An Easy Guide to Communal Eating

Double-dipping is a classic faux-pas that I engage in every single day. It's not that I'm rude, or don't care about spreading germs. It's that I eat with my hands from communal dishes. I can count on one hand the number of times I've used an actual utensil in the last two months. Even at restaurants, I prefer to tear off a piece of bread and use it to scoop up vegetables and meat. (Lentils were quite challenging at first but now I have the hang of it. The trick is to smoosh them a bit in the bowl.)

Anyway, I highly recommend giving up utensils and individual plates. It makes for less clean-up and more of a shared experience. Just remember to eat only what's in front of you and don't stray into your dining companions' eating territories. It helps if you imagine a pie chart, and one of the triangles as your "area." Eat the vegetables first and don't touch the meat until your host divides it amongst his guests. (Yes, it's almost always a "him" who divides the meat.) If you're eating cous-cous it is appropriate to pour your sour milk directly into the communal dish and use a spoon. Make sure to tell other people that they aren't eating enough, even as they stuff their faces.

Zebras Eat People and Other Interesting Facts

Growing up in San Diego afforded me many, many trips to the World Famous San Diego Zoo (I believe that's its official name, just like San Diego's official tagline is "America's Finest City", which I've actually heard used in broadcasts in other cities). In third grade my class spent an entire week visiting the zoo, learning about the various animals, their natural habitats and diets, and the then-fledgling panda and gorilla projects. The Zoo and the Wild Animal Park in Escondido continue to be two of my favorite places to visit whenever I'm home.

I was unexpectedly reminded of my love for these places while watching television with my host family last night. Television is a nice, quiet way to bond with them and practice my Tashlheit and Arabic. I can make exclamations, such as, "Hey!" when there's violence, or we can laugh over the fact that we rarely laugh at the same moments during American films with Arabic subtitles. My favorite times are when what I think of as the Animal Planet of satellite TV comes on. (I have yet to find shark week in Arabic.) Displaying ten to fifteen second clips of animals, insects and plants (sometimes animals eating animals and plants eating insects) this channel provides zoning out at its best, providing the simple pleasure of watching nature without getting muddy or cold. Without voice-overs or subtitles, I like to think of this type of programming as universally enjoyable. On this particular occasion I decided to make a vocabulary lesson out of the program, because you just never know when you'll need to know how to say "tiger."

Zebras showed up first, and I learned that they were himar waHsi, which I repeated a few times because anything with more than three syllables trips me up. As the tigers (nimmr) came and went, my host sister said "himar waHsi ibbi l-middn rika kmmi d nkki." And I said, "Zebras? No, tigers do. The things with the stripes? They eat people? Noooooo." And my host sister said, "Yeeeeees." And I said, "Maybe, but I'm pretty sure they eat plants only, just like donkeys." (Donkeys are an excellent frame of reference.) And so I decided that actually she meant the tigers, but just to be sure I decided that I would ask my tutor.

My tutor confirmed that zebras do, in fact, eat people. Himar waHsi directly translates into "beasts of the forest." I had always thought they lived in tall grasses on the African plains (hence the silly striped outfit) and ate plants, but I could be wrong. Third grade was a long time ago, after all.

Later, when I suggested my friend Mia procure some lizards (tqllit) in Marrakech for her spider problem, I was told that lizards cause melanin loss in the skin, creating large white patches, and that they eat people, too.

I'll just have to stick with cats, I guess.

Some Self-Business Development

There are a few things on this blog you may have failed to notice through no fault of your own. This blog's layout is limited by my knowledge of html and time and patience to fiddle with various things. Also, Google has decided to switch most of my basic functions into Arabic. Does anyone know how to undo that? Back to business:

For those who love pictures please look to your right, there are three different slideshows. If you click on any of them you will be taken to Picasa and be able to peruse these images at your leisure. (Mom, you can even order pictures that you want!)

For those of you who love shopping or just giving your opinion on anything and everything please look at the third slideshow, "Don't You Want One?" particularly carefully. These are the products of the women's artisans' association I work with the most. By private email, please let me know what you think of the products. If you have product ideas of your own (especially those geared towards female tourists that utilize weaving, crocheting, or sewing), share those, too. No, you don't get a cut. If you want one of these items, let me know that, too.

Last, if you're looking to subscribe to this blog, scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on the word "subscribe" or "atom". This should give you the RSS feed and allow you to do whatever it is you do with an RSS feed. Man, technology used to be my thing!

Tomorrow my future house is going to be "checked" i.e. approved for safety and security standards. I've never seen the inside of it but I've been told that it is ihla bezzef, and exactly like my host family's home (which is, indeed, quite beautiful). I can't wait to have my own kitchen and put pictures on the wall. I'll tell you more about it when I actually have some facts at my disposal!

In other news, a family member is having surgery tomorrow. Please send safe, happy, healthy thoughts to Los Angeles.

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!

Consumption-sumption, What's Your Function?

Today's New York Times included a guest op-ed by Jared Diamond about the unsustainable consumption rate of the United States. (Which I will not link to because it mentions things I am not allowed to mention.) Obviously, the human impact on the environment is a hot topic these days, garnering Nobel Peace Prizes, countless headlines and endless redesigns of product labels. Oh, wait, that last thing - that's the problem.

One of the most difficult things I've had to adjust to in Morocco has been the rate of consumption here. And with good reason, according to Diamond, I'm accustomed to wasting at 32 times the rate of residents of developing countries!

Here, there is a nearly pathological resistance to waste. Even seemingly well-off families are averse to discarding a potentially useful plastic bag. (I've seen them hand-washed and hung on the clothesline to be reused again.) Candy wrappers, soda cans and gum wrappers virtually don't exist in homes, because individual servings are anathema to how most people function. Families eat from communal dishes (no plates) with their hands (no utensils) and they share one cup for water (fewer dishes to clean, but more "microbes" to pass around). Left-over food, like orange peels and bits of bread are fed to the animals. (Did you know that donkeys love orange peels and cats like bread?) The vast majority of people don't even use toilet paper! (Is that TMI?) The little bit of trash that is produced by the average family is mixed with palm fronds and burned in order to heat the communal bath, or hammam.

The down side of all this is that when there is no system for creating waste, there is no system for collecting it. The fields I walk through every day are strewn with plastic bags that flew off clotheslines, piles of half-burnt trash that was too hashuma to give to the hammam keeper (if you want examples of hashuma trash, please send me an email and I'll be happy to explain) and other random things lying about. No one appears to care, because it's not in their, well, backyards.

When I move in to my own home in February I'm curious to see how many of my old habits will return. Under the scrutiny of my host families, I have managed to produce only two or three very tiny bags of trash, which I take into Oz to discard with some semblance of anonymity. (Though, today, a group of boys started yelling "Peace Corps! Peace Corps!" at me. It must be the large, black sunglasses and unwashed hair that gives me away.) But I already have plans for eating yogurt every morning, and that involves individual containers and that involves trash. Oh, the shame! At least I have a lovely collection of plastic bags stowed away in my suitcase. That, however, is a habit I picked up from my lovely, American grandmother.

Hippity-Hop

The exciting inter-city souk bus ride didn’t happen. Nobody likes a girl unwilling to pay full-fare to Agadir even though she’s just going a third of the way to Taliouine, so I pulled a little maneuver we like to call “taxi-hopping”. It’s a delicate science, not unlike baking, of negotiation, proper mixing, and timing.

As I stood next to the dogmatic ticket salesman whose continuous cries of “Agadir, Agadir, Agadir” nearly brought me to tears, I overheard a tourist ask in French if the bus would stop in Taliouine. The dogmatic man replied “Yes, Agadir, Agadir, Agadir, you pay full-fare, Agadir, Agadir, Agadir.” Mr. Tourist promptly turned on his heel to ask another ticket salesman about his destination. Having waited an hour and half already in the hopes that the silly man wouldn’t sell all his tickets I cried (with only the slightest hint of desperation), “Do you speak English?” His lovely wife said, “Yes.”

Anjuli: Is Taliouine your final destination?

Helen: Yes. Are you going there, too?

Anjuli: Yes! Do you want to join me in a taxi? None of these men will sell you a ticket to Taliouine; it’s New Year’s you know.

Helen: Yes, sure, let’s go.

Hallelujah! Helen (actually Surinamese), her husband Jan (actually Dutch, not French) and I went outside to the grand taxi station to negotiate with the kurti, or coordinator/god of all taxi drivers. It’s a powerful position he holds. My fate has been determined by more than one grumpy, toothless kurti who insisted on 150 MAD for a 5 MAD ride. (Hence my clinging to the hope that the bus ticket salesman would relent.) Helen, Jan, and I negotiated a reasonable, though still inflated, price and piled into the backseat of a grand taxi that to the normal eye should hold a total of five passengers, including the driver.

Helen: We go now?

Anjuli: Ummm, no, we have to wait for the other three passengers.

Helen: Where will they sit?

Anjuli: Well, there will be two in the front passenger seat and four of us back here. We can’t leave unless they sell six seats. Hopefully, there won’t be any livestock.

Helen: Livestock?

Anjuli: Yes. If someone didn’t sell his sheep at market, especially because of the recent holiday, we might be joined by a sheep.

Helen: Oh.

Luckily, there were no sheep, and we were joined by three men (one of them blessedly small) who accompanied us to Taznakht. Wait, wasn’t I going to Taliouine? We’re taxi hopping, people! You can’t just go straight to your final destination. That would be a) efficient and b) boring. I know, I know it’s hard to keep all these towns straight (and, yes, they all begin with t’s and, really, they should preferably end in t’s), but bear with me.

When we arrive in Taznakht the six of us are swiftly piled into a station wagon. Ah, room at last. I can knit and eat oranges. Lovely. Oh, wait, no. They add two more men to the taxi, and we are all squished again. After paying the kurti, we watch the driver expectantly. The car is running, he is behind the wheel and he has even shifted into first gear. We’re on our way! Oh, wait, no. He needs to adjust the bags in the trunk. He returns to the driver’s seat and we begin our journey. Oh, wait, no. We only traveled about 5 feet. The driver kills the engine and gets out of the car. He returns with a jug of water and opens the hood. This is reassuring. I love a taxi driver that maintains his car. Finally, he gets behind the wheel, turns on the car, and we actually drive all the way to Taliouine, with only one teensy stop to pick up a suitcase from three children at a gas station on the side of the road. I didn’t ask what was inside.

In Taliouine I left Helen and Jan to join Anny and Matthew, my fellow volunteers and dear friends, who had arrived some time before me, having taken just one taxi from the opposite direction. Taliouine is famous for it’s saffron. It’s one of the only places in the world where it grows in large amounts and there is a huge farming cooperative just outside of the town. It takes about 200 flowers to generate just one gram of the stuff.

We didn’t see any of it. (Harvesting ended in November.) Instead, we spent the entire weekend talking, and reminding ourselves that we’re not crazy; we’re just products of our culture. (Yes, we’ve totally internalized Peace Corps training, but at least we’re aware of it, right?) It had been about a month since I had seen them, and I have to say they looked better than before. We’re all obviously sleeping more and eating better than we did during training. Matthew is learning the fine art of leather making (it involves pigeon poop) and Anny is exploring the world of underground goat cheese-making (goats climb trees here, so I’m not sure how she herds them together).

We also did some hiking (actually the German, wandern is more descriptive of what we did) around Taliouine. We forded a river, climbed a mountain, discovered Roman ruins, and drank tea with a nice lady that was so shocked that I spoke Tashlheit she almost dropped her baby boy. We also went to an amusement park, which had a rickety old Ferris wheel that I would love to tell you I was brave enough to ride. But I wasn’t. I’m afraid of heights. I did eat fried food, though, and we all know that that’s what amusement parks are really all about. Then we went back to our hotel room, watched Center Stage, which I’d never seen before, started Gone With the Wind, and then fell asleep as a happy little family. This is how I celebrated the coming the New Year.

Taliouine is officially my new second favorite sleepy little town, after my site, (codename: T-Toot) of course. It’s a little crazy to think that I’ve been in Morocco for nearly five months, and that it’s next year already. I wish you all the best in 2008. Leap years are always tons of fun. Make the most of that extra day!

Orange is the New Black

Does anyone else remember that Banana Republic ad campaign a few years back that really pushed orange? There were orange scarves and orange coats and orange knit wool tights. Vogue even touted it as the new "bold neutral." Personally, I never bought into it. And I still don't.

One of my favorite artisans here, Rbia, loves orange. It's best with green in her opinion. It also goes well with brown and black. Or at least that's what she pointed to on the color chart I made for her. Many of her peers agree with her. Indeed, I know some candy marketers that would whole-heartedly agree with all of them.

One of the most interesting parts of my job (aside from the sheep's brain I kind of accidentally ate the other day) is walking the fine line between encouragement and constructive criticism. Rbia works so hard on her products. The time she spends at the association working on them takes away from her household duties, her work in the fields, and her family.

On the other hand I really want that time to be worthwhile. It's my job to tell her what my American eyes see, and what they saw tonight are handbags that could be vastly improved with a bit more attention to color combinations and improvements in technique and consistency.
The wonderful thing about Rbia is that she's open to new ideas and she doesn't (appear to) take criticism personally. We have lots to look forward to. Now if I could only get the whole "organizational management" project underway.

In other news: I saw the king twice this week. He's just as handsome as he is on TV. And tomorrow I'm taking my first "overnight" to see Matthew and Anny (see earlier post) so I'll have a whole new town to tell you about, along with the experience of an inter-city souk bus. Whoa, baby!

Update 27/01/2008: Orange is beginning to grow on me. After being bombarded by the colors over and over again while shopping in the souks for what seems like a hundred days straight, I'm coming around to Rbia's point of view. I still maintain that it is not completely appropriate for the American market though. The color chart I made for them has worked wonders, yet there are red and green bags on the looms as we speak! Imik s imik, (little by little) right?

The Big Feast

My horoscope for yesterday: Quality time with animals will transform your mood. Visit a stable to hang with the horses, go for a hike in the woods with your dog, or volunteer to help out at a rescue league.

Yesterday each family in my town slaughtered a sheep (or two, in my family's case) to commemorate the sacrifice of Ishmael (I know some you want to say, "Oooooh, Anjuli forgot; it was Isaac." Not here it wasn't.) Each house has a lovely, skinned sheep hanging in some shady spot on the roof, or in the living room. It's not really that gross, until you make the connection between what's on your plate and what's hanging upside down behind you . . .

OK, so my horoscope was a little off the mark (astrology is an imperfect science, OK?), but my mood was transformed. The whole ritual slaughtering of sheep thing was a little depressing. (I'm sheltered; I admit it.) Later in the day, however, we got dressed up, put on some make-up, and strolled about town, visiting other families. I met about twenty women I'd never seen before. There was some dancing (girls only), a whole lot of cookies, a little tea, and my favorite treat of all: coffee. Yum. I also made an amazing discovery. Widade, my one English student, owns a sewing machine! Sewing machines are kind of rare here, so this is a huge boon for my association. It's all about making connections.

Kiss and Tell

Birthdays are always a little trying for me. There’s the pressure to celebrate, to appear popular in some way. There’s the constant distance between my family and me. And in the past there was always the fear of an unwanted phone call from my estranged father - a guaranteed argument and tears all around.

On the other hand my family does an amazing job at making me feel quite special. Phone calls, cards, presents, and expressions of love are in abundance every 14th of December. My mother makes a point of calling me as near to 9:29 AM PST as possible, simply because that’s the time at which I was born.

Traditionally, birthdays are not celebrated in Morocco. Indeed, many people don’t even know when their birthdays fall. It’s a hallmark of our individualist culture that we expect to celebrate the birth of a single, normal person.

Needless to say today was rough. I missed home all the more, and waiting until 5:29 PM GMT to talk to my Mom seemed unbearable this morning, as I sat knitting a hat and trying to do yoga in a culturally appropriate manner. (Impossible. Bending over and sticking your butt in the air is never culturally appropriate, but for some reason it’s OK to do on the roof in full view of the entire community . . .)

Things started looking up at lunchtime, when I learned how to eat cous-cous (sksou in Tashlheit) with my hands. I know it seems impossible, but really it’s not. It’s just really messy and involves having fewer qualms about messiness than I have. This new technique caused me to eat much slower than usual (it’s possible), but my host sister, Habiba, was so excited to see me try it that it lifted my spirits - emotional eating at its best.

Later I went into Oz to check my mail (walu) and my email (bzzef). And there were tons of well wishes from all of you! Thank you! Not only do I have the best family in the world but also I have an amazing group of friends back home. I don’t know what I would do without your support.

On my way home, my Mom called, which made me feel tons better. After we finished talking, I entered the communal fields and ran into three little girls that are friends with my host niece, Ikram. We greeted in the normal way by grasping hands and kissing on the cheek. Then I greeted their mothers, whom I had never met before, in the same way. It was one of those rare moments when you treasure something totally mundane. I must give and receive dozens of kisses everyday, but these were special somehow. Maybe it was because we weren’t in a home (where it’s mandatory to greet this way) or because the girls were so happy to see me. I’m a complete stranger to this community. All they know is that some crazy American wants to learn Tashlheit and ask them lots of questions about household goods. But in those brief moments, and as I overheard the girls explaining who I was, I felt like I had connected with my community in some small way. Not a bad birthday present.

What are you wearing?

In another context this question might be considered mildly offensive, but it’s quite relevant to my position in Morocco. Navigating the clothing conundrum is one of the most important ways in which female volunteers adapt culturally and ensure their safety and security.

Something I haven’t talked a lot about is the heightened sense of the public and the private. How I would dress in a house of my own is very different than how I dress in my host family’s home, which, in turn, is very different from how I dress in public. I could wear shorts and a tank top in my own home and no one would care, but the minute I step out onto the street, my manner and dress convey multiple messages about who I am and what my intentions are.

My gender plays a significant role in all of this. As a woman I’m expected to cover-up quite a bit. (You can see how some of the young women in my community dress to the right.) Most days I wear jeans with a loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt. It’s always a plus if the shirt is long enough to cover the rear pockets of my jeans. If I’m in public or in the presence of men I never show above the elbows or knees, or my collarbones (the New York Times was right - they are an erogenous zone!). Cleavage is absolutely out of the question. As the temperatures are quite low this time of year, this hasn’t been much of a challenge. (I’m wearing four layers and sitting inside my sleeping bag underneath a blanket as I type this. I’ve formed an alliance with the family cat to keep warm at night! Oh, and I’m also knitting myself legwarmers, mostly for their function and, maybe, just a tiny bit (like 1%, I swear!) for their fashion. Oh, that hurt to admit.)

The consequences of dressing inappropriately can be serious. It’s considered disrespectful to both men and women to display a lot of skin. Today, over tea, my host sisters, Habiba and Jmeia, and I had a discussion about the hashuma of showing our shoulders. Their advice to me: don’t do it. In a large city like Fes or Ouarzazate a women could be mistaken for a prostitute if she wears too little clothing. Even in the blistering hot summer I’m expected to wear long pants and long sleeves. It’s important that I demonstrate my willingness to adapt to my community, otherwise they may not respect my efforts to work with them as a professional.

None of this is to say that Moroccan women don’t dress how they please. There are those who wear traditional j’llabahs everyday, and there are those who wear skinny jeans and look like someone plucked them right out of Williamsburg. The veil is not mandatory here, and many women adopt it by choice - even over the protests of their parents and siblings. I happen to live in a conservative, rural town that has certain expectations. Even so, I have to say that my community has also been respectful of my choices. No one has insisted that I wear a zif (head scarf) or give up wearing pants. They were very supportive, however, when I bought a pair of house slippers. tHla bezzef (very nice).

In other news: I now have Skype and I almost know how to use it. There’s a bit of a time delay, but I believe it’s beneficial to my mental health to hear your voices, even if we can’t carry on a totally normal conversation. So call me. I miss you guys.