Henna!

It all started innocently. Tina invited us over to tea, back when we were all blissfully ignorant of the consequences of such an action in small-town Morocco. On that Sunday afternoon when we all met at Tina’s host family’s house, and had a HUGE tea service with no shortage of fried-dough-sugar-covered goodies, we walked away agreeing that it was delicious, but we would need a few days to recover (as would our arteries). Well, the host mothers of our “Douar” (village) had other plans in mind. It turns out that tea time at Tina’s (yay, alliteration) was equivalent to some “tea service gauntlet” being thrown, and the fallout was around 8 straight afternoons of increasingly heavy and calorie-laden tea services… every woman for herself, upping the ante for the poor soul who “had” to feed the “Mutatawin” (volunteers) the next afternoon.

The stakes? Best cake in town.

The collateral damage? All of our vascular and digestive systems.

Not that I intend to paint myself too pitiable a martyr, there were advantages to being fed delicious meals ad nauseam (literally), but as we already eat about 7 times a day, that 8^th meal of fried dough balls and pasta covered in honey, powdered sugar and cinnamon (yeah, believe it) was just TOO MUCH. Eventually the competition was squashed, most appropriately by the woman we have affectionately nicknamed “the Tank” (Avery’s host mom). She is awesome, in that she works all day long in the fields, plowing through plants like a weed wacker, before hauling 50 pounds of them up a hill home, and then whipping up some delicious meal or another. She also can EAT. It’s an awe-inspiring thing to witness. Anyways, she invited us to dinner rather than tea, and proceeded to slaughter two chickens and feed us three courses. BAM. End of competition. The Tank wins.

On the subject of food, and as a shout out to Ms. Kari McNickle, here’s a recipe for lentils that’s amazinggg. We have a dish similar to this at least 5 times a week, and my host-sister Raja has taught me how to make them (recipe from Peace Corps cookbook):

Sweet-Spicy Lentils (serves 4-6):

Ingredients:

2 Tbs. olive oil                                    ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 red onion, sliced                              2 bay leaves

1 yellow onion, sliced                        2 cups lentils

2-3 cloves garlic, minced                  3 ¼ cups chicken broth

1 Tbs. cinnamon                                  2 Tbs. lemon juice

1 Tbs. ginger (ground)                       1 Tbs. lemon peel, grated

¼ Teaspoon cayenne pepper

Heat oil in pressure cooker and sauté onions and garlic until light brown. Add remaining ingredients, except lemon juice and lemon peel. Bring mixture to boil, seal in pressure cooker and cook for about 10 mins. Add lemon juice and grated peel. Serve. (if you don’t have a pressure cooker, I’m pretty sure a covered pot would work fine, it might just take longer than 10 mins).

In a completely different vein of thought, lately we’ve been tallying our “glory points”, which is a reference to this passage from the “A Few Minor Adjustments” pamphlet about adjusting to life in the Peace Corps (given to us at the time of invitation):

Some Volunteers… eschew readily available comforts so they can experience what they consider the requisite degree of deprivation. Doing without is part of the image and mythology of the Peace Corps, and some Volunteers associate it with success. In truth, there is no such equivalency. Even if you do have hot running water, you can still cover yourself in glory just as easily as a Volunteer who sleeps under a date palm and takes sponge baths….Sacrifices… aren’t always as obvious, dramatic or romantic as warding off bat-sized insects and enduring weeks of plain rice. (22-23)

Glory? Really? Well, I guess if glory is on the line we better keep score. Just in the last two days I’ve tallied a few glory points… First, for an epic slip and crash on gravel while playing soccer with the kids (gravel burns and a raspberry on my hip as battle scars to prove it! Huu-rah!) and, second, I cut my thumb making a Tagine for dinner two nights ago. I know, I know… we are pretty hard-core here in North Africa. I wonder if I can retroactively receive a glory point for throwing up on the chickens. That might even be worth two.

In other news, we are now tackling technical language in Arabic classes, focusing on public health and community health education terminology, especially. As we will be working in “Sbitars” (public health clinics) and interacting with patients, it’s crucial to take this seriously, or so it would seem. Not to make excuses, but after 5 hours of language class, it was pretty funny to learn that the direct translation from Arabic for “I have Diarrhea” is “Diarrhea is in me”, followed by someone incorrectly using a verb to say “Diarrhea is in my possession” (as in, in your backpack? That shopping bag?).  I’m not even sure the hilarity of this will translate to someone who wasn’t there….  Moving on.

We took an overnight trip to Klaa Mgouna on our free night last Saturday. It was great to see a new town, and to hike for a while around Hedida (a town about 15mins north of Klaa in the foothills of the High Atlas Mountains). The Rose Festival is held in this region every year, starting in early May. We will miss it this year, as we swear in on May 5^th, insha’llah, and then move directly to our sites, but we caught the very beginning of the rose blooming season and it was already beautiful. I can’t even imagine when the entire lush green river valley with high, burnt-orange cliffs is filled with the fragrant, bright-pink roses we were already seeing in bloom. Roses from this region are harvested to make fragrant oils and waters that are used in cosmetics as well as some recipes. It was a really nice trip, and a great way to take our minds off of permanent site announcements this Thursday. Everyone is so excited to find out their assignments, but the anticipation has been intense, and I think I can speak for the majority in saying that we don’t know enough to even create expectations. It’s the ultimate unknown, basically being told “you will go somewhere in Morocco” and that is all. Morocco is very similar to California in geography and diversity. It would be very equivalent to someone telling you that they were sending you to a region of California and giving you no more information than that. You could end up in Death Valley. You could end up in Tahoe. You could be in wine country, the beach, the central valley, the high rural mountains, or LA (god forbid). I could elaborate further, but I’m sure the point is clear: We are excited and scared.

For now, I at least have my glory points… and a LOT of fried food… to help me cope. Rough life

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