The Middle

Still in the thick of Ramadan, so the adventures of Colin Gettle are sort of on hold. Unless that is, you think of Ramadan as an adventure unto itself. I thought that it was going to be, and maybe I may look back on it as such, but right now it has already sort of turned into a daily grind. Get up late, laze around my apartment, break fast with someone, hang out at the café until midnight or so, and then back to the apartment to read or watch a movie until my late bedtime. Same thing every day.

Now that I think about it, it’s strange how quickly things become routine and feel stagnant. Ramadan only started two weeks ago and there are less then to weeks to go. I’ve been trying lately to find a way into a mindset of contentment with the moment. I always seem to be living dreading the future or dreamily dwelling on the past, but rarely enjoying the moment. I know that I join pretty much everyone else in that problem. I have read that smoking pot and meditation both help in bringing a person into their present state of being. I have access to both, but I think meditation is probably the better long-term solution. I think my parents and the Moroccan police would probably agree with me on that too.

To break the routine (and also to try to take care of some personal business) I took a little trip down to Jerada on Monday. Jerada is not the nicest place in Morocco to go to, but as Joe, one of the volunteers who lives there can attest, it’s not the worst place either. Its main employer is the big coal plant just on the outside of town. I know in the US we think of coal plants as dirty dirty places, but I imagine with the environmental standards that they have to comply to, they look a lot better than this place. There are days when it looks like Dante’s Peak with a dusting of ash drifting down from the sky. Anyway, I went there for a change up and some business. The business wasn’t taken care of, but it’s always great to see Joe and Socorra, the nearest volunteers. We always eat well and have fun playing cards, music, or watching the countless hours of movies and TV series on their external hard drives. In this trip also went to see Socorra's site of Gafait about half an hour further from Joe. Her site is beautiful and spread out with a very popular river running through the middle of it. Fasting didn’t make for a pleasant ride back, but in Berkane I saw a group of little old Spanish women who clearly looked like they were having the time of their lives venturing into this part of the country on their own, and that made me happy.