A View on Utopia

I want the National Guard in schools.
I want teachers armed. I want secretaries armed. I want janitors armed.
I want guidance counselors armed. I want nurses armed. I want coaches armed.
I want concealed carry laws, so that everyone can have guns
and hide them on their person.
I want the right to carry automatic weapons.

Why stop there?
Its my God-given right.

Why not equip everyone with grenades, mounted rocket launchers, and start a mortar range?
I want to be assured that if I step out of line, my neighbor will put me out of time.
My founding fathers said a nuclear weapon was an arm
The long arm of the law
And I’m trying to find a cause
So I don’t blame guns
So I don’t blame myself

Because I can’t stop it

God made guns because God made me
And I made guns and prayed they would be used for good
Because God’s good.
So all the ones I made are good
At least that’s what I believe
Because if we resemble God
Then God resembles us
With our culture of violence
Video games and sex on TV
Then God made our culture violent, too

I watched CSI and dreamed I peppered my boss with an uzi
But I don’t have an uzi
I’ve got a shotgun,
A .22, a .357 and a .358,
My dad’s 44 magnum and my cousin’s AR-15
But my guns don’t kill people
They belong to me, and there ain’t nothing gonna change that
if someone barges in to my house,
walks onto my property,
Its my right to stand in this spot, take aim, and pull the trigger

Its the culture of violence, after all,
those video games, sex on TV.
Because my guns are good guns, made in the USA
Where we have enough firepower to keep our children safe.

Asilah

In the Medina

If you’re ever in Morocco, Asilah is a must-see place.  It is a small, quiet beach town with an art problem, evidenced by the myriad murals covering the walls of the old medina.  The restaurants serve great seafood (I had a big cut of swordfish and chips) and wine.  It is difficult because the majority of the people here do not speak French and the dialect of Darija is heavily influenced by Spanish.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Paradise Beach

The first afternoon we explored the old medina.  The second day we went to a beach called “Plage Mhib” or, what the tourist books call “Paradise Beach.”  We’re the only ones there, unsurprisingly after we find the road to be almost impassable.  For those who’ve been to Jim Creek, the road was like that, except we took a Grand Taxi (aka a 1970s Mercedes coup) with front wheel drive.  Every once in a while our driver (who wasn’t that great at driving on the terrain) had to get out and put rocks in front of the tires to get over giant ruts.  


There are tons of little shops were locals put their art on display.  The best time of year to come is during the Asilah International Art Festival in August, but the murals that are painted are left up all year long.

My Favorite Mural

There is nothing better than laying out in the sand or fighting waves in the Atlantic, and the town gets that.  Its slow, with time in the afternoon for a siesta, and during the off-season, nothing is open.



I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

American in a Moroccan Village

Since I've been so bad at updating this blog, here's a journal entry I had to write for class.  It doesn't include my trip to the souk, where I ate some bad fried fish (by this I mean it was a whole fish that was fried) and got food poisoning again.  Let's just say that I feel completely comfortable using a Turkish toilet in any situation.  That, and thank God for Immodium. srsly

I step off the van into the dirt parking lot of the President of the Association’s house. The mountains are bright in the morning sunlight across the fields. Cows moo. Chickens cluck, roaming free across mounds of manure and heaped grass. The group descends down the steps off the van, and a mass of men and a few women form a line in front of us, staring. I knew we were the first Americans, and maybe even the first white people, to ever step foot in Beni Amir, but I didn’t know what that would look like. I’m intimidated. All of those faces staring, oogling, giggling. The language barrier is immediate, an abyss over which modern technology could never cross.

After a five-course meal and a couple photo-ops with the men from the Association, Lincoln and I move in with our host family. We walk down the main street in town a mere block to a quaint house directly across from the mosque. I didn’t expect much and, to be honest, the amenities they did have were more than I expected. There is one wide hallway running the length of the single-story house (if there was a second story, I never caught a glimpse of it) with a sitting room and average-sized kitchen on the left and the living room and sleeping area on the right. Though paint is chipping on the walls in the living room and the sitting room lacks couches, my family has a television (with cable) and a computer. Lincoln and I step into the “backyard” where our host father keeps his prized possessions: cows and an automatic milk machine. We return to the living room and sit down with our host father and five host brothers. Except two of them belong to someone else, and to whom they belong is never discussed. Several other small children wander in and out of the house, a testament to several essential aspects of the community: the openness, the trust, and the family.

As opposed to Rabat, where whenever I return home I ring the doorbell and reply “Karim” to “Skoon” before a member of my family unlocks the door, the door in the village isn’t locked. Unlike Rabat, where it seems shadowy eyes loom around corners, under the gaze of which I’m constantly checking my back right pocket to make sure my wallet is still there. In the village, there seems an implicit understanding of property. Private property is hardly private, and shared property is hardly public. The best example is food, which is prepared in individual homes and I would assume on individual incomes, in individual kitchens, by women. However, the flexibility of public/private borders (if these borders exist at all) means that more than just the nuclear family is free to participate in meals. Sufiane, a friend of the family, ate with us several times, as did a nephew Muhammad, and an uncle. In return, we would eat at Sufiane’s home. Of course, whether this is a daily event in the village is obviously influenced by our presence, but there were no issues raised in any of these circumstances. In Rabat, I have yet to have dinner with anyone but my nuclear host family. In my time in the village, I did not ever have a dinner with the same people.

The entire village is essentially one huge family, made shockingly clear when innumerable men introduce themselves to me and call my host father their uncle. This is, unfortunately, a fragile relationship. With the increase of migration, the formal familial structures are increasingly undermined, especially the perception of property. Land, which formerly (and to some extent still does) separated the rich from the poor, is expendable so long as sons and daughters find the greener grasses of Europe. Remittances are spent mainly on luxury items, creating new demands and desires. This is, after all a two sided coin: on the one hand, remittances make household items like washing machines more affordable; on the other, it is increasing disputes between families over outward demonstrations of wealth. As a result, migration has the net effect of increasing levels of distrust among members of the community. The old walls that reinforced the levy are failing under the forces of globalization.

The forces of globalization are changing the gender dynamic of the community as well. With the establishment of the Association and a new governmental emphasis on human development as well as the prominence of male community members abroad, emerging is a class of educated women, whether that education is in technical skills such as sewing or formalized institutions. In effect, while men go abroad, women go to school. In my family, two of the three boys no longer attend school, including the youngest of eleven or twelve. To wit, my oldest host brother, Ayoub, recently completed his associate’s degree as an electrician, and has wired several homes, including our own. My host sister attends a boarding school in the north, returning on weekends. This is not to say that all women get this chance, and it is highly dependent on family interests (one of which I would be hesitant to say is a lack of perceived importance of education as saying so would provide a simple and overly-generalized answer to a difficult economic and cultural question). In our interview session with women from the village, for example, one woman was removed from school when one of her sisters was abused by a teacher. In a swift and probably heavy-handed response, her grandfather pulled all the women in his family out of school. Only since his death has she been able to take sewing classes at the Association.

While the women on our program spend almost their entire trip inside homes, being henna’ed and talking with older women from the village, Lincoln and I rarely spend time inside. We get daily invites to participate in soccer matches, walk into the fields to look at the stars at night, go to a, for lack of a better term, café to watch soccer, and spend time under olive trees writing and reading. We go over to the homes of friends of our family to visit others on the program who do not ever seem to leave the small interiors.

On last night of our visit, I do not want to leave. Lincoln and I go to Sufiane’s for an impromptu dance party while his mother looks on. Our host brother and Sufiane’s little brother—classmates in school—are with us, trying to teach us traditional dance. We play with a makeshift headscarf, laughing. In the homes, tea and laughter is always flowing, passing out through the windows and mixing in the night air under the brilliant Milky Way. Life is slow, time is untimely. People live on. Some challenge the norms, some breathe them. When we arrive home after spending our last meaningful hours with Sufiane and our host brothers and cousins, I fight off sleep to stay awake and read. Who needs to sleep when there is so much to experience, so much life to enjoy and understand? Why worry about waking up early in the cold, dewy morning when you can be in this brave, thriving world?

My American Constitution

We get back from on the train from Marrakech and I’m starving.  A group of us had spoken about grabbing some street grub on the way back to our homestays.  I go with him and 5 others to his sandwich guy on Mo5.  He’s not my sandwich guy for a reason.  He fries me up some meat with onions in it then tosses in a couple eggs.  I eat that as fast as possible and go home and have a huge dinner with the fam.  I don’t sleep very well and it feels like I’m having hot flashes although I don’t really know what it was.  Also some weird dreams where everyone looks like they did in high school.  When I wake up my stomach is miserable, I have a raging headache, and the part of my lower back where kidneys are found is throbbing.  Well this sucks. 

I go to Arabic at 8:30 getting no more than 4 hours of sleep feeling like what Mick Jagger had to have felt when he decided to get that blood transfusion in Canada. I make it through half of Arabic and I tell my teacher I have to go home.  I get back, and while waiting for mama haja to open the door, scare the hell out of my host brother who is returning home because the entrance way is something out of a Jack the Ripper movie.  Upstairs I go where I wrap myself up in a fat blanket, drink some crazy spice-juice concoction mama haja makes for me, and pass out for 7 hours.  I wake up intermittently to run to the bathroom after which I feel a pang of guilt/gastrointestinal problems and say sorry to the toilet. 

For the next few days I’m on a strict diet of vegetables and rice made with a little milk, cream cheese, and salt.  Last night my host sister told me, “For the next few days, you should only eat things that are white,” about which I screamed inside, “There is no white food here!”  I’m permitted yogurt and unsweetened mint tea, although today I snuck in potatoes, beans, and chicken at lunch.

This trip has been rough on my butt. :(

Kevin Moves In

So after three days of Orientation, my program has us all take one day of what they’re calling “survival Darija” and has us move in with families.  Even for those who came with prior Arabic experience don’t/can’t understand the majority of the words spoken in the Rabati streets.  So, for someone with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the language (I chuckle every time someone says “inshallah”), this should be easy.  

My host brother Youssef picks me up from the center, and I’m surprised and relieved when he introduces himself to me in English, which he speaks fluently.  We switch between French and English on the way to his home, an apartment with five other family members just off Mohammad 5 Avenue near the eastern entrance to the Medina.  The medina is laid out as I would imagine any twelfth century city is, devoid of any logic at all.  We take a left, the street wraps around to the right, where we turn down a street barely wide enough for a motorcycle (of which there are far too many found in streets like these).  Another left and right and I start to think we’re going in a giant circle and it’s just a cruel joke the Rabatis are playing on me.  Eventually, we arrive near the Restaurant de la Liberation, one of the few landmarks with which I’m familiar in the medina.  A couple more turns and we arrive at what will be my home for the better part of the next three months.

We walk upstairs to the front door of the apartment.  The first level is very small and closed, with a bathroom and two smaller rooms, those of my host sisters and host parents.  Youssef gives me a pair of sandals with which to walk around the house.  As I have come to know, every house in Morocco is covered ceiling to floor in tile, with the occasional white wall section.  I have since found out that this makes for a very beautiful mainroom, but in houses that lack central heating, also makes them incredibly cold, and I have been sleeping in two sweaters, under two large blankets, in my ski jacket, with pants, and wool socks.  One night it was even so cold I wore my hat. 

The room at the top of the stairs is laid out in a very stereotypical Moroccan fashion with low couches with pillows for backs.  This room, seldom used, is drenched in aqua and white, and the walls are covered in red-and-brown tiles.  The rest of the upstairs is divided into three other rooms, the kitchen, the guest room, and the family room.  I’ve been sleeping in the guest room, which is as visually stunning as it is oppressive.  The bright screaming-monkey red of the couches reflects off the beautiful chandelier overhead.  It is obviously reserved for guests and special occasions, as there is a table in the center perpetually set with dozens of napkins arranged in a circle.  Downstairs in the bathroom there is a Turkish toilet set up to the right of the shower.  Thankfully, there is a Western toilet upstairs, so I won’t have to be pooping in a hole all semester!

The main family room is set up similarly, except couches line the walls and in one corner is the 7^th member of the family, the television.  It is always on and it doesn’t matter what is on.  For example, as I write this, we have just finished dinner and we’re watching the most annoying sing-song children’s cartoon, with little 3D cylindrical creatures that have mouths that move like those of Canadians in South Park.  They also watch TV in a very interesting manner.  Rather than watching a movie or a program all the way through, they change the channel every two or three minutes, and every time a commercial comes on.  Only they never switch back.  I can’t get emotionally involved in a show, because I will never know what will happen in the end.  C’est la vie.

My first night here, on the way to a café to watch an African Cup match, my host brother Youssef takes me to a mall, where he has to buy casing for a phone.  During the time in the underground shopping center, the call to prayer rings overhead.  Youssef looks at me and brings me to a spot in a corner, tells me to stay there and wait for him while he goes into a nearby mosque to pray.  I’m standing there, the only white guy for miles around, as Moroccan men and women pass by staring at me.  Then, just as I’m feeling most uncomfortable, a man walks by me carrying with no hands a giant cookie sheet of freshly baked pastries on top of his Patagonia-flat head.  Right when the guy approaches me to buy sweets, Youssef returns from the mosque to tell him “la la la” (no, no, no).  As we leave, flat head accosts me for not speaking Arabic.  Thanks bro, I’m working on it.

For those that don’t know, Moroccan Darija is a combination language.  As Zahira put it, its 50% Arabic, 25% French, 10% Spanish, and the rest is an enigma.  When I’m at their house, my host family enjoys making fun of my inability to say the myriad h’s and k’s that exist in Arabic.  There are at least three h sounds in the alphabet and in order to say all of them you have to use different parts of your mouth and/or throat.  Baba hajj has made it a habit of making walking motions with his fingers and saying “baby steps” then laughing at me when I can’t say something.  Last night my host brother was trying to tell me how to say a word and he kept pointing at his Adam’s apple while he made a choking h noise.  They are very helpful, however, and all of my host siblings speak fluent French and three of the four speak fluent English.  Zahira, my host sister, confidently reassured me that students who have stayed with them in the past (I’m their twelfth) always get high marks in Arabic, so at least I have that going for me.

All said and done, Rabat is a beautiful city full of wonderful people who would give you the shirt off their back.  Its poor, but as always, there is more to wealth than being wealthy; a fact the by which the people live and lovingly embrace.

Taking Flight, Amsterdam, and Moroccan Doctors

NOTE: THIS POST INVOLVES IN-DEPTH DEPICTIONS OF UNFORTUNATE BODILY FUNCTIONS

First, I have to be completely honest.  Last Thursday, a mere 15 hours before I am scheduled to leave, I have to go to my physician's office in Palmer because my first ever hemorrhoid flared up.  If you've stopped reading, I don't really blame you, but in the case that I didn't turn you off completely, here we go.

In Transit:
I left Anchorage early on Friday morning without getting any sleep because I was so butt-hurt.  Then my wonderful mother dropped me off at the airport and I flew to Seattle, finally being able to fall asleep.  In Seattle I get an order of chicken fingers and fries, which I can't finish and I feel like puking.  I board the flight to Amsterdam with thirteen hours ahead of me.  At least I can make snarky comments about dumb American travelers like this girl sitting in front of me who takes no less than 6 minutes putting her crap away, taking it out again, putting it back up, and taking off her shoes IN THE AISLE THE WHOLE TIME.

Luckily, there is a cool Indian dude sitting next to me from Seattle by way of Chicago.  After making small talk for about half an hour with him, I plug in headphones and start to watch movies.  How people flew internationally before in-headrest video screens, I just don't know.

The movies went like this:

Moneyball: Good!

Bad Teacher: Surprising.

Colombiana: Fell asleep...

The downside is that there's this awful child behind me who cries the entire time.  Just when I'm about to fall into plane-coma, she starts up again.  Ten hours of crying!!!! What child does that?  Who takes their child to Amsterdam?  Between trips to coffeeshops and the red light district, where does time for a child and the Anne Frank Haus fit in?

Going Dutch

Once I got to Amsterdam I learned that I had a seven-hour layover.  There is no way I'm staying in Schipol for seven hours.  Luckily, Amdam has cool storage lockers where you can keep your stuff before exiting security.  Soon thereafter, I find myself in front of the train ticket kiosk, with no clue how to use it.  I put my credit card in what I think is the credit card slot.  Then the kiosk resets.  Then I try again and hit a wrong button, and it resets.  By this time, Amsterdonians are queuing in the other line behind me.  Stupid American, I can hear them all say.

I ask the girl behind me if she knows how to use it, but she's just as hopeless as I am.  I try once again to get the credit card to work, this time with her help, but we take too much time and the kiosk resets.  Long story short, Monica and I (that's her name) exit through customs and find a place to purchase tickets from humans, even though we both have credit cards that lack a required chip to buy a ticket.  Finally after finding an ATM we're able to buy a roundtrip train ticket, and we board the train to Amsterdam Centraal.  Only we don't go to Amsterdam Centraal.  We end up fifteen minutes outside the city before we realize our mistake.  We get on another train, and despite our guts telling us to get off at various stops along the way, we finally make it into the city.

Cafe Mac?

Walking around Amdam is a trip.  I can only imagine how kooky it gets at night.  We decide to wander around, eventually ending up in the red light district.  Through a street-level window there's a gross hooker in a tight blue onesie showing herself off.  We quickly walk past and I notice through the window on the cross-street a fat hooker with a hairy upper lip omnoming a hoagie.  ugh.  We walk around the rest of the time, stopping shortly in a bar to get a beer.  It's nice to get away from the airport, to stretch my legs.  We made it back in time to board our respective flights, Monica back home to Mexico City, and myself to Paris before my final destination of Rabat.  The rest of the trip is a haze of jetlagged fatigue, and by the time I get to Rabat, I can barely speak English, let alone French.  I made it to my first hotel, showered, and crashed.

First Moroccan Sunrise

The Days Since
My first day in Rabat I wake to the sunrise.  I go downstairs onto the street after a delicious petit dejuner.  Its my first sighting of a man pulling a hand cart.  I go back to my room, grab my things, check out, and head down the street to catch a petit taxi to the centre-ville of Rabat.  The cabbie drops me off on a side street  telling me that there are three hotels in the area, "One here, one there, and one over there" pointing at each in passing.  I leave the cab, disoriented, and head toward one of the hotels to get directions to the Hotel Majestic.  Although I'm pretty sure the man at the front desk gives me good directions, I can't for my life find the Majestic.  I stroll around the block, my giant backpack strapped to me, wheeling my small suitcase.  I feel as though I've gone too far, and I turn up the next block, finding myself in front of the Department of Justice.  Severely lost, I go into another hotel, and the man at the desk gives me very good directions.  The next time around, a boy whom I had earlier passed recognizes me and tries to stop me to buy shoes.  Obviously being lost in the capital of Morocco I don't want shoes.

In retrospect, I can't believe I missed the green marble entrance and gold lettering.  I walk upstairs, telling the man at the front desk I'm with the CCCL and he gives me a room key and takes my passport.  I get to my room, tiled floor, a toilet that looks like an old British WC, and I plop my things down on the farthest of the two twin-sized beds.  Forgetting that I gave the man at the desk my passport, I freak out tossing everything across my room, pulling apart my backpack, looking under the untouched bed covers.  Then, my temporary roommate Asif knocks on the door, and reminds me that I gave my passport to the man at the front desk.  In order to get my passport back, I have to give him a copy of my passport, and he directs me to a photocopying shop a couple doors down.  The shop is located on the first floor (as opposed to the rez) so I walk upstairs to a closed door with a sign reading "Photocopies" pointing at it.  I try and open the door, but the handle doesn't work.  Then I knock.  No answer.  A bit confused, I try to turn the handle again, but it is broken.  I walk back to the hotel, remembering that I had a copy in my things.  After running up and down the stairs a few times, Asif and I go to a Moroccan cafe in the Medina for my first Moroccan meal of vegitarian couscous, fries, and yogurt.  Moroccan yogurt is delicious, by the way.  Then, the entire group of students meet in the hotel lobby and one of the program directors leads us to the CCCL, located in an 18th century riad in the Medina.

My school.

After meeting too many people to remember, I get back to my room and crash.  Somewhere along the way, as you will enjoy knowing, my hemorrhoid burst, and dealing with that all night is nothing but bloody happiness.

The Doctor Gives Me the News (This is where it gets gross)
Today I wake up at 6:00am promptly to the resonance of the call to prayer.  "Alla-hu Akbar" trumpets the speakers across the Avenue Hassan II.  If you haven't heard it, it is one of the most beautifully haunting sounds in all the world, asking men and women to wake and join in salah (roughly translated to "prayer").  I walk to the shower and press the button.  Ice cold water.  I turn it the direction the shower tells me to get warm water.  Ice cold.  I splash water under my armpits and in my hair and I walk, freezing, back into my room where I get dressed, deal with my bleeding buttocks, and begin my first day of school.  Boring syllabus and ways to stay safe day. I talk with Souad, the program director, after our second lecture finishes, and I begin on my way, in her car, to the recommended gastrologist.  In what would be the weirdest afternoon of my life, I go into his office (thankfully Souad was with me the whole time) and we talk about my problem.

Med equipment with dials. The blurriness represents
how I felt.

Then his assistant takes me into an operating room where, after some problems with directions, she tells me to mount a four-feet high table that's only about four feet long and two feet wide.  I realize that medical equipment is outdated in places like Morocco, but the equipment in the room looked like a stereo amplifier from the 70s.  I'm told to prostrate, butt proudly in the air, on top of the table.  The doc comes in and gets to work.  Let me say, if you've never experienced a man with whom you can't communicate insert medical instruments in and around your rectum, you've never lived.  I'm told I have a thrombosis, and he shows me a small blood clot in the surgical pan when he's finished.  I've never been more relieved than I was with a wad of gauze bandaged to the inside of my butt cheeks.  I go back into his office where he writes me a script for medication to go along with the medication I'm already taking.  Something that's true of doctors everywhere is their apparent lack of penmanship, and if you thought that a script was hard to read in English, you've never seen one in French written by a man who is used to Arabic calligraphy.  Naturally, I didn't have sufficient funds on me, so I had to walk down the street to the bank (a recurring theme) to take out money before I could pay for the operation.  I eventually make it back to the CCCL in time for dinner.

I arrive to the pharmacy as a man is boarding the windows for the night.  The woman takes my script, gets me the medication, and rings me up at the register.  Only once again, I lack the sufficient funds.  After some arguing in French, and my inability to communicate has become all to shockingly clear, I am dragged by a man to a bank where the ATM is broken.  We are more or less running through the crowded streets, past the vendors with cheap towels and shoes, to another bank around the corner.  Thankfully this one works properly, and I get out enough dirhams to survive for a few days (or until I desperately need it).  To add to my incompetence, I'm trying to leave the pharmacy but I can't figure out the damn door.  By this time, everyone in the pharmacy is laughing at me, and I can only laugh at myself.  I even need help opening doors here!  What is my life?

So that, in as long as I could have possibly written it, has been my first two days in the Moroccan capital city of Rabat.  It can only get better from here.

P.S. For those who wish to see more pictures, my web album is here.

First Post

This is my first blog post, even though I drunkenly opened a tumblr account in August.  I write this just after midnight during one of the coldest stretches of the Alaskan winter.  The upside: its 5 degrees outside and 20 degrees warmer than this weekend.  The downside: the windchill makes it feel colder than it was this weekend.  We're currently gaining four and a half minutes of sunlight a day (!) but the sun doesn't rise until 10:30 and it still sets before 17:00.  The long and short of it is that its *$&@$@# cold and *#$#$% dark. 

The reason I started this blog is mainly for my friends and family to keep up with my travels while I go abroad this spring to Morocco and then hang out for an extra month in the Netherlands.  I plan on mostly updating through pictures and the inevitable fail stories that you always get when traveling.  I'll also have a Picasa Web Album from my excursions when everything gets up and running.  As much as it pains me to say, I want this to be a politics-free zone, so anyone who may be personally offended by my radical political views won't be infected with lessons on post-modern political and sociological theory.  Leave that to the other blogspot douchebags.  

So stay tuned, I guess, as my just-large-enough-to-fit-in-an-overhead-compartment backpack and I travel halfway across the globe to a country where I don't speak the language.