On Being A Fitness Instructor
I first met the moudira of my Nedi Neswi in November at our final Peace Corps training before they set us off to begin work in my final site. We chatted some, and she told us some of the things she thought we could do at the Nedi: teach the women English, teach preschool classes, and teach exercise classes. I chuckled nervously at these suggestions, feeling fully under-qualified and nervous about the idea of working with unfamiliar people in a new and strange place, but shrugged along as she talked. Fast forward to a month later, Aaron and I are sitting in the moudira’s office with her while we make a schedule. My moudira is named Zakiya (name changed for privacy), and is also my host mom, which means I’ve been living with her for a month. She is a strong and unwavering woman who gets what she wants. Over the past month, I’ve watched her shout orders at my host brothers, boss her niece around, and have her easing going husband succumb to her will. She runs her house like the captain of a ship, barking orders and taking no flack. I should love her for this, as these are some traits I appreciate in myself, but in the context of working in the Nedi, it means I don’t feel I have any room for input. She knows what she wants, and she gets what she wants, and I’m too scared to chime in with my broken Darija. Thus, we let her schedule us for seven classes a week - one English class with the women, three classes a week with the preschoolers, and….drum roll….three exercise classes a week. I sighed as Zakiya said this, already beginning to feel anxious. These were the classes I was dreading most. Sure, I like to exercise on my own time, but I have no experience leading a group of people during an exercise class in English, let alone in Darija. We left her office and I went straight home to begin preparation for my new gig as fitness instructor. After spending the whole weekend drawing up different working routines, translating instructions from English and Darija, practicing the routines on my roof and creating not one or two, but four different possible playlists of music, I felt at least a little prepared. The first class I decided to teach was yoga. I’m not sure what inspired this decision, since I hardly ever do yoga, but I felt like it was more manageable than attempting to lead Zumba or HIIT Circuits. I arrived at the Nedi at 4:10 pm, with my class set to start at 4:30 pm. I wanted to be early, so I could reread my lesson plan and practice my Darija commands one last time. As I pedaled my bike in through the front gate of the Nedi, Zakiya was also walking in, returning from her lunch break. “Salam! Ki diyra”? I called out to her (Hi! How are you?). She didn’t respond, and instead gave me a strange once-over look. This was very out of character, as greetings are a big deal in Morocco - for her not to respond immediately with a “Labas! Bkhir! Kulshi myzan”?, I knew something was off. I figured she was confused by my timing, since I was twenty minutes early (another foreign concept here - being on time is being early in Morocco). I figured that must be why she was confused and decided to try and explain, “Ana bkrri shwiya 7it bghiti….”(I’m a little early because I wanted to…), but before I could finish my explanation, she cut me off. “No! You’re not early, you’re late! We said 4 pm”. I looked down at my watch. It was now 4:12, and dread started to fill my stomach. Could it be possible that I, an extremely Type A, punctual person, had gotten the time wrong on my first day of class? “I’m so sorry!”, I exclaimed, and rushed into the exercise room, flustered. Indeed, the room was already filled with 6 or 7 women. I set my stuff down and turned my speaker on, trying to calm myself down and start as quickly as possible to make up for being late. As the women got settled, I noticed a lot of them were wearing jeans, which wasn’t ideal for yoga. I attempted to say in Darija, “maybe next time wear different pants, because exercising might be hard in jeans!”, when one of the teachers at the Nedi Neswi stormed in, cutting me off (again). She started to yell at me in Darija, and I tried to ignore my mortification in order to catch what she was saying. The gist of it was, “They had on better clothes this morning, when you were supposed to come teach exercise, but you didn’t and then changed back into jeans and now they’re not in the right clothes!” Damn, this whole exercise class was really off to a terrible start. Now feeling doubly flustered in addition to embarrassed and guilty, I apologized profusely, and decided to just get on with the class. I turned the music on, and we began to stretch, balance and chaturanga. As the women followed along and I got more swept up in the flexing and stretching of my muscles, I began to forget my earlier humiliation at the hands of both Zakiya and the other teacher. The class ended, and I said thank you to the women for coming, ducking quickly out before someone else could chastise me.
The next day, Aaron and I returned to the Nedi to teach our first scheduled English class. We poked our heads into Zakiya's office, and again, she looked up in total confusion. “We’re here for English!” we said. She clicked her tongue at us, shaking her head, “No, you teach English tomorrow”. Aaron reached over and grabbed our schedule off her desk, pointing to show her we had indeed agreed to teach English that day. “Oh, okay”, she said, and gestured at us to follow her towards a classroom. She headed out, with Aaron following. Before leaving her office, I grabbed the schedule and looked at my exercise time: 4:30 pm, Monday and Thursday. I had been right about the time - my moudira was the one who had been wrong. Fuming silently, I left her office, walking into the classroom, where much to my chagrin, the teacher who had admonished me the day before was standing. I listened to her and Zakiya chatting, and as I thought about Zakiya’s back-to-back scheduling mistakes, I realized that Zakiya must have told her I was coming to teach exercise the previous day in the morning instead of the afternoon. I felt frustrated that I had been yelled at not once, but twice for mistakes on the part of my moudira, and that Zakiya was so headstrong she didn’t even consider the possibility that she might have been wrong about the time, and not me. To this day, I still come promptly at 4:00 pm to teach, and have scheduled a third class for a morning time. The exercise classes themselves are amazing and fun - we all laugh together, sweat together and feel empowered and strong together. And at the end of the day, us women making each other stronger overwhelms every feeling of mortification I had that first day while I was getting yelled at.
The best feeling of all was when the teacher who yelled at me that first day started coming to my class. She smiles after every class and thanks me for the workout.
On Women and Exercise
So far one of the most difficult parts of living in Morocco (for me) has been the inability to exercise how I would like to. Back in the US, I was part of a gym and made a point to go 4-5 times a week. Here, gyms are less accessible to women (many don't allow women at all, and those that do in my city have specified hours for women that clash with my school schedule). For a time, Aaron and I were waking up at 6 am before 8 hours of class and work to run before sunrise, but then we were told by our language teacher it was too dangerous to run in the dark and we were no longer allowed to do that, even. Because of these obstacles, I find myself exercising in new and weird ways - P90X on top of the roof of my house, yoga in my bedroom and workouts of my own design in any secluded place I can find. Today, on my one day off a week, I persuaded Aaron to go on a run with me to the local park, where we would do our own series of exercises before running home. I normally avoid running or working out in public in daylight hours in my city, because of all the unwanted attention it attracts. On a good day, walking through my city means turning every head, getting some unwanted yells and occasionally having strange men try to walk alongside me. When running in public, I stand out as an obvious foreigner, a jogger (not many people jog here) and a woman exercising in public. I needed to workout desperately today, so Aaron and jogged through the streets to the nearby park, getting the normal slew of unwanted attention. Once we got to the park, he took off to run laps and I started doing crunches, squats and push-ups in the grass. After ten minutes of working out, I looked up to notice two small girls thirty feet away doing squats alongside me. When I switched a workout, they carefully watched me and followed along. Their mother stood alongside them, watching them copy me. Watching these young girls copying me and exercising alongside me was an amazing moment. I was so happy that they felt inspired enough to even try the workouts I was doing that all the frustration from the unwanted attention melted away. Exercising visibly in my community is going to mean I get ogled at by a hundred people, but if one of those people is a little girl who decides to dance, run or stretch because she saw me doing it, then it will all be worth it.
On Surviving and Thriving in a Foreign Country
The last two months in site, I've started and quit writing about 15 blog posts. All of them revolved around the same theme, and a couple different names kept circulating through my mind: "Comfortably Uncomfortable", "Here in mind but not in spirit", and "Ns Surviving, Ns Thriving". In Darija, "ns" means "half". I decided to go with this title, because that best sums up how I feel. Some days, I love being a Peace Corps volunteer. I wake up to call to prayer, smell milwe baking in my neighbor's house, sip my coffee on my roof and lesson plan for the day, before teaching with my husband. Those days are good. Other days, I wake up and dread leaving the house, knowing I'll have to work through my broken Darija to do anything, and even something as basic as ordering coffee will be something I'll have to put an unnatural amount of thought into. Those days, every stare bothers me deeply. Those days, I wish I had the anonymity I did in the US. Here, walking down the street causes every head to turn. On the good days, I smile brightly and say hello, sometime emphatically stating "mahdrsh Frances", or "I don't speak French" to every shout of "Bonjour" I get. On good days, I can even appreciate the bonjours, and understand people are trying to be friendly and are curious. On bad days, I feel like a fish in a tank, peered at and inspected like some sort of strange specimen. On bad days, I curse French people, and hate that I'm being mistaken as one of them. Ironically, I hate it almost equally as much when I get shouts of "Hello!". I hate my obvious foreignness, and how I know these next two years, I'll never be mistaken as Moroccan, never get a "Salam" before a "Bonjoir" or "Hello".
These types of seemingly shallow thoughts float through my head on the daily. At first, the staring, the people shouting hello and even the men cat calling didn't bother me much. I'd experienced this stuff before while traveling, and shrugged it off. But then, about three months into my service, I realized this wasn't a short stint being a tourist in another country. I'm trying to integrate here in Morocco, and knowing I'm going to be stared at, ogled at, judged, yelled at, talked to, whispered about and side-eyed every time I step foot outside my house for the next two years is an exhausting realization. When I contemplate how much attention I draw (both from well-meaning Moroccans and more crass attention from men), I'm only barely able to imagine making it two years.
When I pull on clothes in the morning, I also feel smothered. I dress to not draw attention - long shirts that cover my bottom, long sleeves that cover my forearm tattoos, and a neckline that's considered modest (here, that's basically a crew neck). But even dressing modestly, my clothes are still western. Couple my jeans and sweater with my light brown hair, and people can spot me as an outsider from a mile away However, some female volunteers can't even get away with wearing jeans in their site, so in that respect I'm lucky to live in a bigger area and have more freedom. I still feel that I've lost a lot of my freedom of expression in the way I dress. I'm already dreading the 100+ degree summers where I'll have to wear pants and cardigans and be very overheated. When I think about how oppressive it is to have dressing modestly become a necessity to avoid catcalling, my stomach clenches up.
There are huge cultural differences that make living here a struggle for me. How can I possibly thrive here, as myself, when I can't be my full, true self? Anyone who knows me in the US knows I'm an outspoken, do-what-I-want type of person. Here in Morocco, every person that addresses Aaron and I while we're together ignores me, and addresses him first. Purely because he's a man. Again, at first this didn't bother me, but after having so many people look past me to talk to Aaron instead, I started to feel angry. I want to say my opinions, because that's who I am as a person, but more frustratingly, I want women to be taken as seriously as men. I want women to get the chance to speak first, to say what's on their mind, to not have their husbands become their spokesperson, because guess what? Women have their own thoughts! Their own ideas! Watching people differ to men over women, in nearly every situation, is absolutely maddening.
These are some of the times I feel like I'm barely surviving here.
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