A Month in the Life

Ok, I admit it. I clearly suck at blogging, but tonight I have managed to work up sufficient levels of guilt and an intense enough desire to not do my homework to give this thing another go. The past month has been rather eventful, to say the least. When I last left off, I believe midterms were fast approaching. No use dwelling on that subject except to say that now finals and final papers are looming large as the end of the semester is rushing forward faster than I want it to. It's more than a little weird to think that in about a month's time most of my current AMIDEAST buddies will be heading home to the States, while I stay here in Morocco. I know that a new group of kids, who I'm sure will be fabulous, will arrive in January, but I've made some great friends this semester, and I will be genuinely sad when they leave. My roommate has definitely heard a fare share of angst ridden whining on the subject as I cannot possibly imagine a better person to live with. I am fond of telling her that I am going to request "another Evelyn" as my roommate next semester.

But I digress. The past month has certainly been an exciting one. I have been to Spain...twice, visited Marrakesh, spoken to a member of Parliament, and tomorrow I am heading to the Sahara desert for a five day excursion. Where to begin? I suppose Spain is as good a place as any.

Spain part I was part of an AMIDEAST trip to Tangier, Chefchaouen, and Ceuta. Ceuta is a little tiny bit of Spanish territory hanging out in northern Morocco. For reasons that I cannot fathom, Spain sees Ceuta and its fellow territory Melilla as its foot hold in Africa and steadfastly refuse to relinquish the land to Morocco. Either way, what it comes down to is that in order to get into Ceuta we, literally, left Morocco and entered Spain. This was more than a little weird. Upon entering Ceuta we filled out our entry cards and walked through a set of chain link fences that looked disturbingly like something out of Children of Men. We then spent two hours walking around streets that were beautifully paved, looking at architecture that was decidedly European in design, and eating pork. It was quite a nice little break. When it was time to return to Morocco, we trooped back through the Children of Men gates, pas some disgusting toilets, a tiny little cat, and the random guys smuggling stuff back into Morocco, and as soon as we set foot on Moroccan territory we were sexually harassed by a group of men standing near the customs booth. It was good to be home.

My second trip to Spain was over Green March, or the long weekend that celebrates when King Hassan II organized a massive march of Moroccans into the Western Sahara to expel the remaining Spanish colonial forces and return the land to Morocco. It's a pretty big deal here, and my friends and I found it more than a little ironic that we chose to spend the weekend of Green March in Spain. Anyways, I passed my weekend exploring the cities of Grenada and Malaga. Grenada was a gorgeous mix of Moroccan and Spanish architecture, which is not that surprising given that it was the last Muslim hold out during the time of the Reconquista. Highlights from Grenada include the Alhambra, which is a spectacular old fortress full of lovely gardens and a palace absolutely covered in spectacular Arabic calligraphy, totally failing at tapas, eating an entire plate full of food only made from pork products, and drinking red wine. Our time in Malaga was spent shopping, sampling the tasty local seafood, and making poor life choices that involved blue drinks called playa iguanas. Needless to say, Spain was a lot of fun, although I did embarrass myself quite often by trying to speak Arabic with cashiers and waiters. It appears that Arabic is now my fallback language to use when I do not understand what people are saying to me. I suppose that's progress...of a sort.

My next weekend adventure was to Marrakesh, with the rest of the AMIDEAST group. This was our last AMIDEAST sponsored trip, and while it was a good time, I don't think I will be counting Marrakesh as one of my favorite Moroccan cities. Fez and Chefchaouen certainly had their fair share of tourists, but no place I've been to, besides Disney Land, can hold a candle to Marrakesh. I swear that sometimes it felt like there were more Europeans than Moroccans in the city! Marrakesh does have some great historic sites including gardens full of olive trees, a gorgeous old palace, and a hidden graveyard with a stunning tomb for the king of one of Morocco's later dynasties. After visiting all of these places, my friends and I devoted ourselves to some serious shopping. I was in rare bargaining form and seriously aided by the fact that most of the vendors were not expecting me to speak Arabic. My favorite part of our trip to Marrakesh though, was the Jamiyaa al-Fina. This is a huge open air market full of food stalls, snake charmers, fortune tellers, story reciters, and henna artists. Walking up to the square at night was an intense experience. Between the smoke visibly rising from the masses of food stalls, the smells, the music, and the yelling it is a complete sensory overload, but a lot of fun if you're in the right frame of mind. My friends and I enjoyed a delicious meal at one of the food stalls and the only shadow on the evening was a crazy little beggar kid who refused our food and insisted on following us for a good couple of minutes even though we were clearly not going to give him any money. Everyone's more aggressive in Marrakesh I guess. The night ended with a trip to the Michael Jackson movie, This is It, which was a ton of fun, as Michael Jackson is awesome and everyone in the theater sang along to all of the songs.

In between trips, school does continue, and I have made some interesting headway on my murshidat project. I have spoken to a member of Parliament, a women who is a leader in the PJD, which is Morocco's leading Islamist party. I have also visited the school where murshidat are trained and attended a class in the Islamic Studies Department at Muhammed V University. All in all, this project has been quite a whirlwind and although I have not yet managed to talk to an actual murshidat, I have still learned a lot about the program and the changing role of women in religion in Morocco. I hope that I will be able to continue looking into the issue of murshidat next semester as there is still so much I have to learn. The one dark spot of this project is that it has rather clearly brought home the sometimes seemingly insurmountable language barrier that I still struggle with. I am unable to talk to most people without a translator and miss-communication issues have resulted in some botched interviews and frustration and embarrassment on my part. Ah well. Hopefully my Arabic will continue to improve with time, and I really just have to come to terms with my decision to stop taking French in college.

The past week as been spent worrying about the three papers that I still have to research and write (which of course did not actually result in starting said research) and the impending doom of finals. I really do hate the end of a semester. Ah well, tomorrow I am heading to the desert, where I plan to put all of that yucky stuff completely out of my mind and instead focus on the beauty of sunrises over the dunes, dancing with nomads, and trying not to be too frightened of the camels! It should be rather wonderful.

The Past Two Weeks

I once again find myself apologizing for a lack of updating! Those of you who know me well are aware of the fact that I have never been able to keep a journal of any kind longer than two days, and I guess even updating this blog once a week became too much for me. OK, that sounds terrible and I promise to at least try and be better about posting in the coming weeks. In my defense, I haven't done many interesting things since Fez. Schoolwork has finally caught up with me and between studying for midterms and starting papers that I've been ignoring, my weekends have become study time, rather than adventure time.

So, to dredge up ancient history, the last trip outside Rabat I've taken was to my Arabic teacher's farm located about 45 minutes outside the city. Our morning began with a trip to the local souq. Now, I know the souq in Rabat pretty well. I'm familiar with the many stands selling clothes, jewelry, 5 dirham undies, shoes, and crafts. I also know how to get to the tailor souq, the food souq, and the stolen cell phone/ pirated DVD souq. The country souq was like nothing I had ever seen before. There were carts of people selling all kinds of fruits, vegetables, and meats. Some of the meat was still alive. Our teacher took us to the livestock section and showed us how to tell how old a sheep is by its teeth. It was all a little surreal.. The best part of the souq was the Fantasia. A Fantasia is a horse show which mainly consists of teams of guys on horses riding at a judging tent in a straight line and firing off their guns at exactly the same time. Our teacher said that the Fantasia only happens every couple of months and it's an opportunity for the local farmers to show off their horses. Horses are a big deal here in Morocco. I don't know very much about them because my own horseback riding career ended rather unspectacularly at the age of seven when I took two lessons in which I was afraid of the horse and my teacher made me cry. Anyways, Moroccan horses are special because they are a mix of Arabian and Berber horses and apparently really super fast. Watching the Fantasia was pretty awesome even though my teacher said that most of the teams we saw were not very good (meaning they didn't ride in a straight enough line or fire their guns at the same time). I guess that the professionals were supposed to come later in the afternoon. We began our Fantasia watching in the spectator section (read a dirt bank next to the field), but one of the families that owns a stable invited us all to sit in their VIP tent and drink tea while we watched, which was cool. I would love to see a professional Fantasia sometime because even the amateurs were amazing. The traditional costumes were lovely and the horses themselves were breathtaking.

After the visit to the souq we continued on to the farm. My teacher really does own a legit farm with a small orchard, vegetables, and chickens. He's currently working on a swimming pool as well. We all went on a tour around the gardens, and my teacher insisted on sending us home with fresh fruits and veggies for our families. My Arabic class is eight girls, so after our walk through the farm we helped the women of the family prepare lunch, which was couscous, salad, and grilled meat. Dessert was fresh fruit and it was all delicious! Lunch was followed by another walk and the inevitable Moroccan tea. My teacher says that he wants to have us back sometime so we can all stay the night and see the stars.

Even through I've been hanging around Rabat for the past couple of weeks, I've still been doing some cool stuff. Last weekend my friend Sarah and I decided to do a little medina shopping. We wandered around for a little while and I ended up buying two bootlegged DVDs and a CD with three Cat Stevens and one Carole King album on it all for three dollars US. I consider this a rather smashing success even though Inglorious Bastards was completely in French, and thus I understand none of it.

I also spent an afternoon last week exploring Chellah with my language and culture partner, Ilham. Chellah is an old ruin from Roman times right near the Palace and it's in remarkably good shape despite the laissez-faire attitude that Morocco takes with most of its historic monuments. Ilham explained that only recently had the government decided to take an active interest in the preservation and renovation of Chellah. The highlight of our afternoon was being pulled over by one of the gardeners, who guessing that I was American and that Ilham spoke English, asked if he could use me to exchange a five dollar tip he had gotten from some American tourists. After negotiating a proper exchange rate, with much help from Ilham and much joking from the other gardeners, I was the proud possessor of a $5 bill and out 40 dirhams. The gardeners figured out that Ilham is Amazigh, or the politically correct term for Berber, and they all tried to teach me a little of the Amazigh dialect that Ilham speaks, but it was a rather spectacular fail. Our evening ended with smuggling a bag of some really large citrus fruit that I don't know the name of in English (compliments of the gardener) out of the orchards. I really like Ilham because she's an exceptionally nice young woman and very different from my host family. She's studying for her doctorate in biology right now, so she's busy, but she still takes time to listen to my pitiful Arabic and show me around Rabat. She even offered to translate for me if I need to talk to any Moroccans for school projects...which leads me right to my last bit of exciting news!

I have to do a project on some aspect of Moroccan society for my contemporary Moroccan culture class, and I chose to write about murshidat, or women who preach in the Mosque. They are not Imams, so they can't lead prayer, but they do offer classes, advise, and general religious support to the women in their communities. The program to train women murshidat began in 2006 as part of Morocco's "religious reform" which aims to promote a more moderate Islam in Morocco. Since the murshidat program is very new, I quickly learned that there is virtually no material published about it anywhere. All of my research will need to be through interviews and first hand accounts, which is more than a little intimidating. Luckily my Moroccan culture professor and Gender, Islam, and Society professor were able to give me some people to talk to. Next week I am interviewing the director of one of Morocco's leading Islamist newspapers (thank God he speaks English!), and a murshidat that AMIDEAST got me in touch with. I am also supposed to talk to one of the women who teaches murshidat courses in the big religious school in Rabat, and a couple of women's rights activists that my professor knows. I feel in a bit over my head, but hopefully this will be a great learning experience and I won't offend too many Moroccans with my ignorance!

So, that's about it folks. I'll try to update sometime next week, but with midterms it's most likely that you won't hear from me again before next Sunday.