9 Everyday Things

There are a lot of things that I do everyday – that I also did everyday back in the States – that really aren’t the same. I haven’t talked about them, though, because they’re ordinary to me now, and we don’t very often think to talk about the things we take for granted. I’ve had some guests come visit lately, and it’s made me realize just how different some of these things were to my American self when I too first got here. Here’s a sample:

1 – Traditionally, when I wanted to buy something, I would go to a store that I knew carried the product (possibly after having done some research into where such a place might be), locate the item in question, examine its quality, perform a sort of economic calculation of its price and the price of not purchasing it, and then act on that decision. You probably do something similar, and, to be fair, a lot of that’s also the same here in Morocco – but not all of it. At no point in all this is the step “spend 5-50 minutes bantering with the merchant about how although it’s beautiful (whatever it is), it’s just entirely impossible for me to buy it at that price, unless, God protect him, he can lower the price, most likely by two thirds or more.” Fortunately, however, you can usually find more of the same product in the generally immediate area. Some people criticize the Moroccan marketplace for its tendency to lump all the rugs together, or the jelabas, or the hardware stores, but it makes shopping so much easier. Since you’re likely to have to see three or four merchants of the same product to find one who’ll give you a reasonable price, it certainly helps if you don’t have to walk across town in the process.

2 – I’d say that most Americans consider doing their laundry to be a “chore.” You have to collect the dirty clothes, sort them by color and fabric and washing process, take them to the washing machine, put them in the machine with the appropriate detergents, softeners, starches, and scents, turn on the machine, come back a half-hour later and put them into the dryer, add the necessary anti-static cling products or wooden paddles to beat the clothing into submission, wait another hour or so until it’s dry, and then fold. It’s a complicated process with very little credit, and, if you’re unlucky enough, you might have to pay a machine for the privilege of doing all of the above. Washing clothes is a lot easier out here. All you need to do is grab a couple giant tubs capable of holding 5-10 gallons of liquid, fill them water, laundry detergent, and as much clothing as possible, and then (if you’re me) spend the next hour-and-a-half manhandling them aggressively and using Buddhist meditations to convince yourself that the stains are going to come out. You have one basin for soapy water and another for rinsing, and you don’t have to worry about the dryer at all since there aren’t any – you just put everything up to air dry. There are times, however, when I feel a little nostalgic for all the nonsense involved in American washing, particularly when I’m lugging a 70-pound tub of water from the bathroom to the living room or when I’m flaying my hands with granulated Tide detergent or the two straight months of winter when the sun doesn’t come out preventing me from drying clothes and thus being completely unable to wash at all. It’s times like that when I feel like I could find the mental and physical strength to turn some dials and carry a laundry hamper to the basement and back again.

3 – Social commentators in America like to tell us about how much time we spend waiting in lines, and there are those guys who’ll just start standing in a line on the street simply to get other more sheep-like people to fall in line behind them without even knowing what the wait’s for. They probably have a point; Morocco would have a much harder time getting it. The streets of Morocco are lined with storefronts, and the economy is such that they attract pretty good traffic, but, unlike most storefronts back home, it’s the minority that you actually walk into in Morocco. You’re standard convenience store is set up so that you walk right to the counter that opens on the street, tell the guy what you want, and then he gets it for you. It’s very efficient, and absolutely second nature once you get used to it, except for one thing: there are no cash register lanes to get into when you’re ready to go – there’s usually no cash register at all. It’s just a counter, which doesn’t really have a “paying” or a “just browsing” end, and the owner is running around getting things for people, so there’s no way of really creating a “line.” This, I believe, is the origins of the informal “no lines policy” in Morocco. It doesn’t matter who got there first, or who’s already talking to the salesman, or who’s trying to do something complicated or who’s just got a really simple transaction. Everyone just goes up to the guy, tells him what they want, and let him figure out how to please all his customers. There are a few exceptions, of course, like the bank and the post office. If it’s really busy, people have to “line up” by putting their business on the counter, usually in the form of their national identity card. It’s hard enough for us newcomers to be defensive shoppers at a regular corner store; it’s terrifying to plop your passport down on the counter and be left only to pray it’s still there when you it’s your turn after being crowded away by another hundred people doing the same. The irony, though, is that despite how frustrating it is to come from a society where you’re bred to patiently wait your turn and find yourself blocking off the old lady from getting her bread and eggs before you, you can’t really side with the people who joke about “Moroccan lines.” In reality, and once you figure out how to work in the system, the majority of time everyone’s being served. The guy will be getting money from one person while finding cigarettes for another and planning the quickest way to the milk cooler to fill your order. All at the same time.

4 – If you dig deep enough, almost everyone has some sort of special talent. Some people can juggle or do bird calls, while others can actually solve a Rubik’s Cube without the use of magic markers. My skill is finding money on the ground. It’s pretty much an innate ability; my grandfather was the same way. I’ve done a few parties and small charity events, and get the occasional emergency call about lost keys, and I can tell you that I have never in my life been in a place with so little lost change as Morocco. In fact, in my sixteen months in this country I have found exactly two coins on the ground. One was a 5 centime coin, the only one I have ever seen, and the lowest denomination possible in the Kingdom. And I can only count that on a technicality, as it has no practical monetary value at all. There is no price tag in all of Morocco that has a value in the hundredth’s place after its decimal. I’ve talked about this change problem of mine with other volunteers, and I’ve heard surprisingly similar accounts from across the country. No one has any plausible explanation, though there are theories. Some claim that the atomic density of the Atlas limestone creates a reverse magnetic field which resists metallic change, others that Moroccans are generally more conscientious about their coins. The debate will certainly not be resolved anytime soon.

5 – There is no topic more discussed, nor event more feared by newly arrived trainees, than using the bathroom in Morocco. Morocco is a meeting ground of cultures, and in no area is this more readily apparent than her toilets. It’s certainly possible to find the Western sitting toilets that we’re so used to, but this is certainly not the norm. Much more likely (practically guaranteed outside of tourist restaurants and hotels) are the Turkish style, the “Turk” or “Turkish Delight” in colloquial language. The Turkish toilet is an incredibly efficient machine. It’s merely a ceramic plate with two raised platforms to interface with the user’s feet and a sloped basin leading to the simplest plumbing imaginable: a hole. There are no complicating levers or seat hinges, nor inscrutable floating devices in the back tank. Flushing is as easy as pouring a bucket with water down the hole and letting the pipes dispose of the evidence, and since it’s shameful for people to hear what you’re doing in there, you can fill the bucket to cover the sound while you’re working. It’s the Spartan ideal of toilet technology, though it does clash with our American bathroom hedonism. Whereas we have whole department stores devoted solely to the beautification of the bath and specialists trained to maximize the toilet-tub-sink aesthetic, the Moroccan restroom is more closely related to a political prison. We can agree on its importance in society, but that doesn’t mean we want to go there or talk about it, and we clean it only whenever we think someone from the outside might come by for a surprise inspection. But that doesn’t happen very often, most likely because no one wants to deal with the embarrassment of asking someone else to use their bathroom. In fact, a friend says the kids in her town don’t drink water specifically so that they won’t have to ask for the facilities while visiting a friend’s house. And this could have something to do with the fact that my Turk is a lot more work than your Western. There’s no where to sit, so you’ve got to squat the whole time, which is great for your calves, but not so good for instilling a sense of relaxing tranquility. And you certainly can’t read the newspaper.

6 – Did you ever find yourself needing to just run over to a friend’s house for a quick second to take care of some business or another? Pop by to say hello while you’re on the way somewhere else? I feel like that all the time; unfortunately, that’s pretty much impossible for me here. I would say that Morocco has a pretty communal culture – particularly in comparison with what I’ve grown accustomed to in America – and visiting friends and relatives is a fairly important part of the social contract. Especially during holidays. Ironically, though, that’s when it becomes the biggest problem. Let’s say that you’re an American Peace Corps volunteer living in a small Moroccan town on Eid Seghir (the “small holiday” – or Eid al-Fitr in standard Arabic – the end of Ramadan). On Eid Seghir there are two things you do: eat and visit. But you’re connected all across your town, and have people everywhere who’ve helped you in innumerable ways throughout the year without asking for anything in return. You pretty much have to visit them all, so you do, which isn’t a problem since they’re your friends and you like them. It’s just that you’re running on a really tight schedule because you’ve got about thirty key places, not to mention all the other stops you’ll be making that you forgot to write into your agenda, which leaves room for about a 10-15 minute visit with everyone. Long enough to come in, shake hands with everyone, offer some congratulatory remarks, eat a few cookies with a glass of tea, and be on your way. Three houses in, with ten glasses of tea and hundreds of cookies down, and two hours later, you’ll remember that this is impossible. You can’t pop in and out; you need to drink tea, make small talk, eat whatever they give you, and then repeat until you’re basically begging for permission to leave. And this isn’t just during holidays, this is all the time. If I’m in a hurry, I’ll take every back road I can think of just to avoid major stops where I know I’ll get trapped by self-appointed surrogate mothers. Sometimes bicycling helps, but you pretty much just have to lay back and accept that you’re going to be late, or that you’re only going to doing half the things on your to-do list for the day. Then again, you could do worse than never-ending free lunches.

7 – Mopping, in its most basic form, is pretty much the same no matter where you go. You use some kind of long-handled device that has an attachment at one end for moving water about on the floor so as to remove grime and other filth. In America we have several kinds of mop. Most notable are the sponge mop with a built in water-wringing device and the yarn strand model that can also serve as a costume wig in community theatre and off-Broadway musicals. Every floor I’ve seen in Morocco has been either tile or concrete, and, as there are no vacuums that I know of, the mop has a pretty solid monopoly on the floor-cleaning products market. There are two very important things to know about Moroccan mops. First, they have a couple names. We call them karrata up here, which is a very cool word, though others say jafaffa, which, as best as I can figure, translates literally as “droughter.” Even more excellent, however, is that no matter what you call it, it’s pretty much a giant squeegee. That’s awesome.

8 – We’ve got a few different kinds of handshake in America. There’s the standard, the two-hand shake, and the handshake with a hand on the arm, not to mention the thousands of informal pounds and high fives. And when you meet someone in the States, unless you’re a politician or meeting for the first time, chances are you’re not actually going to “shake hands.” You could just as easily get by with a wave, head nod, or nothing at all. Morocco, on the other hand, has pretty much only one handshake, the standard (though there are other types of greeting, used particularly for elders and other respected individuals, such as a hand or forehead kiss). It’s not really all that interesting that Moroccans shake hands. What is interesting is the frequency and ceremony involved. When you first meet someone, obviously you should shake their hand, but what’s unusual for us is that out here, you’ll continue to shake their hand pretty much every time you run into them again in the future. What’s more, if you shake one person’s hand in a group of people, you have to shake everyone’s. This can be a real endeavor if, for example, you walk into a wedding or other massive social gathering, and there have been plenty of times when students have walked into class late and I’ve made the mistake of shaking their hand, which means that they then have to go down the lines shaking every other student’s hand in the process (some do that anyway because they think it’s funny). But that’s not the end of the ritualization. Moroccan culture, descending from Islamic tradition, exalts the right and frowns upon the left. Not only do we shake with our right hand, but we shake hands with the group from right to left. A group of Americans will usually shake with whoever’s the most convenient at any particular moment until everyone’s shaken with everyone else. This means that everyone once in a while, you might find yourself with your hand just sticking out there waiting for the guy coming, especially if, like us, you’re new to the whole circle of shaking. But that’s better than not shaking; you can definitely get called out for failure to shake. The only time you don’t is if the “shakee” in question is a conservative woman, in which case it’s best to wait for her to offer a hand and to just smile and be polite until – if – she does.

9 – America is a milk country. The “Does a Body Good” and “Got Milk” ads have been some of the most successful campaigns of all time, and “milk and cookies” and “cereal and milk” are two of the most essential staples of our diet. Morocco is not. It goes into coffee a lot, as well as the occasional glass of hot chocolate, and gets mixed into fruit juices in the summer, but I’ve never seen anyone sit down with just a glass of milk. That’s not really that big a deal for me since I too don’t really ever sit down with just a glass of milk, whether I’m in Morocco or America. What does matter, however, is that my milk, like any other red-blooded American, is cold (unless it’s hot chocolate). You won’t find that here. Any glass of milk you ask for is going to be heated as though you were about to add the chocolate in to it, and a request for a cold glass is likely to get you a funny look and the assumption that you’ve clearly mistaken in your language. And a glass of warm milk.

On Development, Part IV

Eddie Levert, lead singer for the O’Jays, once said: “Money money money money, money.” To this day, no one is quite certain exactly what it was he was talking about, so we’ll assume that he was trying to describe the life of a Peace Corps volunteer.

I swore into service in late November last year, and in the past year of being a volunteer (and the three months of training before that) I’ve had one prior expectation blown more than any other: that I’m really needed. The Peace Corps volunteer’s role (among other things) is to bring knowledge and innovation to the community – to incubate the American “can-do” attitude in parts of the world where chronic under-development have entrenched a mentality of fatalism and inertia. It’s the reason why the Peace Corps enlists volunteers right out of college; they may not have too much experience yet, but they’ve got the passion to transform the lives of others. I’m a youth developer here, and I’d been an English teacher and led youth programs back in the States, so I felt pretty confident coming into the Peace Corps that I could shake things up in my community.

It took about two weeks to be absolutely convinced that my community shakes plenty on its own. There are several youth associations working in the Dar Shebab and out, language programs and a fair number of English speakers qualified to give classes, and youth who take their own initiative to hold programs on issues relevant to their lives. What they actually don’t have are resources – computers for technical training, cameras for film projects, soccer goals with nets in them, paints and pencils and sheets of paper – in short, what they don’t have is money.

This is a problem, not only for the youth groups trying to develop themselves, but also for me as a Peace Corps volunteer. You see, most development organizations aren’t really doing development at all, they’re charities. They show up in a community and ask the people what they need, and then they give it to them (or at least they give the money to go get it). The Peace Corps is different. We [ideally] ask the people what they have and what they want to do and what they need in order to do it, and then we spend two years trying to help them find it. The difference is that the first style of “development” leaves the recipient without the knowledge of how to go get more things, or how to get replacement things if the things they’ve just been given break, other than to ask some other “development” group. The second style makes the recipient invest his or her own time, sweat, and money in getting things, and makes sure they know how to do it themselves for the next time. The first way’s a lot easier, though, and that’s what happens most of the time.

And so it’s a real struggle, not the least reason for which is that your community doesn’t always appreciate the difference between development and “development.” Counterparts are constantly coming to you asking for money or equipment, and so you try to explain this idea of sustainability with as little condescension as possible, all the while fully aware that they aren’t likely to be able to put up their own money to get these things even if you do show them how.

But you have to choose one path or another. Here are some of the ways I’ve dealt with this in my work in Freedonia, which will hopefully illustrate the complexity of the situation. None is a perfect solution.

You could just say no. As of yet, I haven’t completely done this as I’m still trying to push each request off into one of the other paths, but there’s undoubtedly going to be a handful that don’t get addressed by the time I’m finished.

You could just give it. So far, I’m happy in knowing that I haven’t just given anything that was asked for, though I have been proactive in seeing holes and filling them without having them brought to me. For example, there’s no art going on at the Dar Shebab, and the Peace Corps office ships out left over reams of paper and other items from time to time, so I’ve collected a handful and just gifted them over to a guy who I think will be able to take them and build something from them. I also got some paints and other art supplies from another volunteer, so I included those as well. And I’ve made a pretty thorough collection of baseball equipment – gloves, bats, and balls for baseball, softball, and whiffleball – and, though it’s still all in my house, I’ve made it available for the kids (and it will be going to them when I leave). I consider that one to be “Goal 2” (increasing awareness of American culture on the part of the peoples served), however, rather than “capacity building,” so that’s a bit of a different story.

You could put together a grant. The Peace Corps has two different models for this, though I haven’t actually done either one. Yet. They require the community to pay for 25% of the project themselves to ensure both that there is local ownership and that it truly meets a community-identified need. I’m about to have a seminar with all the various youth-serving organizations in town to teach them about how grants work – those that come from the Peace Corps as well as from other organizations. This is often the crucible for the organization. There is so much of a culture of expectancy built from bad development that many aren’t interested in going through the hoops of all this process. Part of that’s our fault. The volunteer is usually the one who knows how to do this, and, as a result, is the one who usually does it. A lot of people we work with expect or look to us to fill in all the blanks. I’ll have to write later about the success or failure of my little workshop.

You could connect them with another source. I suppose that this is very much like putting together a grant, but if you can put your group in contact with another organization that provides funds or resources, then they can pursue their goals independently. Obviously, the Peace Corps isn’t opposed to communities securing funding for their projects, they just want to make sure that these funds are brought in by the community and don’t lead to a dependency on the Peace Corps. I just finished one of these. A counterpart of mine is the organizer of an annual film festival, and earlier this summer I convinced him to add an amateur youth film competition as a part of it. He loved the idea, but had just one very legitimate concern: the festival budget just didn’t have the funds to bring film teams from all Morocco to Freedonia and provide them with food, lodging, prizes, workshops, and all the other accoutrements of a film competition.

Fortunately, I had earlier that year met some representatives of the US Embassy responsible for youth programming and outreach who had told me to let them know if I ever had any projects going on that they could be a part of (the Embassy loves working with volunteers because we’re plugged into the local communities and can give them a hand finding effective outlets for development funds). I wrote them an email, we wrote them a grant proposal, and they just left town after having sponsored the entire youth amateur competition. We had eleven youth film-makers from nine different communities (two of which had worked with other Peace Corps volunteers to make their films), an American film expert who held a workshop on film-making, a panel of professional directors, actors, and critics to judge the entries and give feedback on their work, and live screenings of all the films.

It was a raging success, and you probably think that I’m just going to keep bragging about how great a Peace Corps volunteer I am, but there’s a dark side even this which might turn out to be my biggest achievement in all my service. To start with, both the Embassy and my counterpart expected me to play a much larger part securing and administering the grant than Peace Corps ideology prefers, and it might be the case that it falls apart next year. I hope it doesn’t, but I can’t put my hands in it next year in good conscience. I’ve provided the model, and it will be their turn to copy it. I’ve also been inundated with requests from other counterparts for me to set them up with Embassy funds for their activities. Some are great ideas and I hope that we can realize them, though for the most part I have to send them to my other counterpart to make their contacts. Others are going to be disappointed, and there’s going to be resentment over perceived favoritism. Hopefully I can direct them into one or more different paths to get the resources they need, but I won’t be able to help everyone.

I definitely built a bridge between the cinema club and the Embassy (though it remains to be seen how well it’s used), but in doing so I probably used up a lot of the support beams necessary in some of my other bridges. That’s not entirely a bad thing, though it will make my work harder. Then again, I’m the third consecutive volunteer in town, and that means that I have to take down the scaffolding crutches that my predecessors set up to start Freedonia’s self-development. It’s not going to make me any friends, but I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to transform communities and make friends. I still get to incubate the “can-do” spirit, only I have to do it by pushing people in the water. I can point out the life preservers and shallow water, but they have to swim there on their own. That’s development.

9 Things That Shock Moroccans about Americans

We’ve talked about some of the things that shock us, but intercultural dialogue is a two-way street, and there are plenty of things that we Americans do that amaze and offend our hosts. It’s easy for us to see the offense or shock in the things I described earlier that Moroccans do because they run contradictory to our culture. Here I’ve tried to present what shock Moroccans in as offensive a way as possible to try and simulate the way many Moroccans would feel them. I won’t be completely successful in that, but suffice it to say that they take every one of these as seriously as we do what shocks us.

1 - In America, a man’s reproductive fitness is judged more minutely than his fitness to be a NASA pilot, and the first criteria is does he still live with his parents. We tend to get out of the house as soon as possible, and our parents tend to echo the sentiment. We often end up living with roommates until we find ourselves judged “fitting,” but Peace Corps volunteers are forbidden from living with each other – if that’s even an option (I, for one, don’t have a site mate). Not so for Moroccans, who live at home until they’re married – unless forced by circumstances to move away – and then only for work, and they’ll do whatever they can to find family in the new location to live with. Sometimes, if they’re men, they’ll stay after marriage. If they’re women, they could very likely move to his parents’ home. Because why would you want to live away from your family? The only reasonable answer is that you want to do things that you can’t do in your family, namely be drunk all the time and have constant extra-marital sex. I had to go through very lengthy explanations of why I felt the need to leave my host parents’ home, most of them centering on how I do in fact love them, despite how things may look. One land lady, upon hearing that I would potentially be living in her rental apartment alone, refused to show it to me. My friends had to explain that I didn’t want it “for that,” I just didn’t have any family.

2 - You might not think to notice it, probably because it’s just so obvious to us, but one of our most sacred traditions is paying our own way (and you yours). Sure we mooch off our parents and significant others, but when a group of friends get together they’d better all bring their wallets with them, or make plans to pay it back later. This is absolute lunacy in Morocco. When guys get together in the café, one of them buys. When dudes accompany each other to the hammam, the first one pays for the rest. They’ve got all sorts of games and jokes about figuring out who’s supposed to pay, aside from “pay for what you drank.” The idea is that the others will pick up the tab next time, and everything will generally all even out. This theory breaks down when you’re with an American, who almost never have to pay because, despite living for two years in Morocco, is still the guest. Our money’s good for just about anything here, but not this. Lately, I’ve taken to fighting back. I once had to have another American friend pull a complicated wrestling move on our Moroccan associate just to have the time to get to the waiter and give him the money first. It didn’t matter that he’d treated the two previous times, he was furious. I still paid, though.

3 - There are a handful of new Americans doing their training here in Freedonia, and before they came, their host families-to-be had pretty much only one question: do they eat meat? These days, it’s not too hard to find a friend who’s a vegetarian; I’ve met only two Moroccans who don’t like to eat meat. It’s just not done around here. Perhaps it’s because a lot of the reasons why we choose vegetarianism aren’t present here. We’ve talked about the general lack of animal camaraderie, so it’s not likely to be caused by having fish who are friends. Maybe more significantly, there really aren’t industrial farms (sheep, goats, and chickens just roam freely through the town), nor is there any considerable use of growth hormones or genetic manipulation – it’s just too expensive. And there’s little dietary health consciousness. In fact, most people ascribe to the belief that the fatter you are, the healthier you are (those are the same word in Darija). With no moral, social, or nutritional pressure, it’s not surprising that Moroccans tend towards carnivorism, or that they’re so shocked to meet someone who isn’t. Moroccan dietary philosophy is that meat is good for you, and, being the most expensive part of the dish, it’s also a special treat. Consequently, vegetarian volunteers often find themselves embroiled in a guerilla war with their host mothers, who do whatever they can to ninja meat into their American.

4 - The Western handshake descends from the tradition of the Norse, who, being largely right-handed, shook with their right hands to represent that they bore no weapons, and, thus, no hostility. The Boy Scouts of America have turned this on its head and shake hands with their left to represent that they trust each other. Moroccans shake with their right because left hands are unclean. It’s a product both of Islamic custom – the Prophet’s message discussed a very broad definition of morality, including public health – and the economic fact that toilet paper costs money that most people would rather spend elsewhere that lead Moroccans to use their hands to wipe. Of course, you wouldn’t want to eat with that hand, especially in a society where your hands and food come in contact unmediated by utensils, so they’ve decided to designate one hand for public life and the other for the bathroom. This becomes a problem when foreigners come and touch their food with their left hands, which is just gross, or touch other people with their left hands, which is gross and offensive. The foreigners who know not to use their left spend all their time worrying about using it at the table or in polite society, terrified that they’ll forget and offend someone. Trust me, though, once you’ve used your left hand to clean yourself just once, you’re going to remember.

5 - People in the states go to great lengths to decorate their bathrooms. We have whole stores, magazines, and expositions dedicated to just this. We concern ourselves with the lighting, color coordination, ready availability of entertainment, and general homeliness of our bathrooms. Heaven forbid we find ourselves in the bathroom with nothing to do but what nature intended. Americans count the bathroom along with the other areas of the house, Moroccans tend to treat their bathrooms the same way people treat their insane aunt locked in the attic: everyone knows where it is, but pretend that it doesn’t exist. This is most difficult, however, when someone’s in there, especially since there’s no insulation to prevent sound from travelling from one part of the house to another. The sound of someone using the bathroom is one of the most shamefully embarrassing noises in Morocco, so they’ve set up a system of turning on a water faucet into a small bucket to cover it all up (we don’t need to debate the point that this sound is very similar to the majority of sounds it’s there to mask). We run into other problems too, though, in that entering the bathroom is like entering a pocket in the fabric of the universe, and we should seem to temporarily fade out of this plane of existence. Thus, it is very offensive to speak to someone while in the bathroom, even to respond to someone calling for us, nor should we even consider whistling or humming to ourselves. There’s no singing in the shower in Morocco.

6 - Morocco is a very strongly Muslim country, and, as in many other societies that have a single religion so blatantly dominant, there is little separation between the public and personal aspects of faith. The majority of Moroccans has a similar concept of their religion and come to take many of its tenets and prohibitions for granted. In the case of Islam, all aspects of life are divided into five categories: required, recommended, open to the individual, discouraged, and forbidden, or haram in Arabic. Moroccans know what they’re not allowed to do, but, more importantly, they know that Christians (meaning “foreigners,” as the two are represented by the same word in Darija) do them. And it’s not uncommon for to a local to conspiratorially inform you that Westerners are known to drink alcohol and eat pork. You’ll find yourself in a café when someone will announce to you that Americans drink whiskey (whiskey and vodka, like “Hotel California” and “My Heart Will Go On” with English-language music, have a monopoly on the Moroccan knowledge of spirits), or a student will sidle up to you and discretely ask you if it’s true that Americans do, in fact, eat pork. Some volunteers fear their community’s censure and deny these things, others try to explain that America is home to all faith systems and that there are some Americans who are forbidden from engaging in these activities. I, and probably a minority of others, tell them that these things are true. Almost all find ways to acquire alcohol in Morocco and could answer the question through example. A few try to get permits to hunt the many wild boar and have a pig roast.

7 - With so much Islam everywhere, it’s easy to imagine how it can be difficult for non-Muslims in Morocco. The majority of volunteers are Christian, but even more than that many claim to be. This is because Moroccans are used to foreigners being Christian, Christianity is within the Abrahamic family of religions, and it’s a lot easier than claiming any of the alternatives. Judaism is similarly approved by the Qur’an, but current political situations have resulted in pretty whole-scale ignorance concerning Judaism, a void that has been filled with a general enmity. There are enough Moroccans, however, who will gladly claim the Jewish people as part of their theological family. The biggest problems come from people who dispute the central premise of Islam: there is no god but God. One of the most powerful forces behind the create of Islam was a reaction against traditional polytheism, and thus visitors who believe in non-Abrahamic religions (Hindus, Buddhists, Wicca, etc) cause a bit of stir. Similarly, and more common, is the conflict caused by being an atheist or agnostic in Morocco. It’s bad enough that Christians and Jews don’t recognize Muhammad as being God’s messenger, but to believe that God isn’t God at all can be grounds for some serious debate to say the least. And if there is one truism here, it’s that there’s no halfway compromise. To argue for a general spiritualism is the same as saying that Islam is wrong, and very few are going to accept this from you.

8 - Everyone sneezes, but what sets Americans and Moroccans apart is our much higher tendency to blow our noses. Blowing your nose in Morocco not only requires tissues (a hedonistic luxury), but is also extremely offensive to polite society. It’s the sort of thing that you have to excuse yourself to go do, like using the bathroom. This is a constant source of tension between us, particularly when we first arrive and are bombarded by all the Moroccan illnesses. To make matters worse, that’s the time when volunteers are living with host families. The absolute pinnacle, however, of nose-blown rudeness, is when it is done while eating because now both your hands are befouled and you’re going to reach back into the collective plate. It’s enough to make everyone else lose their appetite.

9 - Moroccan girls and boys don’t really interact with each other as chums, and so it’s a little shocking when Moroccan boys and girls do. For example, boys and girls shared the same floor at my university, which isn’t unheard of in this day and age, but in Morocco would mean only that we engaged in constant debauchery. Boys are supposed to stay with boys, and girls with girls. Not just in the dormitories, but everywhere. Consequently, you see dudes hanging with each other on the street, and packs of girls walking by together. Rarely do you see boys and girls teasing or hanging on each other; in fact, this only really happens when foreigners are in the room, in places such as youth development summer camp. What’s really surprising for me, though, is that the guys I’ve been able to talk to about this don’t really want to be around girls, at least not in that sort of way. A guy I know wasn’t going to his classes after Ramadan ended last year because he said that none of the other guys were back yet, it was just him and a bunch of ladies. Normally, I would tell him to take advantage of the situation, and I did, but he replied that he can’t feel normal when girls are around. He understands guys and they can just be themselves. Girls are a confusing mystery. Unfortunately, it’ll probably stay that way.

On Breakfast: Ramadan Revisited

It’s now been a full year of living in Morocco, which means that we’re right back where we started: Ramadan. I landed in Morocco on September 9^th, 2008, and, coincidentally, my brother got married on September 6^th of that same year (happy anniversary, by the way). It’s gotten me thinking about my relationship with the Peace Corps. I should have expected it, but it’s been a rollercoaster romance. We’ve had passionate chemistry and lovers’ spats. The honeymoon is probably over, but I think that’s good – I came here to engender understanding and develop opportunities of Moroccan youth, not for a vacation.

Last year, I wrote about the history and customs of Ramadan, but it was as much from my academic experience as it was from my observations. A year later, I can see much more of the daily life, and understand even more of it. That is how I would like to mark my anniversary, by reevaluating some initial impressions and looking for some kind of cultural growth.

I landed on around the fifth day of Ramadan last year, so I missed out on all the preparations and general run-up, as well as the opening ceremonies. Getting ready for Ramadan involves pretty once one thing: going home. Freedonia had been absolutely packed with tourists – almost all of them Moroccan – and they’re all gone. In their place are all the college-aged sons and daughters and the family members who went away for work. It’s not true that everything stops during Ramadan, but it is true that business hours are cut and many people take their annual vacation.

As for “grand openings,” like so many other Moroccan holidays, there aren’t any. This is partly because no one knows exactly when it will start. Ramadan begins with the first sliver of crescent moon (the fast starts as soon as the sun rises), which modern astronomy could easily identify years in advance if it wanted, but modern Islamic society has retained the ancient astronomical tradition of relying on the visual sighting of the crescent by the scientific community. This often means that different Islamic countries will have Ramadan beginning on different days – usually the eastern Muslim world starts a day or two before.

This means that everyone has a generally good idea when it will happen, but they never know exactly what day it’s going to be, but they can’t be sure, so they have to have everything ready a few days in advance. “Everything” means tomatoes; “tomatoes” mean harira; “harira” means Ramadan. People don’t celebrate the start of Ramadan with parades or fireworks or gatherings. They go to the mosques, get together with their families, and – most importantly – they eat breakfast. Breakfast is at sunset (around 6:45 - 7:00 this year) and every evening is like an all-you-can-eat buffet at the International House of Pancakes.

Different families and different regions have different traditions concerning their breakfast spread, but there are a few staples that are omnipresent in Morocco. Islamic tradition calls for breaking the fast with dates and milk, and we stick to that, but with the addition of figs, which are in season now, and we also drink tea, which is a Moroccan civic duty. And you’ve got an array of breakfast breads. The most common is millwi, a type of fried, flaky pancake. (“Millwi” is the Amazigh word; Arabs tend to call it mismin – or sometimes millwi.) If your family really feels like going a little crazy you might have a millwi variant such as rrghaif, the “Moroccan pizza,” which is made with onions and peppers in the batter, or khubs shahamah, “fat bread,” which is fried with little pieces of fat that dissolve into greasy deliciousness. You’ll likely also find, either as replacement or in concert, a plate stacked with bagharreer. These incredible little pancakes are spongy on scale with Ethiopian injeera bread and are usually served cold, supersaturated with butter and honey.

Ramadan is about thirty days long, so you’ll have a few variations from day to day, but there will always be harira. Harira is a tomato-based soup with a selection of pieces of meat, small noodles, barley, small bits of fat, and chick peas, and always highly seasoned, most notably with cilantro. Everyone is required to have several bowls of it, usually as the final course of their breakfast. There’s also going to be a couple wheels of bread or lengths of baguette to go with it.

All the while there’ll be a plate or two of shebakiya, the spiral dough pastry that tastes like fried honey, a handful of hard-boiled eggs, eggs that have been submerged in boiling water, and a few saucers piled with a dry peanut and sugar paste called zumeta (the Arabs call it sslou). Unlike everything else on the table, these only come out during Ramadan, though it’s hard to eat more than a teaspoon or two of zumeta at any one sitting, so this one lasts for a little while after the fast.

And no breakfast is complete without the entertainment: the world famous Ramadan television programming. Ramadan is the season when the best actors from across Morocco get together to present a tour de force of nonsensical comedies, melodramatic soap operas, and inane hidden camera shorts. These shows all air every night on the two major Moroccan stations, 2M and Al Maghribia, and only during Ramadan. We didn’t appreciate the full extent of this last year, and took our favorites for granted until they were taken away from us. This year (like all the rest of the country) we couldn’t contain our impatience waiting for the season debuts. Unfortunately, it’s pretty unanimously agreed that this year’s offering is a record low, and I’ve even been told that Al Jazeera ran a segment on the poor quality of Morocco’s Ramadan programming. Perhaps it has something to do with the much higher than usual incidence of random English words in the dialogue.

But they watch them anyway, and I hope that marketers have appreciated just how big this is. I mean, every night for 30 days is as big as the Superbowl. Literally everyone is at home, eating breakfast, and doing what every Moroccan loves to do: watching tv. I didn’t quite realize the extent of this last year, but sometimes I’m late for breakfast, and I’ll find myself walking through town five minutes before the a’adan (call to prayer) and I won’t see anyone. Once, I was travelling and happened to arrive in Fes right at sunset. I had to walk across town (there weren’t any taxis) and it was incredible, I rolled my suitcase through the center of the busiest intersection in the city, and walked right down the middle of some of Fes’s biggest avenues. There was no one to get out of the way for.

During our initial entry to Morocco last year, we weren’t allowed out of the hotels and training centers at this time for security reasons, and it makes sense. It may only be around 6:30 in the evening, but the streets are populated like its 3:30 in the morning. Police have to have breakfast, too, you know, and, fortunately, so do criminals. You still have to be careful, though.

The worst time, however, is from about 4:30 onwards, what is generally referred to by volunteers as “Unhappy Hour.” This is when all the people who usually like to smoke or drink coffee and haven’t been able to for about twelve hours just can’t take it anymore. Have you ever had a friend who tried to give up smoking and you had to tiptoe around him or her because of the nicotine withdrawal emotional swings? Well, imagine that your friend is actually several thousand people, and that’s what it’s like in your town right before breakfast. Particularly in places where people have to drive or pay for things, but I once went over to a friend’s house to watch the Moroccan national team play against Togo, and we got together with the rest of his extended family and neighbors to have a little soccer game of our own afterwards. I have never seen so much fighting, arguing, and general bile in all my time in this country. An hour later, though, and we were eating baghareer and joking like we’d just gone on a picnic.

It’s like that every day.

You Can't Spell "Tunisia" without the Word "Tun"

As you undoubtedly know, a tun (or tunne, as you sometimes see) is a large cask for holding liquids, especially wine, ale, or beer. You might not think that there’s really much of a relationship between the two, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Back in college I interned for a semester in the Office of Science and Technology Cooperation of the US Department of State. In my first few days I had the honor of setting up my good friend and mentor, Bob, with some much needed translations before he left for meetings in the Grand Maghrib. He then said something to me that was probably the supercoolest and most vexing thing I’ve ever heard: “If I’d know about you two weeks ago, you’d be on that plane with me.”

He brought me back a bottle of Tunisian wine – which is still sitting back home in the States – and thus began my lifelong ambition to go to Tunisia, the home of Carthage and Tataouine. Five years later, my lifelong ambition was achieved. The following is taken from my adventure journal, edited for time, content, and to fit your screen.

11 August 2009

8:46 PM. Today I arrived in Tunisia, the twenty-third country I’ve been in – though it almost didn’t happen. I got to Casablanca on Sunday, expecting to meet mom and Paulo that night to leave Monday (yesterday) morning. They never came. The reason for this is that they’d changed my flight reservation for Tuesday so as to take advantage properly of my vacation and weekend time. We didn’t. They went off to Jedida by themselves, I hung around in a hotel in Casablanca. They showed up last night and we left this morning.

I still did my best to stuff it up. On putting our bags in the taxi I realized that I didn’t have my carte de sejour. Even so, I managed to get through every checkpoint at the airport but the last one without being noticed. He asked me if I live in Morocco and where my carte was. I told him that I do and that I forgot it. He gave me a look that said, “Seriously, give me your carte.” I gave him a look that said, “This is about as pathetic as I can be, I really don’t have it.” The lesson here is that when you go to leave the country, make sure that you bring the documents showing that you are, in fact, a legal resident there. After a little more talking and being pathetic, he asked me what my number is. I didn’t know. He tapped his keyboard a bit and then asked me a few questions to verify that the records he was reading were mine, I answered them, and he let me go. The lesson there is that it’s possible to go through customs without your carte. They’ve got your information. It’s probably best to bring it anyway, unless you particularly fancy feeling like a maroon.

Our take off was delayed, and we had to wait forever to get our luggage, so I suggested that we just go straight to Kairouan and skip Carthage. A lot of people would probably disagree with this, as Carthage is probably the most historically significant piece of Tunisia. That’s true, but, first, I’ve never really cared that much about Roman history when compared to some of the other great histories of the world. The coolest thing about Carthage was its total destruction and Rome’s message to the world that if you mess with the empire, you’ll be lost to the world for all time. It’s strange then to go and see it, and disappointing even to learn the part left out of most history texts: shortly thereafter the Romans rebuilt and populated Carthage. I prefer to think of Carthage as salted earth and a poor strategic use of elephants.

The country of Tunisia, however, is quite pleasant. We’ve seen mostly rocky scrubland, similar to that on the plains outside of Azrou and Khenifra, but greener. In fact, as mom likes to say, it looks a lot like “Morocco with a fresh coat of paint.” And from what we could see of Tunis from the highway it was a big, clean, shiny city. The little villages were similar to the ones just outside Fes, but they seemed brighter. There was trash but not quite as noticeable. The environment changes more quickly, however, and I expect it will be even more dramatic tomorrow.

The city of Kairouan reminds me a lot of Sefrou with a Chefchaouen paint job. It’s got an old medina and a ville nouvelle, but neither is really all that interesting. Cute, though. The shops all sell things only a little different from stuff you get in the Kingdom: leather, pottery, metal, soccer jerseys. We wandered around looking for a restaurant that doesn’t exist and being taken to another that wouldn’t serve us (until later, they said), but we got to walk and stretch our legs. The atmosphere is a lot like a coastal town – Jedida, or maybe Essaouira – without much noise or traffic. We had a handful of people offer to be our guides, which I eventually convinced to go away.

Which is the last thing: language. So far, it’s been a little rough, and I think I’m really indebted to the handful of Fos-ha words I’ve picked up. I got along ok with the hotel clerk, and managed to make our self-appointed guides leave, all in Arabic (I should say, Darija). But their accents are hard to understand, and one or more may have spoken the Moroccan dialect. Mom’s right, though: it will be a serious test of my ability to put all I’ve learned to use outside of Morocco, and to see if I have something that might be of use in the future. A lot of the time, though, I’m letting Paulo use his French so that he feels more in control of what’s going on. We’ll see how that changes as we get down south and in the desert.

12 August 2009

10:25 PM. Today I went from kind-of-desert to definitely-desert – though I’d expected to hit pinnacle-of-desert at the end. Tozeur, however, is only assuredly-desert. Perhaps tomorrow, but I get ahead of myself.

We began this morning with an awful breakfast (Tunisian quince jam is no mishmash, though maybe it’s just the high-class hotel), and went to the Grand Mosque of Kairouan. It’s allegedly the fourth holiest Islamic city (after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem). That remains to be seen, but the mosque was incredible. It has spiral-ridged domes that I’ve never seen before in Morocco, though are everywhere here. As we travel, we’ve also noticed that some mosques have the three-ball crowning on their minarets, whereas others have a star and crescent. Some have both.

I also made some linguistic observations. There is no گ in Tunisian Arabic, though there is a lot of the “g” sound. They use this letter: ڨ, and don’t make “v” sounds (they just do ف like in Fos-ha). I’ve learned a few new words, like نزل for “hotel.”

And I’ve begun learning about Tunisian food. At lunch in Gafsa we ate rice, lubiya (not as good as Middle Atlas), a dish of spiced beef called kamounia (with cumin, obviously), and an eggplant salad with oil and spices called shlada meshwiya. For dinner I ate camel (not great) and tried some Tunisian tagine. It’s like a big omelette, not as good as the Moroccan kind. I did get to try the harrissa, whis is fantastic, and taste Tunisian olives, which are smaller than Moroccans and harder, but with an incredibly rich taste.

That was all in Tozeur, where we got to drive through the palm oasis and go out to watch the sun set over the shotte. Perhaps we just couldn’t see enough of the shotte to appreciate it, or the experience was altered by the artificiality of the fabulous Belvedere Rocks. We’ll get our fill of the Shotte El Jerid tomorrow as we drive over it for more than an hour.

I also bought my souvenir, which is certainly more than I should have paid, but precisely what I wanted: a turban just like the one Indiana Jones wears in Raiders of the Lost Ark (some of which was filmed here, I hear). Now I can feel like I’ve been to a desert country.

Final thoughts: Tunisia is incredibly flat, aside from the measly ridges rising out of the kind-of-desert. The rear wiper (not present) is broken on the car causing the mechanism to turn constantly and not be able to shut off. The noise that the motor makes every ten seconds or so will drive me insane before this trip is finished.

13 August 2009

9:46 PM. Today was the longest day of our Tunisian voyage so far (though tomorrow may prove to be longer), travelling from Tunisia’s almost western-most frontier to its almost eastern-most.

We left Tozeur after another pitiable breakfast, striking out from the palms and into the desert. Almost immediately we entered the Shotte El-Jerid. Here there was no vegetation – only sand and a burned out tour bus. And salt. The El-Jerid is a salt pan (or some similar geological term), as evinced by the salt creek bubbling alongside the causeway. Salt crystals form wherever the water collects, often forming a crust over the water like a layer of ice in the winter. And the water, for whatever reason, is red – ranging from a soft pink to a deep purple Kool-Aid color. And it was also here that Luke Skywalker brooded over Tataouine’s two moons, so we took plenty of angsty teenager photos.

We continued past the shotte, passing unattended grazing camels and sand/salt sculptures made to look like them until we reached the town of Douz. Douz is home to Tunisia’s largest desert date palmery and borders on quintessential Sahara desert. Mom and I took a little ride with Ali, our guide, and Ali Baba and Mohammad, our camels (mine and hers, respectively), most likely so named as soon as I asked what their names were. It was delightfully touristy, having men on horses and camels ride up and offer photograph opportunities, and men on mopeds offering coke, but they didn’t make us dress up like caravan herders like some Italians near us. And I rode a camel in the dune sea of the Sahara Desert, even if it was only a half hour in the “coastal waters.” It was pretty cool.

From Douz we started heading into the mountains and to the highlighted part of today’s trip: Matmata, Luke Skywalker’s home. The ground got at once more desert-like and more vegetated – with little oases spotting the hills and the occasional grass. We passed some troglodyte houses and finally arrived in Matmata. After completely blowing through town, we were accosted by Mustafa, a self-appointing guide who took us first to his house (to see a Berber house, I guess), and then to the Sidi Driss Hotel, where Luke lived with his aunt and uncle. It was great to walk around and see all the doors and windows I recognized. We stayed for lunch, but it never came. They had nothing in the shops about Star Wars.

So we ate elsewhere, and were treated respectfully (rather than like livestock rolling off a tour bus) and ate a lovely meal al fresco. We sampled brik, a kind of poached egg, parsley, and potatoes in an eggroll-fried crust, and Tunisia’s couscous, a bit courser than the Moroccan kind and with a spicy tomato base. Very good, though I’m partial to what I get back home. We left Star Wars country and headed on, glad to have seen it and completely ready to go.

Aside from mom being flagged over randomly by police and then sent on immediately upon being recognized as foreign, we had no incident on reaching the island of Djerba – supposedly the Land of the Lotus Eaters. (I don’t care much about Rome, but the Odyssey is my bag.) The ferry is a short fifteen minutes, and the island has a very Newport or Block Island feel. We pulled up just after sunset and walked to the port, photographed the fake pirate boats, and ate dinner. With dinner we tried ojja, another egg dish, this one of seafood with poached eggs in a tomato sauce, and had some crepes. It was delicious. We also discovered the most poorly translated menu of all time. I got one to take home.

Finally, I popped into a souvenir shop to get something for Salma and got into a fantastic conversation with Mohammad, the clerk. We talked about tea services, rosewater sprinklers, horses and elephants, and almost everything else. It was great because he definitely spoke Tunisian Arabic, but we understood each other really well.

And a final note of linguistic discovery: it may be that “g” and “k” sounds are nearly the same. The towns of Gabes and Kebili were written on street signs as ڨابس and ڨبلي , both with the Tunisian ڨ . The town of Kettana, however, starts with a ك . And ث may be pronounced like an “s.” An ice cream company, ثلجة , was written in French as “Selja.”

Somehow, while trying to operate the windshield wiper fluid, mom unintentionally shut down my nemesis: the rear wiper, which by this time in its eternal struggle with an imaginary wiper against imaginary rain had taken on the tone of a very angry machine.

14 August 2009

10:26 PM. Tonight is my last night in Tunisia – for this trip, at least. I turned out to be right yesterday when I wrote that today would be the longest drive. We went a good 400 kilometers (I think) from Houmt Souk to Nabeul, a little town part of the Hammamet touristopolis, almost all of it pretty uneventful. We rode the ferry back across from Djerba and I was almost tempted into buying a GStar hat, we drove by endless miles of olive groves and tried to photograph the little roadside gas stands, and mom got pulled over again at a random inspection stop.

Our highlight for the day was El Jem, a tiny town with the largest Roman arena in Africa (and in terms of its preservation, more glorious than the Coliseum in Rome). Approaching the town, the ruins tower over everything else, much like a modern stadium would. In fact, it was a lot like any other arena I’ve been in, aside from being 2000 years old and the site of violent ritual death. It was also absolutely amazing. You could walk up into the stands and down into the gladiator holding dungeons.

And I finally found some of those guardians of the bey to get as presents for the Assekours and Seghirs – and one for myself. I didn’t bargain any, but I got a free desert rose (I think for speaking Arabic and being Moroccan).

Finally, we drove the rest of the afternoon and into the evening to Hammamet. It turns out that this is the vacation capital of Tunisia, and was more packed with tourists – both foreign and domestic – than I’ve ever seen here in Tunisia or elsewhere. We also didn’t have a reservation anywhere, but they found a place in the sacred tour book. We spent the next hour trying to find it, learning, at this time, that it was in Nabeul, or “North Hammamet.” Eighteen kilometers later and there were more tourists, and no sign of the Hotel Alya. In the end, we settled for a different place, from a different tour book, which required driving back across Nabeul to find. We found it and had a lovely dinner on the beach. No new foods, though.

On the road, I noticed a sign for the town of Zrig, written as زريق . I don’t know if it was just missing a dot over the final ق , but if it wasn’t, it’s strange to see that letter transliterated as a “g.” I know that Kairouan is spelled القيروان .

And the biggest shock has been here in the Greater Hammamet Area: humidity. It feels like noontime in Atlanta in the middle of the night, an exaggeration only because I haven’t felt that ever while living in Morocco. I don’t know if I’m going to miss East Coast summers or not.

15 August 2009

12:14 PM. I’ve just taken my seat now on the Tunisair jet ready to take me back to Morocco. Today has been spent almost entirely in the airport, but it’s given me a chance to reflect on this experience.

I also had a most amazing encounter sitting at a little café and meeting another American – a Peace Corps volunteer just CoSed from Mauritania – sitting next to me and having the same sandwich. He’s on his way to Casablanca to see a bit of the country before returning to the States and whatever fortunes await an RPCV. We might even meet in Fes.

And now I’m here thinking about all I’ve done and seen in Tunisia. Mom made a good point last night when she said that it seemed like we’ve been doing a lot of driving, and we did that, but we also saw a lot of the country. And though we probably spent as much time each day in the car as we did out, that’s where we got to experience the desert, the mountains, the palmeries and olive groves, the little towns and homemade gas stations.

We pretty much did or saw only one thing in each city or town where we stopped, and there are plenty of places left where we never went, but I enjoyed what I saw and did. The people were friendly, and it was fun to actually be a Moroccan. I got by with Darija, which bodes well for a PC Moroccan’s chances after service when it comes to being a useful “Arabic” speaker. Almost everyone I talked to thought I’m either full-on Moroccan or that at least one of my parents has to be (usually my father if they saw me with mom).

And so the question remains: am I glad to have come? My answer is yes. Not only is it a new place to add to my list, but I’m content with the way I saw all that I did. I ate as many different Tunisian foods as possible, I spoke the closest form of the local language as I could, and I never bought anything without first learning about it. The man taught me how to wear the desert turban, my friend went to great lengths about rosewater sprinklers (and everything else in his shop), and I forwent bargaining over guardians of the bey in exchange for learning about their history. I even demanded to know the harvest year before buying a box of dates.

Would I come back? Tunisia won’t be at the top of my travel lists, but that’s because there are so many other places I still want to see. If the opportunity presents itself, I’ll certainly take it. I haven’t seen the deep desert or Cap Bon, Carthage or Tunis, and I’d like to spend more time in some of the places I did see, especially Kairouan and Djerba. All that, however, will have to wait until the next time, inshallah.

On Language, Part IV: Berber

We need to start this with a brief talk about that word. “Berber” comes from the Greek word barbori, meaning “someone who does not speak Greek.” A lot of people will tell you that it comes from the word “barbarian,” though, if you think about this, that would be a little egotistical of us to think that it was English that define this ethnic group, especially as they’ve been on the world scene since long before anyone was speaking English. No, the truth is that our “barbarian” comes from the same root. This is a lot like the evolution debate. Humans aren’t descendent from monkeys – no one wants to think that – we both come from the same place. By the same token, Berbers aren’t barbarians.

Still, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from believing that “Berber” is a derogatory term, a situation that isn’t helped by the way it’s been used in the past. Rather than represent the complex and storied culture of the indigenous peoples of Northwestern Africa, it has come to suggest all the worst of Orientalist prejudice. As a response, activists and progressives have proffered the word Amazigh, the Berber word for “Berber.” The reasoning is simple: Berbers are backwards, uneducated peasants, Amazigh are proud mountain people. Although we can disprove the origins of the word “Berber,” we can’t ignore the fact that it’s been used for the purposes of subjugating the collective consciousness of this people, and, despite the fact that the Amazigh word for “foreigner” literally means “Roman,” we can support their re-identification by using “Amazigh.”

It’s beside the point, anyway, since we’re talking about language here, and there’s really no such thing as the Amazigh language. It’s more like the scores of Amazigh languages, which is the biggest problem we have. There are some universal words, like “bread,” “water,” and “foreigner,” but where you have one ethnic identity, you actually have at least five distinct languages. In the north, most Amazigh speak Terrifite (taken from the Rif Mountains). You’ve got Tassousite in the Souss Region of the Anti-Atlas, Tashleheit in the High Atlas, and Tamazight in the Middle Atlas. Finally, there’s even a separate term for the language spoken by the Amazigh in the Sahara: Tasaharouite.

Even then you’re misleading yourself if you think that with only five languages, someone might be able to master all this. The history of the Amazigh is one of mountain isolation, and, as a result, you can go thirty kilometers down the road and you’ll find Shleu (another Amazigh word meaning “Amazigh”) saying something completely different. Some people claim that if you speak one Amazigh language natively, you can understand the gist of any, but I doubt that. I’ve seen my host brothers (who speak Tamazight) watching a tv show in Tassousite, and they have about as much clue what’s going on as I do.

Imagine then, that you’re an American Peace Corps volunteer trying to figure all this out. Youth development volunteers like myself all learn Darija, but a little more than half of the small business development, and the significant majority of health and environment volunteers I know learn to speak Amazigh. This is because we have spring and summer camps with kids from all over the country, and they tend to live in much smaller communities (and stay there). It can be a real problem, though, when they do travel. Our spring camps include volunteers from all sectors, and we were fortunate enough to have two environment volunteers who spoke Tashleheit. Unfortunately, not a single kid in camp could understand it. Granted, it was an English immersion camp, but let’s not kid ourselves, they were left to the mercy of the other volunteers whenever they wanted to say just about anything.

The worst, though, is training. You can’t go five miles without finding a new Amazigh dialect, so imagine what happens when you train in a town on one side of the country, and then find yourself serving on the other side of the mountains. Most everything you just learned has to be unlearned and then replaced with something new. This goes for grammar as well as vocabulary, since, being a proletarian household language, there aren’t really any “rules” – only generally accepted forms and structures. Anything goes, really, as long as everyone else knows what you’re trying to say. I know a guy near me who trained in the Azilal Province, and he couldn’t say anything to his host family when he showed up here, and, already three months into his Peace Corps service, he had to deal with his town asking him why he couldn’t speak.

But if it’s crippling on mobility, it makes up for it in spades when it comes to integration. If you ever wanted to ruin someone else’s service, all you have to do is show up in their site and speak the local dialect. Until that volunteer leaves, and probably longer, they’ll never hear the end of people in their site talking about that other volunteer, who came and visited for just a few hours, and how great he or she is for speaking Shleuha, more likely than not with the added “better than you.”

I don’t speak Tamazight, but I’ve learned, and Dr Peter Venkman would undoubtedly agree with me, that when someone asks you if you speak Shleuha, you say, “Yes.” At first (and we’re talking within my first days in site), I would make the very reasonable response that I’d just gotten to Morocco, that youth development volunteers need to speak Darija, that I hope to learn the one and then the other but don’t want to mix them together by learning both at the same time. “No,” they would reply. “You need to learn Amazigh.” Now, when someone asks me, I just say, “Sure, etch agharom” (“eat bread”). If they press me, “Su ahman” (“drink water”). It doesn’t matter if they just asked me if I think the weather is hot, if I want to go home to see my parents in America, if I’m on the way to the hammam, and they don’t seem to really care, either. I’ll say everything else in Darija, including “I don’t know what you’re talking about” in response to anything said in Tamazight, and I’ve never once had a person tell me that I don’t know enough. In fact, they tell their friends that I have supernatural abilities. Even if I try to say that, in reality, I only know about twenty words, they have no desire to believe in anything other than my absolute fluency.

Which, unfortunately, isn’t likely to ever actually occur. Despite the aesthetic and intellectual attraction of the Amazigh languages, they really can’t be called “essential.” Granted, there are some people here you’ll meet who don’t speak a word of Arabic, but, on the whole, that’s a very small minority. The truth is, that, being so community specific and informal, someone who speaks a dialect will invariably have to speak another language during their service. And, to top it all, the Tamazight spoken here in Freedonia is so full of Arabic that I can pretty much understand the general idea of anything that my family is talking about, as they only speak when they’re talking to me. And the few times that I’ve gone and learned something in Amazigh, I’ve come back to my host family and repeated it for them, only to be told that that’s not our Tamazight.

I’m glad I know what I do, especially when I can impress my friends here with a few words, but I don’t think I’m going to be an Amazigh scholar when all is said and done. And I don’t think my community expects me to, either. They probably won’t ever stop talking to me about how great Jawad (Josh) was for knowing how to speak Shleuha, but I think that all they really want to see is some validation of their culture. They speak Darija the majority of the time, too.