9/28/06

Welcome to the latest installment of Me, My Life, Morocco,

I really had to get my mind right before I wrote this one. I tried a few times before now to write this letter but it kept starting grumpy. I have been in desperate need of a turning point.

Since I arrived in Sefrou on Sunday I had not even had the whisper of a shower. I still haven’t but now I have had something even better. It may only be better because I was living with my own stinky self for so long but this better thing is called the hmmam.

The hmmam is like the public bath house. Believe me, it didn’t sound appealing to me either. The way it was described sounded a lot like the JCC locker room for those of you who know what I am talking about. Essentially it is the same minus the completely naked old Jewish guys. Thank God! Instead it is a bunch of mostly naked Muslim guys. The religion doesn’t really matter but at least these guys wear underwear.

The inside is essentially three rooms that drastically get hotter as you make your way to the back room. My friend Nate and I decided to take the plunge about an hour ago and it was great. You fill up a bucket with warm water and then scoop it out of the bucket with a cup to get yourself wet. The next step is lather/shampoo/scrub yourself down. Then the rinse and you are done. I milked this process for well over 35 minutes in the medium heat room and it was exactly the turning point that I was looking for. You cant have a better time on 75 cents anywhere in America. It could have been the wait but I think that this might just be the way to bathe all the time.

Enough wash talk. This week has been a very demanding test on almost all my faculties. I have not had the opportunity to exercise at all except for some pushups and situps in my room which hardly qualifies. I really love to play around and without it I have felt somewhat incomplete.

Besides that I am working much harder than I have in what seems like forever. I spent six years trying to learn Spanish and right now I would say that we are equivalently three years through even though it has only been three weeks of training. The classes are moving so fast and it is taking all my concentration and patience to even try to keep up. Four consecutive hours of language every day, six days a week is a struggle. The fact that the extremely imperfect Peace Corps textbook is the only resource that even attempts to organize this language only adds to the frustration.

Another trying aspect of this week has been my host family. My host mom is great. Even though I can’t form sentences she thinks I’m almost as funny as my real mom does. It is difficult to understand my host dad in everyway imaginable. Maybe it is just the cadence of the language but I always think he is yelling at me. I know for sure on the first night that he was because I think I came home later than he was expecting. Oh well.

I also have a host brother. His name is Ismail (Iss-mail) and he is 23. He works at the C-bur (cyber café), and I think he is a student, sometimes… maybe… who knows. He is a nice guy when he’s around, but that is not often. The Ramadan schedule I think puts him in an awkward situation for breaking the fast and working. We start breakfast at 6:15 p.m. sharp and he usually comes in about half way through. Tonight after breakfast we took penalty shots at one another in the Salon (living room) for about half an hour which was fun even though I lost pitifully.

As I said breakfast is at 6:15 p.m. which is a very weird thing to say but that’s the way it is. We have had good, but the same food every time so far. Atay (tea just for me) to drink, l’bid (hardboiled eggs), Herrera (red soup), shebekiya (sesame pastry), tamara (candied dates), mskuta (cake), chuubs (bread), and some other goodies to eat. Pretty tasty all in all, but not a lot of variety from night to night.

The eating experience is a lot of fun because it is all done by hand, even the soup. It makes a huge mess but that doesn’t seem to bother anybody around here and that is okay with me. Table manners are pretty arbitrary and I‘m thinking that burping and slurping are encouraged.

It is weird because I eat my second meal at around ten (an hour from now) alone. One night I fell asleep early, before my second meal. At three in the morning I was woken by Ismail who told me it was time for dinner. I told him, no… it’s time for sleepy. I was eventually coaxed out of bed in a tank top and basketball shorts (very culturally inappropriate) and ate a meal with the family. I think I would prefer things this way, so maybe I will get them to do it again tonight.

A good scrubbing, the ability to make small sentences in Derija, and Talib Kweli in the background. What more could a guy like me ask for on a night like this. I hope that everything is going well stateside. I love hearing and responding, so thank you for the many e-mails I received after letter #4.

Love you all,

Charley