Magically Speaking

August 14, 2008: I just found this entry from January in my drafts section. I must have been saving it for something, but I don't remember what. So here it is now!

January 18, 2008

Magical : beautiful or delightful in such a way as to seem removed from everyday life.

Magical is my everyday life. Rbia can unlock locked doors without a key, Nora and Habiba can translate "my Tashlheit" into "actual Tashlheit", Brahim can procure a house that once seemed impossible to find, and Ayub finds chairs and tea in any room of the house, including the roof. I don't know how to say it in Tashlheit, but I'm hoping that after a few months my community will just gradually pick it up and know that it expresses my delight/awe with everything they do.

There have been some serious ups and downs (way more of the latter than the former) over the past eight weeks. Having been wrenched from my surrogate family of trainers and fellow volunteers, I was dropped (OK, fine I was chauffered in a cab) into this tiny town, in which I appear to be the best thing since sliced bread. (Only there's no such thing as sliced bread here, so you can imagine just how great I am!) It's not that I do anything particularly special by any stretch of the imagination; I just happened to have been born outside of T-Toot. As everyone here has known each other since birth, my eating, sleeping, hygiene, and travel habits are all subject to intense scrutiny. Sometimes it's flattering that everyone in town knows my name, and other times it's intimidating that I can only remember about a third of the names I'm told.

At first I took the attitude that this is just something I have to "get through". Soon my homestay will be complete and there will be no one to see when I wake up, or count the number of times I brush my teeth each day. Everything will be different, I thought, when I have my own house and I can be independent. Then I realized how negative the idea of "getting through" something truly is. I had resigned myself to being unhappy for two months! In New York, I "got through" each workweek so I could relax with friends on the weekends, never totally enjoying the majority of my days. How sad is that? I had a moment of realization that I was in this totally foreign, exotic place and, yet, I had carried much of my old baggage across the Atlantic. To paraphrase Gandhi's words in a very different context: the change had to be within me, and emphatically not my environment.

So I began by thinking of all the things I take for granted at home, but that people here manage to do without on a regular basis. Properly working locks, a (mostly) universal language, and rental brokers are just a few examples. I've also decided to embrace my new-found celebrity. I do yoga on the roof and go running through the fields (to shouts of gawr! gawr! sit! sit!). I blatantly ask people what they did all day, if they seem to know more about me than I think they should. (If we've never shaken hands before, should you really know how often I've been to the hammam?)

My raised profile has had some surprisingly positive effects on my work. For one, it attracted a second English student, who in turn put me in direct contact with his mother, who is a member of my artisans association. Sitting in her living room, after my first session, we began to talk about the association, which I had been trying to gather for a meeting for nearly six weeks. Why wasn't it meeting? What was keeping the women away? Please, let me help you. I want to know what you need.

And, magically, the next day we had our first meeting. Hamdullah!