Big January Update

Hello everyone it has been a long time again. I have decided that tonight is the night that I must update you all on my life here in Morocco. Since last time I have spent my first Christmas away from home and it was an interesting one. I was in Assilah a beach town North of Rabat. It is a great place but it rained the entire time I was there with my boyfriend Doug. I really missed home but we spent the week of rain inside watching movies and listening to all the new music Doug downloaded. From there we went to our friend Natalie’s village in the mountains near Azrou. The sun finally decided to shine and we looked at rugs and built a mini raft and watched it rush down the river. Life in Morocco is full of simple days and pretending you’re a child again. After leaving Ait Hamza we traveled to the Sahara Desert for New Year’s. It was an amazing time spent with lots of Peace Corps volunteers. One of my greatest New Year’s to date. I have decided that I must spend every New Year’s in “the nature!” After New Year’s Doug and I traveled back to Marrakesh and spent our last days together before we ventured back to our own villages. This journey let me see the diversity Morocco has to offer from beaches to mountains to gorges to desert. It is truly an amazing place and I am very lucky to be doing Peace Corps here.
Once I got back to my site anxiety came rushing in with questions of what should I do for work, have I accomplished anything here, what am I going to do after Peace Corps. I have been struggling with these questions since I arrived in Morocco and sometimes the waves of anxiety hit me harder than I can handle. Last Monday this all came to a head when I totally lost it and had a horrible day of crying and wishing I had my mom to talk to. I ended up talking to Sachel and he put it all in perspective for me and now I am back on track.
After talking to Sachel I decided that I am going on sabbatical from work for the moment and going to focus on integrating back into my community. When I left for two weeks everyone thought I went back to America for good and was very sad that I never said good-bye. I don’t really understand why they thought this because they all know I am leaving in May. Here in Imi n Tlit months don’t really matter and nobody really has a grasp on what day of the week it is, nonetheless what month it is. Now that I am back and they realize that it is only January they all are ready to have tea with me.
I have a hard time booking my time here because everyone wants to have tea with me all at once and then I don’t know how to even begin choosing where to start with my tea times. This usually results in me just going to my host families and nobody else’s houses for a couple of weeks. Now I have started getting a schedule and I have to go to Rabat for a dentist appointment in three days. It seems like every time I get back into the groove of things there is some holiday, or school break, or I have to go to Rabat. I am just coming to the point where I am going to do the best I can and I need to stop pressuring myself with work and live in the now the best I can. I also need to take mini steps toward my future instead of just letting it overwhelm me.
Today when I was at the internet I got the best email from my mom with lots of wisdom part of the email said “None of us know what we are doing with our lives and we all hang on to and let go of people, places, and things as we go along. Security is an illusion and life is a journey not destiny.” I thought that was the perfect thing to say for how I have been feeling lately.
After I got back from my Internet session in Smimou today I ran into one of my neddy girls and she told me about some town drama that was happening and I became apart of the investigation. The lady that runs the neddy supposedly came back from Essaouira today with 57,000 durhams, which is like 7,000 dollars, which could not have been right. Regardless of the amount she lost a lot of money and started accusing the other girls at the neddy of stealing it so they all were forced to be strip searched to prove it wasn’t them. Then when I got back we started looking for this boy that probably stole the money that all of a sudden is no longer in town, kind of suspicious? Since, I am allowed to go anywhere in town and the girls aren’t I was told to go to all the café’s and the middle school to see if he was seen today. No luck, my guess is that he fled to Casablanca and is getting on a plane to France right now.
This story has become the talk of the town and will be for years to come. It was kind of fun to listen to all the women speculate on who and how this happened. My real guess is that someone stole the money in a taxi or it was misplaced somewhere. Or since I don’t like the lady that runs the neddy I also speculated that she made all this up so she doesn’t have to pay the women at the neddy for their work. I was quite the investigator today and everyone thought all my ideas were the funniest because none of them dared say what I was saying. I will probably get in trouble for this tomorrow but I don’t care it reminded me of how fun it is to be from a small town sometimes and run around and talk about people. Yes I know gossip is a sin but we all like to relish in it from time to time.
Other stories that I need to tell you about that I don’t want to forget, the other day I was having trouble putting my propane tank on my oven so I asked the shop keeper next door to come help me. My propane tank was clearly leaking and he decided to test it with a lighter anyways, which started a huge fire. I started running because my basic instincts were that I am not going to get blown up because of this. He started laughing at me and put the fire out with his Jalaba, which is Moroccan clothing that is robe like. In the end he fixed the problem and nobody lost any skin to third degree burns.
Story three for you, every time I go to the post office to pick up a package I have to wait for a customs guy to come and make sure there aren’t any bombs in my packages. Every time he goes through my packages I have tons of food in them and he has started to notice. So mister package man looks at me seriously and tells me this isn’t Somalia we do have food in Morocco. Then I have to explain to him if he moved to America he would like it if his mom sent him Moroccan food. He did not buy this and still thinks I am crazy for getting Trader Joe’s sesame almonds sent to me, there are almonds here in Morocco but there so expensive and not sesame covered;)
Well that is all for now. Next week I am off to Rabat for a dentist appointment and a glasses appointment. I am looking forward to this because I will have time to do some applications for my future, do some paperwork that the beaucracy of Peace Corps is making me do, and to see Doug. I really don’t want to leave my site at this point because I am making progress on my reintegration. But, I will just have to work real hard when I get back. My plan for work in the future is to keep doing tooth-brushing lessons and paint some health murals on some schools but my main priority for the next four months is to be with my people of Imi n Tlit.
Can you believe that I only have four months left!!!!! This is bitter sweet and I am going to really enjoy my time I have left here and I will really miss the people and the simplicity of my life here.
Until next time love,
Emmy