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!

Loss and Hardship…

    A lot of what Peace Corps volunteers talk about is possibility and promise. We tend to be unabashedly positive people. However, recently Peace Corps Morocco was forced to acknowledge the negative possibilities that we walk along side throughout the course of our service. A volunteer from one of the southern provinces died unexpectedly on the afternoon of November 17^th in a hospital in Marrakech. We can't know the details of her passing due to the strictures of the confidentiality agreement we all sign at the beginning of our service. Despite this the volunteers close to her have put the pieces together and have determined a few illuminating things.

    First, we know that she was sick for about a month before being forced to seek medical help. On the morning of the 17^th her illness escalated rapidly, resulting in extreme nausea and a blinding headache. She was then taken to a hospital nearby where they determined that they could do nothing to help her. Afterwards they transferred her to the larger hospital in Marrakech where she died late in the afternoon with a Peace Corps medical officer by her side.

    She was twenty three years old. She was a member of my Peace Corps family, and though I only met her once I feel her loss keenly. We volunteers, especially those of us far from Rabat and the well served Northern provinces; often feel that we are our first and best support network. We are a family. To lose one of our own unexpectedly in this way can be devastating even to those who aren't close.

    Last Saturday, as of the writing of this post, less than a week after her death; her friends, her Peace Corps family, gathered in Rabat to pay homage to her life with us and the loss we all feel. I went, personally, because many of my friends were very close with her and I felt it was important to support them. The memorial service took place in the Peace Corps compound on a beautiful sunny morning. I remember being able to smell the sea that morning as a fresh breeze came in off the Atlantic. As if the earth itself was trying to fill the void we all felt as her body winged toward the other side of the sea.

    Her friends stood in front of us to share the ways that their sister had affected their lives. Her program staff stood up to say a few words about the work she had done and the lives she had touched. The Peace Corps librarian stood up to tell us about his relationship to her, she was a particularly widely read PCV, and during his speech something happened that sticks in my mind. He said, choking through tears, that he was sorry she had to die in his country.

    Now, almost five days later I can't let go of that moment in my mind. She had to die here. Why did he phrase it like that? Africa, the continent that probably birthed humankind has probably drunk more blood than any other place on earth. That is part of why we are here, because so much of that blood has been shed by innocents and bystanders in seemingly unending conflict. Some places are so soaked in human blood that the locals claim it has turned the soil red. Why? To what end have all of these lights been extinguished before their time? Is it really necessary? These are, of course, questions that we are largely unable to answer.

    In this instance I can answer this question, at least partially. My sister, my friend, sold her life dearly. She opened up beautiful possibilities in the lives of both her fellow volunteers and the children she worked with in her site. She was teaching some of the kids in her youth house German. No other volunteer has done, or probably will do, that. She forced the shyest volunteer I know to share her life story in a way that made her want to do it. She brought art and life to people for whom pessimism, cynicism, and perhaps even despair were standard operating procedure. She pushed and pushed and pushed her friends and colleagues to focus on what could be and not what is. She was relentless. I met her once and instantly liked her. Was all this worth her life? Who can say, the knee-jerk reaction is always no to that question. It's inappropriate to react otherwise, especially to the loss of someone who is so young; someone whose life had only just begun.

    However, the cold reality of the situation is this; it's something that all Peace Corps Volunteers have to live with. We are living in a place, no matter what country we get posted to, that could take our life. We have come specifically because there aren't the services and support infrastructure that exist in the states. The odds of something like this happening are fairly low, but it does happen. I've heard that the life expectancy of a PCV is ten years lower than the national average in the US. I don't know if that's statistically accurate or not, but the principle holds for every single PCV I've met. We are people who value the quality of our lives over the number of years we live it. We push ourselves outside of what is comfortable and familiar, some of us do so recklessly. Maybe this is difficult for our loved ones to confront when stated so plainly, but it is an enduring fact. We are here giving it our best despite circumstance every day. We are here living our ideals. We are here for you, for each other, and for the dream that JFK stated so plainly when he sold his bold plan to congress. Look up the speech, it's beautiful. We are here, and here we will stay, each taking his or her turn, until we are no longer needed. We are here until that happy day when the dream of peace and equality for all is realized.

    This is why my sister, my friend, had to die. This is the price of that dream sometimes. So if you share that dream I urge you to pay homage to the loss of a young and bright life by putting your money where your mouth is. Go out and volunteer somewhere. Go give comfort to those who suffer. They are everywhere. If you truly regret her death then help us end the need. Help us make the world a better place for everyone who lives now and even those who do not yet draw breath. It's easy. It's necessary. You can do it now. Don't wait till tomorrow, or until after your hair appointment or until your rent check clears. Don't wait till someone in your life is suffering to see that the need is everywhere. Go. Help. Do it now. Thank you.

Madame Secretary?

    Two days ago I shook hands with our current Secretary of State a certain Hillary Rodham Clinton. Maybe you've heard for her. You may have even voted for her in the primaries. She visited Morocco during the time that my class was in In Service Training. This was no more than a fortuitous coincidence and I would not flatter myself by saying that she was in any way here on our account, but she still made time for us in her schedule which is nothing to be sneezed at. Mrs. Clinton is in many ways a personal heroine to me and many of my friends.

    Beyond our personal admiration for her she has positively affected all of our services regardless of our personal political beliefs. Allow me to elaborate. Our previous administration also had a female secretary of state, but unfortunately she was serving under a president who ended his tenure so universally maligned (if not outright hated) in Morocco that her position actually hurt people's opinion of her. This time around things are a little different. Our current president's very recent African heritage makes it very easy for people here to identify with him. Occasionally they seem to even take a little too much ownership of his success in my opinion, but I'm not here to judge or pick nits so I will gladly let that slide.

    Hillary's sister is also married to a Moroccan man and her in-laws still live here. When you combine the fact that she is part of an administration headed by a half African man who is actively reaching out to the Muslim world with her role in spearheading that effort and her personal connections to this country you find yourself hard pressed to find a way to make her more beloved here. As a woman in power she has conducted herself in a way that is both assertive and dignified. She is about as good as it gets when it comes to positive female role-models.

    With that in mind you begin to understand what an asset she is to a volunteer trying to open young girls' eyes to the possibilities that await them in a moderate, and actively reforming, muslim country. I have thanked God for her every time my host-sisters have re-opened a book after talking about her. She is the living embodiment of hope for young women who's intelligence and ambitions far outstrip the lives that their mothers live. Without Hillary what would we say to girls who are on the verge of dropping out of school, to girls who see few options other than marrying early and living with their husband's family, or to girls whose villages judge them, not by their brains, but by their bread.

    I would be shocked right out of my socks if Hillary Clinton ever read a single word of my humble blog, but on the off chance that this ever happens I just want to say thank you Hillary for inspiring our girls to shoot for the moon and for being generous enough with your time to shake my hand and ask me how I'm doing. You are truly a blessing to Peace Corps volunteers in this country and many others. Keep up the good work and see if you can't put a dent in the Israel issue while you're at it. Peace out y'all and keep reading. I'll be posting more and more often in the upcoming weeks.

And Now For Something Completely Different…

    My sitemate left our site for the last time today. We moved the majority of her stuff into the scary room in the middle of my house and she left our site to go to America. Home. I feel all kinds of things right now, but mostly I feel like I'm just gonna miss my sitemate. Time to get back in the saddle.

    A little bit about my sitemate first, my sitemate was a unique individual in my life. She grew up in Ohio and a huge fan of the buckeyes. She was a cheerleader for most, if not all, of high school and then left it all for the west coast. She went to a small school in southern California for her undergrad and spent a lot of her time on and around the beaches of orange county.

    One her first major travel experiences, definitely the one that got her interested in travel, was a semester with the Semester at Sea program. Through this program she hopped from port to port around the world for the course of an entire semester while taking courses for college credit. My sitemate saw the world for the first time. At this point she was hooked on travel. I'm not sure whether or not she applied to the Peace Corps during her last year of college or shortly thereafter, but apply she did and was eventually accepted to the program in Morocco as a health volunteer.

    As with most prospective volunteers, she had a little down time between the end of college and the beginning of Peace Corps. She elected to spend this time travelling Central America. Her original plan was to backpack all the way back up to America, but she was offered a job by a young man who runs a hostel in Panama while she was passing through. She and her backpacking buddy elected to stay on as hired help and my sitemate's employer eventually became much more. So it was that she left for the Peace Corps with an amazing experience working in Panama and a wonderful boyfriend.

    All this describes how my sitemate came to be in the Peace Corps, but it doesn't describe her as a person. My sitemate is a bubbly personality; one of those people who never seems to run out of energy. She is relentlessly positive and social which made her a shoe-in for most the most integrated volunteer in our class. In our village she was constantly making the social rounds in a way that I couldn't even if I had been as enthusiastic. Her position as an American woman gave her access to both the private world occupied by women and the public world occupied by men. Her work at the sbitar (health clinic) made her a trusted person in our community.

    With me it was a little different. She was my confidant, friend, and fellow spectator on the Amazigh world. We shared walks out under the stars and discussed our philosophies on life, love, politics and everything else. She is thoughtful, intelligent, and open-minded. We laughed at our foibles and the many aspects of Moroccan life which seem ridiculous and bizarre to American sensibilities. My sitemate was steady and always willing to talk if I needed to. There at the end she was even getting to be a pretty good cook. She is driven, curious, and dogged in her pursuit of new skills and interests.

    This was, and still is, my sitey. Dearest sitey you will be sorely missed. I wish you all the success in the world and feel safe in saying that you will find success in anything you attempt. There aren't enough of your kind in this world and my site is all the poorer for not having you in it. Be good and tell yo' man that I'm insanely jealous of the fact that you will be a part of his life and not mine. It's just not fair. Marhaba any time you want to come back. The fellas down at the commune won't stop talking about how much they miss you and our favorite landlord has almost come to tears a few times talking about it. You are wonderful, unique, and a blessing to those who know and love you. This tribute doesn't come close to doing you justice and I know it, but I also know that you are generous enough to forgive me this and the fact that I didn't say all this to you in person. Bye babe.

You are not your effing Khakis!

    As someone who has collected a string of odd and different jobs, it has always been my stance that a person is not just the job that they perform. Experience has born this out for me over the course of my short and eventful life. Take my friend, we'll call her Molly, Molly is in her late fifties and is enjoying her third career as a gardener working for a large landscaping company near Asheville. She lives with her partner in Asheville, enjoys going to opera, loves the local art scene, and generally milks life in Asheville for all it's worth. However, the fact remains that in the reductive mindset of our times Molly is "just" a gardener.

    In my current life as a PCV I run across this dilemma in another sense. Many of the Moroccans I work with do not socialize with me outside of our interactions in the work setting. My interactions with PCVs tend to fall to the other extreme. I interact socially with PCVs much more than I do actual work with them, and when we do work it is often used as an excuse to create a social event.

    This dichotomy leads to a rather unfair double standard around the value many PCVs, including myself, place on relationships between Moroccans and PCVs and PCVs and PCVs. For example, if my counterpart is a nice guy who sucks at his job I will most likely think poorly of him because I don't interact with him in the social milieu in which he shines. The same holds true for basically any Moroccan in my life with the exception of my host family and friends in my site. It certainly is the tendency almost universally in my working life.

    On the other hand the standard by which I judge PCVs is much more lenient when it comes to their professional performance. These people are usually my friends first, and therefore if someone's personality rubs me the wrong way then it doesn't matter how good they are at their job I won't like them. On the other hand there are volunteers who probably aren't as effective as they could be and might even be outright hostile to Moroccans occasionally, but because I mesh with their personalities I find myself defending them when I shouldn't.

    The fact is that good people are good people, but doing what you say you're going to do is part of that. If you take a job and don't try to at least be competent at that job it indicates a failing on your part. Some personality defects affect other people more than others, but when you go back on your word you always hurt someone. Unfortunately I struggle with seeing the whole picture around both Moroccans and PCVs, and PCVs tend to get the better end of that deal. We aren't our jobs, but they are part of us.

    That is of course with the possible exception of myself. I'm afraid that I will forever be "Peace Corps Jack" to a small group of Fullbright scholars in Rabat. Thanks for putting me up guys, I appreciate the hospitality. Be good and DO WORK!

What’s the difference really?

    Last night I hosted a young lady who has been in Morocco for the past year working on a fullbright scholarship. She only has a little bit of time left and is reflecting on a lot of things that I will have to think about soon. What was the most valuable part of her project? Was her time here well spent? What is she going to do when she gets back to the US?

    I have heard a lot of Peace Corps Volunteers musing on these subjects as they approach their Close of Service dates. It makes me wonder whether we are not more similar to each other than it seems at first blush. On the one hand Fullbrighters are here to do research, and not necessarily provide technical assistance as such. However, they are put in situations that often demand that they lend a helping hand.

    We are told that we are supposed to be ambassadors for the United States from the first day we are in country to the second we leave. Fullbrighters are just told to do good research. Yet we are often placed in sites wherein American Culture is so out of the normative experience that it is difficult to find a common nomenclature, much less actually convey our value system effectively. Fullbrighters on the other hand mostly live in large cities whose populace is much more exposed to western media through advertising, magazines, and television. They actually have a good starting point for a common understanding, and based on our conversation last night they often are able to articulate our culture very effectively. Then again, a lot of what they study, we live. A lot of the people they interview we eat dinner with on a regular basis. They research and we experience.

    The fact of the matter is that Fullbrighters often talk a lot of trash about Peace Corps kids and vice versa. We, the Peace Corps, dominate this country's experience of Americans, even more so than tourists in many cases. There are over 200 of us and the Fullbright program only has 15 kids in country. They have a much harder time explaining what they do, because most people assume that they must be Peace Corps Volunteers or something just like it. It's easy to see how they could resent us. Then again, they get paid four times the amount that we do. They get to live in large modern cities with most of the amenities of home and a much smaller culture gap. It's easy to see how we could resent that too.

    Be that as it may, after hosting a Fullbrighter for dinner, after hanging out and watching the office, and after reminiscing about home I have to say that we have much more in common than not. I miss the same things that she does. We shared many of the same experiences, and struggled with many of the same things. We both feel a call to help those without the opportunities that we grew up with in America and we both feel changed in a fundamental way by our experiences here. We both love living abroad and we love being with the people to whom we have become very close. We are strangers in a strange land that is getting more familiar every day. We are united in so many things that the differences seem to pale in comparison. This post goes out to Steph. Thanks for the Apple pie, the laughs and the perspective. I have talked smack about Fullbrighters for the last time, and I wish you all the luck in America, life and love. See you soon Nsha'allah. ;-p

Long time no post…

Well, oh faithful readers, it's been a little while since my last post. A lot has happened, I have lost my bank card, got stranded for a while in someone else's site. I am organizing a workshop for a bunch of associations. I joined a fantasy football league. I identified an exciting lo-tech super green solution for a problem my community has with heating. I secured a commitment from the department of water and forests to help my community start an experimental fuel wood grove. A lot has happened.

    On the other hand, a lot has stayed the same. I am still hanging out in the same site with the same people, and having the same conversations. It's something that I hear from a lot of other volunteers aside from myself. "Why do we always have the same conversations?" The people in my site seem to like me, but the fact is that there is only so much we have in common. People here remind me of people in small town America in certain respects. They're content, settled, and largely unconcerned with life outside of this town. This is not to say that they don't have problems sometimes, that they don't go anywhere ever, or that they are apathetic. However, there is a certain investment in place that just doesn't register with most PCVs.

    What I mean by all this is that there are certain people who are willing to leave everything they know and love behind to do something they think will be incredible. There are certain people who will not do that, and very often think the former type is a little bit nuts. Oddly enough, joining the Peace Corps is one way that the former personality type is almost guaranteed to run into the latter. As a matter of fact, most health and environment volunteers are dropped right smack into the middle of tiny villages full of them.

    We, the adventurous "leave it all behind" type love to talk about the places we have been, the places we want to go, and adventures we want to have. Basically we're unapologetic dreamers and we talk like it. The people that we live with discuss things like who is talking/feuding with whom, the price their crops will fetch, the weather, and the price of transport. These are all valuable conversations to have if one lives in a small farming town to be sure, but after a while it becomes a little repetitive. You add to that a sizeable cultural and linguistic divide and things can get a little weird.

    That said, there are definitely moments that bring us all together. I experienced this for the first time yesterday. My fellow environment volunteers and I have spent the last three weeks organizing a workshop for local associations to educate them about some of the principals behind successful projects. We discussed things like group dynamics, community involvement, and monitoring/evaluation techniques. It was really rewarding to be able to involve our local associations in a dialogue not only with ourselves, but with each other. Just when I thought we had nothing in common I find that we are all looking to do the same thing, and that we can find common ground.

    Now, finally, I have a direct concrete answer for why I'm here. I'm here because it's possible for people who don't completely understand each other to work together. I'm here because we can do good, and we can find understanding. I'm here because I believe, as do all volunteers, that we have more in common than not. It's nice to finally have all this affirmed by completing a successful project; no matter how small.