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.

This is why we can’t have nice things…

    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.

Put on Your Traveling Shoes…

    Travel in the US is something that most people see as a minor inconvenience and occasionally a serious undertaking, but things are a little bit different here in Morocco. This weekend I will be travelling to a training session in a site north of mine so it seems appropriate to talk a little bit about travel. There are several different modes of travel available to PCVs in Morocco. There are trains, which are very limited in usefulness as they only run between a few of the largest cities. CTM buses are next up, these are government run tour buses that run at prescribed times along prescribed routes, they only stop at designated stops and are really nice. A step down from this are the souq buses, these run at prescribed times as well but are not as reliable because they'll stop for anyone with a thumb out as long as they have room for another passenger. After that you have the transit, which plays a large role in my life, these are converted Mercedes vans of various vintages and occasionally run according to a schedule but mostly just go when they are full. After that are the ever present taxis, these fit six, are occasionally terrifying (depending on the drive), and leave when they are full not a minute earlier. Some people hitch, but this is against Peace Corps policy and occasionally gets people in trouble when they ride with strangers. Most people who do hitch do so from site only and with people they recognize.

    The first thing to know about Moroccan travel is that things are rarely, if ever, on time. However they will occasionally be early and will not wait for you. Waiting, therefore, is a big part of getting around here. If I had a dollar for every hour I waited on transportation I could probably fly home for a bar-b-que sandwich right now. The other thing to remember is that things usually run in one direction in the morning and the other direction at night. It is important to keep this in mind when planning routes and travel times. Take, for example, the transit run from Imilchil to Beni Milal. This run leaves in the morning from Imilchil and will get you to Aghbala in under three hours. You switch transits there and it's just about two more hours to Beni. Seems easy right, it is, but only on the way to Beni from Imilchil. The return trip doesn't work quite that way, because the transit back to Imilchil leaves from Beni in the afternoon and gets to Aghbala in the early evening. The catch is that the transit that takes you the rest of the way leaves from Aghbala to Imilchil in the morning. Thusly you have to either spend the night in Aghbala and budget two days for the trip or take another route. As you can probably tell things get convoluted quickly.

    Another interesting wrinkle is that not all forms of transportation are available in all places. My site, for example has only transits. Thus, if you want to get out you have to plan on being ready at certain times. This is not negotiable, the transit will not wait, and it may not show up when you expect. Flexibility is key here. In some sites there is no set transportation schedule and "resident" transport. In these places you have to stand next to the road and wait for something to pass that has room in it. Very few people in these sites have cars; so hitching, if you are willing to risk it, usually isn't a reliable answer either.

The final, and worst, situation is the walk in site. In these sites there isn't even a road to stand next to. You have to hike out to the road to get to the point of waiting for something to pass. I met a young lady the other day that lives in a town eight kilometers from the nearest road. If her luck isn't running, and nothing passes, she walks sixteen K roundtrip for nothing and loses a day. There, but for the grace of god, go I.

On the other end of the spectrum are the sites in large cities. These sites almost always have active and available transportation. All of them have taxies that run throughout the city and to many other places. They usually have CTM stations, souq bus stations, transit stations, and a few have trains. You can literally get wherever you want to go at almost any hour of the day. Hopefully the city where I will be going for my training will have this kind of transportation. A decent Mexican restaurant wouldn't hurt either, but you can't have everything ;-P. Till next time ya'll, take it from me transportation is a luxury not a right. Enjoy yours while you have it, and think of those of us who don't occasionally. Peace.