So basically I have been running around Morocco for the last two months trying to get my life here in order. This most recent phase is what the Peace Corps calls "adjustment," which has been officially dubbed by volunteers everywhere as the most difficult phase of service, and I wholeheartedly agree. It has been and will continue to be really difficult.
My own particular situation has a number of difficulties. Even though there are actually other Europeans who actually live in my town, I still stand out like a sore thumb. People aren't used to seeing me yet, and where ever I go people stare at me. Often I leave my house and check one, two or three times that I am actually wearing pants, or a shirt, because I feel like I must have something horribly wrong with my appearance by the way people are looking at me. My biggest problem so far has probably been harassment. My site, and especially neighboring Ouarzazate gets a fair amount of tourists who pass through on their way to go down south for camel treks, so everyday I encounter at least one person who I have to convince that I am in fact "mashi touriste" (not a tourist) and yes, "kan arf l'arabia" (I know Arabic). When go back to my site I still often get asked what hotel I am going to, or when I am trying to get to friend's sites to go visit for the weekend I have to deal with the taxi drivers who jest at me by saying that the village I am going to is "mashi bahel Marrakech" (not the same as Marrakech) because they wonder why the hell I'd be going there. Also, since my site isn't small I've been getting a lot of attention from men, that isn't really culturally appropriate in Morocco, and is pretty much absent from smaller sites. I can't walk down my main street without a number of men ranging from age 14-50 trying to talk to me in English, French, Spanish and Italian. I've also gotten a few invitations from drunken men to go "see their apartments" which is basically an invitation for sex and is one hundred percent "shuma" (shameful) in Moroccan culture. However, since my site is big, and not everyone knows about the actions of others all the time, like in small sites, men in my community can get away with it. What's particularly frustrating is when this happens in the middle of times when I am trying to form relationships with members of my community like store owners and vegetable vendors and I end up just getting angry and embarrassed about the situation.
The other most frustrating thing has probably been the language. I’ve been dealing with a number of problems with my apartment that have been next to impossible for me to express in or understand the response to in Arabic. So normal things like officially registering my electricity meter in my name with the city electricity office or getting my leaky pipes fixed are a several hour-long activity in which a lot is lost in communication and I usually leave more than slightly confused about what exactly is going on or what I am suppose to be doing. For example, the night before I needed to leave for Rabat (where I am currently) I discovered that the pipe going into my water heater was leaking and since I was going away for the better half of this week I knew I needed to get it fixed before I left. But alas, I had no idea how to say leek, and I knew that all I really needed was a wrench to tighten a bolt where the water was leaking but I didn’t know how to say that either. I tried looking both up in the giant Georgetown dictionary that Peace Corps gave us, but neither words were in it. So I sat around for about an hour trying to figure out a way to tell someone about my problem, it was also at night so I knew that the chances of me finding someone to fix things was pretty slim. So I ended up going to my local tool shop with a picture of a wrench that I drew and told the guy that there was a “muskil” (problem) with my water heater and then used hand gestures to communicate that there was water dripping. He ended up coming back to my apartment and fixing it for me without a problem, so it ended well. But things like these seem to happen on a daily basis; you think you’ve finally got some things figured out but then something comes up out of no where and you’re like wtf how am I ever going to be able to communicate this and you walk into the situation knowing that you will most definitely embarrass yourself and you probably wont understand a lot of what’s going on. Welcome to the next two years of my life.
Language is often complicated by the fact that in addition to Arabic most rural or small town Moroccans speak one of the many Berber dialects, a regional variant on Tamazight or Tashleheit. So people are always like “nte kat arf l’arabia… u wesh kat arf Shilha?” (you know Arabic but do you know Shilha/Berber) and unfortunately have to respond with no I do not, and say I’ll learn later, after I master Arabic. This is even further complicated by the fact that a lot of my new PCV friends (Heath and Small Business Development volunteers in my area) do speak Shilha, so often Moroccans ask me why don’t you speak it, your friend does? Its also hard because were living in the same country but speak different languages, so we’ll be at a post office or restaurant and I will be speaking Darija and they will be speaking Shilha and whoever were speaking to will respond in a mix of both and we (the PCV’s) don’t understand what each other are saying.
On the positive note, work is going well, and unlike some of my other fellow volunteers I actually have work to do right away. There is a strong demand for English tutoring/teaching in my site and I have the solid structure of the Dar Chabab to work in so it’s really easy to start working on that right away. Volunteers in my sector are lucky because we do have work right away to keep us busy when most of the other sectors, especially those who get put in Berber communities where people cant speak Arabic let alone English, usually have to wait 6 months to a year before they can start working. So, I’ve been doing a lot of English tutoring with the Baccalaureate high school students, I’ve been helping out at the maternal clinic in my site, and I’ve been easing my way into the women’s association and a literacy group that meets at my Dar Chabab. I really don’t want to spend my whole time here teaching English but until my language is better it’s the easiest thing to start doing right away.
Another good thing is that no matter who I talk to, from my Peace Corps best friends to other people in my stage, even the guy who did best on our initial language exams, everyone is having a difficult time. You ask people how things are going and the first words that come up are difficult, challenging and frustrating. All of our experiences have been really different but they all involve their own problems. In comparison to my situation I have friends who are girls in small sites and don’t get any harassment at all but they also don’t have work because the moudir of their Dar Chabab is missing. In contrast to my somewhat lack of community in my big site, other’s have too much community in their sites and everyone constantly knows what they are doing and the volunteers are having to work on their diplomacy by rotating houses at which they eat dinner at so they don’t offend anyone in the community by leaving them out. I can leave site for a weekend or week and maybe my host family or work counterparts will know but not the entire community. Others have to deal with defining their role as volunteer money wise. I have a few friends who are constantly telling me about problems they are dealing with that involve members of their community, their host families or their work counterparts constantly asking them for money, or asking Peace Corps for more money. Again and again we have to tell people that we are volunteers and that our jobs are not to just give people in our sites money or pay for supplies or projects. Others, including myself are also dealing with the challenge of replacing a volunteer, trying to communicate that the work we want to do may be different from the past volunteer, or in some of my friends cases that we are here to do work and help facilitate projects not to just sit around for two years, which unfortunately it seems like a lot of volunteers ended up doing.
This has also been the period for community assessment, which is a time of observation and analysis about our community and the needs and wants of the people we will be living and working with. I am suppose to have a long and detailed report of everything from my site’s history, to gender issues, to the major health problems, education statistic etc. I haven’t really started my report and have only been doing basic observation of my community. I plan on diving into this assignment when I get back and finding specific community members that I can talk to about these topics when I get back. This is also going to require long tutoring session in which I can get all of my questions translated into Arabic. Much like final papers I had to write in college, I am kind of avoiding getting started and also dreading the task but alas it will help me figure out a lot more about my community and help me build the much needed “relationships” that I need to successfully do work in my community.
Peace Corps says, and I admit this is extremely corny; that it is the toughest job you’ll ever love. I don’t know if I love it yet but it’s definitely the toughest job I’ve ever had. However, even though it’s only been a short 4 months out of the long 27 month stint that I am suppose to be doing this for, I am definitely in no way ready to end this experience. The main reason why this question is even on the table for contemplation right now is that for the last week or so Morocco has been hosting about 100 PCV’s that were just evacuated from Niger because of the recent kidnappings. Some had been there for a year, some for six months and some had only been in their final sites for a week or so. A lot of them are going home, for good, some are going to try and reenroll for a later date and some are opting for immediate transfers, a lot are going to Cameroon or Rwanda (I’m super jealous, every day I still whish I had gotten placed in Sub Saharan Africa). So based on the situation of these other volunteers some friends and I have asked ourselves, if there was some conflict in Morocco and we all got evacuated tomorrow what would we do? Despite all of the challenges of Peace Corps I am definitely not ready to go back yet, I have yet to accomplish a lot of the personal goals I set out to achieve by leaving, plus I’ve already invested too much time and effort in the whole challenge that is being a Peace Corps volunteer.
All of this contemplation on challenges was further analyzed over the past day or so that I’ve been in Rabat. During my time here I paid a visit to the Peace Corps Morocco headquarters and got to talk to not only my Moroccan staff but also a lot of the American staff, a lot of who served as Peace Corps volunteers (Zaire (DRC) and Togo) and have worked in various Peace Corps countries (Botswana, Malawi etc). Even though they may have served 20 or 30 years ago, they expressed that they had had the same feelings of frustration and the same challenges, and also were able to offer a perspective of the different challenges that arise from different regions and cultures across Africa. The adjustment phase is incredibly universal and I don’t think its easy for everyone, but even though it feels like I arrived yesterday and still know nothing about what I have gotten myself into, I’ve been here for 4 months already, and by March I’ll have been here half a year, so In’shallah it’ll just keep getting easier as time progresses.
Btw my mini vacation to Rabat via Marrakech has been great. I’m going through somewhat of a culture shock within Morocco. So many girls are unveiled here, there is highlighted hair, makeup, skinny jeans and heals. Also, a fair amount of public display of affection, adds for iphones and a lot of people speak English. This is not the Morocco I’m use to, its crazy how much the cities contrast to the smaller towns, and especially the countryside. When other PCV’s come to my site they call it “being in civilization”, but even my site feels like a completely different world compared to the big cities. All of a sudden I feel self-conscious about the fact that I haven’t showered in a few days and I’m wearing countryside appropriate clothes and not the latest fashions from Europe. But its not just me who is suddenly out of place, the older Moroccan women who are veiled and wearing jallabs on the train or walking around Rabat with their modern looking children look just as out of place, its like they are holding on to their traditions from the countryside that don’t really have any place in the modern cosmopolitans like Rabat. Its nuts, because being that I am a PCV working in the “bled” (countryside) its exactly that old time traditional that I’ve been trying to adapt to. Its like you spend so much effort trying to fit in at your site and then as soon as you go into a city you stand out again, but not for being a foreigner, but for looking somewhat like a country bumpkin
Everyday I feel like I am “wllf” (accustomed) to something and then all of a sudden there’s something entirely new to wllf to that I never could have imagined even existed.
