Moroccan Listings

I’ll sum up my orientation to Morocco in lists. You can await a breathless oh-my-god-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into-what-is-that-and-how-many-ways-can-you-make-a-guttural-noise at a later juncture.

My scheduled seminars for first day of orientation, in order:
1. Health Issues
2. Safety and Security Guidelines
3. Fears and Expectations
4. Lunch
5. Introducing Bargaining

Badrdine’s tips for bargaining in Morocco:
1. Show indifference
2. Shop around. Every store is the same.
3. Use Arabic. “ssalamu ‘lekum”, peace be upon you, is the way to any Morccan’s heart.
4. Bring a companion.
5. Have change in your pockets.
6. Always ask ¼ of the price.
7. If all else fails, just walk away. They’ll call you back if they can make profit.


Words taught to survive the first night at the homestay:
Shukran: Thank you
Safi: Enough, I’m full.
Shabaat: I swear, I’m fine.
Kuhli: Eat. (usually repeated by host mom)

Bad Scheduling:
Thursday, Febuary 3rd
3:00
Meet family

Friday, Febuary 4th
8:30-10:00 am
Begin Survival Arabic
11:30-12:30
Lunch with your families
Enjoy your Week end (:


My only description of my host family before meeting them:

Name: Drissi
Mother: Fatima
Father: Moustafa
Daughters: Iman and Hamid

Languages Spoken: Moroccan Arabic, English (few), French
Room: Single
Bathroom: Turkish
Water: Hot

Harper’s index, SIT Multiculturalism and Human Rights in Morocco version.
Number of monarchies in the world: 27
Number of Arabic countries in the world: 22
Number of Islamic countries: 57
Number of countries in the world: 193
Total world Arabic population: 350 million
Total world Muslim population: 1.7 billion
Total Moroccan population: 33 million
Percentage of Moroccans that identify as Muslim: 99%
Number of newly appointed judges in Morocco that are women: 25%
Percentage of Moroccans whose mother language is Berber: at least 50%
Percentage or Moroccan’s who are Berber: unknown.
Total number of people in my program: 37
Number of men in my program: 7
Number of people in the other SIT Morocco program: 12
Number of men in that program: 0
Percentage of participants majoring in International SomethingorOther: 78%
Percentage of people with a major name that is too long: 89%
-i.e. Politics with a Minor in Peace, Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation. Major in Humanities, Media and Cultural Studies. Double Major in Anthropology and International Studies with a Minor in English Literature.
Number of women with a major and/or minor with “Gender” or “Women’s” in the title: 7
Middle Eastern Studies majors: 6
Jewish Studies majors: 2

(the last five stats are educated guesses).

Producto de Los Estados Unidos

WE PRETEND TO LISTEN FOR FOOD

My program took a trip to Rabuco, an agricultural area outside of Valparaiso and toured a blueberry farm with the stated intention, as set out by our director, to understand the effects of globalization in Chile’s agriculture. The real reason all of the students were there was for the promised feast we would (and did) have later. With the unfortunate scheduling of the excursion on a Saturday morning, the resulting collective sleep deprivation and the general indifference to blueberries (besides eating them), we were not at our academic best.

Last semester I took the “International Political Economy of Food and Hunger”, so despite the weight of a sleepy friend’s head on my shoulder for the majority of the tour, I made an effort to pay attention since I had spent the good part of a semester debating about how exactly globalization affects farmers in developing countries such as Chile. For the most part, it was in vain. The jolly owner showed us the unripe blueberry plants, took us into the room where they held the chemicals they sprayed, and showed us the outfits they picked berries in. I began to wonder about lunch.

THIS PART IS ACTUALLY INTERESTING

Once we got into the packing plant I had broken off from both the group and relieved myself from my friend’s head and began to wander around, thinking about what lunch might consist of. I found myself staring lazily at the packets the blueberries were put in, unconsciously reading the words: “Sunnydale Blueberries! Product of the USA”.

What.

While I hadn’t paid much attention, I had at least gathered that these blueberries were by no stretch of the imagination or FDA rules being produced in the States, much less at the Florida address stamped on them.

I had a brief inner struggle about whether I should embarrass this kindly man about whether his operation was essentially illegal but decided I owed it to my hours spent in Food and Hunger to at least ask. After all, I would not be able to tell this story if I didn’t have a suitable ending.

THE PUNCH LINE

When I asked the owner his look of confusion made me think that my Spanish made my question unintelligible. I showed him the packet and told him what “Product of the United States” translated to in Spanish.

He smiled and said that the company just sends him the boxes to fill up with blueberries. He was responsible for the blueberries meeting their export standards but what how they labeled the blueberries was their own “engaño”.

Engaño is one of those words that has many translations but each one is illuminating. Engaño means: deceit, swindle, trick, ploy, mistake, misunderstanding and hoax. (Thank you, SpanishDict.com) I think all are appropriate.

On that note, he decided to direct us to the free samples of blueberry jam. My friend started to speculate on how awesome it may be if the jam was dispensed by massive jam-shooting guns hanging from the ceiling accompanied by women covered only by mashed blueberries, rather than in jars. I think there may have been sound effects.

AND THE AFTERMATH

This experience (jam-shooting aside) made it startling real many of the things that I had talked about in class. (See, Dad, it’s not called “not study” abroad, it’s just learning in a different cultural context). It served as a confirmation of what I had learned and now is a perfect anecdote to illustrate what a strange, deceitful, tricky, hoaxy food system we live with.

Labels aren’t to be trusted—I would be very curious to see how the blueberries make it into the United States in these boxes and whether the FDA knows about their existence. If they do, I wonder if there is some loophole that allows them to be marketed as such.

The fractured supply chain—watching the farmer shrug off the responsibility for who eats his berries demonstrated how estranged the food system has made the producer and consumer. Between them is the looming middle man of a transnational corporation.

The importance of face-to-face information—So where does this leave people who are determined to buy local or at least from their own country? If you can’t trust the labels and federal regulatory organization, who can you trust? (Douse with skepticism, light with irony).

No, but seriously. The information gap makes it almost impossible to be a conscientious consumer. Perhaps someday there will be an iPhone app for that. In the meantime, I award another point to the farmer’s market.

Sounds of Valparaiso

Many a morning I have laid in bed cursing the streets of Valparaiso. To be clear, I love this city. These are the damnations made by the recently and rudely awakened. Each morning I have the distinct pleasure of enjoying, from my own bed, the symphony of obnoxious noises that make up the street life of Valparaiso.

It is mainly due to location. The next-door church clock tower, the busy street below and the fire station across the street are relatively discreet. In this case, relative is the operative word.

Across the street is the headquarters of the Santiago Wanders, which, despite it’s name, is Valparaiso’s home soccer team. The Wanders and their fans are unanimously recognized as “flaite”, a Chilean socioeconomic category characterized by poverty, low education, an aggressive demeanor, a vulgar vocabulary and a fierce love for playing reggaeton from their cell phones in public. On game days, the die-hard fans line in front of the building to drink cheap beer and yell. They chant fútbol cheers, holler at passing women, harass passing men, argue loudly about sports statistics and probably even remark on the weather at an elevated volume. On special days they remember to bring the drums. This all begins at the godforsaken hour of 9 am on a Saturday.

During the week, the noises of the street take a more academic turn. The local schools regularly fill the streets with marching bands from the military academy, drum lines from the alternative school, even German heritage pageants from the German language school. Non school-sanctioned activities include mass walkouts protesting the government’s education budget cuts.

Other sounds can be heard throughout Chile. There are the ever-present car alarms, which I can now imitate from memory. There is the man who is selling 7 kitchen towels for a dollar and announces this incredible offer by repeating it rapid-fire through a static filled megaphone. (Thankfully the Wanders fans have not yet been so inspired). There also is the lazier and more-tech savvy salesman who plays his spiel from equally static boom box. The wares change but they always are of poor quality and dubious utility.

The source of the most obnoxious and prevalent sound—a repetitive metallic clanging that goes on for minutes—remained a mystery to me for a month. Turns out, it was the propane man. Most of these door-to-door salesmen yell and some have rhythm but they all push a cart full of tanks and bang a stick against the metal to announce their presence. It feels like it is banging against your own eardrums.

Finally, there is a strange moaning call I hear some mornings whose source I have avoided discovering. The pitch and rhythm is always the same but the words are indiscernible. I have decided to imagine a mythical creature that wanders the streets of Valparaiso, undetectable besides its call. Of course, it is searching for long-lost love. It probably looks like Sasquatch.

Perhaps I entertain this fantasy because I am in between dreaming and waking. Or perhaps because surrounded by the reality of the junk salesman, gas tanks, drunk soccer fans, uniformed drum lines and protesting students, I don’t want to know the truth. Or perhaps it is that I simply I want to preserve the mystery of this city. I want to leave some of it unknown, left to be discovered. Or, I don’t want to get out of bed to find out.

los 33

So after a long absence, mining is my theme. Below you’ll read about my recent travels, how to know when the desert flowers, what makes Chileans honk their horns, why zee Germans are in Chile, the still fresh Bolivian grudge against Chile from 1884, the Day of National Dignity and how it caused the coup, a little IPE jargon, stories of real live Chilean miners that I met in real life and also a link to a quite informative article.

This past week I took a trip up the coast of Chile with some friends to see the desierto florido or flowering desert. Every few years or so, depending on the rainfall, parts of the desert in Chile will spontaneously burst into bloom. It can happen in many different places, but usually centers around Vallenar and Copiapó. It’s impressive, considering this country is home to the Atacama desert which has the distinction of being the driest place on earth. This phenomenon is one of those natural wonders that so unpredictable that it can still easily be enjoyed without seeing a gift shop. The 6 day trip up was everything you could dream of as a gringo college student—our lives contained in our backpacks, every night clandestinely sleeping on beaches, surviving on deli meat, cheese, bread and avocado for every meal, never showering—I had a blast. I’ll put some more photos up on my tumblr, for all to see.

When we were driving through the desert, taking in the dusty hills that have been transformed by washes of fuchsia, yellow and baby blue, our driver told us that about 34 km away were the trapped miners. It was odd standing in the dry heat with the sun beating down on my already burnt face while that only X miles away there are men who hadn’t seen the sun for…how many days?

When the miners first sent up their letter with saying they were alive after XX days, I was in an underground museum in Santiago. As my friend and I entered an exhibit of staged photos of the who’s who of Chile committing unspeakable acts in the darkness of the Santiago nighttime, a security guard stopped us with the news. Los 33 todavía son vivo. When we got above ground the city was reverberating with the honking of cars. As we walked down an avenue cars went by with Chilean flags waving out windows and words painted on their hatchbacks? I tried to imagine that sort of spontaneous, public, communal celebration happening in the US. Chalk it up to culture, to a different brand of nationalism, to latin passion, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the States unless there is a sports team involved.

Mining is integral not only Chile’s economy but also their national identity. We are a country of copper, a Chilean told me, which is Chile’s most exported natural resource. In fact, mining created Chile’s borders. The War of the Pacific (1879-1884), that Chile won quite handily against Peru and Bolivia, started with disputes over the mining region of Antofogasta. For a few decades Bolivia and Chile had shared the territory, giving free reign to their respective venture capitalists, obviously an arrangement meant to be broken. By the way, while Chilean entrepreneurs, engineers and miners were flocking to what is on the surface an arid wasteland, the fledgling Chilean state was paying Germans to populate the much greener and hospitable south. (More on Chilean Deutschophilia later).

In any case, secret treaties were made, there were arguments over taxes, so inevitably war broke out. Chile, much more unified than Peru or Bolivia, won and came away with some heroic stories to retell during national holidays and two more regions chocked full of mines (more on Arturo Pratt later). Bolivia, on the other hand lost its access to the sea, which they are still contesting to this day (current request: 10 km of coastline). Peru lost dignity and territory. This new acquisition was a very lucrative source of income for the Chilean state and much needed to solidify its hold on the area.

The mines, however, were not a continual blessing for the Chilean state, nor did they even stay in Chilean hands. The elite in Chile, since the beginning, have tended toward a mutually beneficial (for them) combination of a conservative politics with very liberal economics. Sounds familiar, right? As mercantilism faded into a more free market policy, the income from the mines stopped flowing back into Chile and instead was extracted (hah) out by multinationals.

There was a break in this process of extraction is when the mines were made state property during a process known as the Chileanization of Copper, starting in 1955 with the establishment of a government body to deal with the multinationals and then worked towards state ownership through “negotiated nationalization” in which the state bought shares to avoid conflict with businesses (and according the Wikipedia article, the US). Then, that dastardly or saintly—depends who you ask—President Salvador Allende took a drastic or much needed—again, depends…—step and got Congress to unanimously pass a constitutional amendment that nationalized all mines, present and future, which was celebrated with the Day of National Dignity. These fairly radical socialist policies were the catalyst for the coup that instated the military government or dictatorship—…who you ask—headed by the infamous General Augusto Pinochet. Under Pinochet the mines were made private once more, as they are to this day.

I could write about resource traps and what they mean for the development of a country, but this article summarizes much better.

If you don’t want to read it, heres the jist:

A problem facing Chile and other Latin American countries is “the inability to break free of the shackles of commodities exploitation, which provides their livelihoods but leaves them perennially vulnerable to boom-and-bust cycles and wild currency fluctuations. It also consumes capital that might be used to develop higher-revenue, and more stable sources of wealth, like manufacturing”…as well investment in science, technology and education.

Still,the inter/multi/transnational ownership of the Chile's natural resources is a common complaint, with the main culprits being Canada, the US and Spain (and globalization looming in the background). It seems the only mining money this country really sees is from the income of those who are employed in it, and I’ve met many of them. My friend’s host dad is gone every other two weeks to drive a truck at a mine near Iquiqui, I talked with a man who does surveying for a Canadian mining company and spends most of his weeks traveling and I met a 20 year old Rastafarian from Copiapó who has a son on the way who is studying to be a mechanic in the mines. What ties these people together is that while the mines are providing their employment, their jobs are inconvenient, to say the least, and mostly chosen out of necessity. And lets not forget that mining is so dangerous that when the mine first collapsed on los 33, they weren’t the least bit surprised, they had been expecting it.

So, as I was passing through the northern parts of this country, I was glad to see all the Chilean flags inscribed with messages such “Esperamos por los 33”, esperar being a verb that encompasses wishing, waiting, hoping and expecting. At the same time though, I wonder if this will be a moment when the country not only revises its safety policy for mines (which, of course, the government is promising) but also reexamines what mining means for this country now, and whether it should continue to define it.

los modismos

Why hello there. How is it going?
Or, in Chilean...Hola wn/a, que onda wn/a...

To break it down:
Wn o weon, is Chilean phonetic spelling for huevon which is huevo (meaning egg) + ón, the ending that they tack onto words to mean it’s big. And the significance of big eggs of course has the crudest of roots.

Like most Chilean slang its all how you say it. At times it’s a term of affection--dude, bro, pal, what have you. Or, with accompanying hand gestures, it means fucker. I've heard a Chileana comforting another girl about a guy who was a jerk with: "Que weon, weona", meaning, "What a fucker, dude(tte)." While they may not have a lot of words, what they have, they so frequently they could put frat boys to shame, brah.

Que onda means, quite literally, how are the vibes? There is a Physics class called Ondas. My host mom's shampoo promises Ondas Perfectas. People/Places/Things are categorized by their ondas. My friend was taking a class where he has to do a presentation on what he likes so the class could feel his ondas. He has since reluctantly dropped the class.

Surprisingly, slang is a great conversation starter. Every Chilean loves their slang, from my professors complaining about the ubiquitous filler word “po” to a punk kid I met in a squatter house who quizzed me rapid fire about the dirtiest words. I now carry around a notebook of slang and whenever I whip it out Chileans love to add. Of course, its not quite kosher.

Slang is also very revealing about a culture. Take the word flaite. It means “ghetto” but in the “sketchy” sense. Although American rap culture is here in full force it seems the concept of ghetto fabulous did not get imported. But, as my host mom said, every country has a word for flaite, just as every country has a group that has been so entrenched in poverty that it has created its own culture.

Here is the one that really blows my mind (though no for delicate readers): choro. This word is used like “pussy” but it also can apply to a hard gangsta. Lets just reflect on the implications of calling a male a pussy in the United States.

In closing, here is a sampling of Chilean slang:

palta-avocado (in sp., aguacate, very common here, more on that later)
al tiro-immediately
1,000 pesos-una luca
quemar el arroz-to be gay (literally, to burn the rice)
tocate-show
cuático-out there, weird
La picada-the BEST place
filete, la raja, polenta, bacan-cool (I’m waiting to learn the distinctions)

Upcoming topics: micros, completos and my classes.

Up North, ya know.

This is in Brule, WI. My family goes up to a cabin there with a bunch of their old friends. This year I asked my mom how they knew everyone and after each name she paused, thought, and said "music."
We've been going since I was 4, it was nice to return once again to a familiar place, with familiar people--in the "like family" sense. For one family, the Pucci's, my brother is Cousin Carlo and many of the adults have Aunt and Uncle prefixes.

Highlights included a drenched 3o mile ride to Lake Superior and back, another very successful trip to the Fig Leaf, a small town thrift store (high waisted coral shorts, $1.25!), watching World Cup semifinals in a small empty bar on Highway 2, and the 13th (or so, whose counting?) annual talent show, this time at 9:30 am featuring the vocal styling of a 4 year old boy in a Buzz Lightyear costume. And of course, who could forget the 4th of July celebrations put on by the Village of Lake Nebagamon. There was a parade of Miss and Little Miss Lake Nebagamon, a VW bug dressed up as the terrible Hodag and an intimidating black truck with Ole's written across it in red white and blue. All's well in Middle America.

Firsties.

Current location: Minneapolis, my bedroom.

Off Into the Wild Blue Yonder.

Didn't know that this phrase comes from a song commonly known as the Air Force Song. Not sure if that bodes well.

So, here we go. As the song says,

Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At 'em boys, Give 'er the gun! (Give 'er the gun now!)
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under,
Off with one helluva roar!
We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey!
Nothing'll stop the U.S. Air Force!