I've been in Morocco for two years now. I've seen a lot of places, met a lot of people, and done a lot of things, and I've written about the better parts of it for your entertainment. What I've never talked about, though, is the coming. I didn't wake up here from a coma; I knew in advance and chose this destiny. I spent a lot of time before leaving telling myself not to have any preconceptions, but it turns out that I'm more like Ray Stantz than I'd realized, and try as I might, once in a while an idea or two would pop in there. Sometimes I pictured the Stay Puff'd Marshmallow Man. Other times I didn't. These are a few of those others:
1- We've talked about cats a lot, but I like cats, so we can always talk about them a little more. I've had a lot of cats in my life, and always felt like I had a pretty good relationship with them. At the very least, if you'd asked me what a cat is like, I would have felt confident in answering you. Not as much anymore. The cats here are different (the cats here, for all intents and purposes, are squirrels), and perhaps that's a convenient microcosm for the world of cultural anthropology. Neither the living environment nor the history of cat-human interactions is not the same between America and Morocco, and thus their societies have evolved in different directions and formed what we could very anthropomorphically call cultures (or, if this was a children's cartoon, “cat-tures”). Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification, but that's essentially how it works: culture is the by-product of the collected history of a certain group's stimuli and responses, which, over time, becomes an entity in itself. On the other hand, I could just be spending too much time with cats. One thing I know for certain, though, is that Amal knows more about sustainable development than I do, and she's always there to remind me. I like to pick up cats and pet them, but she doesn't, and she's happy to bite me if I forget. And that's important because development needs to be based on the needs of the local community, and not the desires of the developer. She's a sharp cat.
2- The stereotypical image of a Peace Corps volunteer is probably along the lines of dirty, long-haired hippie. A bleeding heart who's too concerned with saving the world to worry about how long it's been since he washed his 100% all-natural pants or had a decent shave. I would have taken exception to all this, but the reality is that you all might be closer to the truth than you think. My hair has certainly never been as long as it has while serving (in no small part due to the fact that I still haven't been able to convince any barber that it's full of cowlicks and physically cannot be styled in any way that Moroccan dudes like), nor have I ever had as high of a bearded to clean-shaven ratio in my life. More importantly, what would you answer if I asked how many days in a row have you worn the clothes you're in now? Probably not many, and that's what I would have said two and a half years ago, but now I take a shower every four or five days (at the best), and that's even including when I'm in Rabat for trainings and staying at fancy hotels. I've been riding this one pair of pants for about a week now, and I'm planning on taking them all the way through until I peace out of Freedonia. I'm not proud; I just don't really notice it anymore. As for hippie, well, we sure didn't sing Kumbaya on the plane ride over, but I'd also never put patches in my jeans before living in Morocco, so you be the judge.
3- It might not seem like it to people reading this, but I've usually got a lot I want to say. Unfortunately, for these past two years in Morocco, I've been largely on my own. It's one of the hardest parts of the Peace Corps to explain – and deal with – that you can be living with people but be by yourself. A big part of it is language, though culture plays a large part (sometimes you just want to talk about things that you're interested in, and small town Morocco and small city America just aren't always the same in those areas), and there's also the fact that every night I'm back at my house by myself. All volunteers deal with this loneliness in different ways. Some drink, some leave, some make new friends. Me? I just talk to myself. This is something I've been doing for a long time, actually. Whenever I want to think of a word in a different language or using a different pronunciation, I have to say it out loud, which is weird, so I don't. But I have to move my mouth in the shape of the words, which, in the end, is just about as weird. And so there I am, walking around Freedonia by myself, and moving my mouth around like I'm having a very serious conversation about whatever it is that I'm thinking about in my head. From time to time I'll catch myself doing this, which is very distressing, so I concentrate on keeping my mouth closed and before I know it I realize I've been having a silent conversation with myself about how ridiculous I must look to everyone walking past me in the street. This cycle plagued me for a good chunk of my service until I final hit on the perfect solution: chewing gum. Unfortunately, ever since I had braces in high school, I haven't (emotionally) been able to chew gum, but I figure you don't really need to actually be chewing anything if all you're trying to do is seem like you have a good reason to be moving your mouth, so I jut pretend like I'm the poster child for Big League Chew whenever I'm out of the house. At first I had to think about it, but steadily it became more and more natural until I'll frequently be out in the street chewing away without any knowledge of what's going on in my mouth. And that's started to become problematic, too, because now my jaw's working pretty much all day without any respect for my traditional control of its movements, and it hurts. I should probably just go back to talking to myself.
4- During my Peace Corps application interview, they told me to be ready to have free time, so I came over ready to catch up on my hobbies. I planned on learning to play the guitar (or some local variety thereof) and finishing the zombie-themed role-playing game a friend and I had started ages ago. While in country I decided to construct a mosaic from broken pieces of tile and to design brilliantly hilarious shirts for the other members of my training group. I didn't do any of those things, and I can't really say that I filled that time with other more productive ventures. I did some writing, I learned to cook some local dishes, and I pursued a lot of nonsense for my fellow volunteers, but my number one pastime turned out to be watching illegally pirated films. I don't think I've ever been so up-to-date with American pop culture than when I wasn't even living in America. No matter the movie, or whether it's even been released yet, you can find a dude walking around the cafes selling a copy. And it's not just the blockbusters but also the classics (and completely nonexistent titles like Titanic II). I found copies of A Fish Called Wanda and Coming to America at the local pirated movie shack, which is a great place to go shopping on a Friday night, as long as the guy will play a scene or two so you know it's got an English soundtrack. The Peace Corps is a great place for television shows, too. Although your internet tv doesn't work in Morocco, your torrent downloaders do, and any time volunteers get together it's like the floor of the NYSE, swapping season two of Lost for the most recent episode of Community and an Uwe Boll film to be named later.
5- My name is Duncan, which I'm hoping is coming as a great surprise to any of my more faithful readers. My full name is Duncan Palfrey de la Feld; you might not have known that. In either case, you know that in Morocco – aside from when I go to English language summer camp (and sometimes even then) – they call me Amin. I'm cool with this, too. Amin means a couple of things, but generally comes out as “trustworthy,” which is great defense when people don't believe the many things that I like to make up (“What's my name? That's right, you can trust me.”). There have been times, however, when I haven't been happy to be Amin, which is usually when, after introducing myself as Amin and a foreigner, someone asks me what my “real name” is. Obviously, I tell them Duncan (this is one of the few areas when I generally don't make things up), and it's usually settled at that or with a few attempts to pronounce it. But every once in a while I'll get someone who tells me that Amin is a great improvement. This makes Hulk mad. First of all, Duncan is an awesome name. It means “dark warrior” (to be fair, “dark-skinned warrior” – “swarthy warrior”), not pansy “trustworthy.” Boy scouts are trustworthy; dark warriors kick ass and take names. I'm happy to be Amin, especially if the best you can make of my real name is “Junkel,” but just so long as we all agree that Duncan is the most empirically bitching name available.
6- I love to travel – I've been to twenty-four countries so far (some legally and some not) – and now I'm starting to worry that I'll never be able to travel again. Not because I won't have any money or time, but because I don't know if, after having been a volunteer, I'll have the ability to be a tourist. The most incredible part of living in Morocco has been living in Morocco. I see all these tourists (some of whom are friends of mine) and I think to myself, “They have no idea what this country is about.” It's not really their fault (unless you hold not joining the Peace Corps against them), and they probably don't think of their chance to be in Morocco as anything short of a lifetime opportunity, but from where I'm standing, a lot of them are just wasting their money. But by knowing this, I can now never take a trip to a new and interesting culture and not feel that I too am wasting my time, but at the same time I don't think I'll be able to be a Peace Corps volunteer everywhere. I don't know, I don't know if I'll have enough time.
7- During my interviews I was told that volunteers are given a stipend roughly equal to the salary of a local person doing the same work. That is entirely untrue. My closest parallel is a teacher, and being a teacher is a great profession in Morocco. From my experience, you can live in a big house, have a car, and raise a family on a teacher's salary, which I certainly could not do with my living allowance. The idea of the living allowance, though, is for us to live generally at the same level as the people in our communities, so it's better that we don't get very much (never mind the fact that almost no one would believe that my income is anything less than infinite, but that's a story for another day). If you want the luxuries usually enjoyed by expatriates – cooks, maids, microwaves, western-style toilets – you'll have to pay out of whatever funds you had before you got here, or whatever you can guilt your parents into sending you. Otherwise, it's a holiday in Cambodia for you, which really isn't all that bad. Yes, there is poverty in Morocco, though not everywhere, and yes, there are people who live each day thinking about how they're going to eat tomorrow, and those aren't all beggars, but in general you can get what you need without having to struggle to find a way to pay for it (with the exclusion of medical care, though that too is a story for another day). Nevertheless, a lot of volunteers still ride their monthly allowances down to the end. A lot of that goes towards cheese, and alcohol, and recharging their phones, and it's taught me a very important lesson: I'm a wicked cheapskate. You can't get cheese in Freedonia, and I won't spend the exorbitant prices either for the cheese or the taxi rides to Fes and the grocery store. I've never been a drinker, but that too is partly because I was too cheap in college to get interested, and I can't remember the last time I made a phone call that wasn't absolutely necessary and couldn't be said in just a text message, and that I couldn't walk across town to say in person. I've learned to pinch centimes in ways that would make a mul souk tip his hat, and not because I have to, either – I have mountains of dough in my Moroccan bank, enough to buy my ticket home entirely in cash – but because it's just my nature, and it's made me a better person. Not a better person than I was before, but a better person than you. I go so far as to save the laundry water to use for flushing the toilet, and that's environmental awareness you can take to the bank.
8- I've talked a bit about fashion in Morocco, and don't think I'm bragging if I say I've become a bit of a Peace Corps folk hero for my ability to wear incredible Moroccan G-Star clothing – it's just the truth. And like countless volunteers before me, as my bags get packed they're becoming more and more full of Moroccan clothes. However, there's a lot more Freshness than traditional with me than you usually find with the typical volunteer. And they ask me what I'm doing; I'm never going to wear that stuff in America. And they don't get it that G-Star isn't ironic for me anymore. I take a walk in the Rabat medina souk and honestly think how awesome it would be to walk around declaring “Lost for Life” on my chest, and I would, too, if only I wasn't such a cheapskate.
9- I've faced a lot of obstacles in the Peace Corps, but the biggest is probably the realization that I don't think I really like youth. It's not a moral opposition, but more of an irrational fear that originated from the fight or flight choices I made back in high school. Let's face it: youth are terrifying. Of all the potentially dangerous areas in Freedonia, the only place I ever actively avoided was the one short stretch of road and small souk right in front of Mohammad the Sixth High. I would regularly – and happily – walk long out of the way if it meant I wouldn't be seen by the kids always hanging around outside of the gates, which in my town means literally scaling cliffs rather than face a sixteen-year-old. Regardless of all this, however, I've come to love youth development and the kids that I've worked with for two years. This has had no effect at all on my policy of hiding from them as much as possible, but it's nonetheless a genuine respect for them. Despite my emotional handicaps, however, we've managed to do some great activities, like the supercool Rocket Bottles Project I just did with Andrew and Zack of making and launching soda bottle rockets filled with water and air, and it's because of this that I feel I deserve my status as Golden Child of second year youth development. I mean, youth development volunteer that's afraid of youth? The heartwarming screenplay practically writes itself.
10- I'm not an overly athletic person (that's really the domain of my younger brother), though I'm passable enough that I can feel shocked to be picked last, and can even sometimes be a sort of mutant superman to my nerdy, nonathletic friends. Coming here – especially as a youth development volunteer – I not only expected but genuinely looked forward to all the soccer games I was going to play. First of all, I could probably compensate for my American ability by being bigger than the kids, and, more importantly, there was no way I wasn't going to develop the necessary technique playing soccer everyday to not be able to come back and school my little brother. Even if I didn't have these lofty goals, there was no way I wasn't going to be playing, and so you can imagine my surprise as I recount to you that in my 27 months in Morocco, I have played exactly four games of soccer. One was a bit of after-tagine playing around out at the lake (I scored a goal), one was the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em attempt to get some kids to play frisbee when they clearly weren't going to sit still and learn English (I scored a bunch of goals, but half the players were under ten years old), and one was a pick-up game in the town's central park after the US victory over Algeria in the World Cup (I scored another goal, but all anyone is going to remember is that I was still wearing the patriotic face paint I'd put on at the cafe). The last game was my one attempt at a pre-breakfast Ramadan game, which was a lot more like a two-hour fight, and it's arguable that I played in it. It was more like I huddled in a corner of the field and prayed for the call to prayer so desperately that I almost converted. I sure got to watch a lot of soccer, though (and I'm immensely proud to say that I never called it “football”), but I never got in to the Moroccan league, probably because no one seems to be really all that interested. There are only two teams that are of really great note, Raja and Wydad, and they're both from Casablanca, so who cares about them? Every once in a while we get some new graffiti for the Fes team (that's what Fatal Tigers means, if you recall from long ago; they wear yellow and black stripes on their jerseys and apparently have a somewhat indifferent outlook concerning their destinies), but there are only two teams anyone in Freedonia wants to hear about: Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. For my part, I couldn't care less about Spanish soccer, but I did finally find a Moroccan team I could believe in. Honoring the glorious history of Morocco's ocean renegades, the Salé team (Association Sportive de Salé)has the simultaneously most awesome and most unfortunate name in all of soccer: ASS Pirates. I bought a jersey.
11- It could be that I spend all my time with youth, or it could be that the vast majority of my colleagues have just graduated from college, but whatever the reason, something about being a youth development volunteer has caused me to revert to the maturity level of a thirteen year old. Granted, it's a really witty thirteen year old – kind of the thirteen year old we all wish we could have been when we were thirteen years old – but to give you an example, the first thing my training group asked our language teacher how to say I Darija is “that's what she said” (“dak shi li galt,” for those of you interested). Then again, it's pretty entrenched in Peace Corps Morocco identity that each sector has a unique personality. Environmental education volunteers are your stereotypical mountain people that don't shave for months and actively seek to live in the remotest possible sites, small business volunteers are sophisticated and goal oriented and like to get together for cocktail parties and brunch, health volunteers may not actually exist – at least I've seen no conclusive evidence to that effect – and youth development is known for having training sessions on how to play games. During our Mid-Service Medicals and Miscellaneous Methodology Meeting, the small business volunteers were having a session on international marketing strategies while we were staging a flash mob to the Black Eyed Peas' “I Gotta [sic]* Feeling.” So it's probably not entirely our fault that we spend our free time laughing about farts and telling dirty jokes, and, in case you're wondering, one of the best resources for dirty jokes is Darija itself. Every year we get summer cam scholarships, which every kid and association in town wants a part of, so we get non-stop requests for “folders” for a month or two at the end of the school year. And how do you say folder in Arabic? “Milf.” And, of course, hanging up the announcements about camp scholarships requires going out and purchasing peneez (thumbtacks). It's not limited to youth development volunteers or dar shebab activities, though; anyone can join in on the fun. Just do like I do every morning and tell the world “I woke up.” “Foqt min na'ass.” I guarantee it'll brighten your day.
*As a matter of principle, allow me to state categorically that I am a full supporter of informal speech, as well as using said in writing, with the exception of using numbers in the place of words (“Got 2 go” is going to be the downfall of modern civilization). That being said, “gotta,” as in, “I Gotta Feeling,” is an unstressed truncation of “got to,” as opposed to “got a” (meaning “in possession of”), which would be written as “got a.” Thus, the song's title is best paraphrased as “I Have to Feeling.” Damn kids, with their music.
12- I've always thought of myself as somewhat of a gentleman, and, if popular superlative awards are any indicator, I've probably always been right. And part of my well-documented gentility is the lack of bad words in my vocabulary. It's not that I've been overly opposed to foul language, it's just that I've always liked to think of myself as smarter than you, and that I can think of a much more scathing and demoralizing comment than a simple curse. Over the course of my service, however, a change has occurred, and I now find myself putting Popeye to shame. I'm convinced that it's largely the result of my linguistic impotence – that no matter how good I've gotten with Darijia I could never really get into a passionate fight – and thus I compensate with foul language. The only problem is that despite spending every day with the youth of Morocco, I don't actually know any bad words in Arabic, and so I'm forced to do what every meat head jock I've ever made fun of did: swear. And I imagine it's from there that it's gotten into my regular English, though I can't make any guarantees. Whatever the cause, it's gotten to the point where I'll drop an F Bomb as soon as look at you, and I'm starting to worry that I might not be able to do that when I get back home.
13- The first thing my mother said when she came to visit last summer was “you need to take a bath.” It's gotten me thinking about what she's going to say when I land at JFK in mid-November, and what she's going to say when we're eating Thanksgiving dinner a week later. It's not a question of Moroccan manners vs American manners, it's going to boil down to living by myself vs being a member of a society. If I want to eat dinner straight out of the pot, there's no one who's going to know, and if I don't want to wash my clothes for a few months, there's no one who's going to say anything. Every now and then I catch myself closing the bathroom door and wonder what I'm doing – it must be some sort of vestigial reaction. Very soon, though, and I'll be back in America and mooching off my family, which means I'll have to remember all of the polite society that was drilled into me as a kid, but I don't wager it'll be an easy transition. I should probably just stick to pizza and Chinese food until I get my fork legs back. Then again, I imagine that when Tom Hanks got back from his castaway island, he fired away a good burp or two himself.
14- Unlike some, I didn't join the Peace Corps looking for love, nor did I ever have need to change that goal during the course of my service. In fact, from what I've been told (and I know it's true for the youth development program), I'm the only volunteer that arrived in September 2008 in a relationship that will be leaving in November still involved with the same person (that's just a little shout out to the girl with long black wavy hair). Still, they set us up to expect to be bombarded by proposals (because the Peace Corps volunteer mantle is a visible aura of charisma, and it's the easiest way to send your children to America), but even if they didn't, who's not going to want what I've got after they've seen me in my G-Star G-Pants? In reality, there were a few girls who flirted pretty hard (though the chick from the dentist's office might honestly have been really excited about my teeth), but not a single proposal. Nor did any fathers come up and take a stab at me. It could be that, not having converted to Islam, I'm still off-limits (Muslim girls aren't supposed to marry non-Muslim men; they say it's because you can be sure that a true Muslim – being a God-fearing man – will necessarily protect and respect any woman, whether Muslim or not, but the real truth is that's it's just a matter of eliminating the potential for inheritance problems), but I honestly don't think that was the reason. They could easily just ask, “Why don't you convert and marry my daughter?” No, I think the real truth is that the dar shebab gave Salma and I a wedding when she came, and say what you will about Morocco, there's apparently a “no home wrecking” rule in place. And it was just after Salma left that I noticed the pack of girls who hang out on the main street weren't whistling at me or calling me over to talk anymore, which is too bad because I secretly loved that they did that. For gender development reasons, not because my ego is that fragile that it needs to be stroked by lusty teenagers. I hung up the “will you marry me, Duncan” poster the lady volunteers made for our summer camp boy band performance to take care of that. I turns out that's the only proposal I got. Then again, the other day I showed up to the dar shebab early, and the director's wife was hanging around outside with some of her friends, and, as I stood there awkwardly waiting for someone to unlock the front door, they got to talking about me. “Who's that?” “That's the American who teaches here.” “American? You should have him marry one of your daughters.” “He speaks Arabic” was all she said in reply, but maybe that's the key. Folks here might have been planning my married life ever since I set foot in country, I just wasn't listening.
15- I read a few books before coming to Morocco, all of which were written in the traditional, Orientalist style, and all of which loved to talk about Morocco's love of magic. Anywhere you look you'll find references to how Morocco is the only Islamic country that still believes in djinn, the spirit-like beings made of fire (as opposed to humans, who were made of clay). Although it's the route of the word, djinn are not genies; they're more of a parallel species living on an alternate plane of the same universe who generally ignore people, though sometimes they can be malevolent – especially when people invade their territory, such as uninhabited homes. They're servants of God, however, just like people, so they can be commanded by those with great knowledge of the Qur'an, and compelled to lead the faithful to hidden caches of ancient Berber treasure hidden in the mountains. Truth be told, though, I've heard absolutely nothing about magic from anyone in the country who wasn't a foreigner. In all my experience, no one puts food into their wells to keep them happy, no one uses the hands of the dead in their couscous for magical purposes, and no one is consulting village witches about their medical problems. Of course, there are people who do all of this I'm sure, but from what I've seen, it's a lot like voodoo in New Orleans, which is to say that everyone knows about it, and perhaps plays lip service just for good measure, but it's not something that happens with anywhere near the kind of frequency to call legitimate practice – certainly not on the scale of what's written about on the outside. Then again, maybe people just don't talk about it with me. Our G Star guy in Sefrou once wanted to give us his business card, so he did, and we immediately commented on how the picture on the card wasn't him, it was soccer megastar Ronaldo. He didn't seem to think that was all that strange, but, after about five minutes of ragging on him, he produced a second card, this one featuring himself standing in the entrance-way of his shop. That's a great card we said, but he was unconvinced. He explained that he didn't like to give out this card just in case it fell into the wrong hands – the “wrong hands” in this case being girls who might want to take his card to a magician and use it to put spells on him to do who knows what, so maybe there's more magic than I thought.
16- It's getting to be a pretty old story: Morocco is a lot colder than everyone thinks. Yes, there is desert, and yes, the temperature in the desert will regularly break 120 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the summer, and yes, being assigned to a site in one of these places is the most horrible fate imaginable, but the surprise is still always the cold. And, if you're fortunate enough to be placed in a cold site, you will learn the meaning of ultimate suffering. You know about bone-itis (though maybe not that I was already getting flares of it before Halloween), but let me leave you with one final story of just how cold it is. Like all Peace Corps volunteers, I've got my share of psychological disorders, and one those is the inability to take off my pants while still wearing a shirt. Call me crazy, but I think it looks weird when dudes are both beshirted and pantsless; the proportions are just all wrong. Conveniently, I don't often have to remove only my pants, but when I'm getting dressed for bed (or undressed for work), I have to take off my shirt first, then my pants, then put on the new pants, and lastly the new shirt. That's just the way I do things, and I'm sure anyone can see the obvious benefits. Life in Freedonia has been a different matter. It's so cold that it is literally impossible to be naked – even in the house. I can't take a shower (whether hot water is involved or not), and I can't take off both my pants and shirts (obviously, by this point I'm wearing more than one) at the same time. How cold is it? It's so cold that it cures my neuroses (Yakov Smirnoff said that), and when it's cold enough that you're making clinical breakthroughs, it's time to go home.
