What it's been like

In a bizarre turn of events, I found myself in Virginia this week. Now that I’m back in Rabat, drinking mint tea in a café by myself, I can’t really wrap my head around the fact that I was taking a walk with my parents the night before last.

Maybe it’s because I brought some flannel back with me but it feels a little like Autumn here too. It’s got me feeling cozy and introspective.

While I was home for a few days, I had the interesting situation of processing out loud something I’m still in the process of doing. It was an exercise in finding out how I feel, hearing myself say things and realizing I meant them. Well, yes it IS going well. Yeah, I guess I DO like it. Now that you ask me, I AM glad I came here.

I think that’s why I’m having a hard time keeping up over here in the blogosphere. It’s not really in my nature to document something in the present. It seems tenuous, considering how moody I can be. And when I go to write, what comes out isn’t what I’m presently experiencing but what I’ve been thinking. Things totally (or seemingly) irrelevant to my surroundings: making French Onion soup in Nashville, my poetry professor in college who began every class by striking a gong, a weird memory I have of crying at October Sky as a kid and not knowing why.

But at the same time I know I should get over that because it’ll be over before I know it, appearing in odd-shaped, amorphous blurs when I go to write about some other future present.

So here’s a taste of what the past two months have been like:

 

 

 

October 6

Today was finally my first day in the classroom. It’s a long journey to think back to the early drafts of my Fulbright application, writing how I'd hypothetically handle "classroom issues." I remember sitting on speaker phone in my stinking hot car in the driveway of the McLaughlin's last July, listening to the Fulbright panel dissect my drafts. I had gone over the minutes on my family’s phone plan and I was stressing out because I’d have to pay for it. And I was thinking how it probably wouldn’t lead to anything anyways. And now here I am sitting on the floor of my room in Morocco, drinking a Casablanca after my first day teaching a university class.

I was so nervous beforehand that I couldn’t sleep last night. I literally lay awake until 4 am wired, worrying I’d oversleep, panicking that I wouldn’t be able to drop off. It’s funny thinking back to high school or college classes and how my teachers or professors – at least some of them – must have felt the same way before our first day. It’s so hard to see outside of yourself when you’re school aged. I couldn’t have imagined that maybe someone else’s palms were sweaty too.

But the truth is, at the back of my mind, I was kind of banking on no one showing up. That happened to a fellow ETA in El Jadida last week. No one showed up for one of her classes and then just a few showed up for her other. It’s supposedly standard for the first day of class here. Schedules and room assignments are still in flux. One of my Moroccan friends told me not to teach on the first day. She told me don't even worry about it. So I’m sitting in the classroom as the clock strikes twelve and the class walks in. I keep my face frozen as not five, not ten, not twenty but fifty-three students walk into class and take a seat. Completely underprepared and inwardly overwhelmed, I begin with the best face I’ve got for the occasion.

The students are respectful and engaged. The students are bright and responsible. The students ask questions when I give them the chance. One asks if we’ll have presentations. Another asks if I’ll let them know when we’re having a quiz. A group on the front row asks if I knew the previous ETA. They said they were in her culture club and they wanted to know if I’d have one too. "Uh," I stalled. "Sure. Well..." I asked if anyone would be interested. Twenty five people signed up. People came in from the hallway saying they weren’t in my class but they wanted to sign up for the club. The club I didn’t know I was running.

All in all, I survived and the world kept on turning. I had the class break up into groups and writewhat they knew about US Culture, how they knew it and what they hope to learn about it. One group had this to say: “America is very known by fast food, fried chicken wings, hot dog and pumpkin cake.”

They are, of course, in no way wrong.

Hoping there’s pumpkin cake in your future, sweet friends, and lots of it.