My 100th Post!

According to the statistics that blogger.com keeps, I am, at this moment, writing my 100th post.  I arrived 7 months and 8 days ago. It has been 5 months and 7 days since I swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I have 1 year, 6 months and 25 days until my service ends next November. Today is Sunday, April 18th, 2010...

And I am still in Morocco.


Keep reading everyone!
Sincerely,

the Author

On La Classico

Recently FC Barcelona played Real Madrid for first place in the Spanish football league. This was a big deal. Professional football in Morocco is not known for its excellence or grace. Here the big teams of Raja and Wydad pale when compared to the teams of Europe. As a result, the football that is most closely followed in Morocco is that of Spain, with Barcelona being the national favorite and Real Madrid being a close second. So when these two titans met, every male in Morocco crammed into a café to watch what would happen. Barcelona, won 2-0 despite being a man down due to yellow cards. That put them on track to win the Spanish league and they are still on course to repeat their Champions League triumph of last year, a fact Morocco is very excited about. 

On Marrakech Continued

Marrakech is my favorite city in Morocco. The reasons for this are largely personal. It is the nearest big city to me (three hours if you lucky) that feels normal. It has boulevards, malls, taxis, women in public, shorts and t-shirts, and so many other things that you take for granted until they are missing. For example I recently received the following text message from a friend:

“Im in a mall. Sitting in a

coffee chain. Having an iced

Mochacino – I s*** you not –

with a movie theatre and

tgif s up the escalator. In

Marrakech. Holy crap.”

While living in a surreal journey, the pauses taken in reality, are invaluable. Marrakech provides that.

I remember first hearing about Marrakech in a kitchen in Shoreditch, London. A friend’s flatmate had just returned from a romantic weekend there with her boyfriend. It was an interesting sounding city and as good a topic of conversation as any as dinner cooked and London’s weather fell outside. I could not imagine at that point in time how much of my life would be spent on its streets.

‘Kech is my salvation. It is where I crawled away to in order to recover from food poisoning. Where I spent New Years. Where I taught seventy four children to scream, ‘Oh A Laeah!”

I hope to have many more adventures there, in my favorite Moroccan city. 

On Bargaining Continued

Bargaining in Morocco is an acquired skill.

Three foreigners in Morocco recently went to purchase the exact same item, a scarf, checkered black and white, of the kind Yasser Arafat might have worn. The first person, who had been living in Morocco for seven months paid 25dh for his. The second person, who also had been in Morocco for seven months paid 30dh for his. The last person, who had been in Morocco for a week paid 50dh for his.  

On Liquidity

Financial markets, as we all know, are complicated things. Nowhere is this fact clearer then when talking about the Peace Corps Volunteer debt market.

On any weekend when PCVs gather together in one of the lager cities of their country a sprawling network of financial trades and debts grows upon arrival. For instance, they might rent a house that costs Dh800. One of the PCVs will pay the sum up front at which time the others will become in debt to them. This situation is repeated for taxis, groceries, meals out and any other communal commodities purchased. Thus a spider’s web of debt is born.

This matter only becomes more complicated when, illiquidity is introduced into the market. Banks will only give bills out in Dh100 or Dh200 denominations.  So a PCV might owe Dh60 for rent but be unable to pay because the size of their notes leaves them insolvent. The solution to this is to trade debt until sufficiently moveable denominations are reached. For instance, if two different people owe one person Dh40 and Dh60 respectively, one might buy the other’s debt in order to square themselves with the initial creditor.

At a certain point, as is only natural, all this debt matures, which further complicates matters. A PCV might be leaving a day before the rest and need to settle their finances. The total amount of their debt will be entailed to circulate upon their largest creditor, along with the necessary funds to settle it. In this way a PCV might find they own the debt of someone whom they had never credited in the first place.

Such a situation came to a head last week in an ice cream store. One creditor, having loaned too generously, found himself broke, without even 5Dh for an ice cream. In trying to call in some of his debt in order to buy an ice cream he discovered that the original people whom he had financed had traded their debt away and now totally different people owed him money. None of these people had debts of the correct denomination to be solvent.  Nor could they themselves consolidate in order to reach such a denomination. Needless to say the store was not willing to break a Dh200 note on a Dh5 ice cream. The creditor left the store broke, dejected and hungry. The one consolation, his debtors let him have a bite of their ice creams.

On Women in the Cafe

Some of my fellow PCVs visited over the weekend. We went out to a café. Some of them were girls. This is very unusual in my town. The reason I did it was that, part of Peace Corps is about creating understanding of Americans and in America (and for that matter in many of the cities in Morocco) both sexes go to the café. The problem was the next week I had some answering to do. “Who were those girls? Were they your wives? Are they going to be? Why aren’t you married? Are you going to marry a Moroccan? Can we marry them?”

…I told them good luck with that.

On Spring Camp

Last week I worked at a spring camp in Marrakech organized by the Moroccan Ministry of Youth and Sports. There were seventy-four Moroccan students between the ages of 12 and 17, learning English, playing sports, doing club activities like theater and dance, and having a very fun time. Six Peace Corps volunteers worked at the club, including the worlds oldest serving volunteer who is 85! Everyone enjoyed themselves and by the end of the week, when it was time to say goodbye, there was a lot of crying. I look forward to doing it again next year.