More on the Moroccan desert

What ideas did you have about Morocco before you started reading my blog? If you imagined deserts, sand, camels, and nomads and their tents, you weren't alone.

As I hope my blog has illustrated for you, though, Morocco is a geographically diverse country. I didn't see any camels until I had been here for a few months, and my recent trip to the desert was the first time I saw a landscape that I thought might be described as "stereotypically" Moroccan or North African.

The transition to a desert landscape really begins south of Midelt. The mountains are always close by, but the land slowly becomes dustier, and the vegetation becomes more sparse and scrubby.

There was an unexpected number of hotels along our route from Midelt to Merzouga. Some of them were shockingly (and, we all agreed, too optimistically) grand. As we drove by these hotels, we saw that the vast majority had virtually empty parking lots.

We had originally made reservations at such a hotel (although not nearly as new as the one pictured to the left) in Erfoud. It was such a depressingly outdated and empty place, though, that we quickly ditched it for a smaller and grubbier – yet less deserted and more comfortable  – hotel.

The way people look changes, too, as one approaches the desert. Skin gets darker, and by the time we got to Erfoud, we hardly saw the faces of any women, most of whom were covered from head to toe with abaya-like black garments, some with brightly colored embroidered patterns on them. The Rough Guide to Morocco says that Erfoud gives one "a first, powerful sense of proximity to the desert, with frequent sandblasts ripping through the streets." We arrived in this normally dusty town during a time of unusually strong winds, and the coating of grit that quickly accumulated on my body, along with a  constant sense of impending danger to my eyes, made me immediately understand the benefit of full body coverage.

You need to put something on your feet

Yesterday I stepped out to the lobby of our building (which is right outside my apartment door) to exchange my green laundry tokens (purchased on campus) for the silver laundry tokens which are necessary for doing laundry in our building but which can only be obtained a few at a time. I stayed out there to chat for a while with Aziz, one of our favorite downtown staff members.

As we were talking, Driss, a young and very nice security guard who is (justifiably) quite proud of his English, walked by a couple of times. The second time, he looked down at my feet, which were covered only with some fuzzy cream, brown, and pink-striped socks. He said, in a nonthreatening but very sincere and very serious tone, "You need to go put something on your feet. You need to go right now. It's not good for your health to have just socks and have your feet on this floor."

I came back to my apartment, duly chastised. Driss would be disturbed to know that I did not put something more on my feet. But if I get sick, I will know it was no one's fault but mine for letting my feet get so cold.

Things I forgot to say in my previous post

I was in such a rush last night to get pictures of our trip to the Cascades d'Ouzoud up on my blog that only later did I realize I hadn't written about half of the things I had intended to. So here are some of those things, in no particular order:


- Even in places in Morocco where the landscape looks familiar (T and I have, on multiple occasions, been reminded of Wyoming and Montana), there are frequent reminders that I am in a foreign country. No matter how remote a road seems to be, there will always be pedestrians, hitchhikers, and people on donkeys traveling along that road. I often wonder where they're coming from and where they're going.

In remote locations, one is also likely to encounter people trying to sell things. When we got onto the mountain roads not far from Ouzoud, we started seeing people along the road holding up little bundles of fresh herbs and making a variety of mysterious gestures which we assume meant something like, "Please buy these herbs! I really need money. Don't you feel sorry for me?" And we did; we felt sorry for them.

Many of these people – many more than I would have guessed – were children, often very, very young children. As we drove, we discussed the pros and cons of stopping to buy some of the herb. (I think it was some kind of mountain thyme, but I'm not sure.) I imagine they couldn't have been selling the little bundles for more than one or two dirhams each, and I wonder what could possibly have been the maximum amount of money someone might bring home at the end of a long day of standing by the roadside. Seeing these people was a reminder both of how difficult the job situation is here (it's unimaginably worse than in the U.S., I guarantee) and of how hard people try to come up with ways of having even a tiny income.


- I should have taken the opportunity yesterday to spend a little more time explaining exactly what a riad is. Basically, a riad is a large, multilevel house with a central area that is open to the sky. Most of the riads I have stayed at (many have been converted into somewhat upscale bed and breakfasts) have had some form of covering on the rooftop terrace to provide some protection from the elements to the central patio/garden, but this is not always the case.

In the United States, indoor and outdoor spaces are usually carefully separated from each other; "indoor" and "outdoor" are mutually exclusive categories. This is not true in Morocco, and riads illustrate well the lack of a clear distinction between the two. As I mentioned in my previous post, the riad we stayed at has a full-sized orange tree growing in the middle of it. Above the orange tree, at the level of the rooftop terrace (another characteristic of a riad), a clear plastic tarp has been stretched to provide some protection from the rain (although there are a few inches on all sides that are not protected by the tarp, which means that one can get rained on while standing in certain places on the ground floor). At the center of the tarp is a large plastic tube that goes down to the base of the orange tree, so that when it rains the water follows the tube and waters the orange tree!

This lack of separation between indoor and outdoor means that, when the weather is nice, a riad is a lovely place for hanging out and relaxing. But when the weather is cold, the riad is also cold; many owners go to great lengths (and, I'm sure, expenses) to try to bring their riads up to Western standards of comfort regarding winter temperatures.

How I came to be walking down the streets of Meknes with a woman holding a plastic jar with pieces of my stomach in it

This blog entry contains some personal medical information. Although I am providing this information for the purpose of illustrating what I think are interesting cultural differences, if this sort of thing makes you uncomfortable, you can skip reading it. Rest assured that, despite the provocative title, nothing dangerous happened to me today, and my health is relatively stable.



I have hinted in previous posts that my health has not been at its best since coming to Morocco. I haven't written much about it because…well…I didn't think it was really that interesting.

But in some ways, I guess it is, and maybe writing about it is relevant to the purpose of this blog. Definitions of and attitudes toward health and sickness are culturally bound. (An example with which many Americans might be familiar is the changing stance of the American Psychological Association on homosexuality.) The procedures used for identifying and treating illness – from how one makes a doctor's appointment to options for laboratory work – also change from culture to culture. The theoretical frameworks from which doctors approach diagnosis and treatment may be different, and the social roles of doctors and "patients" are also culturally defined.

I am someone who has always found medical systems difficult to understand and navigate, even with parents who are nurses, even in my own culture, even communicating with people who speak the same native language I do. As I wrote about previously, all of those things that cause difficulty for me in the U.S. cause more difficulty here.

Happy to have a cold

I never thought I would be happy or relieved to have a cold. Despite the fact that colds affect me with some frequency, I tend to be a big, whiny baby every time I get one. But given the other ailments that have plagued or could be plaguing me, I'm finding a strange comfort in having a gold ol' cold right now. I have a warm apartment, lots of soup recipes, and plenty of herbal teas and ginger. So bring it on, cold. Bring it on.

Can and Can't

What you can't (or, at least, often don't) get at the University health center:

     -A urine test
     -Blood drawn
     -Blood tests
     -Any other kind of test, really
     -Long-handled cotton swabs (apparently, they don't exist in Morocco) 
     -Routine blood pressure, temperature, or weight checks
     -Thorough physical examination
     -Questions about any allergies you might have
     -Explanations of medications being prescribed to you
     -Explanations of anything in fluent English
    

What you can get at the University health center:

     -A box of surgical gloves, for free
     -Several tongue depressors, also for free
     -A laryngeal mirror, again at no cost! (or is a dental mirror? I'm not sure on the difference)
     -A signature and stamp on a form indicating that you are healthy, after a very cursory physical examination
     -A signature and stamp on a form indicating that you have tested negative for tuberculosis without taking any test (don't worry, I didn't do this)
     -A signature and stamp on anything, really
     -A variety of medications for treating all kinds of stomach and intestinal discomfort and distress
     -Explanations of many things in fluent French
    

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 going to the dentist

Last Friday evening, after spending a wonderful but long day in Rabat with my friend LW, I decided to relax on the couch while watching TV, eating some popcorn, and drinking a beer. After biting into a particularly crunchy piece of popcorn, I noticed that one of my molar teeth felt a little funny. I touched it with my tongue, and I went cold. A chunk of my tooth was missing.

As far as I was concerned, one of my biggest fears had come true. I had gotten some crazy idea in my head about Moroccan dentistry that it consisted only of getting teeth pulled (without anesthesia) at the souk by people who may or may not be dentists (yes, you can get dental work done at the souk). I have been experiencing a little bit of "Morocco fatigue," so the idea of having to find a competent and hygienic dentist, figuring out how to make an appointment, figuring out how insurance works, getting to the dentist, and communicating with the dentist was exhausting. In addition, never before had I broken off a chunk of a tooth, and I wasn't sure how much pain I could potentially be in, nor did I know what might be required to fix it.

Luckily, there is an American trained, English speaking dentist in Fez who is used to working with people from the University. And luckily, I have a generous friend here (LW) who was willing to take me to the dentist. The office even had a receptionist who spoke English. Communicating my problem wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it might be.

However, this was the most painful dental work I can remember having. I was warned that this dentist is "rough." I think she's used to people telling her that what she's doing hurts, so she didn't believe me when I said that the anesthesia she injected did not extend to the tooth she was working on. Tooth nerve pain – ouch. She filled the heck out of the tooth and warned me that it would be sensitive for several days. I'm still a little nervous because if the sensitivity doesn't go away, I may need to have a root canal. If that happens, she had better do a more thorough job with the anesthesia.

It cost me 500 dirhams to have this work done. That's a little over $60, which is affordable even if the insurance company doesn't reimburse me for 80% of the cost. That seems so absurdly cheap to me as an American, and yet it is a cost that is completely out of range for many Moroccans. If I were an average Moroccan, I would probably just have to live with what was left of my tooth, and if it got bad enough –if the whole tooth rotted out –I would go to the souk and get it pulled out. There would be no other option.

Absinthe update

If I had done even a minimal amount of research before making some guesses in my previous blog post about shiba, an herb sometimes added to Moroccan mint tea, I would have discovered that yes, it is absinthe, also known as artemesia or wormwood. But the word "absinthe" is used to refer both to the alcohol (which is illegal in many countries) and the herb, shiba/artemesia/wormwood that is an ingredient in the alcohol. Shiba has some medicinal effects, which is why Amina advised me only to add a small amount to my pot of tea, but it doesn't appear to be dangerous in any way when added to tea like that--and it makes the tea taste extra yummy.

Speaking of medicinals, I came down with a cold yesterday. I think I have been sick more often than not since we got here (part of culture shock, right?). I'm missing out on a hike today, but T assures me he will take pictures, and I just might be able to convince him to be a guest blogger so you can all join in the hiking fun.