Fallout…

Well my dear blog readers it has happened again. I have wasted a perfectly good day or two trying to travel around the king's schedule. The last two weeks have been (and continue to be) something of a perfect storm of fallout for me, by which I mean that I continue to struggle with and work around the secondary and tertiary effects of events completely outside of my control. Let's take things in order. First of all, I'm not sure if everyone (or anyone) back home is aware, but a Volunteer serving in Morocco died recently. This, as you can imagine has sent shockwaves through the volunteer community and particularly the second year small business development and youth development groups. Second, shortly after her death we ran into l'eid kbir (pronounced laid ka-beer), which meant travel restrictions, social obligations, etc… Last but not least, the king came to my province which, while exciting, meant that all of the transportation the usually runs on a schedule abandoned their schedule, ran when they felt like running and left those of us not in the know hanging out to dry.

    This month I have been to Rabat twice. This is extraordinary and extraordinarily expensive. The first time I went to Rabat it was for the memorial service for my Peace Corps sister who, at only 23 years of age, was taken long before her time. It was a beautiful service and I would do absolutely nothing different if I had it to do over again. After all, if volunteers don't come together to support each other in time of need who will? However that basically cost me a week in site. This is a price that is difficult for me to pay right now because I am working on projects that require me to be in site right now.

    After that came L'eid Kbir. L'eid, as we call it, literally translates to the big feast. It is, as you might expect the biggest feast of the Muslim year and such an event that people travel from every part of Morocco to every other part in a rush to be with friends and family. As a result of the extraordinary travel conditions that are part and parcel of this holiday the Peace Corps heavily restricts travel during this time for Volunteers. Basically I yo-yoed from being stuck out of site to being stuck in site. What's more, the familial and social obligations inherent in this holiday mandated that I spend several days straight eating three meals a day with my landlord's family and my host family. It's not that I mind this at all, but this time I had no say in the matter.

The other interesting thing about l'eid is the menu, it's a sheep. Not just sheep meat, a whole sheep, all of it. I mean ALL OF IT. Right down to the eyeballs (which I was forced to tactfully refuse twice). I ate pretty much everything else though, liver, kidneys, intestines, stomach, lungs, heart, the fatty stuff under the skin, and of course brains. It was interesting and I found myself liking a lot of things that I thought that I wouldn't (brains with scrambled eggs isn't that bad). However, once again, the fallout was several days of touch and go intestinal distress.

    Immediately after l'eid the king came to town. I know what you're thinking, Presidential candidates criss-cross the states four or five times during the course of a presidential campaign not to mention the kind of travel they do when serving as President. It should be easy and fairly commonplace for the King of Morocco to hit every province once a year given how small this country really is. You would be wrong. The king makes his rounds on something like a decade rotation for the whole country. He hits each province about once every ten years. However, the south hasn't seen him in longer than that. I have been told that this is because there was an attempt on the last king's life perpetrated by a group of conspirators from somewhere in the southern provinces. As a result the south hasn't been graced by his majesty's presence in quite some time. This made his visit a big event.

When the King rolled into town everything stopped. Everything. His entourage requisitioned government buildings to put up his security detail. The local governmental institutions went nuts. Most importantly, for me anyway, the transportation infrastructure went completely haywire. They moved the bus and taxi stands across town. The Transit vans that I usually ride to and from site changed both times and locations. Some transport simply stopped running, and the population in whatever town the king was in tripled because of his security needs and curious out-of-towners.

The last thing that one need understand about the king visiting is that rumors fly thicker than flies in a pig sty. If it is rumored that the king will be going to some town in the next few days then every single transit, taxi, bus, and pick-up truck going to or from said location will be completely crammed full of people trying to see him. It doesn't matter if he shows up or not, they will still go in droves. It doesn't seem to matter that most of the time these rumors are simply that, rumors. People will still stop everything and go.

It was during this madness that I was called back to Peace Corps central to attend a meeting of the Volunteer Advisory Council. I'm just a back-up rep. for my class, but my lead rep. had a conflict so I was called into play. At this point people from the north who had come south to see family/king were beginning to trickle back north, and everything going north was completely full. For the first time ever I saw a taxi stand run short on taxis. Buses wouldn't even stop at cities between the stand they were leaving from and their final destination because they were crammed to the gills right off the bat. It was completely maddening.

I am more than happy that I am able to represent my fellow volunteers, and grateful that the king would finally roll through the southern provinces. However, combined with l'eid travel insanity and the extraordinary travel demands of this month already layered on me, by the end I was simply begging for mercy and praying for transport. The fallout has been extraordinary this past couple of months and I'll be happy when I can finally dig myself out from underneath all of this and start teaching English in my site. Hold on guys, I'm coming home I promise!