I imagined moving into our own house and fixing it up by painting and decorating, maybe with Moroccan carpets and handicrafts. Ha! The reality is that the PC allowance for settling in doesn’t even cover the basics of appliances and furniture. So we moved into a fourth floor walk-up apartment and are learning to overlook the cracked windows, shutters missing slats, doors that don’t close (which the landlord will fix, inshallah), chips in the paint, a lopsided sink, and a funky odor coming from the ventilator shaft. (And really, isn’t it just common sense to put a drain in the lowest part of the floor or sink or whatever you want drained?) It’s back to college living with cardboard boxes for end tables and plastic lawn furniture in the living room. Our kitchen consisted of a counter along one end with a sink in it. There were no appliances, or cupboards or shelves. But it does have stunning views of the Middle Atlas mountains, is close to transportation, our counterpart co-ops, and is just up the street from a great little coffee shop with outdoor seating that welcomes western women.
Every time we buy something like a plastic table or ponj or wash buckets, we have to hand carry it back to the apartment, which means passing in full view of all the patrons of the coffee shops and everyone in the streets and on their rooftops. I’m pretty sure everyone knows what we have purchased, and Moroccans never hesitate to ask you where you bought something and how much it cost. Then they will shake their heads and say “gali bezzaf! (very expensive!), knowing that they could have gotten a better price.
One of the goals of Peace Corps is to help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of people served. I’m afraid we may have temporarily set back the cause when we recently bought a refrigerator. After visiting two or three stores two or three time each, asking prices, and having our host family ask prices, we finally settled on one. Two days later when we went back to have it delivered, the salesman led us to another model of the refrigerator we had purchased and launched into an explanation of …………something. We clearly didn’t understand so he went over it again, louder, with an increasing number of onlookers and a French speaking person who was called in to explain it to us in French which we didn’t understand either. Finally we just nodded in agreement and got in the truck for the delivery. Two men, not much bigger than me, hauled the refrigerator up four flights of stairs. After setting it up, we were admonished to wait until five o’clock to do…………… something—we weren’t sure what—but he kept pointing at the plug and the wall socket and the refrigerator motor. We both heard him say something about butagaz.
When I don’t understand what’s being said, I sometimes make up my own dialog to fit the gestures. I thought he said he would come back at 5 with what we decided was a grounding wire or something we needed to save us from sparking an explosion. Five o’clock came and went and no one showed. So the next morning we went to the store and asked the owner what we needed. Again he pointed to a wall socket in the store that had a third prong, so yes, we were convinced that’s what we needed. Finally he sent one of the delivery guys back with us to do whatever needed doing so we could use the refrigerator. He grabbed the plug and………. plugged it in. That was it. He also showed us how to move the shelves to different levels and how to open the vegetable bin. I can’t imagine how helpless he thought we were to not know how to plug in a refrigerator. He may even think we had never seen one before. Apparently what he told us was to wait until five o’clock to plug it in because they had laid it sideways for delivery and the fluids had to settle. I’m also making this up but now it seems likely. It was another “lost in translation” moment.
