Note: Chronologically, this belongs before "Aziz", but I am just now getting around to publishing it. The original date on this entry was December 2nd, 2011.

It’s the coldest night so far this winter in the High Atlas and the stars themselves seem frozen in place as my friend “Moha” and I walk back to the village center from his family’s house on the hill. The trees along the river are bare and silver by the starlight, and the snow on the mountains seems to glow with an ethereal light. Our breath spreads out before us in clouds as we pass beneath a streetlight, and turn onto the deserted main street. Nearly all the cafés are closed at this hour, save for a few that cast slabs of light out onto the night-dark pavement. I sigh slightly, thinking of the cold (it’s only gonna get colder) and of the five months that remain of my time here. I have been here for twenty-one months. According to the tally in my journal, this is approximately 642 days. As I have said before in this blog, the longest I had lived away from home, prior to Peace Corps, was about seven months when I was working off of the coast in North Carolina. 642 days; this is a long time. I consider my home in the Southwest to be nothing short of paradise (not exaggerating). When I close my eyes I can still see endless ranges of snow-capped peaks festooned with dark forests of evergreen and carpeted with nodding summer wildflowers. Trout leap in the streams and cougars stalk the night-haunted forests. Farther west, canyons brood in perfect red silence, a shining ribbon of water along their bottom the only movements save for the gentle sighing of a few luminously green cottonwood trees. The mountains lavish and fecund with life, the deserts spare and perfectly balanced; beautiful opposites they are yin and yang. The Navajos call it hozho, harmony, and if you sit still long enough in my Southwest, you will feel it seeping into your very bones. Morocco is beautiful as well, stunningly so, but the balance is broken; the scales are tipped. It manifests in my psyche as a vague tiredness, a heaviness. I still find joy in my day-to-day life here, I still love my friends and host family, but when five months is up, I will be ready to go. For now, it’s time to enjoy my last Atlas winter, so I turn my thoughts to something else. I think back on the past hour spent with Moha in his house. Turns out that my friend is one of the only people here in the valley that has internet and I desperately needed to check my email; I had some important stuff coming in. It took awhile as I had to learn to navigate the French keyboard and menus, and the welcome interruption of Moha’s large, exuberant mother (my host-auntie) who came in to fuss over me and ply me with tea and food. Our teeth were chattering by the time we got to my street, and Moha bade me goodnight before for going off to a café. I continued the additional hundred feet to my front door, numb from head to toe, and could barely turn the key in the lock. I tromped coldly up the stairs, trying not to trip over my frozen feet, and made my way into the study. The woodstove I had made for me last year sat sadly in the corner, grey with dust and rust-spotted from a leak near the pipe. That sight was normal to me, but next to it… was wood. Wood is rather difficult to acquire in the Eastern High Atlas, an area that has been deforested for close to three hundred years. It is trucked in from afar, or poached from the National Park; I try not to ask which at this point. A friend of mine in the village, “Mehdi”, had been trying to sell me firewood since the summer, and I finally acquiesced to his frequent requests last month. It had been awhile since then, and neither of us could seem to get a date nailed down to do it. As of this writing, it’s still not entirely done (we’re chainsawing the large pieces down to size tomorrow so they will actually fit up my stairs), but I do have enough wood for tonight. I looked at the stove for a moment before gently lifting off the top panel and easing an entire ifssi (a shrub-like and extremely flammable High Atlas plant) into it. On top of that, I placed a few chunks wood and held a lighter to the bottom of the ifssi. It went up like a firework, and within five minutes I was shedding layer after layer of clothing. After an hour, the room was comfortable and all of my extremities were alive and accounted for. First fire of the year, and based on the huge amount of wood being delivered tomorrow, this will be the first of many. If this is a vision of days to come, I am ready for you winter! Let’s go one more round! Thanks for reading, Charlie

Note: This is just the compressed story, and doesn't include any of what happened after I returned to my site, but enjoy it all the same! This will answer the question that some of you have posed regarding whether or not I actually work... the answer is yes. Read on.

Rain falls softly from a slate grey sky, and drips slowly from the drooping tips of the palm leaves that dominate the view from my hotel window here in Rabat. Birds sing unseen, sheltering from the rain, and people rush across the courtyard beneath my window. The rain today is a slow, gentle fall, almost a mist, and smells of the nearby sea. It’s quiet, for the city, though the call to prayer drifts in on the breeze every few hours. It’s a good day to just sit and write; a good day to read and think. This I do, for a time, but my thoughts seem to turn where they have tended to over the past few months; they turn to a 17 year old boy in my village named Aziz Atmani. ~ I met Aziz in the early spring of last year while I was on a walk from the nearby lake, accompanying Molly’s dad and stepmom back to the village. I remember the day very well, it was clear and cool, and from the top of the volcanic sill above Lake Tislit, we watched as a pale gold of the spring sunlight painted a startling array of swirling colors across the flatlands between the two lakes. Mark and Molly had gone back another way and I agreed to take the parents back; following the road below a neighboring village, and crossing the fields back to my house. It was late in the day by then, and the slanting light cast long shadows on Tissekt Tamda, the mountain that looms over my village. The children were walking home from school in clusters of three or four and greeted me loudly and raucously, laughing at my accent when I replied. All save one. I didn’t see the boy until he was at my side, he said nothing and looked at the ground. He was small and thin, dwarfed by a massive wool coat that was several sizes too big for him; still looking at the ground, he greeted me in a whisper. When I replied, he finally looked up at me. He had the look of the Amazigh that live in the deep mountains; slanting almond eyes, high cheekbones, and brown hair. He said his name was Aziz. I was at a loss as to why he had approached me, most kids just greet me and run off howling with laughter; and yet he lingered. I asked what he wanted, and the resulting string of Tam was even more confusing. One word kept popping up, however; afous, or hand. I looked over at him, belatedly noticing that one sleeve of his overcoat hung dark and empty. He had no left hand, and he was asking me what I could do about it. I flushed and said I didn’t know anything about prosthetics, that I was an environment volunteer and that wasn’t my area of expertise. He looked unsurprised, and slowly walked away. By this time, Molly’s family had walked off ahead and I was left alone in the fading light, watching Aziz’ back retreat down the road, every movement giving off an air of defeat. “Blati!” (wait), I said as I trotted to catch him. I put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him again before saying “I don’t know anything about what you’re asking, but I will research it; that’s all I can promise.” For the first time, he smiled. A few weeks later, I had him into my house to take a couple pictures of him and what was left of his hand; as well as getting a clear view of what had happened that had caused him to lose it. He told me slowly and haltingly, and I had to ask him to repeat much of it before I got an idea of the story: There had been an accident, two years before, when Aziz was just fifteen. Like any fifteen year old boy, he loved playing with fire, regardless of the consequences. I flushed, recalling several close calls I had had with bottle rockets around the same time in my life. Aziz, it transpired, was an avid watcher of NBC action, a channel where they play old, American action movies over and over, without ever once saying that they are fictional (this is important). One day, after watching a movie, Aziz decided to make a pipe-bomb. He took a length of metal tubing and stuffed it with industrial-grade fertilizer (widely available and loosely regulated in a country whose primary natural resource is phosphates). The only problem now, was a fuse… for which he used a match. You can all guess, as I did, what happened next. The makeshift explosive detonated before he could throw it, leaving his hand a charred ruin. What little remained was amputated at the hospital in Er-Rachidia. I could only imagine the pain and horror of that four hour ambulance ride; the smell of burned flesh, the screaming. Yet he told it to me so matter-of-factly, he had had two years to come to terms with what had happened; what had shattered his life forever. He had gone from whole and normal, to broken and outcast in a matter of seconds. A few snapshots and he stood up, we had gone quiet after his story, but he broke the silence and said “shukran” (thank you). Then he took my hand, kissed it once, and ran out the door into the darkness of the street. ~ Four months later, after several meetings and innumerable emails and phone calls, Aziz and I waited side by side for a midday transit. It was mid-July by then, and the leaves of the poplars shivered in the warm breeze. The mountains were lit up by the flat, hot light of the summer afternoon, and people hid from the sun in cafés; beneath awnings or sometimes even an umbrella. A month or so before, Hakim, my contact in Rabat, had put me in touch with a prosthetics specialist who lived and practiced in the Spanish enclave-city of Melilla, on the northern coast. He had taken an interest in Aziz’ case, and was on vacation in our area. Our destination was Merzouga, where we would meet the doctor on the fringe of the Saharan Erg, a dune sea. But first we would spend the night in Er-Rachidia, which Aziz had not returned to since the accident. The transit arrived in short order and we watched as the miles of silent mountainsides and deep canyons slid by our window. A taxi from Er-Rich completed this leg of the journey, and soon we were sitting together at my favorite café, drinking sweet coffee and enjoying the shade provided by the towering eucalyptus trees in the back garden. My friends, Driss and Said, both joined us and Aziz looked back and forth between us as we spoke in English. I explained to him that one of them would be our translator tomorrow, to enable me to speak with the Doctor, who spoke Spanish, French, and Moroccan Arabic—no Tamazight. The entire process hung on what he would tell us the next day, and it would be then when he would tell us whether or not Aziz was even eligible for a new hand. Said agreed to join us the next day and the rest of the evening was spent introducing Aziz to other volunteers who were in the area. He also had the opportunity to try his first pizza, which he thoroughly enjoyed. We went to bed exhausted, and met Said the next morning at the taxi stand. The morning sunlight was already hot on my back as we crammed into the taxi bound for the city of Erfoud, considered by some to be the gateway to the northern Sahara. I ended up buying out the additional seats in another taxi who said he knew where the Auberge was that the doctor had referred us to. Before long we were powering across the Saharan Hamada, rock-plain, and watching as the heat roiled off the scorched landscape of blackened rock in shimmering, viscous waves. Soon, the sparkling sea of dunes rose from the rippling horizon, their gigantic reality seeming a fevered mirage in the midday heat. Merzouga itself was not much of a town, the center being a cluster of one-room shops and small hotels, half-swallowed by the eternally encroaching sands. Sun-darkened men in indigo jelaba robes and a few tired looking camels watched as we drove around trying to find our destination The auberges were scattered along the edge of the erg itself, and the shining red-gold dunes loomed over everything as we searched. After a time, we pulled up to a low, earthen building half-buried by the shifting sands. My throat was dry, and sweat rolled down my back as I stepped out into the sunlight and knocked on the front door. I was greeted by a rather suspicious Moroccan man, who turned out to be the owner, demanding what my business was asking after one of his guests. I looked sideways at Said and asked him to translate for me. “Tell the Spanish doctor that the American is here to see him, and be fast about it.” Shooting me a glare, the proprietor vanished into the dark interior leaving us to stand in the heat, which had climbed to nearly 115°F. After a while, a tall gray-haired man came striding up the hall toward us, with the proprietor trailing behind him sullenly. I had never been more relieved to see anybody in my life. Aziz was measured and evaluated in the doctor’s sweltering hotel room, and a cast was made of his damaged wrist and forearm. Speaking with the doctor through Said, I was told that Aziz was the ideal candidate for a prosthetic hand. There were a variety of options, but all were expensive; even with the doctor being willing to work for free, this would require a grant of some kind. Though the doctor said he was willing to start work right away, I asked him to hold off while I researched the funding possibilities. Aziz was ecstatic on the ride back to Er-Rachidia, but I was more subdued; I knew how much work I had ahead of me, and I knew how easily everything could come crashing down around my ears, sliding away like sand through my fingers. That night, I sat on the front steps of the apartment building where we were staying with my friends Marcus and Dipesh, looking up at the stars. I thought of the impossible responsibility and fragility of the task ahead, and how much was riding on it. I remembered what Aziz’ father had said to me a few weeks before as we sat at a café table back in the village “I know that this may not happen. But if you do this for my son, the whole valley will be happy.” The door opened behind me and Aziz sat down on the steps as well. “Hassan, I know this may not work out, but I want you to know that either way, we’ll still have a party in my village to celebrate.” I sat there in silence, not knowing what to say. ~ Peace Corps grants are tricky. They come in a variety of forms, but all are clear that they should be used only for a “sustainable” project, that benefits the community rather than the individual. What I was trying to do for Aziz, was not a Peace Corps project by the standard definition. It would change only one life, rather than many. In my estimation, this was still entirely worthwhile; I came here with the hope that if I could change one life, help even just one person, my time here in North Africa would have been worth it. But how was I going to do it? I researched on my own for awhile, making phone calls to various Peace Corps staff members trying to work things out. Finally, we found what we were looking for, a much needed loophole; one that could make many small scale projects that don’t fit Peace Corps guidelines a reality. It was so simple, I was at first wary of its legality. Although I wasn’t allowed to raise the money on my own, privately or through grants, there was no reason that an association could not do it on Aziz’ behalf. In essence: If I never touched the money, I wasn’t raising it. I racked my brain, trying to think of a Moroccan association willing to accept donations for a project like this. When I put the question to the Peace Corps staff on the other end of the phone, they replied slowly: “You misunderstood; when I said ‘any association’ I meant any association.” “So, means any non-profit back in the states?” “Yes!” “How about a church?” “Sounds fine to me.” I immediately sent an email to Christ the King Lutheran Church, back home in Durango, Colorado. I told Aziz’ story, and what I had been able to do so far. Their reply was brief, and very positive. The tagline of the email? “Let’s give the boy a hand” ~ Summer crept by, and I watched as my friends back home, faculty from my college (Fort Lewis), and colleagues from my work with the parks donated to Aziz’ cause. Ramadan came and went in a blaze of dehydration and delirium and I soon found my hands full with the Wedding Festival in Imilchil in mid-September. The nights lengthened and grew colder; the days began to be filled with the crisp, golden light of another Atlas Autumn. Finally, I got an email. We had reached, and overshot, our original goal on 9/11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York which planted the bitter seed of distrust and hatred of Muslims in many Americans. Aziz is muslim, and this fact had been emphasized passionately by my old friend, Kip Stransky, during that service. He explained that on that day, of all days, we should remember to love those who are different from us and to extend our love and goodwill even to those that society tells us we should despise. After all, isn’t that what Jesus would do? ~ The leaves had been swept from the poplars by the river by the bitter winter wind, by the time the doctor informed me he had finished. We set a date for mid-December, and again I found myself sitting with Aziz as we waited for the transit. The morning was pale with frost and the people followed the weak sunlight from café to café as it slowly moved from one side of the street to the other. The first snow of the year glistened on the mountains high above and I was just beginning to warm up when the transit arrived. In the days that followed, Aziz and I made our way to the Northeast corner of Morocco. We stayed with friends of mine the whole way; they were very generous to take us in, and I thank them for it. Errachidia was the first stop, then ten hours by bus across the Saharan plain to Oujda, a rest in the beautifully forested village of Tafelghalt, and finally to Nador, a city perched on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was a journey of firsts for Aziz, and he marveled at things that I too often take for granted. Here are a few highlights: Stoplights exist to regulate traffic, ice can be used to cool drinks, occasionally the water that comes out of the tap is hot, just because the nice man tried to sell you something doesn’t make it legal, and so on and so forth. It was quite an experience for him, and for me as well, as I got a fresh look at my own life (which I long considered to be mundane and rather normal) through the Aziz’ eyes. We stayed in a hotel, for which the doctor had kindly paid the bill, and walked along the seashore for awhile which was another first for Aziz. My friend Socorra, who had been in Morocco as long as I, joined us in Tafelghalt and accompanied us to Nador to help out with translation. She was proving an invaluable source of support to both Aziz and me, as Aziz was not always on his best behavior, so two pairs of eyes were better than one. He started calling us ‘Mom and Dad’ which I found rather appropriate as we always seemed to be hollering at him about various things. In the space of two minutes I had informed him, much to his chagrin, that, no, he couldn’t ride the pony that we passed and Socorra then had to pull him out of traffic. So yes, ‘Mom and Dad’. After our walk, we took him to McDonalds, (yes, there’s one here too) a place I avoided like the plague in the states but rather enjoyed in the Moroccan setting. To Aziz it was a veritable ‘cave of wonders’, with well dressed people forming orderly lines to place their orders, music playing quietly from invisible speakers, and a non-fluctuating room temperature. I can empathize with him of course, as central heating now makes me patently uncomfortable (do people really need their houses so warm!?). Socorra and I chatted in English, blessed English, as Aziz tried to figure out what to do with his cheeseburger and McFlurry. He enjoyed it of course, but not nearly as much as the two rounds of bumper cars I paid for at a traveling carnival on the way back to the hotel. By the time the doctor arrived the next morning, I had few remaining fingernails after biting most of them to the quick. We exchanged our greetings in the hotel lobby and proceeded up to the room. The new hand was a wonder, a delicate sheath of life-like plastic skin fitting over a carbon-fiber frame. Aziz was dumbstruck by how real it looked. He told me he had never seen anything like this; to be honest, neither had I and I told him so. The hand was adjusted to fit right there in the room and, after an hour or so, it was on Aziz wrist and he was running around giving everyone high fives. The doctor was grinning ear to ear, as was Socorra who had been an amazing translator. I smiled cautiously, not believing it was done. But as I looked at Aziz’ face, I saw ecstasy; so different was he from the tired and downcast boy I had met on the road nearly a year before, that I could scarcely believe them the same person. We had done it, he and I, a little project that could have died at anytime was kept alive by a veritable chain of friends and advisors. This wasn’t my doing, as the doctor insisted to Aziz, I just had the pleasure of being the facilitator—a catalyst for change. But after all, isn’t that what Peace Corps is all about? ~ As the rain slowly dies down and daylight begins to fade from the hotel courtyard, I shut off my computer and sit in the dark quiet, listening to the drops of water falling from the drooping leaves of the palms. I think of all that I have seen in the past 22 months here. I think of the four months I have remaining in Morocco, and wonder what challenges and opportunities they hold for me. But most of all, I think of Aziz and smile.

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the delay,

-Charlie

Ok, ok. I realize that it has been about 5 months since my last entry. This is unforgivable and I have very few excuses; but here they are. Since my last entry, I have been engrossed in a complicated (and hopefully rewarding) project that will be coming to fruition in the next week... Wait for an update on that! Also, I have had to deal with my second Ramadan (the entire month of August), the Imilchil Wedding Festival (in September), the onset of winter, and winterizing my house. Lots of things to keep me busy.

I have five months left, and expect regular updates from me until my term ends. It's winter now, and there is not much else left for me to do.

For now, I would like to turn your attention to my work in the "Canyon Country Zephyr", a publication out of the red deserts of Southeast Utah, that I write for bi-monthly. It's a wonderful paper, one that I grew up reading (I picked up a copy whenever I was in Moab), and I hope that you will enjoy the Z as much as have! Enjoy the other authors work, and maybe even contribute to the Z! You know how difficult it is for the written word to survive in such dire economic straits, and we are already losing papers and post offices left and right! Ok, getting off my soapbox now, read on.

I may slack on the blog, but I don't slack on the Z! Below, you will find links to all eight of my entries so far, which you can download as a PDF and read at your leisure. If you would like to comment, you can have your say on the Zephyr main page or email my editor, Jim Stiles at cczephyr@gmail.com. Enjoy, and please forgive my blogging lassitude!

Volume 1: Oct/Nov 2010

Volume 2: Dec 2010/Jan 2011

Volume 3: Feb/Mar 2011

Volume 4: Apr/May 2011

Volume 5: Jun/Jul 2011

Volume 6: Aug/Sep 2011

Volume 7: Oct/Nov 2011

Volume 8: Dec 2011/Jan 2012

Expect more entries soon; on Winter, Ramadan, Wedding Festival, and of course my project (once complete).

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

Reading back over several of my older blogs from the same time this last year I have come to realize how much my life here in Morocco has changed. The same things still happen to me every day; I still go to the same stores, run the same errands, and sit in the same cafes. But now it's all normal, it's all easy, I can speak as much Tam as I need to in order to communicate in conversations about, well, anything. I have learned the importance of descriptive terms and how, if you use enough of them, you will eventually arrive at the word that you were searching for. I have friends now, good ones. Guys that walk down the street with me with their arm around my shoulders (a step up from holding hands, which everybody does), an older woman that yells at me whenever I forget to come over for tea, and merchants and cafe owners that try to marry me off to any woman that they happen to know (or see). Everybody knows me now, or at least knows of me. I can't say how many times a person, that I would swear to having never seen before, has walked up to me and struck up a conversation... always having started it by greeting me by my name (Hassan).

The gendarmes and town officials are my friends now as well, and I find them helpful and easy to work with. At fourth of July, they told me I could erect a flag pole on my roof and fly Old Glory proudly and prominently in the center of the village... provided of course that I fly a Moroccan flag above it. They loaned (or at least that was my impression) me a Moroccan Flag to use (full sized ones can be tough to obtain outside the cities), and when I went to return it the next day they refused to take it back. They said it was a gift and that, since I was Moroccan now, I could have it.

This is not the first time anyone has called me a Moroccan; no, I remember the first time very clearly. Seven or eight months ago, I was just emerging in late morning from my little cement house, blinking in the rich, golden sunlight of late fall. Feeling thin and frail, still sporting a headache and mild vertigo from my latest intestinal malady, I carefully fitted my sunglasses over my uncomfortably pale eyes and stared down the street. A boy of about 14 was headed my way, I had seen him often working in the warehouse across the street and he would always nod to me as I passed by. He stopped and appraised me for a second as I stood there swaying slightly. I smiled a little and murmured "Sbah lxir" (Good morning). He smiled back and repeated the phrase and we exchanged morning pleasantries. As I bid him farewell and turned to go to the store to buy the first food I had had in days, he took my hand and placed his other hand on my unusually prominent collarbone (did you know I have collarbones? I didn't before coming here!). He looked at me seriously and said: "Hassan, you are berber." "Hassan, shyin amazighn". Without waiting for a response, he turned and vanished into the warehouse and left me there staring after him dumbfounded and more than a little pleased. I'll always remember that.

This boy was the first, but now it is commonplace for people to call me amazighn or Hassan win Ait Haddidou (the tribe of berbers in the area; the sons of Haddidou). In fact, if an outsider from another village walks up me when I am with my Moroccan friend and refers to me as an aromi (foreigner), my friends will shame him and correct him with "No, Hassan is berber, Hassan is one of us. Hassan belongs in [village]". If I am alone and the same thing happens, inevitably a diminutive, white bearded old man in a jelaba robe and head-wrap will shuffle over to us, shake my hand, and wheeze out the same barrage of chastisements and insults to the outsider before bringing one hand up to the side of his head and shaking it in the motion for "crazy". Apparently, not only am I a member of the tribe now, but everyone and their uncle is expected to know it immediately.

I have also forged deeper connections with select Moroccans here in the village than I thought possible with my limited language. My best friend in the village, I'll call him "Haddou", and I have had hours long conversations on life, love, religion, and girls. He has come to lean on me as a confidante and often tells me many things that I likely didn't need to hear. He lights up whenever he sees me on the street and I spend a few hours with him every day in his brother's cafe where he works. He is the son of my host father's oldest brother, effectively making me his cousin, but he refers to me as his brother. One night when he was upset, (Haddou is 18 and, as I recall, being a teenager sucks) He was just sitting in a chair outside the cafe and staring at the ground. "What's wrong?", I asked. "I hate it here." He replied.

"In [village]?""No, the whole country, all of Morocco!""Oh, well, do you need a break?""Yes!""Well, let's go to America for an hour..."

We spent the next hour or two in my living room looking at pictures of the states on my computer and listening to "The Best of Jimmy Buffett" on my massive speakers. We didn't say much to eachother at first, but by the end his head had cleared and he was smiling and laughing. I stood up and shook his hand as he got up to leave and asked he was still upset. He said no, and thanked me. I told him to come back any time.

No one insults my language anymore. Or rather if they do, they tend to retract the statement later in the conversation. One day I was sitting on a cement sewage cap by the side of the road in a nearby village, waiting for the afternoon transit to come by and take me home. A man in his fifties walked up to me, took my hand and, after we had exchanged pleasantries, he said "You don't know any Tam". Instead of my standby reaction of last year, which was blushing slightly before looking at my toes and agreeing sheepishly, I locked him in a steely gaze, smiled a little, and replied "How would you know? We haven't even talked about anything yet.". The exchange ended after a long talk about the lack of snow last winter, the wheat in the fields, whether I was fasting for Ramadan (yes, I am), and inquiries after our respective families Moroccan and American. He showed me a nasty burn on his hand, and complained about the clinic being closed (a reasonable thing to complain about), and asked me for a light for his cigarette (always carry a lighter). As he turned to go I took his good hand, and asked quietly "Do I know how to speak Tam?", he smiled broadly and smacked me on the shoulder before answering "Yes!".

When it comes to language, I am my own worst critic. I hate my lack of vocabulary and lack of training (I have never had a tutor here in the village). I think I speak like an unusually slow toddler, if was in school here, I would be the tall kid who repeated the third grade... twice. But, to my constant surprise, people continue to understand what I say and even more shocking, I understand what they say. A couple of months ago the second years, the most experienced volunteers in the country, my icons and friends, left. Their service was up, they had finished their 26 months in typical style and panache, and suddenly the people I had grown so used to spending time around and learning from were gone. In their places arrived two starry-eyed new volunteers, fresh out of training and ready to take on the Atlas. Suddenly I had two people that looked to me as I had looked to the second years. I was suddenly an example, an advisor, someone to assist in insurmountable daily obstacles that didn't seem to me like such obstacles anymore. My memories flooded back quickly and I remembered how this place, these people, and this language seemed to me a year ago. The presence of the new volunteers gave me another perspective on the village and their arrival signaled a distinct change in the nature of my service. I was no longer on the uphill scramble. I was no longer trying to fit in and integrate. I was already there, I wasn't Charlie anymore, but Hassan win Ait Haddidou. I had arrived. I was in.

Thanks for reading, sorry for the delay,

-Charlie

P.S. If you are still wondering, "Does Charlie ever work?" The answer is yes I do, and it's going great... but that's all a story for another time.

Before I began my service here in Morocco, I was unaware that an entire village could hibernate. I mean, sure there’s Silverton that gets snowbound every winter and Lake City as well, but for the most part, American cities and towns just change activities. In Durango, kayaks are put away in the fall and swapped for skis and beacons, the climbing harnesses stay out but the medium changes from rock to ice. Or people go to Utah and claw their way up the sun warmed walls at Indian Creek. My village, however, hibernates. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I had the pleasure of watching it begin to stir this past week. Shops are getting new awnings painted and the café owners are renovating to best accommodate the tourist rush that we all hope will come. Today, I went down to my favorite café, run by a host cousin of mine, and brought my hookah with me. We sat upstairs in his newly refurbished seating area and smoked the hookah and talked about various things, such as when I was planning on getting married (a frequent question here, in the marriage capital of the Atlas). As I sat with my tea glass in hand, I looked around at the newly painted walls depicting various scenes from around the region. To my right was the lush shores of Lake Tislit and the sweeping expanse of the Plateau du Lacs; before me was a scene from the annual wedding festival depicting fully decked out amaizighn and Tamazight. The women in the painting were depicted in wedding garb resplendent in tribal cloaks and colorful headscarves, both signifying their belonging the Ait Yaza and Ait Brahim, the two tribes that make up the Ait Haddidou. The men wore white jelabas and head coverings; behind them all loomed a towering Kasbah. The painting that interested me most was that to my immediate right, of a moss shrouded waterfall. Cascade Agouni, the waterfall that I am currently writing grants and proposals to build a permanent trail to; anything to increase tourism. I have not yet seen it, though I will go up to survey it any day now with one of the local guides. I am sure I can find it myself, if you have been reading this regularly you know that I have been in far sticker situations in the wild Atlas, but I would prefer some company even if I have to speak Tamazight the entire day, an activity that wears me out far more than any physical exertion. ~ I went on my first run in a long while early this morning. The sun was not yet up and red dust still hung thick in the air from the recent Saharan sandstorm that howled around my house for three days prior (try sleeping through one of those, it ain’t easy). The snow was almost gone from the mountains and the fields were green with new wheat. I reached the end of my run and encountered a dog who woofed at me halfheartedly; I didn’t want to try him so I turned around. I’ll bring him some bread tomorrow and see how that goes. Dogs, like elected officials, accept bribes. The college (middle school) was free of kids since most of them are on holiday right now; Moroccan spring break and the remainder of the run was quiet except for a few confused farmers that jumped at the aromi (foreigner) that ran by them in sweatpants and a soccer jersey. Just wait till I start wearing shorts next month… The poplars are beginning to leaf out and the willows along the river are drooping with innumerable grey catkins, birds are beginning to return and as I run by the stands of poplars Hoopoes hurl shrill warnings at my back. Sometimes if I am sitting in my study reading, with the windows open to let in the warm spring air, sparrows will perch on the ornate iron bars and chirp at me tentatively as if asking to be let in. Not that this is unheard of, in the house that I lived in down in the Dades Valley, a year ago now, I often shared my afternoon tea with a couple of small birds and several gorgeous calico cats. Looking up at the mountains this afternoon, I realized that the snow is almost gone and suddenly I was back at the point in the seasons that I was first introduced to my high mountain village. I have come full circle and now I know what comes next. The gentle warm of Atlas summer, the glorious golden light of fall, and then once again a harrowing winter; I suppose it’s time for an encore. I have grown to love it here, and am loath to spend much time in my house anymore. If I am not walking in the mountains above the village, I am sitting in a café surrounded by Moroccan men and we talk about, well, everything. Projects are moving along slowly, but at least they exist. I am slated to start teaching at the secondary school next month, and have a few other things going as well. A few days ago, I also got to work in the fields for the first time. I loved it. I accompanied a friend of mine to his fields in the shadow of the rock fin that houses the Qaida and he taught me the finer points of irrigation. We diverted ditches and watched as the water rushed around the tender young wheat shoots. It was a beautiful morning and I went home to lunch thoroughly muddy and satisfied. My friend Ali has told me recently that he would teach me about farming in his fields as well. He has apple orchards and I can’t wait to learn about their upkeep and management, not to mention snag a few apples in the fall to make apple butter with. I am finally reaching the point that I am fully comfortable in my village, and reaching it makes me realize how uncomfortable I was initially. It was incredibly intimidating being here all alone, with barely function language surrounded by people that were different from me in so many ways. It’s hard to describe how one can feel alone surrounded by people, but I assure you it’s possible. ~ A friend of mine recently commented that I was having an easy time over here because all my blog entries are so positive and “uplifting”. I know this is true and the reason behind it was that I didn’t think anybody wanted to hear me complain. So, in attempt to bridge this gap in communication with you all, I will now try to convey some of the difficulties I have experienced throughout my service. This is not complaining, please understand, but a matter of fact reality check. First and foremost, is language. Imagine having communication taken away from you and then having to learn it all over again. Speech, hand gestures, and even etiquette. I was suddenly in a place where I couldn’t use my left hand for much of anything in public, since that is the hand people use to clean up after a visit to the bathroom. I have even been shamed by an old man who saw me writing with my left hand while sitting in a café! The language has been incredibly tough, Tamazight berber is even more difficult than Arabic, and little is actually written town about it. Not to mention it changes every fifty miles or so. The second hurdle vies for dominance with the first and that is illness. Not many people realize that I was sick for the first seven months in Morocco! I wrote about my brush with Typhoid last year, but otherwise I haven’t really mentioned it. Well, I will now: I have had at least 4 intestinal infections and 3 different parasites, I have been or more medications taken in tandem than I have ever before had to consume, and happily, got over it six months ago. I have been well ever since then. The last parasite that I had back in October was never identified, and the Peace Corps medical staff and I simply called it “The Kraken”. It took three days of the pharmaceutical equivalent of a hydrogen bomb to slay it. I can take one more round of that medication this year if need be, but no more than that due to its other damaging effects. Third hurdle: isolation. I have been alone more in the past year than I have ever before. I got a lot of reading done I suppose, and am more in tune with myself than I have ever been. But there were days, sometimes weeks, that went by when I really needed a friend to talk to (in ENGLISH) and had no one to turn to. My neighboring volunteers have been amazing. We really look out for eachother and are willing to drop what we’re doing to go nurse someone that’s sick, or to cook them dinner if they’re in a funk. We are all in this together. So, there are other things as well, and they vary from day to day; even easy days here are more difficult than being back in America. But those are the three big ones, and I hope they clarify for you “why this is the toughest job I’ll ever love” Happy spring, and thanks for reading, Charlie

Here is an entry from my first Peace Corps Journal (I am now on my second). It is from my first week spent with my host family in Ait Gmat on the Dades river. I was getting to know my family and my fellow trainees and had no idea where my site was as of yet. It's a good look back....

03.09.2010 (Day 9)

The wind howled all night last night. I slept very hard though, and awoke without knowing where I was, but my confusion made me smile. I was energized all day and enjoyed myself thoroughly. I felt like we were connecting to the community today, especially on our community walk out into the countryside. Everyone is so very friendly and I spoke to many people.

The countryside is beautiful here, and there are raised paths between fields of wheat and clover. These are bordered by blooming almond and apricot trees and what I swear is aspen. Silvery olive trees are everywhere; in fields and in every courtyard and garden. These fields have been cultivated for more than 1000 years and the crumbling kasbah that we walked through to is testament to the region's violent past. The valleys of the Dades and Draa anre the first actual civilization you hit coming north from the Sahara so the kasbahs defended the local people from Tuareg raids and also served as centers of commerce.

It's all so rich and fascinating and I am devouring every moment; the warm breezes, the rich golden light, and the echoing call to prayer. This country is beautiful and mysterious. I know this euphoria will not last, but taking it one day at a time, I think the two years will fly by in no time at all. Well, now to my host family, to dinner, and tomorrow to Ouarzazate for debriefing.

~

It's strange, in some ways it feels like my life has started over. I am learning even the most fundamental things in life all over again: how to use the toilet, even how to eat. This evening Hayat was having a great time teaching me to eat lentils with my fingers. I felt like an accomplished toddler when I finally figured it out and was lauded by the family.

I look forward to experiencing my site, wherever the heck it is, for two years. The opportunity to watch a village grow and change throughout the seasons will be a joy indeed.

~

And it still is... There have been many ups and downs, some of which you have read about here on this blog, but ultimately the euphoria did give way to a gentle acceptance and contentment. I am happy to be here, I am happy to stay, and in a year's time, I will be happy to return home with stories and memories to share with you all.

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

NOTE: I just dug this up in my freewriting file on my computer. I forgot that I had even written it.The original date is below:

02.27.2011 Last year, at almost precisely this time, I found myself standing in line at the tiny Durango-La Plata County Airport waiting for my tickets to print. Behind me, the La Plata Mountains loomed large and icy, framed by the thick glass of the terminal windows; to my left a stuffed bear in a flyfishing getup stood sentinel by the gift shop. We were pretty quiet, my family and I. Looking back I think we were in shock. Peace Corps had been thrown around our family dinner conversation for almost a year and a half now, but I am not sure if it really hit us until we stood there, next to a flyfishing bear and backed by the familiar mountains that supported our world. I had decided to join the Peace Corps on a whim in the fall of the previous year. I had just finished an idyllic, albeit short, season at Grand Teton National Park; living in a one room cabin, flyfishing every day at twilight, and always with the rugged, glaciated backdrop of the Teton Range framing my every moment. After such a jaw dropping experience, I found myself back home in a strange doldrums of sorts. I like my home and I love my parents, but it didn’t feel right to be back in the role of live-in son. Sleeping in my room and eating for free weighed heavily on my mind. I was no longer who I was and thus home was no longer the place it had long been to me. In the midst of all of this confusion, I grew more and more frustrated by the lack of job offers from the NPS, despite the slew of applications I had fired off to many parks all across the country; I am not picky. No bites. A large part of this, I knew from unfortunate experience, was from the Preferential Hiring points afforded veterans; most of whom deserve it. Many hiring officials never even make it to my application. I was reading a book that fall at home, a creatively titled sequel to Muleady-Mecham’s book “Park Ranger” called “Park Ranger: the Sequel”. It was a good book and shared details about the Ranger’s life that had been too dark to be shared in the first book. But it wasn’t the fatal car crashes or high-angle body recoveries that commanded my attention, it was a brief mention of a ranger who got permanent status through “Peace Corps Preference”. I called some of my NPS friends and researched it. Sure enough, service in the US Peace Corps would qualify me for not just eligibility, but noncompetitive eligibility. Translated, it meant I could be hired without even having to apply for a position. It was a loophole, a magic bullet; hell, I figured, I could put up with anything for two years, so long as it led to that. If I went into the Peace Corps, my career was assured. I began my application that night. A season in Big Bend fell in my lap shortly after my application went through and I handled interviews from SW Texas trying to determine my placement, which had been narrowed down to the entire continent of Africa. Silence for awhile and I began a summer season at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, deliberately turning down interviews for positions in Yosemite and Wrangell-St. Elias so I could be closer to my extended family in the east. I spent the entire summer driving around Appalachia and the Piedmont visiting family and friends that I hadn’t seen in years. It felt so good to reconnect with my forgotten roots; to chase fireflies and walk around barefoot. I reeked of bug-spray and sweated constantly. That said, the serenity offered by the island and the constant boom of the surf gave me amazing peace. I left in the fall, more connected to the place than I had ever been before. I had people to miss and people to miss me, I can’t wait to see my rediscovered family again. A few months after that, I found myself in line at the airport, waiting to go to Morocco. I was bound for Africa. Africa. A name I had associated with mystery, danger, wildness for my entire childhood was to be my home for two years—four times longer than I had ever been away from home. Add to that the fact that I was to live in the midst of an Islamic culture, the enemy according to some. A few of my friends thought that I would be killed on sight, simply for being an American. Even my parents, two of the most broad-minded people I know, were concerned for my safety. Even I had my doubts, we are spoon-fed so much hate by our national media, that it worms its way into our collective unconscious. America, a nation that defines freedom for much of the world, was pointing the finger at an entire religion, billions of people, for an atrocity committed by a few fanatics. Our spin doctors told us who to hate and who to fear, within a decade the very sight of a man in a prayer robe and traditional beard sent our psyches into paroxysms of terror. The moment I stepped off the plane in Casablanca, the first time I met a Moroccan in my training village, and when I was fed, tended-to, and loved by two separate families, I knew I had been lied to. ~ Over the course of the past year, I have learned what defines a culture, I have seen grace, nobility, and love far surpassing my expectations. I have come to legitimately love the people here; even as I struggle speaking their language they are kind, understanding, and amused. I have had to relearn patience in the face of a system that is barely held together. I have relearned how to speak, how to cook, how to bathe, and even how to go to the bathroom. I never realized that culture begins at birth; arriving in Morocco I had to relearn everything. Even now, after so much work, I feel like a precocious 3rd grader. My only real achievement is staying well for the past 5 months—and sick for the first 7. I have also learned to live with myself, I can be alone for long periods of time without growing lonely; I read and write almost every day. I sit in the mornings on the cement expanse of my roof, regarding a vista that I know would have tourists talking for many months after. The unknown has slowly become known, and the unusual is now commonplace. I have watched my friends grow and change with me, many of them are leaving next month. They are finished with their service; they have done what they came to do, and now it is my turn to help new volunteers through the ups and downs of their first year; just as the previous volunteers have helped me. In many respects, the two years lived in the Peace Corps, is like living an entire life Birth to Death. The amount of personal evolution is stunning; and difficult to encapsulate. I found it difficult to talk about with people when I was home for Christmas—was that really two months ago? I am not sure if this evolution is making me a better person, or simply more accepting of my faults. Sometimes I think the former, other times the latter. What is for sure, is that I have made a home in this place that was initially so foreign and unknown. I have grown to love it; to find peace in its chaos, and to see indescribable beauty in each day spent in the high Atlas. Had I known any of this, I would have smiled to myself as I stood in that airport, to the right of the flyfishing bear, between my silent parents. I would have strode confidently toward the gate, ecstatic with the prospect all that was to come. As it was I hugged both my parents, all of us choking back tears, and taking one final look at the mountains through the windows, and at the bear by the door, I boarded the plane and was gone.Thanks for reading,

Charlie

The wind rustles the tall golden grass of the silent graveyard as I pass through it on my way home from lunch with my Moroccan family. It is cold today and a chill mist drifts down from the looming clouds that form a grey and threatening ceiling above my tiny village. Tombstones jut at odd angles from their mounds, poking above the sea of grass as immobile reminders of finality; the long stems sway in the breeze and brush the cold stones. Death surrounded by life. In many ways the entire village is like this right now, with the advent of spring. The willows have begun to bud along with the poplars and the tall walnuts that stand hidden behind the Qaida. Snow remains on the nearly sterile heights, but I know from last year that the thorny ifssi that grows here and there on the mountainsides will soon burst into a riot of bloom and the warming air will be heavy with their scent mixed with the raw, flinty smell of Atlas stone. In front of the post office, I see three of my friends who tell me with no preamble that a tsunami has hit Japan and hundreds of people have been killed. I have a hard time following the fast berber narrative and when they slow down I hear about swamped fields and houses on fire. It seems unreal, to hear of such pain half a world away spoken of in a 3000 year old dialect in the middle of the Atlas Mountains. I end the conversation quickly and I say I will go home to look it up on the internet. Passing through a narrow alleyway winding through the ruined remains of the Kasbah, I note how pale the earthen walls look against the leaden sky. Looking upward I see whisper-thin tendrils of snow beginning to descend the flanks of Tissekt Tamda, the folded mountain that I watch the sunset light up in the evenings. As the snow begins to fall, it seems as though the mountains are being erased, lines are blurred and the whole scene seems to take on an ethereal tone. I reach my door and let myself in with a bang of metal. I turn on my computer and let the modem dial, it takes a few minutes to load CNN. The horror is plastered there on the page for all to see; body counts, videos of sweeping waves and homes ablaze. On one part of the island, firefighters are working to quench an oil refinery that has caught fire, on another a nuclear plant is shut down as radiation leaks out into the surrounding countryside. I close the page down and sit for a minute. Trying to comprehend bad news is always difficult, I try to put myself in the shoes of the victims but never can. It is a level of pain and shock that I can’t even fathom; that I don’t want to fathom. I remember another time, nearly ten years ago, when I sat on the edge of my grandmother’s bed watching the twin towers crumble and collapse in New York. It was September 11th, 2001; I was 14 years old. People were running toward the camera, grey with dust and faces streaked with dark trickles of blood. My family and I sat there, stunned and no one spoke for a couple of hours. Our circuits were fried in the face of the horror that played out before us like a movie. But it wasn’t a movie. Last night, I listened to an NPR program called “This American Life”, they were talking about a 1950s talk show that hosted a survivor from the Hiroshima blast and I listened he told his story in halting, emotional, English. The show ended with a tearful handshake with the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb that fateful day, who was also a guest on the show. The pilot had retired and become a sculptor. His most famous work was a marble mushroom cloud with runnels of blood streaking down its sides. He called it ‘God’s Wind at Hiroshima?’. It is a question he asked himself for the rest of his life. Pain and Disaster. Death and Silence. Some of this we cause, some sweeps ruthlessly down from the universe. A bolt from the blue; an act of God. God’s wind? I can do nothing to help the people in Japan, I can do nothing from here in my village in the Atlas. I simply will sit here, feeling again as though I am on the edge of my grandmother’s bed and numbly watch as disaster unfolds. My thoughts and prayers are with those who are in pain. Peace be with you all. Thanks for reading, Charlie

It seems that yesterday marked one year in this glorious country that I am privileged to call my home. I have seen a full cycle of seasons here, and cannot believe that the time has flown so quickly. Just last March I had arrived here in Morocco and gone to Marrakech for my introduction to training. Today, I would have been busing over the Tizi-n-Tichka pass to Ouarzazate, which was to be my "hub" city for the next two months. I was tired and apprehensive, but overall I felt excited by the unknown adventure that lay ahead of me; a year out, the adventure continues and is made no less wonderful by the passage of time. I think that I will stop here, and let last night's journal entry speak for itself:

"03/03/2011 (-432) Day 365 Today marks a year in Morocco; one year ago today, I arrived at Aeroport Mohammed V and took the bus to Marrakech. I wrote my first journal entry in the football field at the Club CNSS and wondered at the great unknown before me. I have lived in a state of amazement and wonder ever since. I am sitting at a high table [on the roof] of Cafe Clock, near the Bab Boujaloud of the Fes Medina. The sun is setting on the city and the horizon is broken by crumbling minarets and banded by purple and gold. Swallows dart and dive about in the fading light and the soft sound of drums is carried to me on the same breeze that bears them aloft on their evening rounds. An old man in a striped jelaba is pacing on a nearby rooftop, laundry hangs from a nearby window, and somewhere far off children laugh as they play. Soon the call to prayer begins to echo from countless mosques slightly offset from eachother. The reverent cries form a round, a whole and circular sound. God is great, indeed. I spent the morning with [my friends] in their Villa on Anfa Hill that overlooks La Corniche of Casablanca. and the endless swell of the Atlantic. [my friend] and I had a quiet breakfast this morning and later [her husband] took me out into the city in his convertible. As we crusied beneath the fading grandeur of the french art deco architecture. [We spoke for a long time, about many things before he took me back to get my bags and meet the train]. The train took me to Fes and I wrote for most of the journey, sleeping for the rest. After a few hours the soporific swaying of the train and the clicking of the wheels forms an irresistible lullaby. One year has ended; another lies before me. What wonders are ahead for me now? Tomorrow to Midelt, then to Rich, and finally to [...] the little village in the Atlas that is now my home."

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

The day was bitterly cold and I pulled my jebada tighter about me as I walked up the main hill toward the village Post Office. Dark clouds hung heavy over the mountains toward the North and a chill breeze was beginning to blow through the streets, moaning and kicking up dust. Around me, men in jelabas pulled their hoods down against the dust and some of them sat in the cafes looking somberly at the churning sky.

The transit I boarded some time later was quiet; people chose not to speak, conserving what little warmth there was in that metal box. Crossing the pass above Busemoh, it was beginning to snow, stinging particles of ice that lashed sideways against the windows and formed strange shifting whorls on the pavement before us. That afternoon was spent in the village of Outerbate, sitting by a crackling woodstove and enjoying the company of one of my friends and neighbors on the mountain.

Just before sunset, it began. The wind had died and the snow fell thickly in curtains of fat, white flakes that streamed by outside the window and began to collect on the mud walls of the surrounding houses. Unseen in another part of the village, a mule brayed plaintively, but even that was muffled and then swallowed by the silence of the snow. Anyone who has spent time out in the winter snows can attest to the effect it has on sound, even the loudest shout disappears into the icy depths of a winter forest. All that can be consistently heard is a slight hiss, scarcely audible, of snow falling and collecting around me. Flake upon flake, crystals fusing together and crushing downward beneath the weight of their fellows. The sun the next day will melt the top most layer, crystals dissolving into liquid water only to refreeze beneath the light of the winter moon into fantastic spiraling shapes. Sediment will melt the surface layers faster, dust suspended in the atmosphere, borne in from the desert, leaving the face of old snow sun-cupped and agitated, like the ripples in a puddle during a heavy summer storm.

What storms in summer possess in violence and force, the snow makes up for in longevity. Like the dripping of a spring that erodes stone, the silent and steady force of falling snow is both light and heavy all at once. It covers the mountains in its silent blanket and the world is born anew with the coming of the morning sun.

~

A day later, only white streaks remain in the chill shadows of the peaks; beside walls and beneath the barren trees. Only these pale remains testify to the majesty of the winter storm. A rare gift of snow in the Atlas…

Another bus trip down the Ziz Gorge to Er-Rachidia. I love it, looking down from the high windows of the Souq bus into the sea of Date Palms along the river. Nothing contrasts so brightly from the colors of the Sahara-side Atlas than that of green palm fronds and dark Oleander. It was sunset as I rode through, the sun was lighting the tops of the cliffs, setting the crumbling French watchtowers aflame with its golden light. It was dark when the bus trundled into Er-Rachidia and I made the familiar walk through the dusty alleyways to an apartment where I have spent a great deal of time over the course of my service here. The volunteer who lived there had since left the country and been replaced by a new one, and several members of his Staging Group were there to greet me when I walked in. After an evening spent with them, swapping stories and eating good food, I awoke the next morning to shafting sunlight and made my way out into the city to find breakfast while everyone slept. Not many people were moving this early; Er-Rachidia is never very busy in the daylight. The people here have learned to hide from the sun, a habit that continues even in the milder months of winter here. I had a layered pastry for breakfast, chased by an avocado smoothie so thick that I had to eat it with a spoon. I was alone at my table on the balcony above the cafe, watching the people below me finish their breakfasts and working on a letter to my brother, who is in school in Seattle. Paying the waiter a few dirhams and offering my thanks, I walked back out into the sunlight. I went back past the market to another Cafe, this once named for my village, and went into the back garden to enjoy the towering green trees and listen to the birds singing unseen among their boughs. A puppy tottered among the tables begging for scraps and another snoozed in the sun beneath a table at the rear of the garden. Cats mewed from the rooftop of the cafe and everywhere was cool breeze and dappled sunlight. I sipped my coffee slowly and waited for my friend arrive, a Moroccan who I had been introduced to some months before by the volunteer now gone. When I saw him in the doorway, I motioned him back and he sat with me for some time. We discussed our lives, and work, and ideas that we could collaborate on in the future. He is university educated and knows perfect english, and I enjoy spending time with him. After awhile, he left and I waited for another friend to meet me.~ When she came into the cafe, I waved to her excitedly and she sat down. In the cities, women can sit in most cafes free from suspicion or ridicule. This is not the case in the rural areas like my village where even come female volunteers will not sit in the cafes for fear of attracting negative attention. My friend Malika grew up in Er-rachidia and her family still lives in the city. While in the states, I had picked up a computer power supply from a generous friend of mine to replace Malika’s which had been fried on the powerful electrical current found here. I know this all too well, having toted a pair of speakers all the way to Morocco only to have them sizzle and smoke and then die. It was not a good death. I handed Malika the power supply and she thanked me and invited me to have tea with her family. I followed her as we walked across the city, across the dry riverbed and past the Muslim and Jewish cemeteries to an area of Er-Rachidia I had never before seen, passing between the cool cement houses, with the hot desert sun beating down on our heads, it was easy to forget the brutal cold of the village and the fact that it was January. We arrived in front of a beautiful home draped with crimson bougainvillea, and Malika ushered me into the cool interior of the house where I met her mother and sister. Tea was soon served and, I confess, it was some of the best tea that I have yet tasted here in Morocco. It was not overly sugared and was flavored with a winter herb that Malika said was called merd’dduš. Almost all Moroccan tea has a base of black tea and sugar, but it is the herbs added that make them unique, and they change according to the seasons. Now, winter, was the time of merd’dduš and, up on the mountain, shiba which is a spicy green herb said to encourage warmth. In the summer the tea is flavored with cooling nana (mint) and it is this variation that makes Moroccan tea famous. Although I am a fan of flio (peppermint). Accompanying the tea was a variety of delicious edibles, including mascota a moroccan cake, fresh bread (aġrum), fresh olive oil (ziit-ziitun), and locally rendered date syrup (tahaloute) which proved to be absolutely amazing. After a long time talking and laughing in both Tamazight and English, I got up to leave and Malika walked me to the door, but not before her mother put up a hand and walked into her bedroom, motioning for me to wait. She emerged clutching a small parcel to her chest which she handed to me smiling. I removed the plastic wrappings and found myself holding a small shallow bowl made of fossil-filled dark stone. It was beautiful. I was speechless, a thousand things to say in English flowed through my head, but nothing came in Tam but a simple thank you. It was impossible to convey that this was likely the most meaningful gift I had received in Morocco. I stammered my thanks, several times, and then Malika led me out into the sunlight. We parted ways at the main road and I walked along under the sun, retracing my route back across the dry riverbed and toward the part of the city that I knew. I drew plenty of stares as a tall, blond aromi (foreigner) was a bit of an anomaly, but I didn’t notice. After nearly a year in the fishbowl, standing out is just a simple fact of my life here. ~ That night I sat on the roof of the apartment building up among the satellite dishes watching the city come alive as people flooded out onto the streets for their evening shopping and socializing. Meanwhile I watched the sun setting crimson on the desert horizon and watched as scores of white egrets soared in from their daytime haunts along the River Ziz, searching for food among the palms. I sat for a long time and watched the city move and the stars come out. I smiled to myself thinking back over the 11 months I have spent here and realizing how much I love this place. Thanks again for reading,

Charlie

My time in America seems as though it was a dream as I sit here in my village watching the weeks fly by. Already I have been back a month, and it feels as if I was never gone. Life continues to tick by as usual, the same men sit in the same cafes, following the warm sun from one side of the main street to the other. Morning belongs to one set of cafes and afternoon to the other; a time honored system in a land with no central heating. The same group of kids play soccer (football) in the street in front of my house most nights, hollering and carrying on. Sometimes fights break out or a kid knocks at my door asking for me to retrieve the ball he has kicked onto my roof. Souq every weekend with its customary flood of people, and lunch with my Moroccan family on Fridays with the shaking of hands, drinking of tea, and eating of couscous, which is perhaps one of the tastiest foods on the planet. I mention this not to convey boredom, but rather the delightful regularity of life here in the Atlas. Everything moves slowly, and routines change with the seasons. Very few people are transient here, most have lived here all their lives and will continue to do so; in that respect, my village is not so different from small town America.

Everything feels different after my visit home, not only was I happy to be back, but I am still happy to be here. I delight in the culture and the people that I see every day. Interactions that before I would have viewed as negative now only serve to make me smile and laugh; I feel a deep inner peace and satisfaction and feel content to sit back and watch the seasons pass. I am working though, and have several projects on the table. However, as none of them are sure yet, I will not elaborate on what they are, just that they are proceeding and look promising. I hope to meet with the school soon about reinvigorating the defunct Environmental Education Club, so that will be something to do. But mostly I, and really all of the people of the Atlas, simply have to survive the winter cold and await the glorious months of summer. Months that I was unable to fully enjoy last year due to illness and culture shock.

A good friend and fellow volunteer told me that after one year, I would begin to feel more content here. She said that after seeing one cycle of seasons, there weren’t too many surprises after that. I tend to believe her, and I do not think it coincidence that this feeling of confidence and contentment comes so close to my one year mark, which falls in early March. This is also a reason, I believe, that many people say that Peace Corps doesn’t really start until the second year. Well, I am ready to begin and look forward to my remaining months here. May they be glorious. Thanks for reading,Charlie

Resting my head against the window of the crowded third class carriage, I could feel the rhythm of the train wheels as they clattered against the rails. I glanced at the other Peace Corps Volunteer dozing quietly in the seat across from me and raised my head to look out at the scenery flashing past. The countryside between Fes and Casablanca was green and lush; olive groves marched up and down hillsides and smooth brown fields stretched to the horizon. The day before, spent in the old city, or medina, of Fes had been cold. But not nearly so cold as my village in the Atlas that I had left behind several days before. I knew I would not see it again for over a month; I was going home. ~ A cold day in Colorado, with the Mercury having plunged into the negatives at night, and climbing into the single digits and teens during the day. Near sunset, I find myself standing on the cold stone of a Park Service overlook high on the Mesa Verde cuesta, above the Mancos River Valley. The scene below is perfect and still, and the land is a patchwork of sun and shadow from the retreating snowstorm. Over the La Plata range, silver banners of snow connect the earth to the sky and everywhere hums with the dormant potential of a winter world. Snow covers all, the conifers stand black against its brightness while the cottonwoods along the frozen river and the aspens on the mountainsides form a grey fog of uncertain shape and color.

This has long been a special place for me; it is a place where I go to think, reflect, and contemplate my life. I came here minutes after being told I had been hired as a Park Ranger at Mesa Verde and returned many times that summer to watch the thunderstorms roil and growl above the mountains. I came here each time I returned home from the many parks that I worked at after that, sometimes when the future was uncertain and other times when I had only a few short days of respite before being again swept along in its tide. This is a time such as this, in the middle of three weeks in America in the midst of my Moroccan experience.

~

After ten months in Africa, the familiar and comforting seems strange. I still know how to function here, I remember how to use hot water straight out of the tap, how to get groceries at the supermarket, even how to drive in the snow. But my brain feels as if it is not fully engaged in the actions of my daily life at home. Going to coffee shops to see friends, spending time home with my family, visiting my grandmother; all of it feels like muscle memory, a remembered routine. Every street corner, storefront, and park holds multiple layers of memories for me; memories of youth, adolescence, now adulthood. There are so many associations with everything in this place that I am tied to it eternally; it is unquestionably home. But how do I reconcile all that I have learned in Africa, all that I have seen and felt in these past ten months, with places and people that have changed little, if at all?

I know cannot allow myself to grow comfortable here, to revert into the person I was before Morocco, to pick up my American life where I left off. I have sixteen months left in my Peace Corps Service and travel after that. Who knows what else will have changed in that year? In many ways, I feel as though I am just getting started in Morocco. So these are the things that I sit and think about while looking down into the Mancos Valley, gazing through the many layers of memory and time; trying to make it all fit. ~

On another day, I find myself driving along the ice-choked San Juan river outside of the town of Bluff, Utah. The snow lies thick upon the ground here also, drifted and swirled by the desert wind; each chamisa or snakeweed surrounded by a berm of pale crystal. The white sandstone cliffs that encircle Bluff rise before me and I know that I am close to my destination. Soon I begin to drive slowly through the town. There is the old trading post, closed and asleep beneath bare cottonwoods, the lodge on my left, the coffeehouse on my right. The town is tiny and quiet, it is also where I ultimately would like to settle down and live quietly with my family, at least in one fogged and distant possible future. The Twin Rocks Cafe is open for business and I pull into the gravel lot at the base of the steps.

Eating in this Cafe has long been one of my favorite pastimes when I am in this part of the world, I like to sit and eat, read the local paper, and listen to the conversations of the locals. Across from me, two older women strike up a conversation in Navajo and I listen to the ebb and flow of their beautiful language. I took a year of Navajo in college, and found the language incredibly difficult, but now after close to a year of speaking Tamazight, Navajo does not sound strange to me anymore; maybe I'll try learning it again. Another possible future.

Later, standing at the base of Comb Ridge next to the wash, I look up along the red and white teeth of the monocline as it stretches away to the north, fading with distance before being abruptly swallowed up but the volcanic laccolith of the Abajo Range. Cedar Mesa rises to the northwest, tiers of red stone stairstepping into the sky cleft to its base by the dark mouths of many canyons. Another place of layered memories, I stay there and look and listen to the desert around me. I look at the tracks of coyote, raven, mouse, and lizard imprinted in the soft dusting of snow at my feet and see where the ice has been broken for them to drink. Everywhere there is life and to me life in the desert is the most beautiful there is. Like a star in the night sky, life here blazes strong in the void and the land's harshness melts away before its vibrancy.

~ My time in the states came to a close after three weeks when, to my surprise I was ready to go back to Morocco. After saying goodbye to most of my family, my brother having left the week before to go back to college, I watched the landscape fade into faceless cloud as the plane to Denver climbed out of the airport and turned northward. My Dad accompanied me to Denver International Airport and we parted ways in at the gate, him to go to Chicago on business, and me to Frankfurt and finally back to Morocco where I would spend the rest of my term. Ten months down, sixteen remaining. The flight across the Atlantic was easy and painless and I landed in Frankfurt at midday with a ten hour layover to enjoy. As my bags were checked, I only had a small backpack with me so I exited through customs to go out into the city. An hour or so later, after a bratwurst and paper cup of Gluwein (hot, mulled wine) sitting on a park bench in the square, I found myself walking along the River Rhine and looking out on the fog shrouded city of Frankfurt. I stopped inside a redstone church on the river bank and sat in a pew for awhile enjoying the warmth and the grey light streaming in through the stained glass windows. I was lost in my own thoughts for awhile and I am not sure how much time passed before I left the church and continued on to a small Beer Garden situated on an out of the way street corner. I enjoyed a tall tankard of German lager in the small cozy interior and talked the hostess into posting a “Bread, not bombs” sticker from a Durango Bakery behind the bar. Looking at it, a little piece of home in the midst of foreign surroundings, it reminded me of myself; only, I am not sure where home is anymore. Is it with my family? They have their own lives now, and my brother is flourishing in Seattle which he seems to view as home now. But where is mine? After the strangeness of the last few weeks I began to realize that home was really wherever I happened to be. The Colorado Plateau will always be my place; I will always belong there. But now, I had reached a point where the concept of home has become more nebulous and abstract. I was surprised to discover, standing later on a bridge staring into the muddy waters of the Rhine, that Morocco now felt more like home than my parents’ house in Colorado; that I was looking forward to being back almost as much as I had anticipated my “homecoming”. I could never have discovered this without taking a trip back to Colorado and the epiphany filled me with an electric anticipation. ~ Seeing the spire of the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca from the airplane window, I knew that I had arrived back in Morocco and the rest of the day passed in a blur of airport activities. I had no trouble with baggage and I again found myself with my head resting against the train window as it rumbled through the foothills of the Rif Mountains toward Fes. Once there, I got a hotel room near the Bab Boujaloud, the tannery gate and main entrance to the Ancient Medina, and I fell into bed for eighteen hours, sleeping straight through the jet lag. Sitting early the next morning in a café by the Bab Boujaloud, I looked around at the scene before me. Men in flowing jelabas leading donkeys or pushing carts bustled back and forth through the gate. Sleepy school children wandered out from their homes deep in the medina and walked out through the gate to school carrying colorful backpacks. As I savored my coffee and harsha (a cornbread-like flatbread that’s great with honey) and looked at the Arabic script on the storefronts and at the towering minaret of the nearby mosque, I felt a sensation of relief come over me. I was back in the familiar, I was back to communicating in shaky Tamazight and broken Arabic, I was back to using Turkish toilets and questionable transportation. I was home, and it felt good. As always, thanks for reading, Charlie P.S. To my friends and family that I have once again left behind, I miss you already. Stay as awesome as only you can be!

It was cold this evening. This is normal now, here in the Atlas, as winter as arrived after a long and glorious autumn. The poplars on the river are bare and the mountaintops are dusted with a delicate rime of snow. I lay back in my chair on the roof of my house and looked up at the sky. The stars were beginning to show small and cold against the blue darkness of the dusky sky and the half moon was perched, glowing at the very apex of the dome; neither coming nor going. I lay there and listened to the sounds of the village around me; children playing in the street, dogs barking in the distance, every once and a while the grate and rumble of a vehicle passing my house. As the cold began to permeate my clothing I stood and looked down at my shadow cast by the moonlight. Long and thin, I could make out the folds of my dark cloak, and the peaked hood of the jelaba robe that I have taken to wearing every day. I looked out over the village, at the smoke rising from the chimneys of the mud houses, and the glowing string of street lights strung out along the road where it passed through the sleeping fields. It was so quiet and peaceful, I wished I could stay longer, but the cold forced me inside.~ This has been a month of many things, some the normal every happenings of life here, and others wild, unexpected, and delightful. L’عid axatar, the great feast of Abraham, occurred mid month and I spent three days with my family and their relatives talking, laughing, and sharing in the holiday spirit. I was able to assist in the ritual sacrifice of a ram in front of the house and the subsequent butchering and consuming of the same animal. It was an excellent few days, though seeing the entire family together reminded of how much I miss being with mine and sharing in the easy camaraderie of kin.

Later in the month, I headed to Rabat the capital city in a wild day of traveling across the country by car and by train. It was good to be back there, and it felt fairly normal to navigate and spend time with my friends there. The committee of which I am a member met with Peace Corps staff in a small room at a hotel in the seaside town of Mehidia. While there we also got to meet the members of the new staging group of Volunteers who were just finishing up their two months of training, just as I had seven months before. Suddenly I realized that I was no longer among the newest volunteers in the country, and that the volunteers ahead of me would be leaving soon and suddenly I would be among the “experienced”. Soon enough I would be breaking in the replacements for my friends on the mountain who will be returning to their lives back in America.

In a moment of time alone, I stood on the beach and looked out over the dark Atlantic as the waves lapped at my toes and the warm sun beat down on my back. I thought of my country out there across the interminable swell, of my mountains, my desert, and the tall lighthouse where I worked all last summer, gazing out toward Morocco. So much has changed since then, and most of the change has been in me. Running back through my experiences of the past nine months, I had difficult thinking about all that had occurred and all of the things that had happened to and around me. So much behind me, and even more ahead, I look forward to it with excitement and caution. I no longer fear the unknown, as it is slowly revealing itself to be yet another chapter in the life of a global citizen.

A few days past that moment on the beach, I sat back in my seat and listened to the train clicking and whirring as it passed through countless small towns between Rabat and the port city of Casablanca. I adjusted my tie and looked out the window at a white minaret silhouetted against the blue sea as we passed. I was nervous, for whatever reason, to meet the people who were to pick me up at the railway station in the city. I was to spend Thanksgiving with an American family who lived in Casablanca and had bought a tie and dress belt for the occasion. I still looked a little rough around the edges, but I was clean at least and was ready for some time in upper echelons of Moroccan society; a direct contrast from my usual day to day experience.

As the family pulled up in their Subaru, the first I had seen since coming to Morocco, they greeted me warmly and helped me with my bags. Thanksgiving dinner was several courses of amazing food and wine served at an English speaking club in Casablanca. Dancing followed and I enjoyed mingling with my fellow Americans; one woman threw her arms around my neck simply because I was in the Peace Corps. Her hug and whispered thank you meant the world to me; I never get hugged anymore.

What followed was a string of four incredible days spent in a beautiful Villa by the sea, eating good food, taking hot showers, and playing tennis with the godson, who was my age, on a clay court behind the house. The godson, my new friend, took me out one night to see Casablanca and I enjoyed having drinks with him at Rick’s Café Americain (movie enthusiasts eat your heart out). We ended the evening on the top floor of a hotel looking out over the lights of the largest city in Morocco and the minaret of the Hassan II Mosque looming against the dark ocean. The next day we walked by the cafes and shops along the waterfront talking, laughing, and enjoying the salt air. The couple hosting me was incredibly kind and generous; they treated me like family and gave me the run of the house, sharing meals with me as well as their time. I learned much from them and I will always be grateful for the sanctuary they gave me from my sometimes harsh reality here. But all things must end I soon found myself back in Errachidia blinking in the Saharan sunlight, steeling myself for the long journey back to my site.

It took time getting back and I was fairly tired and depressed by the time I stepped off the transit at the top of the hill. But I heard a voice say my name behind me and my friend Mostafa threw an arm around my shoulders and shook my hand, demanding to know where I’d been. I smiled realizing that yeah, I was home.~ So here I am in my little house in the Atlas, I have one last day remaining in my site before I start the long Journey home for a Christmas spent with my family and friends. I can't wait, and the time to leave will be here before I know it. Thanks for reading, Charlie

I woke minutes before my alarm went off this morning. As it began its incessant beeping next to my head, I stirred beneath my warm mound of blankets and swore softly. 7:00 am is early, especially here in the High Atlas at the beginning of winter. But knew I had to get up this time; I wanted to run. I remember the last time I really ran, a full year ago, barefoot on the beach in North Carolina as the sun rose sluggishly above the breakers and seabirds wheeled, crying above the surf, searching for breakfast. I ran a couple of times at the beginning of my service here, slowly and painfully between spells of illness. But now I have been well for almost a month and can feel my strength slowly returning. It is time to go again.

~

I pull on an 80s style tracksuit that I bought at the market a few weeks ago, and a baseball cap with the Colorado flag on it, and pound down my front stairs to the street. I open the door slowly to silence and stillness. It is bitterly cold and my breath turns to steam in the air before me. No one is in sight, most everybody is still asleep at this time of morning. I lock the door behind me and walk to the edge of the fields, where I begin to run. Frost covers the ground in a thick blanket of silver, every blade of grass or ploughed furrow of earth made ethereal and ghostlike. The morning sun blazes on the mountain tops above the village, but the valley floor where I stand is still thick with cold and shadow. The only sound in I can hear is the pounding of my feet on the pavement and the rhythm of my breathing.

Across the wide swath of the fields, another small village is perched on a long fin of dark stone. Smoke trails from the stove pipes of several of the mud houses and rolls across the grounds, the cold making it impossible to rise. Everywhere holds the air of sleep and perfect peace. Out across the fields a lone farmer slowly makes his way out to his land. He is a small dark figure against the silver frost and the bone-white trunks of the bare poplars that grow along the River Melloul.

The sun begins to shine over the summit of the folded mountain and I watch as morning and warmth comes slowly to the valley. Later, on my roof, I stretch and drink a cup of coffee. The frost is melting from the fields and color is slowly returning to my village. Down below a group of children chases a pair of Storks, their feet pounding on the bare ground; they laugh as the Storks float upward and away, like great kites against the mountain backdrop. The smoke is rising now, forming neat plumes above the village near the river; spiraling, twisting, and dissipating in the warming air. Soon all is as usual in my village in the Atlas, the sun has come and the light is the even and constant gold of Fall. This was worth waking up for.

10/16/2010

This is a short entry concerning an experience I had today on souq day.

I woke up late to a cold bedroom and dragged myself reluctantly out of bed. I pulled on my clothes and walked into the kitchen, put on some music, and made coffee. As is my custom, I went up onto the roof to drink it. There was the new stovepipe with its fresh collar of cement that my host father/landlord applied only yesterday to prevent any future flooding of my study. I added some water to the cement to keep it from cracking as it dried. Looking out from the house I could see that it was a sunny day with high clouds scudding across the sky. The sunlight held very little heat however and the breeze was cold on my face.

I walked aimlessly into souq and wandered among the tents for awhile. I spoke briefly to merchants that I knew and had tea in a small shop with a man about my age from a nearby village. I just didn’t feel much like talking with people today, I wasn’t really in a bad mood or feeling particularly stressed, just somewhat anti-social. I didn’t buy anything and was on my way home when I ran into Fatima.

Fatima is one of my favorite old Berber ladies in my village. The female culture is very difficult to learn about as a male in this society for many reasons. But Fatima is my main window into the other half of life here and she invites me over for tea occasionally, which is what she proceeded to do as we stood off to the side of the road talking. I promised to come by at four, expecting a pleasant and very formal tea in her little sitting room. This was the case last time I went over for tea; I sat on a hand woven carpet on the floor of the salon and looked around the room at the nice sideboard with its silver teapots and at the rich carpets and plump cushions lining the walls. Salons are often the fanciest room in a Moroccan home, and they are also the only room a guest usually sees. The kitchen is off limits; I am normally entertained and impressed in the salon while being fed lots of tea and various food items such as this year’s almonds or maybe some bread and fresh olive oil.

The bread here, called aġrum in Tam, is a white bread shaped into flat round loaves. Many people here get their bread from the shops on the main street. Where it is stocked fresh every morning, I have often wondered where it comes from. It is one of my favorite things here in Morocco, fresh bread every morning. I am not entirely sure how I’ll go back to eating sandwich bread back in the states. Maybe I won’t, we’ll see. The bread is always perfectly baked and there always seems to be enough to go around, but never so much to leave “day-olds” the next morning.

~

Four o’clock rolls around and I step out of my house onto the deserted street. All of the commotion from Souq is gone and the people have returned to their respective villages with their purchases. Ducking into a small alley, I walk up to Fatima’s small, mud house. The door is ajar but I knock anyway and wait for an answer. I voice inside the house yells something in Arabic and I announce myself. The voice does not belong to Fatima, but I soon hear her sweet, lisping Tam explaining who I was. A young girl, about my age, comes down the stairs and beckons me to follow. She is lovely, and I am mesmerized; I have never seen her before. She leads me upward and I start to turn into the salon as before. She shakes her head and points farther upstairs. I continue climbing and find myself in a large kitchen with a high ceiling. Fatima is there, next to a large flat table covered with about ten rounds of unbaked bread dough. Another woman I didn’t know sits next to her and looks up at me quizzically, but not startled, and Fatima explains that I was invited for tea. I am given a small plastic stool to sit on and tea was put on a small butane burner in to corner. The girl takes her place next to Fatima and explains that she is her daughter, now living in the south near Agadir, she is up here for a visit.

The girl, whose name is Naima, sits across from Fatima on the floor; each has earthenware dish before her into which she throws premeasured lumps of risen dough, deftly using the dish to pat them out into rounds. This is done with incredible speed and practiced grace; there is a sort of beauty to the whole affair and I find myself caught up in watching them work. We speak in short simple sentences, but most of the time is spent in comfortable silence and I feel as though I am part of something I have not yet experienced. I imagine Fatima teaching Naima how to do bake bread, as her mother had taught her, on the floor of this same kitchen and now here they sit facing eachother, their hands moving in mirrored rhythm, the girl grown up and married to a man on the other side of the country.

I watch as layer upon layer of unbaked rounds is piled upon the table, with clean cloths between them to stop them from sticking together. I am still confused though, why so much bread? I ask and Fatima explains quietly in her soft Tam, that this is the bread for the entire town. I am still confused for a moment, and then it hits me; this is the bread that I buy every morning in the shops on the street. This is the bread that I see the boys running back and forth to the cafés and hotels in the afternoons. I have been eating Fatima’s bread for 5 months and never thought to ask where it came from. When do we ever ask where our food comes from in the states? Usually we don’t really want to know. But here I am able to complete the cycle in my mind. There are no unknowns left the equation. This bread comes from the golden fields of wheat I see caressed by the morning breezes in late summer. This is the wheat that is cut by hand and stacked in sheaves along the road; the same wheat that is then sold in massive sacks at the Souq every week. Then being ground into flour either by hand or by the machine that people wait in line to use down near the square. The flour that Fatima then uses to make her bread that I buy every day. It is so simple and elegant and for the first time I feel a sense of loss, wondering at the

degree of separation between us and our food back in the states.

The water boils for tea and they add peppermint, a rare treat; peppermint tea is my favorite of all of the varieties I have been served here. The room fills with the smell and we continue to talk, the conversation speeding up as I adjust to hearing women speaking Tam instead of the men that I normally talk with. The tea is ready and Naima pours and serves it to us as we all sit around a small round table on our plastic stools. Tiny shortbread cookies are brought in and a plate of zmita, the baked flour I was served a lot during Ramadan, is here as well. But of course, there is fresh bread, and sweet olive oil to dip it in.

When tea is finished, Fatima begins bake the bread in her butane oven, which has two shelves. It is a quick process and most of it is done with a flat wooden spatula and by hand. The smell of fresh bread mixes with the earthy smell of the house and the sharp scent of peppermint tea that still lingers. It creates a magical, indescribable fragrance that I feel is uniquely Moroccan; it is one of many things I will miss when I go. I can sense a bond slowly forming between myself and this place, it is like the bonds I have felt in the past with the parks I have worked at or really any place that I have stood still long enough to know. These bonds are forged over many months, but they are permanent. I firmly believe that I leave a piece of my soul behind in the places that I love and that that piece is what calls me back as the years go by, like a child forgotten on a road trip.

I sit for awhile longer and talk to the women in the kitchen, watching agrum slide in and out of the oven and watching the golden leaves on the poplars outside the window quake and shimmer in the afternoon sun. It has been a wonderful tea, and I hope to come back soon. I thank Fatima and Naima and walk back toward my house, blinking in the sunlight and reflecting on what I had just seen.

~

Later that night, I find myself sitting drinking tea alone in a café, my friends are inside cheering for a football match that I am uninterested in. I watch people on the street for awhile and then get up to go. On my way home, I stop to buy a sandwich at one of the shops. My friend Hamid makes it for me, wraps it up, and hands it to me. As I hold it in my hands, I realize that the bread is still warm from the oven, and finally I am able to understand why.

Another day draws to a close and I feel that I am the better for it…

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

Autumn has always been my favorite season; it moves in gently just as I have grown weary of summer’s heat and light. Of a sudden, although I can never recall the first day I notice each year, the colors become richer. The light is the color of honey in the late afternoons, and the west facing mountainsides and earthen walls of the houses across my valley are painted in shining golden hues. All not illuminated at this time of day is hidden by long shadows and, even a robed farmer leading his donkey home from the fields in the evenings, looms large upon earth and stone as he passes. Sometimes I sit with my friend in his café, overlooking the souq market area, which today was abuzz with the weekly buying and selling. Most people know me now, at least enough to correct those who don’t, and café sitting has become a pleasant experience. I usually just order a silver pot of Moroccan tea and two glasses and then invite the first person I see to sit and drink tea with me.

I won’t say my life has grown quieter with the advent of Fall, but I do feel that stress is beginning to ebb away. I feel more comfortable outside, although there are still bad language days; I simply have to choose whether or not to let it bother me or not. My health has improved somewhat as well, thanks to a round of anti-parasite meds and some probiotics to aid in the repopulation effort. I don’t feel perfect, but I do feel healthy, so I suppose that is something. I have been here in North Africa for approximately seven and a half months. It has been almost a year to the day, since I left the Outer Banks behind me and drove off of Hatteras Island and headed west toward home. I also can’t believe in four short months I will have been here for a full year. It has been fascinating to watch my mind try and cope with the fact that it lives somewhere as exotic and foreign as North Africa. Only, it’s not so foreign anymore, and as I have said before, some of the things that I thought the most peculiar upon arriving here I now view as normal. I am beginning to realize now why re-entry into the society and culture of the United States, is considered so difficult. I’ll get a taste of it when I return home in December for a three week stay.

I am writing by candlelight in an effort to conserve some of the remaining electricity in my “pay-as-you-go” account. I like doing things by candlelight, it shrinks your world down to whatever you happen to be doing at the moment and everything else fades into darkness around you. I am listening to an Appalachian waltz and enjoying the warmth of my dying fire. I am now the proud owner of 300 kilos of firewood which I helped weigh, load, and stack in my hallway last evening. It should hopefully last me the better part of the winter, but there is much splitting and sawing to be done. The stove is a nice little construction; solid and small, and made from thick metal that holds the heat long after the fire has gone out. My host father helped me to cement the pipe in the roof today and I have to keep the cement moist for a few days so it doesn’t dry too quickly and crack. Apparently the leaks in my roof have been fixed before, but then the cement dried to fast and the roof simply began to leak again. I am working hard to ensure that this house is as warm and snug as possible before the hammer falls and it will soon.

I can see the half moon through my window from the desk, it was a beautiful crescent a few nights ago riding high above the mountain at sunset. The clouds have taken on a peculiar quality of late; they ride low in the sky, pouring over ridgetops like the foam on the crest of a wave and then flowing along the valley floors like a slowly retreating tide. The poplars along the river have become golden candles which, when coupled with the honeyed light, burn brilliantly every evening. The fields are being harvested for the last time and being turned over to slumber beneath the coming snows. Looking out from my rooftop in the early mornings I can see mule teams turning the sod with an old style heavy-plough, all the while being coaxed gently forward by their masters.

The apple crop this year was a good one and fresh cider has begun to flood the little shops in the village. Some volunteers in other more apple-rich areas have reported having many bags of apples being given to them by people they may or may not have ever met. A couple months ago in fact, as the apple crop had begun to ripen, I was sitting on the roadside with a friend of mine in a nearby village. The dusty street was silent and the sun was warm and bright overhead. There was no sign of transportation going our direction, but waiting is no longer tedious for most of us at this point. Looking up the road, I saw a venerable and quite aged Berber woman. She was dressed neatly in a white robe and walked hunched over with the aid of a cane. Her dark headscarf was bound with a pale cord and she shuffled toward us, smiling sweetly. Since I oftentimes am unable to see the mouths of women here, I have begun to appreciate the asked of “smiling with the eyes”; and this ancient woman was positively beaming.

As she drew closer, I noticed that she was carrying a large digging tool on her back and realized that she had probably been working in the fields all morning long. There are no retirement plans here in the Atlas, work is life; it is simply what you do and while I have seen many of the people here tired out from a long day, I have seen very few that are unhappy with this simple existence. When the woman was even with me, I raised a hand and said “lعwn” and she turned and spouted off a stream of Tam that I understood most of. After the formalities of greeting were out of the way, we spoke about the weather and about the Wedding Festival. As she was turning to walk away, she reached a weathered hand into a fold of her robe at her back and drew out two small apples, handing them to my friend and I. She then blessed us and hobbled off into the dust. That is how this culture operates here, these are genuinely kind and loving people. And their religion fosters this warmth and strong sense of family. I am beginning to understand now that I understood nothing before coming here and being immersed in a culture that many people in our country are convinced hates us. And I can tell you now, that it simply isn’t true, it just isn’t! I have had conversations with only a handful of people here that dislike my country; while I have had countless conversations with people back home that despise not just this nation, but an entire race and creed.

Some events in the past few months have given me pause; I occasionally read the news here in Morocco, trying in vain to keep abreast of current events outside my mountain walls. I watched the overblown fiasco of the “mosque” at Ground Zero explode into protests and hate-speech. I saw as Reverend Jones threatened to burn the Qu’ran, which thankfully did not happen. All these people see on the news is that the U.S.A. hates Islam and, while this I am sure has my liberal friends muttering their disapproval, it has many of us PCVs over here in absolute fits. On 9/11, a day where we were meant to unite in reverence and mourning for those who fell when the twin towers were destroyed, I found myself confined to my house; alone and ashamed of my country. On that day of all days, I should not have felt ashamed to be an American, but I was told to stay inside by the agency “just in case” any Anti-American sentiment be expressed. Few Moroccans mentioned the Qu’ran burning to me and those that did expressed confusion and sadness, not anger or hate. I think I was angrier than most of them.

This is not to say that I am actually ashamed to be an American, I am just ashamed of what we do sometimes, we are like a belligerent relative at a family reunion that everybody tries to ignore. No, being here in Morocco, I have come to realize that I love my country deeply and I love the principles on which it was founded. But sometimes think we need to consider that there is a world outside our borders filled with humans who are just as kind, decent, and incredible as we are.

~

So why am I going off on this? Well because it’s my job. Here are the three goals of Peace Corps:

Goal 1: To fulfill a community’s need for training and skilled manpower

Strangely this is the only goal that seems to do with the “aid worker” image of the PCV, and as you can see from the next two, the main purpose of a PCV is diplomatic.

Goal 2: To educate residents of the host nation on the culture and traditions of the United States of America.

So we are essentially P.R. agents, preaching a message of “hey look! This is what Americans are really like. We’re not all fat, rich, and arrogant. Most importantly, we don’t hate you, in fact we would like to be your friends.”

And then there’s goal 3, it’s one of the most difficult. Because we will be fulfilling it for years after we return, not just while we are serving here.

Goal 3: To educate residents of the United States of America on the unique cultures and peoples encountered while serving in the Peace Corps.

This, to me, is the most important goal of all. To promote global understanding of one another. This is what JFK had in mind when he created the Peace Corps in the 1960s. His ultimate vision was to have a huge number of future Americans that not only know about other cultures, but that can truly say they can understand another culture. Ultimately, JFK hoped this would lead to better foreign policy on our part.

So this blog, everything I tell you in my correspondence, and the stories I will inevitably tell when I return, are all part of this Third Goal. I hope that by reading this, you feel that you understand Morocco a little better; I certainly do. Because I haven’t just learned about these people, I have learned from them; and many have become my friends along the way. So when I do finally return from my two years, I will see a lot of things differently than I did before and I am not sure what that will be and to what extent. But I do know this, if anyone trashes these good people or their faith in my presence. They will have me to answer to.

Well it’s getting cold and the fire has gone out. I have a lot of work ahead of me for tomorrow and bit by bit I am getting ready for winter. In a couple of weeks I go to Marrakech for a week-long training and after that I have a meeting in the capital. Couple that with possibly teaching at the local Highschool and counting Barbary Sheep (Ammotragus lervia) for the Moroccan Eaux et Forets I have a busy time ahead of me.

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

NOTE: I know I have not written about the wedding festival yet, but I am working on it. It will be up soon, for now, here's an update.

I woke up to this morning to sound of rain on the roof. I smiled slightly at this welcome noise, I have always loved listening to the rain from the warmth of my bed. But then I remembered I had about 20 books drying on the roof from my house flooding last week. I hurled myself out of bed and threw on a jelaba, taking the stairs two at a time. After three armloads of books were safely deposited inside, I sat back in the doorway, looking out over the rainy fields, and began to laugh.

Being up early in the morning is rare thing for most Peace Corps Volunteers, especially after Ramadan, but I love it and hope to make it more of a habit in the future. I put a pot of coffee on the stove, no filters or presses (though I have both), just a pot, some water, and a handful of grounds. Cowboy Coffee; it is said that if you put a horseshoe into the pot and it stands on end, it’s done. I sigh and settle back into my chair to write. The rain continues on the roof and I turn on some quiet music in the background.

It’s October 3rd, and I realize that it has been 7 months since I arrived. This makes it officially the longest time I have ever been away from my family, friends, and the Southwest. 7 months ago, I stepped off the plane in Casablanca. It was so early in the morning, and I was exhausted from the transatlantic flight Looking out on the vast green farmlands around me, punctuated by villages with their tiny pale minarets gleaming in the early morning light, I didn’t know what to think or expect of this strange new place. I think so much of those first few weeks were marked with denial. I don’t think “two years” really sank into my brain; instead I felt like a kid standing on the edge of the high dive looking down in the water and yelling down to his friends “I’m thinking”. In some regards I am still there, after all these months spent here, and I have not fully surrendered myself to being here.

Some days I don’t even feel like I am here, I feel more closely connected to home on the Colorado Plateau than with the people I right in front of me that I can see, touch, and speak with. Some days my reality here seems surreal. But then other times, I feel as though I am fully engaged in this reality, and Colorado seems to be only a distant memory. On those days, I feel as though I am touching something greater; the place I need to be. But now I simply slingshot back and forth between two realities and sit back and enjoy watching my psyche do somersaults. There is a name for this, “the Peace Corps Volunteer Cycle of Vulnerability and Adjustment” and I am right on schedule.

I think that I have made no progress here, but then I think back on the first few months and realize how far I have come. Take this recent trip to Er-Rachidia for example:

~

This is only the second time I have seen rain in Rich, my souq-market town. I pours down and cleans the thin patina of dust from the pink-sided buildings, looking toward souq I see throngs of people moving up and down the street, parting briefly to allow a car or moped splash past them, through the puddles that reflect the slate grey sky. Climbing the dark stairs in the beautifully tiled “Hotel Isli” the night before, I was overwhelmed by memories of just 5 months prior. I look at the door of a little room on the third floor, and remember sitting inside on the floor playing cards and laughing with people I barely knew, but who were destined to become my friends and neighbors. I knew nothing about this place and I had not even seen my village yet, it was just a name in my mind. I walked to the roof and looked down the long valley where the Atlas stretched away into the distance and, my village lay behind those grey peaks, shrouded in uncertainty.

Leaving the Isli, I step back out onto the street and wave to Dris, a store owner that has become my friend in recent months, I buy a yogurt from him and remember how intimidating it was when I first arrived trying to make any transaction in any of the stores. Now it’s so commonplace, I feel that I would freak out in an American supermarket. I take my yogurt to the bus station and quickly claim a seat on the departing bus. It’s the best seat on the bus, the one near the back door with lots of leg room.

As we pull out the station and pick up speed, I look at the now familiar buildings of Rich and realize with a start that I will actually miss this place when I go. My bus soon leaves the town behind and we are soon out in the open desert; the rain makes small worm-trails on the window beside me. The first leg of the trip from rich crosses a wide plain ringed with mountains and dotted with small earthen villages and silvery olive groves. Tall cane lines the dry riverbed which the bus is now crossing on a low bridge.

We climb onto a cliffside road high above the river and I look out at the shattered and twisted sediments that seem piled haphazardly here and there. We go through a small tunnel and proceed into a deep gorge, reminiscent of Santa Elena Canyon on the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, back in the states. The bottom of the gorge is palmeries and villages, some with huge crumbling Kasbahs. The palms sway gently in the breeze, heavy with clusters of orange dates, and small fields of tasseled corn are visible in the openings between their segmented trunks. Here and there, men are plowing the fields with a steel blade hooked to a team of mules.

The gorge walls tower high above and it all makes for a lovely sight; but a familiar one. The beauty of the gorge remains, but its strangeness has gone. There is nothing unusual to me here now; this is just another bus trip. Passing the dam above Er-Rachidia, I see a rainbow unfurl across the sky above the city. Beyond it lies a dark curtain of rain. Er-Rachidia is the gateway to the Sahara and the last time I was here for any significant length of time, was shortly after the backpack trip I took through the National Park. That was 4 months ago.

Er-Rachidia feel different as well, and I look around at all the familiar sights as I made my way through the back alleys to my friend’s apartment where I am staying the night. Later that evening, my friends and I sit in the back garden of the Café Imilchil and I think about all the progress I have made so far. I look at my friends, all have been here longer than I. One is coming up on his one year mark, my friend and neighbor Jack is just reaching 18 months, and my friend here in Er-Rachidia has only six months left. Although their experiences are very different from mine, I still look to them as an example of what I will experience in the coming months and suddenly 7 months doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore; after all, I am still a “freshman”.

Thanks for reading,

Charlie Kolb

09/06/2010

Four short days from the end of Ramadan, and I am sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee. I allow myself liquids during the day, although by rote I am not supposed to. The agonizing smell of sugar cookies which fills the room is my penance; emanating from the small butane oven under my counter. Outside, rain drips slowly and softly from the roof and afternoon storm clouds rumble above the folded mountain above the village. It is a about an hour until evening call to prayer and lfdur, break-fast, which I will share with my host family tonight, as well as with Allen, another volunteer visiting from a village 2 hours to the north. The cookies are for them.

I spent the last two hours alone on my roof, burning trash and cardboard, much of it remnants left by the previous volunteer who left here in May. As each scrap burns in the rusted woodstove on my roof, I feel another step closer to really being here in the village as the current volunteer; transitioning from the former which has now moved on, to the current and future. Each day I feel a little bit closer to actually living here than having just stepped off the plane in Casablanca. Some days I feel as if I have been here for years, other times I still feel as I just arrived; it is frustrating, but expected.

Looking out from my roof I could see west up the valley, past the old fortress of mysterious origin, to the sun illuminated mountains far away near the Azilal region. Storms moved across the dun-colored landscape then, and their shadows, as well as the shadows beneath the pale, striated cliffs, are dark and shifting. A fresh breeze blows out of the river canyon to the east and bends the poplars like deep green flags. There is a crack of thunder above and I look up to a dark and brooding cloud, roiling around the summit of the folded mountain. Brilliant white, almost glowing against the dark back ground, flew a lone stork; one of the minaret dwellers from atop the mosque. The stork was not moving; soaring in place in the face of the east wind, it was stationary before me. I could make out the details of its powerful orange bill and white plumage, bordered by pinions of deepest black. And then it banked out of sight, gone as suddenly as it had come.

I jabbed at the fire with a stick, flipping over an issue of the Christian Science Monitor and watching the pages curl and contort before finally succumbing to flames. Above the hiss of the wind in poplars, I listened to a program that I had downloaded from BBC: Radio Wales, about farmers and their lives in the Welsh countryside. Strangely comforting, though incongruous, I thought that maybe this was a taste of what Peace Corps used to feel like, back before the technology of mobile phones and internet became readily available to PCVs worldwide.

~

In a program on NPR about a week ago, our former Program Training Officer, Gordie Mengel, who is now stationed in Rwanda, spoke of how technology has changed the face of the Peace Corps. He mentioned how many volunteers can access the internet and call home whenever they wish, the connection with home is never broken; it remains there like a tether.

I am certainly in this category; I have internet in my little house, and I can access services such as Skype or Facebook at any time of day or night. Sometimes the net goes out for several days, but it is to be expected; nearly everything here works about 80% of the time. It’s not a problem; Gordie mentioned that his village in Zaire, now Congo, didn’t even have a post office and letters to months to arrive. Let alone care packages filled with coffee, peanut butter and chocolate that arrive every so often. I remember him telling me how he was without water and power his entire service, both amenities that I am used to here and try hard not to take for granted. Gordie’s argument makes a lot of sense, that having this technology available so readily does not just make the Peace Corps less brutal and challenging than it was in the 60’s, but it actually eliminates the need for community integration at our sites. All of us have social needs and back in America those needs were met by our friends and family. But in Peace Corps, before the advent of lightning-fast communication, those needs were met by your friends that you made in your community. You didn’t just feel obligated to get out there and learn a new language and culture; you had to learn the language and culture, because if you did not, you could (would) go insane. On clear nights you could turn on a shortwave to receive news of the outside world, sometimes weeks old, and learn that the rest of the world is still there and that life is going on without you.

In some ways I crave this sort of disconnect, it’s not that I don’t miss you, my friends and family, but I need to be here in order to be most effective in this place for this short time period I have been given. This will likely be the only time I will ever live on the African continent, or anywhere else abroad, for so long a duration. I need to absorb all I can, and let this experience teach me and shape me as it surely must. I have shelves of books to be read; some left behind, some borrowed, most from care packages. I have pages of material begging to be written, including my work for the Canyon Country Zephyr (the first article will come out early next month), and I have projects to plan, both for the Eastern High Atlas National Park and for the village of Imilchil. Add to this working on my house, preparing for winter, and just surviving day to day in a land of squat toilets and parasites, I have no time to spend holding on to connections and threads that will simply slip from my grasp regardless. If I have learned nothing else from moving five times in the last 3 years, it is that life goes on without you. I hate to let go, but I know that the truly important threads will still be there for me to pick up on my return in two years; it is the way of things.

In think in some ways our version of Peace Corps requires more self-control than the Peace Corps of yesteryear. I think that the “classical” Peace Corps was a gauntlet of mental and physical anguish with shining moments of success and deep wells of failure. But once you stepped off of that plane and rode for hours through the savannah, finally getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere, the things that began to happen to you could not be controlled. The disease, the social barriers, and the lack of amenities were just a few of these things. You didn’t communicate with your family and friends back home, because you couldn't.

But now, a lot of things in my life here in Morocco are still far beyond my control, and there is still plenty of disease and mental and physical hardship. The amenities are all there though, most of the time. Granted, I do miss western toilets and real showers that aren’t from an aluminum teapot. However, I think that having these things, and having the internet readily available, is a slippery slope. To not have these things available to you is one thing, but to have to choose when and how you use them is another. Did my friends and I come to Morocco to live like Americans? I don’t think so, but it is incredibly easy to get sucked into the comforts of your house and the line of communication that is always available there. The outside is still dark and mysterious, the people speak Berber and dress differently from you. They watch you wherever you go and kids laugh at you when you pass, some occasionally throw rocks. It’s uncomfortable and, as Gordie mentioned, if integration is optional thanks to your social needs being filled from that communication lifeline. It’s simply more comfortable to stay home and bury yourself in America. That mystical place where toilets can be sat upon, showers are hot and actually drain, dogs do not want to eat you on sight, and where you can understand everything that is said and everything that happens around you. Some people still dress funny, and some still may throw rocks, but it’s home; a place where life can be summed up multiple times a day in a Facebook status consisting of a song lyric of some kind.

The malaria-riddled and shell-shocked volunteers of Peace Corps’ golden age may have acquired higher pain thresholds by the end of their service, but they never had to choose to let go; they were forced to. It seems I have a choice to make regarding my time here, do I choose to be here in Morocco, mentally and physically? Or do I continue to hold on to my tether as tightly as possible hoping that nobody back home will forget about me?

09/07/2010

I put the internet modem in a box on my shelf two days ago; I’ll bring it out in a week to post blogs and answer emails. I have read a great deal and spent a lot of time out in the community socializing. The day Allen was here, and I spent all that time on my roof burning remnants and watching storks, we enjoyed our l-fdur, break-fast, with my host family and then went to the Café to sit and drink coffee. It was l-ayd al-kadr , the night of power, the night close to end of where the entire Quran is read cover to cover at the mosque and when people are to make their peace with Allah. It is a day of repentance and celebration. Allen and I just sit in the Café with our coffee, my host father sits down nearby, telling me earlier that he does not pray or go to mosque, no matter what Rkia, my host mom, says. I suppose he has been around too many Americans and Europeans. There were many other locals about as well, and all were fascinated by Allen and I, who were playing cribbage and shuffling the cards very fast (this is a skill many Moroccans have not been able to master).

My good friend, Khalid sat down with us and, after Allen butchered me in Cribbage, we played several hands of Gin. The conversation was mostly Tam and I was pleased with my language performance; not simply being able to get things accomplished, but to actually enjoy the conversation is a new level I am not used to. I look forward to more time spent like this.

Allen went to wait for the taxi to his site and I went off to run errands for a while. It was another glorious fall day with a crisp breeze and high clouds above the mountains. Laundry flapped on the lines strung on the rooftops and blankets hung drying from the windows of many of the small hotels. I stopped to talk to several of my friends, snoozing in the shade beside the smoke shop, and realized that my language was excellent today, at least compared to its normal quality. I made my way down to the commune, which is the county government, to ask about the upcoming wedding Festival. For an event so significant, it is amazing how few people actually know when it is. I nailed down dates as well as I could, and then spoke with the men at the commune for about a half-hour, they filled me in on environmental woes in the area, and told me a fascinating story about the tribes that were here before the Ait Haddidou; the people who took away the trees. Leaving that meeting I met up with several more of my friends in the street and spoke with them as well. My errands continued, I made a trip to see the Gendarmes to renew my Cartes de Sejour receipt, since I still don’t have the physical card yet, and that was carried out without a hitch.

That evening, I made a chicken stew from stock I had frozen and fresh chicken. I spiced it more with Rosemary, sage, and salt and sliced fresh carrots, onions, green pepper, and potatoes into it and simmered it for a couple of hours. I also made another batch of sugar cookies and ate a few myself, after call to prayer, and sent the rest home with my neighbor Molly, our mutual friend Naomi, and Molly’s Mom, who is visiting from the states. They stopped through on their way to Molly’s village; I will see them tomorrow as well. The stew turned out amazingly well, and I gulped down three bowls of it. I really love being able to cook, it is a skill I will put to good use after this is all said and done.

Later that night, I put on my warm clothes and my Jelaba and walked up the street away from town, climbing the stone fin that the Qaid’s palace sits on. I sat down on the top and looked up at the stars. The Milky Way was a brilliant silver splash crisscrossed with shooting stars and floating wisps of nebulae. Off to my left, another duwar, small village, sat illuminated by a single street light. The village did not have any power and no lights shone in the windows of the mud houses, save for the pale, wavering flicker of the occasional candle flame. The folded mountain loomed above, an inky silhouette against the star flecked sky, untouched by the lights of my village. Behind the fin lay the isolated section of the fields where I had walked a few days before. The river sang softly, unseen behind its screen of poplars and the patchwork of fields was cloaked in the darkness that only comes when there is no moon. As my eyes adjusted, I began to see lights in among the fields, small ones, of a cold, wavering blue almost the color of ice. They pulsed and flickered silently and I knew they could not be fireflies. Then I realized what they were; they were stars. Stars reflected in the still waters that still sat in the fields from yesterday’s storm and the flood that followed. I looked out into the darkness, filled with river-noise, and looked long at the twinkling lights of the fallen stars.

Walking back to my house, I realized again something that I realize at least once every week; how lucky I am to be here, in this deep, mysterious, and ancient place. This place where strange fortresses loom against the sunset sky and storks hover motionless on the winds of coming storms, truly this is a place of beauty and wonder and, while I may not get Malaria or spend months at a time not hearing a word of English, I think the experience will be incredible just the same. I believe that with each passing day this strange place will become more real to me. My paradigms are shifting slowly but I know that one day soon, Morocco will seem more real than the home I left behind. The Southwest will still be there, in the back of my mind, like a wisp of juniper smoke, so faint as to be nearly imperceptible; a dreamlike reminder of a time now passed, and a land far away on the other side of the world.

I took a long walk today. Strolling on the dirt road up the Melloul valley towards the fortress on the hill, I felt very content with my site. The tiny apple trees in the orchards beside the road are heavy with green and ready fruit; almost ready to harvest. Many of the trees down the valley toward my souk town of Rich are not bearing any fruit this year, as an unseasonably warm spring followed by a sudden snowfall in mid-May killed off their crop of blossoms. But we are lucky here I my village and many of us here, including myself, thank God for sparing the trees here. Turning off of the road, I walked between the tiny family plots toward the river. The wheat has been harvested already, and fields formerly filled with waist-high swaying stalks of golden grain, are now just closely cropped stubble. Most of the alfalfa and clover has been cut and dried by sickle-wielding women, ready to feed their sheep and goats through the long, and swiftly approaching, winter months. I saw a flash of movement off to my right and recognized the retreating gold, black, and white form of a Hoopoe; the first I had seen up here in the mountains.

There are still crops of potatoes being carefully tended while the tubers swell to unknown size underneath the meticulously kept earth. Most of the produce from these fields stays in the community and I buy it every week at the vegetable souq. Even the wheat is threshed and ground in the courtyards and homes of the farmers and made into flour. It’s amazing to think that the local bread that I buy every few days was growing in the fields just last summer. I was walking beside the river now, underneath a spreading canopy of poplars and huge weeping willows of unknown age and origin. It is sometimes easy to forget where I am in this cathedral of massive trees, but the dry slopes of the Atlas are readily visible between their trunks and I simply accept the strangeness of this juxtaposition. I was walking through a portion of the fields that I had never seen before; a place hidden from the village by the fin of gray stone on which the Qaid’s (mayor’s) palace sits.

There were few people back there, just a woman cutting grass with her sickle; her young son sitting next to her in the weeds, talking to himself in fast, childish Tam. This is the floodplain back here, and not much of it is cultivated; for good reason too. Just last week, I watched the river burst its banks and flood all of the fields and orchards that were within its reach. I walk past a field of sad, drowned potato plants, completely smothered in silt and look over at tiny orchard of apple trees; the high water mark is half-way up there trunks.

On the day of the flood, I shrugged on my red raincoat and joined a crowd of onlookers on the cement bridge that crosses the creekbed that runs from the nearby lake. Normally dry in the summer, it was bursting its banks and sending great jets of flood water high into the air where it hit the pilings of the bridge. In the distance I could see the floodplain, where I was now walking, entirely drowned in coffee-colored water.

I passed another woman cutting grass with her sickle, I waved and she waved back smiling, unguarded; looking at me not as a strange foreigner but merely an everyday passerby. I wish I could have talked to her, but talking to a woman alone in the fields is considered a breach of etiquette. Although here in the Berber lands of the High Atlas, that line is much fuzzier than down below. I just have not figured out exactly how much. On the rock fin, the sprawling structure of the Qaid’s palace and offices sits perched on the top, a wide balcony overlooks the field, river, and mountains behind; I am sure that it is very pleasant view indeed. I may have to work at acquiring a dinner invitation sometime in the next two years. Below the balcony was a grove of old growth Walnut trees, huge and spreading. They are beautiful, but then any tree is lovely when they are such a scarce commodity.

I came out from around the back of fin and was suddenly back in sight of the village. I took a trail toward the road, stopping to talk to a farmer working in the irrigation ditch next to his potato field. I am still amazed at the complexity of hand irrigation in Morocco, everything done without the use of hoses or pipes. Just ditches and hand tools.

~

I am hungry, but that is not a surprise considering that I am now halfway through the month of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. Yes I am fasting, a question I answer at the beginning of every conversation that I have with people in the village. Except for many of my friends, who already know this. I am cheating somewhat though, as I drink water during the long days. My body is not used to dehydrating for 15 hours a day. I tried it for about a week and got quite sick; I decided that my health was more important than ceremony and I now drink enough water during the day to keep my organs functioning, although sometimes I do throw in tea to shake things up. But I still do not eat during the day and I have changed my schedule like everyone else here.

People wait until about 7:00 in the evening for the “Call to Prayer” to echo through the village from the minaret and then break-fast in large meals called l-fdur. I try to alternate between cooking my own food and breaking the fast with Moroccans in the village. At my host family’s house, break-fast is an extensive affair with dates brought in from the southern oases, large fluffy flat breads drizzled in butter and honey, schebekkia—a honey soaked pastry like baklava, olives, and a roasted spiced flour called zimitta. The main course is a meat and chickpea soup called harira; this with tea, coffee, and fresh tangerine juice makes for a good way to refuel. You just have to pace yourself during this first meal of the night; many nights, especially in the first few days of Ramada, I saw lots of otherwise rail-thin berber guys staggering around the streets after l-fdur clutching their visibly swollen bellies. Pretty hilarious.

All of the cafes open after l-fdur¬ and I sit with my male friends, and any PCVs that happen to be visiting, drinking coffee or tea and talking about anything within the boundaries of my language skills, which are expanding more every day. Sitting on a stoop with my friends Mustapha and Bassou, I was told an Arab proverb—that even the small, slow drops of water will form a mighty river in time. I said that I hope that my river will be like last week’s after living here for two years.

After café sitting for an hour or so, I go back to my house to read and catch up on things that need my attention, such as a blog that I have been neglecting, and then stay up until the wee hours of the morning. I eat my last meal around 3:00am, just before the morning call to prayer, and go to sleep until noon the following day. Then the Ramadan cycle begins again. Every night is new and different. Tonight I broke fast in the cafe of my friend Aziz. I sat outside with Aziz and watched the streets empty as the call to prayer echoes died away. I ate a wonderful bowl of harira and chased it with bread, chilled dates, and fresh black figs. We drank tea and talked about the village and life in general, my friend Mustapha joined us after awhile and he and I sat out talking for an hour as the town came back to life.

Ramadan. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either; it’s just a different experience. However it will be nice to be able to eat during the day in 11 more days; how this month has flown by! Fall is just around the corner, I can smell it in the air some days, when the wind is crisp and the clouds are high. Snow will be falling before I know it, but you know what? I feel like I am ready for it. I was riding down to the site of another volunteer a little while ago and was looking out on the barren mountains and the green fields from the transit I was traveling in. The villages of mud-huts that clung to the hill sides around the minarets of their mosques no longer seemed quaint or strange, but rather beautiful and normal. Wind swept the valley that day and stirred the poplars along the river. Taking in the scene, I realized for the first time that, not only was I not the least bit homesick, but that when I did go home after two years, I would truly miss this place. I don’t know what sparked the change, but it felt like a thread breaking somewhere in my chest; a slight letting go.

Ramadan is almost over, but I feel that the adventure is still only just beginning, I wonder what comes next?

Thanks for reading, please don't forget to comment!

-Charlie Kolb

08/07/2010

Introduction:

This essay is a tough one to write because I have a huge amount of material to draw from. I have done so much in the last few weeks with my friends in Azrou, that I don’t know where to start from, or what to tell you. I can’t give a step by step account of any kind, because that would just turn into a novel. So I think the best plan is to simply pick four different stories from the course of the week and then write a conclusion. Okay, go!

Getting There

The day after my last blog entry I find myself walking to the center of town, a tattered pack on my back bearing the emblem of the US Peace Corps on its front pocket. Hanging by my side is a sack of books, left by the previous volunteer, which I am bringing to donate to the Peace Corps Library. I caught a ride with one of my favorite transit drivers and settled in to enjoy the now familiar trip down the mountains to the town of Rich. I alternate reading “Cadillac Desert” and listening to music on my iPod player, which really is a lifesaver for transit-related situations, plus I enjoy sharing whatever I am listening to with the Moroccan next to me. Call it “cultural exchange”, not that the strange English lyrics are any more intelligible to them as a Berber “Ahaydus” is to me, at least at this point.

Looking out the transit window, I am always struck by the geology that is laid bare along the way, tilted beds of sandstone and limestone, and dark lines of volcanic dikes. There’s a deposit of metamorphic slates after you emerge from the canyon that are colored a deep purple and streaked with sea green; they have eroded into smooth, low hills that extend colorfully up the valley as far as I can see. In the villages closest to this deposit, the slate is crushed and used as roofing for the mud houses; as rain falls it washes down the earthen walls leaving purple streaks that remain vivid even when dry.

The road curves down to Rich over a distance of 150 km. It crosses high passes and hugs rivers lined with poplars and orchards of tiny apple trees. The wheat has been harvested, but the potatoes are huge and blooming. Under the apple trees, clover and alfalfa is knee deep; the women cut it by hand with small sickles and carry it on their backs to their houses where it will feed their stock during the winter. If there is even a small amount of water, it is used carefully and shared among the clans and families in an ancient water rights system that I do not yet fully understand.

The transit passes through villages, some have volunteers in them, most do not; the volunteers along this route are considered the “mountain” volunteers. Volunteers from the hot lowlands call us “bledies” which is essentially Peace Corps slang playing off of the word “bled” (Berber for “country”); basically, we’re hillbillies. It’s a good group, three of us from the environment sector, four of us from the health sector. The three of us from the new “stage” group, the group that arrived in March, are headed down the mountain to Rich and then to our two week long PPST (Post-Pre-Service Training). Of the three, I am the only environment sector volunteer, so I am headed North to the city of Azrou in the Middle Atlas; my two friends will be making their way south to the city of Ouarzazate, where our original PPST was held. It is strange to have the two sectors separate; many of us have friends on the “other side of the aisle”, and it is sad that we won’t get to spend any time as a full group for another few months.

I arrive in Rich with no problems and catch a taxi to a friend’s site that is just South of Rich. It is so there, but I enjoy his company as we make dinner and eat with his host brother who has fairly good English. We end up having to sleep in the same bed because there is only one fan in his house; it is simply too hot to sleep without it. Even with the fan, I don’t sleep well, and sweat all night. I have breakfast with my friend and catch a bus. It is bound for Azrou and I pay the driver the necessary fee before settling into a seat and zoning out. I spend the next 4 hours reading and listening to music. I have been on this stretch of road before, on my way to Rabat last month, and my ability to ignore it is a testament to how I am getting used to my North African surroundings. I only start watching again when we climb into the Cedars and I know we are getting close to Azrou.

It is a city built into the mountainside and many of pale buildings are roofed with green tiles. The Minaret of a huge mosque dominates the city center, filling my view as a flag down a taxi to take me to the Hotel that Peace Corps had mentioned in their email to me. I was swarmed as soon as I checked in, first by my friend Pete, who hugged me from the front and then my language teacher Haddou who grabbed me from behind and said “Guess who?!” in Moroccan accented English. The rest of the evening was spent in a similar state of happy greetings and after lots of hugs and handshakes, we walked into the city for dinner and coffee, swapping stories all the way.

Being with other Americans, especially friends who are going through the same experience, is therapeutic and I was not surprised to hear my own story echoed by my peers. We all had fascinating pathogens of some sort and some of us even bonded over having the same species of parasites in our intestines. Besides that, there were stories of language barrier and culture shock, host family woes, and social victories; half-baked project ideas sailed around the group like projectiles and I was overwhelmed by the huge amount of English being spoken at me.

We go back to the hotel and talk for hours on the hotel roof while the moon rises over the rooftops of the city. I finally go to bed late, exhausted from socializing and sweat my way through another hot night. Training begins in the morning and the two week clock is ticking.

Field Trip

I wake up at seven to find my friend Eric standing over me sweating from a run, I roll over hoping it’s just a nightmare; no, it’s not, and it’s time to get up and get moving. I yawn and stretch, sore from a night of tossing and turning in the heat. Pulling on one of my two sets of clothes, I stagger downstairs and grab the typical Moroccan breakfast of bread and jam, chased by sugary coffee. I return to my room to pack a daypack. Today we are headed to a lake deep within Ifrane National Park and there we will do exercises in environmental education and be trained more.

Most of the training up to this point has been lecture based and involved sitting in the same room for hours answering vague questions. It felt like every federal training I have ever been to; hours and hours of jargon with buzzwords thrown in for flavor. So, at least I can be entirely sure that Peace Corps is without a doubt part of the US Federal Government. Needless to say, we were all ready to go outside.

I traveled in a school-bus yellow transit with half of the group, the other half traveling in a white Toyota van behind us. The climb begins on the highway that winds back into the forest, and at the top of the pass we turn onto a smaller road that is soon entirely swallowed by the trees. The cedar forest here is thick and healthy; I had almost forgotten what dappled sunlight looked like. It was great to be going through a forest again after so long in the barren mountains. The road continued to climb and then leveled out as we emerged on an open plain covered with interesting volcanic geological features. I was told that this entire area of the park was resting in an old caldera; I am not sure if this is accurate, but based on the calderas back in the San Juans, they aren’t necessarily obvious (the Rio Grande valley near Creede and South Fork is the rim of one of several overlapping calderas from the formation of the range).

All of the grass has been eaten down to a nub by sheep and goats, the same is true of the lakeshore when our van crunches to a stop in the gravel and we get out to walk around and enjoy the sunshine. It is so cool up by the lake, reminiscent of being back in Imilchil; the coolest place in Morocco. Group photos are taken and we go exploring. The lake is full of frogs and waterfowl indicating ecosystem health, but the lakeshore is utterly devoid of the riparian vegetation I would expect to be here. Everything has been eaten, and the feces that washes into the lake has caused massive algal blooms. I think even of the small lake near my parents’ house in Colorado; of the rushes and cattails, the splashing of muskrat and the whirring of red-winged black birds. I think that we don’t realize how wonderful even the “nature” that we consider mundane in America, is still amazingly healthy; especially in the west. I am continually amazed by how much I learn about my own country by being here; it’s what I signed up for, after all.

After a long lecture on field trips and outdoor environmental education (the best kind) and several demonstrations of this, we had lunch and reluctantly piled back into the vehicles. We stopped at the pass to walk around in the trees. We had requested that we stop in the forest, figuring that we would stop in one of the deep, virgin stretches full of Macaques. Instead we stopped at the pass, one of the most impacted and touristy parts of the road. This became more apparent when three people with saddled horses brought them over to us trying to make them ride them. This is strictly against policy, horses are an unauthorized vehicle, but as the Safety and Security coordinator was busy riding a small donkey, I figured it was ok. So I grabbed a large Bay, swung in to heavily decorated fantasia saddle, and trotted off in to the forest with the horse’s owner running to keep up.

I am not very good with riding horses, but I could handle this one; so I took it to the end of the road, swung it around and trotted back. It only spooked a couple times, pretty good for an Arabian, but I just calmed it down and kept going. I got back on the bus smelling like horse, but having had a good time.

Paradise

During our free weekend midway through training, a friend and fellow volunteer, Steven, took me and a few others to his site in the southern section of Ifrane National Park. It was a long taxi ride to get there and we had to change Taxis once. Soon, however, the taxi was winding its way through a high, forested valley full of fig tree and fields. At the top of the road lay a small village surrounded by trees and all clustered around the pink central spire of the village mosque. What was most striking about the scene is the gigantic travertine plateau rising 400ft above the village. Vines and other vegetation hung off its sides and a massive 200ft waterfall gushed directly above the town, its spray twisting into billowing plumes and comets before crashing into the slope below.

Steven’s house was a palatial construction, two stories high and tiled and ornamented on every surface. It was filled with nice furniture and also had a western toilet. This is Peace Corps? We spent some time cooling off in the house before follow Steven down trail that wound up the canyon. Pines and cedars covered the canyon slopes and fig and poplar trees grew by the river. We made a stop at a berry bush that was bursting with fruit and then headed to the river. The river was full of city Moroccans (holiday weekend) and some were even as white as we were. Eventually we found a pool that we could have to ourselves and slid into the icy mountain water. It was sublime, Steven gets to do this every morning after his run.

I wasn’t really experiencing “site envy” I still love my site in the Atlas, barren though it maybe, and I wouldn’t trade. But a massive waterfall certainly wouldn’t hurt. On our way back along the trail we heard a noise and looked up to see no fewer than 8 Barbary Macaques on the slope opposite us; we watched them and they watched us for awhile before we both moved on. We walked back to Steven’s house cool and content. The taxi came back to pick us up, and we left the valley as the sun set behind the mountains. It is always good to see a glimpse of Paradise.

Conclusion

I wish I could say more about these two weeks, I would talk about the long social evenings we spent out on the town looking for food. I would talk about the hundreds of Egrets that pour in to roost near the Mosque at sunset or maybe talk about the winding streets of the medina. I may say more about my incredible friends and their experiences or perhaps elaborate on the rest of the training. But I simply don’t have the time. It is Ramadan now in my village and I need to focus on that experience; expect a blog on that fairly soon.

To conclude I will say that training went well, it ended well, but it is good to be back in my site where it is cool and relatively quiet. Pictures of Azrou are up on my facebook account and will be up on flickr soon as well. Also, I have a new blogsite for any of you who like my writing enough to actually want to read more of it. It’s a blog that I am posting some of my older work to about my experiences as a Park Ranger as well as just adventures around America. You can find it at www.wind-water-stone.blogspot.com .

As always, thanks for reading,

Charlie

I am trying something new in this entry and will attempt piece together a series of short entries over the course of a full week rather than one long entry at the week’s end.

Monday: 07/19/2010

It is so quiet this morning. I was awake at 6:15 and in my running gear 10 minutes later. My run is only a couple of miles to begin with, as I get back into the swing of things, readjusting to altitude, and rouse my body from its state of atrophy. When I stepped outside, the sun had not yet crested the mountaintop at the eastern edge of the valley, yet the clouds were alight with shifting shades of gold and palest pink. No one was about, as I ran across the patchwork of tiny fields, save one man several fields from the road that was already hard at work.

It is almost harvest time here and the wheat hangs heavy on the stalk. Some fields are already cut and the grain stands stacked in sheaves, giving off a smell not unlike freshly mown hay. The river flows by in the distance, marked by a line of stately poplars, the only trees in the valley. The bare mountainsides rear suddenly behind the river, their folded flanks rising and undulating high above the village. The mating pair of storks that live on the minaret of the mosque soar silently over the fields in search of breakfast, followed closely by their two fledglings which are now nearly the size of their parents.

I am now running even with the “college” which is the equivalent of an American highschool; it is a new-looking government building, painted yellow. No students now, mid-summer, but in the fall I may pick up where the previous volunteer left off and do some Environmental Education classes here. Who knows? Too much to think about now. I see a man seated on the side of the road and I recognize my friend Khalid, I say “good morning” in Berber (sbah lxir) and continue running. I am sure I’ll have a chance to talk to him later in a Café. I continue running with the fields on one side and a cliff on the other. A few dump trucks shatter the silence by trundling sleepily past, but the disruption is short lived and I am alone and unmolested until my watch beeps and I turn around.

Back at my house, I turn on John Denver and open all the windows. Americans are known in the region for playing our music too loud so I embrace the stereotype. I light the stove and put on a kettle for coffee, then I head up the stairs to the roof. The roof door opens with a bang like a gunshot which has frightened a fair share of houseguests over the past month; it’s loud but it has ceased to startle me. I step out on the roof and feel close my eyes as the sun hits my face; I look around. The sun has lit the tops of the poplars by the river and the banded cliffs south of the town. Looking west the ruin of a Berber fortress, also lit by the sun, cuts a sharp profile against the distant mountains at the end of the valley; the mountains are half in sunlight and half covered by cloud shadows. Nearer to me, the spire of the mosque rises from the chaos of mud and cement buildings and the storks have returned to their nest there with whatever breakfast they had been able to find.

After a satisfying workout, I make breakfast between my final sets. My breakfast is very simple but satisfying, to say the least. If you wish to duplicate it, here you go: First get a couple tablespoons of the smoothest Olive Oil that you can find and heat it in a frying pan. Next crack 3 eggs into the pan and turn the heat to medium, cook unit the whites are no longer runny and but the yolks are still move when you shake the pan. Slide it carefully onto a plate and season liberally with salt and pepper. Leave the fork in the drawer and opt instead to eat Moroccan style and get a tear a hunk off of a round of fresh bread, the crustier, the better. If you’re in Durango, go to Bread bakery! Using the bread, and your right hand, (not your left, this is important) eat the eggs . Chase with fruit yogurt or, better still, a few cold slices of cantaloupe; which, in this country, is green. This goes great with coffee too.

Well, I need to attend to the rest of my day. I have a site inspection from a Peace Corps employee today or tomorrow and I need to go to the post office. Ar askka, inchallah (Until tomorrow, God willing).

~

Around sunset I took a long walk which began with a tea invitation from one of my favorite elderly Berber ladies, Fatima, who greets me every day and is one of the few women that talks to me on a regular basis. She led me up a cool, dim staircase into a small salon deep within her lovely mud house. She served me tea, cakes, and peanuts and I talked with her and later her granddaughter who came by. For the first time I felt at home in this village and basked in the Moroccan hospitality; I will have tea here again, I have a feeling.

My walk took me far up the road by the river and I wound back through the laden wheat fields and through thick groves of Poplar and Weeping Willow that I hadn’t the slightest notion existed in this place. It was refreshing and I saw people who knew me; what’s more, not one child asked me for anything. It was a good walk all around.

Tuesday: 7/20/2010

I woke up late this morning and it affected the rest of my day, most of which I spent inside. On the one trip I made outdoors, I was waylaid by two arab men (you can tell them fairly easily in a Berber) village. They were grilling me in French and Arabic about something I think pertaining to me being a tourist and what hotel I was staying in. I was frustrated by the whole exchange and told them several times that I don’t speak French and when I tried Tam they looked at me as though I had grown a second head. I finally managed to grab a nearby boy (one of my neighbors) who I spoke to in Tam and who then translated to the men that I was actually even less of a tourist than they were and lived here in the village. I think they were with some tourism agency or something, I never figured it out, but at least they deigned to leave me alone at this point. The boy, whose name was Murad, invited me in for lunch. I declined, but will go back later to be neighborly.

I didn’t do much of anything for the rest of the day, and stayed in my house, feeling alone and very American. I watched a couple of movies and talked with some friends back home while on Skype. I didn’t really begin to feel like myself until I spoke with my friend in Peace Corps Paraguay who related the advice to me that we all have days like this, and you simply have to roll with them and let them wash over you, because tomorrow will be better. I hope so.

Wednesday: 7/21/2010

I woke up at 8 or 9 this morning and made eggs and coffee, determined to have an easygoing day to myself and to get my house ready for company as several of my fellow volunteers had things to do in my village and I was going to have to go down the mountain to Rich to meet with my Ministry of Water and Forests “counterpart”. I was informed that morning that my counterpart had been transferred and I no longer had one; needless to say, spending four hours in the Mercedes van was suddenly not necessary. The Peace Corps employee who had driven all the way from Rabat said she would be in my village tomorrow and I am just to stay here until then.

I decide to do laundry instead. I fill up several tubs of water in my bathroom and proceed to wash all of my garments by hand, one at a time. It is tiring and time consuming, but I think I will get the hang of it eventually. I load my clothes into bag and haul them to the roof where I hang them on the clothesline. The only garment I have that is still clean is one pair of boxer shorts and my brown Jelaba which I am currently wearing.

I stop to look out over the fields and at the puffy white cumulus clouds building over the mountains. I it is calm and quiet, with only a slight breeze stirring the poplars by the river and the willows where I had walked on Monday. Women walk to and from the fields, their domain by rote immemorial, but up in my valley, the men work too especially as the wheat begins to harvested. I see it laying cut in the fields, or stacked in sheaves; waiting to be loaded onto patient mules and donkeys who have walked these fields so long that they need only a gentle tab to send them on their way to the house. In between the wheat fields are the flowers of potato plants and small apple orchards whose floors are planted with lush alfalfa. All this will be cut, used, or harvested in some way before the snows come in November and the valley will be as barren as the surrounding hills until the land re-emerges (along with me) the following spring.

I like the feel of the soft jelaba against my skin and realize just how well made it is, not bad for 150 DH. I go downstairs and clean for awhile, alternating with reading or playing mandolin. I go upstairs again to check my laundry and notice threatening clouds above the mountains, most rainstorms last for only a minute or two so I don’t worry too much and go back downstairs. About a half-hour later the sky opens wide and rain begins to beat down on my roof. I run up to my roof in my Jelaba to gather my laundry. It is raining sideways in merciless, stinging drops. And soon my Jelaba is sticking to my bare back and I am shivering. I take my laundry downstairs and hang it from every surface of my apartment; literally, doorknobs and doors, nails, drawers, everything.

My jelaba gets hung up as well and I sit shivering in one of my blankets on a ponj. I try to read and eventually just take a nap as the storm subsides. I get up sometime later and don some dry clothes and go out to buy ingredients for the dinner I am planning to make. I get back and try to make tea, realizing that I am out of butane. As it transpires, so is the rest of the village, so I trudge back to my apartment and call my friend who agrees to bring some with him on the transit later.

When my company finally arrives, all volunteers from the “mountain” as we call it, they bring in bags of food and the butane tank and I get to cooking. I don’t have much experience cooking, nothing but a few signature dishes, and I was flying blind on this attempt. But I just started throwing ingredients in the pot and before I knew it I had an entire chicken in the pressure cooker and was mixing up a green chili “roux”. I combined my ingredients, no measuring or recipe, and then shredded the chicken. It turned out to be an amazing Green Chili Stew with just the right balance of spice and flavor to it. I was thrilled and can’t wait to try out another recipe. I threw the chicken leavings back into the pressure cooker and left it to boil into stock.

We ate all of the stew as my friend Molly made a wonderful barbeque chicken pizza which we ate with cookies and coke. A good meal all around. We stayed up and talked for hours about our villages and our homes in America, friends and foods we missed, and interesting things we had seen. I came to confirm what I already suspected; that we have an awesome crew of people here on my mountain and that this next year I have a feeling we will be there for eachother and ready to hop on a transit at a moment’s notice.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I will mention it here: Peace Corps has a wonderful social circle. Volunteers as a rule are kind and giving people and we are influenced both by our volunteerism and the hospitality that we are learning from our surrounding Moroccans, which is like Southern hospitality, but magnified. Imagine how much more we would know about eachother if we invited in passerby for tea and trusted our fellow countrymen enough to accept such invitations. These are commonplace here and issued without guile; there is even a specific hand-wave that people will do at passing cars that literally means “stop, and come in to drink tea with me”. We could learn a lot from these people.

I feel that my fellow Americans here in Morocco help to keep eachother sane and give us shoulder’s to cry on that have had similar experiences. Until you finish your two years, there are always volunteers that have been here longer than you that you lean on for experience and advice. We are all here for eachother and I look forward to many more evenings like this one.

Thursday: 7/22/2010

We all woke up late and slept well, no mishaps or sudden illnesses, so that is certainly a good thing. I staggered groggily out of my room and put on some coffee everyone; breakfast was a simple affair of yogurt and different kinds of fruit. We sat around a discussed our plans for the day and I shared that a Peace Corps employee would soon be here to do my “site check”.

I get a call from her a short time later and go outside to meet her. She is surprised, but unfazed, by the unexpected houseful of Americans. I make some Moroccan tea, which I think is pretty terrible; I suck at making Moroccan tea. But she dutifully drinks it and we go to have lunch with my host family up on the hill. It is my host father and mother with the baby, along with my host sister Fatima; the boys are at a relative’s house in another village for the weekend. Tea (better tea) and salted peanuts, followed by a small tajine for lunch; it is strange to see the room I had slept in for 2 months converted into a living room instead.

The Peace Corps liaison leaves shortly after lunch and tells me that I am integrating well. I walk back to my messy and still people-filled house and settle down to hang out some more. The water is done for the day so we really needed to scrounge for the water to clean the kitchen with, but we take care of it eventually. I put part of the stock in the fridge and the rest in the freezer for use later.

People left the house one by one, the last was my nearest neighbor who caught the last transit of the day and sped off down the mountain to her site. I spend a little more time out in the village and then went back to the house to begin the process of cleaning up. I am alone again, but it’s not as sharp as it was a few days ago. When dinnertime rolls around I get out the stock in the fridge and combine it with spaghetti noodles and some fresh vegetables and more spices to create some amazing chicken noodle soup that I eat before going to bed.

Friday: 07/23/2010

I get up late again and groggily go about making coffee and breakfast which ends up being 3 eggs sunny-side up and hashbrowns. It is excellent and wakes me up quite well. I go out into my village to go to the store; today is the first of the two souq days (no, I don’t expect to sleep tonight), and the town is flooded with hundreds of people I don’t know, and don’t need to know so I go home. The day was largely uneventful and I spent it cleaning and organizing things in my life in preparation for the 2 week training in Azrou that starts on Sunday. I will leave tomorrow on the transit and spend a night with a friend in Rich and then take a 5 hour bus from there. Nothing further to report on this quiet day save the fact that I made delicious marinara sauce from scratch!

~

Well, that is one week in my site and I will go ahead and post this entry now as I may not have time to later on during training next week.

As always, thanks for reading,

Charlie

07/17/2010

At this point I have spent about 10 days in my house cooking for myself, cleaning less than I should, reading, writing, and working out enough to prevent utter complacency. Days run together and are divided into two distinct parts: morning (with water) and afternoon (without water). I can do dishes and fill drinking bottles when the water is on from 8-12, but once it’s off that’s it. So an average day looks like this: Up at 8 or 9 and working out until ten; eggs and coffee for breakfast, followed by water related chores. This is then followed by swearing at the half-assed Moroccan, well everything. Be it my dishwater backing up in my shower, along with every single sink in the house leaking, internet not working for any apparent reason, especially aggravating when my phone has full service… from the same tower. Couple that with the drafty windows and a leaking skylight, and I am almost convinced that many things in this country are made by the lowest bidder and this makes me oh so grateful for American building codes.

It’s Souq Day again today and, as I mentioned before, the Souq is two days long and starts up bright and early at 4:30am Saturday morning. So I got the rare “pleasure” of being woken up by barking (occasionally screaming) dogs, large herds of bleating sheep being inexplicably driven through the 4 foot wide alley beside my house. Also, no vehicle in Morocco is required to have a muffler and the truth is that most Moroccans do not know how to drive and the few that do should never ever have been given a horn. Truck drivers honk at least six times and then noisily get out to crunch up my alley and audibly (oh yes) piss beneath my window. On hot nights, of which there are mercifully few, I have to have my window open and enjoy this rousing audio presentation. Granted the windows, also being Moroccan, don’t shut out the sound anyway, but they do enough to make it possible to sleep through it. Those of you who know me, know just how much noise bothers me…

But this is the living situation I have chosen, and I am just venting. After all, a blog that is all wine (or in the case of this country, Grape Juice) and roses is simply not honest and no PCV just sails through their service with absolute ease… I am shooting for relative ease. Psychologically I am a textbook PCV and am gutting my way through the “initial vulnerability” period at a predictable pace. While I am enjoying myself, I am also incredibly homesick. There! I said it! Yes, I am homesick, I want nothing more than to be home in the southwest with my friends and family doing southwestern things like river trips and long perilous hikes in a more familiar, though still howling, wilderness. Now, this is what my heart and reptile brain tell me, with their fierce admonitions to get back into my comfort zone. But if I do that, what will I learn? And who will do my job? My brain acknowledges that the pros outweigh the cons by a huge amount; I have friends here, I have opportunities here, and a (very much) howling wilderness to explore with more caution than what I have previously exhibited thus far.

No, leaving Morocco early has not even crossed my mind as a consideration, simply because the things the siren song of my homesickness tells me I want will be there, relatively unchanged, when I return! I have a lifetime to enjoy the Southwest, but only a two year window to experience North Africa. Thus does my mental cycle spin round. Besides, I’ve only got 659 days left, and I have been here for 140 days already.

Other things keep me honest, and securely in Morocco for two years, aside from just my reasoning. One is a PCV in Paraguay (you know who you are!) who served as a Ranger with me at Grand Teton two years ago (yep, it’s been two years this month!). She lived with her host family much for much longer than me and had to watch setback after setback as she had her house built. She’s moved in as of now, and much happier for it and we occasionally talk and/or exchange letters across the Atlantic. She works for a rain forest reserve which is about as similar to the Atlas as it is to the surface of Mars. Yet our jobs are similar and we work for our countries’ version of the National Park Service in an Environmental Education capacity. If either of us were to leave, I think we'd let eachother down in some way. The second external factor is an RPCV friend of mine who I worked with during my season at Cape Hatteras and who said simply, and with a smile: “Charlie, if you get all the way to Africa and E.T. (early terminate) for any reason whatsoever, I will hunt you down like a dog and I will kill you.” Ah, yes that is an excellent motivator as well.

I had a question posed to me in a recent email that simply asked what the hell my job actually is. There is a reason I haven’t really detailed this yet, it is because during the “initial adjustment period” I am not allowed to actually “work” (does this mean learning Tamazight is considered “recreation”?). Mainly though, I do know what my job will be and I will post a blog entry all about it in about 3 weeks. I have a crucial meeting with my counterpart in a few days, and two weeks of environment sector technical training in the city of Azerou after that. When I return, I can begin my work in earnest, and then I will tell you the details.

~

I suppose I should write about some good occurrences this week. The first and foremost being the discovery that I am able to cook! Between the Huevos Rancheros stew detailed in last week’s entry, and last night’s achievement: Green Chili Queso Soup, it has been a good week in the food department. I received a large windfall of green chilies in two separate care packages (thanks guys!) and, along with the containers of ground Chimayo Red and Chimayo Green that I brought from home, most of my dishes have a great Southwestern flair to them. There was a Green Chili Cream-cheese Omelet a few mornings ago that I was quite pleased with. So, if nothing else, I can learn how to cook from my time here!

Other good things of course include the books I have been reading (keep track of them on my booklist on the sidebar of this page). Since my last entry, I finished “Teaching a Stone to Talk” by Annie Dillard and “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols; both were amazing and taught me a great deal in very different ways. My current books are “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner, and “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman. A third that I am enjoying as well is a gem that I found in my favorite used book store in Durango, the “Southwest Book Trader”. It is called “The Wilderness Reader” and it cost about 2 dollars; it’s an old book as well from the 1970s and it has been beaten up and dragged around for much of its life. But here’s what makes it special: it’s a compilation of works on the American Wilderness and includes work by: William Byrd, William Bartram, Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, John James Audubon, John C. Fremont, Francis Parkman, Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, Verplanck Colvin, Isabella Bird, Plenty Coups, Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, John Muir, Mary Austin, John C. Van Dyke, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edwin Way Teale, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and David Roberts. Pretty amazing stuff.

Other good things from this week are that I am enjoying playing my Mandolin a lot and have also gotten much better with the Penny-whistle (as one PCV described: The ultimate portable instrument). Also, despite the anti-social nature of this week, my language continues to improve.

So, in conclusion, it has been a long week alone. But I am learning more every day and this is as it should be. I have a feeling I will be well into the swing of things by the time Ramadan concludes in late September… my seven month anniversary.

Thanks for reading, I’ll try to make it more poetic next time,

Charlie

So finishes the most quiet and satisfying day I have yet passed in Morocco. I have either had houseguests, or been the guest of someone else, for nearly a week. I have had little to no time alone and am still in the "getting used to" phase of occupying my new home. So today was my first full day entirely by myself and it was, in my opinion, well spent.

I awoke to sunlight shafting through the ornate bars on my window, which I had left open to let in the cool night air. I stirred under the single woolen blanket that covered me and staggered to my feet, checking the time briefly on my phone. No need to dress in my own house and the morning air felt cool and gentle on my skin. I walked blearily into the kitchen, looking briefly at the pile of dishes in the sink from the spaghetti my PCV neighbor and I had made the day before, and filled the tea-kettle with water. I turned on the stove and lit it in one quick, fluid motion; I smiled, realizing how I was getting used to the Moroccan kitchen. I turned on some music, "Very Best of Sons of the Pioneers" and listened to old cowboy ballads as I poured the steaming water into a french press over several spoonfuls of French Roast that I had a received in a wonderfully thought out care package that had arrived yesterday.

I carried the press and an empty mug into my study where I checked my email briefly before settling in to read from Proverbs, my favorite book of the Bible. I also scanned my favorite Psalm, Psalm 50, which gives the most eloquent defense of Christian Environmentalism I have yet found. I think of John Muir again, as I often do these days, how he constructed an argument for biology and environmentalism, solely from biblical references, in an instant. He had been accused by a blacksmith that he was staying with of laziness and frivolity; of misusing his God-given talents and skill on something as useless as cataloging plants. His argument was this:

"You believe in the Bible do you not? Well, you know that Solomon was a strong-minded man and he is generally believed to have been the very wisest man the world ever saw, and yet he considered it was worth while to study plants; not only to go and pick them up as I am doing, but to study them; and you know we are told that he wrote a book about plants, not only of the great Cedars of Lebanon, but of little bits of things growing in the cracks of the walls.

Therefore you see that Solomon differed very much more from you than from me in this matter. I'll warrant you he had many a long ramble in the mountains of Judea, and had he been a Yankee he would likely have visited every weed in the land. And again, do you not remember that Christ told his disciples to 'consider the lilies how they grow,' and compared their beauty with Solomon in all his glory? Now, whose advice am I to take, yours or Christ's? Christ says, 'Consider the lilies," You say, 'Don't consider them. It isn't worth while for any strong-minded man'"1

I love that exchange, Muir was about my age when it transpired and he was walking 1000 miles to the Gulf of Mexico from the heartland near the Great Lakes. This was years before he first glimpsed the Sierra, his muse, the 'Range of Light' and yet he was still completely, well, Muir.

I finished my coffee and completed a workout; a light one to bring me back from the illness induced atrophy that I found myself in after 4 months of... 'distress'. I ate a protein bar for breakfast (also a care package gem, from a different package) and, with resignation, put on some clothing. I go out into the village for roughly 20 minutes, talking to those I know. I buy some vegetables at the 'daily souq' and pay an amazingly low price for them. I make another stop by my favorite 'hanut', or shop, and buy some essentials from Ali.

I return and look at my watch, realizing that I have only one hour of running water left in the day, so I fill my big kettle and top off a couple of black buckets in my bathroom. I do last night's dishes while I wait for the water to boil and listen to more quiet music, not thinking of anything in particular. When the kettle begins to steam, I strip back down and take it into the bathroom. I enjoy a long and much needed 'bucket bath', mixing the warm and cold water in my bucket and pouring it over myself with a plastic cup. I use the handmade soap from Kelaat M'gouna that my host sister, Nouhayla, gave me when I left Ait Gmat 2 months ago. Eventually I use all my water and towel off. I pull on a pair of linen trouser that I purchased in Rabat and go back into my study.

I pick up Desert Notes/River Notes by Barry Lopez, another of my heroes that I have already mentioned. I read for a long while my mind entirely focused on his words and the meaning behind them. I read the story of Coyote and Rattlesnake, a story I have never before heard (and I have read many Coyote Stories). This one had a great deal of depth to it, and struck a deep chord within me as I absorbed its words. One passage, in which Coyote has climbed the sacred mountain to consult the Great Spirit, is especially poignant as Coyote pours out his concerns for himself, his friend the rattlesnake, and for his beloved desert:

"Akasitah [Great Spirit], I have come here to ask you to change your mind. Below it is chaos because of the Shisa [humans]. In a while there be no place to go. I and all my friends, even the mountains, they will be taken away by the Shisa. It is said that you are wise and fair. How is it that the Shisa have come to this? Must I always be a coyote to the Shisa? Can I not be who I am? I ask you to change things. Let me walk out of the traps. Let Rattlesnake up off the ground so he can see something coming. Let these things happen or we will be no more. There will be nothing left. The Shisa will take even the desert."2

Coyotes concerns echo in my own heart and, as look out on the ravaged hills surrounding my village I realize that they are this way because humans (and their beasts) have destroyed them- they have been taken by the Shisa. But here is Akasitah's reply:

"Coyote, you see like a man with only one eye. The Shisa are like a great boulder that has broken away from the side of a mountain. The boulder makes a great noise as it comes down the side of the mountain. It tears away great chunks of earth and rock and breaks the trees like twigs, throwing up a cloud of dust against the sun and you are afraid for your life. There is no need to be afraid. It only seems this way because you have never known the world without the Shisa. You have spent your life under the boulder. I understand your fear.

Once there were no Shisa at all... Coyote: they are like a boulder fallen off a mountain. Soon they will hit the earth at the bottom of the mountain and roll out into the desert leaving a little trail in the dust. The boulder will come to a stop. You can sleep on it at night. Do not worry. Go."2

I won't expand on that much, I'll just leave it for you to digest as I did; if you're anything like me, you'll feel a vague comfort and a lessening of that sense of doom so common in our times of Climate Change and Oil Spills. Not to lessen these problems, they are terrifying and disgust me to think we, the Shisa, have anything to do about it. But the comfort comes from the feeling that we are dealing with a power and a creation so much greater than ourselves, that it will always be greater than humanity at its most powerful.

I place by bookmark with the lizard on it that reads: 'readers find heat between the covers' and open my mandolin case with a click. I select a large pick and play a clear and ringing 'Ashokan Farewell', before methodically moving through the songs that I already know and the songs that I am currently learning. I was given this mandolin by one of the men I most admire in my life, a musician, civil war reenactor, and close friend, by the name of Michael. He lives with his family in a house by a tidal creek off of Mobile Bay in South Alabama. I have spent many weeks in his home, drinking sweet tea on the screened-in porch or dangling my toes in the brackish water of the creek, dark with tannins leached from the over-arching trees.

I played until my fingers began to sting, and then a little more;I winced and look at my fingertips which were now blistered. A good practice session... I rise and begin to make lunch in the kitchen, Annie's Mac and Cheese (oh joy!) which I make in an automatic sort of way, but eat slowly,savoring it and knowing that my supply is limited. I walk out into my sitting room. Sun streams through the skylight and I lay down a mat in the center of the room.

I put on some quiet music and spend the next hour engrossed in yoga, flowing from form to form, my mind emptied of all thought save the intake and exhalation of breath, and the slow beating of my heart. I feel the sun on my back and sweat beading there, I am aware of my skin, my muscles; I feel what is tight and what is relaxed, what is weak and what is strong. I explore my senses, but keep my eyes shut, aware of only the suggestion of light from the warmth on my shoulders and the glow through my closed eyelids. I slow and stop, settling into a seated position to meditate. I concentrate and let the music flow through me. Thoughts try to surface, but sink back into the nether before they can break the surface and be realized. The music stops and I open my eyes. My brain reactivates, but slowly like a catatonic pulse; a scarcely discernible rhythm. The sweat dries on my back and shoulders as I pour a glass of sweet tea, cold and smooth, from a pitcher I had made the day before.

In my quieted state I simply stare into space, I am happy and carefree. Not the fleeting, manic (and brief) ecstasy of personal triumph, but a quiet happiness; a contentment and acceptance of myself, my circumstances, and my surroundings. No worries could be recalled and that was enough. I looked at the pictures on my kitchen wall, they are of national parks from across America, some of which I have worked, most I have not. Over my sink is a small painting of the mountains near Lake City, purchased there and sent to me as I worked on the island in North Carolina. Below the painting is a tally of the days I have spent here and a small notecard with a tiny watercolor of downtown Durango on its cover. Inside the card is a short message from my grandmother, written in her tight and beautiful cursive: "Dear love of my heart, don't forget your way home!" The date is the day I walked into the conference room in Philadelphia, confused and unaware of what lay ahead. The card arrive a couple months ago in a package from home and has occupied a place of honor ever since; it reminds me every day of my way home, as it should.

There is a blank space above my gas stove and I am going to fill it by painting a Muir quote that I have selected in black calligraphy (yes, I can). It is short, simple, and inspiring. It is one my favorite quotes:

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."1

I sip my tea and walk around my house a bit before picking up Desert Notes/River Notes and reading it until I reach the end. I read of deserts and of rivers; of dark forests, running salmon, drought and plenty, dusk and dawn. I read of a vision, a vision of being surrounded by the creatures of the wood and river who speak to the storyteller who has just saved a fish from the encroaching drought:

"Before we could ask for rain there had to be someone to do something completely selfless, with no hope of success. You went after that fish, and then at the end you were trying to dance. A person cannot be afraid of being foolish. For everything, every gesture, is sacred. Now stand up and learn this dance. It is going to rain."2

Lopez' words ring true, a person absolutely cannot be afraid of being foolish. Especially here in Peace Corps; here in the high Atlas of Morocco, the mountains that hold up the sky. If I can make myself realize that my actions are sacred, that what I do here matters, maybe I too can make it rain.

I close the finished book, and go into the kitchen to make dinner, a successful experiment that I name "Huevos Rancheros Stew". I eat a bowl and I go pull on my clothes. I pick up a notepad and a pen, with a couple letters to answer, and head to the nearest Cafe. My host father is there and we speak, both in English and Tam, laugh, and drink mint tea as the sunset fades into gloaming and dark clouds growl on the horizon promising rain.

I think back on the day, of what I have learned and what I have felt; I feel more whole from today. I feel that I touched something greater and feel a sweeping humility that perhaps heralds the beginnings of wisdom. I will not worry, what I am doing here is right, it matters and is sacred; I will not fear being foolish, because perhaps even my uncoordinated dance could someday bring the rain...

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

1: The Wilderness World of John Muir, edited by Edwin Way Teale

2:Desert Notes/River Notes, by Barry Lopez

NOTE:This is part 2! If this is your first visit, scroll down and read part 1 beforehand. Again, I am sorry about the length, I will try to keep my entries more concise from here on out. Enjoy reading and don't forget to comment so I know you were here.

IV:

06/12/2010- Day 105 in Morocco – 692 Days of Service Remaining

In the end, I only got roughly 2 hours of sleep; besides the inordinate amount of tea I had had to drink in lieu of dinner, I was also plagued by fleas which seemed to bite just as I began to drift off. I awake to a grey dawn feeling nervous and unrefreshed. The herds are gone and Hassan is beginning to rouse beside me. Outside, I smell baking bread and the woman soon appears with tea. One of the children gives me bread, with his left hand. This is simply not done, but I know it was not done on purpose, so I smile weakly, and tear off a small piece that had not been touched. As I chew it, the family looks at something outside, and I hastily tuck the rest of the bread into a crevice in hopes that mice will find it before my hosts do. I smile again as they look back at me and refuse the offer of more bread. Next, there is a breakfast soup, called Ahareer; it is one of my favorite Moroccan dishes and I slurp down a couple spoonfuls while it is still scalding hot, hoping that whatever microbes were in the milk have been killed by the heat. Hassan eats the rest and we look at my map.

We gaze at it together for about 10 minutes before I realize that, to Hassan, this map is meaningless brown squiggles on a green and white background, occasionally marred by French names for mountains or towns. I thank him for the help and we go outside where I ask for more specific directions. He tells me that there is a pass about 4 hours distant that leads to the village that is my destination. When I ask where it is, he smiles and points with his whole hand, just like my host father, “Nishan”. I thank my hosts profusely for their generosity and hospitality. Thinking of what I can give them, I reach into my pack and produce what remains of my cheese, about half of my food, and give it to Hassan. Before I walk out of sight, the children have finished it and are playing with the foil wrappers.

The family and their home vanish as I round a curve in the cold, grey canyon. Looking back, I can see no evidence of humanity, just stone and misty cedars. I ponder whether the house in which I slept would even be there if I went back, or whether it was some twist in time deep in this canyon which seems to be a world all of its own. Time seems to stop beneath these ancient trees.

I start my march and immediately the exertion of the previous day and the absence of sleep seem to tear at my body; my pack seems to be a living thing with talons digging deeply into my shoulders and hips. The canyon is narrow and I follow animal sign to find the path of least resistance. Occasionally a rushing, whispering noise will break the tomblike silence and I will look to see a tumbling cascade enter my streambed, waterfall upon waterfall climbing upwards into the dark trees and eventually disappearing into the mist.

The trees drop away and I find I badly eroded trail that goes over a nearby pass; it is too soon, it has scarcely been an hour since I left the house in canyon. I go to the divide and look down into a deep defile with several small houses at the bottom. This valley is nearly as deep as the one I have just clawed my way free of; my mind tells me that this can’t be right, that I missed a turn and am too far north. A shred of mist blows from a nearby promontory and I catch a glimpse of a shepherd boy in a flowing teal Jelaba, he doesn’t see me and I turn around and go back the way I had come, searching for the true route.

I am not lost, merely confused, I tell myself over and over. I feel the dread return, pulsing beneath the fatigue; what if this valley won’t let me go? I am on a small bend in the creek covered with small broken flakes of shale. I stop here and drop my pack. I spread out my topographic map and pull out my GPS, which quickly dies (didn’t I change those damn batteries?!) but not before it can give me a set of coordinates that at least confirms that I am still in the valley. I look at the mass of lines, which is drifting in and out of focus, and try to dig deeper; there must be some trick I haven’t thought of, something I am forgetting. It hits, me and I dig in my pack, going back to basics. I pull out an orienteering compass, a tool I haven’t used since I got my Eagle Scout years ago in the BSA. I place it on the wedge at the bottom of the map and hear my scoutmaster’s gruff voice in my ear, still barking instructions. “By the way, Charlie, did you forget your Scout book again?!” “Uh, yes sir, but I still remember how to orient a map!”

I look down and realize the job is done. Placing my hand on the damp paper, I line up the compass and take a bearing on my destination: the unknown pass. I fold the map and point the compass. I leads back up the canyon I had backtracked, but I walk the wash for a third time, this time with purpose. I gain a spurt of energy and find myself back on the misty saddle before I realize. I am looking back down into the deep valley, the boy is gone but the view is the same; it looks exhausting. Exasperated, I pull out my compass. The bearing unrolls like a glowing thread across the bleak vista, point directly across. There is nowhere to go but down.

V:

I start down an eroded trail straight into the heart of the valley. On the cloud shrouded heights, sheep bleat unseen. I hear I shout and turn to look back. It is the shepherd boy, yelling something I cannot understand in Berber, I wave benignly and keep going down, the boy does not follow. I hope deep ruts that cut across the trail, stumbling on stone, my knees and hamstrings protesting this new abuse. I reach the bottom and see the stream leading into the high basin where the map says there is a way over the mountains to my destination, where I can rest. I step onto a bank and prepare to step gently into the streambed, when a rock gives way beneath my right boot and I fall.

I land hard on my side and a sharp pain burns on my forearm and shoots up my humerus, I am on my feet again before I have time to process and I go through the different things I can use in my pack for a sling. A quick assessment shows that there is no lasting damage, just a scrape up my forearm and a bruise. I shake myself and stagger on up the stream. My heart sinks again as I hear barking.

I glance over my shoulder shows an angry shepherd dog standing atop the bank when I fell. Thankfully I am swallowed by a bend in the stream and the dog does not follow. There are several houses here and I keep my head down not wanting to attract the attention of more dogs, or their masters. My efforts are in vain as some children spot me and start chasing me up the streambed. I see an older girl with a baby on her back, she motions for me to go before they catch me. I nod and quicken my pace. It is in vain, however as the children, two boys and a girl, catch up to me and begin demanding things in French.

I am exhausted, my patience is completely gone and has been for some time. I look at my assailants; they are some of the dirtiest children I have seen, one of the boys has a string of green slime flowing from his nose onto his lip and all of them are covered in dirt and offal. They put their hands out demanding the trio of items I have become accustomed to hearing: money, candy, and pens. All demands are made maddeningly in French. In Tam, I say I don’t have any of these things; this is true I have no candy, I have one pen (damn them, it’s my pen), and the smallest amount of money I have is a 100DH note, deep in my pack. I have no intention of giving them anything; a kid begging me for money is maddening on the best of days, in the cities they single me out and badger me mercilessly simply because I have pale skin and eyes. It goes without saying that I am French, and speak French; I have see clean, obviously well-fed, children leave their parents and come up to me demanding a handout. What is infuriating is that tourists often give them what they want. But, as a PCV, I can’t carry around pens and candy all the time. Whatever small money I do have, I need to use for food and lodging. So, wrapping up this tangent, I will give to the blind and the lame, the obviously destitute, but I will not give to kids.

The look at me silently for a minute and the older girl with the baby walks up behind the trio. The demands begin again, still in French, I say firmly that I don’t speak French. They look at me as if I am crazy, and I know my Tam is intelligible, but they just act like they don’t understand it. I want to scream from anger and exhaustion. The older girl yells at the little demons to be quiet and then asks me my name. I tell her who I am and where I am going. She looks at me for a minute and then asks halfheartedly for candy. I say no, but without force, and she leaves it be. I ask her where the piste is that goes over the mountain. The gestures back over my shoulder, looking suddenly wild in her robe and colorful headscarf, “nishan.”, that is all. I turn to go, one of the smaller kids makes to follow me and she calls him back. Soon they too, are swallowed by the canyon.

Clouds still shroud the summits around me but they are higher and paler than they were this morning, the weather shows some sign of getting better rather than worse. The cliffs high above are of a strange red stone I do not know and much of it has tumbled down toward the creekbed, where I am walking, in huge round boulders. The creek grows tighter and steeper and my legs burn as I climb; I have to stop often. I am starving and thirsty and I am drinking water, but it never seems to be enough. I know I need food but I find it difficult to eat the stale bread I have left in my pack. I think about the cheese I gave away a few hours ago and convince myself that it wouldn’t have helped matters anyway.

I am confronted by a small cascade, there is no way past it except going up the steep slope to my left. But this is not a scree slope, it is a solid mass of wildflowers and tall grasses all heavy with the night’s dew not yet gone. I half walk, half crawl through the slippery fragrant mass, making no effort to step carefully. The smell of wet grass and crushed flowers is sweet and offers some small comfort to my pain-fogged mind. I look up as I crest the hill and scan my surroundings. I am in a hanging basin, bounded by mountains, entirely carpeted with waving golden grass. This is no wheat field, it is simply a vision of what once was, here in the Atlas, back when the mighty cedars could be could found in every valley and where all basins were explosions of life and color, following the receding snows in the spring of the year. In this long past era, huge herds of Barbary Sheep could be found browsing the slopes and being hunted in the forests below by hyenas, lions, and even a species of Atlas bear. The forgotten valley of last night and this golden basin are reflections, shadows of a greater past.

I sit down suddenly and slide out of my pack. I half lie, half lean on my pack and squeeze water between my cracked lips. The grass nods around me and I think of Frodo, the hobbit from Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings” being pursued by a Shelob the spider, tripping over a stone and suddenly finding himself facedown on the forest floor of Lothlorien, instead of in the terrifying darkness and stench of the spider’s cavern. I feel a similar bewilderment at the sudden peace and perfect tranquility I feel, lying here in the sun, high in the mountains. I can feel myself surrendering to sleep and then the truth comes crashing down; I am not home, I am in Africa, in the middle of dangerous and unknown mountains, still far from my destination, and at the edge of my physical and mental capacities. I am back in the cavern again, but I feel I have somehow been given a gift with this sudden vision of paradise and peace; it is good to know at such times that these things still exist.

I stand up and look back the way I came, able to see all three of the mountain passes I had summited in the last 24 hours, even Tizi-n-Isuwal, scarcely visible in the distance. I feel the vague stirrings of… pride? No, not that, more of a sense of wonder and the knowledge of exactly how far I had come and how much I had seen. Turning to where the compass points I see the faint tracery of a piste, as fine as a distant spider’s web, angling straight up the mountainside, out of the basin and out of sight.

I start trudging toward it, looking at my boots, placing one foot stiffly in front of the other in the manner of a reanimated corpse. I stagger through ankle deep flowers, this time a thick carpet of shining buttercups. I cross the stream for a final time and look up. The piste lies straight above me, perhaps 200 vertical feet. My pace slows to a crawl and I employ a “rest-step” I remember my father teaching me, to use for high mountains, where every step is a small victory. This mountain is scarcely above 11,000 feet or so, but in my exhaustion, each step seems a small victory just the same. It takes me almost a half hour to reach the piste, I collapse and drink more water, also forcing myself to eat some bread; chewing it slowly and fighting back fatigue-induced nausea. I know I cannot let myself get sick, simply because what fluids I have, I want to keep. The sickness passes and I continue the climb; toward the top, at the base of the cliffs, is a snowfield. It is pure, clean, and cool and I drink in its cool crisp smell. It reminds me of home and energizes me in a way similar to the meadow which is now just a golden swath far below.

I stagger, gasping, onto the pass; my vision swims again and I think I am seeing double. Not another one. No. The map didn’t say there were two. But I shake my head and the vision stays with me; the trail drops away into a basin and there, on the other side, is another pass.

VI:

Resignedly, I shuffle forward. My phone beeps with its first signal since Tizi-n-Isuwal. I have a message from a neighboring volunteer. “What time are you headed down from your village on the transit?”. I call him briefly, biting back my first words of “Send help!” I speak normally telling him that I am not headed down on a transit today. When questioned why, I say that I decided to walk. “To (village name here)?” “Yeah, and it hasn’t gone great, I’ll tell you tomorrow when I see you.” I say. “If I see you…” He mutters, only half kidding. I hang up and put the phone in my pocket, transfixed by the distant pass as if it were a gun pointed at my head. One step at a time, left foot, right foot; rest and breathe. The air is thin and dry and offers little comfort.

I arrive much more quickly than I predicted and see the pass close before me. I stagger up what this time has to be the final summit. It is, and I am looking down at a village perhaps 2500 feet below. The mountain drops sharply in bands of cliffs and toward the bottom all is a swirling commotion of green and red slate. The village is a few huts surrounded by deep green fields. It seems close enough to touch. I pull out my phone and call the volunteer that I am to stay with at my destination tonight and announce my imminent arrival. “Ah, you may be too late,” he said. “I am pretty sure the last transit has left for the day,” I cut in, “I walked.” There is a pause on the other end and then. “You what? From where, and when?” I tell him, and there is another pause. “Wow, well I guess I’ll see you tonight then. Try to hitch a ride with a truck on the road; you realize it’s 16 more kilometers from the village you see to my village, right?”. What? 16 more?! “Oh,” I say “No, I didn’t, but that’s okay, I’ll see you tonight regardless.” We hang up.

I pick up my pack and start down the faint and treacherous piste that angles down the mountain. I am following the tracks of a woman and a donkey, the shoe pattern is distinct and leaves clear marks on the rock. I descend slowly and carefully, slipping several times despite my caution. The trail grows fainter and fainter and finally fades into nothing, leaving me in the middle of a steep scree slope that I would have been loath to navigate well fed, hydrated, and without a heavy pack. I am not afraid, merely sad and angry, and my feeling is reflected and magnified by a growling wall of black clouds oozing into the valley like a malignant force, trailing thick ropey curtains of rain.

VII:

I dig in with my boots and walking stick and skid downward, hopping from ifssi to ifssi, my legs screaming from each impact. I am almost to the slate layer when I realize that there something wrong with the contour, an inconsistency that I had overlooked when choosing my route. I cannot see it and then I do; there is a horizon line; that means there is a cliff. I skid into a drainage and see a sheep trail, faint but discernable, leading down a crack in the strata. I clamber down it, thankful for the discovery, and look back at the cliff. It is a 60 foot pour-off of solid grey limestone, a shepherds' shelter lies to one side and delicate streamers of flowers and shrubs hang down its blank face. I look back at the wall of cloud and think of how awesome this will be in a few short hours, with water raging off the brink, breaking into comets and streamers of spray and raging on into the river far below.

But I am numb and even this vision of beauty does little to inspire wonder in a mind and body so close to the brink. I descend more, this time on the purple and green slates, hitting a small cliff band each time the color changes. I soon develop an ability to see the cliffs coming based on the color and flow of the rocks ahead. I see a herd of goats trailed by a sheepdog, I quickly scale a low hill and find a route down the opposite side from the dog, which I am sure is less than friendly toward foreigners. I start down a small drainage and am almost immediately cliffed out again. High on the slope opposite me is a house with a dog lying in the sun outside the front door. I pause in the shadow of a gnarled juniper tree and drop my pack. I sit down at the side of the tree opposite the sleeping dog and drink some water, my head leaning on my pack. My vision swims and I fall asleep for a moment, waking with a start. Not yet buddy, you’re almost there.

I get up and find another way around the cliff, the dog still sleeps and I tread carefully. I am at the foot of a small waterfall when the dog wakes up; I scramble unnoticed onto a little used piste at the edge of a wheatfield. I look back to watch the dog. I am upwind of it and it doesn’t seem to notice me. It trots to the base of the waterfall, and sniffs the spray, then wanders up the opposite hill, on an errand of its own choosing. I let out a breath that I hadn’t even realized I had been holding. I follow the piste until it disappears and returned to the creekbed only to be forced to find a way around 3 more waterfalls of 20-30 feet in height. All of them flowing, and all of them beautiful. But I don’t see beauty, only coolness and an invitation to come, drink, rest, and forget. A siren song in flowing water.

I see something ahead; it is a concrete irrigation channel, situated on the canyon wall like an aqueduct. The village I saw has to be nearby! I look back at the pass, now a distant notch high above, and then start to walk, balanced on the aqueduct, confident that it will take me back to people, to safety, to rest. My tongue feels huge in my mouth and my lips are cracked and dry. The sun beats down on my rain-shell, but I am chilled from fatigue; I feel ill, and want to stop, but I force myself to go on.

I soon come to a group of men working on the ditch; I speak to them, my Tam sounding like the rustling of dry leaves. I ask for the road and they point; they are startled by my sudden appearance, but one look into my eyes and they do not ask questions. I run into other people as the fields grow thicker and the ditch broader. Naturally, I also start accumulating children, they ask me for things in French and make like they are going to shoot me with their sling-shots. But they hold back, eyes warily watching my walking stick. One of the older boys, maybe 13, initially torments me but then looking into my eyes he sees the weariness and pain there, and instead guides me to the road. I look in wonder at the mud walls all around me, this village which would have seemed so poor and small less than 48 hours before, now seems decadent and civilized; the children have left me for the moment and I am alone in the streets of the village. I pass through a tunnel and walk through an avenue of trees.

There is a truck on the road with no-one nearby. I collapse in the dust and lean against the wheel, bringing out the last of my water. The children reappear, this time saying nothing, simply sitting or squatting in a semicircle around me, roughly 15 feet away. Just watching. Their eyes shift from me, only when an older berber gentleman in a sport coat comes over to see what the fuss is about. I clamber painfully to my feet , I shake his hand and speak to him in Tam. He keeps my hand in his and places another on my shoulder; a sign of closeness, of kinship. He tells me the truck is not leaving until tomorrow, and that I was welcome to stay with him tonight and drink tea with his family. I thanked him but said, truthfully, that my friend would worry if I didn’t show up tonight. He helped me put on my pack and dispersed the children. He asked again if I would stay and I gave the same reason as before, adding that I must go; with a sinking heart I realize that I have 16 kilometers to walk before nightfall.

I start walking again, each step a new pain, I am hailed by a farmer who runs from his field and speaks to me, he also invites me to his house for the night, once he realizes I can speak Tam. I make my excuses and apologies and keep forging ahead. Off to my right I see a truck next to a group of laborers working on the road. I walk up to them and ask when the truck is leaving. They say tomorrow. I offer a small sum of money, the driver ups it to the point of being ridiculous. I shake my head and sit down to rest. A short rest turns into 1.5 hours and I speak to the workers in Tam about them, me, and the state of things in general. We drink tea together and I get up to leave. The driver motions for me to wait, and tells me he will take me half-way, to shave off 8 kilometers; another of the workers offers me a place in his home for the night. I ask how much the driver intends to charge for the 8 kilometers and he tells me it is a gift because I am tired and speak Tam. I don’t ask questions and crawl into the cab.

The driver takes me 8 kilometers down a winding river gorge and then tells me he will take me all the way to my destination for a fee of 100DH. I get out and walk, after thanking him for the free 8 kilometers of course. I limp down the road against a chill down-canyon wind. My American friend calls and says he is coming to get me with one of the local transit drivers for a very small fee. I walk on, covering about a kilometer more before I hear the sound of a motor. I step to the side and stick out one thumb. I realize must be quite a sight in my dusty red rain shell , and blue backpack. I try to stand a little straighter and even manage a smile; only my eyes belie the pain and exhaustion I feel. The door opens and my friend, a fellow PCV whom I have never met and know only from others’ descriptions, steps out onto the road. I stick out my hand; “Hi, I’m Charlie, it’s great to finally meet you!”

Afterword:

I soon got the rest I needed so badly and spent the next two days recovering and eating in the village I had worked so hard to get to. In the mirror, my eyes still looked tired and my cheeks were still hollowed, but I was safe and whole among friends; with the massive experience to process in my brain.

Three days after I sank into the seat in the back of that transit, I am standing at the window of a top floor apartment in the city of Errachidia. The sun is going down on the desert and the call to prayer echoes through the streets, clashing with the Eagles singing “The Sad Café” on the stereo behind me. The two friends I am staying with are off doing their own thing and I am by myself for a time, deep in my own thoughts. I look out at the city; the neon lights of shops and pharmacies are beginning to flicker into life and a soft breeze rustles the colorful rugs that hang from balconies and windows. People move on the street and I can hear the distant throb of music somewhere out of sight.

I look down at my little black journal, battered and scratched, and scan the entry I have just written:

“My friend, who thought the entire venture was insane and foolish, said that I unbelievably managed to pull it off with no illness, injury, or even real mistakes. I still catch my breath when I realize just what could have happened, what could have so easily gone wrong. But then I realize that it was all handled well… I drew upon skills and resources I didn’t even know I possessed… No false moves, no major mistakes, just fear, doubt, and adrenaline.”

And now? What do I feel now, looking at the darkening city? I feel clarity, humility, and a deep inner quiet. I feel that I gained a new understanding of myself and of the natural world at large. I take no pride in my accomplishment, just a sense of thankfulness, and the knowledge that I did what I set out to do. I searched for the beating heart of the Atlas and found it deep in that shrouded, forgotten valley. In that lost Eden; in that Hall of Giants, it was there and it was strong.

NOTE: Due to length, I am splitting this entry into two parts, I will try to publish the second half in the next two days, but certainly by Monday. Email if you have questions, but for now, enjoy.

On the desk before me lies a journal. It is small, roughly the size of a passport and just as thin. Its covers are black and scratched and its pages stained; the ink blurred with water and sweat. I remember it crisp and new only a few months before as my good friend, a Park Ranger in Nevada, pressed it into my hands as a gift. Only five of its pages have been filled so far, but it is the story contained in those five pages that I will attempt to convey in the following account. It is an account of a mere 48 hours in the Atlas Mountains but the events of those 48 hours, I feel, will shape the rest of my service here. So given the personal importance of these events, I feel that it is best to translate them to you in all honesty. I will not make myself out to be a hero, and I will not cut out the fear, pain, and doubt I felt.

These five pages have very little rhyme or reason, no structure at all really. They are simply a bulleted list of a strange shorthand, my shorthand, with words or phrases written to trigger my memories of moments past. Looking through the list I see the points begin neat and legible and end in a more desperate scrawl. Now, I will attempt to recreate the series of events from this list and let the memories flow from the little journal onto this page.

I:

06/11/2010 – Day 104 in Morocco – 693 Days of Service Remaining

“Nishan”, my host father is speaking to me, his weathered face illuminated by the early morning sun; a cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth. “Nishan”, he says again, “go straight”; he gestures to a hazy mountain pass over my shoulder. The white landrover sits behind him, engine ticking in the cool morning silence. The mountains between us and my village are shadowy and wreathed in fog, their slopes a play of dappled light. I nod solemnly and point at the pass “Nishan, anikkin fhmgh” “Go straight, I understand”. He nods once and waves goodbye before getting back into the Land Rover and vanishing into the fog.

I turn around and look down at a large lake, named for a bridegroom, which shines like a mirror in the slanting light. My pack, not very heavy at 40lbs, already begins to bite into my shoulders and reminds me how much conditioning I have lost from the myriad of illnesses I have played host to in the past 3 months. I grip my stout walking stick, perfect for fighting off third-world dogs, and start to walk. Road underfoot, a barely discernable track, is soft purple soil almost the color of a bruise and contrasts sharply with the shifting turquoise of the lake that I am skirting. All around me clouds pour into the valley leaving the passes and canyons shadowy and mysterious.

I meet two shepherds who look at me curiously and ask me questions which I answer in my halting Tamazight. Next there is a man in a striped Jelaba, he is riding sidesaddle on a gray mule laden with goods; I greet him and move on. I leave the road and follow a route over a series of purple gullies, shallow here but canyon-like near the lake thanks to erosion and over-grazing. A mustard-like plant sways at my feet, I have no idea what it is. Nearby, I hear cascading birdsong and look to my left where I see a killdeer, or what would be a killdeer, except that it is black and white. The same and not the same… I top a rise and a broad valley filled with shifting cloud shadows spreads out before me. Herds of sheep move across the flat surface trailed by robed shepherds and small clouds of dust. Beyond the valley, the mountains tighten and the valley rises to the pass my host father had pointed to which shimmers in the distance.

The valley floor is arid and ravaged by countless decades of overgrazing; all of the plants have been reduced to small patches and much of the ground is simply dirt. I stride forward lost in thought; I think of my hero, John Muir. He spent much of his life walking alone in the mountains with nothing but bread and an unquenchable passion for life and the natural world. While I never hope to be as brilliant or as eloquent as Muir, I find his outlook on life a worthy goal. Passion, childlike wonder, and great love of simplicity are things that I strive for. Maybe I can learn more about this while I am here in Africa. “A man needs naught but bread and beauty…”

A patch of greenery at my feet catches my eye and I look down into a tiny patch of star-like morning glories, blooming from a crushed and unrecognizable be if chewed leaves. It is things like these that show the resilience of nature and give me hope for this fledgling park that I am hiking end-to-end. After all, it is my primary duty while I am here in Morocco to research and draft an Ecological Management plan for the park and its resources; everything I see, I see through that lense.

The sun blazes down on my head but the wind is chill. I am hailed by two dusty shepherds, a father and son named Haddou and Moha, and we speak briefly in Tamazight and they point the way once again to the pass, Tizi-n-Isuwal. I continue on and step into an akka or dry-riverbed filled with round, water-sculpted stones. I quickly enter a canyon and am struck by the silence. The canyon walls are angular and the beds of sedimentary rock are tilted toward the sky. The canyon is deep, narrow, and dry reminding me of “Blue Creek” in Big Bend National Park where I had worked two winters previous. I hear a crunch and look down realize all of the stone I am walking on is perfect fossilized shells and corals. I pick up a tiny cockle and roll it between my fingers, hefting it in my palm. It looks as though it just washed up on the beach, but I know it is millions of years old. It is from a time when this place was beneath the sea; long before the mountains were thrust violently skyward by the grinding collision of continent on continent.

The wind dies and the sun continues to shine without mercy; I shed a layer and continue. My gaze is drawn by what looks like an emerald on the canyon wall. It is tiny seep spring hung with lush, green draperies of flowers and leafy plants out of the range of hungry sheep. It is beautiful and perfect and makes me smile to myself. I round the corner of the canyon and see that the sandstone has met with shale and that water has been forced to the surface. The sudden sound of trickling water startles me and seems deafening in this silent defile. There are hanging draperies on all sides and colorful butterflies flit among the tiny flowers; above my head a pair of doves flush from a hidden nest in a whirl of movement and a rush of wings. This sudden life in the midst of such a barren place reminds me of the “Banta Shut-in”, a remote oasis in Big Bend National Park where the geology forces hidden water to the surface in deep, clear pools.

A pool at my feet is teeming with ephemeral life; insect larvae wriggle across the bottom and water striders scull lazily away from my shadow. Tadpoles swim back and forth; I take one in my hand, thinking of a passage in a Craig Childs book concerning tadpoles. In the passage Childs describes the tadpole as a “raven’s eye” glistening against the dry roughness of his palm. I look at my tadpole and see only what looks like a speck of mud against my hand, with two eyes that are regarding me with reproach. I gently place it back into the water and it swims away to the far end of the pool.

I continue on and the water dwindles to a trickle. I hear buzzing and look down to see the last pool of water alive with bees drinking their fill to take back to a distant hive. It is an echo of another time in Big Bend where I was hiking with my friend Katie in a narrow gorge called the “Devil’s Den”; there it was a blind leap off of a pour-off through a cloud of thirsty bees drawn for miles by the intoxicating scent of water. The canyon climbs on, hot and dry, and I see a rock cairn to my left. My gaze shifts to a small stone enclosure nestled into an overhang in the canyon wall. I go to investigate, expecting a food or water cache of some kind. Instead I am struck by the smell of death. In the stone structure lies not a carcass, but select parts of one. A sheep’s head, feet, and entrails lay strewn in the dust, swollen with heat and decay. The world is flies. I step back and wonder why. I see no evidence of cooking or splashed blood so why is there a carefully marked, carefully constructed stone enclosure full of sheep parts here in the middle of nothing? I realized just how little I know about this culture and these people here in the Atlas. Oh well, this journey will simply bring me one step closer to such understanding.

The canyon forks and I follow the side with the most recent evidence of water. It climbs quickly and I soon scramble up onto a high slope to get a view. The pass lies before me, bounded by high limestone cliffs; an all important horizon, over which lies the extreme unknown. I look down at my feet at a pile of sheep spoor made feathery by dung beetles. There are no beetles in sight now, but I have seen them in the valleys. Rolling balls of offal to unknown destinations, they are nature’s janitors. I think on John Muir again and his tendency to refer to all living things as “people”, a distinction which my scientist side dismisses as anthropomorphism but which my sentimental side enjoys. If dung beetles are indeed people, then they would be content ones at that; happy with their role in the universe that other creatures find disgusting and awful. I think I would like to meet a dung beetle; he would be good company once one got past his smell and general appearance.

Lost in my musings I crest the last rise onto Tizi-n-Isuwal and drop my pack; the view that spreads before me is unlike anything I have ever seen and certainly not what I expected after the ravaged lands I had crossed in the previous hours. The land falls sharply away below me and a rough trail, or “piste” can be seen winding down to the valley floor which is lush with the greenery of carefully cultivated fields and orchards. The village of Tirghist clings to the hillside opposite; it is a series of stair-stepped mud buildings with an incongruous yellow “sbitar” (clinic) on its far edge. Above the village rears a mountain as sharp and sudden as a meat cleaver; according to the map, this is Jebel Fazaz and it runs from west to east in a jagged spine of limestone. I can see other mountains from my perch and they also trend in the same general direction, sometimes for miles. Below, a dusty road winds into the village; my next destination. Before I leave the pass, while eating my lunch of bread and cheese, I receive a call from home. I speak to my father for awhile about what I see and my optimism for the remainder of the trip; we will not speak again until it is over, and that conversation will be far different.

II

The descent is rugged, but on a defined trail which is more of a comfort than I realize. The piste winds past huts of mud and stone, presumably occupied by shepherds that are out on the mountainsides with flocks right now. I look up at the gathering clouds, they are dark but not yet menacing and the weather is still quite warm. The juniper trees on the slopes are gnarled and wisened by the elements and on the road below I can make out the tiny forms of farmers leading or riding their laden donkeys from the fields back to their homes in the village. It takes about an hour to reach the valley floor where I spend some time speaking with a crew of construction workers in Tamazight, answering their questions with mounting pride in my linguistic prowess. I walked into Tirghist, followed by the usual stream of children who actually were not asking for handouts for once. I heard them whispering to eachother, trying to guess my nationality, finally settling on Arab; after all, what European would ever want to learn Tam? I was quite pleased with myself as I walked through the village and felt the stares rolling off of my back. I walked to the yellow “sbitar” and was invited inside by the doctor and a berber man with a University of Michigan Baseball cap.

The doctor made tea and we all sat and pored over my map; I spoke in Tam to “Michigan” and he in turn translated for me to the doctor who only spoke French and Arabic. Michigan advised me to turn around and take the piste from Tirghist to Tilmi and from there to my destination. I gestured to the (presumably) more direct route I had chosen and he nodded and said he hadn’t tried it but gave me the names of the passes I would be crossing and wished me luck. I finished my tea and threw on my pack, walking out the door I looked down at a dog half delirious with age and disease. It regarded me blearily and its tail thumped once before I move on. I left the village talking to an old berber woman and a young boy of about 13 they asked where I was going and I told them. They looked at me dumbstruck and we soon parted ways.

My road stayed high above the river and its shimmering wheat fields, looking below I saw the boy I had spoken with talking to a group of women on the riverbank who immediately looked in my direction. I wave and they wave back; I smile knowing that my story is being spread and that I am impressing the locals. Pride is so insidious.

The trail drops to the edge of the river and winds through a gorge of red stone streaked with white jags not unlike lightning. The riverbed is a black shale and hard underfoot; easy walking with little or no mud to deal with. Clouds roil overhead but I pay them no mind in the euphoria of the beautiful unknown. It is silent here save for the whisper of water over rock; even the wind has died away. The canyon widens and I see my pass, Tizi-n-Aroush, off to my left. I step out of the canyon onto an outcrop of shale. I pause to drink water and make water as well, looking toward the distant divide underneath the churning sky. There is animal dung on the outcrop and I realize then what will be one of the most vital epiphanies of my journey: where there is shit, there is a way. This means that if I can find the spoor of domestic animals, or even their human masters, it means that this way is used; this way goes. I understand now what Craig Childs meant in his book, the “Way Out” when he spoke of looking for animal sign to find a way out of a canyon or, in my case later, over a mountain.

I continue walking and pass a woman bent low under a load of hay, leading a fully loaded donkey and followed loyally by a black cow that was munching contentedly from an oat bag tied to her muzzle. The woman sees me and asks me for candy. I say I have none, which is true; I offer her water instead and she raises an eyebrow and points at the creek behind me saying “there’s water right there, why would I want yours?”. I flush and murmur an apology; my pride deflating a little at her bent form a the knowledge that she had done something far more strenuous every day of her life than I was doing with my clean blue backpack and designer gear. My peg was taken down a few notches.

I was following a small stream at this point, bounded by hanging gardens of moss and rushing cascades singing down the mountainsides. Massive cushion-like “ifssi” sprouted on all sides and, between them were wildflowers unlike anything I had ever seen. There was a spiny variety of Phlox and peculiar flower that bloomed at ground level looking for all the world like a Bachelor’s Button, but from a thorny “thistle” rosette. Many other beauties demanded attention but the show-stopper was a delicate raceme of scarlet orchids which sprouted from a marshy area near the trail. I stopped to admire them for a second and kept moving as I felt a raindrop splatter on the back of my neck.

I stopped halfway up the pass to rest, eat a bite, and put on my raingear. It was sprinkling but nothing had yet come of the storm and I was still hopeful it would blow over. My legs ached from the abuse of the day and from the wasting of illness; I could feel bruises blossoming on my now prominent hipbones and the shoulder-straps tugged hard at my upper back. I reckoned that I could camp soon and that it would be an easy walk to my destination the next day. I stretched, looking down into a pool of reproachful tadpoles, and wondered for the first time if this venture may have been a bad idea. Ah well, no turning back at this point.

I kept climbing and could see the pass in the near distance, another horizon between me and the unknown. I noticed that some of the ifssi around me had been burned to the earth and I remembered what I had been told concerning ifssi as a berber firestarter. Looking back, I could see plumes of smoke visible on other high slopes marking the location of burning ifssi and where shepherds were huddled around the burning bushes with their flocks, jelaba hoods raised against the coming storm. Grey rain curtains sweep the landscape behind me and I stagger exhausted onto the saddle of Tizi-n-Aroush.

III

My heart sinks into my shoes and become aware of my racing pulse and tunneling vision as I look down at the valley, the unknown. My pride evaporates and sweat appears on my palms; above me the sky opens and the rain pours down. I stare mutely through the driving rain at this vision of hell and look down at my wet map. According to the contour, the general shape of this valley is correct, but its rugged violence is entirely unexpected. Rocky hills and promontories all bounded by cliffs, wreathed by fog, and made grey with sheets of rain. Below me the land drops away suddenly in a chaos of wet scree and ribbed shale. The faint trail I was following vanishes entirely and I feel a sick dread. I shiver with the sudden cold and damp and know that I have to begin my descent.

I am cliffed out several times and lose my footing on the slick stone, saving myself with my stick from dashing my brains out in the narrow creekbed. I keep my ears open for the sound of floodwaters but I am still high enough in the canyon that it is not much of a worry. My mood descends as I do and I am exhausted from the day so far. My watch beeps and I look down at it, wondering why this time is important. I remember and my mood sinks even farther as I realize that, at this moment nearly 6000 miles away, two of my best friends are getting married. I realize how utterly alone I am, that I am in the middle of the Atlas Mountains in Africa, with no friends to help me and no safety net to fall into. All I have to rely on is my wits, my skill, and the mercy of my creator; the realization is terrifying.

I turn my ankle on a wet stone and fall heavily again my stick. I curse myself and my stupid pride, realizing what a wonderful life I left behind in America and how here, in the middle of nowhere, there is actually potential for my story to end unfinished. This is how is happens, I think darkly, this is how good people die, all it takes is one mistake to set off the spiral and that’s it… forever. But I realize that I have not yet made that crucial first mistake and continue on, carefully. I look up at the sharp crags and back at the pass, now high above me. I stop to drink water and raise my bottle grimly in silent tribute to my distant friends; friends that I was unsure I would get to see again. I curse myself again, this time for being a coward, and continue on, praying quietly for some comfort, some sign that I would make it out of this

The rain begins to lessen and then ceases entirely, but night is coming fast; I know I have only one hour to find a place to camp. In my peripheral vision, as silently as ghosts, trees begin to appear out of the mist one by one and then many. They start small and then become massive with huge trunks and weird umbrella-like spreads of dark branches. I know them at once and I stop to stare in awe; I am standing on the fringe of one of the last stands of old-growth “Atlas Cedar” on the planet. This tree is an endangered rarity and I realize with a start that this tortured valley is like an “eden” of sorts, a lost world untouched by time. I close my eyes and murmur my thanks; the giant trees have given me some small peace. But the fear stays, just under the surface, sitting in the back of my throat like bile. My hackles are up and my heart continues to race.

I see no sign of humanity save for a couple abandoned herder’s shacks and evidence of old trails, now fallen into disrepair and forgotten. I reach the confluence at the heart of the valley which is marked by a spire of red stone. I turn and shuffle exhaustedly up the other fork, my eyes scanning the ground for a place to camp. I almost settle on a spot where I could sleep half-inside the trunk of a fallen and burned out cedar, but I keep moving forward mechanically, not know what force is driving my exhausted limbs.

Ahead of me, on a bend of the creek, there is a two room hut of mud and stone. I had passed several like it, it is constructed the same as all berber dwelling have been constructed for millennia. But this one has people. People on the roof, people next to a smoking outdoor oven, kids running to meet the men returning from the mountains; around them a few dogs lay on the ground. One hand tightens on my stick and the fear rises. I set my jaw and raise my other hand, palm open, fingers splayed, toward these unknown people, seemingly the sole occupants of this forgotten place.

Activity ceases and all eyes are fixed on me, this strange European dressed in bright colors; it is as though I have fallen from the sky. One of the men strides toward me and puts out his hand. I take it and smile weakly, my limbs feeling suddenly heavy; I greet him in Tamazight. His has lights up and he looks at me incredulously. This mysterious stranger speaks my language? Albeit badly? He takes me by the arm and introduces me to the family, 7 in all, 5 men and 2 women. His name is Hassan, the same name as the one I was given by my family in the desert. I follow them inside, hoping for good intentions, and lean my pack against the wall of the hut. I am seated on a dusty rug next to a rusted woodstove which glows with a welcome heat. I am brought tea and a crust of bread; my exhaustion threatens to overtake me and I sway slightly. My every movement is apparent to the seven pairs of eyes that are watching me from the opposite side of the room.

The evening passes in a blur, my language is surprisingly passable and Hassan is familiar with the Peace Corps, being from a nearby town with modern conveniences such as… dirt roads. I am able to explain who I was and where I had come from to everyone’s mutual satisfaction and I am soon ushered upstairs to the other room I had seen where dinner would be served. Looking at the state of the cooking area and having been told that there was no bathroom. I knew that any food I took would be a dangerous gamble on my already weakened system and that I may not be able to make it out of this valley if I got sick. I told the family this before dinner was offered they knew I was not going to eat from the steaming pile of sheep organs and vegetables that watched being devoured. I kept taking glasses of tea and apologizing for my bad behavior, trying to appease the woman who expressed her consternation to me from behind her few teeth. I looked remorseful as I could and she accepted my apologies. I am accompanied to the “restroom” by Hassan who protected me from the family dogs who apparently wanted to eat me. I throw down my sleeping bag on the floor of the first room, the rest of the family sleeps in the other, next to the dying woodstove.

I lay awake for many hours listening to the bleats and coughs of the sheep outside and to the skittering of mice in the corners of the room. My mind is racing with the impossibility and surrealistic nature of my situation. Finally, toward morning, I fall into a dreamless and troubled sleep...

15 hours of travel over the course of two days brought me out of my mountain village to the seaside Capital of Morocco, Rabat. I came here as part of my duties to the "Volunteer Action Committee"(VAC), a position I was elected to at the end of my training in early May. VAC represents the volunteers of Morocco to Peace Corps Staff, and to other people as well, we are the liaisons, in a sense. Dragged me unceremoniously out of my site and into the big city was a two hour meeting; but it made the trip worthwhile.

The director of Peace Corps worldwide, Aaron Williams, was visiting Morocco for the first time in his career and certainly for the first time in his 8 months as director. He was appointed by President Obama late last year. We had the opportunity to meet with him and air our few concerns about Peace Corps in a casual setting (or as casual as it could be, in light of the company). Mr. Williams turned out to be pleasant and down to earth, very easy to talk to, and full of stories about his work in Aid organizations including his start as a PCV in the Dominican Republic.

After the meeting we sat down to a meal of Couscous and I had the opportunity to sit at the Director's table to hear more from him, about his plans for the future of Peace Corps. I stared in consternation at my spoon and realized that I couldn't use my hands to pull apart the meat and eat Berber-style. So, I attempted to look like I had some semblance of etiquette, most of which I have completely lost and forgotten over the course of the last two months. The spoon felt awkward in my right hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to switch over to my left simply because it had become habit to do everything with my right. The Couscous was good, different from what I had been served in my training village of Ait Gmat, or in my site in the mountains. The conversation was stimulating and we spoke of many interesting thing at the table, most of which I can’t post on the public domain as they are unrealized ideas and best kept under wraps.

~

That essentially sums up the meeting, but I ended up spending three days in Rabat getting a full medical evaluation (I have parasites; don’t get worried/excited/envious). I did not mind this extra time, as there was so much to see in the Capital. Plus there was also something to be said for the basic creature comforts I happily experienced on a daily basis. These included hot showers, western toilets, real pillows, and soft beds. The night after the meeting, several other volunteers and I took a Petit Taxi down the winding, narrow streets until we got to a nondescript white wall with a small plaque that read “the American Club”. We flashed our Passports at the security guard, who determined that we were not a threat, and entered through the gate.

It was like stepping into a backyard BBQ. There was a lush green lawn spreading from an outdoor bar and patio; the air smelled like burgers and fries, with a hint of beer, and the only language to be heard was English—American English. There were several families there, drinking and talking with friends while the kids ran around the lawn and the playground that sat in the corner. I sat at a table, slightly dazed, and enjoyed a dinner of a hamburger and chicken wings while in one hand I held a frosty Samuel Adams (Boston Lager). I nearly forgot I was in Morocco until the sunset “call to prayer” spilled in from one of the Mosques outside the walls. We spoke to some of the other Americans, all here for different reasons, but most living in country rather than visiting. A woman from another agency invited us to a beach bonfire, but the taxi ride was too long and we walked back to our hotel instead—in hindsight, I wish I had accepted the invitation.

I got up the next morning and ate breakfast at “Toast” a Café near the hotel. Here their signature breakfast dish is also called “Toast” but it was so much more than that. It was two slices of toast with a slice of cheese and sunnyside-up egg on top; it came with orange juice and coffee. As the typical Berber breakfast consists of bread, olive oil, and coffee, I was understandably excited. The food onslaught continued, reaching its peak with a Royale w/ Cheese from McDonalds: Rabat, an establishment that also offers a burger on Pita Bread called the “McArabia”. Add fries and a coke and it was certainly a meal that made me happy, if not actually a happy meal. I know, I am traitor to everything I believe in—I ate at McDonalds for the first time in many years. But man, that burger was good and somehow, sitting back in my site the Atlas and thinking about the parasites I was told I have (and am currently treating); the guilt is just not coming. Dinner that night was at the German Institute and involved a bruschetta salad, pizza, and some more cold beer. Not losing sleep over that either. Why am I elaborating on food? To stress just how amazing it was to me, and how mind-boggling things I took for granted back home are now that I am deprived of them on a regular basis. To list a few, in no particular order:

- Beef: it’s what’s for dinner, but not here, and I am sorry but mutton is not an adequate replacement.

- Hot water: this is obtainable only with a butane heater, some of which are deadly.

- Pillows: I have mentioned this before but I didn’t realize what a big part of my sleep depended on a nice soft pillow to rest my head on. Hard and often rough couch cushions simply don’t suffice.

- Bacon

- Decent Beer: growing up around some of the best beer in the world has left with the opinion that no beer is better than bad beer, but even bad beer would taste ok when it is cold and socially acceptable.

- Toilets: when you are exhausted and ravaged from Dysentery, you have no idea how nice it would be to have something to sit on so if you pass out… ok enough said.

- Raw vegetables: These aren’t entirely gone, but they are rare and occasionally dangerous.

- English: I just miss not having a headache every time I talk, this will go away and it gets easier every day, but I miss days that didn’t focus entirely on trying to get my point across.

- Real Cheese: I am sorry Morocco, but “Laughing Cow” is closer to “Cheese Whiz” than actual cheese. Why is the cow laughing? Because it’s not f**king cheese, that’s why!

Ok, that’s more than enough, I’ll write an entire entry on things I no longer take for granted later… Eventually. Incha allah.

~

Ok, maybe a little about the city itself; please forgive the “stream-of-consciousness” nature of this entry. It’s written, like most of my entries, in a short time span and is entirely unplanned. So back to Rabat... It is a beautiful city; most of the buildings are white and many of the streets are lined with palm trees whose trunks play host to twining English ivy. Fountains spray and pigeons take flight against the white sky; in many respects, Rabat feels like an average European city. That is, until I see the swirling Arabic script on the store fronts or have the call to prayer carried into my hotel room along with the honking of car horns, and the murmur of conversations on the street; all hard “q’s” and nasal vowels. Walking down the street, the illusion of European normalcy is further shattered by the abrupt appearance of a massive wall of beige stone with yawning archways leading to the medina, or old city.

Inside, merchants hawk everything from traditional Moroccan clothing to Barbie dolls. The streets are narrow and winding; laundry is strung above the crowd and colorful rugs hang from the windows and balconies of the homes of the people who still live in this place. At intersections where the crowds come together, traditionally dressed water-sellers stand shouting the name of a particular spring from which they get their water. The water is dispensed from a goatskin bag slung against their back into one of 3-4 golden cups that hang from a bandolier across their chest. They are dressed in red, green, and blue, with wide brimmed fringed hats.

Sometimes the street passes under a building or a shade covering. One street in particular comes to mind, thronged with people and wares hang or sit on every surface. Silver teapots on gleaming trays, carved wooden camels and intricately enameled furniture beckon from some stalls, while still others contain ornate jewelry and ceremonial daggers from the deserts of the south. Every once in awhile I pass a “spice stall” and look inside at the wizened patron sitting among the baskets piled high with spices of every kind and color, each spice forming a cone above its basket. The smells are intense in this place; from the spice stalls a strong and heady aroma floats on the still air, mingling with the smells of livestock and human sweat. Further on is a smell of cooked food and I purchase a sandwich of spiced ground beef (called Kefta) mixed with scramble egg and sprinkled with even more spices. They are cheap and wonderful; I slip into garden and eat mine underneath the towering palms. I talk to another volunteer who is with me, and listen to an ancient Arab man admiring my watch from a nearby bench (zwina l’magana, zwina l’magana).

The next day, I return to the medina alone and navigate the narrow streets from memory. I know that the medinas in the major cities are the most dangerous parts to be alone and ignorant but they’re not that bad if you keep your head. Rule number one is to watch your valuables; I carry a backpack in the cities, but it goes under one arm if I enter a medina, so I can keep an eye on it. Also, do not express interest in any wares, just admire in passing unless you want a long and frustrating exchange with a merchant; which I could tolerate if anyone here spoke Tamazight. Interestingly enough, a being white kid who, when confused, lapses into an obscure dialect of Berber, in a city that speaks predominately Arabic and French, earned me more brownie points than I expected it would. More often than not, merchants would pull out their rudimentary English simply because I was gutsy enough to try Tam on them. One merchant in particular told me to go get married in the Atlas and bring my new wife to his shop where I could buy her clothing at a discounted price…

On the other side of the medina, after making it through alive, is the sea. The last time I saw the Atlantic was in the rearview mirror as I left Cape Hatteras last fall and suddenly I am faced with the same body of water but on the opposite shore. I walk down the beach for a ways; the social mores of Islamic culture are scarcely discernible here as young men and young women walk this way and that in their bathing suits. It looks like any beach on the east coast except the people are thinner and darker. I see a lighthouse further on and go to it. There is a guard charging a 10DH entrance fee; he speaks English and we talk about lighthouses and I tell him about my lighthouse in North Carolina. After a few minutes of conversation and questions, the guard looks around him and, seeing no one, motions me inside. You do not have to pay, but be quick about it, okay? I walk across the battlements around the lighthouse stand next to a rusted cannon watching the sun glitter like diamonds on the rolling swells. I enjoy the smell of salt spray and listen to the crash of the waves on the sharp rocks below, thinking of other beaches and other times spent on the seashore.

Reluctantly, I walk back into the city and re-enter the medina in search of another sandwich. This sandwich I eat in the dappled sunlight of the Royal Arboretum, filled with tropical trees and plants including a row of box-cut Ficus that are the size of buses. I sit and people watch for awhile as the palms rustle overhead and birds sing. A Moroccan couple in western clothing watches their children run ahead of them, partially covered in Ice Cream, and following them is a woman in a full veil, with only her eyes visible to the rest of the world. Men with long beards walk with their hands clasped behind them, clad in the plain white Jelabas of the devout. Older men pass wearing business suits, the outfit made Moroccan by the addition of a red Fez.

Wandering around the city after the arboretum, I came upon a strange and wonderful thing: a Cathedral. I didn’t expect to find one, but here it was. It appeared to be a modern construction, but with proportions similar to the Cathedral at Canterbury, in England, or the National Cathedral in New York. The door was open and I slipped inside. It was dim, and the only light came from a large stained-glass window depicting the crucifixion of Christ. Here, in the middle of an Islamic Nation, I was faced with this literally shining representation of God made flesh; I looked for a long time, awestruck. Despite the look of suffering in His face, I felt like I was greeting an old friend who I had not seen for awhile, just then realizing how much He was missed.

The next morning, I left Rabat, to return to my site, where I am now. But I feel that that journey, crossing the country alone using every approved mode of public transport, deserves its own essay, which I will post shortly. Until then, as always, thank you for reading.

-Charlie