They tell us to blog on our good days and journal on our bad ones.
My journal is empty.
Unfortunately, I’m so busy having good days that I really am not paying much attention to my blog either. BUT, today was a day that by that maxim NEEDS to be blogged about.
Well really, I need to start with a snippet from yesterday. Yesterday, I was taken out of my fusha class (I am a student in a class for women learning fusha) by my boss, to sneak into the pool a day before it opened to the public and meet the people in charge of the associations I will be volunteering for.
When I tell you it is the most beautiful pool I have ever seen that is not an exaggeration. It is pristine, goes from 1.5 m to 4 m deep, is Olympic size (100 m long not 50 and about 50 m wide) and is surrounded by various trees and greenery. The walls are such that you can’t see out and feel like you are in the courtyard of a castle.
I sat down with the main associations President and discussed what we each wanted from the experience. I left with a 15-hour a week schedule (5 hrs with women, 5 hrs with children, 5 hrs with men). They explained that I am going to be weaned into the process. For the beginning they have a male coach who will teach all of the lessons, but I should be there from day one as an assistant coach to all the teams so everyone knows me very well. As time passes, we will split the men and children up and co-coach all their practices and the women will slowly become only my team (so that the entire place can be void of men so the women who want to participate but can’t while men are present can start coming/swimming).
From what they have told me: the women are mostly learning, the men are mostly getting exercise, and the children are mostly competing nationally. They sent me out with a DVD of previous competitions, as well as videos of the dinner gatherings they have the night before each race (remember greenflies and ohs pasta parties? Think that only the dishes are communal and involve a lot of eating with your hands). I was also given an official swim team shirt, for the association I will be coaching for! I left there on an incredible high, which was followed by a feast of Mexican inspired food in honor of it being Cinco de Mayo.
Today, I got up intending to be super productive – washed all of my clothes, studied tashelheit for a solid hour, studied fusha for a bit and then wrapped up a few letters I’ve been meaning to get in the mail. I left the house to rush to my 3pm fusha class (I know the aforementioned doesn’t seem like it should have filled all my awake time till 3pm but handwashing a full suitcase worth of clothes is more impressive than it sounds). When I got to the class, the teacher politely informed me that my mudiir (boss) was waiting to have a meeting with me because the class would be a Qur’anic recitation class instead of the usual. We met about the upcoming summer plans to finalize a schedule for my regional manager. Driss, the aforementioned mudiir, and I made a very beautiful schedule. It includes what he expects of me & what the associations expect of me, as well as our trainings and the days around when I will move so everyone knows when I will be working and when I can’t.
After that meeting I went shopping in a store I haven’t been in before where the owner quoted me the post-haggle prices that Moroccans get, for even my more expensive purchases (smart man, because I will surely patronize his establishment regularly now). Then I went to the first swim practice of the season, starting off with the women. Three women, myself, and their male coach – as well as a bunch of women watching from the sidelines – all of whom are interested in getting in the water when the man leaves the picture. During the practice it started thundering and lightening. I hopped out of the pool accordingly and when no one followed me I looked around and said, ‘What are you all waiting for?’ implying they should get out. The male looked at me like I was absolutely absurd. He went on to call me (jokingly, not rudely) just about every kind of ‘weakling’ name he could think of, and pulled a whole bunch of, ‘What are you, scared?’ type comments. I proceeded to say, the best explanation I could possibly muster about how lightening could kill people in a pool (which ended up with a serious amount of circuitousness ‘the lightening could hit this pool and then it would make the water electric and then you would all burn’ WHO THE HELL KNOWS ‘to electrocute’ and ‘to strike?’ I was just impressed I could muster up ‘thunder and lightening’ from the deep recesses of the Arabic half of my mind.) Anyway, the three women stayed in the pool, and he insisted Americans are crazy and scaredy cats (sorry guys, my bad on dropping the ball on our rough exterior, I play with a lot of things, lightening while I am in a huge pool surrounded by trees is not one of them).
Anyway, practice continued as the weather got better, and I went back and forth between working with the woman who knew the most and the woman who was in the water for her first time ever. (I hopped in with the latter woman and she told me afterwards in the changing room how thankful she was that I was there and how she already trusts me and looks forward to learning from me!)
The woman who knows the most has clearly swam most of her life. I gave her a few tips to help with her breathing and her kick and watched her freestyle get stronger with a more effective kick in a matter of hours. When we got out of the pool she said, “Where have you been– and where did you learn what you know?” She asked me if we can focus on backstroke so I can’t wait to do so many drills I haven’t thought about it years.
Aside from it being incredible, to be in a pool in Morocco instead of sweating and to consistently impart knowledge I am fully confident in, I had a couple revelations while at the practice: 1) The particular coach and I have VERY different approaches to coaching/teaching in general. He asked the woman who had never been in the water before to dive in (she has NEVER been in the water and didn’t even conceptually know you have to blow out your nose). He also pushed her in and when she panicked accordingly and I helped her by putting out my hand, and saying, ‘Don’t worry, everything is okay, you can stand here,” he yelled at me/berated me for interrupting his process of ‘teaching her not to fear the water’…. :/ in the locker room she said how thankful she is that I will be coaching them, and I’m taking it as a sign that my approach might work better with at least her. 2) HOLY SHIT I NEED TO LEARN SOME FRENCH. Every single instruction was in French. Some of it was simple for me to figure out, crawl (with the French r) = freestyle, sure. Some of it, I was like WTF?! He asked me to ‘something something something a plunj.’ so I assumed he meant dive in (‘plunge’, dive, you know?). Apparently he meant, ‘Get me two kickboards.’ Accordingly, he was not amused when I shook my head 'yes' and dove in.
(I am going to absolutely have to figure out what kind of chocolate he likes and conveniently bring it to the next practice for him – If you have other ideas, inbox me).
I wrote down a bunch of words and I asked a fellow volunteer who is fluent in French if she could help me try to pronounce them correctly, and in the process check that I am not making a total fool of myself. She graciously agreed so I feel like I can breath a little bit easier than I was when he was barking at me earlier. I also made them laugh a lot trying to figure out how to say so many things. I realized apparently I only knew the street slang for ‘ass’ and couldn’t come up with ‘butt’ or whatever is more appropriate (I know now, don’t worry, the ladies on the side of the pool taught me). I also made so much up (point your toes at the wall I used ishar illa – which is translated as ‘points to’ but also as in ‘indicates’ so I assume it doesn’t translate).
I also need so many new analogies, you can’t tell a Muslim to make their belly like Santa Claus to float (my quick thinking said, ‘You know how big your belly is on couscous Friday, make it that big’).
Because the weirdness in my Morocco life never ends, I walked out of the pool and the parking lot, which had been completely empty 2 hours before, was full of monster trucks. Yes, you read that correctly, monster trucks. Each truck was surrounded by roughly 5 white people in shorts and tank tops. I attempted to ask a couple what was going on but because no one spoke English or Arabic they all just kind of nodded at me and continued tinkering soooo I went over to the parking attendant, who explained – ‘Oh, a bunch of random tourists are going to race these big crazy things from here to Massa on that straight road’ (Its about 30/40 minutes on a bus). I followed up with things like ‘do they need permits?’ and ‘Is the road closed off for the event?’ and to both questions he was like ‘heck no’ (alright really he said ‘ohho’ so just ‘no’ but he said it in such a tone that I heard ‘heck no’ both times).
Next, I headed over to my host families for some good ol’ kaskrut (the light snack between meals, usually mint tea and something sweet). My host moms got a big surprise for me and she told me a bunch of times in the past few days to come over today to see what it is. The surprise was that her family members came over from Holland and brought with them a whole bunch of random snacks, including two things she had never seen before: marshmallows and pumpkin bread. She was super disappointed that we have both in America and in retrospect I maybe should have lied on that one, but I tried to impress upon her how thankful I was to have been included in the surprise. It was phenomenal.
I headed for home because it was starting to get dark and she piled gifts into my hands. A big thing of the olives I can’t get enough of (these particular ones come from Agadir and are just unbelievably delicious & spicy) a whole bunch of food she cooked for me including Moroccan soup, a pj set that is red with black cats all over it that says ‘le chat noir’ or ‘the black cat,’ AND a whole chunk of the pumpkin bread and a pile of candy. Oh, she also gave me a new package of tissues because I had come to her house (from the pool) with wet hair and so most assuredly I will catch a cold. (It seems many host families here believe that if you have wet hair outside you will surely get a cold).
I walked home to a text from another host family member, saying they want to see me tomorrow at her house because they have gifts from their weekend in Rabat for me.
The generosity is ENDLESS. The people are incredible, and I am just consistently overwhelmed by how blessed I am to be here. I love this place. I know the honeymoon phase is supposed to end or something, but if I get to that dark place (which I imagine will be in the winter, when there is no more coaching) just remind me of how absolutely incredible this time was, and will be again next year. Remind me how I spent Sunday on our beach, Monday learning fusha, and Tuesday in our pool, and how every one of those days I taught someone something they had little or no access to before I got here.
Remember that time I was nervous about joining the Peace Corps? Yeah, me neither.
And uh… something something something a plunj. (I’d try and translate, but I’d be soo wrong).
