Working on A Life

Experience is what its all about. And the stories. Post college most people go on to find a job, or apply to grad school. I decided just to live. This is my story as related to my family and friends. (This journal represents ONLY my views and none of Peace Corps or the US government.)

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Location: New England

We are working parents looking to make the most of whatever adventures we can find close to home.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Revenge of the Goatman!

January/February(PART 1 of 2)

Hey All,


Excited to hear from me again? I realize that its been quite some time and for that I apologize. It has also required that this latest group letter be split into two parts so that I don’t overwhelm you all with a massive backlog of details about the last two months of my life… Besides, February isn’t (quite) done yet so if I sent part two now I might be jumping the gun a bit.


It’s a great day to write a letter… Sunlight streaming in through the windows, relatively warm… some music and a hot cup of Gingerbread Cream tea. Sounds of village life in the background, children laughing/crying and carrying on, roosters and donkeys and the thum… thum… thum… thum… thum of laundry on the wooden washboard outside my window. Its all very peaceful and serene, at least in its own way. Its hard for me to imagine sometimes that there is another world out there. This scares me. Its also hard for me to believe that there are only three more months left of my service here and that these three months will be full of paperwork, medical exams and general sloth and should fly by even faster than the rest of my service. This is OK with me. Its time to be finished and to move on. I’ve started the process of reconciling all the disparate aspects of my service, both positive and negative into some kind of memory collective that I can be, at the least, content with. It’s a much harder process than I would have thought at the beginning, or even the middle of it all. I often find myself daydreaming about what life could have been, what service should have been, what life will be etc… with the accompanying roller coaster of emotions. Happiness, anger, fear, hope, sadness, confusion, worry… Despite the fact that I often find myself doing nothing but thinking its still all rather exhausting.


But I have been up to a few things in the last months other than sitting and thinking. As I concluded in my last e-mail (way back in December) all the volunteers in the country were on PC lockdown for the first two weeks of the new year starting on December 28th. Ostensibly this is for safety and security reasons because it happened to co-inside with the biggest holiday on the Muslim calendar L’aid Kabir (the big holiday) and is the busiest period for public transportation with a corresponding rise in accident statistics. However, as my friend and fellow volunteer pointed out wryly in his last group e-mail (which I’m shamelessly plagiarizingJ) we really take our lives into our hands any time we ride in any form of public transportation in this country. My usual motorized means of transportation out of my village is a 6km long ride down a (barely) one lane dirt road crammed in the back of a 15 passenger van (that has no permanent attached seats) with 42 people in it. Its probably more safe with all those people because without them the 18 hay bales,6 people, 48 suitcases, and a dozen sheep on the roof would make it rather top-heavy. Last time I got a ride I had to stand up and not touch anything because the last thing in the back of the van before me was 2 tons of unprocessed ripe olives and every available surface was smeared with a deep purple slime that was actually quite slippery and which I’m sure would never have come out of any clothes that came into contact with it… (this is not to say that I have any “nice” clothes left anyway). The unfortunate boy who was paid a few cents to ride back there with the olives was already covered head to foot in the stuff but he and I had a good laugh trying to stay out of it anyway. It was an experience much akin to what I imagine surfing must be like. All of this is a marked improvement on what transport was like in my last village. I have many more stories but I digress. The point is to say that the restriction doesn’t actually make that much sense since we aren’t really safe at any time and the increase in accident statistics is simply a result of there being more people on the roads to have accidents rather than it being actually more dangerous.


As a result of the restriction, my new years eve party consisted of a number of congratulatory text messages, a good book and a phone call with my girlfriend at midnight. I did try to have a conversation with my host dad earlier in the day about how it was a holiday for the rest of the world as well as the biggest yearly celebration in the Muslim calendar. He realized the significance to me but it didn’t mean much to him. He pointed out correctly but rather depressingly missing out on the spirit of the thing, that one day was the same as the next and that any given day could be said to be one year from its previous incarnation. Who got to pick Jan first as the beginning? Why not the 12th of September? Their religious calendar rotates forward every year by 11 days because its based on the phases of the moon so some years their new year actually would fall on the 12th of September and the fixed nature of our calendar is equally baffling on their terms. (They have however, conceded its usefulness for commemorative secular holidays like Independence day and for business purposes. I guess it would be rather too confusing to issue compound interest or determine the due date of a bill payment based on whether you could see the moon or not.) They must apply similar logic to birthdays, which aren’t celebrated in this culture either and are often only remembered after much searching through the family records (which my host family keeps in a Transformers trapper keeper – remember those? - binder under the sink in the kitchen). Some older people I know only have a season of the year listed on their birth certificate and can only remember the year they were born by associating it with some major life event, like the end of the French protectorate or a major flood.


My level of participation in this years L’aid Kibir holiday was much increased over that in my last village last year. This was partially because I’ve gotten over some of my inhibitions against inviting myself to things and partially because I really couldn’t have missed the festivities if I had tried since they gathered to kill my families sheep right under my bedroom window. Also, my host dad hasn’t been paid in 11 months (and interestingly works for the same organization that is supposedly supposed to be directing my own work… coincidence?) so my rent money went a significant way towards completely funding the celebration in this house and they can’t really deny me.


The first day of the festival starts with each family/household killing their own sheep in a ritualized fashion. To give some perspective on this and so that you can relate to its significance let me give you some numbers. In my village alone there are approximately 67 households, which amounts to just over 600 people. That’s 67 sheep in one day, in one village. The previous average meat consumption per week for my entire village might not normally exceed a single sheep. Most people can only afford a few grams of much cheaper chicken per day, if they have any meat at all. In all the times I’ve eaten with my host family I’ve never had red meat and we’ve had only one bite of chicken each on two occasions. On a global scale I think I read someplace that there were close to 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, all required to participate… you can do the requisite math if you’re interested. (ok… I was curious and I did it. Based on an average of 5 people per household that’s 320 million sheep in one day)

>Members of my host family enjoying a once yearly soda treat

I went out to the screams of the fluffy and dying all over town. I watched several sacrifices from my rooftop. The time honored and Q’uran dictated traditional method of slaughter would drive the animal protectionist people in the states nuts. Facing Mecca the head of household slices the throat of the animal deeply (sometimes) and then simply waits for it to bleed out. This takes many minutes. Most of the sheep I watched stood back up and wandered around for a bit before the reality of their situation hit them. The last few minutes are filled with some rather violent convulsions. I’ve become somewhat immune to the effects of having to kill my own food (or have it killed for me in most cases) and so I was much more interested in the follow up. Once the animal was well and truly dead a hole was poked in the inside skin of its leg near the anal opening with a long sharpened stick. The skin is then separated from the body by putting your mouth up to this hole and blowing air in so the skin inflates like a balloon around the rest of the body. I had never really realized that this was possible (despite some previous experience that should have made it clear to me) and it fascinates me every time. Because the hole they make is so close to the anal opening it’s a practice that has also spurred a whole slew of PC urban legends. I’ll leave them to your imagination. Once this is accomplished the whole skin can be removed using a single slice and then pressing your fist into the air gap to remove the last of the skin/fat connection. This is accomplished by starting with the back legs and then breaking them at the knee joint to create a natural loop to hang the animal by, finishing downwards towards the head, which is completely removed. The organs are removed and saved (almost all are eaten including the intestines, which my host mom wound up like yarn around her hand) and the body washed of all remaining blood.

>My host siblings with the fresh (still dripping) sheep carcas... They like posing with dead things for some reason.

>The whole gang hanging around outside my window. The kids are acting like monkeys and the adults are trying to skin the sheep.


My host mom is one impressive lady. While I worked with my host siblings to cut up the liver into bite sized pieces and wind each one in a sun-dried layer of subcutaneous fat to be placed on skewers and bar-b-qued she roasted the head on a fire, hair and all. Let me tell you, this smells absolutely horrid. Then she scraped off the burnt skin and hair and removed the horns with a hatchet, opened the skull and dumped the brain onto a plate and broke the rest of the head up into more manageable pieces. My first meal of the holiday was liver/fat kabobs (actually pretty tasty) and sheep brain scrambled like eggs with salt and cumin. Not my favorite but perhaps it was a texture thing. I skipped the meal where they ate the rest of the boiled head parts, having already tried that. I just can’t get over the empty eye sockets looking at me while I eat. The rest of the sheep is prepared in various ways and most are pretty tasty, though there are definitely people I know who would argue with me about that.


The communal celebration of the holiday is also interesting. In my village there was a “Bituman” and several apprentices that came out to terrorize children and dance the evenings away. I’m not really sure what the direct translation of this word would be but “Goatman” works fine for me. Basically, some of the town youth make a costume out of un-cured sheep skins and a goat head that is ridiculous in its complexity, dress someone up in it… give him a goat hoof club and send him out around town with 3 or 4 others dressed in a funny combination of drag and Halloween costumes from the salvation army, carrying whips to round up and beat the towns children viciously and repeatedly. In return for these beatings they get… nothing. No candy, no money, no toys… nothing. Its hard to determine the motivation but they LOVE it. Not only that but there were some tourists visiting that had young children and even these kids joined the game with enthusiasm… leaving their Gameboys behind at the hotel. The game would start every evening for the week of the holiday about an hour before dusk and continue a few hours after dark. The general game of tag would go for the first hour and then the monster man would be joined by a singing and dancing drum troop of the rest of the male village youth. This troop would visit each house in the village one at a time over the course of the week and lead the villagers in song and dance, drink coffee and pray. I got dragged by my host sister on the rounds for several nights and used the opportunity to take some pictures of the goat man.
>Kind of speaks for itself.... neat costume but it started to really reek by day five.

>My host sister Hadija with some apprentice goatmen. She took many more beatings than strictly called for in the name of flirting with the men behind the masks...


Each evening the festivities would finish with the majority of the village gathering around a central fire pit and dancing, drumming and singing until some unseen signal sent them all home to each other’s houses to enjoy meals made exclusively of sheep meat. It was all somewhat surreal and yet also somewhat fun.


During this time I also met Brahim, the owner of the hotel in my village. He’s married to a British woman and works as an IT specialist for Disney in London, though visits Morocco frequently. He and I talked about the village and what could be done to improve its future. We agreed that trash was a problem both for the health and the image of the village, which is trying to re-invent itself as a gateway of eco-tourism into the adjoining National Park. He agreed to provide trash barrels for the village if I would educate the villagers about the importance of this particular aspect of environmentalism and if we could secure a promise from the village association to assure the projects long term sustainability by assigning someone to collect and dispose of the garbage. I’ve been working on this project off and on ever since with informal education sessions and talks with the village association president. We’ll see if it ever actually leads anywhere. Brahim, his wife and I also talked at considerable length about working in rural, disheartened communities in general and they were, for the most part, understanding of my difficulties and appreciative of my successes. I’ve maintained communication with them via e-mail since their departure back to England. It was more support and progress than I’ve received from PC or my official Moroccan counterparts in some time as well as more concrete, rounded and realistic project ideas with some hope of success.


After the fire died, the last drumbeat had faded into silence, and the Goatman was banished for the last time I had a celebration of my own. The travel restriction lifted and I headed to the airport in Marrakech to meet my College roommates and best friends Leo and Jess who were arriving for a visit. This was definitely one of the most exciting moments of my entire service and technically I was working the whole time they were here since the 3rd goal of the PC is the education of Americans about the culture and people of Morocco. Mostly though I was just happy to have their company for a while and also to get them away from their silly desk jobs.


There was a slight hiccup at the beginning when they didn’t get off the plane they were supposed to be on due to a slight mix up over what day of the week it was and it was an indication of my stress level and anticipation that I just about had a complete and uncharacteristic meltdown. All was well in the end though and they arrived the next day. We managed to have a great time despite encountering just about every travel problem I’ve yet seen in Morocco… and this as I’ve covered, is quite a considerable number. We traveled immediately to my village for a few days, did some hiking and talked and talked sitting on my roof with my village sprawled out below us, overlooking my life in more ways than one.


We returned to civilization and met up with Carly in Marrakech, where we spent a few more nights seeing parts of the town that I haven’t seen before, shopping, and experiencing Moroccan food again from a long forgotten tourist point of view. Of these sights perhaps the Bahia Palace was the most impressive. It was begun by some long forgotten king of some long forgotten dynasty. One of many that has controlled the city of Marrakech, which has a reputation akin to a frontier city in the wild west period of the U.S. in that it was only ever barely under the control of the rest of the country or even the of the people that supposedly ran the city itself. The Palace was then added onto by any number of other kings and parts of it are still in use by the royal family today. Mostly its main impressiveness comes from the sheer scope of the intricate and delicate looking plasterwork and natural cedar wood hand painted ceilings. The rooms themselves are empty though and it made me wish that they would furnish one in a model of what it might be like so that people could get the complete picture.

>Leo and Jess at the Majorelle gardens in Marrakech... Still one of my favorite colors for a house!

>Leo and Jess in front of the Koutoubia Mosque Minaret our first full night in Marrakech

>Hand painted ceadar ceiling inside the Bahia palace. There were seperate rooms like this for wives and mistresses... How properly religious of them...

>An example (and not the best one) of the intricate plasterwork. I liked this window for some reason

>Beautiful Alabaster fountian inside the Bahia Palace in Marrakech. I liked the mirror in the picture


After Marrakech we went down the Atlantic coast to the city of Essaouaria, an old Portuguese fort town that I had visited once before for the music festival last June. After some hotel issues we settled into a place operated by a fast-talking Australian/Moroccan named Taz. I’ll admit that I was initially adamantly against staying there since he approached us on the street but when our own hotel reservation turned out to be a disaster it was great to have already scouted out another alternative. It takes me too long to admit that I’m wrong sometimes… but I can do it! We watched the sunset over the Atlantic from the roof and had delicious Italian food. We walked along the beach and checked out a half submerged castle (Leo and I soaked our pants to do so but it was worth it!) fended off the camel jockeys and dodged camel dung while we played Frisbee (its been much too long since I’ve played against an opponent that can catch. Moroccans seem genetically disinclined to any sport that involves the use of the hands.) and generally relaxed and had a good time. Carly and I tried to do some bird watching only to realize that the birds we intended to watch had left in October and wouldn’t return until April. Ahh well. We got in some good bird watching the few days when we departed for Agadir, a bigger more modern city a bit further south.

Some large wooden boats under construction at the docks in Essaouira. I was amazed that they still made wooden boats this big!

>Carly and Leo posing at the fort in Essaouira with some traditional fishing boats

>Traditional fishing boats in for rest or repair

>Me, Carly, Leo and Jess on the beach in front of the eroding castle.


In Agadir we shopped for souvenirs and had an adventure figuring out how to send the larger ones home via the post office. I’m happy to report that the process was a success. We wandered through the Souss river estuary planning a sunset stroll down the beach only to be stopped at the edge of the kings compound by the guards. Despite the fact that Carly and I have done the same walk three times before they didn’t want to let us pass the last 100 yards to the beach. It took some fast talking about completely unrelated subjects like the weather and village life, to convince them that we were indeed 4 harmless nature lovers and fundamentally incapable of breeching the multiple barbed wire fences, evading the armed guards and dodging the thousand or so video cameras to get into a compound that the king stays at a couple times a year, and that sending us back through a swamp in the dark with no flashlight was cruel and unusual punishment. We made it through though and celebrated our success with McDonalds french-fries and home-made Ice Cream. I was extremely sad to see them go back home.


Their visit was also enough to get me thinking about the road less traveled. Here they are with real jobs and salaries and a whole new lifestyle. As Leo put it they were still just as broke but they were broke in better apartments and eating better food than we ever did in college. It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have done the same. I’m going to go home to the discovery that absolutely everything has moved on and I’m still going to subconsciously expect a life of futon couches, TV’s propped up on milk crates and ramen noodles. Some days I regret the choices I’ve made that brought me here, especially when nothing ended up being like it seemed it should, but in the end I am still happy with my life choice and my plans for the future. People at home respect what I do, or even what I’m trying to do and that respect is gratifying and often enough of a reward to shield me from the more disappointing aspects. Of course there is also the fact that at least my life here has made me see that Raman noodles can be a delicacy and I would kill for a cheap Wal-mart futon again! The variety of Perspectives on life have always fascinated me and this experience has opened my eyes on a whole new level…


Quite enough for now I think… I’ll finish up with February in Part two in the not to distant future. You won’t want to miss it. I went to Spain! I just got some letters from some people that I haven’t heard form in a while and it was great! I’m jealous of all the “normal” details, random thoughts, correspondence chess games (found a good e-mail site for this if anyone is interested) vacation photos and work problems. Makes me feel connected still and its vitally important. I couldn’t do this without you guys. Thanks for staying in touch… and for those of you that have been delinquent you still have three months to make up for it! No hard feelings. J If you can’t manage it then I’ll be home soon!

Till next time, stay well.

Much love and luck to everyone!

Cheers!

-Andy