I recently arrived back at site from a two week technical training in a city about four hours travel away from me. It was the first time my entire group had been able to spend more than a few days together in the same location. It was time for the grand social experiment to begin. The question we endeavored to answer is, what happens to young Americans when you separate them from everything that is familiar to them for three months and then bring them all back together in a place where they have access to the two staples of life in America, pizza and beer?
The answer it turns out is rather surprising. The two sectors were housed separately in hotels across town from each other. The health group is almost all women and the environment group is almost all men. We were occupied for about 8 hours each day and then released into town until our curfew at 10:30pm. Given that dinner was at 8pm and there was a bar and a pizza parlor about halfway between the two hotels you can imagine that a lot of volunteers chose to abandon their respective hotels as soon and often as possible to do what we like to call "cross-sector exchange."
For the most part we behaved ourselves, we used our free time to relax and talk shop. We exchanged horror stories about our sites and the various ridiculous experiences we have shared. We even talked about possible cross-sectoral projects that we could do if our sites happened to be close enough to each other to accommodate that sort of thing. However, almost all of this perfectly respectable socializing was done in the context of a steady consumption of beer and/or pizza.
I suspect that the one thing I will never become accustomed to about this country is the reactionary way people respond to prohibitions. In our case, being denied time to socialize and drink during the last three months led to a glut of both when we were finally granted the opportunity. In some cases, to an excess, I won't mention any names (I never do) but there were a couple of people who used the opportunity to get completely hammered and/or start some drama. There were some heated words, a couple of people ended up crying, and some seriously awkward moments for folks in our stage.
The worst thing that ended up happening happened towards the end of the week. Some of the folks in our group elected to break policy by drinking in the hotel that housed the event. Not only is this grounds for getting booted out of the Peace Corps if you get busted, it's highly disrespectful to our Muslim hosts, for whom drinking is completely forbidden. However, this is not to say that all Moroccans abstain, some do drink, but it's within a highly stigmatized social context. They look at drinking like we might look at using marijuana. At any rate, some of us drank in the hotel, and while they weren't caught, they left evidence of their debauchery to be found by hotel staff. Thusly did the hotel management and our program staff find out and suddenly everyone was in trouble.
On the one hand I feel a little bit insulted that anyone would be so callous and stupid as to break the rules that flagrantly, but if I'm going to be completely honest, I must admit that I understand the impulse. We are adults, and are perfectly capable of handling ourselves as such. We are Americans who are living in a completely foreign and sometimes supremely frustrating culture. It would be nice to have a space that we can use to at least create the illusion of the familiar and comfortable. For some people this means being able to relax and drink with a few people in private. I don't condone what they did, but we are in a difficult situation working for people who sometimes seem ungrateful, and even hostile, despite the sacrifices we have made to come here. The folks who broke policy were dealing with this situation in the way that seemed most comfortable and familiar to them. I can understand that. Unfortunately for us, we can't afford that particular luxury. We are ambassadors for the US 24 hours a day. We are expected to be culturally sensitive ALL THE TIME, and that's why they pay us the big bucks.
