No! I am not dead! I know that it has been some time since my last entry on this blog, but for those of you have questioned the state of my pulse in the last few weeks, rest assured. It is still beating. No. My AWOL status is due entirely to laziness and maybe a small amount of lacking inspiration. Not, as some seem to think, to freezing in a freakish snowstorm or over consumption of Morocco’s sweet tea (though I have no doubt these things may yet take their toll). I guess I shouldn’t waste too many words or too much of your time in the pursuit of excuses, but instead will get straight to the point of catching you up on the story of my Morocco life.
If I’m not mistaken (and I’m pretty sure I’m not since I can look at it directly below) that my last entry left us off somewhere right before Thanksgiving. That holiday seems almost an eternity behind me. I’m hard-pressed to remember what has happened since then, but I know that, somehow, I have been busy. Or at least I have felt busy. In this is the story of the last couple months regarding my personal development. I can call a day where I had one meeting and made peanut butter a very busy, exhausting day. So when I say that my month was busy, remember the context in which it is being said.
Thanksgiving was an “experience.” Emphasis on experience since I have never celebrated anything like it before and probably won’t ever again. It was my first major family holiday away from home (other than one Easter while I was in Turkey. There aren’t a lot of big Easter celebrations at our house anyway so that wasn’t a big deal) and my first in this country. The celebration we had here was strangely similar to one I would have had at home with most of the same foods, new family, and even some football, but it was definitely different. I say “strangely” because, while we tried to replicate what we were all used to, there were so many constant reminders of where we were, or more appropriately where we were not that it was hard to convince ourselves that this was 100% Thanksgiving. Anyway, I wont repeat what has already been said when its been said so well by my friend and neighbor to the south, Socorra. She has a blog about it on her sight that says almost everything, and might I add, in a more entertaining fashion than I think I’m capable of. Everyone should be reading her blog anyway.
After I returned home from Jerada Thanksgiving, showed some other volunteers around my site, and devised plans for a massive French colonial style paintball war, I pretty much immediately had to prepare for work. And I mean like REAL work. Like I had to finalize plans for a meeting I was to have with the women in Tegma about the benefits of forming a business cooperative for their rug weaving and about what I realistically could and could not do for them. I didn’t really have to do that much, but the language is still my biggest challenge, and even the simplest task (like calling someone I don’t know) is so much harder than it normally would be. In the end, through the haze of my constant misinterpretations and fear of language failure, the meeting did not happen the way that I had tried to plan. It did happen though, and that fact alone makes it 80% successful. Luckily I had the help of a very motivated Oujdi woman and a representative from the ODOC (The govt department that supports the formation and upkeep of business cooperatives) that we convinced into coming. They were able to carry the meeting and convey much of the message that I couldn’t. And despite my having planned a more active personal role in it than happened, I was happy to let others do it for me. A major tenet of Peace Corps is that I should be more of a cheerleader than anything anyway. The results of the meeting: while it seemed to have gone well to me, it apparently didn’t. All that talking that I thought was constructive conversation was mostly complaining, criticizing, and asking for things that we couldn’t give. Pretty disheartening to find that out afterward, but that’s all part of the job and I will continue to try with them as long as they start taking a more active role in their own future and demanding less of outsiders. Now to figure out how to communicate that.
While this meeting with the women was probably my biggest work related activity of the last couple months, it wasn’t the only one. I’ve filled at least a few hours since talking with people and having meetings, all in an attempt to set the foundations for successful future projects. To many of you at home, this may not seem like much. It certainly seems that way to me most of the time. I often have to sit down and think about it realistic terms to appreciate that I am not wasting my time away here. I work at the pace that my counterparts work, I try to find and cultivate motivation within them before moving on to serious action, and I am trying to stick to the PC mantra that we should only help them do what they themselves are passionate about doing (this being extra difficult as I'm not finding a lot of passion to do anything beyond drink tea). Working under this philosophy means that a lot of my time is spent not actually doing any “work” whatsoever. This is another large challenge, only second to language. I don’t like feeling lazy! But… I really really hope, in the end, that all of this idling and prodding, pushing and waiting lead to successful/sustainable projects.
As most of my time is not spent doing work that can easily be measured, or for that matter, be counted as work at all, I still spend plenty of time idling away the hours. I continue to work on my recorder skills (yes, that is the musical instrument), and until someone has pity on me and sends me a more legitimate instrument (excuse me all legitimate recorder players who are reading thing) I will continue down this path of grating noise. I also continue reading lots of books and watching lots of movies. Thank you to those that helped me out with these sanity savers over Christmas! I have added hikes to my list, visited Oujda a few times, somehow ended up in front of a quite decidedly anti-American crowd with an American flag, decorated random things around my house, drunk far to much tea (need I mention it again?), bought a bbq and an oven, been chased in the dark by wild pigs and gone on vacation. I think I will write about that vacation which includes Christmas separately.
And that’s about it. Or at least that wraps up a lot of the mundane into a short and sweet summary. As I kind of like writing more about the mundane, and maybe some of you like reading about it, I will continue trying hard to avoid laziness and to write more often.
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