January 31 -- Today I had a very informative meeting with Dr Jim Miller, the director of the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange (MACECE), which is the Fulbright host organization. I am amazed at the linguistic complexity of this country, and I am excited to learn more about which languages people speak and why, and I wonder just what exactly I'm likely to see happening in schools. I also met the rest of the MACECE staff, and Moustafah accompanied me to purchase a cell phone. The most challenging part of the day was when I had to hail a cab and ask the driver to bring me back to my neighborhood in the medina. I memorized how to pronounce it in Darija, and surprisingly, I got here! I am really convinced that I need to learn Darija ( Moroccan Arabic) as quickly as possible. My host family has been helping, but tomorrow I'm set up to start some real tutoring. In the afternoon, I ventured out to explore the "quartier" or neighborhood. Simply put, once I walk the one block to exit the medina, I am one more block from the Kasbah (the word for a fortification), which sits at the mouth of a river and right on the Atlantic coast. The photo above shows the Kasbah Ouyada (not sure what that means yet) from the protected beach below it. From street side, it looks like a giant fort. I walked out on a stone jetty into the ocean and took this picture of the beach and lighthouse just south. Then I climbed the path up to the kasbah and wandered a bit. The fortress was built in the mid-twelfth century, and there are houses where people live now that have their dates from the 1300s carved above their doors. The oldest mosque in Rabat is there, and a castle with a lovely garden where the orange trees are in full fruit. There are cats everywhere: cats on the jetty, cats in the kasbah, cats on the river promenade waiting for the maquerel or sardines or whatever to come in on the fishing boats. Perhaps one day I will devote a day to a photo montage to the Cats of Rabat. They are everywhere. (By the way, "cat" is the second word I learned to say in Darija.) After the kasbah, I strolled along the quai beside the Bouregreg River, and watched kids riding small cars, flying kites, and eating cotton candy. The fishermen were coming in for the day, so I saw many cartons full of their catch. There is a restaurant on a corsair anchored at the quai that celebrates the Pirate Past of Rabat-- apparently there were centuries in which Rabat's primary economic engine was piratry, and ransom money from the countries that could afford to buy back their sailors. So now you can go enjoy a lovely mint tea or "plat de fruit de mer" on the deck. My favorite sign of the day though is for a french fry stand, which advertises pick-up and home-delivery. Wow. Home-delivered fries. I'll document this sign on the For My Students page.
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Sunday January 29, my church gave me a warm and lovely sendoff, with prayers at every service for safety and excitement in Morocco, and then just a few hours later, an errant corkscrew set off a full body and carry-on luggage search at Dulles. I wasn't expecting the excitement would start so soon! ( I think my TSA agent was new, because the others were kind of humoring him: "Now you've contaminated the wand, so you have to...") Then, their worries about me apparently satisfied, I boarded the plane and took off. My next surprise was when we landed in Paris at 7:30 in the morning, local time, and it was still dark. Really dark. I have previously enjoyed the summer solstice in France and watched the sun set at 10:30, but I have never been there in the winter and didn't realize that the latitude would make for long nights. How I would hate teaching a first block class in Paris! (hahaha-- those of you who know me from school know that I really don't like much of anything at 7:30 in the morning!) The next flight was about 3 hours to Rabat. I can't tell you what we flew over, because the clouds were thick below and I couldn't see anything out my window. I fell asleep. But when I woke up, this is what I saw: The Coast of Africa, and Clear Blue Skies!!! Then I saw mountains with snow on them, and then the land flattened out, and we landed at Rabat. Where my phone announced to me: "Welcome to Morocco! No service." Well, at least it still works as a camera, and I can still play Two Dots. So don't text me! Tomorrow I am getting a Moroccan phone, and I'll install WhatsApp on it, so if you have WhatsApp, you can reach me that way. Ahlam and Saïd from MACECE (the Fulbright-sponsoring organization here) met me at the airport ( I was the absolute last person through customs, where there was a good deal of discussion regarding the entry card I filled out--- did they know about the corkscrew incident??) and brought me to a lovely riad in the medina. I will spend my first 10 days here while I look for an appartment and get my two feet firmly on the ground. It's a wonderful traditional place. It's on a winding little path in from the main street, it has many floors and about 20 foot ceilings on each floor, and about four little terraces and rooftops from which you can look out and see: the river that separates Salé from Rabat and is bordered by a wide and sunny promenade; the rooftops of all the rest of the city and the minarets; and framed by palm trees, I can see the Atlantic. I will start doing some walking and photographing tomorrow. The inside of this home has beautiful ceramic tile everywhere, and some very cool architectural "fretting" (though I just made that up, and I'm sure there is a real term for it-- I'll have to research that); thick plastered walls; long sofas that line the walls of many rooms and make inviting places to have tea, or talk, or sleep, or write blog entries. My hostess, Nezed speaks French and her son Hamza, who is a newly minted travel agent, speaks wonderful English. I don't think I am the only foreigner that they are hosting at the moment, but I haven't met anyone else yet-- except Nezed's sister, who only speaks Darija, which is what everybody speaks here. It's the Moroccan version of Arabic. I've learned to say something like "choucroute" , which is Thank You, but in French it's Sauerkraut. Darija lessons are high on the priority list! Nezed and her sister made a delicious lunch. Here is it is: It was a tomato salad, and some meatballs in a delicious savory sauce. Using our hands, we ate it with bread. (though Nezed kindly put out a small spoon for me if I wanted it, since my technique in using bread-as-utensil is quite poor at this point.) But it was a delicious meal followed by sweet tangerines, which are in season right now, long with strawberries, raspberries, and all citrus. Yum!
All of a sudden, it's starting to get real. The calendar turned over to 2017, a year that seemed still far away until very recently, and a year that will provide a watershed experience for me. I've been thinking about Morocco since October 2015 when I saw an advertisement in a listserv I belong to announcing that the applications for the Fulbright Distinguished Teaching Award were open. (Thank you Lisa Adeli!) The application was long and a bit daunting since I thought I had a very small chance of being accepted, but filling out the application led me to think about my teaching practices and goals in ways that I hadn't considered in a long time. Completing the application was great professional development! I got some wonderful support for my application from my curriculum supervisor (Thank you DeWayne Cash!); I worked incessantly on the application until I hit the submit button, and the waiting began. When the approval email eventually came, I was completely floored-- and grateful for the support of my husband (Thank you Paul Stutzman!) so that I could actually accept the opportunity. And now, here I am less than 30 days away from stepping foot in Rabat and finding out where my curiosity will take me.
I have had a little preparation. Last August, I met with the other Fulbright DAT recipients for an orientation in Washington DC, and I learned a lot more about the program and what to expect (thank you Holly Emert!). I was able to meet the two Fulbright teachers from Morocco who were embarking on their experience in the US, and I spent some invaluable time with a 2015 DAT recipient in Morroco (Thank you Cynthia Reedy!), who was a font of experiential knowledge. The community of Fulbrighters is pretty impressive! And now, I am beginning to work through my final checklist of things to do before I go: figure out appropriate clothing for an Arabic country where I will clearly be a western woman; where to live; how to access funds, the internet, and teacher colleagues; which classes to sign up for at Mohammed V University; how to ensure systems to keep things running smoothly here at home and in my classroom; and make sure my parents know how to use Face Time. So here I am, on the cusp of the adventure of a lifetime, not at all sure how this is all going to work out, but confident that it will be something special. And I invite you to follow on this blog as I document whatever it is that Morocco brings to me. |
Marcie StutzmanTeacher, Researcher, Adventurer, Explorer; Maybe crazy; Possibly too old for this Archives
October 2018
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