Dental Hygiene

I wanted to write about my dental hygiene lessons a long time ago but somehow I kept finding excuses not to. I wrote about dental hygiene in my town last year when I did a couple toothbrushing lessons. This year I went to a school in a different part of town. Family and friends from home were generous enough to donate toothbrushes and toothpaste so I was able to give every kid one of each. I hope that by having the materials, they will be a bit more proactive about brushing their teeth.
I started every lesson by discussing cavities and how they are caused. I asked the kids to explain to me what cavities are and how they would go about getting rid of them. Generally, most of the kids knew how to appropriately answer these questions. The problem was that many didn’t know how to properly brush their teeth and that very few of them ever actually brush their teeth. After the lesson in the classroom the teacher and I would bring all the kids outside for a group toothbrushing.  My sitemate, Briana, or I would take turns doing the demonstration while the kids followed along. The teachers often helped by reinforcing the message. We handed out toothbrushes and oftentimes had to show the kids the proper way to hold a toothbrush. We then gave them toothpaste and instructed them about the ideal amount they want to be putting on their toothbrush. After that, we began the demonstration. All the classes were rather successful and the kids really had a good time laughing at us goofy foreigners. 
Below are some photos from the lessons:

6 Months Left...

As the days get colder it becomes more difficult to get out of (my very warm) bed every morning. I’m pushing myself to get up early and enjoy my town as it slowly wakes up and as the sun slowly comes over the mountain. I do this because the realization that I have six months left in Morocco has been on my mind a lot recently. I have been aware of my time left here, but only superficially. Now it has really dawned upon me that I will be leaving soon. It feels strange to write that but I have to constantly remind myself that it is true. I’m leaving soon. Aywa. I suddenly feel rushed to visit everyone dear to me. I feel the need to visit every corner of this wonderful country; however, I also feel the need to spend every waking moment in my community. How do I reconcile these two polar desires? Not only am I struggling with these thoughts but now I am also being forced to make plans for my return. Job searching is now something that I have to add to my weekly cyber list. I don’t want to think about responsibilities in America while trying to savor my last months in Morocco. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic but six months go terribly fast. I don’t know where the last 18 months have gone…

My sitemate, Briana, recently finished her service here and has since returned to America. I was with her when she began to feel the crunch of her impending departure. I was the as the weeks left became days and then hours. I hated to see her go but that’s how our service works. Her preparations for departure made me think about when I would have to do the same. Thoughts about my departure crossed my mind but for some reason they still appeared distant. Now that my closing of service date is set and now that I have reached the six months remaining mark, I can’t help but feel a bit rushed. (I empathize with you Bri :/ ) I still have a lot of health education to do and a new sitemate to show around so for the time being that’s what I will concentrate on.

Part of my town just as the sun came over the mountain. :)

Body Image Issues

As I mentioned earlier, women’s concerns about their body image have only recently become apparent to me. Previously, I’ve heard women make fun of each other about their weight but they never seemed to care much about how they looked. It wasn’t until recently, though, that I have talked to women seriously about their weight. Some women have asked me what they should do in order to lose weight because they think they are too fat. I don’t know if this assessment comes from concerns for their health or for ideas of what it means to be attractive. Its usually married women past child bearing age that ask me about this but just the last week a young girl also mentioned her desire to lose weight. Rather than drink the sugary mint tea, she just drank hot water with crushed mint. She told me all about her “regime” (diet). She was only allowing herself two meals per day and had stopped eating all fruit. Obviously, I discouraged her from continuing with this plan and suggested that she just exercise a bit. I don’t know what other crazy diets may be in practice around town. :/
On the opposite end of the spectrum are the many young women who are terrible skinny and want nothing but to gain weight. A few young women have asked me for pills that will help them gain weight. Does such a thing even exist? While some young women are severely skinny, the majority are just slightly underweight or normal weight by our standards. I believe that by local standards, the fuller and voluptuous woman is still the most attractive so hence young unmarried women desire to gain a bit of weight.
I never would have thought that body image would be a big issue here, especially considering how girls are raised. People here bathe in public bathing house (hammam) in which they are exposed to every body type. Women and girls are not squeamish about nakedness and so the message often seems to be that everyone is comfortable in their bodies. So is this concern with body image due to recent international media exposure or a desire for improved health? I’m still trying to figure this out…

L3id...awd

This past week and a half has been quite eventful. I don’t mean eventful in terms of work, but rather because of everything happening around me. You may remember that last year I wrote about “L3id Amkor.” Well, its that time of the year again and once more I want to share a bit about my experience with it. L3id(which means “holiday”) was on Saturday but my celebration of it really started on Friday night. I went over to a neighbor’s house to hang out and get henna done. First, I helped them make cookies. Everyone spends the day before l3id making cookies and other sweets to have handy on l3id when they are visited by their family and friends. After the baking party, my friend Namia mixed the henna and began to decorate my hands. J While waiting for the henna to dry I hung around the house and helped the family assemble their new washing machine. One part of l3id is that people get new things. So, for example, children are often given new clothes for the holiday. When going around to visit people everyone wears their new clothes. The youngest boy of this family was so excited by his new outfit that he ran over to me and showed me his new socks and shoes J Anyways, this family got themselves a washing machine for l3id. Very few families in my town can afford such a luxury so this was quite a big deal. The whole family gathered around to help set it up and everyone hovered around as they washed their first load of laundry. The younger children never strayed from the machine. I have yet to use a washing machine in Morocco so this was also my first time seeing how they work here. This particular one is small and doesn’t rinse clothes. So, the women still rinsed the clothes in buckets and then put them in the second compartment to spin dry them a bit. Despite still having to do some of the work themselves, they were extremely grateful for their new purchase. The older women in the family were ecstatic and kept talking about how much less work they were going to have to do each week. It was really great to see the effect something like that has on people.
I as mentioned last year, much of this holiday has to do with charity and being with family. On Saturday morning I went out to where my host family lives and partook in the sheep slaughtering festivities. We all went outside to watch it happen and then I hung around while they skinned it and took it apart. My host brother even quizzed me on the various organs. Haha. I spent the day with various people from that part of the village and then once it was getting dark I went out to watch the Boujuloud. I don’t know much about this tradition except what I have witnessed thus far. Young men take the skins from the sheep slaughtered that day and fashion them into outfits. Some young men also wear other costumes. For example, there were a couple dressed as women, one dressed as a monkey and others are religious figures. The whole troupe, along with some drummers, go from house to house asking for charity. My friend told me that people give them sugar, meat or money. They stop and sing at every house and occasionally stop and perform a theatrical piece of sorts. On one of their stops they pretended a boujuloud was sick and needed medical help. Its was actually a humurous piece and all the people watching really enjoyed it. I couldn’t understand a lot of it because my tamazigh isn’t that good and much of it was puns of the sort that only native speakers understand. My friends tried to explain some of it to me…Anyways, Sunday morning I had breakfast at my friend’s house and returned to the center of town to continue with my visits to my favorite families. I drank lots of tea, ate lots of bread and refused many meat skewers :)


The boujuloud. This is in the town 6km from where I live.

My host dad is holding the sheep's intestines. Later they cleaned them and cooked them over the fornu.

The sheep after slaughter, skinning and removal of organs. And yes, its hanging from a light pole...

Nutrition Lesson

Recently, I taught a nutrition lesson at the local weaving co-operative. I wrote out the lesson so that it addressed nutrition issues specific to women and young girls. A young girl from my town helped me correct my lesson and then also helped me present it. I told the women that Briana and I would bring snacks if they provided tea. They did as was agreed and I brought over a bunch of fruit and Briana brought a cake. After they got over the fact that we were eating fruit as a snack (more on that later), I commenced to talk to them about women's health and nutrition. It was actually really frustrating because some women would start to talk amongst themselves or one would pull me aside and ask a question pertaining to her personal health. Teaching a large group of energetic women is quite a challenge. Haha. Teaching them is nothing like teaching children. The young Moroccan girl helping me had to keep grabbing their attention just so we could get through the main points of the lesson. Though they may not have listened to every point I made, they did all seem to take an interest in the topic. I told them about various vitamins and minerals, what foods to find them in and why those particular vitamins and minerals are important for women.
After the lesson, various women came up to me with questions about their health. One woman is concerned that she never seems to gain weight and yet other women wanted to know what they should do to lose weight. I had never given much thought to the issues that women here have with body image but now I have really begun to notice their concerns with their bodies. I will expand on this later. I'm just glad that the women in my town are taking an interest in their health because now I may be better able to advise them on proper nutrition. :)

More Health Lessons

The 15th of this month was global handwashing day so I dragged Briana to one of the schools in our town so that we could do some handwashing lessons. I haven't previously taught at this particular school so it was nice to teach some kids that I don't know very well. This particular school is located about a 20 minute walk through the fields. The school is actually close to where I did my homestay.
Anyways, I talked to the kids about microbes and general sanitation. Then Bri and I demonstrated proper handwashing methods. Then we had a few kids come up to the front of the class to show us how they wash their hands. The funny thing is that they all knew proper handwashing already! So I felt a little silly but really the point is to reinforce proper handwashing. Just beacause they know how to wash their hands, doesn't mean that they do it correctly everytimle they should. I mean, almost every house that I go to still only uses water (and NO soap) to wash their hands before a meal. I'm just trying to get people to use soap when washing their hands... Just using soap could eliminate a lot of diseases people around here get, like diarrhea. I'll continue with the lessons at the two other schools and next week I'll be teaching a lesson about proper nutrition at this same school. Wish me luck :)

I haven't been doing much recently besides hanging out in my town. I will start my health lessons next week inshallah so things should be getting pretty busy soon. I actually wanted to update this today because I have been learning a few things about Moroccan migrant work in Spain. I spent the better part of this morning calling various agricultural offices in Spain to try to help some women from my town. There is actually quite a substantial number of women from my town that go to Spain every year to work on the berry harvests in early spring. There were a couple women who hadn't been invited to go back this year so they asked me to call and find out why. They don't speak spanish and my tamazight insn't that great but in any case i was playing translater. haha. It was quite interesting really. The people in Spain kept wanting to know who I was so I had to explain my role as a peace corps volunteer and then I had to ask them about the migrant work that these women do. I will try to learn more aout it from these women so that I can write a more well informed entry next time. I will leave it at that for now :)


For lack of a better image, I have posted this. haha. Here, I am hanging out at my host family's house on the day after Ramadan ended. They make all those cool rugs that I am sitting on :)

End of Ramadan

Once again i have waited far too long to update this. I think I recently wrote about Ramadan. Well, I fasted the entire month except for five days. :) I explained most of what happens in my town in my Ramadan post of last year. We broke fast at the second to last call to prayer, basically at sunset. Then most people went to bed at their normal time and woke up at 3:30am. There was a drummer who came by to wake everyone up. Most people had real dinners at this hour while I, on the other had, tended to have a snack like a smoothie or yogurt and fruit. I just couldn't do the full dinner at this hour.
I broke fast at someone's house almost every night of Ramadan. The photo below is actually from one of the houses that I went to. The break fast meal was usually bread heavy and very sweet. Everyone breaks fast with a date and then digs in :) At this particular fdr(breakfast) there was also hard boiled egss, shebekiya(honey covered sweet), a few kinds of moroccan bread, "berber pizza," cake and many other yummy things. The meal is always accompanied by sweet mint tea or coffee. After the bready meal, everyone gets a bowl of soup. The soup is called Harira and is usually tomato based and has chickpeas, pasta and sometimes veggies. The soup was usually my favorite part. Though, everyone has the same basic meal it was really interesting to see how each house had slight differences. I really enjoyed Ramadan despite the difficulty of fasting. Ramadan ended on the 20th of september so now we're back to normal eating schedules, hamdullah.

Ras Lma

I promised that I would write about my recent vacation to Ras Lma and look I'm keeping my promise. :) My sitemate, Briana, and I are actually just two days apart in age. Crazy huh? So we decided to celebrate our birthdays together by going to a quiet beach on the Mediterranean. We went a week after our birthday and had quite an adventure getting there. We were waiting to take a train from Fes to Nador and instead of getting on the next train we were at the train station for hours because a previous train on that route had derailed. We couldn't leave until they cleared the mess up. Once we did leave we thought all was well but only discoverd a few hours later that we had to change trains (trainge) because the derailed train was still on the tracks. We walked past the derailed train and hopped on a new overcrowded and hot train. After hours of heat, tiredness, hunger and everything else we finally made it to Nador. Once there we took a grand taxi to Ras Lma. None of us had been before and were rather pleasantly surprised by our accomadations and the town in general.

Ras Lma is actually a little berber town nestled between the mountains and the sea. The town doesn't have hotels so we rented an apartment. The only people vacationing there were Moroccans. Really I think I only saw two other foreigners. The water was warm and it felt great to just relax and take in the scenery about me. I also learned a bit about the differences between the berber dialect spoken there as compared to the one that I have been learning :)

Cliffs below the lighthouse. Its beautiful here and these cliffs are perfect for a nice (and sorta scary) jump into the sea. I actually jumped, as you can see below. I did it after a couple of failed attempts haha. And no, I still don't know how to swim, but my friend was below in the water ready to grab me once I went under. It was actually a lot of fun :)

Mudouana

A young girl whom I am quite fond of was recently married. Her wedding was fun and went over quite successfully. Though I'm glad that the ceremony went well, I can't help but feel sad that it ever happened. I don't like that she got married because I think shes only 16(or so). She's too young to be entering into a lifelong contract that she probably didn't have any say in to begin with. (her older sister, now 22 years old, was married last summer and is now back at home because her husband beats her)
In 2004, Morocco enacted a family code called the Mudouana. This family code raises the legal age of marriage from 14 to 18. It also allows women half their husband's wealth in case of death or divorce and it makes sexual harassement an offense punishable by law. (polygamy is still allowed under the family code)
The Mudouana sounds great but the truth is that it's quite difficult to enforce, especially in little towns such as the one I live in. It is also easier to get one's way in a culture where bribing (and political fraud) are endemic. Many 14 year olds do and will continue to marry. There is still hope for those stuck in sour marriages, though. A divorce must be obtained through the courts and the husband must provide for his ex-wife. Divorce is still rare but at least now the woman won't have prostitution as her only resort. If a woman in a bad marriage(ex: her husband beats her) had no family to care for her she either put up with the marriage or had to work. Women in cities were likely to be literate and thus not have to resort to prostitution as their livelihood.
The Mudouana strives to protect women's rights and to liberalize them (a bit) from their previous confines. Women have been making great strides in Moroccan society in the last few years. I only hope that this trend will continue.
To read the Mudouana go here: http://hrea.org/moudawana.html

Update

I know that I have been terrible about writing on this thing. I was rather busy recently and frankly, the internet has been less then good as of late. I apologize (really i shouldn't be making excuses) but will briefly tell you about what's been happening.
First of all, Ramadan has commenced once again. Saturday was the first day of this month of fasting. I saw two shooting stars on saturday night and have taken that to be a good omen for this month :) I am still fasting (now four days in) and hope to continue to do so for the entire month. I am going all out and abstaining from water as well as from food.
Ok. So before Ramadan my friends and I took a wonderful vacation and went to a small mediterranean beach town called Ras Lma. I will post some photos up soon. It was a great vaccation. Before that, a bunch of peace corps volunteers (myself included) helped out at a SIDA booth in Boulmane. We educated people about the disease and enjoyed the Boulmane berber festival :)
All has been well and I promise to write again soon (internet permitting).

You Are Lonely Here?

I met a girl on a train once, and like everyone else that I meet she was very surprised that I wasn't Moroccan. But you have the face of a Moroccan... I know, everyone tells me that. Anyways, she began asking about what I am doing here. I told her about my work with peace corps and where I live. She then asked me if I was lonely here. Yes, I live alone. She wasn't asking if I was lonely but rather if I had family here or if I lived alone. People often tell me that in Arabic there is no word for privacy; the closest equivalent is lonely. Haha. I guess most of us peace corps volunteers are "lonely."
Just to keep your minds at peace, no I am not lonely. In fact, I feel quite at home here. There is never a lack of lunch or kaskrew (snack) invitations. For the lack of anything better to say, I am going to tell you about what I have been doing in the past couple of months.
I hope you all don't think that I am constantly working. One of the hardest things for volunteers is usually dealing with the lack of work and the overabundance of free time. Anyhow, right now the bulk of my work consists of health lessons at the elementary school. I wrote about this previously, but I thought I would mention the latest lesson that I taught. My sitemate always helps so she helped as I told the kids about the bad effects of tobacco or smoking in general. Surprisingly (or maybe not) most men here smoke. Cigarettes are sold individually anywhere you go in this country, so its rather easy to just buy a single or two if one is low on cash and can't afford the pack. This makes it easier for many more people to smoke. I showed the kids pictures of cancerous lungs and of the way smokers age. I hope that had some sot of impact on them. The school year is actually just ending so this summer I will just be improving my lessons for the next school year. I also want to start doing exercise with women. Some women in the weaving co-operative have asked me to show them some exercises. I want to accompany these exercises with talks about health topics that affect them, such as: high cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes, osteoporosis, etc.
Apart from work I have just been hanging out in town and learning bzzaf(a lot)! I have been cooking and baking a lot :) Also, recently I witnessed local elections here. A woman whom I highly respect ran for a position in the commune and she won! There was a lot of celebrating at her place and I was really glad to be around to witness all of it. I have also been to a wedding or two in the past few months. Those are always a lot of fun though tiring at times. Also, recently all the volunteers in my stage had to go to Rabat for medical exams. It was great seeing people who I never get to see because we live so far from each other. After medicals, i took a side trip as I made my way home. I went to Asilah (beach town near tangier) and to Chefchaouen. Both are beautiful towns that I hope to see again before I leave Morocco. I can't think of what else I have been up to but I'm sure theres more. I'll put some photos up too. :)



A wedding in my town. We're watching from the balcony of a neighboring house. The row of men are the haydus performers.

Look I can bake! Haha. My family thought I wouldn't survive here because I didn't know how to cook when I first left the states, but look I'm doing just fine.


My sitemate and I teaching children about the bad effects of tobacco. My sitemate is holding up giant cigarettes that we made for the lesson.


A Rifi woman selling vegetables outside the entrance to the Chefchaouen meedina. This is from my recent trip to Chefchaouen, a beautiful town nestled in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco.


This is Asilah, a beauiful beachtown about an hour south of Tangier.