First off, I’d like to apologize for abandoning the blog readers – apparently there are more of you than I realized (I was really just capping it at mom and dad). Every time I sit down to actually write in this thing, I’m so overwhelmed by how much there is to write down and the difficulty of communicating clearly everything I’ve seen and felt, that I get overwhelmed and move on to something easier, like trying to find a job this summer (still working on that one).
Starting with the basics, I now have one week left living with my host family. Next week, specifically Saturday at noon, I leave my host family and venture out into the wide world by myself. Since my research is going to put me in Rabat, three other SIT students and I are most likely renting an apartment in a neighborhood called Hassan for about a month. I’m incredibly excited to be able to do my own grocery shopping and eat what I want, when I want. It’s not that my host family’s food isn’t good, it’s actually delicious, and I know I’m going to miss kous-kous Fridays, but I’m definitely not going to miss eating bread for breakfast, bread with lunch, and bread with dinner. Part of me is nervous that I’ll completely revert back to Western culture and habits when I’m living by myself, but then again, maybe after living with a Moroccan family in a pre-medieval medina for two and a half months that can be excused.
I’ve decided on a research topic that’s actually completely different than the possibilities I was considering before. I’m working with this incredibly awesome environmentalist named Dr. Hakima El-Haiti (her quotable moment, when explaining how environmental sustainability can be economically efficient, is: “People ask, which do you want to do, make millions, or save the turtles? I say, I want turtles and millions.”). She’s helping me to suggest environmentally sustainable alternatives to plastic bags to one Marjane store (kind of like a Walmart except less evil I think) in Rabat. The effort would include an impact study in which I research just how many plastic bags that particular Marjane uses per year and what their impact is on the surrounding environment, distributing a survey to Marjane customers to gauge public opinion regarding this potential change, and then offering alternative options such as cloth bags. What’s really exciting about this idea is that my advisor suggested that we could try and partner with women in poor rural communities who weave baskets for meager incomes, and try to convince Marjane to sell some of these baskets for fair prices, therefore providing income generation for impoverished women. To be honest, this last part of the project is what really gets me going, but I see how ambitious it is, and I’m willing to maybe let it go if it can’t be accomplished.
I’m not quite sure how this whole idea came together, it just clicked one day and I knew it was perfect. When we travel, we sometimes pass by entire fields filled with plastic bags – Morocco’s solid waste system really can’t effectively deal with its expanding population and growing consumer culture, and so people just dump their refuse onto the land, which is really disturbing. Our most recent lecture series was on environment and development, and it’s really disconcerting how many issues Morocco really has. For instance, when we stayed at a rural village for a week (more details on that later) we talked about how the population growth has caused people to cut down more trees, which caused soil erosion, therefore depleting its nutrients. The village was in a semi-arid area undergoing a three-year drought, the villagers’ crops were not fairing well and their wells were at record low levels. Every family had at least one relative sending remittances from abroad, and many were planning on moving to urban areas that are already overcrowded. Our director, Lahcen Haddad, said that people were making efforts at reforestation, but that generally only 20% of reforestation efforts are successful. He grew up in that area, and told us that the sparsely-covered hills we saw were covered in forests during his childhood. It was really sad that even in remote areas people’s mere existence can have a negative effect on the environment.
As a whole, our village stay was a really incredible experience. The name of the village is Feryat, and most of the people who live there belong to the Ouled Khallou tribe, which I think is Berber because some of the women had traditional Berber facial tattoos (blue lines between the eyebrows and vertically down the center of the chin). The nearest paved road is about an hour from the village center – it’s incredibly isolated. There are no stores, no cars, no streets, just houses nestled in these gorgeous rolling hills of fields and forests. The environment was really strange in that when the ground didn’t have crops growing in it, it was rocky and brittle. People have been farming here for centuries, but I can’t imagine how they managed to make the rocky ground fertile.
The houses themselves are made of mud and stone, and are relatively sturdy. My friend Michael said they looked like the family had carved them straight out of the hillside. They’re not really enclosed structures, more like outer walls enclosing a few rooms. To get from the bedroom to the kitchen to the sitting room you have to walk outside. There aren’t really floors either, just smoothed stone with mats on top, and no furniture. The mom crouched down on the kitchen floor to cook, or we sat on bags of flour. Outside the house there were cows, chickens, turkeys, sheep, goats, and a donkey. I learned a lot of new farm vocabulary that week. Every morning I was woken up by the rooster and the donkey – I don’t know if any of you have ever heard what a real donkey sounds like, but if you could mix the sound of rusty hinges with exasperated whining, that would be close. My family naturally woke up at 6:30 with the sunrise (they let me sleep in until 7:30) and went to bed at 9 or 10. They had some electric lights, but once the sun set the darkness just washed over everything, it was like the rest of the world beyond the beam of my flashlight didn’t even exist.
There were a lot of new experiences for us in the village. We all wanted to help our families as much as possible, but none of us were exactly adept at farm life, and at least for me, I feel like they were often placating me by giving me chores, which is the exact opposite of what I wanted to happen. I did get to ride the donkey a few times, and we bonded in a sense, except for the time when I wanted it to go in a different direction and it just walked around in circles for a good five minutes. I said good morning to the donkey once (“sabaah il-kheer ya hi-maar!”) and my family thought that was pretty hilarious. I also discovered that sheep might be the dumbest animals I’ve ever seen, and that cows can give you the evil eye if you milk them the wrong way. Every day we took the donkey to get water from the well, and one day I tried pulling up water using the bucket attached to a rope tied to a tree. I threw the bucket down, and started pulling it back up filled with water. I was using the edge of the well as kind of fulcrum for the rope, but all of a sudden the rope snapped, whipped me in face, and the bucket dropped and sank to the bottom of the well. I was completely astonished – not only did I feel incredibly guilty for breaking these people’s water source, but other SIT students were there to witness the blunder, which made it even worse. That was one of my more rough moments.
There were good experiences too though. I helped my younger host sister, age 17, practice her English (She insisted on us reading a dialogue about getting a prescription, and explaining the concept of a “side effect” in Arabic was a little challenging). She and the other younger sister, age 14, study in the nearest town, but the oldest sister, age 21, stays at home and works with her mother. I always wondered how she felt about that, whether she resented her sisters or accepted her lot in life. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her about it much because the language barrier was pretty intense. I had to use all of the colloquial I knew, and still I couldn’t understand most of what they said. The educated children and the father could understand me the best, but the mother and grandmother barely comprehended my formal Arabic. It was frustrating, because I would say something that I knew was completely grammatically correct , and I’d get blank stares in return. Also, in Rabat, my host family speaks to me in French or formal Arabic, and then in colloquial to each other, so I know when they’re speaking in colloquial it’s not to me. But in the village, I never knew when I was being addressed, so I was forced to intently listen the whole time and try to pick up what I could. Coming home to Rabat was like a breath of fresh air, which was a strange experience in itself, because I never thought I'd think of Rabat as home.
There's lots more to say, but my hands are cramping and I need to go buy some fruit juice. I'll re-visit the blog later this week though and finish up all of my many thoughts.
So long friends and family!
Julia
View from above: Looking from my apartment down to the family that lives beneath
I've finally figured out how to put pictures on my blog, if you haven't noticed. Alright, off to do some more work on my research project and then out to fancy dinner with the friends!
