Since I´m not there anymore, I think it´s now okay to show the exact location of my village, Khoukhate. I´ve marked all the important places, bike trips, running routes, and others, and put up some pictures.

Here´s the link to the map:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=es&msa=0&msid=105585629350532448728.000480562f80edd91f676&ll=32.984476,-4.784546&spn=0.433129,0.883026&t=h&z=10

Here are some of the pictures that are shown on the map, that correspond to places I´ve marked:

A couple of months ago, I began a project to improve some irrigation ditches around the Izzie village. Our valley is fed by dozen of natural springs that gush water all day every day, all year long. Most of these springs are channeled through dirt ditches to get to fields, but along the way, the majority of the water seeps into the ground and never makes it to the intended destination. A few of these ditches have over the years been improved by concrete, preventing loss of water and reducing the amount of time it takes for this water to travel to the fields. My favorite institution the Rural Commune has funded these projects in the past, with the following results:

$6000 constructed a channel 150 meters long

$15,000 constructed a channel 400 meters long

I had a few thousand dollars to improve a major central channel that serves the majority of farmers in the village, or as much of it as we could with these limited funds. My results:

$1500 finished the 400-meter original project (10% of the cost of the project had the Rural Commune financed it)

The other $2500 has financed five other smaller irrigation projects, for a total of probably about 650 meters, almost all constructed within the past week.

This project, though stressful in that I'm about to finish my Peace Corps service, is fun for me because I get to watch these three villages compete for my approval, all three asking about the progress of the other ones every day. It's also fun because it gives me plenty of opportunities to shake my head disappointedly at my favorite institution.

My second and final attempt at raising a kitten in Morocco has failed - this one got caught in a glue mouse trap, stumbled around for a day stuck to a piece of cardboard, then probably died of a heart attack or inhalation of glue fumes, I'm not sure. This picture was taken a few hours before the unfortunate incident:

I'm a notoriously bad gardener, but finally something that I planted grew! It also just so happens to be among the world's most valuable plants. If things don't work out for me in America, saffron farming might be the way to go. I literally gave them zero attention after planting them, and just about every bulb blossomed. The two kilos of seeds I planted will probably yield less than a gram of saffron, and I'll probably be gone before at least half of that is harvested, but I'm still really excited.

Some days, it feels like the past two years flew by, other days I feel like I've aged ten years in the 25 months since I wrote my first "Couscous Chronicles" email to you all. I won't even try to sum it all up in one email; you should check out my blog if you want a fuller picture of what I've been doing here in this tiny village for two years. (www.couscouschronicles.blogspot.com)

Top Ten Things I'll miss about Morocco: (see attached corresponding photos)

1. Long, non-hurried jogs down empty dirt roads between plateaus with my dog

2. My dog (even if he is arguably the world's worst dog; his favorite activities appear to all my neighbors to be biting little children and eating kittens)

3. Waking up whenever I wake up, without an alarm, and then sometimes having nothing better to do than sit all day with my baby chicks.

4. Eating fruit right off of the trees, olive oil straight from the stone press, and vegetables right out of the ground

5. Wowing (or at least amusing) everyone with my awesome Moroccan dance moves (a still picture can't really do this one justice. Ask for a demonstration when I get home)

6. Manual labor and its tangible results

7. Camel burgers

8. This little girl who squeals "SEEENTEEEYA!" every time she sees me.

9. Endless village drama over minor things (my under-$2000 projects result in endlessly entertaining drama)

10. Sunsets like this one from Thursday, over these snow-capped mountains

My post-November 12th Travel Plans: I'll be spending a week in Portugal and a few days in Spain before embarking on a trans-Atlantic, 14-day cruise that arrives in Puerto Rico. After a few days in the rain forest, I'll be flying home to Cincinnati, where I'll be until I figure out my next steps. At some point in the near future I'll start looking for a job, but also plan to spend some time visiting friends in DC and my brother in San Francisco. Depending on how long the job search takes, I may have more time to visit more of you in all your random places. My temporary address will be my parents' address: 5556 Nickview Dr, Cincinnati, OH 45247 in case you want to send me anything. Starting December 17th, I'll be reachable by cell phone at 513-504-6680.

Finally, several of you have asked if there's any way you can help out with my projects or if there's anything you can send to people in the village, and after thinking this over and talking with the director of the primary school, I've decided that the best thing would be, if anyone is interested, to provide scholarships for the girls in the village who want to continue their studies past the sixth grade but can't afford to pay for room and board at the closest middle school, a boarding school about 50 miles away. Currently, there are a handful of girls who still come to class at the primary school every day even though they should be in middle school because they really want to be in school. It's sad because the costs only come to about $30/month per student, so approximately $300 for the whole school year, which includes room, board, and transportation back to the village to visit their families for holidays. If any of you might be interested in sponsoring a girl for a month or two (or for a whole year), let me know and we'll figure out logistics.

So, thanks for all of your emails and letters and wall posts over the past two years. I'm sorry that I've been slow to respond, and I'm sure I've over-used the "I don't have internet access" excuse. I hope to see you all and catch up soon!

Danielle's younger sister Jessica is fifteen. This spring she finished her last year of middle school and was preparing to start high school in the fall, when her aunt proposed that she marry the oldest of her cousins, 29. Since she was born, it was assumed that she would marry one of her cousins, as she was one of only a few girls in an extended family of dozens of boys, but we didn't know that her aunt wanted her for her son so soon. In the course of a couple of weeks, she had to decide (at the incredibly unstable age of fifteen), whether she wanted to drop out of school and get married, and move to the city to live with her husband/cousin and his whole huge family.

She had been almost a little project of mine - I was teaching her English and drilling her on her homework, always talking to her about being the first in her family to get a high school diploma and even go on to college, about all the possibilities she had for careers and futures. We talked news and politics and pored over my map of the world. I honestly intended to invite her to spend a summer or a year with me in America someday so she could learn English and see a bit of the world outside of the village. And then came the marriage offer. Her aunt insisted that even though they wouldn't have the wedding until next summer, she would have to quit school and move in with her husband's family immediately, to help out around the house and get used to her new life. The legal age for marriage in Morocco is 18, but no matter how many times I brought this up and tried to argue that there's a reason for this law, the family would just bring up examples of women in the village who had married at 13 or at 14, and they're happy.

My (unconfirmed) interpretation of the situation was that the aunt had wanted this girl as her daughter-in-law from the beginning, and was afraid that if she were to finish high school, she would not be satisfied marrying one of her uneducated cousins. I think her aunt was also getting older and tired, and with only one daughter and a house full of boys, wanted an extra hand with the housework as soon as possible. Jessica had to decide whether to stand up to all the pressure from her aunt and her own family, finish her education and possibly not ever find a husband (since there definitely is a preference for uneducated, young wives), or marry her cousin, who she knows is a good man from a good family, where she would be treated well, not have too hard of an adjustment to make, and she would still see her own family all the time.

For the first year I knew her, I never knew that Danielle had ever been married. She never talked about it and I just assumed that she was another of the many unmarried women in their 30s in the village. Her story is that she married young, at I think 16, to a man she had never seen before the wedding. She wasn't married long before it became clear that he was an alcoholic and soon after, began to treat her poorly. She was faced with the choice of staying with him, even if he was a terrible husband, or leaving him and moving back in with her family in the village, knowing that as a divorcee, she may never get another marriage offer. She left and came back to the village. Now, at the age of 30, she's still unmarried, wants nothing more than to be married, but has no real way to go about meeting men, and no one wants to arrange a marriage for their son or brother or nephew with a woman who is clearly not "pure".

A misdialed number led to a conversation that led to a secretive text-message relationship with a man that went on for several months before they agreed to meet. She spent a weekend with him, lying to her family about going to visit an aunt or a friend somewhere, and then later I helped her meet him again by telling everyone she was going with me to Fes and then sending her off to his town instead. Even at the age of 30 and even though she was divorced, she still could not tell her family that she was going to see a man. After their second meeting, he told her that his mother disapproved of his marrying a divorcee (he was almost 40 but still couldn't stand up to his mother regarding whom to marry). But he continues to send her texts, urging her to come visit him. She has to decide whether having a secret lover who will never marry her is better or worse than having no one at all.

Heather grew up in the village, the very beautiful daughter of a young single mother whose husband had abandoned her a few months after her daughter was born. At eighteen, she decided she was bored with village life and went to live with her aunt in one of the big cities, helping her aunt take care of the children and working occasionally at a call center. Living with an aunt busy with her own children, and having the excuse of work allowed her an enormous amount of freedom to hang out with friends and to start dating secretly. For five years, she dated a man that she was madly in love with, and they had secretly rented an apartment so they could spend time together out of sight of her aunt and cousins, and his four children from a previous marriage. Though he loved her and they appeared to have a wonderful relationship, he claimed he was never going to be able to marry her, because of complications with the children, and other problems I never really understood. Heather accepted this situation and turned down the many offers of marriage that came to her, because she loved her boyfriend.

This past year, however, came an offer from a man who had come several times before to ask for her hand, was a little older and had a well-established small business, and was extremely nice. Heather was faced with the choice of staying in a relationship that would have to stay secret, meaning years of lying to her aunt about where she was going and maybe never being able to have children herself, or leaving the man she loved to marry a man she didn't love but that she knew would be good to her, provide her (and their children) with a nice house and a comfortable life, and allow her to live a life in the open without lies or secrecy. She chose marriage and is now pregnant, but confesses that she still thinks about her old boyfriend all the time even though she knows she has a wonderful husband who loves her more than anything.

One of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers just got married to a Moroccan and held a completely traditional Berber wedding, which I attended. This got me thinking it's about time I wrote about marriage in this country, and not just a recounting of the different weddings I've been to and how many hours of dancing I participated in. I've been skirting around writing about this issue for two years, afraid of judging another culture's traditions before I fully understood them. And while I don't claim to understand everything even after two years, I don't think my understanding is going to deepen much in the next month, so I'm going to go ahead and write. There are a lot of things that turned me off about Morocco and Moroccans two years ago and that I have since learned to appreciate and even like, but at the end of the day, there has never been a moment when I wished that I was girl born in rural Morocco. The next couple of posts are going to be marriage stories about some of the girls I've gotten to know really well here and who have shared their "boy problems" with me (I've changed their names).

(I fully acknowledge that these girls' experiences are not universal across Morocco and may not even be typical, as cities are quickly evolving and becoming more and more "Western" every day, with more and more liberal values. But it's still hard to listen to my friends tell me these stories and ask for advice, when I have no idea what kind of advice to give.)

It's Apple Season in Midelt, the province so proud of its apples that it built this lovely fountain in the center of town:

The month of the year when everyone is employed full-time, and when literally every time I leave my house I come home laden with the sweetest, juiciest apples I've ever eaten, freshly picked from one of the village's orchards. I eat at least four or five apples a day and still acquire them much faster than I'll ever be able to consume them.

I find the apple trade here fascinating - it's well known that the richest people in the area (after the corrupt politicians) are the apple farmers, many of whom have orchards with thousands or tens of thousands of trees. An orchard right outside of my village has 45,000 trees and brings in over a million dollars a year in apple sales. Every morning during picking season, they send trucks out into the surrounding villages at 5am to load up hundreds of workers who then pick apples all day, taking precisely-timed breaks, and then drop them all off in the afternoon, "Grapes of Wrath" style. The richest farmers also build giant refrigerators to store the apples and sell them throughout the year as prices rise.

The perfect, happiest time to be spending my last month in Morocco.

Fasting Ramadan would be awful if I had to wake up before noon and leave my house before 5pm and had actual important things to do. But since I don't, I've been accomplishing a lot of lying around and watching TV shows and movies. (Or, "reintroducing myself to American life and culture...") This year's Ramadan accomplishments include:

Season 3 of 30 Rock

Season 3 of How I Met Your Mother

Seasons 5 and 6 of West Wing

The past eight months of Infomania

2 books (making my book-to-tv-episode ratio is about 1:50, embarrassingly low)

At least fifteen hours of Spades, the card game, in its two-, three-, and four-person forms

Seven feature-length movies

In my defense, I start every day at noon, (or one or two pm) by stepping outside and contemplating leaving my house to go do something more useful, but invariably the super hot sun drives me back indoors and back into my nice soft bed. I attempt this venture several times throughout the afternoon, always retreating defeated, to more TV show watching, until 5, my official jogging time (which, in the lazy spirit of the month has turned into a casual walk/jog).

The big event of this year's month of Ramadan was the opening of a women's prayer room in the mosque. Previously, the men would pray five times a day in the mosque while the women would have to pray in their own homes because they can't pray with men. So this room was a big deal, and for the past few months, all the women have been looking forward to finally being able to pray together in the mosque, and listen to the (equivalent of a) priest give the sermons. No one had any idea how much drama this room would create, however. Basically, a whole village of women have to figure out a set of norms for how to comport themselves in the mosque. Some women have never prayed in a mosque before, some have only when they've traveled to visit relatives living in cities, and everyone has a different idea for how one should act.

Questions that need to be resolved soon because they're making people upset:

• What should one wear to the mosque? When they pray in their own houses, women usually just wrap a sheet around themselves, but is that appropriate for a mosque or should women dress up in their fanciest jalabas?

• What's the appropriate pace for the prayer? Should everyone pray at the same speed since they're all together, or should everyone follow their own pace?

• Is it appropriate to leave once you're done, or do you have to wait until everyone finishes?

• Is it appropriate to bring your young children with you?

• Is it appropriate to answer your cell phone in the middle of the prayer?

• If you come late, should you just jump into the middle of the prayer or start from the beginning by yourself? Should you greet everyone or try to sneak in inconspicuously?

• Is it appropriate to talk amongst yourselves before/after the prayer, or should everyone leave in silence and not talk until they're outside?

• Are there "assigned seats?" Should you give up your place in the front row if one of the old and prominent ladies of the village comes in and wants it?

• Is it appropriate to correct an old lady who isn't following all the right prayer steps in the right order, or should you let her keep making the same mistakes?

As do most dramatic situations in this village, the mosque drama amuses me, as every single night after the evening prayer, the women come home and then spend the next hour ranting and gossiping about who was wearing what, or saying what, or doing what during the prayer, who greeted or didn't greet whom, who knelt next to whom, who came late or brought naughty children or did other shameful things. I've heard a couple of women swear they're never praying in the mosque ever again because of XYZ that so-and-so did. I suppose any big change requires some time to work out the norms, and for everyone to adjust the way they've been praying privately their whole lives to fit the new norms. This is an interesting time, and would be a fun study for some psychologist, because I'm sure that in a few weeks everyone will be following the new unwritten rules of prayer in the mosque as if they'd been praying there forever.

The biggest news in our new Province of Midelt is that the president of the province (more or less the equivalent of a state governor) got caught on webcam demanding and accepting bribe money. Here's a link to the video, though if you don't understand Arabic, it's probably not that interesting to watch.

The president is the one who spends the whole time shining his shoes, the other guy is his vice president, and the old man on the left is a guy who runs a little carnival. The carnival guy I guess wanted to keep the carnival up and running in Midelt, but every time they get to the agreed-upon closing date, the president makes the guy give him bribes to keep it open a little longer. The video goes more or less like,

Old man "So how much do you want from me this time? I've already given you a million and a half" (about $1200). I'll give you another million."

President "A million? That's nothing, two! Two million or we don't even have a conversation"

Old man "A million is all I have right now. I'll give you each half a million, and give me til the afternoon to go round up the rest." (hands over the money, bill by bill)

President "This stays between us, if I find out you've told anyone. . . "

Old man "Of course! Who would I tell?"

So now we'll see what happens. Once this video got uploaded to YouTube, the president immediately released a response video, denouncing the video as a fraud, that the old man spliced and diced voices that weren't the president at all, trying to frame him, that he's just a humble former Islamic studies professor who's trying to work to make Midelt a better place for everyone. Last I heard he's waiting to be tried in the big court in Meknes, the nation (or at least me), crossing its fingers hoping a big example will be made of this guy, finally starting a serious and long-overdue war against corruption in Morocco.

Surprisingly, the hardest part of the day isn't late afternoon when it's hot and the fast is coming to an end. In my opinion, the worst part of the day is waking up, knowing that you have X number of hours before you can eat or drink. As those hours pass, it gets easier, as I find things to fill that time, and once there's only an hour or two left, I go running, and then sunset comes. The other worst part of the day is right before the sunrise call to prayer, when I'm not hungry or thirsty but feel the need to eat and drink, knowing it'll be fifteen hours before I can eat again. (And knowing that the more water I drink at 4am, the more times I'll have to get up to pee in the middle of the night).

It does feel wrong to be unhappy going to bed every day and then wake up unhappy every morning.

For the whole first week of Ramadan this year, I seriously regretted my decision to fast again this year. I had great memories of last year, playing cards all night and getting invited over to break fast at different houses all the time, and feeling this big sense of accomplishment at the end of the month. I think I'd conveniently suppressed the memories of hunger and thirst and days that seem to drag on for weeks. This year just seemed harder and less rewarding. But then I got back to the village after a week of fasting while traveling, and things got easy again. Almost too easy. I could once again sleep until noon and hang out in my nice and cool mud house in my comfortable bed all day. I think I'll survive the month after all.

The new biggest joke in the family is how my baby chicks are growing up American, just like their "mother". Proof:

The chicks I brought hang out in a group by themselves and don't seem to like hanging out with the village-born chicks

My chicks refuse to eat bread, eating only expensive chicken food

(And the best one, in my opinion), as soon as it started to get hot out, they pulled out all their feathers and ran around almost naked for a month (I'm pretty sure I could hear the other chicks muttering "hashuma!" (shame on them) under their breaths the whole time)

I loaned my camera to some of my host cousins for a couple of days, and when it was returned to me, I found it full of pictures they'd taken of themselves with the express purpose of my showing these pictures to my friends in America who would surely see the pictures and immediately want to marry them. I tried to explain that that's not really how we get married in America, but they were so sure that this tactic would work that I said I'd give it a try. So here are my cousins who are hoping to get married next summer, and are therefore on the hunt for wives. Let me know if you're interested.

Last year I spent who knows how many hundreds of boring hours in hot, stuff, cramped rooms full of women waiting to be served a meal that would almost certainly make me sick the next morning. This year I've decided that wedding season is too short to spend attending the boring parts of weddings, and this year I'm refusing to go anywhere near rooms full of women, and also refusing to eat dinners. The plan is to sleep until about 2 or 3 am, then go to the wedding, hopefully missing the boring parts and showing up just in time for the dancing. We'll see how that strategy works.

Some random wedding reflections I've had this second time around:

Weddings last all night, not because there's anything all that fun happening, just because they're for some reason supposed to. There are often several empty hours in the evening when it feels like people are just waiting for it to get late enough for the wedding to start. The day after a wedding, it's entirely acceptable for an entire village to sleep and lounge around doing nothing literally all day. Sometimes I think maybe just having the excuse to be lazy the next day is the real reason for holding an all-night wedding.

One of my new favorite wedding traditions, which I'd never witnessed until this past weekend, is the public mocking of all the groom's wedding presents to the bride and her family. A representative of the groom's family opens the suitcase full of clothes and gifts, and presents them one by one to the crowd, all the time saying how beautiful each one is, and how lucky the bride is to have such a generous husband. Meanwhile, the men of the bride's family ridicule every article of clothing and the audience dies laughing, except me, since I still don't really understand Moroccan humor.

If you're putting on a wedding, it is extremely important to fairly distribute the wedding cookies. The biggest faux pas in a wedding seems to be accidentally giving one of the guests more or fewer cookies than the other guests. At the wedding my family held for my host brother, we counted and recounted every little dessert plate of cookies to make absolutely sure that everyone received exactly nine cookies, one of each of the nine varieties. At a wedding in Rabat I helped at, the women spent hours the night before arguing about how to arrange the 30 varieties of cookies on trays for each table, so that every guest would eat not only the same number of cookies, but the same number of "fancy" cookies (ones made with almonds). At some point around 3am in the middle of the cookie arranging, I was like, "seriously, guys, are people actually going to get upset about the number of cookies they do or don't get?" The answer was yes.

After a wedding, no matter how nice or fancy or expensive or fun it was, everyone spends the next few days talking about how it was nothing compared to their wedding, or the wedding they just held for their son/daughter/sister/brother, etc. When I got back from this wedding in Rabat, which to this point was the nicest, fanciest and most expensive wedding I'd been to, everyone in the village saw the need to bring out pictures and videos from previous weddings, and to point out all the flaws of the Rabat wedding.

Weddings are supposedly the best place to meet a future husband/wife, and girls get really excited about the possibility of getting noticed by some guy at a wedding. And yet there is zero interaction between young men and young women at weddings. The women and girls sit on one side, and only dance with each other, and the men and boys hover around the edges and also only dance with each other.

I have a Moroccan "kaftan" that I wear to every wedding. When I wear this kaftan in the village, I'm among the best-dressed women there. I wore this same kaftan to the wedding in Rabat a few weeks ago, and felt like a big country bumpkin next to the super fancy, sparkly dresses the women were wearing. I found out later that most people when they go to a fancy wedding rent a really fancy dress just for the night, and they're only like $10-15 to rent. The bride also usually rents her outfits, and throughout the night will change clothes several times, but all the dresses are brought by the wedding planner and returned in the morning. Pretty good system, actually.

Every spring, souk is full of baby chicks for sale. And everyone thinks the same thing: "this 6 dirham chick will grow up to be a 50 dirham chicken, let's buy a bunch". I decided to do a chicken-rearing experiment, and bought 50 chicks. Within the first two days, 41 of them had died inexplicably. Within the next week, another two got eaten by one of the neighborhood cats. I admit I've become a little obsessed with making sure nothing happens to the seven that remain. Which means several hours a day of babysitting chicks, protecting them from cats. Not as boring as it sounds, actually. My seven hang out with the 12 chicks that my neighbors are raising (all that remain from an initial 37) and each of the 19 has its own personality (one really likes to hunt ants, one really likes to go exploring in my house, one likes to sit in the corner by itself and stare at the wall, some sleep standing up and some sleep like ducks with their heads under their wings, one likes to stretch its legs a lot, a couple like to run sprints back and forth across the courtyard, and they all have their own best friends that they hang out with.)

My favorite little quirk: A few of them think they're turkeys, since one of our turkeys accidentally sat on some chicken eggs until they hatched; neither the turkey nor the chicks have noticed yet that they're not actually related.

I went back to the states for two weeks with the express purpose of not thinking about couscous or associations for two whole weeks. My plans were foiled by an email that arrived the minute I arrived at my brother's house: Williams and Sonoma was in the market for a hand-rolled couscous to sell in their 260 stores across the states, and had found our association through a Google search on hand-rolled couscous. To make a long story short, we didn't end up getting the contract, but for about a week, all I could think about was how I could deliver 1000 pounds of couscous per month (about the same quantity that we made in all of 2009) to the US. Daunting, yes, but I think I could have pulled it off. This is how:

Williams and Sonoma would pay us about $2.50 per pound of couscous (more than double what we normally sell it for in Morocco), packaged and labeled to their standards and delivered to the port in Casablanca. They would then ship it to the states and to their stores, where it would sell for about $10 a pound. In order to crank out a thousand pounds a month, we'd set up at least two satellite rolling-centers, in two of the other villages (the Izzies and the Tabbies), and each group would make 300-400 pounds, or as much as they could. With a group of 4-5 women able to roll about 40 pounds of couscous in an afternoon, they'd have to work rolling 2-3 times a week, for 5-6 hours a day. I'd come gather the couscous weekly on a donkey, put it in huge sacs, and then when we'd finished the 1000 pounds, hire one of the sheep vans to drive it to Casablanca. A handful of my brothers and other guys from the village and I would go to this glass company that makes glass jars, go to the lid company to buy lids for those jars, then probably rent a hotel room and spend a couple of days jarring and weighing and sealing the jars, labeling them, then delivering them to a waiting container at the port headed for America. Since as a Peace Corps volunteer, I wouldn't be able to take any of that money for myself, here's the impact an extra influx of $1200 per month (after you subtract from the $2500 the price of ingredients, jars, labels and gasoline to transport them to Casablanca) would have on this tiny village:

15-20 currently unemployed women would have an income of 400-500 dirhams per month each (more than what my host family of 8 spends per month on food, or enough to pay the room and board and tuition to send two children to middle or high school).

My brother who currently sells dishes in souq would make as much in a weekend of transporting couscous to Casablanca as he makes in several weeks now

A handful of young men who currently do nothing but hang out on the street corner would have a week's worth of work per month

The association would still have some money left over to invest in community improvements or activities every month

And the giant "Couscous" sign we installed at the dirt road turnoff into the village wouldn't be quite so ironic

This will only take a second, and might help me get $500 to hold a summer camp in my village this summer.

I applied for a grant from Kids to Kids, an organization that raises money for kid-related projects led by Peace Corps volunteers. The projects that get the most votes will be funded, so it would be great if you could take a second and go vote for my project.

www.kidstokids.org

click on "vote now". (you have to put in your email address, but you don't have to confirm subscription to the mailing list if you don't want to)

My project is called The First Ever Iztat Summer Camp. You can find it easily if you filter by country and only look at the Morocco projects.

Thanks! I'll let you know how it goes!

Some volunteers in nearby Midelt decided to put together a race. Each little village could bring ten little kids to participate in the 1km run. I decided this would be a fun thing to make a big deal out of in my villages, so we started training in late March, and then in late April, a few days before the race, held qualifying races in each village to pick the official 10-person team. The qualifying races themselves became a village event; parents came out to watch and all the teenage boys served as referees or track markers or pacers.

Pictures from the qualifying races:

Painting jerseys for each team:

The Official 2010 teams:

Singing all the way home:

After more than a year of hearing about the camel herd on top of the plateau but never seeing them with my own eyes, I decided a few months ago to make it a point to go find these camels. I asked everyone I knew where they were, and the answer is always, "take this path, go over those hills and they're right there." Three times I set out in search of them, following those directions and trekking up and down hills and through canyons on my bike, finding nothing, and every time I'd come home unsuccessful, all the people of the village would tell me, "just take that path, go over those hills and they're right there." Then one day, one of my neighbors came running into the house and told me to get my bikes, we're going to the camels. And there they were.

Me milking one

Collecting camel urine (supposedly medicinal)

Playful baby camels

Maybe one of the best things about Morocco is its incredibly high frequency of rainbows. They happen all the time, several times a week. Here are a few I've managed to capture on camera; for every rainbow I catch on film, there are dozens that go by unphotographed, but still very appreciated.

My goat Chantel had her baby! Here are the first baby pics:

Her name is Dolce, because she looks exactly like the cute little girl from my favorite Mexican soap opera:

A few days last month, the volunteers in the area and I decided to go into all the tiny primary schools in the area and talk to the kids about tooth-brushing and handwashing, and about not smoking. 7am on Wednesday, I left my village and biked three hours to the big dam/lake halfway between my village and Midelt, where the other volunteers were coming from. Though I'd done this bike trip before, I'd never actually reached the dam, which turns out to be one of the most impressive sights I've seen so far in Morocco, though oddly it's closed to the public.

We biked back three hours to my village, rested for a few minutes, then got back on our bikes to head out into one of the even smaller villages nearby, to a school of 20 kids, backpacks full of toothbrushes and toothpaste to distribute, feeling like we were those classic Peace Corps volunteers from the 70s, biking hours through the brush, dodging mean dogs and carrying our bikes over ditches and through swamps and sand to go help children in places with no roads and taxis. (We of course could have arrived at all of these schools in cars, on relatively nice dirt roads, but that wouldn't have been nearly as fun, would it?)

After three attempts at baking cakes that include couscous (the first one tasted great but was too sandy. The second was too bland and dry, the third a little too dense and didn't rise), we'd run out of time to experiment before the big women's day event in Fes. So what could I do but piece together what I'd learned from the three previous trials, throw in some new random ingredients just for fun, quadruple the recipe to fill a huge sheet cake pan, and cart it off to the public oven, positive that the fourth time was going to be the charm. And it was. I think it turned out shockingly good, considering how terrible I'd recently proven myself to be at recipe creation. Here's the recipe. I've named it the official Kookie cake because all of the interesting ingredients (couscous, olive oil, carrots, apples and almonds) are grown or produced in the village.

6 eggs

2 cups sugar

2 cups mild olive oil

4 cups flour

2 packages of baking powder (2 tsp maybe?)

3 packages of vanilla sugar (1.5 tsp vanilla extract maybe?)

a pinch or two of salt

2 large apples, peeled and grated

3 cups shredded carrots

1 cup dry El Karma hand-rolled couscous, boiled in water until it softens and loses its uncooked-flour smell (or steamed if you have time to kill)

3 cups almonds, crushed (sprinkle on top of batter before you bake it)

Another random addition to my list of newly-acquired skills, a bit unexpected considering that my first year in Morocco I could not even eat olive oil straight with bread because it had such a strong flavor. And then one day I started loving it. Last week in Fes, my friend Gail and I brought together all the different olive oils we could find to learn how to taste them. Tara, an actual professional, led us through the steps of looking at the color, smelling, feeling, and tasting the different oils. It felt so sophisticated, and the seven oils we tasted were all extremely different. We decided the oil I brought from our village's olives that had been ground on a stone (not electric) press had hints of apple flavor, and most definitely an award-winner. Now I have to find someone who can give that award.

I have long suspected that my site is the perfect place for long bike trips. But the Peace Corps issues just one bike per volunteer, and since my sitemate doesn't ever want to bike with me and bike trips alone aren't nearly as much fun as with someone else, I haven't taken advantage of the fantastic biking trails in the area. I finally acquired a small fleet of three peace corps issued mountain bikes, borrowing them from nearby volunteers who weren't using theirs, so I can finally take my brothers or friends or visiting volunteers on serious bike trips. The first one was a trip to a lake about 30 km away from the village. I knew generally where it was, and had checked out the google satellite maps to be sure that there was a road leading there, but we still managed to get lost several times and had to ask random sheep herders for directions. After three hours of relatively hard biking we arrived at maybe the most beautiful view I've discovered yet in Morocco.

So last week I bought a goat. My neighbors and I had been talking about getting a goat for awhile now, basically, I would make the initial investment, then sell the babies to get my money back, all the while milking it, making cheese maybe, and then leave it with the family when I left. Sounded like fun, since they agreed to take care of its food and everything, and who doesn't need a pet goat? I decided even if I didn't actually end up getting back my investment, just having a goat to milk, and goat babies following me around, and fresh goat cheese was worth the $120. Because the goal is mostly my own amusement, I of course bought the goat with the most ridiculous-looking curly ears. And then I named her Chantel, after the villain in Morocco's favorite Mexican soap opera, Frijolito. At first I was hesitant to name my goat after such a nasty character, but then I realized that getting a goat named after you isn't generally considered to be the best compliment. The village is pretty amused too.

I know I already used that cliché once already in my blog, but I can't think of any other cow-related clichés at the moment. All the cows from Izzie-ville get taken out to graze every morning together, and come back together every afternoon, a lot like kids going off to school for the day, and coming home to their houses at night. For a long time this was a mystery to me - how, in a herd of 140 identical-looking cows, could you ever find the ones that belong to you to bring them home every night? The answer is, the cows know where they live, and go straight home. All you have to do is open the barn door at the right time, and the right cows will march right in. And in the morning, you just have to open the door again, and they'll march out and assemble in the open space outside of town to get led out to pasture. Pretty impressive for such a big, stupid-looking animal.

There are two brands of Peanut Butter in Morocco: Jesse's and Dakota. Jesse's is generally considered among Peace Corps volunteers to be the better of the two, and it's not hard to see why. This is the back label, word for word, of the Dakota Delights Crunchy Peanut Butter Jar:

Nutrition Information (values per 100g)

Energy 640kcal

Protein 641kcal

Fat 642kcal

Carbohydrate 643kcal

Sugar 644kcal

Sodium 645kcal

Phosphorus 646kcal

Iron 647kcal

Nicotinicacid 648kcal

Vitamine 649kcal

Cholesterol 650kcal

Ingredients: Roasted Peanuts, vegetables oil, sugar, salt

Produced by (Please insert your company name only)

Hilarious but a little scary. I think I'll stick with Jesse's Peanut Butter.

I trudged up to Fes a few days later, not excited about breaking the sad news that for all of our brilliant ideas, we were unable to come up with a single good recipe for couscous desserts that could be eaten with fingers. I met the woman who had commissioned the couscous truffles in a cafe, along with another of our Fes friends, a professional food writer and recipe-inventer, who was shaking her head before I finished telling her what we'd been trying to do, and immediately said, no, couscous will never roll into a ball. The answer, she said, was to think of what couscous will act like, not what it's made from. So we couldn't just substitute couscous for flour, even though essentially, couscous is 100% flour, but we could substitute couscous into recipes calling for polenta. A quick internet search gave us lots of recipes for polenta cakes and cookies. So the challenge was back on.

I whipped up a polenta lemon cake and a batch of Italian polenta cookies, both using our whole-wheat couscous, and took them off to the public oven in the Fes medina. The oven guy had a huge wood-fire oven full of cakes, cookies, breads and whatever else the people in the neighborhood needed to bake that afternoon. I hung out and chatted with him and watched him shuffle everything around using long-poled oars so that everything was perfectly and evenly baked. In an hour of watching I didn't see anything emerge even slightly burned. When the cookies were done, he shook his head at me and told me that the next time I wanted to bake some cookies, why didn't I just come and tell him what kind I wanted, and his wife would make them for me, because clearly I was not cut out for cookie baking. The verdict: better than the couscous truffles, but they felt a little bit like I'd accidentally mixed a handful of sand into the batter, crunchy, in a way that cakes and cookies are not supposed to be. And thus the list of couscous recipes for my book dropped back down to one.

Our association was invited to prepare snacks that would accompany afternoon tea at an afternoon event celebrating International Women's Day this weekend in Fes. The task: create sweet, small finger-food desserts using products from the association, as a way to provide us with some publicity and provide a novelty snack for attendees. One of the women in charge of the event and I began dreaming of truffles and pastries made from balls of couscous, and we were pretty sure we'd stumbled upon the idea of the century. What if we opened a bakery/patisserie where everything was made out of couscous? And this could be a whole chapter in the (yet-to-be-started) book I'm writing called 101 Couscous Recipes! Some of our fabulous, mouth-watering ideas included:

• Strawberry Jam and Dark Chocolate Couscous Balls

• Apple Cinnamon Raison Couscous Balls

• Reece's Peanut Butter Cup Couscous Balls

• Coconut Macaroon Couscous Balls

• Date, almond and honey Couscous Balls

• Caramel Apple Couscous Balls

• Snickers Couscous Balls

• Chocolate Orange Couscous Balls

• Boston Cream Couscous Balls

• Lemon Meringue Couscous Balls

• Carrot Cake Couscous Balls

• Chocolate Mint Couscous Balls

• Mojito Couscous Balls

So I bought a big bag of baking supplies, including a syringe to inject jam into the middle of these balls, and a friend who was visiting from the states, and my tutor and I spent a long rainy day trying to turn our brilliant ideas into reality. It didn't take long, however, for it to become clear that pastry chef was not my calling, and there was probably a reason why none of these had ever been created before. Couscous, quite simply, does not roll into balls. Refuses to roll into balls, even when combined with things that we thought should make it sticky, like honey, or melted chocolate. Every single combination we tried fell apart in a drippy, crumbly mess. We managed to trick the couscous into making a ball shape only twice: once, we found that if you boil, not steam the couscous, and leave it undercooked, it stays sticky enough to roll into balls that can then be dipped in chocolate. However, undercooked couscous has a pretty distinct, raw-flour taste that could not be covered up no matter how much jam we injected into the middle with the syringe. The second trick was to coat the inside of a tiny muffin paper with chocolate, stuff a tiny pinch of sweetened couscous into the middle, the pour more chocolate into the cup, encasing the couscous in chocolate and creating a kind of Reece's Miniatures. This method was not only a lot of work, but also left us with what was little more than cheap chocolate in a little cup, hardly a very exciting creation. At some point we gave up, dejected, cooked the remaining couscous with vegetables and spices the way it was intended, and resigned ourselves to thinking that maybe the book should be called "1 Recipe for Couscous" since that's how many recipes there seemed to be that actually worked.

Beginning the second toilet project did what we had hoped for the first project: provide some incentive to actually finish it. And sometime near the end of January, we declared the project finished, and began planning the toilet party.

To my disappointment, the toilet party included neither a toilet-shaped cake nor an inaugural use of the toilets by the director of the school. Instead, it was a long program of religious songs, performed by the girls in matching outfits, and a series of skits performed by the boys, including one about swine flu, one about hand-washing, and several other (very relevant) other skits about playing tricks on your neighbors. In all, a good time, and even though my toilet-cake idea was rejected, I still giggled to myself as I poured everyone lemonade, my private little joke with myself.

Ever since last Thanksgiving when someone in the village felt sorry for me and roasted some turkey kabobs so I could celebrate Thanksgiving, I’ve been planning a real Thanksgiving dinner for this year. This year Thanksgiving fell two days before the really big Muslim holiday (Eid Kabbir), on a day when everyone is supposed to fast to get ready for the big day. So I took the liberty of moving Thanksgiving up two days and celebrating on Tuesday.

My two lovely turkeys on their way home from the market

Turkey #1 hanging out on the kitchen counter waiting for the festivities to begin

Turkey #2 about to be plucked

Turkey #2 stuffed and squeezed into my neighbor’s butagas oven

My neighbors’ and friends’ first Thanksgiving

Overall, I had a great time and I thought my first ever solo attempt at turkey and stuffing and hot spiced apple cider and pumpkin pie turned out really well. After some discussion, however, my guests all decided that the turkey would have been better roasted on kabobs and the stuffing better if we’d used rice instead of bread. So the verdict still stands that it was cute of me to try, but I still need some serious cooking lessons before I can even think about ever finding someone to marry me.

It’s now been 12 weeks since the road was destroyed and surprise surprise, it is still not fixed. Every week rumors spread around the village that this is the week it’ll be fixed and I get excited and believe them and then another week goes by and of course nothing changes – the sheep vans still have to take the “village bypass” road (just two tire tracks that run around the outside of the village through the tall grass of the open prairie). And everyone else still has to park at the top of the road and walk the mile and a half into the village. Comical, really, if it weren’t so frustrating.

For those of you who can't make it out to Morocco to take part in our couscous-rolling workshops, this article is a good walk-through of the process.

http://viewfromfez.blogspot.com/2009/11/making-traditional-moroccan-couscous.html

Last week we had a great group of students come visit the village to make couscous and then do a one-night homestay with some families in the village. The weekend was intended to be a learning experience for the students - both about the art of couscous-rolling and about life in a super rural village - and we expected some discomfort on their part (how will we communicate? will we just sit and stare awkwardly at each other all evening? how do I flush a toilet without running water?). The girls took it all in stride, however, and it was the host families who were the confused ones - this was the first time any of them had ever been offered money in exchange for a bed - they all tried to give the money we offered them back, as it is second nature to let a guest spend the night and no one would ever think to ask them for money. Even when we explained that no, it's okay to take the money, this homestay program is one of the ways the Association is helping its members generate a little more income, they were still unsure what they should do. It was actually really refreshing to see, after so many times when I've felt like I'm being ripped off on everything just because I'm a foreigner. The host families saw these three relatively well-off girls not as rich foreigners but as tired travelers far away from home who needed a place to sleep and a hot meal.

You can read the students' summary of the weekend on their blog, here:

After months of wondering, I finally found the missing link connecting my original host family (Cheikh and all his daughters) to my new adopted host family (my fantastic neighbors). Which means I have figured out how I (as daughter of my first family) am related to myself (as daughter of my second family).

My 2nd host father's brother's wife's father's sister's son is my 1st host father. Said another way, I am my great uncle's son in law's niece, or the reverse, my uncle's father in law's great niece.

I'm still working on drawing the family tree of the entire village - it's already pretty overwhelming - but it's fun to see how everyone fits into the picture.

Someone wrote this great article about us on the biggest expat blog in Morocco, A View from Fes. You can see the whole article (with pictures) at http://riadzany.blogspot.com/2009/11/moroccan-couscous-traditional-way.html

Monday, November 02, 2009

Moroccan couscous - the traditional way

Couscous, or seksu as it's know in Moroccan Arabic, is one of the staple foods of the Maghreb. It's made of ground semolina that's moistened and rolled in flour.

Moroccan couscous

These days we usually buy ready-cooked couscous in packets from the supermarket, but there are parts of Morocco where it is still hand-rolled by village women and the difference in taste is remarkable. This is the 'real thing'.

Cynthia Berning, a US Peace Corps volunteer, has been working with a women's association in the small mud village of Khoukhate, some 130km south of Fez in the Middle Atlas, with the aim

of bringing back an appreciation for the art - and taste - of hand-rolled couscous.

Cynthia Berning

"The majority of women and girls [in the village] are still illiterate and thus have few opportunities to contribute financially to providing for their families", explains Cynthia.

"Enter the Association ENNAHDA ('rebirth' in Arabic), an association with the goal of increasing the standard of living for all residents of Khoukhate through the creation of employment for the women of the village."

When the operation started two years ago, it was limited to couscous production. But the business has now grown to include jams made from locally-grown fruit - fig, apple, apricot, orange, carrot and watermelon, there's herb-infused olive oil, almond butter, and the Moroccan high-energy snack 'zmita'. All the products are marketed under the name 'El Karma', which is Moroccan Arabic for fig tree, and is also the name of the natural spring in the village.

Now the association has an eco-tourism project where groups of visitors are welcomed to Khoukhate to learn the secrets of a good Moroccan couscous, and at the same time experience traditional rural life. Visitors roll their own couscous from scratch with the local women, and then cook it and eat it for lunch.

Couscous preparation: step 1

Step 2: sifting the couscous

Couscous ready for sale

The association has teamed up with Fez Food and Cafe Clock and it's now possible to learn this traditional art in Fez - great for people who don't have the time to go out to the village. There are monthly couscous workshops at Cafe Clock, conducted in English, French and Darija. The three-hour session begins with fresh vegetables, wholewheat flour, and water brought from the village spring. It finishes with lunch, and could be the best couscous you've ever eaten.

The next workshop is at 11h30-14h30 on Friday 13 November at Cafe Clock. For details and to book, contact Fez Food. Fez Food also runs excursions to the village.

For a peek into Cynthia's adventures in this tiny village, visit her blog, Couscous Chronicles. Information on the women's association can be found here.

Five weeks have now passed since our road was destroyed by that last flash flood – five weeks of having to walk half an hour to get in or out of the village, carrying everything on donkeys (including the new computer and nice printer we just bought for the association. I wish I’d taken a picture of the $500 printer on the back of a donkey and sent it to HP.) In those five weeks, people have not stopped talking, and fighting about what should be done. People from the next town down the road, the “Izzies” (who now have to walk an hour to get to the new improvised parking lot at the top) started using the private road that the rich landowners built for their own private access to their fields and mansion, the landowners got mad (after all, those Izzies are “bad people”) and blocked the road with one of their tractors so no one else could use the road. A band of Izzies broke the tractor in the middle of the night, and started ambushing the landowners’ nice shiny cars with rocks every time they tried to come or go. Then they went into town and filed a police report saying the rich landowners had chased them with his rifle, threatening to shoot them (this didn’t actually happen at all, though it’s a quite believable story considering what the landowner said a few months ago about taking that rifle and killing them all if it weren’t for the police.) There was a big police investigation, and every night the men would sit around and argue about what should be done, and whose responsibility it was to do it.

Finally this past week, money arrived from the government to divert the water and fix the road. The Izzies retracted their false police report and slaughtered a sheep in reconciliation. And rumor has it the road will be fixed (and paved!!!), starting this week! I can't even imagine what kinds of drama people will create once the building begins, but I'm sure it'll be fun!

For the first time in my life, my farmer’s tan has come from actual farming. This summer I got into the habit of going to the fields to work with my host brother occasionally if I didn’t have anything to do, and since in all my former lives everything I’ve ever planted and tried to grow has promptly died, it’s exciting to see vegetables growing and being productive. In just the last few weeks, I’ve harvested carrots, green beans, white beans, tomatoes, and corn, planted barley and fava beans, washed, shucked and sorted all of those, and had a great time doing it. Next I think comes olives, then harvesting the new beans and barley, then pruning all the apple trees to get ready for next year. And pretty soon planting all over again. And maybe someday I’ll try gardening again on my own.

I got back from Fes last week to find that our dog had literally eaten the kitten. From my neighbor’s description of his shredding the cat meat off the little bones, it sounds pretty gruesome.

Last week this little thing wandered into my house and into my life:

About two weeks ago, a storm came through and flooded a bunch of places in Morocco, including, of course, my village. This time, though, the flash flood that came through was worse than anyone had ever seen it, and took down stone walls and parts of people’s houses, and after three days of raging through town, the river had carved a canyon in the middle of the road.

I feel a little bad for complaining for the past year about how bad our road was, when now I would give anything to have our bad, bumpy, rocky road back. Now the village is completely inaccessible to cars, trucks, sheep vans – the only way in and out is by foot or by donkey. Yesterday morning I was coming to Fes for an exposition and had to bring a suitcase full of couscous to sell. I woke my neighbor’s ten year old son up at 5am and we loaded the 88 pound suitcase onto the back of his donkey to make the long, slow half-hour trek in the dark, up to where all the vans now have to stop. Twice, he and the suitcase fell off the donkey into mud puddles and had to be remounted. When I installed running water a few weeks ago, I joked that running water might change my status from a “Peace Corps” volunteer (volunteers who live in the “bled” with no amenities) to “Posh Corps” volunteer (volunteers who live in cities and have internet and hot showers in their houses). But I think my donkey trek out yesterday morning proves I belong in the Peace Corps category.

So Ramadan is over. And truth be told, I kind of miss it. I miss the structured days, with everything based around breaking fast, and I miss not having to worry about cooking or meal times because my neighbors just took care of me and I ate whenever they did. When Ramadan began, I told myself I just had to fast this year, and then maybe not ever again, but now I think I’ll definitely fast next year, and any year I happen to be in a Muslim country. Everyone I know who didn’t fast hated Ramadan, with the weird schedules and the being woken up in the middle of the night by the guys who walk around banging drums to wake people up so they can eat before dawn, and they hated that all anyone wanted to talk to them about was whether or not they were fasting. The volunteers who did fast seem to really have enjoyed Ramadan. It’s pretty cool, the day after Ramadan ended I felt the same way I felt the day after I ran my first marathon – really proud that I’d completed something that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do, and actually enjoyed myself while doing it. I really did get used to it – by the end of the month I was back up to my normal running distance and pace, even after 13 hours without food or water, I wasn’t getting headaches at all, and one day I took an 8-mile hike in the middle of the day and was fine. It’s pretty amazing, actually. Before Ramadan, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed for the whole month I’d be so tired and hungry, but it really wasn’t that hard.

Twenty days into Ramadan (a full month after the estimated completion date), and the bathrooms still aren't finished. The foreman only shows up to work every few days, and then got most of the measurements wrong ("if you didn't want me to add anything onto the plan you drew, you should have told me not to add anything."), meaning we had to buy more bricks, cement and steel. Then he forgot to leave a space for the windows. I've passed the point of frustration and now everything that goes wrong just makes me laugh. Though I do want to somehow (without creating any enemies) make sure that the association realizes that if we'd gone with the original foreman, the bathrooms would have been completed a month ago, to the exact measurements we wanted, under budget, with windows. School starts in six days, and there's still a classroom full of cement, random wood pieces and a duct tape, to-scale drawing of the plan on the floor.