hey everybody-
i write from camp, which is in the lovely coastal town of el-jadida. in a refreshing change of pace, our staff is neither incompetant nor evil, and although many of the campers are spoiled rich kids who complain about the lack of scrumptious foods, camp is going phenomenally well.
my contribution to the camp experience is the running of a science club with my friend sokmala (the k is a typo on her birth certificate. true story) which has so far been fun for the whole family.
yesterday we went to the beach and made baking soda and vinegar volcanos, which is apparentely the coolest thing anyone here has ever seen. we drew a crowd of approximately 1 million onlookers, and the kids had to make up stories about their towns and volcanos (which included vengeful gods, irritable genies, and some sort of joe-versus-the-volcano-esque story of human sacrifice). the actual science portion of the class is minimal, but, hey, this is camp. today we are building bridges out of dry spaghetti and straws, and tomorrow we are building small racecars and having a soapbox derby. i hope nobody dies.

there is a rumor going around that the us will no longer send mail to arab countries. does anyone know what grain of truth spawned this (i am assuming false) rumor? it’s kind of absurd.

high fives-
jocelyn.

hey everybody-
somehow i have come through my almost 2 years in morocco without getting stung by a scorpion. unfortunately, i cannot say the same thing for my cat. last wednesday he woke me up at 5 am in his typical fashion- sprawling out in the middle of my bed, which displaces my sleeping self onto the floor. so much fun. except he wouldn’t stop crying, and he didn’t run to the kitchen when i stood up, so i turned on the light. this was probably a mistake, because there’s not much that can be done at 5 am in my town and after i saw his gigantically swelled head i couldn’t get back to sleep. it seems that he had gone out whoring (his usual tuesday night activity) and instead of a pretty lady kitty encountered a scorpion which, being dumb, he seemingly tried to eat. the scorpion, being a jerk, stung him in the chin. and muissolini, knowing when he is out-muscled ran for home.

well, as soon as it was light out i packed him into my cat bag and set out for the agriculture center, which is the closest thing to a vet we have. the 5 men hanging out there drinking tea looked at him, agreed with much nodding and pursing of lips that it was a scorpion, told me that there’s no medicine in beni tajitte for scorpions (for animals or people, convenientely enough) and proceeded to give him a mystery shot of something yellow. they told me that if i had some antihistimine creme (which i don’t have and the pharmacy in town is out of) i could put it on the bite but otherwise there was nothing they could do.

being wholly unsatisfied with this, i sought the sage advise of my friends and neighbors. they suggested: finding the scorpion, killing it and tying it’s corpse to muissolini’s face, having the cat drink tea made from an herb they claim is a natural antivenom (which my host mom spent several hours trying to track down for me, only to discover that the town’s out of that, too), finding the scorpion, killing it and soaking it’s corpse in alcohol then rubbing the alcohol on the bite, and rubbing an onion on the bite and on his face in general.

needless to say, the neighborhood was up in arms and really wanted this scorpion dead. similarly needless to say, there was no possiblility of finding the scorpion as it was at large in the entirity of the sahara desert. while this discussion is going on, my cat is vomiting periodically out of his cartoonishly overlarge head and in general letting it be known that he wants to die.

we settled on the onion, which had the added bonus of making the cat smell delightful, and i think it helped a bit. by the next morning part of his face was less puffy. and since there was no help to be had in beni tajitte (except for an abundance of onions) the cat and i fled town 3 days earlier than intended for the cooler air of the mountains.

we made many strange friends along the way (traveling with a sick cat in a bag is, apparentely, the best possible conversation starter) and i think the cooler air did him the most good. he is better now, a week later, but seems a bit nervous about small moving things. he’s living on my friend mark’s roof for the summer, and aside from the hailstorm yesterday seems to like it.

thus concludes my tale of scorpions and cats. i’ll be off to camp in 2 weeks, which i’m sure will produce many hilarious anecdotes. until then, go seal your doors and windows.

love,
jocelyn.

hey everybody, how’s it going?
things are mighty fine here in the desert. i’m just writing a quick note to let you in on my latest work adventure: youth empowerment workshops. and let me tell you, it was as touchy-feely as the name implies. therefore, it’s a good thing my ‘neighbor’ jessica, who is possibly the most touchy-feely person alive came to help.
the workshops went ok, considering nobody showed up for the morning session on the first day so we had to improvise the entire workshop day by day at the women’s center. actually, two of my students attended faithfully, and even told us, in english, “you guys have changed our lives.”
so i consider my work here a success.
the women however gave mixed vibes. they liked the games we played about leadership and teamwork (which tended to involve blindfolds and lots of giggling), seemed bored by some of the discussions about values and beliefs (which included a discussion of the family code, a newly revised document that has caused unparalleled debate among other women, just not MY women), and then got really excited by the prospects of mapping their goals and drafting project plans for development ideas here in b taj. their ideas included a park for women and children (complete with swimming pool), starting a fabric company here in b taj to create jobs for men and women both, and making a sports center just for women, with aerobics, mats and weights. they were really excited by the prospect of rallying women behind a cause, and seemed especially excited by the last (and most plausible) idea of a sports center.
for me, the best part of the week (aside from being told i had changed someone’s life) was watching how uncomfortable jessica was whenever she saw my cat licking his balls, which happens approximately every 2 minutes. she’s taken the whole seperation of the genders thing to heart, and i think having a male cat in the house made her a bit squirmy. which was, like i said, really fun to watch.
i’m gonna type up a vocabulary list now, but just in case anybody had dreams of mailing anything cool to me, i’m not going to be in my town much for about 2 months. hooray! no more scorpions!
jocelyn.

ahoy once again,
i write to you this week with news of the latest event in a series of emberassing events.
the bathroom project is finished. praise be to allah (and toilets)!
whenever anything actually gets done in morocco, it’s completion necessatates a party. bathrooms are no exception, and so a party was arranged by my host mom, who is a teacher at the school in question and got me started on the project in the first place. little did i know…
the party was your typical ado, with association members (who for the most part had been absent from the project until the word “party” came up) making long-winded, self-aggrandizing speeches. because the speeches tend to be a bit formal, they are often done in a combination of standard arabic and french, neither of which i understand. so i tend to tune them out.
then i noticed my name, in it’s arabicised form, popping up in the speeches a bit too often for comfort and before i knew it, i was presented with a gigantic, framed certificate and then I had to make a speech.
the certificate is entirely in arabic, except my name, which is in all lower case letters (much like my e-mails…) and wertz is spelled with an s. after i’d been dulely embaressed, a cake was brought out, which ALSO had my name on it (the cake was a creation of my host mom’s). my name was spelled right on the cake, which is where it counts i guess, so that’s ok then.
pictures of this event are being processed right now, and maybe i’ll send some of them to america for henry to scan, because i know they’re going to be hilarious.
there’s not a lot of news to report as of late. my house continues to be plagues by giant bugs despite the weather stripping my host dad put under my door. i’m not sure how they’re getting in anymore, but it makes me a bit nervous. muissolini is good, and a deadbeat dad to boot (he knocked up another volunteers cat, which i feel really bad about and am going to stage a berber wedding for them so the kittens won’t be bastards). it’s too hot and too sandstormy, but really there’s no other way for it to be summer in the sahara.
i hope everybody’s well back in america! hopefully i’ll have something fun to write about soon.
high fives-
jocelyn.

hey everybody-
last week was something else out here. first off, there were torrential, biblical rains that led to the distruction of hundreds of houses, the deaths of quite a few, and the return of the river. it rained for 3 days non-stop, something that’s unheard of in the desert. at first everybody thought it was fantastic, but when the rains showed no signs of stopping people got worried. people only left their homes when they absolutely needed more sugar from the store, and i was pretty much the only one out and about. at one point i had to take refuge in a jewelry store (which is the most rediculous store in beni tajitte. like the people here have money for gold jewelry. it’s so got to be a front for something) while a particularly vengeful thunderhead passed by. i’m pretty sure the lightning struck my roof friday night, as the thunderclap was deafening and simultaneous with an explosion and a tremendous shaking of my house.
the rains pretty much turned my town into a giant mud pit, which is gross but not debilitating. but the river became so flooded that it washed away several houses that were built too close. also, since we don’t have bridges out here, when the road meets the river it kind of dips down into it, but is built up a bit with gravel and mud (not the best building materials when you’re fighting water) so the rains not only covered the roads up, but in places washed the road completely away by destroying the foundation on which the road was built.
how would i know so much about the state of the road, you may be wondering? well, i had foolishly called in a weekend overnight up in the mountains to meet some of the new volunteers. technically, once it is on the books that i am going somewhere, if i DON’T go then i am violating our out-of-site policy by staying in my site. strange but true. so i was trying to taxi out of my town once the rains had stopped, witnessing the destruction with my own eyes.
my 130km taxi ride took 10 hours due to the following factors- washed away roads meant we drove cross-country sometimes; waiting for the flooded river to receede enough for us to drive across on 4 occasions; rear-ending another taxi on the road which necessitated lots of yelling and beating of the taxi with rocks; after 4 hours meeting a yogurt truck on the road and buying tons of stuff from them because we were all so hungry (the yogurt was then showered on us during the accident); and finally fixing the taxi in the next town because the driver considered it his sworn duty to personally deliver us to rich, and the thought of changing taxis was anathema to him.
so after much trial and tribulation we all made it out, and i even made it back to tell the tale. all this craziness combined with the fact that i blew up my oven last monday in a giant fireball made last week not my favorite here in morocco. but i’m alive and my eyebrows are growing back, so all’s well that ends well. i guess.
oh, and in light of this national disaster, the king has sent his condolences and a sort-of fact finding team to assess the damages, and enough sugar, tea and fish for 1000 people. i doubt any of that will end up with the people who need it, like the 30 families here that had to spend the night in the gas station because their houses are gone, but we’ll see.
lastly, i have attached the horribly emberassing letter the elementary school sent peace corps in light of the bathroom project. enjoy.
jocelyn.

friends, countrymen, henry-
i say to you today that i have seen, with my own two eyes, the worlds smartest man. he is neither tall in stature nor a man of many words. in fact, he is a man of no words, because i only glimpsed this man as he slept.

first, let me reiterate in what miserable condition the public transportation is out here in the desert. we don’t have buses so much as we have the suggestion of buses, ruined husks of vehicles that once ran free on the salt flats. hundreds of years of use without a tune up in conjunction with the abuse the buses take from the passengers and their livestock has turned these once majestic automobiles into the clunking, slow, broken rusted heaps that i ride on for hours on end to buy cheese.

many are the times i have wished the buses provided any modicum of comfort. sleep is neigh impossible when the bitterly cold winter wind is blowing, not outside your window, but on your face through the many holes in the sides of the bus. it is even more impossible in the heat of summer, because that is when everyone travels to see family and seats are nonexistant. and yet, this man in his brilliance found a way.

i was walking home from the womens center, passing the newly constructed bus station (which is nothing more than a flat square of concrete poured last fall) when i saw it, the green pearl, pull in and start the process of spewing out passengers while an equal number of passengers attempt to board through the same door. sometimes i like to loiter when this spectacle is going on, and i laugh under my breath as old women with gratuitously oversized bags shove young men out of the way. mainly, i am simply happy not to be caught in the midst of this melee, and so i watch the better to appreciate the situation from a distance. and it was this waiting that gave me the glimpse of HIM.

the passengers who had managed to exit the bus were now engaged in the time-honored tradition of fighting to get their luggage from under the bus. the drivers assistant/ticket man/authority on all things bus-y opened the under-bus luggage door, and lo, there he was, with a matress, blankets, and a pillow, sleeping soundly despite the deafening roar of the bus and the passengers. for just a moment everyone near the bus grew quiet, the better to contemplate the momentous thing we were witnissing. then the bus man closed the door on his sleeping passanger and opened the next door down to reveal some brightly colored, giant bags full of produce.

sheer brilliance! this man is my hero! he’s found a way to beat the system! the next time i have to take the 4am bus for 5 hours, i am going to bring my bed and do as he did, sleep in peaceful comfort.

jocelyn.

ahoy there mateys!
sorry i’ve been off the map for a while, i was literally off the map and not really in my town. i have done more travelling than magellan of late and not much of it has been kid tested and Peace Corps approved, so there wasn’t really a lot of time to stop and write.

first and foremost, thanks to everyone for the birthday notes! yes indeed, i am now 24, and can already feel my joints starting to go and i swear i can actually hear my hair turning gray, if in fact that makes a sound.

and now, a tale of misadventure and mayhem, entitled “my morning at the preschool.”

ahem.

like so many of my days, this one began so innocently, with a cockroach falling off my bathroom ceiling and onto my head while i was peeing. “oh, my!” (mother fuckers!) i said (yelled), while gently sweeping (madly swatting) the roach from my hair. “that was just dreadful!” (i want to poison the whole world just to kill these bastards) i thought to myself as i calmly (wildly) reached (scrabbled) for my broom and went to town (went absolutely apeshit) on the insects that daily invade my WC.

after washing my face (scrubbing madly at all parts of my body exposed to insects) i realized if i didn’t leave soon i would be late for drawing time with the preschoolers (i was supposed to be there 10 minutes ago). i gathered my things (grabbed a sweater and mismatched shoes) and left for the womens center (ran through the streets). i arrived just in time (15 minutes later than usual) and passed out paper and crayons. while i was attenting to the children (telling them to please, please stop yelling my name) their teacher told me that she needed to take her 1.5 year old son to the hospital for his shots (she mentioned shots as she was strolling out the door with her son) and asked if i would mind terribly watching the kids while she was gone (she left me alone with 50 preschoolers and no back up.)

it soon became evident that the teacher was the main source of calm in the classroom (the kids are too terrified of her to be bad when she’s around) and after 5 minutes they became extreamly unruly (little monsters). though my boss at the womens center was around, she was in the middle of breakfast (drinking tea and laughing at me) and could not be disturbed (wasn’t about to get sucked into the preschool classroom). i was on my own.

surely by now you are all well versed with my…ill ease (mad rage) when around small children. all i can say for the rest of the morning is that there were approximately 4 tussles (fistfights) between 5 year old boys, 2 boys cried, and one girl tried to appropriate (steal) another girls drawing. in the end my boss came to my aid (stormed the classroom) and told everyone to go sit in the courtyard (this constitutes recess here) and be quiet (literally to “shut up”). it seems the children are even more terrified of houria than they are of their teacher. i left (fled the scene) the moment their teacher reappeared, an hour and a half later. i hope never to repeat this experience.

just to let everyone know, the check to complete the bathroom project finally got to me and i was finally able to cash it. i even managed to get the money back to my site without being robbed! so we’ll probably start building this weekend and hopefully finish shortly. i’ll send pictures when everything’s done. thanks so much to everyone who donated, it’s totally a worthy cause.

x’s and o’s
jocelyn.

hey everybody-
sorry i haven’t written in a while. i’ve been in hell, aka camp, for a couple weeks, and only recently have i been able to control my rage to the extent where i felt it safe to go out in public.

just in case there was some ambiguity in the above statement, camp did not go well. well, to the campers it went alright (i’m basing this assumption on the fact that most of them cried when it came time to leave) but for the 5 of us volunteers it served only to intensify my dislike of this place.

i will not bore you with the details, but i will briefly relate one of the main sources of grief. in short, the 15 moroccan staff members, who were supposed to be role models and camp counsellors, threatened the 134 campers and told them to lie to us because the staff didn’t want the kids to learn american dances like the chicken dance and the charelston. it seems that they found our demonstration of grunge “dancing” so terrible they found it necessary to tell kids that anyone who danced would have their fathers called. we’d asked them no less than 4 times if they had a problem with the dance party, and they said it was a great idea, so when 133 kids (1 brave girl rocked out with me, i’m assuming she was in the bathroom when they made their threats) told us they were sick when they had been absolutely fine only 20 minutes prior, naturally we became suspicious. and when multiple kids told us the same story of what had happened, naturally we became hateful towards the staff.

my favorite part is that somehow the staff thought none of the 134 kids would tell us what had happened, so after the failed dance party (we ended up filling the time with a spelling bee) the head guy got up and told the kids how ashamed he was of them for not dancing.

the rest of camp was filled with frosty looks and extreamly sarcastic words (these mostly from me when i caught one of the male counselors teaching some boys a hip hop dance they were going to perform for the talent show) between the volunteers and staff. yes, i believe we really did a lot there to promote cross-cultural understanding.

i hope those of you in iowa city are okay, and have at least patched the holes in your roofs with plastic bags. kelley sent me some pictures of the destruction, and i must say i’m impressed. the tornados even made the news here, which is really saying something.

all the best-
jocelyn.

hey everybody-
just a quick thanks to everyone who donated to my toilet project. it’s no longer on the website, so i can only assume that means it has gathered all the money and is slowly making it’s way back across the atlantic. with a little luck we’ll get the bathrooms built in the next month.
thanks a lot everyone!
jocelyn.

friday, march 17, 2006.

10:37am.

i was lucky to get out of there alive.

it started as a bright and sunshiny day, par for the course out here in the sahara desert in mid march. yes, it started like so many other days, with my cat sleeping on my face and my hair badly in need of washing (possibly because the cat plays/sleeps on it so much and he is filthy?) and a very large spider crawling up my wall. but today was no ordinary day. oho (no, as the berbers say) my friends.

oho.

today was friday. and friday means

(cue scary music)

TIME TO DRAW WITH THE KIDS AT THE WOMENS CENTER

now, i’ve been doing this twice a week for over a year, and you’d think i’d have gotton used to it. and, to be honest, i almost have gotton used to it, but that’s not really the key piece of information. it’s the KIDS that never get used to it. it would seem that crayons are about as common as finding a pork chop here and having an entire 45 minutes to freely express yourself is more exciting than breakfast during ramadan. so whenever these kids see me all hell breaks loose.

imagine 50 4 year olds, confined to a space that in american terms would be a tool shed, all SCREAMING your name at a decible level an amphatheater would envy. this is how my day started.

upon entering the room i noticed that not only were the kids rowdier than usual in that they had all stood up on their chairs the better to scream my name (and some kids were actually trying to climb on top on other kids for a height advantage and owing to the fact that there’s not actually room for the kids to all stand side by side) but THEIR TEACHER WASN’T EVEN THERE. yes, that’s right, she knew i was coming (possibly alerted by the roar of “YASMINE” which, i imagine, was audible from spain) and went and hid in the next room with my boss. little did i know they were plotting against me over there.

so we drew, and we yelled, and we complained that kowtar (which is my favorite girls name, can’t you just see it- KOWTAR OF THE HILL PEOPLE) was hogging the crayons, and for the hundredth time we explained that a white crayon will not show on white paper, and we were just finishing up when in came the teacher with a big grin on her face (this entire time i had been pacifying her 1 and a half year old son with funny faces) who told me it was my luck to distribute the snacks today, which turned out to be those sugar wafers that everybody likes so much. especially 4 year olds.

at the sight of sugar wafers all 50 kids hearts began to race, and their little bodies, not knowing what to do with all the energy, simply converted it into sound. the distribution of said wafers was accompanied by a deafening roar that has possibly left me hearing impaired, i’m not sure. but after some yelling about how youssef took two and i only got this broken one, everyone was sufficiently hopped up on sugar. and that’s when the teacher let them out on their recess.

unfortunately their recess takes place in the open air hall that i must traverse to get out of the womens center. and these kids with their misguided love of me, all hopped up on sugar, are big kissers.

imagine being in a narrow, confined space, maybe 15 feet long and 4 feet wide, completely filled with small children trying to kiss you. they actually formed some sort of coalition of the willing and made a solid wall of kids in front of the door, all of whom were making comical kissy faces and tugging on my clothes to get my head in kissing range. now, call me crazy, but i don’t really want to be kissed by 50 kids who are not only sticky from sugar wafers and covered in snot, sores (we have a lot of scabies around here) and sometimes flies. but alas it was not to be.

in a valiant escape attempt, i tried to use my height advantage to simply step OVER the little munchkins, and this was presumably EXACTLY what they were waiting for. they struck together, and just before i toppled to the ground, kids hanging off all my flailing limbs, i glimpsed my boss and the teacher, laughing from the other side of the window. once on the ground i was powerless to resist the overwhelming force of the kids, and got kissed approximately 7,492 times. only then was i able to flee the scene and begin plotting my revenge.

clearly the kids are able to work together to achieve limited goals. all i have to do is become their leader (i’m thinking sugar wafers could serve as a proper reward/motivation scheme here) and formulate a plan of attack. a similar kissing barrage could be effective, but i would like to go above and beyond. why get even when you can get ahead? i am therefore considering translating the “song that never ends” and teaching it to ALL 50 OF THEM. although i feel that unleashing such a song on an unsuspecting town could have serious repercussions, and could in fact be declared an act of terrorism. comments?

so i hope you are all surviving the tail end of winter out there, and that you are all well. thanks gramma, barbara, rhea, skye, and natasha for the letters. i’ll write back soon.

and thanks everyone for the donations! the bathroom project is down significantly, only 260 dollars to go! we’ll have those crappers fixed in no time.

high fives-
jocelyn.