Day 13

(Hopefully my post titles will become more creative…)

Day 13

Wow, only 13 days? (tltash, I’m supposed to be memorizing numbers 0-1000 tonight so I might as well practice) It feels as though months have gone by, and with how much I have seen, done, and learned they may as well have.  I am currently living in a small town (think 300 people), about 40 minutes west of Ouarzazate, where so far I have encountered only four different families. I am not alone yet. I have a wonderful training group of seven people and a Language and Culture Facilitator (LCF) with whom I spend my days 8-5, Monday thru Friday, and 8-12:30 on Saturdays. The rest of my time I spend with my host family. My family consists of my host mother, father, 20 yr old brother and 24 yr old sister, as well as whoever else from the extended family happens to stop by. In peace corps tradition they have given me an Arabic name, so around here I am known as Saiid.

The town is on a sort of hill in the middle of a desert valley overlooking an oasis with three rivers running through it. Hopefully when I get a chance to post this I’ll have a strong enough Internet connection to upload some pictures. Just to give you some stats, according to the local authorities there are a total of 59 towns in the area of the oasis with a total of 22,000 people. The fields, fdadn, by the river are just beautiful, I am at a loss of words right now to describe them besides zuina (zweena) bzzaf, which means very beautiful in Darija (Moroccan Arabic).  The language is really difficult but for every time I am frustrated or exhausted from struggling to communicate I am amazed by how much I can actually understand and say after only 10 days of training. When it comes to communicating, I have found my French experience to be extremely useful as the schools here start teaching French in second grade.

The people here are so welcoming and nice. Everyone wants to have the volunteers over for tea. I think the children in the town have finally become more used to having us around. They have shifted from staring at us in silence while we tried to engage them in the ritual greeting conversation, to starting the greeting themselves, and have cut back on calling out Bonjour. The greeting is really a wonderful thing here. While it may be just as superficial as the American exchange “How are you?” “Fine and you?” they sure spend a lot more time on it. In terms of bonding, I think just the amount of time you spend looking the other person in the face while you go through it definitely increases your connection. Here is what I am talking about:

A: S-salam aalaykum

B: Wa alaykum s-salam

A: Labas?

B: Labas, lHumdullah, bixir?

A: Labas, lHumdullah. Shnu smitk?

B: Smiti Saiid. Unta?

A: Smiti Muhammad. Tourist?

B: La, ana mashi tourist. Ana mutatawei Merikan mn Hay’at Ssalam.

A: Ah, mezien, mtshrrfn

B: Mtshrrfn

Translated

A: Peace be upon you

B: (reversed)

A: Fine?

B: Fine, thanks be to god, good?

A: Fine, thanks be to god. What’s your name?

B: My name is Saiid. And you?

A: Smiti Muhammad. Tourist?

B: No, I am not a tourist. I am an American volunteer with the Peace Corps.

A: Ah, good, nice to meet you.

B: Nice to meet you.

Of course the second half varies depending on how you know the person. When I came here I was of the understanding that to get through this and then the process of asking about one’s family and health would have to take several minutes at least. However, in reality the whole conversation is done while talking over the other person, with a series of labas, bixir (same thing basically), lHumdullah and Inshallah (God willing), so the whole thing is over in less than a minute and you have either moved on down the road or the conversation turns to the weather or the activities of the day.

Well having just finished dinner (a description left for another post) I’m going to check in with some volunteers at other sites by text message and review my numbers a couple more times.