The most striking images so far...

I've been pondering a way of successfully blogging about this weekend's events, and I have decided to describe it to you to the best of my ability, with complete honesty about my trepidations.

My concern is in the over-empahsis of traditions that are foreign in our culture, and highly ritualistic in nature. I fear painting a picture of the people amongst whom I live that turns you who may be reading my blog away from them, and away from seeing the compassion and hospitality with which they live their lives, and the common ground that we share.

Were tourists to be in my country on Saturday, they may have been quite shocked. This was the Eid Kabir, the "big feast," and the biggest of all Muslim holidays. It commemorates the time at which Abraham at the last minute did not sacrifice Ishmael, but instead killed a sheep. Every year, many families in my country commemorate this occurance by sacrificing a sheep. The theology behind it seems fairly complex, in that most of the Muslims I have spoken with have explained it slightly differently. To some, it signifies obediance to Allah. To others, it is the cleansing of sin. The sheep is sacificed, and the skin used for rugs and clothing, the organs made into dishes, some of the meat eaten, and the rest given to the poor.

Now that you understand that this tradition has an origin based in a very relatable aspect of faith, and that the outcome is one of generosity and prosperity and wastelessness, let me describe the scenes of the weekend.

I spent the weekend in Chefchaouen, a town whose name means "see the mountains." The city is mostly a walled Medina like Fes, so the city is closely crowded together in one concentrated area with no suburbs. Did you know suburbs were an American phenomena? I always assumed all cities had them, but many cities here are closely gathered around one point, and then they stop. It reminds me of the old caravan circles of the westward-bound settlers of America.

Chefchaouen is painted blue. It used to be green, because green is the colour of Islam, but the large influx of Jewish refugees who took over the town in the middle ages sometime painted over the green of Islam with their own blue. The town was left this way because it is so distinctive. The whole city is red clay, whitewashed, and painted periwinkle or cerulean blue. During my late-night walk on Friday, I saw three different groups of 1-4 women outside (around midnight) with sponges tied to sticks to scrub over the walls with blue paint by moonlight.

On Saturday, the streets of the blue city ran with red blood. The rivulets of red pooling down the steep mountainside between the cobblestones, ofsetting the blue of the rest of the town... unforgettable.

Each family sacrificed their sheep with the gathering of the family outside after morning prayers, and slit the throat. They skinned it, washed the organs, and burned the heads. For the rest of the day, the streets were dappled with makeshift wire campfire contraptions supporting sheep heads. There was a very distinctive smell, and the air was clouded with smoke.

Amina invited me to feast at her house the next day, and her family prepared an amazing lamb and prune tagine. She showed me the remains, what was essentially a skeleton, of her family's sheep, hanging from the doorframe leading from the kitchen to the courtyard.

I do not want this experience to overly emphasize the "us and them" aspect of the culture in which I live. I think the most important aspect of loving others is finding the common ground, and the fact that it is present in all - we all have more in common than we have apart. This particular experience, however, made me extraordinarily grateful for the Truth that I have managed to find.

Independence Day

In 1956, after nearly 50 years as a Protectorate, Moroccan people from all regions unified under late King Mohamed V (grandfather of our current king, who is in my town this week!), which caused him to be exiled. The people rallied in protest of the exile of their monarch, and he was returned to them from exile, bearing the Declaration of Independence. This holiday is not celebrated in any particular way now, except that we have a day's vacation every year in commémoration.

The 18th of November was a Wednesday this year, which I find to be the best day of the week to have a vacation. Ethan's birthday would be the following day, so we took the opportunity to celebrate when we could. Five teachers grande-taxi'ed to Ifrane, a pretty mountain town (with the original Atlas lion sculpture) and had Malawi with one of his Berber friends. We got delicious malawi with honey, and took some in a bag for lunch.

Ifrane was chilly, being a mountain town, but very set apart from other residences. With the sun shining down on us as we left, we found the day perfect for our cross-country 17km hike to the next town of Azrou. The desert shrubs made the going difficult sometimes, but we made it out into the farmland between the towns, open golden fields, shepards leading their flocks to graze, and locals wrapped in whatever garments they had of every colour stading out against the sunny earth.

Ethan found his compass in a book of maps, and we wound our way through the low mountains without losing our bearings, and without being eaten by any of the mangy guard dogs that ran from forever away to bark at us. We arrived in Azrou just after sunset, when the light was fading fast and we were just thinking that we would like to be at our destination. We took a bus back to Fes and stopped in the Medina for tagine at Ethan's favorite rooftop cafe.

Ethan and I decided to walk home from the Medina, and the others caught the red petit-taxi's. From the Medina, the old walled part of the city, you walk south through the old Fes J'did, and the old Jewish quarter, and then you arrive in Fes Nouveau, the more modern part of the city, where there are streets with cars. As we were entering Fes J'did, and turning off onto a back-path, suddenly the town went dark.

There was a power outage in the entire Fes J'did and Mellah.

The residents spilled out of their houses, since it was after dark and their houses would have had NO light, and there was some time of bustle as they ran back and forth with torches made of crumpled paper or cardboard tubes, or ran for their motos to turn on the headlight. Gradually the town settled down again, with the magic that a power outage inflicts: the people resumed their work, but left open their doors and windows to catch whatever starlight they could. As we walked through the narrow streets, we could see the flickers of life pinpointed by the fires of candlelight. In the darkness, in one window was a candle next to a woman working her embroidery; in another door was a man by a lit buta tank tallying the books from his day at the hanout. It was like having life highlighted for us in a soft glow that seemed very appropriate for this country, and we were bit dissapointed 20 minutes later when the streetlights limped back to life.

Rabat Ville

It feels nice to come home to Fes. I enjoy traveling, but I am just now beginning to enjoy the feeling of coming back to someplace familiar. Today, I am coming back from the capital city of Rabat, where many of the teachers spent the weekend for a 'conference' with the teachers of the big school in Casablanca. It was wonderful to get to see them again, or in some cases to meet them for the first time after hearing so many stories about them!

We stayed in a hotel right on the beach in a little town about 20 minutes outside of Rabat, and spent so much time out on the sand. Abdul and I were the only ocean-swimmers, but Gwen and Anna did get in the water! There was a lot of good quiet meditation and down time, and time for us all to build up one another and share our stories and experiences. It was relaxing, but felt very cut-off from my country.

We took the train home. I love the train. I also immediately connected with one of my local friends to plan a get-together for tomorrow night. Rabat proved highly helpful for the science classes in terms of samples gathered from the tidepools and coraline algae (which the students are drawing tomorrow), so a big thank you to Abdul who led the sample-gathering expedition.

It was fun to be on the beach on the western shore and think about Steve and family directly across the ocean in New Jersey.

Spain

Last weekend was the weekend of Green March, a Moroccan national holiday. In the 70s, King Hassan II organized hundreds of thousands of Moroccan citizens to march south through Morocco to take back the Desert. To celebrate this reclaiming of our territory, the weekend is a national holiday, and schools are given Friday (and usually Thursday) off!

I've now been in my country for three months, and I have yet to have the government complete the transactions on my paperwork for my carte-du-sejour. Due to immigration laws, I had to leave the country before the three month mark, in order to re-enter and start over on the deadline to get the carte-du-sejour.

During this long-weekend, all the other new teachers at my school and I decided to go with the thriftiest option and hop across the boarder to Spain on a Ryanair jet for the steep price of 2 Moroccan centimes, fractions of dirham which are fractions of dollars.

The best part of the weekend was actually taking a personal day Thursday and leaving on the train to Nadour Thursday around 2am, a four hour ride, with Ethan, 3aisa, and Jona. We took the train to Nadour, and discovered that the train secretly continued to the next town north. Having the day before our plane left, we took the train past Nadour, through beautiful golden towns.

The cold weather has not sapped any of the golden luminescence of the land, but makes it look richer and more inviting, and is more deceiving. The cold is far from the bitter frigidity of New York, but is a continual permeation, like Chinese Water Tourture. Indoors are just as cold as outdoors. The train was just as cold as outside, or colder. When we pushed out way through the rusted doors of the train that barely granted us admittance, we were happy to drink in the sunlight. We ate a lunch of traditional Moroccan food - there is no other kind - of egg in oil with Moroccan spices, eaten by picking up bits with scraps of khubz bread.

The four of us trudged past high fences and walls with shards of glass embedded in the concrete like snaggly, crystal teeth. We stood at the end of a line of Moroccans in heavy winter djellabas, scrunched between a wall and a rough metal barred barrier. Someone saw our passports and waved us forward, and we were admitted into a different line. The Americans got through in minutes.

Over the boarder of the North African coastal Spanish city of Melilla, we had only to walk several blocks from the boarder to leave the Moroccan cultural influence. I uncovered my hair and pushed up my sleeves. The men took off sweaters and stood in the sun in T-shirts. We found a park to sit outside, and I played on some soccer goals and playground equipment and was generally child-like and undignified.

On the way back to Morocco to catch our flight, we passed an outdoor market where women seemed to be buying unusually large quantities of items. We heard the sound of tape, and saw a group of women with their over-djellabas pulled up around their chests to allow rows of sandals to be packaging taped to their bodies to smuggle them back across the boarder. We would witness this much this weekend.

We were among the 23 people on the full-sized Ryanair jet, on the pilot flight from Nadour to Madrid, and 3aisa's friend Theresa picked us up in the airport and dropped off Ethan and I at the house of the couchsurfer we were staying with. We went out walking the city, spent some time in Plaza del Sol, sampled lots of tapas, and went salsa dancing. The following day, we enjoyed sleeping in, picnicking in the landscaped green park, and walked the downtown of Madrid. In the evening, we had Mexican food and went out for more tapas and drinks. All the meetings with the other folks in our groups failed due to lack of ALL means of communication, and our attempt to see a movie in English ended in both of us being swarmed by employees. I think they didn't want us to enter the theatre late. I'm still not sure.

Saturday, we had time to visit some beautiful cathedrals and have one more picnic and a walk through the park before metro-ing to the airport. We met Jona and 3aisa at the airport, and enjoyed a seemless transport back to my city, through airport, petit taxi, by foot, grande-taxi, and finally train. The guys slept most of the transport (it was very late), and I got time to study on my own, read, and observe the people around me. I got some good tips on a variety of smuggling that really shouldn't be effective. The women taped so much under their djellabas that they were round. They could've rolled.

It was fun to come home to Morocco. I enjoyed Arabic being a relief to my ears after Spanish, and it made many aspects of this culture seem much less frustrating. This week at school has been smooth sailing.

Internet Cafe

Hey all,

Just when you have a routine down, technology reminds you that Africa runs a little diffrently. Our internet and computers at the school are temporarily, but indefinately, out of service.

It's made lesson planning more difficult, and has also made me very greatful to my own fifth grade teacher, who placed so much emphasis on my penmanship. My students have been recieving photocopies of my own written worksheets. Hamdullah that the photocopier still works!

The plague has been sweeping the school this week. We have had about half attendence in the high school, both among teachers and students. The school even funded some preciously expensive 1oz bottles of hand sanitizer for each classroom to help prevent the spread of the disease. I don't know how much this helps, but my students love going through "santizing patrol" at the start of each class. They always remark on how expensive the bottles are, and seem proud that the school would spend that on them and their health.

Yesterday during nature study, I took ill myself, and spent the day at home today. I have a germ that has yet been unintroduced to the school (I don't know where I would have picked it up if not from the school), and I thought bringing that to the students in their states of many weakened immune systems would be self-defeating to everyone's education. After sleeping most of the day, I feel recovered.

Tomorrow my portion of the Rennaisance program begins, with a ballet class after school! I'm excited to spend more time (and time that is less formal and authoritative) with my students. I even have two volunteers from the seventh grade to assist in classes for the first two weeks while we do ballet.

My language studies have been going well, and I have gotten to the point of holding enough basic conversation to be able to briefly (and simply) discuss more important issues in Arabic. Though my main concern here has been with my students, it's nice to be able to respond to the taxi drivers who ask if I am Muslim in a way that positively reflects my culture.

The local guy at the next computer over is now more interested in my computer screen than his, so I'm going to sign out. Post me lots of messages to read next time I come to the cafe!