Thursday, February 10, 2011

I'm updating again!!!

...though this time not from the comfort of my home. I don't know why, but the home Internet is so slow. I mean, I do know why. It's dial-up, and I live in the middle of nowhere. Anyhow, sorry if I was chatting with any of you and then I suddenly disappeared, that's just how the home Internet rolls.

For reasons I don't quite understand and which no kid has been able to explain to me, the kids have had school off for the last day and a half. Since most kids live up in my 'hood and don't go down to the dar chebab unless they have school, that means no work for me. Here's some things I've done with my time off:

-Scared the bejeesus out of a donkey (I still don't understand how this happened. And no, it wasn't intentional.)
-Had a dance party in my house. Forgot that my floor is uneven and wiped out in the middle of a rousing rendition of "I Just Can't Wait to Be King."
-Discovered the secret to getting the right consistency in my marinara sauce. (Hint: Stick it in the food processor.)
-Got mocked by two children for making tea with tea bags and not putting sugar in it.
-Ate a lot of bread.
-Thought about showering this morning but then remembered that it's only been 4 days since my last shower so I'm probs good for another couple of days.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

OMG, I'm actually updating my blog!

I bet you all thought I forgot about the blog! To be honest, I kind of had. My Internet options here in G-town (I can't tell you where I actually live lest you should try to use this information to stalk me...) are pretty non-existent, so until I got Internet set up at the house last week I couldn't really update the blog. Even now my Internet is so slow. Like seriously, the only thing slower than my Internet is the speed at which my sleeping bag is drying after I washed it to get out the puppy poo. But even if the Internet is slow, I'm gonna try really hard to get better at updating this thing.

So, some of y'all in America have been asking me what I do here. That's a decent question, as I'm not always sure myself. The last couple months I've been focusing on "community assessment," which is basically me hanging out with people and asking them stuff about G-town and what goes on here, what kind of stuff is important to them, what they want me to do, etc. This has been somewhat complicated by the fact that I originally found the way they talk out here in almost-Algeria to be incomprehensible. I won't go into all the linguistic differences, but here's an example: There's no second-person masculine out here. So that's been an on-going struggle. Even today, I was telling a kid I liked her shoes and she told me that wasn't the word for shoes, and I'm like, "Um, that's def what it said in my book," and she's like, "Yeah, but that's what people in the West talk like. We don't say that." Cut me a break, kids. This book is from Rabat. Rabat is in the West. Can't you just be impressed that I know any word for shoes, even if it's not the right one?

But it's not all hanging around and assessing stuff. I teach English sometimes, too. I play monkey-in-the-middle a lot, like pretty much everyday. I got some theater projects in the works. But yeah, honestly, there's a lot of hanging around and trying to integrate into the community. And....the strength of my Internet is fading fast, so even though there's probs a lot more I could say, I'm gonna go ahead and post this while I still can....if I still can....