Thank you...

...to Moroccans in my town who helpfully remind me that I still do not speak Arabic well.

My town...

...does not need me so much as it needs a factory.

The Philadelphia Phillies

My hometown baseball team gets better and better the longer I am in Peace Corps. Alhamdulillah for Abner Doubleday and John F. Kennedy.

Culture Night; and, What is Coming

The trainees in my town gave presentations at the Youth House about different facets of American culture. Their efforts to explain diversity, diet, music, and electoral politics to a crowd of a couple dozen Moroccan 14-28 year-olds were laudable. Less so was my performance as a translator for them. In the midst of handling a question by my new counterpart, Moussa, about religious music in America, I could no longer handle the fact that no one was paying attention to my effort to translate and elaborate upon the answer of one of the trainees and I left the Youth Center, leaving the trainees to continue their presentations in English with the help of their language teacher (a Moroccan who is not from my town) to work as a translator.



I came back before too long, but sat in the back of the room and declined to help as a translator for the remainder of the evening. At the time I excused myself I was trying to explain that some music while not being explicitely used for religious purposes may have religious themes; the blues, for example, in regards to its inheritance from a time when slaves used religious metaphors to express not only their desire for freedom by also to encode the means by which it was accomplished; those angels coming for you in "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" are Underground Railroad conductors. The kids in that Youth Center tonight will never know the difference, not that such knowledge would help them get the freedom most of them desire, ergo to no longer have to live in their town (as opposed to doing back-breaking agricultural labor in Spain or Italy, which is where most of the runaway Moroccans end up).



Being as my counterpart is in regards to his personal life a fairly pious guy, maybe he was trying to bait me into some kind of debate over which divinely-ordained socio-cultural-ethical system permits people to do what in their free time. Maybe. Yet I have trouble distinguishing when people in my town are deliberately trying to catch me and when they end up doing so accidentally. I guess I must be fairly easy prey, as I devote a lot of time to learning the language, tolerate certain letters of a religious law that is not incumbent on me (by fasting Ramadan, for example); I have not met many people who truly, consistently allow me to do such things for my own reasons (personal, professional, or not really based on anything as the case may be) as opposed to insisting that some kind of inscrutable, or perhaps in their minds all too scrutable destiny, is leading me to radically embrace being exactly like they are in every respect.

Let's try an experiment. What if I offered to the kids who so desperately want to learn English from me because I speak it fluently, and yet also seem so desperately to want me to change who I am because they think they know the best way for me to be, which they would choose for me if I gave them the choice: I can really become Moroccan in the only way that would really count for them (as opposed to the fluffy ways in which I for example refer to the trainees as "those Americans" and even occasionally as "gawaar", a slang in Derija for "white person" (even though one of the trainees is half-Chinese and another is half-Lebanese)), but only on the condition that I never utter a word of English again in my life. OR, I can teach them English but they can never tell me again that they know whats best for me as far as anything concerning any aspect of my life goes.

Of course the reality of what is coming will probably follow what ibn Khaldun said in a devilishly witty double entendre found towards the beginning of his work "al-Muqaddima" ("The Introduction", to the study of history that is), in which he said "the future resembles the past more than one drop of water another". However, the Arabic word used by ibn Khaldun means really "what is coming", and so perhaps refers not the course of future events, but rather to the remainder of "al-Muqaddima" and of the larger work of which it is a part. He understands history so well that his work is the precious few drops pulled from the glass that saved one whose understanding is parched, metaphor sufficiently extended by me.

I am almost half-way through my service, and I am still not sure how to keep Moroccans from distracting me from trying to accomplish something resembling the work I came here to do. I do not blame them because I am not sure they are trying to do so, or that they realize just how personally draining it is for me when they do so (beyond the fact that it is a waste of time for them and for me). But at any rate it is, so I need to find ways to cope with the facets of Moroccan culture that bug the hell out of me that do not involve me translating Ibn Khaldun off the internet.

Lesson Planning

I am getting ready to start teaching English at the Youth Center in my town. There is a theory that I would like to test this year. While there is all manner of enthusiasm among some of the kids here for the study of English, I think most of them do not want to learn it so much as wish they already knew it.



Any time I ask a kid why he (sometimes, she) wants to learn English, I inevitably get some drivel about it being the world language. This does not explain why any particular individual wants to learn it, it just gives me a vague, over-arching statistical appraisal of the situation.



Ramadan went well for me all told. The arrival of the trainees was an especially jolting shot in the arm for me and my counterparts here. The next couple of months could be very big for me accomplishing something by, for, and with the youth of this town.



In a town of 40,000 or so people, the resources for use in the Youth Development field are divided amongst three government ministries, about one dozen associations, several private schools, and ever more prevalent pool halls, doubling as arcades and hash dens. Why have a Youth Ministry as the odd cousin of the Education Ministry; with whom does any country's educational system have more to do with than its youth?

But the kids in my town see through all that, keeping me abreast minute-by-minute of those actors lack of interest in the education of the youth. All they know is what they think they should already know: the English language; computer programming; how to get their town clean; how to find a job. They know they should know these things, but they find it hard to grasp that I cannot give them. The poor things need to stand up and get them. I can help, but not for long.

Round Tani

That means "Second Round" in my personal version of Moroccan Arabic. I reserve it for kids in my town who understand English well and are able to speak it fluidly. By taking even a quick look at Moroccan Arabic, one can find a host of words that are borrowings or literal translations of foreign languages, mostly French and Spanish. There are now at least a few English words, and I am campaigning hard for more to make it in.

I do not need to try hard. Several people, accross a large age range, from both genders, and assorted educational backgrounds, have laid this one on me:

"Kan-speak-i al-Anglais walaini rir shwiyyah"

For those of you keeping score at home, that short sentence includes: an English verb conjugated in a commonly used first-person singular conjugation of Darija; followed by the French name of the English language with the Arabic definite article attached to it; a word for "but" that so far as I know is unique to Moroccan Arabic; followed by "only a little" as said in the Moroccan dialect. Everyday conversation keeps my synapses firing in ways I never knew possible.

Once again, linguistic tangents pull me away from the point, creating long runs for short slides. It is the second time in my service that I will be living in the midst of the Ramadan fast. Ramadan is one of the months of the Islamic lunar calendar. The fast commemorates the fact that...well, I am not going to try to explain the religious importance here, owing to poverty of ability.

The practical point is that as of September 2, every post-pubescent Muslim in my town is abstaining from eating or drinking anything from sunrise to sunset. There are other daylight-hour prohibitions, smoking for example, as well as various exceptions and rain-checking provisions. Those are best dealt with here by my citing my assertion above that I am ill-equipped to explain them.

I just took a quick glance at some of my posts from last year during Ramadan. Aside from one
day that involved a four-ish hour hike, I went along with the no eating or drinking provisions of the Ramadan fast during September and October of last year. It was not very difficult, actually. The weeks we spent in Boulmane, my Community-Based Training site, during Ramadan were real cake. The weather was cool, and living with a family made learning how to do the fast very easy. I just did everything they did. Cake.

Well, I am going for it again. The immediate reaction of both Americans and Moroccans has rarely strayed out of the immediate vicinity of "really? why?" One of my Moroccan friends helpfully reminded me that I am not Muslim. Another went right to the heart of the matter. Ignoring the question of religious identity, he said that there was no benefit to fasting if the person fasting did not make sure to keep up with their prayers. Now that I think about it, the latter could have just been talking about cafeteria* Moroccan Muslims who have gotten to the point that they can starve so long as they do not need to do it while bowing.

Without straying into anything having to do with religious importance of the fast, I did notice tonight that at the break-fast meal (literally futur, the word commonly used for breakfast as a morning meal) my host mother, who has graciously invited me to come over to break my fast with her every day during Ramadan, left the room after eating only a few dates and drinking some water. She came back after a few minutes to take of the other fare, gone just as long as I remember she took to complete her prayers back when I was living in her house.

It is an interesting project combining equal parts linguistic and cross-cultural finesse to explain why someone would fast Ramadan without the obvious compulsion of the need to fulfill a religious obligation. I am reminded of a passage from Edward Atiyah's book Black Vanguard, in which the scion of a wealthy West African Muslim family decides to fast Ramadan, but in a spirit that is more ego-aggrandizing than submissive of one's nature to the meaning of a religious rite. There is a jarring scene in the novel where the son, who returned to his homeland after a number of years in England including studies at Oxford, rebukes his father's congratulating him on deciding to fast by saying something to the effect that he is fasting not out of piety but by way of expressing existential angst of some kind or another. Excuse the lame recounting of book I read more than a few years ago, on a trip to Cape Cod with my parents immediately before or after I took in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Greene's protagonist is another ball of fun, a somewhat more melodramatic Kurtz without the ivory, only a British convert to Catholicism but accompanied by his wife to a place that is somewhat more on the periphery of all that darkness.

Anyway, nothing big behind why I am fasting Ramadan. Even though I am not living with a Moroccan family, I somehow feel that handling my food intake for the next four-ish weeks the way the most of the adults in my town are handling it might just be easier for me in some kind of not very profound way. I have no comment at this point about the medical benefits or risks regarding the fast, although when I get around to talking about some of the typical break-fast meals I will express one or two concerns about the ratio of nutritional content to fried dough.

This conundrum that a fasting non-Muslim presents to people in places like Boulmane and Mrirt, someone who does the mandatory thing that is not mandatory for them without thinking too hard about why it is mandatory, may not arise as much throughout the month as it did today. And even if they do conundrums, intellectually kinetic situations, even a little friction, have led to at least as many positive as negative outcomes in this Moroccan life thus far. But I am not keeping score and I do not really believe anyone else is.


* I was going to write "lazy" here, but immediately decided to try to bring the idea behind the phrase "cafeteria Catholic" into the discourse about Morocco. The next step is trying to bring it into Derija and make it resonate with Moroccans' ideas about piety, faith, and intention.

Their Time

If you are a Moroccan, and you are in Morocco, and it is a Friday, odds are that you will eat cous-cous for lunch. If you are a foreigner living in Morocco, Friday cous-cous is the meal invite you are most likely to receive. I have a couple of theories as to why that is the case. Briefly, one of the my more plausible ones is that a member of a Moroccan household knows that out of any given meal in the week, midday Friday affords a large quantity of food with which to entertain a guest. Its a safe thing to invite someone to a meal that one knows will be enormous. In my experience, the amount of food is substantial, at least a kilogram of cous-cous with vegetables (usually carrots, pumpkin, zuchinni, and potatoes) and either meat or chicken served in one enormous bowl shared by everyone. The families that an have invited me have all offered spoons. Those of us with leathery skin can eat by hand, balling cous-cous up with bits of vegetable and popping them down. It takes some practice, but I am getting there.

One of my newest students invited me to Friday cous-cous this past week. I sometimes have trouble handling invitations from Moroccans. I want a date and time, set in stone, if for no other reason than to cement my own commitment to the meal, tea, what have you. Accepting open invitations is just not something I know how to do yet, especially as I have no capacity to reciprocate. Luckily the day was easy to nail down on this one. Timing was tricky. Not all Moroccans are whole-heartedly embracing the recent switch to Daylight Savings Time. Rather, they are but in a peculiarly Moroccan way. "Come at two o'clock on the new time," my student told me. "One o'clock on the old time." I have noticed more than a few Moroccans who did not change their clocks, and at least one national bus line that changed their clocks but proceeded to push up the departure times of all of their routes by one hour so that the buses would continue to leave at the "same time" as they did on the "old time." There is not universal enthusiasm for what another guest of my student referred to not as the "new time" but as "their time." Who are they? I will get to the bottom of that one and let you know.