Adaptation/Wuluf/Myar

I’ve been living in my village for nearly seven months now, which according to Peace Corps places me somewhere between the “Adjustment” and “Mid-Service Crisis” phases of my experience in Morocco.

Sometimes I feel like no time has passed at all; yesterday I was swept along to an enormous 4-course feast in a faraway village where I was interrogated by friendly elderly women who scolded me for not eating enough and doused with perfume and made to feel my Tashlheet language skills were middling to nonexistent (I was doing well for tea and cookies, but by the time they whisked away the tagine and replaced it with a full-on plate of couscous my vocabulary was as scarce as spare room in my tummy).

But then, mrra mrra (from time to time) I look around and realize that as I’ve been slowly piecing together the puzzle of life and culture and work here, I’ve undergone a very gradual but significant series of adaptations (not the least of which is slipping all sorts of Arabic phrases into my everyday parlance, including mrra mrra, waxa, safi, and the ever-present insha’allah, which has kind of become a whole new paradigm for looking at the world…but that’s an entry for another day). The question most frequently asked of me by Moroccans employs two more of my favorite words – “wuluf,” in Arabic, and “myar,” in Tashlheet – both of which mean to adjust, adapt, or get used to something. “kan-wuluf” and “ar tymyargh” – “I’m adjusting” – are still some of my most-used phrases, and as the summer sets in (with a whole new set of challenges) they’re especially apt.

A few of my other adaptations (or “wulufs” as I like to think of them, in a total corruption of the Arabic language…):

Bedding: I now sleep under an elaborately rigged heavy duty mosquito net and improvised canopy to ward off not only mosquitoes and flies but scorpions and all manner of dirt and dust particles that my ceiling routinely rains. I try to think of it as living in a fort.

Shoes: I check them for scorpions without even thinking now!

Theory of relativity: I have come to accept that truth is relative and so is time, and not in any postmodern intellectual Foucaultian way. One of the most useful lessons I’ve learned here is that Moroccans hate saying “I don’t know,” and to many people here, hazarding a guess in response to a question is sincerely more truthful than offering no information at all. Talk is cheap here, and seeing is believing. One day I’m sure I’ll wake up having converted to the cult of empiricism; I try not to believe anything about this place I haven’t personally witnessed. And even so, I’m painfully aware of the Heisenberg principle – that the act of observing an event or phenomenon changes it. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to ascertain how much of what I see is being affected or altered because of my presence – the presence of a white person, an American, a non-Muslim, a development worker.

Neatness: I always neatly fold my bedding and clothes now, because sometimes when you don’t there are mice and scorpions lurking in the rumpled-ness.

Dining: I’ve finally figured out why Moroccans eat so late at night: for those of us in “bled” kitchens (literally, country kitchens, which are more or less open-air), daytime in the summer equals flies (no matter how well you curtain or screen off the door…I have no idea how they do it) and intense heat – such that it’s really not worth doing anything in the kitchen till the sun goes down (about 9 pm these days). The other day I tried cooking something around 6 pm and by the time I was done I was drenched in sweat and trying to kill flies with my chef’s knife.