Ramadan in Rabat

I do promise to update about the past trips to Fes and the Sahara, but I thought I would begin with current events and work backwards.

Yesterday (the day I arrived back from my quick trip to Dallas) was the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. Muslims cannot eat, drink, smoke or do basically anything from sun up to sun down during this month. So, they wake up around 4am to eat breakfast and then around 7pm or so they break the fast with really good food. Then around 9 or 10, they eat dinner. Those two last things account for how people can gain weight during a time of fasting. Seeing as I am not Muslim, I am not expected to fast. The CCS staff (can't remember if I've explained, but CCS stands for Cross Cultural Solutions, the organization I am with) and one of the volunteers are Muslim, so there is fasting going on inside the homebase. Some of the other volunteers have decided to try it out for a day or so. I probably will, but I may not give up water because I find that to be an essential part of my day. As to how it affects our daily lives--really it doesn't affect it much. Cafes and restaurants are still open and will serve foreigners. Most people have a little shorter work day (go in later and may leave a little earlier), so our volunteer times have shifted by an hour. Yesterday, we had the break the fast meal and then dinner really late, but today they decided to do both at once because most of us ate so much at the break the fast that we didn't want dinner. Also, random sidenote: something we ate yesterday at the breaking of the fast made most of us sick. Two of us (including me) threw up and others just felt really sick. So, hopefully whatever it was won't kill us again tonight.

So, I began the first day of Ramadan on a plane. There is a Royal Air Maroc (a moroccan airline) flight directly from New York to Casablanca. It's only about 7 hours and the easiest way to get here. One leaves NYC around 8:30pm and arrives in Casablanca around 7:45am. I've been on this flight multiple times and it's always the same routine: board, about an hour later eat dinner, turn off all lights and sleep, about one-two hours before landing eat breakfast. But since this is a Moroccan airline going to Morocco, we were served breakfast around 4am Moroccan time which was basically like 2 hours or so after we ate dinner. No biggie but basically the entire day I was messed up as to what time it was and what meal I should be eating. Oh also, Morocco just recently (maybe in the last year or so) decided to observe daylight savings time. This meaning that the country recently began changing the clocks with the rest of the world. However, they decided to do the fall time change on Sunday (and as far as I know the rest of the world did not). So, truly yesterday I was a little confused as to the time.

Most of the volunteers whom started with me left this past Saturday as most were 3-weekers. There are now only 8 of us left, but we get a whole new group this upcoming Saturday. It was very strange to return to such an empty and quiet house. At the same time, it has been rather nice to have an emptier home. The house can feel like a dormitory at times where one can never really get any time alone. While I was gone, the girls who are still here moved to one of the rooms upstairs. So, now I am in a room for 8 people on the second floor that has an excellent terrace connected to it. I'll take pictures of the house soon.

That's all for now. More soon.
~Sunshine