Heat, Rabat, and Henna Fun

Ok. Below is a photo taken of Lake Tislit near Imilchil from my 4th of July weekend. It was a bit rainy that day, but still beautiful.

Will be glad when the locusts die off. They like to jump and fly at anything that moves near them. And still dealing with the fearsome turk. A friend of mine left it uncovered the other day. I’ll just say it’s a bit of a shock to see 6 huge black beetle/cockroach things in your bathroom. I like summer other than the darn bugs. They’ll go away around September inchallah.

I’ve been back for about a week since my latest Rabat trip. I had to go up for a medical thing, like usual. As far as I know all is well, :). I have a new allergy med that I think it is actually causing my ear to ache more, but I’ll re-evaluate after a month. The trip was a little crazy. Had trouble finding an open room in Rabat on Wednesday and then just stayed with a CBT mate of mine on Thursday, she lives about an hour outside of Rabat. Then I was going to stay in Midelt, but my friend backed out last minute and I stayed with another CBT mate of mine in Azrou instead. It was nice in the fact I was able to travel there with a friend and was able to just relax and use internet while my friend did his thing. Also got to see my language trainer from training, :). Haven’t seen her in 8 months, so it was really nice. The bus ride back to Errachidia the next day was crazy. The buses weren’t running between 9am and 11am, so had to wait a couple extra hours and then fight my way on the 11am bus and enjoy a 6 hour ride back instead of the normal 4-5 hours of the 9am bus. I should have awoken an hour earlier and caught the 8am, but that’s Morocco for you. I didn’t realize traveling during the summer was so different. I also wasn’t feeling well the entire way back, hence I was very happy to return to my house after a long journey back.

Otherwise just been going to the coop and hanging out with my women since I got back. I also dared and dyed my hair with henna. It’s a pretty deep red now, but I love it. If I’d henna’d my eyebrows you would think it was natural. Posted some photos below so you can see the difference in color. Basically I had to sit around for 4 hours with plastic on my head before I could rinse it out. Normally women here henna their hair in hammam for about an hour or two, but I wanted the really rich red color and it’s too hot to go to hammam during the summer. Henna is supposed to be really good for your hair and also a cure for dandruff. Not so sure about the latter, but hair feels much healthier now and head isn’t as itchy as it was. Looks great too, ;). My coop women loved it.

Weather’s been a bit warm as well, so started sleeping on my roof until the temperature in my house goes down a bit. As you can see by the following photo, my new roof bed isn’t so bad. Just wish I had a fluffy blanket and it would be perfect. Sure beats sweating all night, it’s actually cool enough on my roof to use a blanket. Had to deal with a small plague of locusts the other night, but as soon as I turned off the light they stopped bothering me and my cat killed many of them. It’s also just nice to look up at the stars late at night, so beautiful here.

Otherwise life is good. My host family is great. I’m planning a trip out to the West coast for about a week to visit Essaoura and Tiznit. Have friends near both and plan on doing some shopping and hanging out at the beach. Essa is great for the beach and Tiznit is very well known for its silver jewelry.

It’s days like today (Monday) that make me happy to be a volunteer and not sitting at an office job all day. My coop president and a couple other women decided to take a walk through the forest today instead of going to the coop. It was so nice to just hang out and be outside getting some exercise. Great bonding experience, :).

Baking fun and fun with goats

So far July has been a good month. For the 4th of July I went to Imilchil to celebrate with other volunteers. We were going to go celebrate at the lake, but it was a stormy day so we ate at a volunteer’s house and then took a walk out to Lake Islit. It is a beautiful lake about an our walk from Imilchil, many tourists come to this lake. We basically just walked around for awhile and then we went back to Imilchil and ate awesome pizza and apple pie while celebrating 2 volunteers’ half birthdays with carrot cake. Overall a good time. Then I stopped by 2 volunteers’ sites on my way back to Errachidia. It’s always nice visiting other volunteers’ sites.

Then the following week as my counter part who is also the coop’s president was busy with her cousin’s wedding, none of the women were meeting, so I just relaxed a bit and worked on some personal projects. I also had tutoring Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as my tutor and I have been very busy this past month. She went over vocabulary and practices for Ramadan, the month before Ramadan, summer terms, and wedding information as summer is wedding season.

The month before Ramadan is a holy month in which many Moroccans begin preparing food items special to Ramadan and cleaning their houses. This month is called sh3ban. Two things that every Moroccan serves during Ramadan are shb3kiya and zmita. Shb3kiya is a fried bread item dipped in honey and sesame seeds, very yummy. Zmita is a dish made with burned flour, crushed fried almonds or peanuts, sesame seeds, fennel, and with whatever other spices Moroccans may wish to add. During sh3ban, Moroccans prepare these items which will be eaten throughout the entire month of Ramadan. Women will also bring their blankets down to the river to wash them and clean every corner of their home as well as all the clothing, pots, pans, etc. My neighbor told me the other day that whenever I want to wash my blankets she’ll go down to the river with me and help me out. It’s about the only way to wash a blanket here due to the nature of no washing machines and buckets can only hold so much. I tried my hand at hosing down a blanket in my upstairs room on one of my lines, it was fairly successful, but I would prefer the blanket to be a little cleaner.

Ramadan itself is the only month in which Muslims fast and pray. It’ll start around August 22 this year and is also when Moroccan time goes back an hour again and goes back to normal. They don’t observe daylight savings like the rest of the world. Even though we moved our clocks ahead an hour, the majority of Moroccans such as my village still run on what we lovingly call old time. During Ramadan Moroccans do not eat or drink anything during daylight hours. They will wake up very early in the morning to eat breakfast and drink as much water as they can, generally around 4am, and then sleep again. Then around 6pm, after the sun sets on TV, Moroccans eat Lftor, breakfast. This meal is very large and starts with a round of milk, juice and dates. On the first day each person eats 7 dates. Then after the milk and dates they eat melowee (flat fried bread), eggs, shb3kiya, zmita, and their main course of some kind of meat. Then later that night they have a 2nd lighter meal and then a 3rd meal around midnight before going to sleep and waking up at 4am for their final meal before fasting begins again.

That’s my little cultural piece for the day.

Saturday I went to my coop and just hung out with a few of the women for a bit working on my cross stitch while they worked on their tirz d fasi, fasi embroidery. Sunday I went into town and went swimming with my tutor, her mom, her friend and a friend of mine at an indoor swimming pool for women only. My friend and I felt like celebrities with all the Moroccan teens and kids coming up to us. It was good, the day was 42°C, 113°F, but the shade the pool was under and the coldness of the water actually made me cold. Was a good feeling. Then when I returned back to my village my retired Nomad neighbor invited me over for tea, it was my favorite, mint tea, :). Then she invited me to see their nomad tent that was set up beyond the small hills across the road from us, so I went over with her younger daughter, about 8, and hung out under the tent for awhile with her and her 2 friends, also neighbors of mine. I learned to how to play a rock game that I am horribly bad at, we played with a bunch of baby goats and I got to ride their donkey for a little bit. My little friend was just leading him around the area. I had a blast, I’ve missed horseback riding so much that riding a donkey was a nice surprise, :). While I was under the tend every time the baby goats came they would basically stampede down the hill and all I could hear would be this running of goat feet. I had so much hanging out with them.

My language is slowly improving little by little and making wonderful friends here. I think it’s so cool that my neighbors used to be roaming nomads, they actually still travel from time to time. I’d love to go with them sometime. I think it would be fun to wander the desert.

Been baking again and made awesome white bread. Decided to use a mixture of white flour and yellow flour to help give it stability and it turned out really well. Made myself a couple grilled cheese sandwiches, they were amazing. My next attempt is to make brown sugar using white sugar and date juice and make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Been told date juice has similar properties to molasses which is all brown sugar is, molasses sweetened white sugar.

Summer Begins

Hooray ! I finally decided to buy an external keyboard that I can just hook up to my lap top, :). It’s so nice to finally be able to type at home again. It’s a French keyboard with Arabic symbols, but that’s ok. Getting very used to the French keyboard anyway and I sometimes have the need to type in Arabic. My lap top still has a few issues due to the heat, dust, etc. and only minimally cfunctions at the moment, but I can wait and have those issues fixed when I take my trip to Iowa. My dvd player doesn’t always function very well, but it is mainly when I use Moroccan burned dvds, my American ones work fine and I think it just needs cleaned.

I was able to hang out with a couple pcvs this past weekend, so that was nice. Visited my host family and my counterpart. My women are working in the fields until Thursday, so not too much going on this week in that arena. I am considering planning a small summer day camp in my site this summer, just depends on many factors. I think it would be really fun. The volunteer before me did a travelling summer camp between her site and a few other volunteers and think that would be an amazing thing to do myself. Unfortunately I didn’t think about it until now as life has been so crazy. I will attempt to plan something for next summer. I have a few friends who would be interested in helping and a volunteer near me who helped the volunteer last year that I can gain some insight and advice from. I have plenty of camp experience, ;). Otherwise just planning to assist my cooperative women with getting funding to purchase or build their own building and general business practices such as budget planning; product development; etc. My counterpart is also going to teach me the moroccon form of embroidery called tirz d fasi. Very excited.

tirz d fasi is moroccan for fasi embroidery. This is basically just the typical Moroccan pattern they use on tea covers, bed covers, pillow vovers, etc. Generally they use the colors red, green or black. Below is a photo of a bedsheet cover using tirz d fasi. I am very excited to begin learning, :).

Summer is warming up, been getting a few summer rains and almost daily wind/thunder stroms. I love listening to the storms. I might turn my upstairs room into a summer bedroom, just need to purchase a ponge to put up there. Going to try to plan a few trips to more northern sites in the next two months so I can get out of the heat a bit. Might celebrate 4th of July somewhere.

Had my first experience in getting my buta gas tank replaced. My buta gas tank went out on Saturday, so as I have no wrench or anything to unconnect it I went to my host family’s house and asked my host brother if he could do it for me. He owns a hanut store and sells buta gas, so very nice. I can now begin baking away again. My mom just sent me a Pillsbury Best Desserts cookbook, so sweets will be the highlight of my summer existance, haha. I hope to start baking with some of my moroccan friends. They would absolutely love my new cookbook.

My mom also sent me my clarinet, so excited! I just need to start practicing again, boy am I out of "shape". Which also reminds me that I need to start working out again as well.

Another little exciting tid bit, well to me anyway, I saw a herd of camels in the dessert across from my house today. Apparently nomads herd them around me. Had no idea. I'll try to take a photo sometime, didn't have my camera with me in the taxi.

Well, I hope to update this a bit more often and include some more cultural information. At the moment I am going to go swimming for a bit at the local hotel with a friend. So excited, :).

nshufk mn b3d! نشوفك من بعر (see you later)

Training

I returned about 4 days ago from a training in Marrakech. It was awesome. The first two days of training weren't so great, but it was really nice to see friends I hadn't seen in 6 months. We also had access to an AMAZING swimming pool even if we were far from downtown kech. Staying up till 1am and getting up around 8am was exhausting, but worth it. On the way to Kech I was able to stay the night in Ouarzazate and get some new summer clothes, very light and flowy caftan/jallaba things. Also while in Kech I got to eat amazing sushi! I was so excited. Also had Pizza Hut one night, had to have my american pizza, and ate in the jma fna one night, the downtown kech market area near the mosque.

Before Kech my cat was very good and killed a scorpion for me, :). I woke up to a dead one in my kitchen. Been dealing with way too many bugs lately. Darn beetles seem to be everywhere. Cockroaches are scary over here, very large. Luckily I haven't seen too many. And my roof has been dropping bits of rock lately. Praying it's just the heat and nothing is actually living up there. That's a scary thought. Other than the scary house issues, life is good. Cooled down to about 90F this week, but it'll only warm up again very soon.

Attempting to plan some inter-morocco travel or a short trip to Europe this summer before my trip back to Iowa. Not sure when or where yet. Somewhere I could swim would be great.

Otherwise not too much going on at the moment. Women have been out in the fields so not too much coop wise happening this week. Still working on getting my lap top keyboard fixed. Inchallah soon. Some exciting news, my host sister just got married. Unfortunately due to my need to travel to Kech I was unable to go, :(. But I may get to go to a wedding in Midelt for the cousin of my tutor, that would be fun. We've now hit wedding season, I hear the music weekly these days. My tutor just did very well on her Bac, so she will be leaving this fall to go to school. Sad she'll be leaving, but happy that she did so well.

As the weather warms up, people have begun taking afternoon naps and staying up much later. We had a time change, but I do not believe it is being observed by my village. We now have what I call "old time" and "new time". It makes life interesting, haha. I'll be glad when this time change goes away around August 20th, right before Ramadan starts.

I attempted to make scones the other day. Didn't quite turn out as I'd hoped they would, but I have plenty of time to try again. Well, I should go do my shopping for the weekend.

Hope to have a more exciting update soon.

May

It really has been awhile since I have updated this. Well, part of that is due to the fact I have not yet had a chance to have my malfunctioning keyboard fixed yet. It's difficult to type when you can't use A or S. I'm hoping to have it fixed before I take my trip home, or I might just buy a plug-in keyboard until I can get a replacement internal keyboard.

I haven't been up to too much this month. I hung around in site for the first half of the month visiting people, working on my cross stitch, etc. Been reading a lot. I did make my own blank writing journal. I ran out of pages in the one I had brought and could not find one here in Morocco, so after hearing how another volunteer makes her own I decided to look up book making online and create my own. I really like it, :).

I had a Warden meeting in Rabat on the 22nd. It was so much fun to see friends and meet new people. I was also able to see Alicia Keys perform live in Rabat for the music festival. That was pretty cool, I'd never really been to a live concert before.

Then this week we had our test consolidation where everyone in the region goes to their designated consolidation point sites in the case of an emergency. Generally when there is an unsafe situation for volunteers we all gather at these points and wait for further instructions on whether or not we will be evauating the country. This test exercise ws to get an idea of how well it would work and what we need to do to make it work more efficiently in a real emergency. It was really great to meet people I haven't had a chance to see yet and to hang out with friends. Even got to go swimming!

Been baking a lot of well. Had a friend come over a couple weeks ago and we made awesome chicken quesadillas with some substitutes of course. Didn't have time to make salsa. I made awesome lemon bars the other day as well. I would have to say my oven is my best investment yet.

Been injuring myself as usual as well, haha. First cut my finger on a glass I broke while washing it, then pinched the skin on the back of my hand in a door as I was opening the bolt and then sliced my thumb on the lid of a sardine can while tying my garbage shut. All minor injuries of course, :).

Next week I will be going to Marrakech for my IST (inter service training) for a week. It'll be really great to see people I haven't seen in 6 months as well as to get some more information to help me in site, not to mention there will be a pool, ;). I'm always excited to swim. It's been warming up here, in the upper 90's. But a dry heat.

hmm...some exciting news for everyone in Iowa. I have planned and bought tickets to take a trip home in September, :). Very excited. I'll be home for the first 2 weeks of September.

Hope everyone is well!

Photos of Marrakech

Here are some photos I took while in Marrakech for a day last month. They are of the souk and one of the carriages they have near the souk:

Hmm…since Spring Camp I’ve basically just stayed in my site. I was stuck in Errachidia for about 4 days a couple weeks ago due to the strike, but other than that no traveling. It’s been nice to just stay in site and relax a bit.

A couple weeks ago I held a small skirt creation workshop in my house for 4 of my cooperative women by their request. I showed them how to create a very simple elastic waist skirt. It went over very well. Now more of the women want me to hold another workshop on more complicated patterns soon. Pretty excited to be relaying some of my knowledge, :).

Other than that not too much has been happening. It’s been warming up here in Morocco, especially down south. Been reaching the upper 80’s and it’s only going to get warmer. The bugs are also beginning to come out due to this warmer weather. Lucky for me my cat likes to catch and eat most of them. She’s still a kitten and ornery, but a good addition. I like her company as well.

I’ve also learned how much I really like cooking and baking while here. I use a buta gas stove and oven for my cooking needs. Basically a buta gas stove is a glorified camp stove and a buta gas oven is something we lovingly call a fire box here. I also have to make everything from scratch here as there are no mixes, etc. Frozen dinners can be found in large cities where there is a Marjane, but nowhere down south. My closest Marjane is about 5-7 hours by bus away. I make biscuits, tortillas, brownies, omelettes, and many other items from scratch. And all the fresh fruits and vegetables! I hope to learn to make Moroccan tajines and Pastilla someday as well. Pastilla is the most amazing dish ever. It is a mixture of chicken, almonds, onions, powdered sugar, cinnamon and spices(pepper, ginger, parsley, coriander, tumeric) within a phyllo shell with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top. Seems my life revolves around food here. I could eat with a Moroccan family any day of the week I wish to, but in my village they only eat Duez for lunch and some kinds of flour based soup for dinner. Duez is a type of tajine eaten in villages. It consists of an oil based sauce with paprika, parsley, pepper, and ginger. Then it generally has tomatoes, carrots, and potatoes for the veggies with some kind of meat in the middle. Generally this is chicken, but it could also be mutton, beef or some other animal. Bled soup is basically flour based with some kind of pasta and maybe some oil and pepper. But there are many kinds.

My daily routine is basically to “live” in the morning and then visit members of the cooperative or fellow villagers in the afternoon. So I generally stay in my house until 3pm just so I can avoid eating lunch with people. I just don’t care for village Duez, otherwise I would love to go over to people’s houses for lunch. I feel bad for avoiding lunch, but I really don’t like the village Duez. I do generally eat with someone on Fridays as that is when most Moroccans eat couscous. Twice a week I hitch a taxi into Errachidia for tutoring, souk, internet, post office. What I mean by “live” is, I have to do everything myself. I have to cook my meals, wash my dishes, do laundry by hand, bucket bath, etc. I have a solar shower though which is nice. Laundry is easily a 1-2 hour process. Then the days when I go to Hammam, that’s about a 2 hour process as well. Hammam is the public bathhouse. Very nice place to go to in the winter months here, not so great in the summer. Beginning to lose track of my days of the week here and the date of the month. Time is very different here.

So that is a bit of an update on my life here in Morocco. Overall life is going fairly well. Better now that I don’t have to make so many trips to Rabat. I can’t currently ride my bike because it makes my knee ache, but I’m hoping after taking a 2 month hiatus (possibly 4 as the summer months will be killer) that my knee will be better.

I’m also beginning to realize that my Fiona (my cat) is really a Fiero. Kittens are very difficult to judge when they are so small. A male cat is better anyway because then I don’t have to worry about kittens.

Also, currently my cat spilled water on my keyboard which really sucks because certain important letters no longer work on my keyboard. Only 5 keys and not even all in the same spot, just on the same side of my keyboard, but important keys: fn, A, Q, S, and V. Makes me very sad that my keyboard doesn’t fully function anymore because of something stupid that my cat did and not even sure it can be fixed, :(. Going to check with the computer guy in Errachidia. If all else fails I can always buy an external keyboard to plug into my USB port. Basically I just need a new keypad replaced. They should be able to do that here, but I might have to order one as I would want it to be an American keyboard.

Otherwise things are good. Haven't traveled too much this month, just spring camp at the start and then I went to Erfoud this weekend to visit a fellow volunteer. It was good. We hung out, I got to use internet, watched a good movie and ate some American candy, :).

Currently I am attempting to find a horseback riding trip near by in my affordability range. Otherwise if I can't find one, I might take a trip back to the states in September, not sure yet. Still deciding.