Productivity

I finally did something significant in my house yesterday - I did the dishes after lunch! I tried to do them after dinner, too, but Mother came running in and dragged me away from the sink while saying that the soap was not good for my hands.

I took a shower Monday for the first time since last Wednesday. Mother took my bag of dirty clothes from the past two weeks, and there were only two shirts in it (but fourteen pairs of socks and underwear). My sense of cleanliness certainly has been relaxed since I got here.

Brahim, my favorite Berber-Moroccan in the entire cosmos, laughed when I said that I would get fat off of his food and responded, "I love fat women; my wife is fat, and I love her. She is beautiful." He then told me where to buy the best cheese and spices in the medina and promised to have me assist him one day while cooking tagine.

Hanane and Mohammed helped me to do my Arabic homework last night. We just started Al-Kitaab 2, the second book in the textbook series. I had been having some problems with it and even they had problems with it. They looked at the vocabulary and confirmed my suspicions that they were words that are not ever used in daily life.

The rain has been insane. It is January all over again. As I type it is coming down in buckets, cats and dogs, battle axes and swords, whatever term you want to use. I cannot hear the girl next to me as she speaks to me. The forecast says that it will end tomorrow, but I do not believe it.

We did mid-term evaluations on Monday and yesterday had a debriefing session on them. We talked about the problems in culture class (i.e. the fact that there's been no culture, only literature), gender class (i.e. the lack of concrete material and relation to actual women here in Morocco) and Arabic class (i.e. the lack of grades and how it is not so much "intensive Arabic" as it is "really fast-paced Arabic"). I hope that our requests will go far in improving these problems.