Friends,

The good news about the Moroccan internet cafe that is just two blocks from the center where I have class: it's pretty much dirt cheap: a 3 month membership is 100 dirham (about $10), and cyberizing (or so our assistant director Mukhtar calls it) is only 10d per hour thereafter. The bad news: pages load heartbreakingly slowly. I'm going insane here! Plus all the keyboards are French, which makes it extremely difficult to type. A and Q are switched, M and ;, W and Z, you have to use shift for numbers, and ALL the punctuation is totally different. So bear with me. I've set up a system, now, where I'm writing this in Word while I wait for things to load. I just hope all this is readable--let me know if it isn't.

Phew! Well, to start at the beginning, I met up with all but one of the rest of the group at Kennedy airport on Saturday, and we commenced bonding exercises. What a bunch. I think every one of us is very interesting and just a little bit weird. At first I was quite excited about the group dynamic, but now that the dust is settling, I'm starting to worry about in which people the weird might predominate. It will be interesting to see how the 12 of us feel about each other after spending 3 months together. It feels, already, like I've been here forever. Morocco is truly a multilingual society, with darija (Moroccan Arabic), standard Arabic, French, 3 Berber dialects all important to daily life. The first challenge was communicating with stewardesses on the plane. I never knew what language to speak, and neither did they! But my real introduction to Moroccan culture was customs. Apparently they just instated a new law a few weeks ago and now they don't have to check everyone's bags. This resulted in an enormous crowd of people, with even more enormous piles of luggage, trying to squeeze through a tiny doorway. There was not even a semblance of a line, and you just had to fight your way through (at least one fight did literally break out). It was absolutely exhilarating, and the adrenaline rush took me right out of my jet-lagged haze. We drove from Casablanca to Rabat across green green fields scored by lines of red soil, and arrived triumphantly at the Hotel Splendide, which is rated E on a scale of A-F in the insight guide, but which we think could not be more aptly named. We'll be staying here until we move in with our families on Saturday.

Friends,

I've just gotten over a nasty cold that totally wiped me out over the weekend. It's the season here and all Moroccans seem to be sick. It makes Arabic class that much more surreal. It's an incredible language, and I love learning it, but doing it for three hours, four mornings a week, my energy is spread a little thin (torture ! !). Classical is so much easier than Darija, though, which really does sound to me like a lot of consonants and gutteral noises strung together. I listen to my little brother talking and throw up my hands in despair half of these sounds I will NEVER be able to make. But in a way it's more interesting. In any case, I've obtained a small wooden camel named Wadi who only only speaks Arabic, and we muddle through things together. Yesterday, he got all gussied up to reinact a scene from The Sheltering Sky, complete with a paper Debra Winger doll. My teacher, Mohammed, is very tolerant, and he actually reminds me to get Wadi out when I forget (jemel jamil=pretty camel). I've been loving other classes though. We had an absolutely fascinating conversation about garbage the other day. And even though it sounds like a taxing amount of school , it really isn't, as expected. And in a way, all of us look forward to doing our homework, because Moroccan families don't seem to do anything besides watch television (I like to look at this as a different conception of leisure).

These weeks have been one of those periods when time stretches to create an unbreachable gulf between things and what came only a short time before. Generally, we imagine culture shock to be frustration with unfamiliar things like not being able to take a shower or find toilet paper or figure out how to catch the bus since it stops in a different spot every day. It's not at all like this. Culture shock happens at the point when you stop taking in all the new information around you with your usual ways of perception, when you realize that there is an entire society around you that you don't understand at all, so that, when you produce even the littlest word or gesture, the things you'd normally take for granted, you have no idea what it will mean to the people around you, and nobody really cares how things are done where you live. It puts you outside of yourself, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy. It' s totally different from being a tourist, where you don't have to change yourself much at all. This hit me about the time I wrote the last email, after the first Arabic lesson when I realized that everyone in this country speaks a language that I don't, and then we talked about manners in the afternoon, and lasted until the intensity of my first day with my family started fading a little bit. Three months still feels like a long time to be a foreigner, but I'm getting used to it. Abdelhay's good advice on how not to make a faux pas is " don't do anything until you see somebody else do it first, " and I've been taking that pretty literally, still.

Salem ou'alekoum,

Peace upon you, and greetings from phase 2. As those at Swarthmore prepare for Spring break, which blows my mind, I have definitely finished with the beginning. After much soul-searching and pyrogenics, I licked my depression, and I just passed an absolutely uneventful and FAST week-the first one. I'm still sad, but sadness is really an OK emotion, and I'm fully enjoying being here. I went, last night, to hear the Andalusian group at the conservatory rehearse, and I even got to play with them a little. The professor is the nicest man ever, and I'm hoping to have some lessons when I get back from our next trip. I had tea with their singer today-she's going to France in April to cut a CD with a French early music group, and she says she wants to be my fourth sister. Tonight I'm giong to see a Moroccan film with some friends, and Monday I'm having lunch with one of our lecturers, who's here as a literacy activist and who was just so cool Lauren and I had to talk to her more. So things are looking up, and it no longer feels like forever until May.

I've been starting to think seriously about what I want to do for my independent study project. Fundamentally English major that I am, what really fascinates me is the post-colonial way that modern, Western things are combined with traditional, indiginous things in ways I find totally mind-blowing. Or, more generally, what the " developing " part of " developing country " means on the level of everyday culture. I was trying to think of good examples, and the best I came up with was sidewalks. Sidewalks here are so much more beautiful than in the states. They're always done with some sort of patterned tiled concrete, not just slabs, and sometimes they're even painted. But they're just not standardized. As you're walking along, they'll abrubtly change slant up or down or just drop off, to accomodate driveways or just different levels of buildings. And then sometimes they'll just end, they'll be ripped up all of a sudden and you'll just have gravel or dirt. It's like this all over the city. Then there's this thing where when you go to a restaurant, they don't have half the things that are on the menu. Mostly it's not even worth it to look at a menu at all, and you just ask them what they have. They seem to think this is normal, but it annoys the Americans. Jesse said one time she wanted to fax something, and she went into this computer place that said FAX on the sign, and when she went in they told her they didn't have a fax machine.

Friends,

I'm pretty much at my limits here. It's nice to know that even developed Morocco can push me there. I call this culture exhaustion, although I think it has a lot to do with me and not a lot to do with culture. What worries me about the exhaustion, though, is that in the beginning I felt like I had a lot of energy to pull myself out of depressions, but I don't know where to find that now, since I'm already operating at the frayed ends of my resources. I've been avoiding my journal, which is bad news. When I'm really tired, though, I just skip Arabic and take a morning to myself, which is what I'm doing at this very moment, and it makes me feel much better. I'm definitely not homesick, anyway-it's too clear that these feelings would follow me anywhere, and I'm very comfortable with the routine and simplicity that exists in my life here at this point. And I still feel gleeful that I'm still eminently functional-I feel really strong. That's the difference between this and therapy : I can be hurting on my own terms. This is a really important experience. My mom was just here reading all about this in Culture Shock : Morocco which is actually a remarkably good book. What is this all about anyway ? I think that it's really easy to project my feelings of lonliness and insecurity onto Morocco, and even when I take them back onto myself they still don't leave me a lot of energy for interaction with this place. I'd developed this huge guilt complex about my family and Moroccan friends, and I was always frantic that I wasn't living up to their expectations, that I was hurting their feelings, that I wasn't spending enough time with them. And then other obligations like papers and 6 hours of school a day were upsetting me too. This is all about my terror of being rejected, which I guess I really can't afford right now. But I think I'm over the whole guilt thing. There are definitely things about this culture which make all this more difficult, though.

Today's topic in the Moroccan cultural studies series : what happens to culture when you subtract American (or Western) individualism. I feel like, first of all, Moroccans have no conception of what my life means to me. Moroccan kids go to school, and then they come home, and then they sit. They are a group-oriented people, who don't have much sense of an individual subjectivity that must be sustained, they don't think of anything in terms of personal space. I don't feel like my family could understand that school is only a tiny part of what I see as important in my life, that I have errands and sightseeing and intellectual work and creative writing and a journal and letters and reading-etc. So I feel very bound to coming home by 8 if I have class until 6, to not missing lunch with them more than one day a week, because I care about them, but mostly because they adore me and I don't want them to feel like I don't want to spend time with them. Homestays are exhausting. Outside the family, friendships are even more exasperating.

Friends,

So, I've really slowed down on the group emails here--sorry about that (notice they are also getting longer and longer). I realized that when I was cataloguing them to turn into Abdelhay (more on my slackerness later). I think that's indicative of the rhythms of this experience, anyway. If you're curious, here's the list so far:

Hello all.

Just one final missive for you before I return to civilization in about 36 hours. It’s hard to believe that this 3 1/2 months, which seemed so infinite at the beginning, is now drawing to a close. But not hard to believe, because the world around me has shifted so definitively. I won’t really know what impact this experience has had on my life until much later, but I think at least that the provinces of my knowledge and the space I’m living in have changed, as they do, I’m sure, with every three months of my life. Only these were a little more clearly demarcated. I am worried that when I get back I will only be able to talk about Morocco, that a zillion details of life that are far away from me here will assail me, that I will say “h’shuma,” “shukran,” and “shweeya” to people by accident. But I’m very glad to be heading back to the place that I’ve discovered is really the country for me.

Waxing cheesy, there, a little. It’s hard to know what to say about ISP. It was really three beautiful, quiet weeks, more about codependency than independence (I spent only 2 days alone, in Rabat). It didn’t really bring any overwhelming new insights about Morocco, which I feel like I know pretty well by this point. The most prominent problem was the ever-present harassment, which never bothered me (and several others) much until recently. I have really come to think that, culture and tradition be damned, it is just completely disgusting. And scary, when you’re out walking alone, and you know there’s really no way to get some guy to go away--I would not travel alone here (one bus ride back from Chaouen was enough). But I don’t really have a lot more energy to vent about this. My main activities of ISP time were sitting in my little cheap room, procrastinating and writing, and then going out to eat long leisurely dinners with my friends. One thing I think is interesting is that I’ve always thought I would like to live in a city. But until now, I’ve never really done it. This time was proof for myself that being in the middle of things really makes me happy. Because I was happy, this whole time, even if I actually did very little except hang out. I’ve stayed in Rabat since the last email except for one final fling, a 24 hour trip down to Marrakesh with friends (it was HOT). I did end up with a collection of four stories, which I’m moderately happy with, and which I should be organizing soon into emailable form. So let me know if you want them.

I feel very vindicated that I will, to the best of my knowledge, be coming home in an eminently stable psychological state, despite all the fireworks. I really think homestay was the problem. I went back to see my family for lunch yesterday, and it totally upset me--interesting. I have become quite attached to people, especially Jessie and Christine (my codependents), and I’m sad to leave them. But Christine is at Swat and Jessie is constantly dragging her Senator’s daughter ass all over the world, so I’m sure I’ll be seeing her around. She’s off to London a day early.

And I’m not sure if I have much more to say about all this. I can hear the call to prayer out the window right now--beautiful. I have decided to keep growing my hair for a while and start shaving my armpits. I will be home Sunday afternoon, and reachable by phone at [censored], and I don’t have enough money (especially after Morocco!) to call all my friends, so you should call me. I hope all is well, and I’m looking forward to finding all my people again.

thanks for reading,

Julie