An Average Day

I realize many of you have been asking what do I do on a normal day. Here's more or less a normal day for me:


A typical day looks like me laying in the fetal position. Haha, just kidding...sort of.

Thank God I'm actually home before 8pm! I might learn how to cook eggplant tonight. I never knew how much my palate was going to expand when I came to Morocco. Moroccans can cook man!

Anyhow, a normal day looks like this:

Wake up at 8:30 (no matter how late I stay up I always wake up at 8:30!!)

Check email and the New York Times website. If there's an interesting article I peruse it. 

Eat yogurt.

 

Do yoga.

Contemplate doing laundry in the bathtub/cleaning my room/writing letters and then generally default to writing lessons for my classes I'm going to teach at night. 

At around 10/11 I generally take my morning 20/30 minute walk to the post office, talk to the post office guys, talk to anyone else who is friendly and ignore cat calls. 

Upon returning home, I look up new games to play with my kids. Then I usually start thinking about lunch about this time and proceed to make, eat, and clean up. Unless it's Friday. If it's Friday, then the entire country (and I don't kid about this) goes to their houses to eat cous cous with their families. I go to my host family's and eat their cous cous or try to make myself scarce because thinking about eating cous cous isn't too appetizing right now. 

Anyhow, after lunch, I either get sort of tired and default to taking a nap or putter around my house until I realize I've just done nothing for two hours and then by this time it's around 3 o clock and I feel like I need to be productive. So I go to a cafe and study language or work on lesson planning or something to that effect.

When 4 rolls around, I wander off to my classroom (which is in a building where women go to get educated). I wait for a half an hour (even though my class technically starts at 4) for students to show up and I awkwardly entertain until I have more than 3 students to actually teach something. 

At 5:30 my older students (or more advanced English speaking boys) show up. I usually start with a game of some sort and then maybe do a scotch of legitimate English teaching and then resort to more games. After the last game, I kick all the younger students out and then I work with my older kids who have written essays. We usually correct and discuss them for a half an hour and then my students walk me home. 

When I finally get home at around 8pm, I'm usually starving so I throw my stuff down and head to the kitchen to make dinner. After I'm done it's usually 10pm and by then I'm under the covers watching a tv show or reading a book. I'm generally out by 12. 

That's a pretty typical day! All in a day's work. 

Alexander and the Terrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Day

I think I may have figured out something. I don’t think I have such a major problem on basic communication skills. I think my problem may be with regular conversation skills. I literally encounter at least 7 non sequiturs in any one day.  I’ve realized it’s not as much the words that people are saying; I just can’t follow the logic of the conversation. For example:

Person:  Ah, Alyah, you’ve been gone for a while. You disappeared! (I get this about everyday, “I disappeared,” and I always think, ‘no I didn’t, I always know where I am.’)

Aly: Yes, I took a test near Fes, like I told you I was going to two weeks ago.

Person:  Did you do well?

Aly: Yes! I did just fine thanks. 

Person: So your mother’s name is Audrey?

Aly: What? Did you just say the word ‘Audrey?’ Wait, what does this have to do with what we were talking about?

Then I usually proceed to look flustered and go glossy-eyed because all of the sudden I realize I feel like I'm making mouth sounds and we have come to the impasse of: nous ne comprenons pas les uns les autres (we don't understand each other).

Here’s another linguistic anomaly I’ve noticed. People repeat things about 4 times in a conversation with me. Honestly I can’t blame them. I can barely speak their language so my conversation partner generally tries to make sure I understand what’s happening. On the other hand, people repeat things to me about 4 times even when they understand I’m not confused. For example:

Aly: I’m leaving for a week to go take a test and get technical training.

Person: Oh, alright. Will you take a bus to get there?

Aly: Yes, I’ll take a bus and return the Sunday after this.

Person: Great, so you’re taking a bus, right?

Aly: Yes, I’m taking a bus.

Person: You’ll be gone for the whole week?

Aly: Yes.

It’s definitely been one of those tear-your-hair-out sort of days. Do you remember the book, Alexander and the Terrible-No-Good-Very-Bad-Day? Well, if you don’t, it pretty much helped make sense of why the world was a not comforting place some days as a young child. In fact, it’s probably one of the big reasons why I want to go to Australia. Alright, I admit that does seem like a non sequitur, but trust me, read the book and you’ll get it.

For tomorrow, I’m going to do some yoga and then I’ll be all hearts, stars and rainbows until I realize I have to go figure out how to wrangle a classroom of 15 super stoked teenagers.

Yella! (Let’s go in Moroccan Arabic)

Laundry list

I thought you would appreciate this list. I will give you a better picture of what's going on right now but for now you're going to have to settle for this.

I just made these notes on my notepad so I can remember to do things, I thought you would like to read them.


write cile a letter
Find so and so on facebook.
Do laundry in bathtub.
Rinse half an hour later.
Update blog
See ministry of Health
CALL IMPORTANT GUY TOMORROW (I have to do that....oh responsibilities)
Make bagels
Start re-hydrating beans
Buy shelves
Be happy

It's a good thing they think I'm slow.

So, this day is deserving of another post. So, Rachel and I went over to this family's house for couscous. After lunch, the father asked me if I wanted to wear traditional Berber costume. Uh, of course! The following pictures are the consequences of such actions.

Who wouldn't want to buy me an appletini?

 Ah yes, gaze at my head dress while I look majestically to my right.

It's like we're the happiest little family!

And now comes for the second part of this blog. This is a much sadder story. So Rachel and I were on our merry way to buy things to make chili. All of the sudden I realized, I didn't have my keys.

W
H
A
T
?

So after a couple of minutes of frantically trying every key I had in my pocket (alas, not the right key, which I knew, yet tried them all anyway) into the lock to see if it would turn. I'm pretty sure I enacted the definition of insanity.

None of them worked, of course. After thinking of every way to break into my house, I gave up. So I went to my neighbor's store. I asked him if he knew of a locksmith. Well, of course he did! That locksmith turned out to be a regular handyman. He actually took a hammar and a peg and pegged out my lock. Yes, he practically beat down my door. Yay! I had an open door! Boo...I didn't have a way to close it. So then, me and this guy who was helping me ran all over town trying to find the perfect lock (why, I'm not 100% sure), but eventually we settled on one. When I returned to my door, my neighbor just kept clucking his tongue at me and telling me hashuma alik (as in, shame on you/why the heck would you forget something like that?)

This is the door that caused it all!!

In other good news: Hey! Cow hooves! YeeeeEESSS!

This is what happens when you give a Moroccan a camera!!

Hey everybody! 

My friend Rachel (a PCV) is over and I asked her if she wanted to see the bunnies that live next door!

Rachel says, "Before I even had mah coffee, I had bunnies in my arms!" (That's the Floridian accent)

My neighbor offered us an adult bunny to pet and hold but we weren't having it! We wanted baby bunnies and meant it! If I do get a bunny, I'm going to name it Jenkins!

That bunny is TINY! It's also resting on a recently washed blanket. 

This is a comparison for size. That is Rachel's hand.

The world's most chill bunnay. 

Rachel being delighted by said bunnay. 

This is me every morning!

So I gave my neighbor my camera. It's a plethora of bunnies!

 I knew I had a sheep next door, I just didn't know how close!

I was totally surprised that this showed up on my camera. Isn't he cute? I'm also realizing that almost all of my blog posts are about farm animals.....but that's cool right?

More Bunnies!

I really want the chickens to start laying eggs! I want some!

And that's been neighbor fun times with Aly and friends. 

Must...not...procrastinate....

Molly McNeilly, if you read this, I no longer have your email and I want it so I can talk to you!!! Miss you!

Anyhow, hey everybody! Nice to see you, sorry I've not written sooner. I just finished a training for the Volunteer Support Network and so now I'm going to be working on my counselor skills! Hooray! I'm really interested in working on mental health while I'm in country (and after of course).

In any event, I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Last week end, I took a fun trip to go see a good friend of mine for my birthday. We (plus a bunch of other great people) watched the superbowl and really had a rousing time. After I came home, I wrote a speech in Arabic, had my students and tutor look it over and then gave a speech to all of 10 people (most of them were my students). So...at least my community meeting is over! Right? Yeah...it's over for now. Haha, I'm considering doing another speech next month Inchallah.

This next week I'm definitely looking forward to heading off up north to go to my first big Peace Corps conference called PPST (that is to say post training training hah). I'm really looking forward to seeing some volunteers I haven't seen in 3 months! I'm not looking forward to a language test....which I should probably study for. Ha, I feel like a typical college student. In fact, I'm procrastinating right now from turning in an important document to Peace Corps in order to write this post....oh procrastination, you're totally going to make me stay up all night writing this. 

The good, the not-so-good, and the terrifying.

Hey all,

So, the good news! I got my computer back as you may have noticed.

The not so good: I lost a lot of information but I will slowly and surely put my lifeline back together again. My computer also took a little vacation without telling me. This is to say that, I had a miscommunication with the guy who fixed it (not his fault, he was after all speaking a language he knows well, and I was doing the opposite of that) happily though, everything turned out ok. I'm so glad to have it back!

The Terrifying: Sorry I've not posted recently. About that. I've been trying to put together a community assessment on my town, which is more or less coming together. The real problem is is just trying to make myself sit down and type it all out. I was reflecting today why I haven't just punched it out yet. Why can't this be like college, where I just spend endless hours on it? Oh yeah, because this isn't college and I am putting together a somewhat coherent and professional piece of work, which in itself is sort of a terrifying thought. Aside from that, I am also signing on to actually speak in front of the community I serve.

"What? No, you're joking," you must think. Au contraire, mes amis! Somehow, I am going to make a sincere effort and give a 15 minute speech in Arabic (more or less....) Hopefully, I'll just say it, and get it out of the way and then we'll have some sort of discussion after that about how I can better serve the community or about the needs I didn't address, etc. My Arabic is shwia (not so fantastic-but what do you expect? I've only been speaking this language for 5 months) but I'm going to give it the good old college try! Can't ding me for effort! We'll see how that goes. For now, I turn 23 tomorrow! First birthday I've ever had in a foreign country and I'm rather looking forward to it.