{"id":515,"date":"2015-06-27T07:27:11","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T11:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/?p=515"},"modified":"2015-06-27T07:29:13","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T11:29:13","slug":"wandering-in-a-group-and-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/2015\/06\/wandering-in-a-group-and-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Wandering in a group and alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"EPSON<\/a>The first whiff of diesel and hot rubber smacked into us as the air conditioned bus unloaded in the center of Rabat, Morocco. It was like coming home. Bags were piled in front of an arched gate in a stone wall dripping with jasmine. The street was dusty, a clutch of small boys leaned against each other and the wall. \u201cHey \u2018Merican!\u201d There we were, ninety-five spanking new Peace Corps Volunteers, along with the people who would teach language and the ways of the Maghreb \u2013 the Land of the West. We passed through the gate into a cool, lily lined garden.<\/p>\n

Family tradition meant living abroad, learning new languages, and assimilating into a foreign culture, a sort of Miss Rumphius life. Joining the Peace Corps seemed to be the answer, but it was easy. \u201cFinish college first,\u201d said the woman on the phone who seemed to have answered the lost paperwork question before.<\/p>\n

I finished college and tried again. The application process started off well, then foundered as all the transcripts, letters of support, and pages of blue boxed forms disappeared in the world of the postal service.<\/p>\n

Thinking a life in journalism might be the ticket overseas, I moved back with my folks and started free-lancing as a writer, covering the political season, writing brochures for cedar fencing and in house newsletters for area businesses. My family was unimpressed. In February, I turned twenty-three. \u201cGet a real job,\u201d they said, \u201cor go back to school and get some practical training. Become a teacher.\u201d Reluctantly I signed up for the graduate school entrance exams.<\/p>\n

Then, salvation! A notice appeared, in the local paper, that Peace Corps recruiters would be in Bangor the next week, conducting interviews out of a motel room downtown. Walk-ins welcome. At the end pale green corridor with seedy gray carpeting, the recruiters had set up their office. We chatted. They loved me. \u201cWhere do you want to go?\u201d Three countries seemed like interesting prospects. Two weeks later the phone rang. \u201cYou\u2019re going to Morocco. Get a passport, get a physical, get fingerprinted. Get the documents translated. You leave the first week of June.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stone wall surrounded a girls\u2019 school that would house the new Volunteers for the next two months. Language classes were formed based on past experience, and I was placed with the group who were on their second tour with the Corps. Our teachers spoke only Arabic, in class or out.<\/p>\n

I made a habit of going off on jaunts, eating charcoal roasted brochettes, drinking milk blended with marzipan. I explored the stone fortress that lined the harbor. I had grown up watching Dad chat in Swahili, Kikuyu, and Luragoli in Kenya, and later Arabic in Jordan. He picked up new words in restaurants, never failing to address people in their own languages. He the liaison. When students went on strike, he negotiated. When the government wanted to close the school in Jordan, he found the common ground. That became my strategy as I moved about the city. When venturing out with other Volunteers, I jumped in and used my language skills.<\/p>\n

Once we moved to our assigned villages, there was a wretched afternoon spent in the garden of a small hotel, slumped on a stone bench, crying on a cleaning lady\u2019s shoulder. She pointed out I was a big girl to be sitting there bawling my eyes out. \u201cYou speak pretty well,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is what you wanted and this is what you\u2019ve got.\u201d She pointed out that my entire complaint had been in Arabic and she had gotten the point just fine.<\/p>\n

Two other volunteers, both men, stationed in the village. Beyond sharing a maid and occasional meals, they wanted nothing to do with me. \u201cWe came here to absorb culture. Make your own friends,\u201d and finally \u201cJust get a life.\u201d Our maid said the mostly smoked dope with the other young men in town.<\/p>\n

Language immersion was the only choice. Teaching students, and fifty rounds of \u201cWhose book is that? It is my book\u201d did not cut it as far as comforting language went. Some British friends in Fes, a full day\u2019s journey away from what was becoming Home, provided an opportunity to relax and speak English.<\/p>\n

I made friends with the girls next door. I frequented the public baths, used sticky black soap, hennaed my hair, and ate mandarins floating in icy cold water. I went on walks with neighbors, my students\u2019 mothers, and other young unmarried women met through my maid. I learned to kiss hands, eat politely, join in bawdy wedding songs. The market-day routine was buying two eggs and taking them to the fried dough maker for a deep fried breakfast sandwich. Spices from cone shaped mounds of red and yellow.<\/p>\n

I still dressed oddly by local standards, wearing a wooly man\u2019s djellebah<\/i>, a kind of over the head, floor length coat with a hood. The one worn by women, while prettier and often embroidered, was thin and required layers of clothing underneath in order to stay warm during the winter. I still misspoke to everyone\u2019s great humor, but learned to avoid saying anything truly rude. Trips to Fes, to spend the weekends speaking English, became sporadic events.<\/p>\n

One of the American men transferred to mystical Marrakech, then back to the States. The one who remained lasted about two weeks before suggesting we share a house. His or mine, it didn\u2019t matter. \u201cI know,\u201d he said, \u201cthat we weren\u2019t very nice to you. But now I really understand and want to make it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would, I realized, be an upheaval. \u201cLet me think about it.\u201d That afternoon I went to the baths. I helped wash a couple of kids, got scrubbed myself, and warmed my bones to the core. As I was getting dressed, one of the attendants said, \u201cWe\u2019ve been watching you. You\u2019re not a prostitute, like some of those other foreigner women. You try to belong.\u201d Decision made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first whiff of diesel and hot rubber smacked into us as the air conditioned bus unloaded in the center of Rabat, Morocco. It was like coming home. Bags were piled in front of an arched gate in a stone … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,20,17,55],"tags":[45,70,34,23,19,39],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-morocco","category-transitions","category-travel-2","tag-culture","tag-morocco","tag-paradigm-shift","tag-transitions-2","tag-travel","tag-youth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3Gnw9-8j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":517,"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beeberrywoods.com\/FiberEtc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}