First, I want to explain the title of this post - shwiya b' shwiya is a Darija phrase that means "little by little" and has become the unofficial motto of our staj. It's how we reckon with the challenges that come along with language barriers, cultural differences, and integration. Moving in with a host family has been a shwiya b' shwiya process - slowly grasping more language, understanding familial norms, and becoming more comfortable in our community.
After our nine days of orientation, all 112 of us Peace Corps Morocco Trainees boarded one of three buses headed out throughout Morocco to meet their host families during Community Based Training. Aaron and I headed to a larger city an hour outside of Meknes, with 132,000 people living in it. Of all the other trainees I talked to, our city seems to be the biggest CBT site. Most people are in more rural areas with 5,000-10,000 people. I packed tons of warm clothes for CBT because I heard horror stories about snow and chilblains, and we ended up in an incredibly temperate area, so I basically lugged my Blundstones out here for nothing and sacrificed 7lbs of precious suitcase weight. I’ve been suffocating wearing cardigans everyday to hide my forearm tattoos. For anyone who doesn’t know, Morocco is a Muslim country and standards of dress are a lot more conservative than what we’re used to seeng in the United States. Many women here wear the hijab, tattoos are uncommon, and women tend to wear longer garments covering their behinds and chest. I’ve basically worn cardigans everyday and have been veryyy warm. Being able to sleep in a T-shirt feels like a blessing. Our days during CBT are made up of language and cultural lessons with our LCF (Language and Culture Facilitators). We have a lovely and smart LCF named Soukaina (Suki for short) who is seriously so awesome. She is incredibly knowledgeable in Darija and English and is also hilarious and sweet. We spend a lot of our day in her apartment playing language games, conjugating verbs and possessive pronouns, having conversations in Darija and practicing the language in any other way she sees fit. Our language lessons last for four hours each morning. At noon, we walk back to our host family for lunch, and return to Suki’s house at 2 pm for a culture session. We have conversations about Moroccan social conventions, holidays, dress, and practice our Arabic script.
A lot of our day is also spent learning about and training to conduct community events as practice for moving to our permanent site in December. So far, we’ve visited a Dar Chabab (youth center), Nedi Neswi (Women’s Center) and Youth Center. I’ve really enjoyed meeting more Moroccans and getting a sense of the culture and language with our CBT group.
Another great (and strange) part of CBT is living with a host family. Aaron and I are staying with a family of four, but mainly spend time with our little host brother Yahya and our host mom Aisha. Our host dad and brother aren’t home often so we see them less frequently. Our mom studied English ten years ago and it came back to her really well, so there haven’t been as many communication barriers with her as I expected. I know my Darija is going to suffer because of this, since we’re not forced to communicate in it as much as some of the other volunteers. Living with a host family has been interesting, confusing and fun. We’re not used to being under someone else’s roof, subject to their schedules, food and rules, so it’s been an adjustment. At the same time, we’ve already seen some awesome things we wouldn’t have if we were staying on our own. We have five trainees in our CBT group and all our moms are really good friends. This means we get pulled around to random houses for tea, dinner, lunch and visiting as our families visit one another. That’s been really cool - in the last week, we’ve eaten couscous as is traditional on Friday, gone to the hamman (public bath) and scrubbed ourselves for two hours in the steam, visited a family’s countryside home to pet chickens, dogs, ducks and cats, and eaten more (you guessed it!) delicious couscous.
We watch the news with our mom in Fus'ha (Modern Standard Arabic) and drink buckets of delicious mint tea. We navigate over language barriers to play card games with our very competitive host brother, full of lots of laughter and some typical 11 year old cheating. Overall, I’m really loving being part of such a close-knit family, eating together, and socializing at all hours of the day. Moroccans are really so hospitable and kind and I’ve felt welcomed by everyone. Case in point - my LCF’s landlord let me hold her 2 day old baby today, even though we’d never met, couldn’t communicate and she didn’t have any reason to trust me with her child at all. This moment has been really representative of my whole experience thus far and exemplified the kindness and trust of Moroccans.
Hi Jasa & Aaron whew you’re so far away but RIGHT HERE! In our hearts & minds. Thx for the Thread that connects us all