Author Archives: Richard Reilly

Cultural Misunderstandings & Moroccan Integration

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English: Extension of Moroccan Arabic (Darija).

English: Extension of Moroccan Arabic (Darija). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I need to talk about yesterday. Out of nowhere, yesterday became my biggest step forward with regards to integration.  At the same time, I made a mistake that will likely come back to bite me.  All in all, the day was busy and worthwhile.  I went to sleep unsure of how to interpret everything…but that is happening more and more here in Morocco.

The day started normal.  I woke up late.  I walked around town.  I read at the park.  That part of my routine is set.  It’s perfect for what I want to accomplish here.  I need to integrate, so walking around daily is a must.  I meet at least one new person a day.  The reading in the park is something that came out of nowhere.  After being told that “I’ve never seen a person in Bhalil read in public,” I decided to do it every day.

When I got back, my family whisked me off to lunch at my mother’s parents’ house.  I’m starting to get to know everyone in the family.  More importantly, my Host Uncle has taken a liking to me.  He tries harder to communicate with me than anyone I have met here in Morocco.  After lunch, he took me to his barbershop.  At first, I thought I was going to be forced to get my hair cut.

Turns out I was wrong.  The barbershop is kind of a local hangout.  A dozen people came and went throughout my three hours there.  I met several friends of the family.  We had conversations about language, indoor heating, money, and clean energy.  It was fantastic.  Later, the English teacher at the local high school dropped by.  We had a long conversation and suddenly I have another counterpart in my work here.  Those three hours at the barbershop integrated me as much as a week’s worth of walking around town.

I headed back to my family’s house.  As we ate, the conversations somehow turned to how long I’m spending in Morocco (two years).  That quickly turned into whether or not I would marry while in Morocco.  This isn’t the first time a conversation has started about me being single.  Back in Bouderham, it was an ongoing joke between the postman and I.  So when the topic came up, I gave an overenthusiastic, “No, no, no, no.”

This is the first time the subject came up with my host family.  They were confused why I was so adamant.  It’s not that I’m adamant against it…it’s more that I can’t see it.  Back in America, I really wanted to have a house and a good job and be more like 30 when I started a family.  If my ideals play into it—religion, writing, etc..—I just don’t see marriage anywhere in the picture during my two years here.

Problem: How do you translate that into a language you’ve been studying for two months?

I missed my opportunity to explain myself.  Instead, my host mother asked me if there was a girl back home.  I said no.   My mother decided my “no” was a little sheepish and interrupted it as a “YES I DO!”  Before I could do anything about it, the conversation flew by me.  I was only asked one more question, “Is she still studying at University in America?”  Unsure of what else to say, I just said yes.

So my host family things I’m halfway to engaged.  This being on the heels of me suddenly feeling single again.  I want to set the record straight with my family…but bringing it up would be inappropriate.  The best I can do is set the record straight if they bring the subject again.  But what am I supposed to say?

Back in America I would explain it eloquently, “We never officially dated, but we were defiantly together.  We never officially broke up, but we are definitely not together anymore.”  In Darija, I will inevitably sound like a bubbling idiot.  I live in a culture where dating is considered inappropriate.  I quickly discovered that it’s not as much of a big deal as I was led to believe.  Still, it is quite a strange situation.

Every day here is unexpected.

I love that.

But it’s exhausting.

Making a Life-Long Project Better

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I’ve been doing the Everyday Project for six and a half years now.  I knew joining the Peace Corps would add a unique spice to my project.  Two years of projects with weird landscaped and veiled women in the background?  I loved the idea.  It will make my project stand out.  When I started getting used to being here in Morocco, however, I realized there was another advantage to being in the Peace Corps.  Time.

There is a lot to do in the Peace Corps.  I spend a lot of time hanging out with my Host Family, eating, and teaching kids.   But, inevitably, there is a lot of free time.  I knew this would happen.  As a result, I made a nice long list of personal goals I wanted to accomplish during my 27 months here.  Most of them were writing goals.  But there were a few random ones.  Genealogy was one.  Another, however, involved my Everyday Project.

I’ve seen a couple projects that aligned the eyes in their pictures.  They are some of my favorite projects.  If you can find a way to align the eyes of the pictures, you can go as fast or as slow as you want.  For me—without aligned eyes—I dare not go faster than ten pictures per second.  Even at that rate, my face bounces around enough that it is slightly disorienting.  So I put it on my list: Align the eyes in my Everyday Project.

I knew it was an ambitious project from the get-go.  To start, I wasn’t sure how to do it.  I tried several different projects over a week in February.  Finally, I realized the best way to do it was with the Ruler option in Powerpoint.  I did three months that week.  Later I realized I was making the pictures too large.  I started again.  It takes about half an hour to do a month—a little less than a minute per picture.  I’ve been doing this for six and half years.  That’s about 2,200 pictures.  Like I said…it’s an ambitious project.

When I started working, I thought it would be a rather monotonous project.  It is, at times.  But, more and more, I find that that is not the case.  I see my face and realize things.  I have a slight tilt to my head.  My eyes look better in the sunlight than in the faux light of the indoors.  I can see when I had been crying—eyes still red.  I can tell when I just got out of the hot tub—hair still wet.

More importantly, I look to the background.  This is the part that brings back memeories.  I like it when I am not home in the pictures.  It’s great to try to figure out where I was…and why?  Who was I dating at that point?  How long till we break up?  Who was I hanging out with?  What did we do?  These pictures hold my life in their pixels.  I’m loving this “monotonous” part of this fantastic project.

Here’s a quick look at what I am doing.  I am currently 300 pictures in.  If you are looking to start your own project (which I strongest suggest you do) or need any advice on aligning eyes, feel free to contact me.  I love spreading this project.

10% Done With Service

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logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Today marks a 10% completion of my Peace Corps service.  80 days down.  720 to go.  As I settle into my community, I am having my fair share of successes and failures.  I feel comfortable walking all the streets of my gorgeous mountainside town.  Youth that will be in my English classes come up to me all the time to talk in broken sentences (Broken Arabic from me; broken English from them).

 

I’m enjoying going to the park on a daily basis and reading.  On my first full day here, I went to a park and read for an hour.  This 20 year old approached me and told me I was the first person he had ever seen read in public in Bhalil.  I was kind of in awe of that statement.  He said that, when it wasn’t time to study, all the students really cared about was soccer.  After walking around town, I believe him.  There’s always at least one game going on in some part of the town.

 

Before he left, he asked me about America.  He followed up by saying he was going to get there some day.  It’s not the first time I have heard this.  There’s this “Path to a Better Life” that most people in developing nations tend to follow.  Here in Morocco, step on is to get into University and become fluent in English and a European Language while studying something important—like becoming a doctor.  Knowing the language and the study will help them get to their European country of choice.  For my stranger in the park, it was Germany.  But Germany is not intended to be the final destination.  America is always the final destination—even in today’s world.

 

For my friend in the park, “I will die in Las Vegas, if God Wills It.”

 

These are the moments that I live for.  I’ve already had several.  Yesterday, I found a road that looped around the outside of the entire town.  After taking a wrong turn, I found myself at a dead end.  It was beautiful.  The road dead-ended because it reached a cliff that overlooks the entire town and the entire countryside around the town.  I stood there for maybe 20 seconds before a man approached me.

 

His English was perfect and he didn’t let me speak in Arabic.  We talked for half an hour.  He lived in the States for 18 years during the prime of his life.  His life story was incredible.  I wanted to keep talking to him all day.  His perspective was unlike anything I have ever heard before.  At the end of the conversation, he pointed to a building next to this beautiful overlook and told me it was for rent—and almost perfect for my budget.  I can’t wait to go back and check it out.  His business is right downstairs from the apartment.  I would love to be next door to a person who can tell a great story.

 

Things are going well.

 

Let’s keep it that way for the next 80 days.

 

 

 

A Feeling I Cannot Shake

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Something is off.  I’m doing well in my Final Site.  This is something else.  Not the strangeness of the place, the people, or the food.  This has to do with home.  I know most people would simply call it homesickness.  But that sounds to simple to me.  This is more.  To be honest…even if I Early Terminated right now and went back “home” to Colorado, I would have this feeling.  It’s an intense detachment.  I’m seeing all my connections fade.  I should have know this was inevitable…but was there even a way to accept it before?  I don’t believe so.

I don’t talk with friends back home very often.  When i do, I either feel a pang in my stomach or can’t find much to talk about.  The same, strange enough, is happening with my family.  Our conversations feel shorter.  Through no fault of anyone, all of the relationship’s I’ve built up for 23 years are fading.  I guess that is what happens when you are an ocean and and continent away.  It’s a pailful experience   I didn’t notice it until my kinda-relationship back home was put on hold.  This was also expected…but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I find myself relying on the support structure that I’ve built over the last ten weeks with other Peace Corps Volunteers.  Given, it is a strong support system.  I have no fear of going without advice and help.  It’s the transition of going from my usual support system to something entirely different that is getting at me.  I have these people who I regarded as immovable pillars in my life back home.  To know that I can not rely on the pillars in strange…and awkward.  I miss my friends.  I miss my family.  I miss my special someone.  I will always love them.  24 months and counting…

A poem I wrote today:

Inescapable 

Hiding or Fitting In?

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Swearing In Ceremony

It’s been a while since I’ve updated.  The end of Peace Corps training is rather intense.  The studying mixes with the goodbye.  The goodbyes mix with finding out where you are going to spend the next two years of your life.  Anticipation mixes with anxiety.  Anxiety mixes with insanity.  Because every time I find myself realizing that I’m in Africa…I think to myself, “This is insane.”  Whether I’m frustrated or genuinely enjoying myself, being a part of Peace Corps is crazy.

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I’ve been in my final site for 36 hours.  It’s already been more than I could ever have anticipated.  As I walked toward my Host Family’s house, a random man started walking with me.  His English was pretty good so we started talking.  It took less than a minute before he asked me if I was Muslim.   I stumbled.  I knew this question was coming.  So few people in my training site knew English that I never had to deal with the question.  Suddenly I was dealing with it.  I said no, which brought up the inevitable follow-up question: “Are you Christian.”  Unsure of how to respond, I said, “Yes.  In America.”

 

It was my first act of hiding myself.  Many of my encounters involves simply not talking about certain aspects of myself that wouldn’t be culturally appropriate—like a dating life.  But this is different.  I will get this question a lot.  I have been advised by Peace Corps Volunteers to simple state that I am Christian.  Although I’ve been Agnostic all my life, now I have to hide it in a way that I’ve never had to in America.  Sure, it wasn’t always something openly accepted in America….but I never felt like I had to hide it.  Now I’m not entirely sure.

 

After by encounter with the stranger, I stopped at a park and tried to figure out the map I’d been given.  A few minutes later, my nine year old host brother found me and brought me back to my house.  It’s quite a nice house.  The older brother speaks English.  The mother is an amazing cook.  The father is a Headmaster at a private primary school.  All this in a beautiful mountainside town.

 

I spent yesterday exploring Bhalil.  I found the place that I’ll be teaching English.  I explored random road and forced myself to get lost.  In a town of 15,000 or so, I feel the need to explore every side road—it shouldn’t be too hard.  The town is amazing and I’ve already had plenty of random coversations with strangers—in broken English and broken Moroccan Arabic.

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Conversation Recap:
Stranger: What is your name.
Me: My name is Rachid.  What is your name?
Stranger: My name is yours.
Me: Your name is Rachid?
Stranger: No.  My name is Isyers.
Me: Oooooo

 

I’ve been in country for 75 days.  I’m already starting to feel comfortable in my own skin here.  A lot has changed on the homefront.  I’m having a hard time staying in contact with my friends.  Relationships are changing with those I felt closest too.  It’s all a very complicated process.  I don’t that will change.  With time, however, I’ll feel like 800 days is doable.   Right now, 2015 feels like a long way off.  Which could be a good thing or a bad thing.  I’m doing my best to turn it into a good thing.

 

Day 56 in Peace Corp Morocco: The End of Training

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I am 7% done with my Peace Corps adventure.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand time here in Morocco.  It’s only been eight weeks since I left the States.  It feels like it’s been a year.  The thing is, my time here feels like it is flying by.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  To add more to the confusion, everyone back home is now an hour closer to me since Morocco doesn’t do Daylight Saving Time.  We found this out by trying to explain to our Language and Cultural Facilitator what DST is.  We confused her and came away with the understanding that there is no DST in Morocco.

Sorry for the sabbatical.  Studying is intense in the first few months of Peace Corps.  The thing is, it works.  I’m holding full conversations with my host family now.  I’m sure it’ll be easier to keep updating once I get to my final site.  Below is my first full piece of writing while in Morocco.  I am still doing a lot of writing–just not anything I can put on here.  I write in my journal on a daily basis.  I’m also doing well on the script I started a few weeks back.  It’ll be a long process, but it is definitely coming together.

Here’s my full Peace Corps Update:

Saying Goodbye to Mom and Dad

 

on Writing in the Peace Corps

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As the weeks pass, I feel that I may be among the lucky volunteers here in Morocco.  We have all be told a dozen times that we will have long stretches of down time.  This isn’t a Peace Corps thing.  It is a cultural thing.  Our job is to work with kids.  When it’s raining all winter or approaching 130 all summer, it is inevitable that whole communities forgo activities for extended amount of times.  Many of the volunteers that I have met fear this.  I understand their fear, but don’t share it.  There is an incredible feeling of purpose that comes with being busy.  To complement that, however, there is an incredible feeling of uselessness that comes with not having much to do.

I’ve experienced the uselessness before.  For me, however, I have an inexhaustible hobby that can take up hours or fit into the small crevasses of free time.  Currently, during training, my writing has fallen into the latter category considering learning a new language (and culture) comes first.  I’m well aware that this will change.  When the activity level dies down and I am sworn in as a volunteer, there will be days where it’s obvious not much can be done.  For that, I am thankful for my hobby.  I have five writing outlets in place at this moment.  First, I write in my diary everyday.  Secondly, I write a letter several times a week.  Those are the two that I currently fit into the small moments of free time.  Thirdly, I have this blog.  Fourth is a script I’ve been hoping to write (This will be a long term goal that will probably take off in the heat of the Summer).  Lastly, I have a short story I desperately want to write (even though it’s still in the theoretical stage).

With all these outlets, I am not afraid of the free time that comes with two years of service.  Writing is my way of untangling the thoughts in my head.  The more I write while in Morocco, the more I’ll understand about the people and the culture I encounter.  I’ll already spend two weeks realizing that the construction of a culture in sci-fi novels is one of the most fascinating and exciting elements of pre-writing….just because I’ve landed myself in a new culture.  I love the realizations that being in Africa are giving me.  They will make me a stronger volunteer and a stronger writer.

Today’s short story comes from my teenage love for zombies.  After seeing “Land of the Dead,” I was fascinated with the differences between all the zombies movies.  I wanted to give another take on the zombie story.  This story came out as a set of diary entries.  It is quite short.  Enjoy.

Day to Die

Day 39 in Peace Corps Morocco

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I went without decent internet for more than a month here in Morocco.  Now that I have a steady connection, I’m going to try to update on a daily process.  I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Fes (a pretty big tourist city) for training.  We got back yesterday evening.  Today, I went back to studying.  Our teacher decided to step things up in class because we now have only four weeks of training left before going to our final site.  After the first hour, all five of us were thinking the same thing: Oh shit.  It’s not like we don’t know the language…it’s that every question or phrase can be worded so many different ways…and it’s difficult to recognize what is being asked sometimes.

I decided to make it one of my personal goals to get to an advanced or better speaking level during my two years here.  I know that means a tutor later.  But right now, that means an hour or two of studying each night.  Since we do 4-6 hours of class, the amount of content we cover requires that of me.  I learn a bit differently than how I am taught…although the classes do give me a good overview of how the language works, I need to drill in order to memorize verbs and nouns and adjectives and everything else.  It is difficult, but I am getting there.  I want to prove myself in these four weeks before we get sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers.

In other news, having the internet is a strange change.  My relationships with everyone back home are changing now.  I can talk to my girl whenever we are both awake–which is difficult but great.  The distance is hard but I didn’t expect any less.  With regards to friends, it is much easier to keep in contact with several people.  I like being able to talk to everyone rather that figure out who I can talk to in my precious small amount of time on the internet.  One of the best parts about having the Internet has turned to out to be staying in contact with family.  With aging grandparents  parents who are nearing retirement, and a sister with three girls in school, I miss a lot if I’m out of touch for just a weeks.  It’s nice to be back in the loops.

Now that I’m in the Peace Corps, I’m going to alternate between uploading old writings and Peace Corps writing.  I’m starting with some old writing because I used most of today studying Moroccan Arabic.  Today’s update was an assignment from 11th grade.  We had to write a horror story that followed a few steps for the genre.  I really like what came out.  I don’t know if I’ll ever write more than short stories in this category, but it is fun.

Isabel’s Ballroom

 

Halfway through Peace Corps Training

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I know I’ve been uploading mainly pictures.  So here’s a real writing update.  Today marks five weeks in Morocco.  Only 109 weeks to go =).  It’s strange thinking that this much time has already passed.  Like the rest of humanity, I’ve been fascinated by the passage of time since I was a teenager.  But this is the first period since high school that time has felt extremely fluid.  Like high school, each day is jam-packed with class, social interaction, frustrations, and excitement.  Unlike high school, each day is a massive cultural experience.  That’s not even mentioning the speech barrier.

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Despite these busy days, these five weeks have passed by in a snap.  At times I can’t believe that I’ve been in Africa for five weeks.  Other times, it feels like I’ve been here a year.  That’s why I’ve always been so fascinated with time.  It is going by so quickly and so slowly at the same time.  I’m quickly realizing what is difficult to be away from and what is easy to be away from.  Being away from my girl makes it feel like years have passed.  Being away from the entertainment world of America makes it feel like no time has passed at all.

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I was certain I was going to Early Terminate in the first two weeks of training.  It was a strange mixture of circumstances that brought me to that conclusion.  I even told my father I might be able to watch some Broncos games with him next season.  Then we started taking a little time out of our language lessons to start teaching English to the children in our community.  That changed a lot for me.  Being able to genuinely help students was exactly what I needed.  Then, during a free weekend, I had a long conversation with a close Peace Corps friend.  Now I have a hard time seeing what would make me go home.

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It doesn’t feel like an emotional roller coaster…but that is because the days stretch on for vast amounts of time.  The truth is I experience multiple ups and downs in a day.  I have overall amazing days and overall sucky days.  In the end, in the past two weeks, little has brought me down for a long period of time.  Once I got settled into the idea of spending two years here, I started making plans.  I know what my plans are for my Peace Corps service—but there are going to be long periods where I need to just fill time (like during the summer when it’s 120+ degrees outside).  For that, I made a list of personal goals.  This includes many writing goals—including finishing a film script I started working on last week.  Having a set of personal goals was exactly what I needed.

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We’ve talked to a lot of current volunteers.  All of them have advice.  All of their advice is simple.  But there’s this strange feeling when I am around them.  It’s like walking into a movie at the theater and seeing other people walking out.  You know that they just experienced what you are about to experience.  You want to know, but you don’t.  I have this strange sensation that I have important questions to ask the current volunteers….but I can never figure out what to ask.  It’s rather amusing.

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I am continuously reminded of something I wrote while in Tacoma with my girl.  It was about home.  It was then that I realize I did not have a home.  It isn’t with my parents.  It isn’t Tacoma.  It isn’t my grandmother’s old condo.  It isn’t my host family.  It won’t be my final site.  What I realize back then is that home isn’t a place—it’s people.  No matter how I look at it, I feel the tether to those I love.  I know where my home is.  Although I love this country and I’m dedicated to spending two years here, I know my home is safe in Tacoma.

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