Lalla Takerkoust

Lalla Takerkoust, April 23, 2010.

I just spent an invigorating few days at my site. On Saturday morning, I took the bus along with several other trainees from Ouarzazate to Marrakech. It’s a long and difficult ride across the High Atlas but the views are absolutely spellbinding. Each bend in the road (and there are many) presents a better view than the last, though I had to keep my eyes closed much of the time to keep carsickness from getting the better of me. We arrived in Marrakech in early afternoon, and about 7 of us had lunch by the souk and walked to Jamè Lfouna, a large mosque in the center of the city. The square next to it is surrounded by shops, restaurants, and hotels, and bustles with snake charmers, monkeys, and tourists. I went to find the hotel recommended by Peace Corps to spend the night as the other trainees continued to Rabat or East into the mountains to their sites. I wound up not being able to get a room because my photocopied documents didn’t suffice, so after trying several hotels and huffing and puffing around town with my heavy backpack, I decided to head straight to Lalla Takerkoust.

The bush taxi ride barely took 45 minutes. I craned my neck eagerly, my eyes glued to the landscape as we neared the village. The land around Marrakech is very flat and I got excited as the terrain began to undulate more and more. In my opinion, the more hills there are, the more hiking opportunities. Lalla Takerkoust is split in half by a river and large dam built in 1938. One side is newer, populated by the families of the dam workers and now by miners, many of which are Arab. The older side is primarily berber, made up of the original inhabitants of the village that was displaced by the construction of the dam. The new side is more commercial and houses the weekly souk, post office, a pharmacy, internet cafes, and several shops, kiosks, and restaurants. The older side is much quieter, with just a couple kiosks. I am staying in old side of the village, known as Amzour. My post has just the right mixture; quaint, withdrawn from the city and surrounded by rolling hills and mountains, yet equipped with a variety of amenities to live comfortably.

Moroccan Host Family Number Two

My host family in Lalla Takerkoust is quite different from the Maali’s in Asfalou. My host father is a small, wiry man named Laarbi. He is 56 but looks 70, with a weathered, gray-bearded face, several missing teeth, and a worn down posture. He thankfully speaks very good French and I learned a great deal about him in the first couple days. He is a gardener in the orchards of a big mine 15km east of Lalla Takerkoust. He works 6 days a week from 7am to 3pm, and has had no holiday or vacation in the last 15 years. Up until 3 years ago, he used to walk over the hills to the mine and back every day: 30 km. He now takes a bus. His salary is quite meager, and he hasn’t managed to get a raise because there are so many unemployed people around seeking to work for less money. All this hard work and no savings to show for it has turned him into a rather cynical man, and he has a gruff demeanor but once you manage to see past it, he’s quite nice. His wife, Malika, is a stocky, gregarious woman of 50 with loads of pep. She speaks no French, which is perfect for me to learn Tash. The first couple days were tough as far as communication, but she is relentless and loves to talk, so I’m catching on. The Tashlhit spoken here is a little different from the Ouarzazate region. They understand all the words I use, but they have some different vocabulary so I have to re-learn many words.

Malika and Laarbi have two sons, Mehdi who is 15, and Hicham, who is 10. They both go to school and spend the majority of their time out of the house. Because Laarbi didn’t get married until he was 37, he is accustomed to doing many household chores himself. I was surprised to see him doing his laundry, making us tea at snack time, and even helping Malika cut up vegetables for dinner. Brahim Maali would never do that sort of thing. Malika is also a bold, outspoken woman who doesn’t hesitate to go out into the village. She is Vice President and Treasurer of the women’s association and sells clothes and jewelry in surrounding villages. As my community partner put it, “she’s not afraid of anyone”, which is rare in this culture for a woman I think. The combination of her social omnipresence and the lack of other females in the household makes for a sometimes messy home. Their house is new and only half finished, so much of it is bare cement walls and floors. The kitchen is well-equipped and usually littered with piles of accumulated dirty dishes and food scraps, but she’s a fantastic cook and showed me how to make breads and tajine and plans to show me much more. After the customary 2-3 days of being a guest, she let me help her wash dishes and cook.

My room is on the roof, with a splendid view and apt outdoor space for doing laundry. I had to coax them into letting me sleep in my own room because they were reluctant of leaving me alone at night. I spent two nights sleeping with Hicham and Malika but when they found me sleeping on a couch outside one morning to escape Malika’s monstrous snoring, they decided to clean up the dusty storage room on the roof for me. Laarbi chuckled for hours about it because he also can’t sleep in the same room as Malika and her snoring.

Amzour Women’s Association

The women’s association I will be working with is headed by Naima, my community partner. She’s 28, had has a History degree from the university in Agadir. She works at the village pharmacy 6 days a week and spends all her free time working on projects for the association. About 8 women, including my host mother Malika, are active members. They started the association less than a year ago with a larger group of women, but many dropped out as they lost interest or didn’t find the monetary benefits they’d expected. At any rate, the remaining members are extremely motivated and active. They work from a tiny loft donated by Naima’s father, making Moroccan pastries and breads to sell to shopkeepers in town. They are working on getting a larger workspace to get the fruit drier from CRDT NGO in Marrakech and hope to get some larger ovens to make bread en mass for local restaurants and guesthouses. Naima has many contacts from working at the pharmacy, as a large part of her clientele is local Europeans, regional shopkeepers, and tourists.

I helped the women make little anise-flavored croquettes in the evenings as they were working on an order for 8kg. They sell them at 15DH/kg, with a profit of about 6DH/kg (less than 1USD). The association also pays two young women/ teenagers to tutor elementary students in the evenings. Maybe I can get one of them to tutor me in Tash. Naima and I have discussed all sorts of potential projects we’d like to work on. I told them about my projects in Benin, and they really liked the recycled art with bottlecaps. Some of the kids started collecting caps for me already.

On Tuesday, Malika and I were invited for tea at a retired couple’s house. They’ve both been to Mecca and are referred to as L’Hej and L’Heja. Their son Jalil is an established artist specializing in recycled metal sculptures. He lives with his parents and has transformed the Moroccan villa into a veritable piece of art. The doors and walls of the courtyards are painted vibrant shades of blue, with ornate moldings and welded metal decorating every corner. L’Hej, is big supporter of Naima and put her in contact with CRDT. He heard of my recycled art ideas and took me to meet Jalil at his art shop in town. He indeed does remarkable work, which he’s exposed numerous times around Morocco. We drank tea in his office and discussed the possibility of working together. He also liked my bottlecap idea and wants to create a sculpture with them. He’s ready to work with me and let me learn some of his trade, which I’m super excited about!

Running in Lalla Takerkoust

I didn’t wait long to communicate to Naima and my host family that I love hiking and running. As advised by Peace Corps, it’s best to gage the level of conservatism in a locale before going out running on the first day. They were very receptive to the idea and supported by wish to run the Marrakech Marathon next year. Naima was excited to hear I was a runner and said she would accompany me in the mornings. She’d wanted to start but was scared to go by herself, especially because if the villagers saw her out and about alone in athletic gear they’d start making stories about rendezvous’ and promiscuity. We decided to meet at 6am, and sure enough, she was at my door at 6 sharp. I ran and she walked most of the way, but she loved it and diligently accompanied me every morning. Word got around and two other women joined us for an hour run/walk. Naima says at least five more have expressed interest in running with us! There’s a basketball court at the school fields that isn’t used much as the boys prefer soccer. Some girls play basketball during gym class. I told Malika’s 14 year old niece I liked basketball and would like to play with them sometime and she came back from school one day with a petition of 15 girls who want to start basketball training with me on Saturdays!

Site Announcement

Yesterday was the big day. We were given our post assignments for the next two years! Folders were passed around the room with our names and site names, most of which were quite difficult to pronounce. I have been assigned to the village of Lalla Takerkoust. It’s in the Al Houz region, only 30 km south of Marrakech. It’s a town of 3500, with a paved road running through it. There is a dam that generates electricity for the entire Marrakech region, and a large lake attracting many Marrakech families for weekend picnics on the shores.

I will be working with a women’s association who is supposedly extremely active and motivated. I hope at least one of the members resembles my host aunt Zahra! Their key project right now is to build a hybrid fruit drier (gas and solar powered) for local income generation. So I may have access to quality dried figs and apricots! My Peace Corps program manager also informed me I will be working on the NGO liaison pilot project very soon. I am to work with an NGO based in Marrakech called Centre de Developpement de la Region de Tensift (CDRT). It’s made of a team of physicians, engineers, and technicians who work on projects such as hybrid fruit driers in the region. So I will be traveling to Marrakech frequently to work with them. I am extremely excited about all this.

I am the first volunteer in this village. I will know much more in a week. Tomorrow I’m going to Marrakech to meet with a current PCV working on a similar project in another village, and we will travel together to Lalla Takerkoust on Sunday.

Earth Day Celebration Part Two. April 13, 2010

Our second day of celebrations proved to be just as successful as the first, except today all the participants were on time. At 2pm, the Zituna men came to pick up our 26 olive trees and we all headed to the school armed with paper, colored pencils, and markers for the kids. Brahim and a couple other men set to work digging holes for the trees around the schoolyard while we gathered the 40+ kids in the classroom to tell us what the environment is and then draw a picture of it. They were enthusiastic and put forth effort in the activity, which was gratifying to see. Because most of them had included trees in their drawings, we discussed why trees are important for us and the environment.

At 3pm, Zahara showed up as promised with the women’s group. She had had them draw pictures of the environment in her classroom, so while the children went outside to plant trees, we had the women tell us about their drawings. Many women had drawn flowers, their houses, the irrigation ditch, and the well. Water, or lack thereof, was the focal point of the drawings. Zahara was paramount in helping with the discussion. She has a way of keeping their attention focused, as they otherwise have a tendency to break off into a million simultaneous conversations. The women asked us to explain global warming and even asked why there was so much talk of melting ice caps on television. This was a poignant reminder of the power and impact of the media and particularly television in all corners of the world. We drew the classic greenhouse effect diagram and tried to explain that even though Asfalou doesn’t seem to have a pollution problem, not burning tires and plastic in the hamam and outdoors still plays a part in reducing the greenhouse effect.

Earth Day Celebration Part 1. April 12, 2010

So, Monday was day one of our Earth Day celebrations in Asfalou. As planned, the six of us plus Saïd walked to the school at 9am to meet the students, teachers, women’s group, and olive farmers’ association for a village trash pick-up. The schoolyard was empty except 5 young boys, who we assumed were there not to pick up trash but just out of curiosity as to what we were doing there. The two school teachers had made us believe on Friday morning that all the students would be there, along with the Zituna (olive tree association) men, and the women’s group. We came equipped with about 20 empty cement sacks and a poster displaying what trash items are ok to burn, and what should be buried instead. We’d drawn items such as sardine cans, plastic bottles, broken glass, and aluminum as non-burnable, and then cloth, paper, and cardboard as burnable.

The school director soon arrived from Ouarzazate, and my host dad Brahim came too. The director said the village was apparently not excited about this activity, unfortunately. The school only has class in the afternoon on Monday, which is why the schoolyard was empty. But, by 9:30, 3 more Zituna men arrived and about 25 kids appeared with gloves and rakes and shovels. Brahim and the school director were invaluable in helping us instruct the kids. We went over our poster, which had Arabic translations for our drawings, then we all spread out. A little squabble of 10 year old girls followed me. They’ve somehow decided I am their favorite trainee and whenever we go to the school or to meet with the women’s group, they appear at my side and fight one another on who gets to stand next to me and hold my hand. It was quite sweet at first, but it’s gotten a bit stifling at times. Regardless, the children here are adorable. We spent over an hour around the village collecting trash. More children showed up with shovels and wheelbarrows. It was quite an undertaking. We filled our bags and went to dump them in a big hole at the foot of the mountain behind the school. We each collected several bags full of rubbish, and probably the most unpleasant part was picking up used diapers. The stench at times was nauseating. There are a LOT of diapers.

The women’s group didn’t show up at the school until we were nearly done with the trash collection. They didn’t seem ready to collect trash but Zahara organized the group and sent them to a different side of the village to do their own trash pickup. We buried all the trash and concluded our efforts with tea and tajine at the school provided by my host family. It wound up being a pretty successful day. I think the fact that villagers saw us Americans and the school director (who doesn’t even live here) getting dirty collecting their trash (and diapers) hopefully made a decent impact.

Weekend Get-Away, April 10, 2010

We’re back in Ouarzazate for the weekend. This was one of our two weekends “off” during training and we all decided to come to Ouarzazate to be “American” for a day, essentially. We came here after our morning class on Saturday and spent the afternoon checking e-mail then went for a deliciously refreshing swim at another hotel. Afterwards, we had a cards and movie night in our hotel room. It was quite fantastic. The six people from my training group piled in the room, and we borrowed a movie projector from Peace Corps staff to watch it in ‘big screen’. We ate popcorn and vented about language classes and culture shock. Then we were all able to sleep in peacefully until 9 am without our host family members knocking on our door to inquire if we were still alive and well.

We had thought of spending the weekend in another town, Telouet, 45 km up river from Asfalou to do some hiking. Telouet is supposed to be a beautiful spot in the mountains with a kasbah built into the cliff-sides. But, the road turns to dirt after Asfalou and only tourist jeeps travel that road. Finding an affordable bush taxi and still having enough time to enjoy the place was merely impossible in a day and a half, so we opted for the familiarity and accessibility of Ouarzazate.

Last Sunday, I went for an epic walk with my host dad and Hassan, his 21 year old cousin. Hassan is going to law school in Marakech and was back in Asfalou for spring break, so we could converse a good deal in French. The three of us walked barefoot in the river for a few hours, then stopped at a village 15 km upriver from Asfalou. We were famished and sought a shopkeeper in the desolate village to sell us bread and sardines. I can’t get over how rural villages are so void of people. There are just mud houses and sand and emptiness. Where is everyone? Brahim says they’re either in their houses escaping the sun, or down by the river working in the wheat, barley, and olive plantations. After our snack, we followed the dusty road all the way back to Asfalou, arriving just before nightfall. We hitched a ride in the back of a pick-up for a couple kilometers, then followed the narrow and harrowing path alongside the irrigation ditch for the last mile. I have found my match for ‘hiking on the edge’. It turns out my host dad is as much of a dare-devil as I, if not more. He made me jump across crevices, walk along disintegrating cliff edges, and traverse the river over sketchy bridges made of rotted planks and cement bags. I had fleeting moments where I actually feared for my life… but we made it home safe and I was extremely satisfied with the thrill of the day. We’d walked a total of 27km!

Training this past week was hectic to say the least. We’ve been assigned the ambiguous task of organizing an Earth Day celebration with the village. So first we had to use our meager community assessment tools to identify partners to work with and to identify what the environmental concerns of the village are. This would probably not be so hard if we had a good knowledge of the language and a couple months to do it, but we just have one week and one person who can translate for us. I don’t really expect it to be a hugely successful project, as I understand that training is meant to give us some experience in community interaction so we know how to improve our approach when we do the “real thing” at our final post. But, we set out to do our best. We met with the local school, the women’s group, and the olive tree association of men to set up Earth Day celebration. The plan is to do a village-wide trash clean up Monday morning with the school, then we will do an informative session on what trash can be burned and what should instead be buried. On Tuesday afternoon, we will be going back to the school to plant olive trees in the schoolyard and have the students draw images of the environment and how to protect it. We are providing the trees and the drawing material. With Zahara’s help the women are hopefully going to attend as well.

Circumcisions and Extreme Exfoliation, March 27, 2010

On the weekend of March 27-28, Brahim’s sisters Maryam and Zahara invited me to a circumcision ceremony in their town, Timdlin. Their women’s association was sponsoring a mass circumcision for families in surrounding villages that lack the means to properly go through the ceremony. As soon as I finished class on Saturday, Brahim and I hailed a bush taxi to Timdlin.

Unfortunately, the ceremony and festivities were pretty much over by the time we arrived. A total of 76 boys age 1-3 were circumcised at the Timdlin hospital that morning. The association had set up tents outside the hospital and fed the families couscous for lunch. I was invited to share a platter of couscous with the cooks. They beckoned me to sit in the makeshift kitchen void of furniture. I sat on a metal stovetop on the floor and had 2 mouthfuls of food before Zahara took me to a tent where the women’s association had their lunch. I convinced them I’d eaten enough so they had me sit outside the dining circle. I got to watch a feeding frenzy of 13 wholesome women crowded around a couscous platter the size of a manhole cover. They babbled merrily in their high-pitched Berber dialect and hungrily ate fistfuls of couscous. Meanwhile, the desert wind was causing the tent flaps to billow violently, yet they didn’t seem worried about the tent flying away, as I did.

The mountain of food before them disappeared in minutes. There was a slight lull in the conversation and Zahara said something about going to the Hamam. They all sighed and nodded. They’d spent an exhausting two days preparing for this ceremony, and now a group of them were going to reward themselves with an afternoon at the Hamam. I of course was invited to partake. I wasn’t prepared to go to a Hamam but Zahara provided me with all the necessary items; we trekked from her house across town with buckets, clothes, soaps, and shower mats to the public bath house. There’s a women’s side and a men’s side of course; entrance is 7.5 dh, or just under 1 US dollar.

It turned out to be probably the most exhausting bath I’ve ever taken. We stripped to our undies and entered the steamy bowels of the hamam. First we lathered our hair with henna, then they mixed some waxy Moroccan soap with henna and I was instructed to cover myself in the brown goop. For the next 2 hours, we scrubbed every inch of our bodies through and through. The women laughed when I lightly passed the scrubbing glove over my arms and legs and started rinsing off. They told me to scrub until my skin turned red. Zahara scrubbed my back and it felt like my skin was getting stripped off. After all the scrubbing, we washed with regular soap, then we washed again with flower-scented soap before rinsing out the henna from our hair and shampooing it. Meanwhile, 2 of the women’s 4 year old boys ran naked around us dunking their heads in buckets and having water fights. The heat and steam was exhausting. We came out squeaky clean, drained, and so relaxed. My hands were like prunes. We put on several layers of sweats and head scarves and sprawled out on a rug for a cup of tea. Moroccans typically bathe like this once a week and don’t really shower any other day. They just do a quick cleanse before prayer. They asked me if we go to hamams in the states. I said only once in a while and it’s expensive. So these women considered themselves lucky.

During our bath, Brahim had gone to another village for a funeral and didn’t return before dark. So I had to stay at Maryam’s for the night. I fell asleep at 8:30 and didn’t wake up until 7am. I had desperately needed sleep as I caught a bad cold and had lost my voice a couple days before. I woke up feeling groggy with a stomach ache because I’d drunk water at the hamam. My moral on Sunday was kind of low. I was stuck at Maryam’s house for long hours in the morning while the women did housework and told me to just sit and watch tv. All I wanted was to go back to Asfalou and brush my teeth and be able to walk around freely in a familiar house. Finally, at noon we piled into Zahara’s husbands car and returned to the village. It’s spring break for schools so the house was full of people. It looked like it would be another afternoon of sitting around and drinking tea while people babbled at me in Tashlhit and threw their hands up when I didn’t catch on.

My host mom could tell I needed some quiet so she invited me to go do laundry in the “urti”. The urti is reminiscent of a green, blossoming garden of bean plants, almond trees, and flowers. We sat by the irrigation ditch and washed clothes (I mostly watched her doing it) while Hiba and Mohammed picked fragrant roses and blew petals out of their palms. At 5:30, Brahim and his niece Mayma invited me for a walk. We were just planning on going in the fields for a simple stroll but then I pointed at the mountain across the river and asked if we could go up. I was sort of joking but Brahim said ok, and up we went. It was absolutely beautiful. We walked through a red rocky canyon to a hidden water spring and up to the mountain top where there was a view of the river valley and the villages along it. The sun was setting when we reached the top, and we walked back down to Asfalou by the enchanting light of the full moon. My moral was soaring by the time I went to bed.

On Monday, the sky was clear of the typical dusty haze covering the valley so our CBT group decided to climb up another mountain during lunch time. We could see all the way to the snow-capped High Atlas to the East and West. I am definitely looking forward to more hiking once training is over.

Vocab in the Fields

On Monday morning of our second week at CBT our language trainer, Saïd, sent us out to the fields to walk around, find farmers, and practice our Tashlhit by telling them about our daily activities. It was a bit unnerving, interrupting a villager hard at work to say “Hi, my name is Felicie, I am American. I get up at 6 AM every day. I go to school Monday through Saturday from 8 am to 6pm. I am learning Tashlhit”. I could barely even say that without my notebook in front of me. I ran into 3 farmers and managed to introduce myself and tell them at whose house I was living, and they told me what crops were in their fields. I still had a long way to go with the language. In the afternoon we interviewed an 80 year old farmer in the fields about olive and almond trees. Our teacher translated this time, so we learned a great deal. I love those kinds of interactions. I think when I get to post I’ll be able to find someone who speaks enough French to help me in such interviews, inch’allah.

One night, I was practicing sentences with the verb “to like” and going over them with my host mom. I tried to tell her “I like coffee with milk (half milk, have coffee)” and she erupted in laughter. Turns out I had told her “I like coffee with baby donkeys”.