Junk food

In one of my English classes on Monday, I wanted my two students to read a short (and, admittedly, pretty stupid and boring) passage from the textbook about the world's oldest woman who, at 109 years old, ate only junk food. I asked the students if they knew what junk food was, and they had totally blank looks on their faces. I started at the beginning, explaining the word "junk," and then gave examples of junk food, pointing out that many foods in this category are fast food and/or are high in sugar or fat. They still looked perplexed. I thought more examples would help, but each time I asked them about a food and asked if it went in the "junk food" or "not junk food" category, they got it wrong.

"Is fruit junk food?" They stared at me. "No, in the United States, we say it's not junk food. It's healthy food." I said. I did the same for hamburgers and pointed out that Americans consider just about anything from McDonald's to be junk food.

"Okay, what about fish?"

"That's junk food," one student said. Only if it's fried, I explained.

"Chocolate?"

"Not junk food," they agreed.

And then it hit me. What a ridiculous concept! (Yeah, I can be a little slow.) Food is what sustains and strengthens our bodies. The concept that some food is essentially garbage is bizarre and probably isn't culturally relevant in a country where many people are just happy to have full bellies. I remembered Michael Pollan's discussion in The Omnivore's Dilemma about Americans' weird relationship to food.

When I came home and told T about this, he reminded me that our Canadian friend Sarah, a kindergarten teacher at the K-12 school associated with the University, struggled for weeks to get the parents of her students to send "healthy" snacks to school. She spoke, with horror, of watching one child eat a snack consisting of chocolate pudding scooped out of the cup with Kit Kats. After my confused ESL lesson on "junk food," I wondered whether Sarah had been making false assumptions, like I had, that food can be objectively divided into transcultural categories of "good" and "bad," "healthy" and "unhealthy."

And I'm curious to know if any of you have had similar experiences when engaged in multicultural discussions about food.

Merry Christmas

Wishing you joy in three different languages

Last night, our friends Thomas and Fazia came over to our apartment for hot apple cider. They told us that the tradition of a Christmas tree and presents is becoming popular with Moroccans, which is interesting because 99% of Moroccans are Muslim.

This morning, I had an email from a Jewish friend wishing me a Merry Christmas, and I wrote back wishing her one as well.

Both were reminders of the versatility of Christmas. Although its meaning has changed for me over the years, it has always remained my favorite holiday.

Whatever your beliefs, wherever you are, whomever you're with, I wish you a Merry Christmas.

Things they didn't tell me

In making our decision to move overseas, in our usual fashion, T and I (i.e. T) did a lot of research. He researched the places where we might live, and he found books on the various aspects, from financial to psychological, to making an international move. We even got to talk to someone who worked at this University for five years. We didn't feel completely prepared when we moved here, but we certainly felt more prepared than some.

However, there are still things I wish someone had told me. Or maybe someone did tell these things to me, but I wish they had been emphasized more.

At the top of my list of things they didn't tell me is the absolute truth that some people, after moving to a new country, will get sick, and they will never really get better, at least not as long as they stay in that country. I don't know why this happens. I have many friends, for example, who came to Morocco and started drinking the tap water and eating street food right away and never had a day of travelers' diarrhea. More common, I think, is an adjustment period of the body that ranges from a week to a few months, during which time the individual is more susceptible to all kinds of bacteria and viruses, but after which that person is basically okay.

Then there are those unlucky few who are constantly coming down with a wide range of diagnosable and undiagnosable ailments that affect a wide range of parts and systems of the body. I seem to be one of these unlucky few. This is something I have tried to avoid blogging about because it is essentially "negative," but the truth is it has also become a large part of my experience living in a foreign country for the first time.

Even minor health problems can be complicated in a foreign country, as I'm sure you can imagine. If one has moved from a developed country to an undeveloped or developing one, the quality of medical care will seem subpar. In fact, while I was very reluctant to go to doctors while living in the United States, I have made a fairly firm decision not to visit a doctor (or especially a hospital) here unless I am already in danger of dying – in case they kill me, of course. For people like me who like "be their own doctors," there is the issue of not knowing what sorts of medications and treatments are available. I have lived in Morocco for 16 months and I'm still learning what is and is not available. There is the additional complication of not always knowing what the real problem is that one is trying to treat.

The biggest problem of all, of course, is communication. Think about the last time you went to visit a doctor. Did the doctor understand you? Did you understand everything the doctor said? I think there's a high chance that you will answer at least one of these questions with "no." But if you had to communicate with the doctor in a language with which one of you was uncomfortable…well, imagine the opportunities for miscommunications and misunderstandings.

I don't know what the solution is for those of us in this small and unfortunate minority. I know I'm not the only person going through this, but at the same time it's not that comforting to know there are other people who, like me, haven't seemed to figure out how to be well in a foreign country.

On finishing my second first semester of graduate school

A few minutes ago, I hit the "submit" button on an exam on Blackboard, and that marked the end of my first semester of graduate school in speech-language pathology

But, of course, this was my second first semester of graduate school. The first first semester was in 2002. I was 23 years old, and I was a newlywed. T and I took all of our belongings out of our studio apartment (where we had lived together for only three months) and put them into the back of my dad's pickup truck. We packed ourselves, my sister, and my friend Marcy into our 1992 Dodge Shadow and drove down to New Orleans, with my parents and the pickup truck not far behind. We didn't even have a place to live in New Orleans, and I think we were too young to be particularly nervous about it.

I was pursuing a Master's degree in English, and T was getting a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I don't recall either of us having any particular career goal in mind at that time. We were excited about the opportunity to live in a new place. We were excited about the challenge, and about the idea of having an "M" after our names (as in, JABS, M.A.).

To help pay for school, we had teaching assistantships, and so we became teachers.

Eight years later, after selling a large number of our belongings, we put most of what remained into a small storage unit in Omaha, Nebraska, and packed the rest into four large suitcases to bring with us to Ifrane, Morocco. I spent a year doing undergraduate preparatory coursework in a completely new field. And now I am (incha'allah) one quarter of the way through with graduate coursework in that field. In most ways, it is an entirely different experience. This time, I'm not going to school out of a vague love of learning and of literature. I'm going to school to prepare for a job. If you know what kind of person I am, you might understand how strange this is.

In fact, I almost feel like I'm a different person this time around. Yes, the school experience itself is entirely different because it's online. But I'm not the same kind of student, either. While I have to some degree embraced the procrastinatory nature of being a student, I haven't done so nearly to the same degree as I did nine years ago. I have handed in almost every assignment and exam at least one or two days before the due date. I don't stay up late writing papers. I'm not nearly as afraid, this time around, to admit when I don't know or don't understand something.

The one way in which I really haven't changed as a student is that the familiar fear of failure is still present. But again, I think I'm more open about it this time around. And I see that my classmates have the same fear. For most of us, this is a second or third (or more) crack at figuring out what we want to be when we grow up. Many of my classmates have spouses who are working extra hard so they can take time off to go to school, and money is tight for them. They have children who put heavy demands on their time and attention. They have aging parents to worry about. So much more is at stake this time that it makes sense for the fear to be more intense.

I hope this means, though, that in a year and a half the success will be that much sweeter.

Season of relax

My favorite season? Season of relax. And what better way is there to celebrate it than with Milka special edition "Season of Relax" chocolate?

Another holiday season away from home

A few days ago, my uncle Jim sent me a link to this song by Tim Minchin. He's a comedian, but I found my eyes misting a little as I listened to the song about the role of family in making Christmas time special (for theists and atheists alike).

This morning, I was shocked upon realizing that it was time to flip my calendar to December.

Christmas is going to be here before I know it, and this year will mark my third Christmas without family and my second Christmas in a foreign country.

Out of a somewhat unhealthy desire to dwell on my growing melancholy, I went back through my photographs to look at pictures of previous family Christmases. Our last Christmas with my family was in 2008. (It also turned out to be our last Christmas at the house in which my sister and I grew up.) Our last Christmas with T's family was in 2007. Even then, it wasn't a gathering of the whole family – T's brother wasn't there.

I love Christmas. It is, hands down, my favorite holiday. And yet this year, I find myself dreading its approach. I know I should set up our little Christmas tree and try to devise some decorations for it. I know I should try to plan some kind of Christmas brunch or dinner for the small number of friends and acquaintances who will be in Ifrane that day. But I'm unmotivated to do those things because the truth is that I just want to be with family on Christmas this year.

Because I know that's not possible, I find my thoughts jumping all the way to Christmas 2012. Where will I be then? I try to comfort myself with the thought that surely next year we will find a way to be with some family members for Christmas. Realistically, though, I have no idea if that will happen. I will still be a student at that time and won't be contributing much to our household income. I have to go to Kentucky for a month this coming summer as part of my schoolwork, so it's not likely that I'll be able to justify another return to the United States a few months later. We also have family members in New Zealand, but…have you ever looked to see how far away New Zealand is??

My best coping strategy would probably be to move forward in planning a Moroccan Christmas, to make plans to Skype with family members on that day, and to try to develop a sense of solidarity with other people all over the world who spend holidays away from their families for a variety of reasons.

Happy holidays, everyone. Try to enjoy the place where you are and the people you're with.