The Hammam and Man Love

Let me tell you about the hammam. The “Hammam Story” is the most told by anyone – Peace Corps volunteer or otherwise – who comes to Morocco, but it is an unavoidable duty. So, what is the hammam? In short, the hammam is the public bath, and it is at once both exactly like what you think it is and completely different.

I went with one of my CBT (Community-Based Training) pals, Michael. It’s very important to go with someone else for reasons that will be explained more later. When you get there it’s a lot like the YMCA – damp, humid, disrobing men making small talk – then, you’re handed a few buckets (important) and go on in to the most memorable bathing experience of your life.

Now, not all hammams look the same – some have many rooms, some have few; some are big, some small; some have many faucets and some have only one – but the one I went to has four rooms, each for a specific purpose. And before I go any further in the story, let me clarify what I meant by the “disrobing” I mentioned previously. You do NOT get naked in the men’s hammam (I’ve heard conflicting stories about what happens in the women’s), but you do strip down to your undies or bathing suit (I opted for the former). So, the first room is called the “cold room” and it’s actually the last room you go to. The two following rooms are each significantly progressively warmer and the final room is the hottest.

The hot room is where you get your water in your buckets (still important), but also where you sit and warm up. The whole philosophy of the hammam hinges around the fact that people don’t really bathe as frequently as they do in the States, for example, and so they have different requirements for getting clean. The room is so hot that you can hardly move and no cleaning is done here. Instead, you only sit and sweat until you’re almost completely dehydrated – maybe 20 minutes – allowing the sweat to loosen the grime and filth that has collected over the last 3-4 days (if you’re Moroccan) or 6-8 days (if you’re a Peace Corps volunteer).

Now you’re ready to start cleaning yourself. For this you have to go to a medium temperature room, take a seat on the floor (after disinfecting it with a little hot water from your buckets), and get out your soap and, most importantly, your kees. The kees was originally designed by Cardinal Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition as a means of extracting conversions from non-believers (see Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I for more information). Today, Moroccans have adapted its use for deep-penetrating exfoliation and extracting conversions from non-believers. Although the kees is cloth, it is actually more closely related to the common cheese grater, and it goes a long way towards explaining the psychology of the average masochist. You see, when you don’t wash yourself that frequently, you build up layers of dead skin on top of your living skin, and you really don’t want that. Actually, after the first time I eventually took a shower in Morocco (sans kees and not in a hammam) and started to dry myself off, I began to panic when rolls of skin began coming off with my towel. These were the unexfoliated follicles, and had I used the kees, I wouldn’t have had this problem.

So, while you gouge yourself with the kees or, as in my case, emasculate yourself by using a loofa (or “American kees,” as my pathetic attempt at preserving my dignity put it), you may make a few interesting anthropological discoveries. The first is the buckets. Morocco is a very communal society. People share everything with the notable exception of hammam buckets (or “plastic gold,” as they are referred to by most lay people). The taking of another’s hammam bucket is justifiable cause for the offended to kill the offender and enslave his women, and I have heard even more harrowing tales of what goes on in the ladies’ hammam. (I should remark here, however, that these are actually second-hand stories and that in my experience the other dudes in the hammam were actually incredibly helpful in filling my buckets for me and lending me a small bucket with which to scoop the water onto me.) The same rules also apply to taking another’s designated (by being disinfected) space on the floor, and I did actually witness a brief total war between two guys on this subject.

The second, and most notable of anthropological points, actually brings us to the second half of our discussion: man love. Obviously, you’ve got as many almost naked dudes as a bad gladiator movie, but there is so much more that might offend the delicate sensibilities of your typical Westerner. For example, let’s say that you’re busy flaying yourself with your kees and you realize that you can’t quite reach all the places on your back (and you certainly don’t want to leave any skin there). What do you do? No problem; just lay down and have your sweaty, scantily-clad pal hop on your back and get busy with the kees (there’s usually a professional wandering around the hammam somewhere, though, of course, his services will set you back a few dirhams). This is totally normal, and it is not at all the only instance of man love you’re going to experience in Morocco.

When you go out of the hammam, almost everywhere you look you can see guys walking down the street holding hands and/or walking arm-in-arm. Was there a spontaneous rift in the space-time continuum and you’ve accidently stumbled into San Francisco? Is this a music video for the Village People? No, this is everyday Morocco, and it’s generally discomforting to most Americans.

But putting aside the immature yet brilliant gay jokes, I’d like to talk seriously about some very interesting culture. As I hope you are all aware by now, Morocco is a proud Islamic country, an identity that comes with certain requirements, one of which is that public interactions between men and women are not smiled upon (and private interaction is virtually non-existent - as far as people are willing to talk about - except for between husbands and wives). This leaves people with little outlet for interpersonal contact, and so, naturally, they turn to intragender relations. I think that the amazing thing, though, is seeing the power of culture in action. Western culture says that men holding hands is wrong (though we certainly need to work on that), and so it is very hard for Westerner men to hold hands with each other. Try it. Find a friend of yours – a guy, assuming you are one, too – and just hold his hand. See how long you can do it before you start to feel really uncomfortable. I’ve done it and I don’t even agree with these constructions, but I can’t hold a dude’s hand for more than about a minute before I just get weirded out. But Morocco says that it’s totally normal, and so Moroccans can scrub each other down almost completely naked and they don’t think twice. On the other hand, don’t ask a Moroccan guy for advice on how to pick up chicks because his culture has given him so little opportunity for interacting with women that he’s about as useless as

The point is that it's all just a matter of what your culture tells you is ok, and it's important to realize that there really is nothing wrong with guys expressing their affection for each other, regardless of how they choose to do it.

And so, you have these two cultures clashing in every volunteer who comes here: trying to intregrate into the culture but having these blocks from our old culture that get in the way more often than not. But if we can spend a few hours taking a bucket bath in our underpants with 25 other guys and have a great time, then there shouldn't be any problem overcoming our other difficulties.

Nshetah

This past week my fellow CBT (Community-Based Training for you who don’t speak Government Hyper-Acronymization, which is when we go to small villages, live with host families, learn Darija, and practice youth development) members and I began teaching English classes at the local Dar Shebab (youth center). Being very conscientious youth developers, we worked out a schedule of ability levels, planned lessons according to those ability levels, announced these levels in writing and speaking to the local Shebab (youth, as you may have guessed), and then proceeded to be overwhelmed by eager English-learners at all the classes, almost all of whom – regardless of which class they came to attend – were of beginner level or lower. This was a bit of a problem, so we turned to the youth developer in Morocco’s only alternative: Nshetah.

Nshetah, translated literally, means "activities" (I think), but functionally it’s more like "anti-class." This means that there are extremely different perceptions of nshetah between adults and youth. Youth see it as their only outlet for creative energy short of playing soccer (for those who are able to), wandering the streets aimlessly, and smoking hash. Adults often view nshetah as non-educational, and, therefore, wasted time.

Nshetah is, however, extremely needed by the shebab of Morocco. As alluded to above, there is really nothing for them (particularly the boys) to do after school. Unfortunately, no one has come to the "Dar Shebab" looking for nshetah. They all want "qraia" (class). This makes the class very difficult, particularly when it is supposed to be an advanced class and you begin with a quick review of the English tenses and a quarter of the class doesn’t know a word of English beyond "Hello." This also makes the nshetah very difficult because regardless if it was scheduled to be a theatre club or chess tournament, it turns into a pandemonium of shebab who came for English, but don’t want to go away when the opportunity to see Americans still exists and so they just run amok.

The trickiest part is really finding something that the shebab actually want and are committed to continuing without your control. Ideally, you’re really just showing up every now and then to give them a little guidance, but, of course, if your town is at that point, they wouldn’t have a Peace Corps volunteer, would they? So, you’re stuck between one of these two extremes, and you have to figure out what to do about it.

At least, that’s the theory. I don’t have my own site yet, so I can’t really tell you what it’s like, but it seems to be a constant struggle of attempting to motivate shebab to create things for themselves without telling them what to create. You’ll have to wait to hear how it goes.

The Duncan Process

I’ve discussed this with many of my companion trainees, and it seems to be enough of a consensus that I’m going to talk about it as universal truth.

Reality for a Peace Corps Trainee (I can’t speak yet for the full-on volunteers) is quite different from that which we were accustomed to back in the States. That is to say that what we would have considered a normal existence before coming to Morocco no longer exists, and our current reality is actually an alternate reality of what is really real.

Allow me to explain. Have you ever dreamt that you were in your house (doing something, it’s not really important what), except when you stopped to think about it – either during or after the dream – you realized that what you had accepted as being your house without question during the dream was in fact completely different from your actual house? That’s what life is like here. My day is really the most typical of days imaginable: I wake up, eat breakfast, walk to school, study for a while, eat lunch, study some more, spend some time at the after-school center, come home, do some homework, eat dinner, maybe watch tv, chat with my neighbors and family, and then go to sleep. The regularity of days is interrupted by the occasional excitement and I have a regular group of friends and associates that I see enough of the time to be able to take slightly (in a good way) for granted.

Except that every once in a while, when I stop to think about it, nothing feels normal. And I wonder why. Why, if I live the Norman Rockwell of routines do I feel like I’m actually in the Twilight Zone instead of the Saturday Evening Post? The answer, I think, is symbols. This occurred to me only the other day when I was walking to school, but I now believe that reason that everything occasionally feels just slightly off is that, like a dream, though I am doing my usual actions, I’m not doing them with or in or about or around or to any of the things I used to do them with, in, about, around, and to (among other prepositions). Just like the house in my dream, my brain excepts Morocco as normal because this is where I am functioning, and where I’m functioning should be, by definition, my home, but when I pause to evaluate my reality I realize that nothing about "my home" is familiar to me.

The most obvious disconnect is language, but by virtue of its being so obvious it’s probably not most jarring. That distinction would probably go to the smells of the street (both pleasant and unpleasant), the dynamic between salesman and client, the relative evenness of a sidewalk or flight of stairs, the artistic quality of a tv show, the temperature change between day and night, or the taste of water – all things that we take so completely for granted and would never consider being possible to do in any other way. For example, my host mother this evening cooked spaghetti, which looked just like any spaghetti you’ve ever eaten, but tasted like nothing you could hope to find on Federal Hill (a reference to the Italian district of Providence for those of you who may not understand). Such a typical action (especially if you know how often I eat pasta) that was totally unlike my typical reality.

These typical actions are, however, the signposts by which we guide our reality. Just like the dream house, we often (here in Morocco) carry on according to the macro-signals of reality – eating, talking, seeing things – without noticing the micro-textures – eating tagine with our hands, talking in Darija, seeing barren desert mountains and flocks of sheep – that give normalcy to the actions we can do anywhere.

This is probably not new psychology, but if they haven’t already named this stage of what I’m sure is "culture shock," then I want to call it the Duncan Process. I think it has a nice ring to it.

On Development, Part 1

First thing, Im writing this in a cyber cafe and I cant figure out how to type an apostrophe on these ridiculous French keyboards, but rather than write everything like a complete fop, youre just going to have to be clever in your reading.

So, Ive decided to write a little about development work. The first and most obvious thing is that it is slow. Very slow. My group and I are still learning how to do it (though not very quickly as our obvious most pressing need is to speak the language), but the volunteer already serving in this town, who has been here for over a year already, is still struggling to get the people together to work.

The reason for this slowness boils down to a few key points. First, you have the cadre of government officials who arent so much concerned with the development of the country as they are of having a job. That is to say, they care more about having a job than they do about personal advancement and so forth. There is also a good deal of inter-ministry non-interaction as teapot sultans want to conserve any available credit for themselves. The second and most challenging problem - for PCVs - is that real development must be sustainable; otherwise it isnt really development at all. What this means is that it has to be able to reproduce itself without the presence of the volunteer.

So what, you say. Why is that such a problem? Well, the answer is that many have a perception of the volunteer as a charitable institution; someone who comes to teach English and donate books, technology, etc. Unfortunately, this sort of "development" really only takes work away from qualified citizens and builds a "beggar culture" with the country. We need new schools, ask the Americans; we need new soccer equipment, ask the Americans; we need new books, ask the Americans (insert any other Westerners for Americans if you want). This is not to say that this is what all Moroccans think or even the majority, but it is a dangerous enough situation that the Peace Corps refuses to allow us to work without domestic counterparts (and rightly so, in my opinion). Every time that we have an idea for some kind of project, from a girls soccer team to an AIDS prevention clinic, we have to find a local Moroccan or Moroccans to do it. We can work with them, give them ideas, be their organizing force - but they have to be the ones to do it, otherwise the country isnt really growing.

Sometimes you find yourself somewhere that is just waiting for a catalyst to push them forwards, and sometimes you find yourself somewhere that expects you to do everything for them, but regardless of where you are, if youre working by yourself, you arent doing development.

More about that later.

GI Joe

They say that of Peace Corps Volunteers in Morocco, 87.5%, including trainees, have diarrhea or some other kind of gastro-intestinal distress every year.

It’s not fun to be in the In Crowd.

On Ramadan

In case you weren’t aware, we are in the Islamic lunar month of Ramadan. And in case you were aware but didn’t really know what that means, allow me to explain.

Ramadan is a Muslim holiday that begins on the first crescent moon of the month (as do all Islamic lunar months), and ends on the following crescent. Although it lasts for a full month, it is, in fact, a commemoration of a one-night event: the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad to Heaven from the rock in Jerusalem to receive the revelation of the Qur’an from the Archangel Gabriel.

Consequently, the month of Ramadan is one of purification and reconnecting with the spiritual. Muslims are forbidden from eating, drinking, smoking, and having sex during the daylight hours, though many also believe that they cannot gossip, fight, use bad words, have lascivious thoughts, or do anything else selfish or sinful.

In practice, this manifests as people spending the daytime as quickly as possible, using as little energy as possible, and then, when the muezzin (the man who calls the faithful to prayer) signals the sunset prayer, everybody prays, eats breakfast,” and then parties all night long. In a little more than a week we’ll have the Eid el-Fitr – the final night of Ramadan – which will be epic.

For Peace Corps Volunteers in a Muslim country, this means that it’s very difficult to have lunch. I’ve actually been observing the fast, as has one other, but the others are often frustrated by their inability to buy an afternoon snack, as well as restrictions on eating or drinking in public. There is nothing forbidden about non-Muslims not observing the fast (though Muslims seen eating during the sun hours could theoretically be imprisoned), but considering how we are here to work on integration and mutual understanding, it’s pretty much out of the question.

And the most important lesson to learn from Ramadan, in my view, is that not everyone observes it. You have the high schoolers who instead of smoking in the bathroom are popping a quick chocolate bar, and every night at the sunset prayer you can see the cafes that are still full of people (though they only now start eating or drinking). You also have the ones who observe all of the restrictions throughout the month, and then pop open a bottle of alcohol the day after Eid. In short, they are just like the hordes of Jews and Christians that observe (or don’t) their high holidays and then spend the rest of year doing what they want.

And speaking from experience, the fast is not as difficult as you might think, though it is by no means easy. The hardest part is waking up early at about 4 am to have “dinner” and being tired all day. That and the fact that no one else in my group (aside from the Moroccans) is fasting. That will change this Sunday, though, when we all go to homestays and stop living together in a group. Good luck to them.

Welcome to Morocco

First, a little housekeeping. My computer is a bit on the fritz, so I probably won't be posting as frequently in the immediate future as we all would have hoped.

Second, welcome to Morocco. I know it's a bit overwhelming, but that's the way it is for me, too. In all honesty, it's most likely because we have spent the plurality of our time learning the policies and logistics of what will be our new lives here in Peace Corps Morocco. It is all coming at us very fast (though with repeated assurances that it will be all coming at us again later), and jet lag - though only 4 hours - is probably still taking it's toll.

I will give a few first impressions, however, which are likely to be contradicted later on (hopefully, if I begin a political career in the future, my opponents won't find out about my flip-flopping). First, Morocco is full of beautiful cities and stark countryside and many other combinations of mutually excluding descriptions. People have been caring and indifferent and deceptive. Food has been exquisite, unmemorable, and quite unappealing.

I think this is the best possible situation one could expect. Having just left the States listening to exaltations of all Morocco ("the people are beautiful," "the country is beautiful," etc) and condemnations ("the men are sleazy," "the country is dangerous," etc), I'm happy to say that they are all wrong.

The people of Morocco are people, the city of Rabat is a city, and I'm very excited to be here.

More later.