More words from Miss Lindsay

check it out yo

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Second mass email coming at ya, Adrian, I hope you are feeling better. I definitely know how you feel…I too had parasites last week from the water I had been drinking. And I’ll send you my home address for a postcard if you send me tours. Everyone else who wants a postcard, send me addresses now! In the meantime, read on.

Hola a todos y todas,

Hello again! Yes, it’s been a long time, I apologize. But there is a lot of work to be done here (fun work, not boring). And I still have not perfected my methods of getting three pre-teens off the computer so I can send an email. It’s like being back at home in that regard...only there’s three kids instead of one!

I am doing well, finally. Last week was a bit of a struggle as I was sick with one thing or another. Sunday morning I woke up with my foot swollen to the size of a balloon, red and throbbing. Turns out I had a spider bite, which made it difficult to walk for the next few days. The spiders here aren’t deadly, but their bites are not friendly. I’ve had three in my room so far, and I hope that’s the end of it. My host father and brothers think the spider thing is hilarious. I’m sorry, but when hairy spiders as big as my foot like to sleep in my room and bite me, it’s not funny! The first time a spider was in my room, I made my host dad kill it as I was terrified. He then proceeded to chase me around the house with the dead spider in his hands. He swears I got the spider bite in the campo, but I know it bit me in my room: I saw it staring me down when I went to bed Saturday night.

But my week got even better. Tuesday night I came down with some sort of stomach bug or parasite and spent the night with the worst stomache pains, vomiting, and diarreah I have had ever (when you have both at the same time, you know something’s wrong). I spent the next two days in bed, not moving, not eating, not doing anything. My host family wasn’t sure what was wrong or what to do, so they just left me, with my host mom checking in on my once in awhile. Thank god Jose is my good friend, besides being my boss, and kept coming by to check up on me and make me drink water. He told me that he had felt bad that day too, and said that it was the water we had been drinking in the campo. You see, he said, the family doesn’t boil the water they give us. I was too weak to yell at him for not telling me this earlier and could only glare at him. I thought we were drinking boiled water! I’m just surprised it took me a month to get sick. From now on, I am bringing my own water everywhere. And Friday, when I finally got out of bed, I discovered I had another infection due to the heat and latrines, which meant a trip to the pharmacy. I’ve always thought I was a healthy person, but I guess I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I’ll move on to less disgusting topics and just say that hopefully that’s the end of the parasites/infections/spiders for me.

Last week while on the phone with home for the first time in quite a long time, my mother asked me if my internship here was a nine-to-five work day. I almost laughed out loud. The question, of course, was a perfectly valid question, but a simple “no” answer is not enough, since my role as an intern here varies almost on a daily basis. So let me try, as best I can, to document my job here and what I hope to accomplish while I am here.

Although I am “officially” here to work on the preschool program, because right now only José and I are working with Cambiando Vidas in the DR, my jobs extend beyond the preschool program. While helping to build the first house, I was working mostly with construction: mixing concrete and cement, laying blocks, sawing roof beams, threading electrical wires, and mostly running errands and assisting the more experienced house builders. The second week was more construction, finishing up odds and ends on the house, running errands, and taking a lot of pictures of the process. Since those first two weeks, each day is different. Since Cambiando Vidas has just started and there are currently only two people in the Dominican Republic working with it, there is a lot to do, and no one has one specific job. When you don't even have an office space and your biggest purchase to date is a printer, it's rather difficult to delegate jobs. In this sense, my work experience here might not be what you would call a typical “internship,” but I think I am benefiting more from working here because I get to learn how a non-profit works as a business and an organization from the administrative and fundraising levels, as well as how it accomplishes its goals out in the community and how it works with the community.

Yesterday we just finished taking a census of the entire community of Las Charcas de Garabito, going door to door to find out how many houses there are in the community and how many preschool age children there are in each house. This way we also started to spread the word about the upcoming program and alerted parents that they will be a vital component of the success of this program. It took us a couple of weeks to do the census, working in the mornings with some very enthusiastic kids from the community helping us out.

Each day traveling around San Juan and Las Charcas I learn more about life here. The other day José and I went to buy vegetables for lunch at the largest market in San Juan, and of course I couldn't pass up such an opportunity to check it out. San Juan has many markets, as it has a population of about 80,000 people, and even though I saw only a small fraction of it, its size and variety of products sold told me its size. But the size didn't startle me; what startled me was something that always catches me off-guard, even though I know that it exists. Here, when you visit a stall, you do not pick your own produce, but instead tell an attendant of that stall what you want and how much. When we arrived at the first stall, the attendant came out, wearing jeans that were barely held up by a belt, no shirt, no shoes, and spoke with the confidence that only comes from years of hard work and dealing with customers; this boy couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old. While I watched him fill a bag with our order, quickly adding the prices in his head, all I could do was stare and think to myself, "He should be in school," and consider the, irony, I suppose, of providing a preschool for families who don't have such access and who desire the education, while we dealt with child laborers in the market.

But both Jose and I are reassured, almost daily, that creating a preschool program is very important to people here. Members from neighboring communities have asked Jose to start up the preschool in their communities as well (we would, but right now we can barely afford to work in one community at a time, let alone multiple ones). And all the families with young kids that we have interviewed in the community are thrilled about the prospect of a preschool opening in January. For example: the other day I entered the house of a mom who told me she was twenty-six and had three kids, raging from age five to nine. Although all her kids were in elementary school, and therefore could not directly benefit from the preschool program, she was ecstatic about the program. What should have been a two minute interview turned into a twenty minute conversation (mostly one-sided) about the benefits of such a program. You are helping the children learn how to learn, she told me, and feel confident in the classroom so that when they enter elementary school they will be ready. If you wait until they are seven or eight to put them in school, like this woman's experience, it is too late to teach them how to learn and they will feel uncomfortable in school. Moreover, she told me that, as her children had learned more in school, she had too, just be helping her kids with their homework. You're helping the entire family, she said, and you're doing what the government should be doing, but never does. Talking with her made my day.

But I don’t want to make it sound like I’m a workaholic here. I get to spend my evenings relaxing with my host family or José’s family, who have become my second host family here as I spend so much time there. On weekends there are basketball games with teams from different neighborhoods in San Juan, so we always go to watch, especially since José’s brother’s team is now playing in the championship game. And we spend many hours with different families from the community, just hanging out and having fun.

This past weekend was particularly fun and relaxing. A group with Habitat for Humanity is here working in San Juan, consisting of high school and college students from the Marin area (small world!). They were going to beach in Barahona for the weekend, and invited Jose and I to tag along so they could find out about what we were doing. The beach has always been a relaxing place for me, and it was fun to meet the kids from college. I always enjoy meeting people my age who love to travel and volunteer, and find out what they are doing. A couple of them had even volunteered with Amgios (the program I volunteered with when I was in Costa Rica four summers ago). It was nice to take a break and talk to more people about Cambiando Vidas. Jose and I even had a “business” meeting with the hotel owners to see if we could get a bargain price for Cambiando Vidas volunteer groups to stay at the hotel. But, of course, it wasn’t your typical business meeting. I said to Jose afterwards that never before had I been a part of a formal business meeting where everyone was still in their pajamas. He had to laugh and admit that he hadn’t either.

On Sunday Jose and I drove down to a small coastal town called Paraiso to take pictures. The town is aptly named.While the beaches in the southwest don’t appear to be as famous as those in the north, I think they were the most beautiful I have ever seen. Instead of sand, the beaches had small white pebbles, and the water was an amazing turquoise color. Never have I seen such pristine water. If the pictures I took don’t convince you to come to the DR, nothing will.

That’s all for now. I hope you are all doing well and getting ready for the 4th of July (I can’t believe it’s almost July....)

Sending amor y paz.

Always,

Sarah

Attack of the Parasites

First of all, to anyone who is worried and found out what happened this week, I’m ok. I was in the hospital for two days for “intoxication alimentaire” (food borne parasites). Once again, I’m ok, and I’ll recount what happened.

I should probably warn you that if you don’t want to read details of bodily functions and all sorts of medical stuff, you should probably skip until the end, or not read this at all.

I think it happened when I ate a salad (Katie, I know…I know…). I was warned about eating them, and I should have not even considered the idea. The problem is, I don’t have stove currently in this apartment, the next one I’m living in has one, so I go out a lot to this one section of the medina that has a lot of restaurants. When you go out to the same four places to eat, you sort of make friends with the guys that work there. You also let your guard down a little bit, and when someone says to you that they make a very good salad, you say, sure, why not?

But as I’ve learned here, you cannot leave your guard down for even a second. Tuesday afternoon I started feeling ill over lunch, went back to the apartment and vomited twice. Having had Giardia years before when I visited South Africa, I instantly knew what the symptoms of a parasite felt like, and I knew I had to find a hospital. I managed to clean myself up, get to the taxi stand at place du Batha, and calmly told the cab driver I needed to go to a hospital. He was curious as to what was wrong with me, so I told him, and he pulled over to a pharmacy in the nouvelle ville of Fez. They gave him the address of Doctor Aloui, a specialist in digestive tract issues, and the cab driver drove me to him. I am continually amazed and dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Doctor Aloui, who is very kind, speaks very clear French, and has a picture of a stomach on his business card, asked me what was wrong, I told him. I went into another room and he used a sonogram to look at my stomach and digestive tract. After this he told me that the problem was that each time I vomited, it cleared my stomach and it was hard to tell if it was just going to pass through my system. If it happened again, I was to immediately call him to go to the hospital. Truth be told, I didn’t even make it out of building before I ran back, asked him to use the bathroom, and began to vomit again. Dr Aloui personally drove me to the Clinique Al Kawtar, where I spent the next two nights. I have been assured many times that this is the newest, best, and most expensive private hospital in all of Fes. I’ve never been hospitalized to the point where I’ve needed to spend the night, much less in a foreign country in the “trière mondiale”. However, I was in a room by myself with blue wallpaper, two couches, a TV, bathroom, and a large open window. The hospital itself looked like any modern medical facility you can imagine, but I can’t describe what the rest of it looked like. I wasn’t curious enough to go for walks with my goutte à goutte down the hallways to explore.

I can’t even begin to tell you how scared I was. I lay in bed for around a half an hour while Dr. Aloui told the staff what he thought was wrong with me. Then two infirmiers came, man and a woman, I can’t remember their names, who were very kind and took care of me that whole night. The first attempt to put the goutte à goutte (IV drip) didn’t go so well. I started vomiting uncontrollably, lightheaded, sweating profusely, and numb in the upper and lower extremities. The guy did not understand what was happening, and kept saying “J’ai fait rien!”, all the while I’m almost in tears because I’m in so much pain, hyperventilating, and panicking because I can’t remember the word for numb in French. I fumble for my English-French dictionary near my bedside, and the best word I can find for it is paralysé, which is an awful translation. So I’m explaining it as, “Où il n’y a pas de sang dans vos mains ou pieds? L’expression en anglais est que les mains ou les pieds dorment”.
“Attendez Monsieur, vous n’êtes pas français?”
“Non, Monsieur, je suis Américain, mais, excusez-moi, ce n’est pas mon problème maintenant.”
“Oh, c’est pourquoi l’accent.”

So they let me sleep for a little while, and put the IV in a little later. During the night, both of the nurses came in and chatted with me when I was up. I vomited about 7 times that night, and they were there each time holding my head up. Once or twice they would joke with me to try and perk my spirits up.

“Qu’est-ce que tu as mangé? Un Tagine? Hahaha!”

They were also curious as to what I was doing in Fez, and whether or not I could speak Arabic, which, aside from a few words in daily conversation that are mixed with the French that I speak anyway, I cannot.

Much of the time, there really wasn’t anything in my stomach to throw up except air, so I’d be hanging over a bowl gasping for breath and retching as much as I can. I still don’t know what it was exactly that I had. If anyone in the medical profession knows what these symptom’s are consistent with, and when the vomit and diarrhea are both green, let me know. They had me on three drips of Flagil, I’ve taken it before, its an anti-parasite blaster, which seemed to knock the thing out by the next morning because I stopped vomiting.

Amel at the foundation called around 1 in the afternoon because they were wondering where I was, and I had to apologise because I had used all the money on my pre-paid cell phone to call my parents about insurance and where I was. Needless to say, I was up all night and had just woken up when she called. About 3 hours later, everybody at the office came and visited me, which was unbelievably nice of them. It was a little embarrassing for me because I looked terrible, and smelled pretty bad, but all of them were very sympathetic for what I was going through.

The rest of the time I stayed in bed and read a couple of stories by Fouard Louri, and watched Cyborg 2 on the TV. The stories were good, especially the one about the man who is paying attention to a girl at the other end of the bar instead of his friend’s political commentary. Angelina Jolie’s lines were not. I think my favorite was “Don’t get dead.” Thank you Hollywood, I needed some asinine and terribly written words of encouragement.

Thursday morning, one of the male nurses woke me up at 6:00 AM to ask if I could spare some money for cigarettes. I gave him 20 dirhams (2∍) and asked him not to bother me again.

At around 9, Doctor Aloui came by to say that I could go soon. I managed to get out around 10 or so, took a cab back to the apartment, showered thoroughly, and went to the office, where I was given an assignment. I worked until about 5:30, and had some soup for dinner. As I am currently typing this, it is Friday, and I am feeling much better.

Those of you who knew me in high school are probably saying to yourself, “There’s something about Adrian, Africa, and parasites that go together.” I’m thinking it myself. But while research and other projects have been set back a week, I’m back on my feet and taking 4 different kinds of drugs (pain relievers, antibiotics, anti-parasite medicine) and chasing them with Pepto-Bismol because the indigestion they cause is pretty bad as well. But I’m alive.

Yay!

There's someone else besides me who's writing! Sarah, I hope you drink enough beer for the both of us... I do miss it. (Do you have an address? I can send love by postcard) Jake, I sent love by postcard last week, so expect something soon.

The Office Politics Between French, Arabs, Berbers, and Americans are Incroyable!

For this week, I thought I would describe some more of the people I work with, or will have worked with.

Julian is a very nice and intelligent guy, but only when he is not stressed out. I've been hanging out with him a lot since the festival has ended, and I can't thank him enough for letting me stay in his flat. As I am writing this, we are actually sharing his flat, which is interesting for me because I've never had a boss who later turned out to be a roommate. We have had some adventures together in Medina, and he is teaching me many things about Morocco. He speaks French, English, Arabic, and Spanish fluently, and I am incredibly jealous.

Unfortunately, the landlord in charge of the building is so bad that he forgot to pay for the water this month, and Julian had no water for a day. You could tell, because he used more cologne than usual. He did go to the landlord to say that I would be living there until the end of the month, and he told him, "Listen, my friend Adrian is staying in the flat for the rest of the month because I already paid for it for the month. You have to let him stay there, because if anything happens to him, I know the chief of police here in Fez. Everybody in the foundation knows that he is living there, and if I find out that something has happened to him, I make one phone call and you are in prison." I really couldn't ask him for more. Its probably something that only could happen here in Morocco. People fear the police here like I've never seen before in my life.

(The living situation for the rest of my time here is as follows. I am staying in Julian's flat for the rest of this month, but for July I am living in the flat of a friend of Julian's next door for 600 dirhams for the month (about $70 or so). It is even more third world than this one. If I want to take a shower I heat water on the stove and I use a bucket.)

One day this week he was bored and waiting for somebody to come, so he googled his own name, and then my name, and when the found the CISLA page with everybody's name and photograph on it. He said, "Adrian, viens!" and since something like 90% of the people in CISLA program are girls, he was like. "Woah! You're université is beautiful. (Points to somebody, can't remember who) I would like a date with her. Can you ask her if she would like a French lover?" I had to laugh, it was too funny. We went to dinner the other night with some other people in the office, and he was looking at a girl in the street and saying, "Beautiful! But you know I can't have just one girl, you know? Its not fair for them!" (Its all the more funny if you know the French)

He also sort of gave me an overview on the office politics of the foundation. Apparently, he is going back to France because they work him like a slave here, and they pay him in dirhams, which, in comparison to the euro, is quite pathetic. He also doesn't like a lot of people in the foundation, who he feels don't deserve the money they earn. Apparently, the local directrice, Amina Fassi-Fehri Laraqui earns 20,000 dirham per month, and she does absolutely nothing. Apparently Amel, who is the person who hired me and who is rather nice, is working here because the directrice knows her mother. Needless to say, Julian doesn't like either of them. He likes Nadia Benjelloun, the international directrice of the colloquium, but she lives in France. I've actually seen Julian and Amel go at each other, and it's a bit scary. Amel had asked me to go pick up someone at the airport, and Julian was saying, "No, I need Adrian, Ismael, and Jihan as part of my time" (I think our team was part of a turf-war between the two).

First they start speaking very fast French to each other, and then Amel starts speaking Arabic and forgets that Julian also speaks Arabic, so Julian starts speaking really fast Arabic. All the while I'm going, "Calmez! Calmez! J'irai à l'aéroport à minuit ce soir! Ce n'est pas de problème pour moi!".

What is even more interesting is that he hates even complaining about the people because it makes him feel like a French colonist, and he understands how bad the colonial rule was in North Africa by the French.

Bleh! Anyway, even Ahmed the Egyptian is more relaxed now, I just saw him with a coffee in his hand instead of a cigarette, and he seemed happier. He even invited me to come to Egypt some day. But Jihane and Ismael are gone now. Jihane went back to Rabat to start an internship in the ministry of foreign affairs, the festival was just a fun thing for her, and Ismael was just a volunteer. He is still here, and he has contacts with musicians here in Fez. Pretty soon, its just going to be just me and Amel and the directrice.

I think even Fatima, the nice Berber girl who works in the accounting office is leaving soon. I actually don't know if she is Berber or not, but she did say that she was from the Sahara and she is very dark. She says that she doesn't like living in Fez because its very small, and most of the people in the north look down on the people from the South because they think they are primitive. Apparently, going shopping here in the medina, while it is very cheap, is always difficult for her because people are expert hagglers and will try to get the best kind of price available. There is because ordinary people do not buy the kinds of things that they sell in the medina, and poverty is something that kills here. In the Sahara, she says, they are very also poor, but they fear God so they won't try to cheat you.

Fabrice Villain is another Frenchman, who is very hairy and always has a cigarette in his hand. It is funny, because he'll rarely take a puff from it. He will be working on something at his desk, dossiers or something like that for the press, and he'll have the cigarette lit in one hand outstretched over the ashtray. He'll point with it, and he'll always have it away from him, but it will be just sitting there in his hand, billowing smoke into the room.

Adil is a native of Fez, who seems to the only person I've met here who openly admits he drinks alcohol. He has said to me at least once, "Hey, you should come with Jihan, we all go to nightclub, shake something up and boom boom. You know"? Apparently he called Jihan once when he was drunk, and it was hilarious. I helped his friend Mohammed the other day with his green card application for the US and as it turns out, he helps to manage a ceramics factory. So if you guys want a Tagine or some other piece of elaborate piece of pottery, just let me know and I will try and make a deal for you. If its under 25 kilos they can ship it to your door.

To show how dynamics between all of us work, I will close with a simple, somewhat humorous anecdote. During the opening days of the big conference, Jihan (who is Moroccan), Juneid, Julian (who are both French), and I were in a car going to the airport in order to pick up a large number of people involved in the conference. Julian was reminding everyone to be as polite and helpful as they could, and in doing so he reminded Juneid that they were both ambassadors of France, so it especially important for them to do a good job. I piped in and said it was the same thing for the United States and me. However, Julian responded with, " No, you cannot represent the United States because your government has not signed the Kyoto treaty. Only California has made good emission laws, so unless you come from California, you cannot represent the US." I didn't really know what to say, but thankfully Jihan jumped in and said, "You see, Adrian, this is French humor. You are supposed to laugh now."

There is much more to come.


-Adrian

Proxying for Sarah...

This is Sarah's post. Whatever follows is the work of Sarah. Sarah wrote the following words.

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I know, I know. I’ve been in the DR for about a month now and have been practically incommunicado. Besides being very busy with work and adjusting to living in a foreign country again, my only real excuse for not posting earlier is that blogspot won’t let me sign in without creating a new email account (and after creating emails for my boss and our organization, and then becoming in charge of all organization emails, I don’t want to have to deal with one more email account). I can’t even use the internet as an excuse, as I have internet at my house. At any rate, the following is the first mass email I sent out to my family back home. More posts to follow.

Tuesday, June 5th

I apologize for not writing earlier, as I promised, but life has been a whirlwind for me since I arrived here on May 19th. It’s not the culture shock (or lack there of, in this case) or the switch to Spanish that keeps me busy; what keeps me away from the computer here is learning new things, meeting new people, and getting back to the intense, yet tranquilo way of living that I have missed since I left Nicaragua in December.

I am living and working in San Juan, a city about three hours west of the capital, Santo Domingo. Although I am getting to know the city rather slowly, I like what I have seen so far. It may have a population of about 200,000, but it is easy to get to and navigate the downtown area, and it is well maintained (at least, I think it is—but I’m comparing it to Managua, where I lived last fall). The city itself is rather flat, but only a few minutes away are mountains, speckled with small towns and rivers. From the mountains, you can see all of San Juan. The mountains are absolutely beautiful, and I enjoy watching the fog lift from them in the mornings and watching the sun set behind them in the afternoons.

For those of you who do not know, let me explain a little bit about what I am doing here this summer. I am working with a non-profit organization, Cambiando Vidas (Changing Lives) that was started here in San Juan literally weeks before I arrived. The non-profit has two components: the first is to build low-income houses for the people in the campo communities surrounding San Juan, and the second is to start a preschool program in these communities, since the government in the Dominican Republic provides no schooling until the kids here reach elementary school. One of the most important aspects of Cambiando Vidas is to get as many community members involved in the programs as possible; to make Cambiando Vidas the community’s program instead of the communities participants in our program. Right now, Cambiando Vidas is just working in one of the communities outside San Juan, Las Charcas de Garabito, but in the future we hope to work in other communities.

This summer, I am working primarily with the preschool program, helping my boss (the founder and idea man behind the organization) to create the program, assess the needs of the community, and get as many kids and parents involved, so that it will be ready to begin in January. But I’m doing other things too, such as helping out with house construction, the budget, writing newsletters to donors, getting other people involved in the organization, and anything else that is needed to help this organization succeed.

The first week I was here marked the first house build of Cambiando Vidas. I came down with some other Americans, all of whom had met the founder, José Abreu, before through working with Habitat for Humanity. I can’t imagine having started my summer internship any other way than that first week. In that first week, our small group of Americans worked with countless community members to build this house. Despite the sun, the heat, and the hard manual labor, community members of all ages came to watch and help out, from the school kids (who kept begging their teacher to cancel classes so they could work on the house all day) to neighbors and family members. For me personally, I had the opportunity to meet many community members that I will be working with this summer, practice my Spanish and translating skills, start to learn about Dominican culture (food, music, dance, beer, catcalls and Dominican men, etc.), and give my brain a break after just having finished final exams.

It’s funny, because I thought that since all the other Americans were in their late 30s, mid 40s, and early 50s (one of them being my parent’s friend from college), I thought I would feel awkward in the group and after spending the day in the Dominican sun working, everyone would want to go to bed right away. Turns out, at least for these guys, the rule here is work hard all day and party harder all night. They all loved to go out, dance, and drink beer (they told me during these nights, they relive their college days). Which made me think of how perfect this kind of trip would be for hard working, hard partying students like us! Haha.

After the first week, all the other Americans left for the states and I moved into my new home for the summer. I am living with a host family: two parents, their 15-year-old daughter, their 12-year-old son, and 11-year-old son. The father is Dominican, from San Juan, and a family friend of my boss, but the mom is Venezuelan and all three kids were born in Venezuela. The family has lived all over: Caracas, Venezuela; Santo Domingo, DR; Montreal, Canada; and have now lived here in San Juan for one year. So at home I am exposed to a little bit of Venezuelan cooking and culture mixed in with Dominican rice and beans and music, along with a few conversations in English (the mom really wants to be fluent) thrown in with the Spanish.

This is the third time I have lived with a host family, and, as is always the case, is quite different from the past two. I have my own cozy room here, as well as my own bathroom. The family also has a computer with internet, and all the other comforts of home. The water rarely goes out, which makes washing easier. And while the power goes out frequently, we are not affected as we have a generator; but when the power does go out at night, it is amazing to go outside and watch almost the entire city of San Juan go black.

This past week I have visited our first house daily, helping to put on the finishing touches and run multiple errands to the hardware stores in San Juan, and getting to know the summer plan better. This week José and I hope to start visiting the rest of the community to begin their preschool program and get as many people involved as possible, as well as finishing things up from the last build and start planning the next house build. José speaks fluent English, and speaks to me in English about program specifics, but when we are with other people, he speaks to me in Spanish, so my Spanish can continue to improve.

That’s all for now. Sending amor y paz from la República Dominicana.

Maroc Part Trois

6/10/07 6:46 pm

With the big colloquium and the festival finished, I have been thinking about what exactly I should write for this week. The concerts themselves deserve the most attention, as visited most of them, and while I could write something about the colloquium I feel as if I couldn’t really do it justice. The reason for this is because I was behind the desk for much it, and I did not get to hear the key speakers. I caught parts of it near the end, so I could understand what was happening, but it did not seem to have a whole lot to do with music. It was more about culture and globalization, which of course music is becoming a part of. The people invited to the colloquium were French intellectual heavy weights, so I had a little trouble sometimes following their ideas. One lecture I did go to was given by Michael Berry, who runs a department in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He is American, but the lecture was in French, as he speaks it flawlessly, and was about medieval Islamic art.

Anyway, I think there is something to be said about the ritual experience of the concerts themselves, because in each of the different venues where, the concert experience was different because of factors such as where it was, who was playing, and also who was in the audience. I will try and categorize the experiences by the different places.

The Dar Batha Museum

Oddly enough, I tried to get an internship there. As of yet, I have not met anyone who works there other than the security guards, who are now good friends of mine. The museum was built in the 19th century, and is designed in the sort of classic Moorish architecture. In entering the museum itself, one passes through a long corridor, and upon stepping through a great big doorway with large wooden doors on either side, you find yourself in a rather large, and rectangular shaped courtyard with a garden in the middle. Arcades line the walls of the courtyard, and at the far ends of the garden are two sets of platforms decorated in white and blue tiles that mark the entrances of the galleries of the museum. One of these platforms has three fountains in the middle, and was where receptions for the colloquium were held, and other one was where the concerts and colloquium itself took place. In center of the ledge nearest the garden, the stage was set up under the reaching arms of a giant and very old tree, which gave shade to the performers in the afternoon. The audience was set up in a U shape around the stage, and if one was sitting in the front row one could see the performer, as well as the garden in back of it. Just in front of the stage, a series of rugs were set up to give certain members of the audience, mostly ridiculous looking hippies, the ability to feel truly exotic and sit Indian style.

Something that I noticed only after the series was finished, the general atmosphere of the concerts held here was something like what you would find in a western chamber music concert. I found that most of the people in the audience were European, American, Australian, or at least not Moroccan. The ritual involved was similar to that of a chamber music series at the Library of Congress. You bought your ticket, received your program, got to your seat, read the program, and waited for the concert to begin. When the master of ceremonies appeared, everyone became quiet as he introduced the performers, told us to turn off our cell-phones, and to enjoy the concert. We listened, shushed anyone who spoke, and clapped when appropriate.

It was the ritual of the western concert experience, only in the Moroccan city of Fez.

Bab Makina

This massive gate was built in 1886 during the reign of Moulay Al Hassan, and today serves as a large outdoor concert venue. (I think Moroccans can afford to have all of these outdoor venues because I have barely seen a cloud in the sky since I have been here!) Inside the gate, high walls surround the whole venue, and the stage is built in front of the entrance to the royal palace. It is a much bigger place, but the atmosphere in general is more relaxed. The only exception was the first concert when the Queen of Jordan, Queen of Morocco, and Madam Chirac were there. I was sitting in the audience next to Juneid, a Frenchman I work with who comes from Marseilles, and as the queen made her entrance everyone stood up and went “ooooooh”! (For anyone wondering what she was wearing, it was long, sparkling white dress with sort of a v-cut in the front. Her hair was also a dark red.) The whole thing was just unreal to me, and I kept joking to Juneid “C’est comme la moyenne age!” (Its like the middle ages!) which he laughed at. We sat down only after the VIP’s had sat down in white satin armchairs in front of the stage. The opera diva Barbara Hendrix was singing that night, and the atmosphere was very formal, but it was not nearly as austere as the concerts at the Batha Museum. There was much more activity in the crowd.

In general, the most part of the people who came to concerts at Bab Makina were Moroccan, but I had the feeling that this was the crème de la crème of Fez society. Something I noticed for the first two concerts was that everybody was wearing their best clothes, and that almost none of the women were wearing a headscarf. This changed over the week as tickets were more accessible, and the general atmosphere of the concerts was more relaxed. At the concerts later on in the week, people seemed to be milling about much more and going to café and ice-cream bar near the entrance. There also seemed to be many more ordinary people, and many more women wearing headscarves.

Place de Boujloud

This is a large public square where the free concerts were held. As far as I could tell, there was no real difference between free concerts of popular music state-side. If you have ever been to a large, outdoor rock concert, you can probably imagine what the scene looks like. The crowd is a single mass of bodies crowded together near the stage, cheering, chanting, and dancing, with members of the Moroccan police and military holding back crowd from the stage. The groups that played here were mostly pop music bands involved in the “festival dans la ville” part of the main world sacred music festival. But as far as I could tell, the groups that played here had little or nothing to do with sacred music. I saw one group that the person who hired me, Amel, actually manages, and they were pretty good. It was like a reggae, pop, ska, rap kind of mix sung completely in Arabic. I managed to ask the lead singer a few questions about the band, and one thing that he said to me was that he felt their only connection with the idea of sacred music was that all music was sacred. Other than that, he felt the message of the music was about social change.

I think what I’ve been seeing a lot is sort of culture within culture, in the sense that what there is a much larger context to all the events that I’ve been going to. In a way, the festival is promoting the “culture” of globalization itself with all of these big international groups coming here, but one thing that I’m very curious about, which has struck me recently is that I know little to nothing about the local music community of Fez is like, and how they feel about their music in the midst of all the things happening in their city.

Its is another thing to explore…

Maroc Part Deux

I should probably begin this letter by saying something that has been on my mind for the past couple of days now. I believe with all reason, that this is the most difficult thing I have done in my life. This is not to say that the experience so far has been terrible, but much of it has been very difficult.

Somehow, I seem to be managing with my ability of French. The worst are times when either someone does not understand what I’m saying, or I do not understand what they are saying to me. There have been a couple of times when Julian, one of my bosses who is French and frequently stressed out, comes at me screaming in rapid-fire French, which of course I don’t understand, and I get stressed out and start screaming at him in return in English. Then we both realize that this is going nowhere, and I speak to him in slow, precise manner which he understands. When he is not stressed, though, he is actually pretty cool. I’m taking his apartment when he leaves at the end of the month when he is going back to France.

The person who I fear the most is Ahmed, the Egyptian. At 6 foot five, a massive build, and a booming voice to match, he very well could have been capable of leading a cavalry charge of the Pharaoh’s finest troops had he not been born in the wrong millennium and in charge of transportation at a cultural foundation. He does have the most difficult job however, because there are a ton of people who have been coming and going this week. Everyday there are four packs of cigarettes lined up on the shelf near his desk, and I swear that he smokes every one of them. Every time I go into his office to ask for a chauffeur to pick up someone from the airport, he screams at me, “Adriano, qu’est-ce que tu fais ici?” (Adrian, what are you doing here?)

How I fit into the organisation itself sometimes can be summed up in a simple anecdote. The other day I was at the foundation, and I was wondering where my other colleagues had gone, so I asked the secretary to call Ismael (another person I work with) for me. When Ismael asked who was asking for him, she responded that it was l’étranger. Roughly translated it means “the foreigner” but it can also mean the stranger or the outsider. It’s a feeling I can’t seem to shake.

So let me recap from last week. Monday was my 8th day of work in a row. Last week wrapped up all the preparation for the colloquium, which began on Saturday. I was preparing dossiers, name cards, and information for the people who came here until about Friday, when most of those people arrived.

Saturday, I started work at the desk of the colloquium in the Dar Batha museum, fielding questions in both French and English about what the colloquium was doing that day. Most of my answers can be summed up in a few lines,

“No, the museum is closed for the colloquium.”
“The bathroom is over there.”
“I don’t speak Arabic.”
“Tickets are about 25 euros”.
“I am more than happy to speak English with you.”
“No, I haven’t slept in days.”
“No, I haven’t anything in days.”

Sunday was the worst. I lost my camera in the morning in the medina when I was looking for breakfast, and the incident with the secretary happened. Then this stupid American guy, who was wearing a big dumb hat, safari shirt, and looked every bit like the stereotypical ugly American, came in and started screaming at me when he learned that the Dar Batha museum was closed. It had something to do with the fact that his being a university professor in the states entitled him to visit any museum in the world free of charge, regardless of what was going on there. A few excerpts from that conversation:

“Listen, sir, I’m really sorry that museum is closed this week. There’s a really interesting colloquium going on, and there are really good concerts happening in the afternoons.”

“I’m not interested in concerts! I’m only here for one day! I want to see the museum.”

“Um…I don’t really know what to say…”

“Well, this is just highly insensitive! And I’ll be honest with you, I’ve found the whole country of Morocco to be highly insensitive!”

The guards, who also manned the desk with me, and also only speak Arabic and French, wanted to know what he was so angry about. I told them, and they asked me if I thought he was racist. I said probably so. I really hope he goes back to the small hole he came from and stays there.

Other than that, here are some amazing things I’ve done.

On, Friday night I went to a concert attended by the queen of Jordon, the queen of Morocco, the king of Morocco’s favourite sister, and Madame Chirac. In my personal opinion, I think the queen of Morocco looked the best of them all. Not only incredibly beautiful, but incredibly well put together, which I’m sure she has an entire team of people for. Wow…

I edited the speech in English that introduced everybody famous, but unfortunately the person who read it accidentally introduced Madam Chirac as Madam Mitterrand, a different French politician. I assure you it had nothing to do with me. I still have the original speech, to prove it, which I’ll try to put down later. Later, I watched the king’s guards, who wore white uniforms satin uniforms and carried long sceptres, salute Madam Chirac on a red carpet as she got into her car.

Saturday afternoon, I went to a concert with the queen of Jordon again, as well as Bono and the Edge of U2. I kid you not. I met an American journalist who managed to take a picture of them, who I will email when I get back to the states to see if I can get it from her. I also received inside information later that they are here in Fez recording a new album.

In other news, I bought a new camera yesterday, so there will be pictures eventually. I’m writing postcards, which will come.

I also bought shaving soap in the medina the other day that had a camel on it, and it made me smile. Conn people will understand.

Its hard living here, but I’m trying to take life one day at a time.