I’ve decided to make this post more of a general update type of thing…lots of things have changed in site since I last wrote and I have good news to share!
And then there was….water!
I finally finally finally have running water in my house! Now when I turn on my tap, water flows out…all of the time! It’s great. For those of you who don’t know, since July when I moved into my house, there has been the promise of running water coming to my community “very soon,” or even “this month.” Don’t worry, I wasn’t completely naive when I came here, I figured even though they were saying soon, they really meant a few months. Deadlines came and went and still no water. I hadn’t invested in a water pump (a device that would bring water from the cistern in my kitchen up through my faucets) because it was expensive and everyone recommended that I just hold out for when the government would be providing it. So I went about my life sans pump-I created a routine and got a whole system going to get the water I would need every day. I stored it in buckets and containers for later use. I got a ton of exercise pulling up bucket after bucket of water, sometimes three or four times a day. I figured out the best way to drop a bucket down a short well in order to get the most water. I learned to appreciate how much water it took to do certain things like shower or flush the toilet since I was so involved in making that water available for my own use. To be fair, people in my community have been dealing with this situation much longer than I have (especially those without pumps), so I don’t have much room to complain. Plus, I didn’t even have to leave the house to get my water like some other PCVs. So all in all, I had it pretty good. But, that doesn’t mean I’m not super stoked that I can abandon my old system and take a big leap into the world of luxury. At this point I should also give a ton of credit to my kind neighbor men who installed my plumping pipes, dug holes, got things through walls and many other things to ensure that I could use the new system…and all for free. God bless their parents, as we say in Morocco.
old water system
new one!
Lots of work too, Hamduallah
The first few months for most PCVs are pretty slow in site, especially those of us who got here right as summer began and most of our neighbors left for vacation in other parts of the country. I had no complaints with this slow start, and frankly I needed a little break after the intensity of training, learning the language and living with two different host families. I did lots of home improvements, cooking experiments and caught up on my reading. As the months passed, I tried my best to do a community assessment: speak with many different members of the community and use my own observations to determine what kind of projects I could begin to work on with various other people in my site. I went to the clinic (sbitar) everyday at first, then a few times per week as other things came up. I started to work with my local commune government to get a trash clean-up project in the works. I planned for many projects and present ideas to people, but nothing was really sticking. I finally got permission last month to begin working in the schools and teamed up with the English teacher at the middle school to work with the students learning English. Even with these things though, I felt like I wasn’t doing as much work as I was able or had time to do. I asked my supervisor from Peace Corps to come to my site and have a meeting with some of the local leaders to see if we could determine some more projects for me or places where people might want my help. Although the meeting lasted less than two hours, things changed drastically for me. I discovered that my community had been able to get funding for the trash project without me, which was great. I also found out that many people in town still didn’t know why I was there and thought I was trying to convert the children to Christianity. After my supervisor assured everyone that this was not the case, the director of the Dar Taliba (the dormitory at the middle school where the girls can live during the week since many of them live quite a few kilometers from school) asked me to start doing classes for the girls there. I am now teaching typing/word processing, English and I have an exercise class every week with the girls. They are a great group and are really enthusiastic about doing my classes. Last week’s exercise class which involved two hula hoops and dancing to Shakira is one of my highlights of my time here.
Party Time
An important feature of Islam in Morocco is a structure called a “mossem” which houses the remains of a person who lived an especially good life or did many good deeds, rather like a saint in Christianity. Every year in the part of Morocco where I live, there is a festival that makes its way around all the mossems in the area and ends with a big celebration in Essaouira. My town has two mossems, one small and one big. We had the festival celebration at the small mossem last week. In Arabic, the word Hfla means everything from party to assembly so when everyone kept talking about the “party” at the mossem, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was pretty much a bigger version of our weekly souq (market) with more clothes and trinkets as well as food to be eaten while walking around. This week is the Hfla at the big mossem and apparently this one is a really big deal-people come from all over to attend. And the party is already starting. Normally, my town is dead on Sundays and most stores aren’t even open but today when I went into town, it looked like a busy souq day…and today is the smallest day…come Tuesday, things are gonna get pretty crazy around here, Moroccan style of course.
candy!
