"It is hot as the hell, yes?"

Greetings from breezy Morocco, where for the past couple days it’s been around 110 degrees Fahrenheit! Anyone want to visit? My dad asked me a few weeks ago what it smells like here: generally it smells about the same, but right now it smells like hot. The aforementioned breeze is remarkably similar to a hairdryer, and to stand in the ALIF program garden at 3 PM, with its tile walkways and patio, is to bake. I may have known what “sweating” meant before coming here, but I never truly understood until yesterday. When you wake up at 4 AM with the pillow stuck to your neck, after having been in repose at least three hours, that’s sweating. And who knew forearms could sweat? I didn’t! But, as with everything, it’s just another thing to which we Westerners must adjust. I drink a truly astonishing amount of water a day, I take cold showers, I sit on the floor to do homework… I deal. 

The first week of classes is nearly over, and boy what a week it’s been. I absolutely love it here. The fruit is so good it almost hurts, the people are friendly, and my host family is a bucket of laughs. On Monday we received another student into the house named Jeannie. Having someone else who’s learning Arabic has given me the courage to do away with English more of the time, and I can tell a difference already. Jeannie and I have a lot in common, get along great, speak Arabic at the same level, both have short hair, and… at home she goes by her middle name, Katherine. To avoid confusion at home she's using her first name. I think there must be something mystical about Morocco’s relationship to the center of the earth that makes these kinds of serendipitous/bizarre coincidences happen so regularly.

There is no way to accurately describe how frustrating and humbling and hilarious Jeannie and my conversations with our host family are when we’re struggling through a simple sentence like “We had good juice today”. The oldest brother Hamid, who’s become our surrogate father/tour guide/professor because he speaks near-fluent English, helped me with homework last night, which means by the end he was very depressed. He finally looked at me, with a kind but baffled look on his face, and said of my Arabic syntax, “Is like I give you hands, feet, and head, and you put hands with feet and head with hands.” It does sometimes feel like achieving fluency in Arabic is as likely as winning Calvinball, but as I get used to my professors and finding a time to do homework between all the interaction with the family (which I refuse to sacrifice) and eating dinner at midnight or later, I think it will get easier.

A related bit of information is that in the space of a single day I managed to mess up three times and say embarrassing, disrespectful, and/or inappropriate things that would’ve probably been unforgivable had a native speaker said them. I know they’re bad because no one would even tell me what they meant. Ha! It’s a good thing my host family has a sense of humor.

The other thing is that I’ve been drinking swimming-pool amounts of tap water at home with no side effects. I knew that this was fortunate, but I didn’t realize that it’s downright amazing until I went to our orientation the second day of class and heard our professors say, in tones of gravest sincerity, “DO. NOT. DRINK. THE. WATER.” They say if I’m okay so far there’s no reason to think it will change. I am, apparently, super.