Song…

Spanish Moss

So, I haven’t been able to play guitar for months and months because of tendonitis. Recently my hand and wrist have been feeling touchy but not really painful. Guitar has been my peace of mind for so long that I’ve been going crazy without having that constant outlet for creativity. Here’s a song that I wrote in Morocco and have wanted to record just in case I won’t be able to play for another really long time. Here are the lyrics:

I wish was a gambling man down in New Orleans

on a riverboat in 1865

I’d sneak up to your cabin every night and we’d make love

to the sounds of the Mississippi night

I’d deck you out in silk dresses and ribbons for your curls

and we’d promenade by Spanish moss lined trees

And I’d swear to you that I would never talk to other girls

if you promised that you’d be true to me

I wish I was a jewel thief

I’d steal from kings and lords and lay treasures at your feet

and watch your necklace sparkle as you breathe

and when they finally came for me ya you would tell them lies

your ruby cheeks aglow with thoughts of me

and we’d sail off under diamond skies ya go just where we please

leave a trail of gold dust on the sea

The river is wide so wide and the ocean is raging and wild

but Oh, ya it’s good to be alive and I guess that it don’t

to be in love

I wish I was a Pharaoh 4,000 years ago

I’d surely make you queen of all the land

As goddess they would worship you

but none as much as me you know

I’d lay you down in soft white Nile sand

I wish I was a gambling man down in New Orleans

but I’m just a working boy who has dreams…

Spanish Moss

…measure with your heart

One thing that has been a long standing tradition in the Stewart family is that everyone helps out in the kitchen. We all love to cook and bake. The kitchen is definitely not reserved for my mom and sisters.

While it’s possible to find men working alongside women in the kitchen here in Morocco, it is not as usual in rural places. When my host sister asked me if I would teach her how to make pizza, I was excited. I have done a few cooking classes at the local women’s association and I’ve found the experience to be exciting and sometimes a little stressful! Imagine, if you will, being surrounded by a gaggle of Berber women who are  watching you measure out flour very carefully and concurrently teasing you mercilessly about not being married: “But Fatima, I’m still so young — dang it, I completely forgot the salt…”

I have never made pizza, but just as all Americans are assumed to be brilliant basketball players, they are also expected to know how to make a delicious pizza! I looked up an easy looking recipe online and set a date to come over to my host family’s house.

Miriam, my host sister, was amused by my American measuring cups. I told her that in America we use them all the time for cooking. Here in Morocco, cooking is a lot more of an intuitive process. Add flour until you feel that the consistency is right. Freestyle the spices. Measure with your heart. In America we pack the measuring cup to the brim and use a knife to level off the overflowing ingredients so that we are positive that we are using exactly 8oz. of whatever we are measuring. I was too nervous on my first pizza attempt to eyeball the yeast and so I put up with getting made fun of for being so serious about my scientific measurments. As we traded cooking styles and tips the pizza came together. As the dough rose, I told Miriam how important garlic was to the pizza sauce. 3ziz 3leihum f Italia! (It’s very cherished by them in Italy!)

When the time came to roll out the dough, Miriam took over. She patiently watched as I struggled to shape the dough into somewhat of a pizza shape before it got stuck and tore. After sitting through two of my performances, she gently motioned me aside, expertly rolled out the sticky dough and put it into the round iron pan. We added our sauce and some black olives, and it looked good enough to eat!

 

I didn't want to put pictures with Miriam's face showing because people are sensitive about being on the internet. So you get me, not quite as easy on the eyes...

It was hard waiting for the pizza to cook, but as it did Miriam and I talked and joked. I kept opening the oven to make sure that all of our hard work didn’t end up a crispy disaster. Slowly, much too slowly, a delicious scent began to waft around the little mud hut where we were cooking. Miriam kept telling me not to open the oven door because I was letting the heat out. I knew this to be true, but couldn’t help myself. When the pizza came out it was perfect. We took it inside and showed my host mother who, drying her hands on a towel, said it was pretty zween (beautiful). Damn straight. The only pizza I make is a Zween pizza.

Before we ate, I ran out and bought some coke. “You can’t eat pizza without coke”, I told them.

So I got to share my enjoyment of cooking and eating pizza with my host family. The women, anyways. My host brother watched tv the whole time 🙂

Summer Again

I am anticipating everything whithering and dying in the mammoth ravaging heat. There are volunteers who say they like the heat. Scary stuff.

The last week or so has been incredibly tiring for a lot of reasons–not the least of which being the onset of the warm weather. Rewind a week. Last Sunday found me anxiously looking out my back door and pondering the corn kernel-sized hailstones bouncing around my back yard. Why now? I hadn’t seen rain for months, and the cold was an unsettling development.

Two Sundays before the hailstorm I was looking over a moonlit graveyard from high atop a hill in the mid-sized Middle Atlas town of Midelt. I had a small bag of Sweet Basil seeds poking out of my front pocket. Jeff, the volunteer in Midelt, was opposite me, picking on his classical guitar tuned up like a banjo and rolling his fingers up and down the strings as we sang out at the graves. I was passing through town and a jam session was necessary. It was a good night of music and mint tea. I left with the gift of a tiny handful of seeds.

I planted those seeds  when I got home thinking that there was no way that the weather would turn cold again. May in the Sahara don’t you know…

So, when the sky cracked open, it was with annoyance that I felt the otherwise refreshing blasts of air on my face and otherwise beautifully cool raindrops on my feet. I thought, “Why, God? Why now?”  The answer was obvious–I had decided to plant my Basil.

I covered the little blue plastic pail with the lid of an old tagine. When the storm passed I opened it up and was discouraged to see the sogginess inside. Must have been rough for those seeds. I was sad and then went inside.

Imagine my surprise when I walked out a few mornings ago and saw a tiny little forest of cotyledons greeting the world from their little blue bathroom pail 🙂 I was very happy. Basil seedlings have a lot of personality as you will see, and I like their looks.

Basil is a charming and versatile plant. I first fell in love with a basil plant in Cairo and subsequently let it die for lack of attention. But while it lived, I grew to really appreciate it’s scent and clusters of tiny white flowers. When I came to Morocco, our acquaintance was renewed when I discovered that it is used as a tea herb in the North of the country. They don’t use it like that in the south, but I sure plan to! I hope I’ll have plenty of basil for my tea and would really love to make some pesto in the fall!

Quarreling lovers

The Loner

Mountain Folk

The three kings

Crepes

My intention was not to bastardize the crepe.

I did end up using a filling that crepe purists might cringe at a little. But that is neither here nor there.

This post is dedicated to Fred, who introduced me to the world of crepes and to Allison, who lived in that world for quite some time and would now like the crepe to be part of her new one.

I chose the Beatles’s Abby Road album as my accompaniment for the culinary excursion. Very key. It gave the crepes a euphoric taste.

 

enjoy.

 

 

Halloween

Time for another On The Spot in Tinejdad.

In this installment it is important that some vocabulary is pre-taught to the listeners.  Actually only one word. This word is “Ponj”. It is not pronounced “Poonj”. A ponj is a sort of Moroccan couch or mattress. They can be very thick and hefty, weighing forty or fifty pounds or could be a light, simple, foam mattress.

I took the liberty of taking a picture with one of the light ponjes.

So, now that we’re clear on what a ponj is and how to pronounce the word…

Some other things discussed:

Would Tim like to spend a night in a cave with me?

What Tim is planning for his Halloween costume. (Please don’t steal his idea!)

And why this may be the LAST On The Spot, ever.

On the Spot in Tinejdad.

So, I decided it was time for another interview. Here it is. Totally spontaneous. Uncut. Awkward. Hopefully uplifting and informative. I wanted it to have a name, because I was thinking of doing a series of these interviews. I called it “On the Spot.”

Some of the topics covered.

Does using toilet paper make you an elitist?

How I feel about Anna. (I was really put on the spot!)

Does Tim use his right or his left hand to wipe?

I like to think that in life, we are constantly learning from our experiences. In this instance, I learned that probably, when conducting an interview, it is better to be prepared than spontaneous.

Enjoy.

Summertime

Until yesterday, I had not slept in the same bed for ten nights running. Two days ago I had two dollars to my name. I found myself getting onto a bus carrying a dirty foam mattress. Locals kept their distance. I was obviously one of those tourists who came without an exit plan. Naw, I’m just a Peace Corps volunteer.

The Summer was something that I was dreading. The searing 120 degree temperatures, Ramadan, nothing to do but sweat and think of the Biblical story of Job. I had heard that one of the best strategies for us desert folk ,was to basically, through a combination of Peace Corps-related work and careful vacationing, stay as far from the desert as possible.

For the first half of July I worked at a English language immersion camp for Moroccan teens. The camps are mandatory for all Youth Development sector volunteers–many opt to do two if they can. Two weeks of teaching, supervising, staying up late, waking up early and bad camp food can certainly take its toll. Not sure if I could subject myself to four. I spent at least one very memorable night in the tiny bathroom courtesy of some sort of cold meat dish. There were 17 volunteers and one tiny bathroom. We were crammed into two rooms and nature’s law took hold. Whatever the hell that means.

Camp was wonderful, though and I must say that Session 1 (there were four total) from the sounds of it, was the most badass and fun. We had a good-humored hard-working crew and there was much laughter and embarrassment until finally nothing was embarrassing anymore, only funny.

Haloween. Some kids cried....

The kids were split into country clubs. The countries were all countries in which English is the most widely-spoken language. I was team Captain of Australia club. We drew kangaroos, made boomarangs and banged out a rousing version of Waltzing Mathilda for the camp talent show. We also had a raucous cheer which we would strategically unleash while everyone was pretty much minding their own business at meal time: “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oooooooooooh, Australia is the best!!!!”

Aussie Aussie Aussie! Boys build model of Sydney Opera House...

So, that was fun. The camp was in El-jadida, a coastal city and so there was some beach time. One of the reasons that Session one was so great, was that the beach was still fairly clean and uncrowded. Later on it would fill up, making it hard to navigate between fully-clothed Moroccan women, the occasional speedoed Frenchman, and dirty diapers.

After camp, I headed up to Rabat for a few days to do some research and help out at the Peace Corps library. Rabat is super pleasant and hassle free. Staying in a hotel by yourself is kind of lonely though, so I was happy to be on my way back home. I met up with Anna in the beautiful Middle Atlas town of Azrou and we opted to stay in a more upscale place on top of a hill overlooking the city and valley instead  of the inn down below. We passed a romantic day of being sick together. She had the nausea and I the gas pains.

It was the middle of July and I found myself home for a week. A few Small Business Development volunteers were working at a craft fair in the center of Tinejdad. They were staying at Dan, my sitemate’s house. I ended up staying there the whole time as well. One of the reasons is that Dan has a great roof.

Another reason is that I found a large black scorpion in my baking house as soon as I got home. They say the little ones are more poisonous. I identified the thing online. “Androctonus crassicauda is wide-spread throughout the Middle East and its name means “fat-tailed man-killer”. I was afraid. I wanted to be sure though. I showed it to my neighbor and asked what would happen if it stung me in the middle of the night. He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully and said, in Arabic of course, “That is difficult, that is difficult.” What he meant was that I would probably have trouble finding antidote or a ride to the hospital that in the next town.  According to my tradition of naming nasty animals “Nigel”, I named the large black scorpion “Nigel” and then promptly killed it. Then I took my still unpacked backpack and rode my bike to Dan’s house.

ugh

We spent our time lying on the floor in various states of undress and heatstroke and took turns soaking ourselves with water from Dan’s shower. Too bad that even the cold water was hot…  At night, we would lie on the roof, admire the stars and pray for tiny breezes. In the morning we would wake up to blinding heat and pools of sweat. Again, it was a lot more pleasant with other people around.

Then came the End of July. I headed up north again to work in an orphanage called the S.O.S village. There are a handful of these S.O.S villages in major cities in Morocco. The orphanage was a little south of Casablanca and like the camp in El-Jadida, fairly close to the ocean. The orphans had been away at various camps for the summer and it turns out that they would be four days late. It takes me two days to travel from Tinejdad to Casablanca. Come to think of it, it takes me two days to travel anywhere that is near the ocean. Anyhow, Mari and I (Mari was to work the S.O.S village with me) contacted our Programming Staff and they said that we could hang out for a few days up north before all the orphans got back.  It would have not made much sense to travel back to Tinejdad and then literally turn right around and some back to the Casa area. So, Mari and I headed back towards El-Jadida. There was another group of volunteers working the camp that we had been at as well as a few others who were just hanging out. At first is was me Mari, Wes, and Jason. Some others passed through town later. Anna was working El-Jadida camp session 3  and had no idea that I was in town. I surprised her and got to see her for a little each day when she was free. That was a treat.

One day, while I was at a remote part of the beach a teenager came up to me threatened me with a large kitchen knife and told me to give him money. I talked my way out until he buried the knife in the sand and suggested that we exchange emails and go swimming. I said “sure”, and then literally ran away and told on him.

We left El-Jadida and made our way towards what would turn out to be a very pleasant time at the Orphanage. The staff was great, the kids were cute (Mari was planning to steal one I swear) and the weather nice. We taught English classes, played sports, and went to the beach. There were about 100 kids from the ages 6 to 17. The orphanage was located in a pretty compound with a grass field, art buildings, an amphitheater and bike paths. There are 11 houses on the complex, square but attractive bungalows that house 8-11 kids. In each house lives a “mother”. The mothers provide everything any good mother provides. Love, tasty food, discipline, and comfort. It really was a great place. I think the S.O.S orphanages are set up by a German or French foundation, but lots of the equipment and cool stuff that was there was donated by wealthy Moroccans.

We had our own little house and cooked/did laundry for ourselves etc… Our daily routine consisted of teaching making meals, playing with the kids, visiting the mothers, and finally eating watermelon and frozen yogurt. That is, yogurt that we froze. Since the kids came later than expected, Mari had to leave early. Anna was just finishing up her camp in El-Jadida and so she was able to take Mari’s place for the last 5 days or so. It was a bummer having to leave all those sweet kids, cool breezes and Anna, but it had to happen.

Mari enjoying one of our gourmet meals

I got back to Tinejdad a little bit ago, and have been occupying myself with a deep-cleaning of my house. No more scorpions please. Beating pillows, putting mattress out to sun, mopping, doing laundry, guitar and juice breaks. It’s hot, but not horrible like the middle July. My regular schedule won’t pick up until the middle of September when school starts again. Life is good. I got a care package from my sister, Siobhan, which was awesome. I’m feeling pretty healthy and it’s getting cooler.

peace,

Will

Sunflowers in Cairo, Roses in Tinejdad

In Cairo, a year ago, I was watching my sunflowers open up to smoggy skies. Sunflowers are a great first plant for someone to try to cultivate–mostly because they are so easy to grow and it is possible to see new growth literally every day. For impatient types, like me, this is a more than ideal situation! Sunflowers are very dramatic. Large and very bright, they get the attention that they deserve.

Here in Tinejdad, I have a modest back yard. I have a couple of small palm trees and two grape vines. The earth, though is very hard and difficult to dig in. Also, the apartment above mine was under construction, and it seems as if most of the paint that was not used to whitewash the cement walls was poured out into my garden area. So I’ve had my doubts as to how friendly the soil would be to planting. I knew that I would at some point, try to though.

A few months ago, I was in the wonderful city of Ouarzazate, celebrating the new year with some dear friends and fellow volunteers. There were Anna, Sam, and Ben and I. We would later be joined by Wes and Mari. We decided to go to the souk (open-air Market). Of course, we bought oranges and peanuts as we wandered around. We were just sort of exploring, and not really looking to buy anything. It was a beautiful day, and we could see snow on the mountains out to our west. On our way out, I saw a man selling small rose plants. They were just thorny stalks, really. I couldn’t resist. I bought one of the roses and took it home on the bus. I sat it on my lap.

Months later, after much consideration as to what color the the flower would be, my rose took me by surprise, almost. One morning, there was this bulb that I had never noticed before, and a few days later — a beautiful white rose unfolded in a lazy, lovely way.

Now, it is long gone, but while it was with me, I would carry it inside sometimes to sit next to me as I drank tea or read. This sounds silly, but after waiting so patiently and being so well rewarded, I felt like I needed to enjoy this one flower as much as possible. I loved its beginning stages, when it was just yawning open. I loved seeing when just one petal broke free from the green, paintbrush-shaped bulb. I would look at it so carefully every day, many times, and try to see it as it bloomed. I could never see it move but it kept opening and opening. It was like trying to discover the exact moment that you cross from a waking state to sleep. An event so subtle that it is not easily witnessed. The blooming of a rose.

Can’t wait till the next one surprises me. Until then….

Like the Milky Way, swirling around and around

From the Side

Sam puts the question to me: “Are Chifus necessary?”

A Chifu is a water heater. Here in Morocco, it gets surprisingly cold in the winter and one of my greatest joys has been to thaw out my feet and body in a warm shower. Even now that it is becoming warmer, it is still nice to take warmish instead of cold showers. In the summer of course all of the water will be hot no matter what. But, for about six months–what a difference a simple thing like hot water makes!

Sam Griffith, a good friend and volunteer up the road, was over for the weekend. Our five hour action plan was to check out this highway bar about 40 kilometers away. We did indeed locate said bar– it was an experience. The sausage sandwiches were good, anyways.

It’s always a pleasure to have visitors over, but we like to keep each other on our toes with lively banter about household products etc…at least that’s what I like.

I told Sam that I wanted to do an interview with him and he sort of turned the table on me by asking me the question: “Are Chifus necessary?” Was I nonplussed? No, I had given the matter much thought and luckily was prepared to account for my opinions.

Enjoy, and feel free to weigh in on the debate.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4542270/interview_with_sam_wmv/

I think I had that first one, but in the second video Sam gets a few good ones in. Also, he mentions what he has dubbed “the prostitute bar” Also, I totally misuse the word compunction.

Check it out.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4542489/sam_interview_part_2_wmv/