Vegetarian Thanksgiving international potluck

 I became a vegetarian when I was 12 years old, and since then, holiday meals have generally consisted of a set of rather bland side dishes--vegetarian stuffing and gravy, green bean casserole, black olives, etc. (I don't even get to eat the mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie anymore, thanks to food allergies).

The food was eaten so quickly that I hardly had a chance to get a picture.

American, Canadian, Brazilian, Portuguese...maybe we can all get along!

But that wasn't the case this year! On Saturday, T and I hosted a vegetarian Thanksgiving international potluck dinner for a small group of vegetarians (and veg-sympathizers). This year's Thanksgiving dinner featured red lentil pumpkin soup, roasted root vegetables, spicy Indian chickpeas and vegetable korma (with precious basmati rice), curried lasagna, fruit cobbler and chocolate chip pumpkin bread.

Right now, I think I have what is traditionally called "the holiday blues," exacerbated by being so far from home and by a fairly high degree of uncertainty about my future. Because of this, yesterday's dinner was a much-needed opportunity for me to reflect on what I have to be thankful for. One thing I keep coming back to is the high quality of people I've had the great fortune to meet. I've written about this before, but it's worth reflecting on again. Every place I have lived, I've met remarkably intelligent, kind, generous, and interesting people. It's easy for me to dwell on how much I miss those I've left or who have left me, but I also need to be thankful for the wonderful people I have met here.

On being a teacher again

This morning – despite the fact that, for the past year and a half, I have asserted that I did not want to – I returned to teaching.

Well, sort of. I just started a part-time job teaching English to Ifrane government administrators two mornings a week. I knew soon after this semester began that I was going to need to get a job to give me something to do besides schoolwork, but I wasn't dedicated enough to the idea to aggressively seek a job. This job came to me and was so close to perfect – except for being a teaching job – that I felt I had to take it.

After the first day, I can already tell it will be interesting, and I think I will learn a lot from doing it. Because much of my experience here has been mediated by an American-style university, this teaching job is in some ways my first experience with a Moroccan institution. I have to go to the Ifrane province building to teach, and I walk past several guards on my way. The guards salute one of my students; he's that important.

It didn't take long for me to remember what I loved about teaching and what I hated about it. I enjoy the challenge of trying to decide what to teach and how to teach it. I enjoy interacting with other people in a structured way. I enjoy helping people learn. But one thing I hate about teaching is that, at the same time that it helps me recognize some of my strengths, it also makes me painfully aware of some of my weaknesses. It's hard for me to think of another situation (except, perhaps, lying on a doctor's examination table) in which I feel more vulnerable.

Sometimes I feel incompetent as a student, but to be honest, that isn't often.  Being on the student side of the classroom (whether real or virtual) feels pretty natural to me. I feel like I know how to be a student. But being on the teacher side – even though I did it for years – feels strange. I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing, or how I should be doing it.

I guess I'd better get used to that feeling.

Before and after

Before

After

Soon after. Yum!

A murder of crows, a clowder of cats...and a league of Arabs?

In the push to the end of the semester, I think I will have less time to post to my blog, so in the meantime I'll tell you what's distracting me from my homework at the moment:

Why does "Arab League" sound okay while "League of Arabs" sounds, well, kind of racist? (At the same time, "people of color" sounds okay but "colored people" is just, well, offensive, and it actually makes me cringe.)

Melilla, Spain

Monday was Eid al Adha, or Eid Kbir, a big Muslim celebration which I wrote a little about last year (here and here). T had a few days off from teaching, and we decided weeks ago that we wanted to go somewhere that wasn't Morocco when the Eid break came. When I told my friend Michael this, he wrote (whether sarcastically or not, I don't know) that he was surprised I didn't want to stay and experience the Eid. The truth is, when called upon, I can drum up a great deal of respect, or at the very least tolerance, for a wide variety of cultural practices. But that doesn't mean I am interested in participating in or observing them. For goodness' sake, there are aspects of my own culture that I'm not interested in – like keeping track of celebrity marriages, divorces, and international adoptions, or watching American Idol. So if you're interested in reading more about Eid al Adha, you'll have to look somewhere else, like here.

Because I went to Spain.

A good time for David Sedaris

At the end of September, when our friend JD left Morocco for less green pastures (by the way, we still miss him), he put into our care several books he didn't feel he could take with him. One attitude I adopted very quickly after becoming an "ex-pat" in a non-English speaking country is that English language books are precious. If someone gives you a book, you read it. Then you pass it on to someone else so that person can read it, too. There is a communal attitude about books that I appreciate.

One of the books JD left with us Is Me Talk Pretty One Day by the hilariously insightful (or insightfully hilarious?) David Sedaris. I'd come across many of the essays in the book before (in fact, I used the essay "Big Boy" every single semester in my composition classes, much to the shock and surprise of my students), but I'd never actually read the entire book.

As I'm reading it, I'm discovering that this is a really good time for David Sedaris. The essays in the second half of the book focus on Sedaris's experience trying to learn French while living in France. I think I appreciate both the humor and the poignancy of the essays in a way I never could have before moving to Morocco.

Many of the things he writes about are resonating with me. For example, in "See You Again Yesterday," he writes:

Life may be difficult for a year or two, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

I think Sedaris moved to France without ever having left the country of the United States before that. I guess that means I was a little bit ahead of him before I moved to Morocco, but not by much. And even though I might be reluctant to admit it, I think I moved to Morocco with an attitude similar to the one Sedaris conveys in the above quote.

Sedaris writes that he moved to France knowing only one word of French, the word for "bottleneck."* (In this case, he was ahead of me, because I don't think I knew a single word in Darija when I stepped off the plane in Casablanca last August.) Since this was the only word he knew, it was the only word he could use to communicate. He used it in all situations and at first, he writes, the French responded kindly and generously saying, "You speak very well." This also sounds like a familiar situation. Just as Sedaris started out in France with the memorized list of French nouns, I have memorized several words in Darija and use them enough that I sometimes fool people into thinking I speak Arabic. But of course, I don't, and I can't say I speak it no matter how many nouns I memorize.

I do not always get a positive and supportive response when I try using some Darija. One of the things Me Talk Pretty One Day has gotten me thinking about is how vulnerable we make ourselves when we first start trying to use a new language. I realized the other day that no one has ever made fun of me for speaking English to them, no matter where in the world I was. But I can very clearly and vividly recall a handful of experiences in which I tried to speak Darija in Morocco or Spanish in Spain and was laughed at. I know I have the type of personality that makes me sensitive to situations like this. (I vaguely recall my mother telling me that on the first day of kindergarten I was worried because I didn't know how to read yet, and she had to reassure me that I didn't need to know what I was going to be taught before it was taught to me.)

If I am serious about trying to learn some Darija during the remainder of my time in Morocco, I need to develop more of a sense of humor about myself, my miscommunications, my mispronunciations, etc. Sedaris reminds me of this and provides a model for how to do it.

There is one other reason I love this book. While David Sedaris is now a well-known and successful essayist, in many of his essays he portrays his life as a series of failed attempts to discover his talents. He failed as an artist, as a musician, as a student, as a teacher; he held jobs as a mover, a housekeeper, and a Christmas elf. Given the major changes in my life over the past two years and the degree of uncertainty I'm still experiencing, I gain some comfort from his life story. Maybe this sounds silly, but I get a message of solidarity from his essays: If you're a loser, I'm a loser. And it's okay. Life is a series of discoveries, and it's okay.

If I'm a loser, I'm in the company of David Sedaris, and that's pretty good company.



*Although I'm pretty familiar with Sedaris's essays, I've never been able to figure out how much of what he writes is True. But I've decided I don't care. His essays are incredibly entertaining, and there is clearly some kind of Truth in them. So what does it matter?

Strange fruit

A significant aspect of experiencing a new culture is trying the new foods that come along with it. This is often something I miss out on because I'm a vegetarian with food allergies.

I often resort, then, to vicarious enjoyment of Moroccan foods. I will come home from the bakery with a new treat for T to try, and as he munches on it, I ask for reports on the flavor. I do the same thing when he eats a tasty looking tagine or bestilla.

The truth is, eating at Moroccan restaurants is not very exciting for me, as I usually get panini "fromage" (there's a reason why fromage is in scare quotes), mediocre pizza, a salad, or, if I'm lucky, lubbiya or bessara--both of which are satisfying but not particularly exciting.

If I want to try new foods in Morocco, I'm better off focusing on produce. I once had a rather interesting experience with desert "truffles" I bought on the side of the road outside of Rabat. (They were pretty tasty, but I found it impossible to get all of the sand out of them, which made for a texture displeasing enough that I decided trying them once was enough.) I've tried quince and some squash I don't even know the name of. I've learned how to cook fresh fava beans.

When we were walking around outside the Meknes Medina on Sunday, T and I saw several vendors selling some interesting looking fruit on sticks. We asked one of the vendors what the fruit was, and when he saw that his explanation meant nothing to us, he let us try it. The taste was pleasant enough, although not particularly impressive. It sort of reminded me of mulberries, but a little less sweet. Nevertheless, the fruit was something new to us, and it was cheap (one dirham for a stick), so we bought two sticks.

The fruit looked totally unfamiliar to me, but after we got home on Sunday, T was able to identify it in about five minutes. I don't think this fruit is cultivated in Morocco; my guess is that these trees are growing in people's yards or somewhere nearby their property, and since the fruit is edible, they're picking it and selling it when it's in season.

That's just a guess, though. In any case, it was fun to try something new, and finding that fruit was a reminder to me to keep my eye out for other new foods I can try.