How To Go On A Date

A step-by-step guide for a single Moroccan gal in her twenties.

 1. Acquire boyfriend. This could be someone you meet at school or work, or maybe the brother of a close friend.

2. Get their digits. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Begin to text each other constantly. Do not feel afraid to express your love soon, and often. Exchange furtive conversations when your parents aren’t around, but keep them short because cell phone recharge is expensive. And make sure not to label his number, so his identity is hidden in case someone borrows your phone or gets suspicious.

3. Arrange the time and place of the date. Make sure you have cross-referenced your family’s social calendar (see step #5) and enlisted the help of a cousin and your awkward foreigner host sister to tag along as chaperones. The location for the date will be where all dates are, obviously: food court of supermarket mall in nearby city.

4. On the appointed day, get dolled up in skinny jeans and a shirt that might suggest at cleavage. Take a lot of time straightening your hair and applying your makeup. Pay special attention to achieving those dark, thick eyebrows you see on TV.

5. Catch a bus into the city with aforementioned chaperones, your mother, and a few other village women, in order to attend a wedding.

6. Put your mother in a taxi and tell her you are going to the mall with your friends and will show up at the wedding later.

7. Go to mall. Browse stores that sell clothing you will most likely never be able to afford.

8. Begin frantically texting date to ascertain that he IS, in fact, on his way. He is traveling an insanely long way for this date. Like, hours and hours on a bus. So it’s important to check in about his new status every few minutes.

9. Visit bathroom. Remove makeup and re-apply.

10. Sit nervously in food court.

11. Your date shows up with his brother. Congratulations! Your date has begun!

12. Although you text each other a gajillion times a day, and you haven’t seen each other in four months, you and your date have very little to say to each other. You, your date, your date’s brother, your cousin, and your awkward foreigner host sister sit in near silence in the food court.

13. Eventually, some conversation strikes up, and you adopt a nagging, scolding tone with your date, probably emulating the way most male-female interactions appear to you.

14. After 25 minutes, remind everyone that you do have to be on the way to that wedding, but suggest the group stays together while you all try to find a cab. Then while you’re all walking through the dark streets “looking” for a taxi, you can get a little hand-holding action in. Genius move.

15. As you walk, it becomes apparent that this was a double date all along, and brother pairs off with cousin. Awkward foreigner host sister is awkward.

16. 45 minutes after the date began, you, cousin, and host sister bundle yourselves into a taxi. The date is over.

17. Once you arrive at the wedding, spend the next two and a half hours in the corner with cousin and host sister, dealing with the fallout from the date. (Don’t worry, the food will not be served for another few hours after that.) Reassure your date that you do, in fact, love him, despite any behavior to the contrary. Accept his poetic re-affirmations of love in response. Spend a long time discussing possible merits of brother with cousin. Numbers are exchanged. Cousin and brother begin texting each other. They will fall in love soon.

 

Why I Don’t Believe In Organizing Trash Pickups

Okay, okay, I do. I do believe in picking up trash. But I want to talk about why I am, by and large, opposed to trash pickups when it comes to youth development programming, and how I believe they can be done better.

I’ve organized a LOT of trash pickups. Working in community development in New Orleans, we were often besieged by volunteer groups looking for a project in a poor neighborhood. Often it’s more work than it’s worth to coordinate volunteer projects for large groups, particularly out-of-towners, so setting them to clear up trash from a few empty lots was an easy enough task that would keep them out of our hair.

I managed to stumble onto my first trash pickup in Morocco after only a few weeks in my site. For a combined Earth Day/Global Youth Service Day program, my counterparts and I organized a trash cleanup session for elementary and middle school aged youth.

Here’s how I wrote about it for Peace Corps:

As one of the events for our Earth Day/Global Youth Day of Service, the leadership of the youth center and the boarding houses organized a trash pickup in the area next to the middle school and the boarding houses. About sixty children came out and picked up trash, resulting in several large trash bags. That afternoon, there was a Powerpoint lecture at the Dar Chebab led by a teacher from the middle school. Everyone had a good time and the Moroccan counterparts felt the event was a great success.

And I would have included pictures like this one:

Here’s how I DIDN’T write about it for Peace Corps:

The event was attended by a random assortment of students who were either yanked out of their classes by adults, or happened to have a free period at the time. The trash pickup was hugely ineffectual as we were picking up litter in an area strewn with trash, and it would have taken a monumental movement to make even a small dent in the aesthetic appearance of the site, let alone create an environmental difference. All this was conducted next to a HUGE trash pit filled with trash. Children were not provided with gloves, and much of the trash was unsanitary-looking – and, of course, there is no soap available for washing hands in the schools, the boarding houses, or in their homes. The large trash bags that were quickly filled were left on the site after everyone posed with them for several group pictures. It is unknown to me how they were eventually disposed of, but they were not there a few days later. (Hopefully they were not just rolled into the pit.) The lecture that followed that afternoon was about smoking and completely unrelated to anything resembling environmentalism or trash habits. Everyone had a good time and the Moroccan counterparts felt the event was a great success.

Clearly, there was way more trash than we were equipped to pick up.

Remember the giant trash pit?

I think, for youth and community development practitioners, organizing trash pickups is lazy. It’s a cop-out. It’s easily organized (if you’re not doing it right, that is), it requires minimal planning or materials, the idea is sexy, the photos are brochure-ready, the numbers shine on a grant. And for western eyes with a western conception of garbage and litter, an area with trash is so demonstrably aesthetically improved once the trash is removed that it’s easy to say: well, even if it wasn’t sustainable, at least it will be a little better for a little bit of time.

And remember, I say all this as someone who has organized way more than my fair share of trash pickups. No one needs to hear this message more than I do.

 Here are Leah’s recommendations for how trash pickups should be done:

1. They must be sustainable. Are there going to be places that youth and community members can deposit their trash from now on, instead of continuing to toss it on the ground? Who will empty the newly installed trash cans? Where should they be installed? Where will the trash deposited into them (hopefully) be brought?

2. They must be accompanied by education. Community members will not alter their trash habits without significant education about why it is beneficial or preferable for them to do so.

3. The trash pickup must happen in an area where an actual impact can be made, and maintained – perhaps an area where youth are responsible for most of the trash, and not a vast pit where mothers put their trash because they have nowhere else to put it.

4. They must be done in an organized manner. Think team captains, quadrants, etc.

5. They must be done safely – with gloves, washing stations with soap, and so on.

6. The trash collected must be well disposed of, and this should also be a learning experience. Where trash goes and where this particular trash will go should be an integral part of the educational element.

7. They must teach work ethic. No picking up trash for 20 minutes, and then 10 minutes spent taking pictures.

8. The space where the trash has been picked must be USED afterwards. Is it just going to remain unused space? Then why bother? Consider sports area, park, activity space, etc.

9. Alternatively, the space picked should be a place where trash is actively creating a health or environmental crisis, and education can be used to show how the trash pickup is creating a positive effect on the ecosystem. Is it demonstrated that this trash is affecting a water supply? Is it demonstrated that animals are eating this trash and dying?

10.  And, as with every single goddamn thing we as development practitioners do, it MUST be resident driven.

I struggle with all this a lot, but I’ve learned a little about trash in my time spent living abroad, and about my own conception of it. I had the hardest time in India, where the trash situation is even worse than it is in Morocco. If I was standing in the road outside my school building in India and eating a candy bar, I would save the wrapper until I got back inside and could deposit it into a trash bin. And then I would watch that trash bin get emptied out onto the curb right where I had just been standing. I really should have just let that candy bar wrapper drop right where I had eaten it. I would have been saving myself time and energy perpetuating my Western conditioning, which was completely untenable in that environment.

That conditioning was so strong, however, that I just couldn’t bring myself to so blatantly litter – and so I continued to let Indians do it for me. Looking back, I feel my behavior was fairly disgusting. There I was, insistent on carrying out a fairly meaningless ritual just to make myself feel better, and letting Indians (who were employed by my school, and therefore working for me) do the literal dirty work while I sat on my righteous American pedestal as a non-litterer. Oh, pat me on the back and give me a banana. (I’ll admit that by month four I had gotten over this and was able to litter, a little, though I could never get over the guilt of letting something just drop from my fingers into the street.)

Some of my classmates in India felt that the Indian relationship to trash was actually more honest. Whereas Americans had found a way to sanitize the experience of trash, to hide the reality of our consumptive and materialistic natures away in covered landfills (where only poor people would have to see it), Indians were confronted by their trash every day. They were living with it. Who’s to say which approach was better?

Well, I’m not ready to go that far yet, but I am comfortable saying that conceptions of trash radically differ in the world.

Working with youth in Morocco, the best way I’ve found to connect littering to hurting the environment is to connect it to nationalism and national identity. You know, when you trash you are hurting your country/your mother land, don’t you love your country, why are you hurting it, etc. It’s effective for getting a group of youth rallied up and (hopefully) receptive to your message, but I’m uneasy about the implications of using nationalistic rhetoric in this way. Ideally, one would cultivate the idea of “environmentalism” first and then discuss trash. And if you’re working with youth and you are able to invest the time and resources to communicate – and, ideally, instill – environmentalism, then might there not be better things to rally around? Clean water access, say? Less pollution? Green alternatives? Might trash on the streets, which strikes westerners as so palpably and perceptibly awful when they step into developing countries, actually not be the most pressing issue facing the global south?

Trashy Mysteries in Morocco

Nope, I’m not over here in Morocco catching up on the oeuvres of John Grisham and James Patterson. Instead, I’m up to my ears in literal trash! How this happened is not a mystery to me, but what I should do about it is.

Living in a new culture, I am frequently stumped by many of the banal, routine tasks associated with adult life, due to my complete ignorance and lack of exposure to the culturally appropriate method. Usually this results in some awkward conversations or me making a fool of myself, but never has the dilemma been so onerous (dare I say odorous?) as the mystery of what I should be doing with my trash.

What do the Moroccans do? As a proper Peace Corps Volunteer, this was obviously my first question. My host family feeds some of their organic waste to their animals, and tosses the rest into a giant trash pit across the street. This pit is right next to the mosque, so anyone entering in through the main door (the women’s entrance is around back – hello, Leah’s undergraduate thesis!) cannot escape the strong whiff of garbage, not to mention the unsightly mounds of waste.  Goats and chickens are often hanging out in the pit, ingesting goodness knows how much plastic (animals that we eat later on, mind). Occasionally, trash gets out of the pit, and we find used diapers or other refuse strewn about the mosque pathway.

When I asked my host family what I should do about my trash, they thought about it, and then remembered that is another giant trash pit near my new house. “You can put your trash in there,” they comfortably reassured me.

I was not reassured.

Unfortunately, one of the first projects I helped organize in my community involved a trash pickup with youth – you guessed it, right in the environs of the giant garbage pit. Since the pit is visible most times of day from the youth boarding schools, I felt that if I dumped anything in it (and was spotted) it would be a hugely hypocritical action. I’m doing my best to be a role model here!

Trash pit visible in background on the left.

Talking about trash is shameful in Moroccan culture, but the trash in my apartment was piling up, and eventually I got up the nerve to ask my supervisor what I should do with it. “A man comes every Monday and Friday,” he said. “Ten dirhams a month. Nine o’clock.”

I was elated. I had discovered an actual system for disposing of trash! And I could pay a local in the process!

The next Friday came. I got up super early and waited by my window for half the day so I could spot the garbage man coming and pay him.

No garbage man came.

Undeterred, I resolved to try again the following Monday. Outtakes from my interview with Johanna Boyle are mostly me saying “Wait a second – I think I hear something –” and then dashing to the window to scan the street below for the garbage collector. One time I even thought it was him and went running outside with my trash bags – only to discover it was the oil-dispenser-and-bread-scraps-collector. Yep, there’s a guy for that. (A guy who was confronted that morning by a wild-eyed foreigner, dressed in a Moroccan nightie and clutching about eight bulging plastic bags, running toward him and babbling about trash. …It can’t be helped.)

But later that day, I noticed that my neighbors had set plastic bags out by their doors. Ah, maybe the trash man had not come yet! I brought a large bag down, placed it outside my door, and left to run an errand, hoping for the best.

When I came back, my trash was gone! Hallelujah! The trash man cameth! Except…all my neighbors’ trash was still outside. Hmm. Who had taken my bag then?

The next trash collection day, I tried to see if the magic trick would work again. I placed my plastic bag outside the afternoon before, as I was on my way out to spend the night at a friend’s house. When I came back the next afternoon, not only was the bag still there, but it had been torn apart by animals and there were remnants of my garbage littered about the ground in front of my house.  Yuck.

Well, clearly this elusive trash pickup man could not be relied upon. I would have to resort to…the Pit.

Since I was still petrified of being seen actually bringing my trash to said pit, I started sneaking out of the house at 5 am or under cover of darkness (dodging the street dogs that become lively at night), dressed as Moroccan as possible to decrease the chances that I would be recognized.

You probably would think that I was going overboard, but before long all my fears were confirmed. One day, I foolishly thought I could chance taking my trash out to the pit in the middle of the afternoon. Unfortunately I was immediately spotted, and to my horror of horrors, a man started hurrying toward me and gesticulating wildly. I went to meet him, and he seemed to be telling me not to do what I was doing.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I asked him. “Someone told me that a man would come Monday and Friday to collect trash, but he didn’t come today, and I have this garbage. What am I supposed to do?” Although I was exasperated and embarrassed, I secretly hoped that perhaps this man would be the answer to my conundrum. Maybe he was about to be forthcoming with new information about a better alternative than the Pit! But instead the man surveyed me thoughtfully, seemed to understand my predicament, and gave me the go ahead.

In the end, it’s just a big, stinking mystery to me. I’m not sure why I shouldn’t – or should – be using the Pit, although I do know that I don’t want youth to see me using it. I don’t understand how the trash collector system works, and I don’t know how to find the man in order to pay him. It’s unknown to me why occasionally my trash bag disappears but my neighbors’ bags stay. So until I get more answers, I’ll continue sneaking off to the Pit every so often under cover of half-light, clutching my trash bags, heart beating overtime at my oh-so-cunning stealth.

PCV POV #1 – Meet Johanna!

It goes without saying that many of the Peace Corps Volunteers I’ve gotten to know here in Morocco are some of the dang darndest most awesome people I’ve ever met. I thought I would use my sophisticated audio equipment amazing editing skills oodles of free time to introduce some of them to you! 

On a recent visit to my duar, I got the chance to catch up with Johanna Boyle. We talked about Peace Corps expectations, her time chillin’ with Barack Obama, the camel herds found in Taroudant, and a lot more. Enjoy!

To follow along with Johanna’s journey, check out  her fantastic blog here.

Johanna enjoys her last meal stateside.

Johanna and her sitemate Liz (rocking henna and djellabas!) point out Taroudant on the map.

How I Became Illegal

Well everyone, I’ve hit upon the one universal element of the human experience. Is it creativity and artistry? The importance of family? Religious devotion?

Nope! It’s bureaucracy.

That’s right! Wherever you live, small town or capital city, nation-state or territorial protectorate, you will have to jump through a lot of hoops. (Remember my fun times at the DMV?)

Those hoops are especially onerous for those who cross borders. The quest for citizenship aside, overstaying a tourist visa becomes a bureaucratic crisis in every place I’ve ever been. I distinctly remember numerous visits to the local police in India, making friends with migrant workers and staring at teetering stacks of hundreds of dusty ledgers, waiting to be told what document I had failed to procure this time.

Morocco, of course, is no exception. Foreign residents in Morocco must apply for a “Carte de Séjour” (residency card) from their local police or gendarmeries.

When Peace Corps sent my group of 95 volunteers off to our respective towns, we had only a week and a half left on our entry visas. This meant we had to scramble to get Carte de Séjours, and fast. Helpfully, Peace Corps gave each of us a large folder filled with a number of documents: work attestations, medical certificates, homestay verifications, host country statements of support, etc. The looming deadline of visa expiration proved a sheer impossibility to meet, given that we also had to wait for the national government to issue us security clearances – but only AFTER we had visited our local government for one form or another.

On top of this, most gendarmes didn’t seem quite sure what was going on. Some gendarmes wanted their volunteers to give them thirty copies and five pictures; others just wanted the originals; mine wanted three copies of everything and eight pictures. (Not long after they changed their minds: ten pics.) Why are the requirements so different on a town-to-town basis? We’ll never know…but I suspect that most everyone was making up the rules as they went along. Almost every time I visited my gendarmes, I learned about something new I was expected to provide: a new attestation, a certificate of residency, a copy of my lease agreement.

I shouldn’t neglect to mention that the Moroccan government has a serious thing for stamps. I’ve never gotten so many documents notarized in my ENTIRE LIFE as I did in the month that I applied for my Carte de Séjour. Even once I had all my paperwork in hand, I had to get numerous photocopies of each piece, and then get all the photocopies notarized.

As you know, I live in a village. The gendarmes and a photocopy machine are a bus ride away, but my local government offices are close by. So in the course of a single day I would take the bus to the gendarmes, then ride back to the government offices to pick up the paperwork I needed, go back into town to get them photocopied, go back to the offices to get them notarized, and then BACK to my gendarmes to hand everything in.

All this would be exhausting enough, but navigating even simple day-to-day tasks in a foreign language requires a lot of mental concentration. Trying to fulfill the requirements of my Carte de Séjour wiped me out on a regular basis! And this must have paled in comparison to the stress that our Safety and Security team was going through in Rabat, scrambling to get 95 security clearances and repeatedly explaining the requirements to befuddled local authorities who had never dealt with foreigners before.

I have now been illegal in Morocco for about two months, and I’m still waiting for that illusive Carte to become mine.

Luckily, I never lost sight of the absurdity and hilarity of the entire debacle. While bureaucracy might be tedious, I always find it a funny and even poignant expression of a distinctly human relationship to rules and order.  I thought that bringing a little levity to this exasperating shared experience might be a great idea, so I decided to try my hand at songwriting for the first time ever. (Unless I count the folk song I co-wrote for History of the 60s in 12^th grade…which I tend not to.) After the lyrics were hammered out I roped in the musical talents of Pete and Britt Luby (check out their insightful and beautifully written blog), and the Ballad of the Carte de Séjour was born! Video of our performance after the jump.

One last thing: I don’t want to write about this topic without bringing up the sheer privilege it is to have legal residency assured. I think it’s safe to say that most international development and aid workers do not have to worry about deportation – a fear that overshadows the lives of millions of productive and law-abiding United States residents, and tens of millions of refugees worldwide.  As glib as this blog post’s title is, I am under no illusions that as a citizen of a world superpower working with an established international organization, my illegal status is an amusing annoyance at worst.

And finally, The Ballad of the Carte de Séjour:

New Time, or Old Time? The Wackiest Daylight Savings Time Ever

Last Sunday I slept in. By accident.

Accustomed to a world in which cell phones automatically change to accommodate daylight savings time, I slept blissfully through the 2 am Morocco Daylight Savings Time switch, in which time advanced an hour – but my cell phone alarm clock did not.

But mashi mushkil (no problem), right? I was a little late to the Dar Chebab (youth center) that morning, but so was everyone else probably – Moroccan sense of time is different than the regimented one Americans cultivate. At least, so every guide book and culture guide has told me.

The week before, I had discussed starting English classes with some high school boys in my village. “Thursday at 5:30 is good,” they told me. “Most of us will be done with our classes and we will come then.”

Great! Thursday at 5:30! I have a day! A time! A place (the Dar Chebab)! Interested students! Mashi mushkil!

Then, on that fateful Sunday of Daylight Savings Time, I talked over my plan with some high school girls.

“The boys I talked to said Thursday at 5:30 would be good. Does that sound good to you?”

The girls conferred. One of them said, “Yes, but that was old time. This is new time. So now it would be 6:30.” The others all nodded.

I was a little nonplused. Was the high school not observing Daylight Savings Time? No, of course it was, the girls assured me. Everyone was using “new time” now.

“Well, then it would still be 5:30. That makes no difference. There’s just more sun in the sky.”

“No, no silly!” they corrected me, laughing. “You spoke with them last week. They said 5:30. But NOW it is 6:30! New time, not old time!”

I decided it was easiest to give in. “Okay, I’ll do classes at 6:30 then.” In my head, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to show up for my class at 5:30, just in case any students were confused by the word-of-mouth memo.

“Meryem, when you say 6:30, do you mean new time, or old time?”

Oy.

Then I went home. Dinner was, to be expected, very late; instead of the usual 9:45, it was at 10:45 (in new time, of course).

However, I noticed that the clock on the wall still read 9:45, which: of course! Whenever Daylight Savings Time happens in the states, it can take me weeks to get around to changing all the clocks. I totally understand.

As dinner was winding down, I stifled a yawn and idly commented, “Oh I’m so tired! It’s so late!”

Everyone in the room looked at me blankly. “Well, it’s late!” I pointed at the clock. Everyone looked. “I mean, that clock isn’t right. In new time, it’s an hour later.”

“Oh, new time? We don’t bother with that,” my host mother said. “We stay with old time.”

OY.

So that’s why all this confusion! To be fair, Daylight Savings Time has only been around in Morocco since 2008, so I can easily see why many people would simply poo-poo the practice. Everything I’ve tried to plan this week has involved a confusing “new time, or old time?” conversation, until I inevitably lose track of what time it is, and what time it should be. As one PCV friend commented, it seems like the only thing that changes during Daylight Savings Time is the hour hand – everything else simply happens an hour later! 

But here’s the real kicker about Daylight Savings Time here: Morocco actually drops Daylight Savings Time for the month of Ramadan, reverts back to standard time, and then picks it back up again until it’s over at the end of September.

Here’s what I want to know. That first week of Ramadan, when we will surely have more “new time, or old time?” conversations, will “new time” be the newly-reeinstated-no-longer-DST-time, which is what is at this moment in April considered “old time,” or will standard time be consistently referred to as “old time,” in which case we will be leaving “new time” and going back to “old time”?

I already have a headache.

What has really struck me, though, is the vastly different comprehension of time that Moroccans have. Sure, every guide book says “Moroccans have a different sense of time,” but usually they mean it in this glib, slightly-offensive way that covers up what they’re really trying to say, which is, “Americans, be warned, Moroccans will be late for everything, just chill.” But what I was encountering here wasn’t that. It was a sense of time dramatically less bounded by clocktime than mine was.

I affix time to a clockface. If something is at 6 pm, then it is at 6 pm, no matter how much sun is in the sky or what the weather is. But the Moroccans in my village do not define time by a clockface; they define it by what they see, what they feel, how many things they’ve accomplished since they’ve woken up, or how much time since they had their last meal. So when those boys told me 5:30, they meant not 5:30 but a certain time in the day indicated by 5:30 – a time that would best be represented by 6:30 a week later.

It makes me think of something I remember vividly from reading Madeline L’Engle books, where she talks about two kinds of time: kairos, and chronos. Chronos is “ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time,” while kairos is “real time, pure numbers with no measurement.”

I guess I am a chronos person living in a kairos world! Talk about a wrinkle in time. Har har.

New Home, New Media: Introducing My Duar

Well, y’all, I decided to try my hand at radio. This is my first attempt EVER, accomplished with embarrassingly cheap equipment, no audio editing software, and no skills to speak of. I abjectly beg you to forgive me the unutterably shabby quality of this overly-long radio story ramble, sit back, turn that volume up!! (did I mention about the crappy equipment?), and listen to the sounds of a typical family in a small Moroccan village, as captured by a Peace Corps Volunteer with slightly too much time on her hands.

Who knows? If I like doing this, I might make it a regular feature of the blog. Recommendations of free, user friendly audio software (that isn’t Garageband) are welcome!

For those confused about my whereabouts, here’s the skinny: For several months I lived with a host family in a small town in the north in order to learn Moroccan Arabic. Now that I’ve passed my language test and been sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer, I’ve been assigned to a village (known as a “duar”) waaaaay down south for my two years of service. I’ve been staying with a second host family down here while I acclimate to the duar and search for an apartment.

Remember about my new name? See if you can spot it, it’s in there a few times.

(And in case any of you were appalled at my strangely affected radio voice, I promise you it’s not pretension – it’s the result of telling my host family I was “napping” in order to be undisturbed in my room, and then trying to stealthily record myself, sotto voce into the laptop microphone, saying the narration.)

Blogging About Language, Part 2: How My Name Turned Me Into a Narcissist

When I first started learning Darija, everything sounded like this:

مشيت لقهوة و شفت صاحبتي  و گالت ليا علا نهارها، و من بعد فسرات ليا البرنامج.

(Since Darija is an oral language, I beg those of you who can read script to please forgive any spelling errors – I tend to ignore proper spelling when I’m writing Darija in Arabic script!)

As with most languages, what is spoken fluidly in the world can differ substantially from the sound of a word you’ve internalized in the classroom, so a lot of time is spent hanging onto each syllable spoken in order to discern anything recognizable. Of course, the word our ears are most trained to pick up and respond to, in any language, is our own name. Think of how many times you were tuning out a conversation in the background until your own name leapt out at you.

So for a while, I was hearing my host family say sentences that frequently sounded like this:

مشيت لقهوة و شفت صاحبتي  و گالت Leah علا نهارها، و من بعد فسرات Leah البرنامج.

Wow, I thought, they talk about me a lot. It made me a little extra attentive (…and paranoid) during family time. As they were CLEARLY discussing me in some way, or making decisions concerning me without including me in the conversation, I was constantly asking  “What? What? What???? I’M RIGHT HERE!”

Pretty soon, I realized that I was hearing sentences like the one above everywhere. And all the time. Gosh, I thought. Everyone’s talking about me a lot. Right in front of me, as if I wasn’t there. How rude!

Eventually, I started to get an inkling that my name might possibly be an actual Arabic word. Finally I realized that I was actually hearing this:

مشيت لقهوة و شفت صاحبتي  و گالت liya علا نهارها، و من بعد فسرات liya البرنامج.

Essentially, “liya” is the construction of “to” or “for” plus the pronoun for “me.” It’s used very commonly with “tell” or “say,” as in:

She told me yesterday. (Literally: She told to me yesterday.)

The imperative form is tricky too. I’ll transliterate it so you can get the full effect:

Tell me: Gul liya
Tell Leah: Gul l Leah

As you can imagine, it is very hard for me to distinguish that doubled “l” sound which is the only clue that the preposition is being used with my name as opposed to the pronoun construction. So even when people were having conversations with each other, completely unrelated to me, I would be obsessively trying to follow along, convinced that someone was about to tell me something.

Almost equally devastating, “liya” is also used with “to be able to,” as in “may I.”

Can I go with you? (Lit: Is it possible for me to go with you?)
I can’t go outside. (Lit: It’s not possible for me to go outside.)

And it’s also used with:

Explain to me
Send to me
Bring to me

(Boys playing soccer in the street also loudly scream it to each other a lot, and I’m not sure exactly what word they’re using it with, but I can guess it refers to passing the ball.)

All this was a major oy vey. Even after I sorted out the issue, I would twitch significantly whenever I heard “Leah/liya,” while my brain sluggishly replayed the sentence in order to discern if it was my name or the pronoun construction that was being used. My host family LOVED this and would giggle with delight every time I had to ask for clarification: “Did you mean me, or to you?”

So what did I do?

I changed my name!

At least, I tried to. Several of my fellow trainees were given Moroccan names by their host families, but my host family loved my name. “Leah, such a pretty name!” they would say, even as I related to them the difficulties it was causing me. (I neglected to mention that Leah is only one syllable off from Aaliyah, the toddler’s name. They’re so similar that she never comprehended they were different names at all, and as a result still calls me by her own name, “Aaliyah.”)

Luckily, moving from my training community to my final site gave me the perfect opportunity to start fresh and rename myself from day one, forever shedding this pesky Leah/liya conundrum.

But what to change it to? Aaliyah was off the table since it was already claimed by someone close to me. Most Moroccans approved of “Layla” since it was close to Leah, but that was dashed when I found out that the PCV one town over from me (with a hard-to-pronounce L name) goes by Layla, and I figured it would be inconvenient if we ever collaborated together. I wasn’t crazy about the other “L” names I had heard of, so I started casting afield. I wanted something meaningful, and I liked the idea of a name that would have significance in both cultures, or represent a shared history. (As some of you know, I do have some experience in giving myself new names, although I still find the act a little hubristic.)

So I settled on Meryem (or Maryam, or Mariam – as usual, English transliterations are all over the map). Meryem is the mother of Jesus in the Qur’an; she’s actually the only female referred to by name in the entire Qur’an, which devotes a whole sura to her. Meryem is also the sister of Moses and Aaron (non-Muslims spell it Miriam), a story shared by all three monotheistic faiths (there’s even some funny lineage confusion in the Qur’anic text because both women have the same name). Anyway, it fit, I like how it sounds, and once I’d visited the girl’s boarding school in my final site and nervously announced my new name to a few dozen girls, there was no going back. Now I hear my new name called to me during games, shouted from windows, and comically mispronounced by the toddler I live with.

I still twitch at “liya.” But it’s getting better. And at least now whenever I do hear it, I know, every time, 100%, that it’s not about me.

Just for fun, here’s my favorite song about a very special Meryem/Miriam:

 

Blogging About Language, Part 1: Why I’m Afraid of Cucumbers

(This one’s a little late – I wrote it while during Pre-Service Training and never had enough internet to post it!)

Dozens of Moroccan middle school students stand in an uneven circle behind the youth center. They’re intently watching a short foreign woman – maybe French, maybe Spanish, they’re not sure – as she attempts to teach them a game. Everything about the woman and the game is new and different and exciting.  “Ready?” she says (in Darija). “Everyone look at me. PENIS!”

We wisely abandoned the penis game for a rousing round of Duck Duck Goose.

…Yep. That was me. So it goes! One of the many hard things about Moroccan Arabic (also known as Darija) is how many gosh darn shameful words there are that only fractionally differ from some very banal, everyday words. I’m blessed with being skilled at the Semitic “kh” sound, but those poor Arabic learners who struggle with it had best avoid the word for “empty” lest they seriously curse someone out!

It’s a fascinating process to be learning a language full-time. Of course, if you know me then you know that this is my DREAM situation – and I relish the speedy standard to which we are held (conversational competency after 2 months!). My training group has Arabic class for at least half the day, six days a week. It’s a serious intellectual workout, and one that I enjoy immensely.

Studying hard! And shivering. It’s freezing in our classroom.

Every day more and more words fall out of the long strands of babble and into clarity and meaning. It feels a bit like I’m adjusting the lens focus of part of my brain, veeeery slowly – or as we say in Darija, shwiya b shwiya. Not all days see exponential growth; some days I get a lot of words, some days I barely scrape a few new ones into my memory. As an organizer, I often talked about finding and appreciating the “small victories” along the way to the larger goal, and I have definitely had to put that philosophy into practice here. I would feel very discouraged if I did not treat every successful verb conjugation as a small personal triumph!

Almost against my will, my French has turned out to be very helpful. For one, Darija is littered with French, and a significant number of nouns have evident roots in French. I would actually hazard that French is more helpful than Modern Standard Arabic, which several of my classmates have significant experience in, because of how frequently and significantly it diverges from Moroccan Arabic; but I expect they would disagree with me. At the beginning of our time here I spoke more French than I probably should have with my host family, but the tradeoff to my language abilities was that I was able to be a person with humor and opinions, instead of a lump who zoned out during family time. Now that my Darija is much better, I’m trying to insist to my family that we only resort to French when I need a direct translation for a word we can’t act out.

Of course, my host family has been an integral part of my language learning, and each member has a different approach to helping me along. Some are very didactic and authoritative about it, and (to my great annoyance) make a big show of teaching me verbs they seem not to have noticed I’ve been using correctly for weeks. Others simply (and gleefully) point to things at the dinner table and say, “Leah! Leah! What’s this? What’s this?” As a result, during most meals I sit there and sporadically spout random nouns in between bites. “Knife!” “Apple!” “Bowl-designed-for-carrying-soup!”

Unfortunately, the “what’s this” line of questioning is a particularly dangerous one, as it can lead to this sort of exchange:

Family: Leah, what’s this? What’s this!!?? {brandishing it in my face}
Leah: Ummm….. Oh I know this one, I know this one…. [*&!$#@]!
Family: {dies laughing} No, Leah, cucumber!
Leah: [*&!$#@]?
Family: No, cucumber! CUCUMBER! CU-CUM-BER!
Leah: Isn’t that what I’m saying? [*&!$#@]? Isn’t that it?
Family: {literally on the floor laughing at this point} No, you said – well we won’t say it, it’s shameful. But you said something naughty!

Later:

Leah: Teacher, please tell me what cucumber is in Darija. Earlier I tried to say it, and I ended up saying a shameful word.
Arabic teacher: There is no shameful word that is similar to cucumber.
Leah: [*&!$#@].
Arabic teacher: Oh, why yes! I guess there IS a shameful word that is similar to cucumber!

Even though I now know the word for cucumber, I’m still a little convinced that I’m going to end up saying the shameful word. (Spoiler alert: I was saying poop. GET OVER IT MOROCCANS. POOP IS JUST POOP.) Anyway, these days I call cucumbers “zucchini” and let Moroccans hysterically correct me. Better they laugh at me for calling cucumbers zucchini than for calling cucumbers poop, right?

Ten Ways Moroccans Show Their Love

Love makes the world go around, right? I’ve encountered a lot of love in Morocco, freely (and occasionally overwhelmingly) given.  Here are just a few of the many ways that the Moroccans I have met express their love for the strange, random Americans who are dropped into their homes by an international development organization for months at a time.

1. They nudge food into your wedge

Moroccan meals happen around a communal dish that everyone digs into with utensils bread. But don’t go thinking this is some gastronomic free-for-all! On the contrary, there are RULES. The wedge in front of you is designated for your consumption, and it’s bad manners (and, frankly, unhygienic) to root around in other people’s wedges. If there’s something in your wedge that you don’t want, you can casually toss it into the middle of the heap so that others can help themselves (the center is fair game for everyone).  However, parents can blatantly collect particularly delicious morsels from anywhere in the tagine and unceremoniously dump them in your wedge, indicating that they are now yours.

This is a bad example because couscous is the one meal in the week that we do eat with spoons… Everything else is bread, I swear!

2. They yell at you to “Eat! Eat!” even when you are in mid-chew

I never know how to respond to the admonition to eat when I am so obviously in the very act of eating. I tend to respond by shoveling it in faster and faster. Of course, the hard part is convincing Moroccans that you are in fact full and cannot possibly eat anymore. Often my host families will dramatically exclaim over how little I have eaten since there’s still so much food left in front of me (due to them shoving food into my wedge all meal, faster than I can consume it). Very sneaky, Moroccans. I usually end up stuffing myself to bursting at every single meal, of which there are many.

3. They refill your tea many times

Moroccan tea is very, very sweet and mildly strong. In the north I typically had it with mint or with shiba (which is…absinthe…I believe?), but in the south they load it with all sorts of herbs and it sometimes tastes a bit like what the apothecary would give you for an upset stomach. As soon as you’ve gotten down to the dregs of the glass, someone will spirit it away and refill it for you. I’ve gotten pretty good at explaining that if I drink a lot of tea, especially late in the day, I won’t sleep very well, but as usual your mileage may vary when it comes to how much Moroccans will respect your wishes concerning victuals. (I’ve had to get pretty graphic about the symptoms that will result if I consume milk.)

My most scenic tea-drinking experience.

4. They give you LOTS of sweets

Someone told me that sugar is heavily subsidized in Morocco, which might explain a little about the Moroccan sweet tooth. As I’ve mentioned before, Moroccans have very few qualms about eating candy at any time of day. It’s also rude not to share anything you’re eating, so chances are that if you happen upon a Moroccan who’s eating some candy (which you will do a lot), you will be forcefully offered some. However, when I try to share candy I’ve been given, I usually get rebuffed; candy given as a gift to the foreigner should be consumed, in its entirety, by said foreigner.

5. They never leave you alone

When I was in my training site, I was accompanied almost everywhere by my host family. Even if I simply had to go to the end of the street (a few hundred feet) in broad daylight to meet someone – someone who, if they were waiting for me, I would be able to see from the moment I left the door – then one of my family members would be sent to walk with me. Whether they were concerned for my safety in the small distances I was required to traverse, or if they were convinced I would be lonely for those three minutes, I do not know.

I never walked this street alone.

6. They’re concerned about your place in the afterlife

They want to make sure they’re going to be with the people they love forever. Makes sense.

7. They give you their clothing

My first host family got a HUGE kick out of putting me in various outfits, both outlandish and traditional. I grew very attached to my host sister-in-law’s fleece djellaba (dubbed by a fellow trainee the “Soviet Prison Guard Djellaba”). When I packed up to leave my training site, I had to explain several times that my space was very limited, and I could only take one or two shirts as presents. (Unbeknownst to me, a few extra snuck their way in, which I discovered when I arrived in Rabat the next day.) My current host family lent me some pajamas that have already been proclaimed to be mine, forever more.

8. They send you lots of texts throughout the day telling you they miss you

I’m pretty bad at transliteration to begin with, and Moroccans transliterate Arabic into text in a very different way than Peace Corps does. So whenever my host sisters send me “I miss you” text messages, I have to furrow my brow and phonetically read the words out loud in order to hear myself say – hopefully – some discernable Arabic. For a while I couldn’t send outgoing text messages, I could only receive them, but this certainly did not deter my sisters from letting me know, every so often, how much I was on their minds.

9. They come into the hammam, fully dressed, just to scrub your back

Now, the hammam is not a chilly place. It’s not even a warm place. It’s a HOT, STEAMY SUB-TROPICAL SAUNA. It is not a place where you want to have anything on. I can’t imagine walking in there in several winter layers, including a headscarf, and hanging around JUST SO SOMEONE YOU CARE ABOUT IS NOT ALONE WHEN IT’S TIME TO SLOUGH THE DEAD SKIN OFF THEIR BACK. Really, the dedication and devotion behind this one still bowls me over. It’s frickin’ inspirational…and a little awkward, since there’s a fully clothed person standing over you as you bathe, waiting for you to hand over your kis so they can flay you alive get you squeaky clean.

10. They cry when you leave

I grew very close to my Pre-Service Training host family, and there were a lot of waterworks in the weeks leading up to my departure. The morning I left, the entire family got up early to see me off and cry some more. I plan to visit them a lot while I’m still in country, and I feel incredibly grateful that I was embraced by such wonderful and generous people. As I do everywhere, I feel lucky to be loved by people I love.