out wit baby weighing. Last Friday was my first day and in addition to weighing about 20 adorable newborns, I also learned how to treat a severe burn and that hanush, a darja word I already knew meant snakes, also means worms (the kind you can get in your stomach…)

4) Find an apartment… Finding an apartment in my site has been the most wild goose chase my short life has ever been on. Even though I am replacing a volunteer, I still need to find an apartment because she was paying 300Dh more a month then was given for rent by the Peace Corps. Thus, I need to find something cheaper. The hunt has basically included me walking around with various members of my community like my host mom, my new friends a British woman and her Moroccan husband who own a hotel in my site, a random girl who I started talking to one day in the library who is now probably my best friend in site and has basically made it her duty to help me find an apt, and going up to random people and shop owners and asking them if they know of any apartments for rent. Then being directed to go to another place, find another person, ask them about the apartment, find the key to the apartment, find the owner and get a tour of the apartment, many of these steps have included coming back at a different time or on a different day. I have looked at about 10 apts, or semi apartments so far which include two hotel rooms that were trying to be passed off as apartments which were priced at 3,000Dh a month (I was given 700 for rent), a mud house, and a woman’s first floor living room and bathroom which she tried to convince me was an apartment. Most of the apartments have been too expensive and the ones that meet my price range have been run down and dirty and thus would require a lot of time and money to fix up to a point where I would feel comfortable living in. HOWEVER, I have fond one jem, a beautiful modern second floor apt, that is decked out with tiled walls, a kitchen with built-in cabinet space and counters, molded ceilings, a private roof, separate toilet and shower, salon and bed room. The building is also very conveniently located near the Dar Chabab, library, market, hammam and taxi stand. I want it! The girl who was two volunteers before me use to live in the building so the landlord likes/trusts Americans and knows the Peace Corps, thus the rent has not be subjected to price gouging, even though it’s the nicest place that I’ve looked as so far. Trouble is that he landlord lives in Marrakech and it took me about a week to track down someone who had his phone number and could call to inquire about the place. The key for the apartment was supposed to arrive last Monday but didn’t and now is supposed to be coming next Monday, insh’allah it does and I can stake my claim on the apartment.

5) Throughout all of this I have been becoming familiarized with my site, which encompasses about three major douars (village/town/neighborhood) and is a couple miles long from one end to another. My numerous missions to find things, people and places has given my quite the tour of my site and little by little people are familiarizing themselves with my presence in site while I am familiarizing myself with everything.

6) Last step has been staying sane, dealing with culture shock and coping with missing my Peace Corps friends. The move to final site has by far been the biggest culture shock I’ve been trough. I finally had to start doing things on my own and was left schedule free with a few memories and phone numbers from site visit that were suppose to help inform me about what was what. The first week was really hard, I didn’t want to leave my host families house because I felt like I had lost my ability to speak Darija and I didn’t know where anything was or know anyone. But each week things continue to become tremendously easier. Each day I feel like there are small and sometime large gains. When I go outside I see people I recognize, the taxi drivers have stopped asking me which hotel I am going to, I remember where things are and have favorite places. I am taking care of things that I need to be done; I am getting thrown into work, hopefully will have an apartment and am making friends. The calls to (and from) other PCV’s expressing anxiety and desperation are growing fewer and far between.

All in all I am being rapidly acclimated whether I like it or not and am falling in love with my new home.