This was my first full weekend in my village and it was full of interesting bits.


MAKING BREAD
Saturday morning we had school (we have school every day but Sunday). Luckily, Saturdays are half days, so we were only there 8:30 - 2:00 or so, and that includes our 1.5hr lunch break. So after class I went home and hung with my host family. This was exciting because for the first time in my life I hand made bread!! The dough was made like typical bread, I think, and I mushed it around in a big heavy, authentically ethnic bowl. I was mashing and punching and kneading for probably half an hour! And my host sisters would laugh from time to time and grab the dough from me, mush it around correctly, and then give it back. They truly must wonder how I survived in the U.S. Either they think it's a miracle or they believed I pay somebody to make meals and do my laundry for me. So anyway, I mixed tons of flour, water, and another flour-like powder together, and then when the dough was ready we made little dough balls, which, according to my sisters, were all subpar, but they showed me how to do it and I improved. Then I took a dough ball and made it into a big round circle that looked like it could become a really thin pizza. Then I spread some kind of wheaty looking, granulated substance on it (yeast?) and folded my circle into a square. Then Hasna, my host sister, used a TON of oil to fry the dough and instead of bake it, it becomes fried bread called "bsmn." (no, I didn't forget the vowels; they are not there.) Making bread by hand made me appreciate how much work goes into it. It made me feel like a more worthwhile humanbeing.

KARATE CLASS
After that eventful afternoon I went to Karate class. All of us except one have decided to enroll in a Karate class together. I would say it's less karate and more a kickboxing aerobic class. I'm getting exercise AND three hot showers a week. Though the studio only has 1 locker room so the girls go first and we have about five minutes to get in and out. But I'm much cleaner than I was the first two weeks. They say gaining weight during training is inevitable just because of the amazing amounts of food we eat. But I would say we are fighting it!


SUNDAY
THE HAMMAM
So Sunday I had my first hmmam experience! The Hmmam is the public bathhouse in Morocco. They seem to exist in every muslim country. Women and men both go. (though on separate sides, of course) and you pay a little to get in and then it's like a hot steam room and you stay for sometimes 2 hours (!) and bathe. So we go, it's 9DH per person, which is about $1.10. It's exactly what you'd picture a bathhouse to look like. There are three rooms. One that is kind of steamy, one that is very steamy, and one that is not steamy at all. The middle room, the steamy one, has two wells of water that are constantly flowing. One well has extremely hot water, and one has luke warm water. There were women there of all shapes and sizes. And everyone wears underwear, but just the bottoms. Being completely naked is "shooma" (shameful). So nobody bathes at the hmmam completely naked. So from what I gather, you sit there and scrub and wash and splash around in really hot water for a few hours. You use this sandpaper-like glove to scrub yourself and if you're doing it right you watch your skin slough off all around you. So I'm just splashing around and then the woman who works there comes up to me and offers to scrub me down. This is what she's paid to do. It costs extra, like 15 DH ($2.00) but she lays you down on a ledge and gives you a full scrub and massage. It felt really good and she sure got all my dead skin off, but it was really uncomfortable because throughout the whole process she was talking to me about becoming a Muslim. They warned us that people would try to convert us as soon as we began to gather the vocabulary to converse and so I guess that has begun. This woman at the hmmam is probably between 18 and 20 and very friendly but she just kept trying to get me to say the Shahadda, which is something along the lines of "Allah is the only God and Muhammad is his prophet" and apparently that's the beginning of the conversion process and we're not supposed to say it. I get that she loves her faith and is trying to share it with me but it was just uncomfortable because I don't have the language to say "no thanks, I'm not interested" without sounding rude.

MORE CONVERSION TALKS/WEDDINGS
So during my hmmam experience, the woman who works there was also telling me that she has two brothers that she would really like me to marry, and that my brother should marry her. She was completely serious too. It's a tough situation to be in when you don't have much vocabulary. Marriage is CONSTANTLY a topic here. Not a meal goes by that my host mother doesn't mention me marrying a Moroccan, most favorably, her son Hosin, who is 26 and still not married. He lives in Rabat. She is constantly talking about how fun a wedding would be and we'd slaughter a couple cows and it would be great. I try to take it as a compliment and not let it get to me. She knows that I think it's funny and not gonna happen, so we laugh about it together, but I really don't think she's kidding. So today when we were hanging outside with some neighbors, the women across the street told me I needed to marry a Muslim while I'm in Morocco so that I can become a Muslim. And then this neighbor ran inside her house and came out with a Ko'ran and gave it to me! I didn't know what to say! I took it of course because she really wanted me to have it, but I really hope this doesn't lead to more conversion talks. I realize that it probably will but soon I'll have the language to say something other than "Inshallah." I completely understand that they are well-intentioned but it is still very strange.

THE WATER
Last thing-- during the middle of the day today we suddenly had no running water. Nobody on our street had water either. So Hasna (my sister), and I walked with buckets to a well and fetched our water. I wanted to know WHY we didn't have any water. And I know the words for "there is no water. why?" and the response always seemed inconclusive. Eventually I figured out that they were basically saying "well, you know, sometimes the water goes out and there is no 'why'." And nobody panicked or called the city. They just went to the well. And then in the afternoon the water was back on and all was running smoothly again and I got to handwash some of my laundry.