April in Granada

Ok so I’m a month behind, I’ll try to be better, but it’s been such a busy one including

major events like a 21st birthday (mine actually) and a trip to Morocco, that it get hard to find time to blog. So put on your reading glasses, this is gonna be a long one with lots of pictures.

I’ve been developing a great relationship with my university professor and I usually sit an talk with him for about 45 minutes an hour every week about the class, my experience here, etc, which is great practice for me and just in general a lot of fun. So, I went in to talk to him one week and expressed some concern about doing sufficient work for our group project and his reply was, “Hey I’m friends with the first female gypsy lawyer in Spain, do you want to have coffee with her tomorrow morning?” The next morning I met with Jose Miguel (my prof) and Paqui Fernandez and though it wasn’t so much the interview I was expecting (Paqui pretty much dominated the conversation) I learned an incredible amount about the gypsy population here in Granada and the Ccentro Sociocultural Gitano Andaluz where she works. I’m totally spoiled to have developed this kind of connection and I’m really looking forward to the other meeting I have set up with Jose Miguel. The plan is that before the end of the semester I’ll go with him to the women’s prison in the area, the juvenile center where he works with immigrant children and a music festival.

Biology continues to be interesting and a constant source of amusement for us, the language barrier always manages to produce a few funny jokes. Since my last post we’ve gone on two more excursions, one to Hoja de Baza the Spanish badland and one to Lajaron an area in the south of the Sierra Nevada. For these two trips we’ve been packed into a tiny bus that we now jokingly refer to as the bio party bus and despite the tiring walks and the long day they have been pretty incredible. During this last trip to the mountains the bus took us all the way to the top so we were actually looking down on some others and were able to see the Mediterranean and had the day been clearer we would have been able to see the outline of the African coastline as well. This particular area had been affected by forest fires so we discussed the effects of fires on the environment, the effects of savage logging and counted pine saplings to better understand.

For my university class our final project, and apparently the only real sort of work required for us this semester, each group has to select a marginalized group represented in Granada’s population and do interviews to better understand their point of view. So my group decided (ok mostly they decided) to learn more about drug addicts and the rehabilitation process of the Spain based organization Proyecto Hombre. We set up an appointment one morning during the week with a counselor for the organization, he obviously wanted to go over our questions with us to make sure we weren’t asking anything to personal or provocative, and with a drug addict going through their program. The interview was incredible and intensely emotional for each of us and at one point the woman began to cry talking about the effect of drugs on her family and her relationship with her young daughter. I was so impressed by her courage and her willingness to talk to a group of students and I feel like it was an important opportunity for us to gain that sort of insight into her life.

I continue to go to lots of theater performances with my theater class and I’ve seen two excellent productions recently. The first was called 2660 (ok I think the last number is wrong, but it’s something like that) and was a five-hour long work that consisted of five different sections. Going in I was counting on it being amazing because it’s really gutsy for a theater company to put on such a long show, but it was definitely worth the time. Overall the pieces seemed completely disconnected except for one theme, which was a reference to ciudad Juarez and the murders of the hundreds of women there, though by the last piece we were able to see the full circle of the play. One of the reasons I loved it so much was because it was a very alternative type of theater with very creative ways of telling the story. In my favorite section all 8 actors squeezed into a small portion of the stage and while telling their story were simultaneously videoed and projected on a screen above them. Occasionally instead of the live feed a previously shot dinner of the 8 actors in costume at a Mexican restaurant was shown instead and there was lots of fast paced jumping and dancing. Then a few weeks ago I went to another production called Sindrome Clown, which was by far the funny play I’ve seen in years. Granted it was in Spanish and I only understood half, these guys had intense accents, but I was holding my sides I was laughing so hard. There were only two actors and then one guys sitting on the side playing violin and basically the these two “clowns” were attempting to hold the entire audience hostage. Then for an hour and a half we laughed as every possible thing went wrong with the process, including the making of a “torture video” of an audience member (they videoed him eating stale bread on a cell phone and yelling help with his mouth full), multiple phone calls to the police and the writing of their list of requirements from the police (which included the ingredients for pisto, a traditional Spanish dish).

I also continue to go to flamenco performances with my flamenco class and last night we went to a show depicting Frida Kahlo’s life in dance. The live music was incredible and included some jazz and folk music along with traditional flamenco music and it was very interesting to see a group perform choreographed dances instead of individuals improvise. What made this performance more unique though was the fact that the role of Frida was performed by a male flamenco dancer.

Almost two weeks ago now I celebrated my 21st birthday! I had a very nice night, ate dinner with some friends, went to a bar owned by a friend who opened a bottle of champagne for us and went out dancing for awhile before going home. But, what made this birthday so special for me was my trip to Morocco. We actually left the morning of April 10th so I spent my day in Gibraltar walking around the Rock of Gibraltar, through the St. Michael’s caverns, watching the monkeys and a group of us went out for fish and chips that night. I had a great day, but we were all exhausted and I was in bed by 11. The next morning we woke up and took the ferry across the strait to Morocco and then took a bus into Tangier were we ate lunch. I had a lot of stereotypes about the oppression of women, many of which were proven true by this trip, but that first day we stopped for lunch at the Darma Women’s Center in Tangier and I was also given hope. The center is designed to teach women how to read, write, program computers, weave, or various other tasks in order to allow them to work or open their own stores. That afternoon we drove into Rabat where we were paired off and sent home with a Moroccan host family. While this was one of the most interesting parts of the trip it was also one of the most difficult because of the obvious language barrier. In our host family we (I lived with two other IES students) had a mom, two sisters and then three family friends who lived there as well, so in the eyes of Moroccan society there was no male figure in the household definitely limited the opportunities of the girls in the household, and therefore us. During the next few days with my family I learned the art of using a Turkish toilet, took a bath in the Hammam (the public Arabic baths), ate incredible food, heard the morning call to prayer, saw our family’s bakery (which also meant lots of fresh bread every day), saw part of a Moroccan wedding, walked through the night market (with a male escort of course), had a discussion with a Moroccan professor, talked with Moroccan university students over tea and held very “conversations” over lunch that consisted mostly of gestures and funny faces. At the end of the time with our host family I was very sad to go and our sweet, sweet host mom gave us huge hugs and kisses as we said bye. From there we drove to a very small, rural town and ate lunch with a family in the community. The idea was to give us the opportunity talk with them and ask questions about rural life in Morocco, but they were so soft spoken and shy that the highlight for most of us ended up being the walk up the mountain, the view from the top and the time we spent playing with the young children. Then we drove to Chefchauoen where we spent our last night. Our huge IES group had been split into four groups of about 16 students so the 16 of us took over this tiny but beautiful hostel in the city and spent the rest of the day shopping and exploring. To celebrate our last night we went to an incredible Moroccan restaurant called Casa Aladdin that over looked the Kasbah of the city. After dinner we all met up on the roof of our hostel with big blankets to talk about our experiences, the highlights and surprises. For me at least it was a great opportunity to talk out some of my frustrations about the experience and Moroccan society and to reflect on the major differences between American, Spanish and Moroccan lifestyles. The next morning we woke up drove through the shanty towns in the city so that we could see the extreme poverty and the effect of tourism and resorts on the area and then went back to the port to take the return ferry to Spain. For me there were many shocking parts to this trip, but the experience that by far shocked me the most was watching the interactions between officers and women crossing the Spanish-Moroccan border and seeing the way I was treated as an American citizen. My little blue passport and my white face gained me incredible treatment and as an American I was waved through almost every line, past waiting Moroccans, without being stopped to have my id checked. One of the few women who actually looked at my picture seemed to really only want to strike up a conversation and wanted to know what I thought of her country and her people. But then I watched them literally shoving older Moroccan women carrying bags on their bags and in their hands only to turn to me and give me a huge smile. It was such a sick power trip. Overall it was absolutely eye opening, I’ve never been exposed to such poverty, such discrimination, such sexism and I have never in my life been so uncomfortable being a woman. It gives you a lot to think about and I’m still thinking. It’s the sort of trip you’re not really supposed to recover from.

It’s so hard for me to believe that my experience in Spain is coming to an end. I only have a little over one month left here before I return to the states. From some obvious reasons I’m so excited about getting back, but it’s going to be so hard to leave a place I’ve come to love. The end of the semester also means a ton of work and I’m beginning to tackle my final projects, which thanks to great grades on my midterms I’m a little less worried about now. Still though, my time will be packed, there is so much I still want to do and see here in Granada. I love you and miss you all!

bss


Pictures: So they are pretty much all out of orders, so here's what they're of from top down. #1 - the view of the city of Chefchauoen and the Rift mountains in the morning from the roof of our hostel. #2 - some of us with a few of the girls from the village we visited at the top of the hill. #3 - me on a camel on a beach in Morocco, I had no idea it was so hard to hold on as a camel stands up! #4 - where I was standing in Gibraltar to take this picture I could see where the Atlantic and Mediterranean meet and the coastlines of both Spain and Africa. #5 - this is most of my university group with the woman we interviewed from Proyecto Hombre. #6 - my Mediterranean Ecosystems pine sapling counting team in the Sierra Nevada.