No wonder

All this time, I thought I was taking relaxing baths with de-stressing lavender oil. And then yesterday I noticed my lavender oil actually has distressing properties. No wonder I've been so stressed out!

On having an accent

One of my English students, Khalid, has excellent pronunciation (which, I should mention, isn't entirely unusual for Moroccans speaking English even as their third or fourth language). Still, his pronunciation is impressive considering that he is a "high beginner" and that he generally doesn't talk.

Today in class, we listened to a short conversation from the CD that comes with our textbook. The people having the conversation were Scottish and, thus, spoke with a Scottish accent. When I asked the students to repeat and practice the conversation, Khalid immediately adopted a Scottish accent.

I was a little jealous of his ability.

Heidelberg

On New Year's Eve, AC's mother brought us fortune cookies. AC and IC had typical fortunes, bland and vague statements, not specific about the future, which I have completely forgotten.

But my fortune made me nervous. It said something like, "An adventure is coming." I got even more nervous when T read his fortune, something about "you will know the right way." I read these in combination to indicate that T was going to lead me on some crazy adventure, and I wasn't quite feeling up to an adventure at the time. Maybe it had something to do with the cold I had developed on our second day in Germany, or maybe it was related to Africa fatigue… I don't know.

The next day, T and I started to feel like our hosts needed a break from us, so we suggested that, on January 3, they could send us off somewhere on our own via public transportation. Instead, though, they loaded us into IC's car along with her TomTom and sent us off to Heidelberg. After a bit of a rough start (the TomTom led us to the center of town, where without a real map or any tourism information, we were a bit disoriented), we had an enjoyable day on our own.


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View of the town and the Neckar River from the castle

I went to Heidelberg knowing exactly two things about it: An American military base is located there, and the city hosts a colony of wild ringnecked parrots (and if you know me, you know which of these two things I was most excited about).


The town is very popular with tourists (but not, I think, due to its military or psittacine residents). When we first got there, I was hearing more English than German around me. I was happy to see a lot of Asian people (who don't often come to Morocco) and Asian restaurants. Thai food for lunch was an unexpected treat.

Fondue, glass pickles, fire bowls, and other German things

During my senior year of high school, I was friends with a German exchange student, AC. After that year, I always thought it would be neat to visit him in Germany. This was a casual wish, though, with Germany on a long list of other places I "wanted" to visit, including Australia, India, and Hawaii. I don't think I ever really thought it would be possible for me to visit him, and I never had a strong sense of why I wanted to go to Germany or what I would even do there.

That was until I moved to Morocco. Now Frankfurt is just a 3 1/2 hour plane ride away (plus a couple of hours in a car). So at the end of December, T and I finally visited my friend AC in Rosbach, Germany. We spent close to a week with him and his wife IC and their two young children MC (boy) and MC (girl).

MC is just about ready to go to bed.

One of the great things about staying with a German family is that we got to learn some details of German culture we may not have been aware of otherwise. For example, because they took us to a New Year's Eve party with several of their friends, I now know that fondue is a fairly common New Year's Eve meal. It also seems that virtually everyone in the entire country sets off fireworks at midnight– a lot of fireworks. And while I thought staying at a New Year's Eve party until 3:00 AM was quite late, when we said good-bye at that time, we were the first ones to leave the party – probably because AC and IC's little girl had refused to be cared for by her grandparents and ended up accompanying us and thus needed to get home at a "reasonable" time. (Don't worry, she slept for a good portion of the party.)

SingStar fun

Another wonderful thing about visiting Germany (for English-speaking people, anyway) is that many Germans, especially those in the younger generations, are very comfortable with English and can easily switch back and forth between it and German. Virtually everyone at the New Year's Eve party knew English. At first, though, people seemed reluctant to speak to us, perhaps because we were strangers and because everyone (I think) is more comfortable speaking in his or her native language. As the night went on, though, more people were kind enough to talk to us. They were surprised to learn that we were not visiting from America, so the topic of how one ends up living in Morocco helped keep up the conversation.

It also helped when my friend AC broke out the PlayStation game SingStar. By the end of the night, even I had come out of my shell, and I was belting out Abba songs with IC as my teammate. Champagne seemed to loosen peoples tongues, and almost everyone was making comments about the game using English for our benefit.

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.

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.)

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?

The road home

The drive back to Ifrane on Sunday (after a weekend spent in Midelt and Imilchil) was long, hot, and uncomfortably crowded. Nevertheless, I was okay with it. I was accepting of it. And I found that, maybe for the first time since coming back to Morocco after five weeks spent in the United States, I was really, truly accepting another year in Morocco.

I want for the tone and content of this blog to be more positive than negative, more forward-looking than backward looking. I try to do more pretty photographs, and less silly navel-gazing.

But the truth is that it was hard for me to come back here on August 25. It was hard not to dwell on a lot of things that are not (or do not have to be) all that important – the accessibility of a Whole Foods store; the closeness of family and friends (and the ease with which I could communicate with them when I had a U.S. phone number they could call); the convenience of conducting business by telephone and in English; the availability of vegetarian protein products and good microbrew beers; even the presence of a soft, comfortable bed with high-quality pillows.

I lost sight of why I gave these things up, and I was seduced by the ultimately materialistic (and, therefore – at least ideally – unimportant) conveniences and luxuries of living in my home country. I lost sight of what I gained in the previous year here in Morocco, and of what I have to gain in the coming year (or more).

So I am back in Ifrane with greater resolve to live here. T and I are planning on hiring a Darija tutor, in an effort (no matter how pathetic it turns out to be) to be able to communicate with more Moroccans. We will try to go on more trips. We will try to make more friends. We will try to be more kind, giving, and generous to those around us. I will continue working on my constant quest to be less materialistic and less caught up in "the little things."

I think this family was probably ecstatic when they were finally able to get their solar panel (which  is just barely visible on their rooftop). That kind of helps put the Whole Foods thing in perspective, doesn't it?

And even though I know that my ultimate goal is to return to the United States and to find a (permanent) home somewhere within its borders, I will work on being patient and appreciative of the moment.

These are all resolutions that I will have to renew week to week, day to day, and sometimes even moment to moment. That is one reason I am posting them here: a public declaration makes them more real, and harder to forget.

At least for now, I'm home. I'll say it again: I'm home.

Weekend in London

This may sound crazy to someone living in the United States or New Zealand, but T and I went to London for the weekend (we left Ifrane at 4:45 PM on Thursday and were back at our apartment before 9 PM on Sunday). A few weeks ago, we found out that T's sister and her family would be in London for a few days. We decided that London is so close (about a three hour plane ride) that we had to go see them, even if it was only for two days.

Before we went there, T's sister asked what we would want to do in London. Knowing that our main focus would be visiting with family, we decided to forgo any of the usual sightseeing and focus on three goals:

1. Have a beer. (have I yet said anything about the beer in Morocco? Morocco has only three beers: Stork, Flag, and Casablanca. I am being generous when I say that these beers are somewhat uninspired. I am not the first nor last beer snob to be a bit devastated by the dearth of good beer.)
2. Eat Indian food. (By the way, Indian food is so ubiquitous in London that I got quizzical looks from the locals when I told them this was one of the goals for my visit.)
3. Go grocery shopping.

In case you're wondering, I accomplished these goals. I had Indian food two nights in a row, and I came home with a suitcase full of frozen tofu, vitamins and herbal supplements, Ziploc bags, PG tips, rice wine vinegar, sriracha sauce, and other goodies.

I also realized during my two short days in London that I was experiencing double culture shock. First of all, I had the obvious culture shock of going from a small town in a developing African country to an almost unimaginably enormous urban area in a developed country. T's sister took me to Tesco for grocery shopping, and I froze up a little when I got to the long aisle that was dedicated entirely to yogurts. I was impressed by many mundane things – pedestrian crosswalks, wheelchair accessibility and accommodations in many places, restrooms with toilet paper and soap and working hand dryers. Everything seemed so incredibly clean, organized, and orderly! In addition, I had trouble adapting to the prices of things. One day, T and I bought an "inexpensive" sandwich to share for lunch, and I realized that our shared sandwich was the same price as about 35 baguettes here in Morocco. On Sunday, on our bus from London to the Stansted airport (it was much cheaper to fly out of Stansted than Heathrow), the bus driver announced that we should buckle our seatbelts because we would be on the highway. I couldn't help but laugh, knowing that once we were back in Morocco, we would be taking a grand taxi over mountain roads, dodging donkeys and pedestrians and bicycles and motorcycles, and we almost certainly would not even have seatbelts.

London is also different from the United States, which is sometimes easy to forget because we do (basically) speak the same language. But same language does not equal same culture. I should add here that somehow I had gotten the idea that people in London would be...well, if not unfriendly, a bit reserved. I found everyone to be quite friendly, helpful, and accommodating to our occasional cluelessness about things like how to scan our credit card at the grocery store.

It was very hard to leave family members after spending only two days with them, but I was also concerned about how I would feel coming back to Morocco. On the plane to Fez, and on the taxi ride from there to Ifrane, I engaged in a little introspection. I was a bit surprised and relieved to find that I didn't feel any sense of dread or disappointment or depression about coming back here. All reservations I had related to one factor: all of my significant difficulties here have to do with the language barrier. It became very clear to me this weekend that if I am going to stay here and be able to function, I need to make an attempt to learn Darija or French. I don't know when or how I'll do it, but I need to try.

T and I have also made a resolution to go on more weekend trips to Europe. This may be the only time in our life that we have the opportunity to do that.

Poor baby

In Darija, məskin* (for a man) or məskina (for a woman) means "poor." It can be used to mean "without money," as in Ana məskina, "I'm poor." But it can also be used much in the same way we would use "poor baby" in English (pobrecito/a in Spanish). Much like the English phrase "poor baby," məskin(a) can be used as a declaration of true pity, a term of playful mockery, or a term of endearment. Really, I think it can be used for all three purposes at once.

My friend LW told me that her maid Amina refers to me as məskina (as in, "I saw the məskina at the souk yesterday") because Amina has this idea that I, poor thing, can't eat anything. I can see where she would get this idea. I think that, when LW has asked Amina to cook a meal to which I have been invited, she has instructed Amina to leave out meat, eggs, and Knorr (pronounced "kənor"; that's what Moroccans call all bouillon, a much-relied-upon ingredient in a suprisingly large percentage of Moroccan cooking).

And, lest you doubt LW's claim that Amina's name for me is məskina, I can say that it is, indeed, what she calls me in person as well as in my absence.

Ana məskina, apparently.




*I'm using pseudo-phonetic spelling here.

Why I wish I could be allowed to learn language like a baby

For my class on language development, the instructor had us watch a video which compared a baby learning his or her native language to an adult trying to learn a foreign language in a foreign country. As an adult trying (admittedly halfheartedly) to learn two foreign languages in a foreign country, I was not impressed by the comparison.

But the more I got to thinking about it, the more I realized that it would be really nice if adults were allowed to learn languages the way children do. So here's what I think I should be allowed to do here in Morocco so I can pick up on more Arabic and French:

1. For at least six months, I should be allowed to do nothing but listen to adults speak. I shouldn't have to cook for myself, transport myself anywhere, or even clean or dress myself. I should just be allowed to sit around and listen to people talk. I should not be expected to respond in any way, other than maybe smiling at them.

2. For the next six months, I should be allowed to make fairly random sounds. I should be allowed – without any self-consciousness whatsoever – to play with my tongue and lips. I should be allowed to walk around making velar fricatives, nasal vowels, glottal stops, etc. I should not be asked to connect any of these sounds with any real-world referents.

3. After about a year of listening to people talk and practicing individual sounds and combinations of sounds, maybe then I'd be ready to start pointing to objects and naming them. (That's pretty much what I do now. Rather than saying in Arabic "Could I please have a kilo of lemons?" I point to the lemons and say "Kilo? Hamd?")

4. Maybe, maybe after that I would be ready for a little bit of formal grammar instruction. But I still shouldn't be expected for at least another year to construct utterances of, say, more than five words each.

I think I might actually be able to learn something if I were allowed to follow these steps.

Seriously, though, I am discovering that I actually can pick up some words just by listening to people talk. (I'm talking about Arabic here. I still absolutely cannot parse French words from each other. French still sounds to me like a bunch of vowels mushed up together. Sorry, HBW.) We went with an American couple to Azrou on Saturday, and the husband, B, speaks pretty fluent Darija and likes talking to Moroccans. So I got to spend a good chunk of the day listening to people speak in Darija. At the end of the day, I realized that I had actually parsed out some individual words. I asked him and his wife what those words meant. I seriously felt like a two-year-old, but I was also proud that I was learning something. Not that knowing the words for "good,"  "there is," and "yes, it's clear," is particularly helpful, but this was an accomplishment for me.

Maybe there's hope for me yet. Maybe.

French or Arabic?

Morocco is a place of amazing linguistic diversity. Road signs in and out of town, business signs, TV commercials, and products in stores display text in interesting combinations of Arabic, French, and English. There isn't any particular consistency to this. Some signs in Ifrane, for example, are only in Arabic; some appear to be only in French. Some businesses use English in their names, I assume in an attempt to attract the University crowd. Throw in the varieties of Berber that are spoken all over Morocco, and then the Spanish in some parts of the north of the country, and you have a beautiful but somewhat overwhelming combination of tongues.

It has become obvious to me that I won't get by very well with only English. I have not encountered anyone in town who knows English (with the possible exception of our cab driver yesterday who was able to tell us that our fare cost "ten dirhams" rather than "dix dirhams"). Merchants seem to naturally address anyone who appears to be a non-local with French. The only time we had been addressed in English, it was clear that someone was trying to get something (i.e. money) from us--what we would be giving them money for was rather unclear.

So...one of the decisions I need to make in the next few days is whether to take a French class or a colloquial Arabic class. French would be easier, and I would pick up on it more quickly. It would allow me to order food in restaurants and shop at the marche (still haven't figured out how to put an accent on that) and at the souk. But Arabic would be, in my opinion, more interesting. And while I can sometimes struggle through making sense of text written in French, of course there is no way for me to make any sense of written Arabic. And locals are generally very impressed by foreigners who can speak even a little Arabic. On Friday, when I thanked our van driver by saying "shukran," he excitedly asked, "You speak Arabic?" I felt I was disappointing him when I said, no, that was really the only word I knew.

T has already decided he will take an Arabic class first. Any advice on which language I should study this semester?