A World Away…

I woke on the morning of November 27th excited for what the day would bring.  I followed my usual morning routine: waking up around 10, snacking on Fitness (a delicious cereal found here), snuggling on the couch watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy with my roommates, resisting the urge to watch a second episode, and legitimately beginning my day a little after 12.  Yesterday, being Thanksgiving, a special day, we all decided to make a trip to the public showers.  All six of us girls paraded through the medina to the public showers.  The public showers are not the same thing as the public bath.  The showers are simply lots of shower stalls, with unlimited hot water, in which you can bask quietly alone for as long as you please.  So we all enjoyed a nice hot shower to start our day right.
After showering we all split up to accomplish our tasks for the day.  The official start time for Thanksgiving was 3:30, so we all had to prepare our dishes.  One group of girls had offered to host the festivities at their apartment and invited everyone from both programs.  Of course everyone agreed to bring something to the table, in the true spirit of Thanksgiving.  Elliott was at our house all day cooking lentil soup.  Sela and Elana went to Jessy and Alice’s house to help them peel potatoes.  Sara and Liz went to the store to get sugar for Sara’s glazed carrots and things for Liz’s mac and cheese.  I was preparing a simple pasta and vegetable medley.  Our apartment is located right off of vegetable street, so I ventured out and bought 3 zucchinis, an onion, an eggplant, 3 tomatoes, and 4 huge carrots- all totaling less than $1.50!  I came home and entered our narrow kitchen and began my creation in tight quarters with Elliott and his soup and Nikki making balsamic strawberries, all to the tune of Girl Talk, a talented, crazy, techno mix artist.  After finishing my pasta, I left for a morning skype date.  When I returned to the house at about 4pm, Elana and Sela were scrambling in the kitchen to finish their dishes- fruit salad and Moroccan veggie salad.  I helped cut some fruit while in the living room Sarah and Liz had returned from the store with a solid cone of sugar (the only way to buy sugar in Morocco).  They were attempting to smash it with a glass, saw it with a knife, or just chip away at it slowly with a spoon.  Sugar was everywhere, but eventually they got enough off to use for the carrots.
Finally, we had finished everything!  Now we had to pack up and head to the other apartment.  Luckily we didn’t have too far to go because they were living on vegetable street also, just at the very end.  So we, again, paraded through the medina, down vegetable street, carrying our bounties.  Elana, first, with her enormous fruit salad garnished with the top of the pineapple, me in the middle with my enormous pot of pasta, and Sela in the back with her overflowing bowl of chopped veggies.  We looked ridiculous in the Moroccan setting.  Especially entertaining was the fact that almost all of our ingredients had been purchased from the vendors on vegetable street- I wonder if they noticed.  All of our food was very heavy and awkward to carry as we rushed to get there and set everything down.  We came to the street we thought was right, stood there for a bit trying to decide which door was correct.  Then a Moroccan woman comes down the street, saying something in Darija about keys and opening the door.  Of course we had no idea who this woman was, but she unlocked the door and graciously invited us in.  We all hoped she wasn’t expecting her own feast.  When we walked in we heard English coming from upstairs and saw one of our friends peaking around the corner; we were in the right place!
We walked upstairs and entered the land of the feast!  There were tables of food all ready to be devoured.  Roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, mac and cheese, soup, rice and beans, strawberries, fruit salad, grilled veggies, veggie salad, pasta, and, of course, my favorite, deviled eggs!  For dessert we had apple pie, sweet potato pie, brownies, chocolate mousse cake, and rich hot chocolate.  It was wonderful.  Everyone from our programs who was in Rabat was invited, totaling somewhere around 30 people.  It was such a wonderful reunion of friends after we’d been split up in our different apartments, busy with our projects.  Friends, good food, and lots of love- that’s what Thanksgiving is all about (minus the family).  It was definitely a memorable Thanksgiving and we were all so thankful that we could come together and have such a wonderful feast away from home.  Now we are all worried about how old we are getting since we were able to all responsibly cook and pull off our own Thanksgiving without any other family members around.  In other words, we’re all excited to enjoy a wonderful family-filled Thanksgiving next year to remind us we’re still young!

Well, here are the pictures of my new apartment, I promise it’s not as messy as the pictures portray.  I am living in a tile palace with six other girls.  It’s absolutely wonderful.  The perfect way to wrap up our time in Morocco- spending time with great friends, trying to figure out our crazy Moroccan experience.  Between our random ISP interviews and appointments we find the time to watch movies, Grey’s Anatomy, make delicious food, and spend time bonding with each other. 

Hello everyone!  So sorry it’s been SO long!  Life has been so crazy lately!  Today is a Moroccan holiday so I am sitting in the living room watching tv with my sister.  There is a really good sitcom on with many many problems of divorce, remaining love, waking from a coma, children, and scheming parents- so great!  This week has been so busy with preparations for Independent Study Project time, plus the election!  The week before that was our excursion to Spain, and the week before that was just kind of boring so there was nothing to blog about!
Of course life here is never boring!  Today is surprisingly sunny, considering it has been raining every single day for the last few weeks.  There has been really serious flooding all over the country.  Apparently this is more rain than Moroccan has seen in over 50 years.  Luckily, this meant that on our excursion when we were driving across the whole northern part of Morocco everything was so green and fresh.  Because of the flooding though many parts of the country are not safe to go to, especially by bus.  We were lucky to avoid any problems on our travels.
Last Saturday at 8 a.m. we boarded the bus to begin our excursion.  The first thing everyone does when we get on the bus is fall right asleep, but I can’t really sleep on buses so I got to see the changing landscape as we moved into the Riff Mountains.  My host mom of course never lets me leave the house without food for later, and since I was leaving for an entire week so she sent me with nearly half of a cake, five round fried bread things, and a bag of chocolate croissants.  I was glad to have everyone on the program to share my bounty with!  Our first stop was Ouezzane, a small town in the foothills of the Riff Mountains.  We had lunch at our school’s director’s BEAUTIFUL house!  He has a beautiful herb and fruit garden, as well as an old olive press on site.  For lunch we had what many of us agreed was the best chicken, or at least top five, we’d ever had in our lives!  Dessert was fresh mandarins from the garden!
After indulging ourselves we got back in the bus.  We drove through the winding mountain roads to the wonderful mountain jewel of Chefchaouen.  I wish all of you could have come to Chefchaouen with us, as it was such a beautiful town.  I think I took more pictures of Chefchaouen than I had the whole rest of my time in Morocco.  Everything in the town is painted blue, which I guess is used to keep flies out of the house.  Of course it was raining both days we were there and SO cold because it was up in the mountains, but I luckily had come prepared for it.  Being up in the mountains reminded me so much of home!  At one point on the drive I felt like we were just around the corner from Levinworth!  For the two days in Chefchaouen we had a long tour of the entire town, ate at a wonderful restaurant, almost got tricked into buying carpets, visited the infamous Hat Man, watched Spiderman when it was too rainy and cold, and enjoyed the crisp mountain air.  It was a great little mountain retreat, and it began our descent into Europe and out of Morocco because it really felt more European than Moroccan.  There were so many European toursists and tourist shops everywhere, but it was beautiful and lots of fun.
After two nights in Chefchaouen we got back on the bus and drove to Fnideq, a small town right on the border to Spain.  There are two Spanish enclaves on the African continent, connected to Morocco- Mellila and Ceuta.  We spent one night in Fnideq, which was pretty much a typical border town, not much to do, but it was important to stay there as part of the migration experience we were having.  The next morning we got on the bus about 7 a.m. to travel through the border.  We arrived at the border, which was packed with cars and people on foot.  We got out of the bus and walked through.  We had to wait a long time for our passports to go through, especially for our academic director and assistant since they are both Moroccans.  The border was so packed with people because most of them commute daily into Ceuta and back.  Many of them go to Ceuta and bring back loads of smuggled goods to sell on the streets of Fnideq.  It is mostly women who do this as they can pass through border control even with loads and loads of goods strapped to their bodies because most Moroccan guards (male) will not touch the Moroccan women passing through; it’s very much an acted out performance of control, but really just a time when the border guards can profit from corruption.  Immediately after passing Moroccan border control you go through Spanish controls.  For us Americans we easily passed, but we walked past the line for the Moroccan working men to pass.  The line was PACKED with men and only a few were allowed into the gated walkway at a time and the way the Spanish border control stopped each group was by whipping them with their belts.  After studying migration for our whole time in Morocco, the border crossing was a very important experience for us to actually see the reality of what migrants go through.
We didn’t stay in Ceuta, but instead went straight to the ferry dock to catch the hour-long ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to mainland Spain.  The ferry arrives in Aljazeeras (which I did not spell right!) and we got right onto the bus and drove to Malaga.  We stayed at a youth hostel in Malaga that felt a lot like a hospital.  We ate at the cafeteria which meant we got a break from Moroccan food, but had to eat mediocre cafeteria food and just ended up eating a lot of French fries!  We got a stipend for dinner and got to go out wherever we wanted.  I went with a group to a cute little restaurant and had an incredible smoked salmon sandwich!  I was sad we weren’t staying another day in Malaga so I could go back for another!  Though I didn’t go to his museum there, Malaga is the birthplace of Pablo Picasso!
The next morning we drove to Granada.  We spent the next three nights at another youth hostel of the same chain in Granada.  It was SO SO cold there and SO rainy!  Luckily, two friends of mine and I found the Spanish secret- chocolate y churros!  Basically the best thing EVER!  It’s really thick hot chocolate with fried dough churros that you dip in it!  We were glad we found it on the first day so we could enjoy it everyday we were there!  The last day we were there was all free time.  We went up in the morning to the old medina, Moroccan style part of the city.  We stopped at a little café and all had tea, coffee, and cocoa up there before we all separated for the rest of the day.  We got our lunch stipends and split up.  Sophia, Angelica, and I went off together- the same group as our chocolate y churros group!  We wandered back down to the city, found a great place for lunch where I had a really good tuna sandwich!  We didn’t really feel like doing touristy things so we just wandered around the city.  We ended up wandering the completely opposite direction of our proposed final destination- our chocolate y churros café of course!  We started asking people, in our VERY limited Spanish, how to get there and it turns out we had wandered all the way out into the suburbs and had to go all the way back where we had just come from.  After asking enough people and walking for a long time we finally were headed in what seemed like the right direction and we took a turn and I looked up and right in front of us was our café!  It was perfect!  We rejoiced and ran inside and sat down for our last heavenly cup of chocolate y churros!  It was the perfect final Spanish adventure!
Spain was definitely a lot of fun, despite the COLD!  Of course I loved bundling up for the rain and cold because it reminded me of home!  Spain was a really nice break from Morocco.  It was nice to go out and not worry about Moroccan cultural concerns.  It was also a good break before we came back and dove into ISP research!  I did miss Morocco a lot, especially my family!  I am so happy we are stationed in Rabat as it is not a tourist destination really at all, though places like Chefchaouen are fun to visit.  Living in Rabat is just much more of a cultural emersion than a vacation, which of course is what study abroad is supposed to be all about!  Finally, our Spain excursion reminded me of how glad I am that I chose to study abroad in a country outside of the traditional European destinations because I really am experiencing a completely different way of life, which is more valuable than anything academic I could have learned.
So now I am back in Rabat!  My family is so happy to have me back!  Of course now it is ISP time and that is definitely stressful!  I have finally decided on a topic for my ISP.  I’m still struggling to articulate it, but here is my attempt for now.  I’m going to be looking at Morocco’s relationship with the African continent, especially in relation to development.  They are not a part of the African Union, and as far as I’ve experienced they really don’t identify with ‘Africa.’  There also seems to be a perception, encouraged through the media, that Morocco is stuck to Africa and thus will suffer in it’s development.  There is a strong push for Morocco to join with other Mediterranean countries and become more a part of Europe than of Africa.  It’s almost as if Morocco has to become more European in order for it to develop.  I’m wondering all of this because I think this ideology is detrimental for development in Africa.  It definitely perpetuates the idea that development = westernization, which I am convinced is not the case.  I’m not sure if that is really coherent at all, but I know through my research it will all be sorted out and eventually, somehow, manifest itself in my ISP paper!  I’m definitely staying most of the time in Rabat because my primary resource is going to be students at Mohammed V University.  I am going to do some traveling on the weekends, at least one trip to Fez to visit a friend doing her ISP there.  It should be a fun time, a time to be independent, to figure everything out on your own.  I’m looking forward to it!  And hopefully I will find time to blog often!  Enjoy the pictures!!

I have my camera cord now so here are some pictures!!  Just a sampling of my travels in Morocco!

Hello!  I am sitting in Café Arab drinking fresh orange juice and using their wireless internet!  I thought I wouldn’t have that much of interest to share this weekend because I’m not going anywhere, but I was wrong!
Friday started out great!  I had chocolate cake for breakfast! My mom insisted, after I ate two huge pieces for breakfast, that I take another piece with me for after class.  Instead of going to our usual Darija class in the morning all the students on my program met and took the bus to our academic director’s university class he teaches.  We went to his cross-cultural studies class and had small group discussions with the students about feminism, fundamentalism/Islamism, and Amazghism (Native Moroccans trying to be recognized as a valued part of Moroccan culture).  The students were so enthusiastic and the discussions actually got really heated, so it was an exciting morning!  I had told my mom I was going to be home at noon for Friday couscous.  Unfortunately, the students talked SO much that I didn’t get home until 1.  She was really worried about me!  So they had already eaten most of the couscous so I quickly took my spot at the table and started finishing it off.  THEN my mom comes from the kitchen holding this plate piled high with couscous!!  She had saved me an enormous portion!  So I ate probably two full couscous meals!  Of course later that night for dinner I was the one responsible for finishing off the huge plate of pasta!  SO MUCH FOOD!!!  I’m excited for independent study time when I can portion my own food, but of course I will be sad without delicious home cooking!
On Friday I also made friends with some migrants!  I’m so excited!  There are two young men who fix shoes right outside of my house.  We only spoke briefly, but I’m excited to get to know them more and find out where they’re from!  Maybe I can get some valuable information for my independent study project!
Almost every Friday there are big protests outside parliament, or other locations in Rabat.  The protesters are usually jobless college graduates protesting for government job creation.  The riot police is often present at these protests, which is pretty intense.  I’ve seen police with their riot gear and batons chase screaming people a few times.  Of course I only witness this for the amount of time it takes me to get away from the situation!
Saturday was a nice quiet day.  My sisters went to school and my mom was working so I was home by myself in the morning.  I got some homework done and got to watch a great tear-jerker, The Bridges of Madison County.  I was glad no one was home so I didn’t have to explain why I was crying so much!  After lunch I went, in the rain, to a café outside the medina.  This is a popular spot for our program as it has wireless internet!  They have wonderful fresh-squeezed orange juice!  After spending a while at the café I came home and spent time with my family.  Like I said, a nice quiet Saturday.
Sunday was definitely the best day of the weekend!  I knew I was going to have a skype date with my family in Spokane, so I was already excited, but then my mom told me that we were going to the hammam (public bath)!  After getting a REALLY slow start we finally packed up everything and headed out!  We brought a big red bucket with all of our bath products and two stools and mats in it and also a big bag packed with towels, bathrobe, and a change of clothes.  It might not sound like a lot, but we were loaded down with stuff!  I was also still in my pajamas!  I asked if I should change and they said it was fine…so I walked to the bath in my pjs!  You walk into the hammam and there’s the first room where you undress, leave your stuff and get your buckets.  Then you enter heaven!  There are three rooms with increasing heat levels.  It was SUPER busy when we were there so we had to stake out our spot in the first room.  Basically you lay out your little mats, get out your stools, and start filling up your buckets.  After filling our seven or so buckets we constructed a little wall with them.  The first step is to use this gooey soap stuff.  After soap, you take this really rough, sandpaper-like black mitt and scrap off LAYERS of dead skin!  It’s wonderful!   That takes about maybe 20 minutes.  Then you wash your hair, which takes about 5 minutes.  Then you spend the next 2 hours or so repeating that and just sitting pouring hot water over your head!  Yeah, it’s wonderful!  So we spent a few hours there, making me late for my skype date, but luckily everyone was still there when I did get to the cyber café!
Now I’m just settling into the second to last week of classes and getting really excited for our week-long excursion to Spain.  Right now the only thing I really know about it is that we go on a route North, stopping in a few different places in Morocco, eventually ending up in Spain for a few nights and then back home.  Should be fun!  Right now my sister is putting chocolate crackers in her tea and mashing them up with her spoon…apparently it’s delicious, but I think I’ll keep my crackers dry!

Well, we all survived the village stay!  There were definitely ups and downs, but overall I enjoyed it a lot!
We left on Saturday morning and drove about three hours to the town of Boujaad.  We met with a local NGO there doing major development work in the town and the surrounding villages.  They’re actually doing a lot with youth engagement so I’m going to contact them again to chat about our project in Sierra Leone and what advice we can get from them.  After meeting with the NGO we headed to the village!  It’s located in the Middle Atlas Mountains, really beautiful rolling foothill/small mountains- absolutely gorgeous.  We got out from the bus and waited for our families to come pick us up.  My mom came to get me- very elderly woman, very hard to understand her Darija, but she was great.  We walked through the fields up to the top of one hill where my house was.  The houses are mud brick houses.  There are a few rooms built off a little open courtyard area, then outside the courtyard gate there is the enclosure for the sheep and goats, another for the chickens, turkeys, and pheasants, and also the room for the donkey.
In my family there was my very elderly mother, Rahbia, her daughter, Haddou, and her two sons Aziz and Mustafa.  Haddou had a five year old son, Omar.  All of our families in the village were somehow affected by migration.  Aziz worked most of the year in Casablanca building houses and Mustafa lived in Valencia, Spain December through August building houses.  Because of the money coming into this community from the migrants, most houses had electricity- solar power now, but soon electricity from the main station will be coming in, some houses had running water, and in mine we always had cookies or yogurt from the town.  Of course this was surprising as we were all expecting to be living without any of these things.
When I first got there my mom made mint tea and we sat for a while in one of the rooms.  The two living rooms were just a room with some tied carpets laid on the floor and then you sat with a pillow behind your back.  At night they laid down a few blankets for extra padding.  So I had some tea and homemade cookies.  We weren’t supposed to drink any of the water since it was well water, but boiled tea was fine, which is a good thing because they make you drink so much tea!  After drinking tea I just sat around and played with Omar.  He appears cute at first, but really is the most ill-behaved child I have ever met!  I’m quite disappointed because I hardly took any pictures while I was there because Omar would have an enormous tantrum each time I even went near my bag- my bag which had to be set on top of the highest cabinet out of his reach so he didn’t go through the entire thing!  He was fun to play with, but he was so exhausting and just threw fit after fit when he didn’t get his way.  I just kept reminding myself that I had two sweet sisters to return to in Rabat!  For dinner we had harira.  After eating I went walking with my mom and Omar up another hill to sit in the olive tree field.  It was so beautiful and peaceful, especially right before sunset!  After our walk  we came back and sat for a bit then went to bed.  I slept fairly well for being on such a hard surface.  Unfortunately, I woke up about 3am and was SO sick!  It was absolutely awful!  Luckily my mom and sister took such great care of me.  I felt bad because they stayed up and sat with me all night.  They were saying a lot, but I could only understand when they felt my skin and said “she’s hot.”  They also poked and prodded my stomach a lot, but it was actually really nice and an interesting experience to be cared for by these village women.  Because I was so sick I pretty much spent most of Sunday laying in bed, it was okay though because my mom did the same thing!  I did gather the strength to go get water with my sister.  We walked, with the donkey carrying the water jugs, about 15 minutes to the well- a five foot across hole built with stones, completely open to the air.  I watched Omar spit and through trash into the well and I can’t imagine he’s the only one, not to mention all of the donkeys, dogs, and wild animals passing by everyday.  It was a tremendous show of strength on the part of my sister!  Pulling water up from the well was SO difficult and she just did it like it was no big deal, it was amazing.  The village women really were all SO strong, it was astounding!  I guess they don’t really have a choice when so many of the men are leaving to work elsewhere in Morocco or abroad.  That was the other thing I did on Sunday- we had an organized conversation between us and the village people.  Basically we gathered in this little building and had a few hours to just ask questions back and forth, about life in the village or America, or migration, or whatever we wanted, with Badr, our program assistant, translating.  It was really interesting!  We talked about everything from village life and politics, the American school system, the impact of migration on the village, and of course the U.S. election!
Although I really didn’t do that much, I really did enjoy the village stay.  The other program has a week-long stay which would have been great, as two days is really not long enough.  At the time of course I didn’t want to stay since I was miserably sick, but if I hadn’t been sick a week would have been wonderful!  It was definitely an experience that is rare to come by and I tried to seize it as much as I could.  I even enjoyed just laying with my mom for so long, there was nothing I could have done to change the situation so I just enjoyed the time to relax!
I am so happy to be back with my family in Rabat!  No more pesky Omar!  I really love my family here and miss them so much when we have excursions.  It will be really hard to leave them in December.  It’s crazy because we only have three weeks of classes left, including this week!  Then we have a week-long excursion to Spain, following the migration route.  Then four weeks for our independent study projects, a week to present them in Rabat, then I come home!  It doesn’t seem like very long, but really I have so much left to experience!  Everyday brings new things.  I try to write about and remember as much as I can!  I have to go write my account of the homestay experience in Darija!