American cookies in Morocco

 

Most of my PCV friends and I have reached a consensus on Moroccan baked goods, they look pretty beautiful but taste like nothing (just overwhelmingly sweet). I’m sure this is mostly just to our American taste buds, but I knew that one of the things I wanted to share from my culture was the greatest American treat, the chocolate chip cookie.

When I returned from America the last time I made sure to bring some brown sugar and vanilla extract. I”ve never seen either of these items for sale here in Morocco.

I invited 4 of my sisters but only Khadija was able to come. We made about three dozen cookies. I just translated the recipe, operated the oven and supervised. Khadija did all the baking!

I had to coax her into it a little, but I got Khadija to try a warm cookie with a cold glass of milk. She admitted that it was pretty good

Khadija and I brought the cookies over to the families house. All the kids got to try some.

The cookies were a pretty big hit and were all gone before any of the grown ups were actually able to try them! That’s what I get for leaving a plate full of cookies unattended.

On an unrelated note, I just wanted to post my wall of calendars. I use these to stay organized and I keep my Volunteer Report Files accurate.  It struck me the other day how FULL my wall is! The group that I came into country with actually just got a lot of our details for our close of service meetings, medical appointments and the dates we are potentially leaving on. Can’t believe we’ve been here this long already!

Career Fair, Zagora

I’m really glad I came across this article. It saves me the headache of trying to blog about it from the cyber cafe.

After 8 blissful months of having internet in my house via USB modem, my provider, Maroc Telecom has switched the way internet is provided. To make a long story short I’m back at the cyber cafe.!

Anyway, about the link…. My good friend Katy organized this career fair (from the link). The fair happened after Katy led 10 career workshops for high school English students in Zagora city. I helped Katy with about half of these workshops and with the career fair.

The most awesome thing is that I’m fairly sure that this fair will happen again next year, bigger and better, and possibly without any PCV help. Yay for sustainability!

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.media.press.view&news_id=2021

50th Anniversary Morocco Photo Book

See if you can spot how many times I’ve made it into the book!!

http://friendsofmorocco.org/Docs/PC50thbook.pdf

Crocheting in Morocco

It all started with a few trips to America. Molly went home in December and brought back a ton of yarn and crochet hooks. I went home in February and brought back my entire stash of yarn and hook. This was all the makings of an American Crochet Workshop.  Ladies in Morocco generally know how to crochet very well, they typically do small intricate stuff that we’d recognize as doilies. They make anything from tea pot cozies, to jackets, to tablecloths. It’s all just very intricate and made with tiny hooks and yarn that I’d consider to be thick thread.

 

From what I’ve gather since arriving in Morocco is September of 2010, crafty Moroccan women are inherently crafty. They don’t actually read patterns! They go off of examples or pictures and count out stitches. This makes their intricate crochet all that much more impressive! I knew I needed to make examples if this crochet workshop was going to be a success. Pictured above is the sample pair of house slippers I made. They look suspiciously like the Moroccan pointy toed shoes that are so common place here!

These are some of the examples of stand alone 2d flowers I made and the floral granny squares. The women learned how to make the basic flowers on Day 1 of the 3 day workshop. Each pattern built off of the one prior to it. The second day we made 6 basic granny squares that when sewn together make the house slippers, and on the final day we made these more complicated floral granny squares that when sewn together with a basic granny square make a pretty cool looking afghan.

Example of the house slippers in action. Can you even stand how cute these are?

The sign that Molly made for her Nedi Neswi (womens center). The photos are examples of all the things we learned how to make.

All in all for the three days of the workshop there were between 20 and 30 women who showed up each day. They each had their own “American Sized” crochet hook and a ball of thicker yarn. I didn’t have a chance to see the completed final projects, the afghans were sewn together after I had returned to site. But I’m certain they are beautiful!

Here are a few photos of me and the ladies of Molly’s Nedi in action. Thanks to Molly for welcoming me into her Nedi and introducing me to her awesome women! ( Oh! and also for the awesome photography skills

Art in Tinzouline!

 

Around 3 weeks ago I had a site visit from my regional manager, Mina. We are working on preparing Tinzouline for a new volunteer. During our visit to the high school we were lucky enough to see these art pieces on display. All were made by students at the local high school.

 

Henna Helmet

This past week has been a little bit on the crazy side. As we PCVs would say, “This week Morocco won!” The beginning of the week I came home and my fridge was silent…. uncharacteristically so. Usually it’s roaring with the sounds of cooling.  Luckily I know a great repairman who has helped me with Monster twice before. We installed a new motor or something like that and Monster is running silently and surely.

 

 

After my repairman friend left, I decided to put some henna in my hair. Natural henna is both conditioning and dyes your hair slightly reddish. I got the mixture of henna and lemon juice into my hair and let it sit for one hour or so. I decided the henna had sufficiently dried onto my hair and it was time to jump into my usually reliable and hot shower.

There was no running water.

This has certainly been known to happen, and I usually have a back up supply. But unfortunately this has been happening a lot more than usual because of some droughts. The henna stayed in my hair that day for 10 hours! It was literally hardened into a helmet. Ridiculous!

Beautiful right? That night the water trickled on, and I took a bucket bath and washed my hair about 6 times. LoL  At least the water turned on at all, right?

A few waterless days later it decided to rain! Hamdullilah the droughts are over and it will stay cooler for longer. Unfortunately the rain blew through my open window, avoiding me sleeping in my bed (directly underneath the window) and blew onto my macbook computer.

My computer will no longer turn on. Of course this occurred during my final week of the semester for graduate school. I had to run to Zagora and purchase a tiny netbook with an operating system in French.

All in all, it’s been a stressful and eventful week. But things worked out for the most part. Spring camp 2012 starts on Sunday so I’m resting up and showering a bunch beforehand.

 

P.S. My hair turned out fine!

Wall to wall Berber carpets

 

Picture this, just after the 4th call to prayer for the day I’m sitting near the center square in the Hollywood of Africa, a city called Ouarzazate. It’s only located about 3 hours north of me, but it’s a world away. I’m sitting in front of these two heavy metal doors wondering where this shop owner is! Luckily I made friends with two Moroccan ladies while I was searching for a yarn store. They assured me that this man had the best yarn for rugs and that he would be here “deba schwiya” or “in a little while”.

This elderly man comes walking up, unlocks about 5 padlocks on these doors and without even a glance in our direction settles in behind the piles and piles of yarn. “This yarn”, my new friends tell me, “is from Taznaughkt, so you know it’s the best.” Taznaughkt is a site of one of my great friends in Peace Corps, I’ve seen the rugs that come out of this small berber town so I know my friend is correct. I attempted to speak to the shop owner about how much yarn I would need, a futile attempt to check the facts and figures given to me when I discussed the same topic with my host family in my site. Futile because this man happened to only speak Berber, I’m guessing this is a common occurence when you are trying to purchase a Berber carpet!
My friends helped me communicate and after a few calls to my host family we settled on 2 kilos of a dark rich blue color (main color), and with a quarter kilo in red, green, purple, gray, and gold. It wound up being a huge pile of yarn that I felt pretty ridiculous carrying around!
I transported it home only to hear from my host Mom that I needed more yarn in even more colors. My attempts to not have a completely garish carpet are feeling ineffectual. So we’ve additionally purchased, black, white and neon green.
I’m very excited about having this very personal souvenier to bring home. All of my nine sisters and my host Mom are intent on doing a little work on it, so I can remember everyone.
Even with each additional color that is added, I keep telling them my rug is “ihila bzzf!” or “very beautiful” in some of my limited Berber. Pending any other urgent yarn purchases, my rug has cost me about 335dh, or about 40$…

 

This was on day one of my rugs life.   The red and blue rug hanging on the loom in the example that they are using. Mine will be bigger though.

 

My 7 year old sister Khadija, and a neighbor Fatima working on the carpet.

What the rug looks like the last time I saw it! So much progress!  I’ll be gone from site for about 2 weeks for Spring Camp. I’m thinking it might even be done when I get back to site.

Art Workshop, March 19th 2012

Hey everyone!

I wanted to quickly update about the biggest project that I’ve done in my site. The head of my Dar Chebab, AbdelKarim, asked me if I’d be able to do an art workshop for about 60 kids this past Sunday, so of course I said, ” Yes”!

I don’t have photos (unfortunately) it was pretty hectic, but it went great. We had 5 tables each set up with it’s own medium. We began with markers, then crayons, then chalk, watercolors and finally glitter! The whole point was to get the kids really thinking about what they were drawing and to go crazy with the details. When they finally made it to the glitter table I helped each of the 62 kids in total add a glitter accent to their drawing.

Some of the art turned out really amazing, I was very proud! AbdelKarim has recently implemented a membership system at the Dar Chebab so it’s possible that dealing with troublemaker type kids could be in my past! Hamdullilah! I have a meeting with him and my regional manager on Wednesday so we can discuss the future of my site.

The summer is creeping up on us here in the Sahara Desert. I’m not looking forward to the 140+ degree days! Luckily there is a lot of work quickly approaching that will keep me busy (and a little further north!) I’ll try to be diligent in updating about work. In the meantime let me link you to a cool article about women in the Peace Corps.

http://ideas.time.com/2012/03/19/our-best-diplomats-women-in-the-peace-corps/

 

As of the 15th of this month, myself and the rest of my group that arrived in September 2010 have been in Morocco for 18 months. Time is simultaneously dragging and  flying by! A special welcome goes out to the new group who arrives in country tomorrow, these new volunteers are the potential replacements for the Youth Development Volunteers in my group. Welcome guys!

Christmas 2011 (better late than never, right?)

This was my last Christmas in Morocco, at least in the near future. Myself and some friends gathered in a town on the coast for some temperate albeit windy Christmas weather. We carried on with some very traditional Christmas traditions from our various families.

Stocking Stuffers! We all purchased each other one stocking stuffer with a price limit of 10dh. We got things like candy, jewelry, socks, bird whistles and useful traveling supplies.

Christmas morning staircase photos.

Christmas morning coffee (from a coffee maker!) and cinnamon rolls!

We also had tiny Christmas tree and we played  a drinking game while watching Home Alone, we took a drink every time someone said “Kevin”, screamed, got hit or fell down. There was also an ornament exchange, a pajama exchange and lots of American quality time.

This is our group in our favorite Chwarma (sandwich) place. The upstairs is meant only for midgets apparently..

Tinzouline Rocks!

Since being in my site, I’ve tried getting a Dar Chebab beautification project off of the ground. Like most things in my site, it’s definitely been slow going. Slow or not, I’m proud of even the little progress that has been made.

We’ve had art club at my Dar Chebab for about a year. Over that length of time we’ve used all different sorts of mediums. Chalk, crayons, markers, pencils, oil and water based paints. The kids certainly love paint the best! I always tell them to “Think Big” or to have “Big or Good Ideas!” I really have seen progress in these childrens artistic abilities.

These rocks were painted over a period of a few weeks. First they practice their ideas on paper. Then they discussed their idea as a group. Things certainly got messy and we aren’t even halfway done with the pathway, but like I said, I’m proud of even small victories!

This is what the area looks like in between my Dar Chebab and our soccer court. No greenery, just rocky dirt. Not so inviting, right?

In addition to not being visually appealing, we have a real issue with vandalism at the Dar Chebab. The kids will throw rocks at the building until glass is broken, the walls start to show damage, our front door was even broken! My mentality on this beautification project was that hopefully with some time and effort the kids would start to feel a sense of ownership of the building and area around the building.

Here is the plan that I drew up with a few of the students. We decided that having an outdoor game area would be great (in this case checkers), some plants or trees would make things look nice and of course the painted rock path to the soccer field.

The first step was getting the kids to go out and find the rocks! I warned them about being careful of lifting rocks that were too big, about scorpions and about using a friend to carry rocks if they needed. Once we got the rocks in the building, we put a base coat onto them. This part wasn’t as exciting as putting on the color!

I brought in a few example of painted rocks I found on the internet. This was very helpful! Some kids copied the examples exactly, and others just referenced them.

These are a few of my favorite rocks. The polka dotted one took HOURS to paint and at least three kids to carry it! It’s really huge.

This is the pathway so far. We have about 30 rocks of various sizes here and I estimate we will need about 60 more to completely line the pathway.