Miskin Hakim!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I haven’t been able to get into a town with internet for the past few weeks. The village I live in doesn’t have an internet café and Peace Corps doesn’t allow us to leave our training sites very often. The theory is that if you leave too often, you don’t integrate well into the community. I think it’s a good theory, but its hard to be out of touch with the world so much.

The Peace Corps has had to send the program coordinator assistant down to my training site at least a few times each with for different issues that have cropped up. My town normally only has water a few days a week for a few hours each day. They alternate between the different villages because water is scarce in this region. Unfortunately, the water pump broke about a week ago. This means the houses are all without water. My host family goes to the well a few times each day to get water and stores it in different buckets around the house. Unfortunately, the well water isn’t treated, so its not very safe. Hopefully, they’ll get the pump working soon because the lack of water is a pain.

Besides the lack of water, the other exciting thing that happened was my 13 year-old host brother fell off the roof and broke his arm. My host dad had already gone back to Casablanca, where he works for the majority of the year, so it was up to my 19 year old host-sister Hasna to take him to the doctor. My host mom, Hafida, doesn’t leave the house very often. It’s a fairly common practice in this village, like in other conservative villages in Morocco. Women stay at home once they are married while men do all the shopping, etc. It’s fascinating to see the different ways Morocco and America differ.

Anyway, Hakim fell off the roof and broke his arm, so Hasna took him to the doctor in Azilal. They gave him a cast, but no pain medication (not even Tylenol.) I felt so bad for him, but he’s a very tough kid and seemed to cope well with the pain. My host dad came back from Casablanca a few days later to help get everything settled with Hakim. They took him back to the doctor a few days later and were told they would have to take him to a specialist (which costs more money.) The speciliast didn’t have an opening for a few days, so Brahim took Hakim to the traditional healer. The healer removed his cast and rebroke his arm. Hasna said it took two men to hold Hakim down and that he was screaming. He really is a tough kid though, because after a few weeks he is moving his fingers and his arm around. He said he’ll be able to take the cast off in a few days.