Tag: writing

Once again, I’ve let too much time go by since my last update.

Today is a national holiday in Tunisia. Yesterday was Eid Kabir, the feast of the sacrifice. We actually got Wednesday off as well. In total, I get five days off this week. The festivities revolve around the ritual slaughtering of a ram of more than one year of age. The family that I’m staying with had me help with the slaughter. Next time I get a fast enough connection to upload photos, I’ll post a few. It was a rather interesting experience. A man walks around through the streets calling out something to the effect of “Slaughterer for hire!” When someone wants his services, they go out on the street and wave him down. He comes into the area where the ram is being held, orients the ram in the correct direction, slashes the neck up to the spine, and allows the sheep to bleed to death. It took a surprisingly long time for our ram to finally expire. After that, he was strung up by his hind legs, the butcher pelted him, gutted him, and got him ready for the family to slice and dice the meat. The butcher, aside from being paid, also got a part of the liver and a part of the pancreas of the sheep. It’s traditional for the slaughterer to receive these bits of the sheep.

After the butcher left, we moved the ram from where we had slaughtered it into the laundry/garden/pool shed. We hung it from the rafters in there and started cleaning out the stomach and intestines. These pieces of the sheep are made into a delicacy resembling haggis but, I’m informed, tastier. In a couple of days I should be sampling this dish. To fortify ourselves for the day, we barbequed some mutton that was purchased the day before and allowed to chill overnight in the fridge. Meat is best here after a few days of curing in the fridge or in another cold place. At around noon, I helped out in taking the rear right leg of the sheep off. We fried it for a couple of hours in olive oil and vegetables. The result was very good. I believe that today there may be more mutton eating as we still have half of a sheep hanging next to the washing machine. The other hind leg will go to charity, as the Koran dictates, but that still leaves a whole lot of meat. Here, every part of the sheep is used. I’m informed that even the head turns into an especially yummy dish and that the muscles in the face of the sheep are the best pieces on the entire animal. We shall see!

Since I last updated, aside from Eid Kabir taking place, I’ve been up to many other things. Ramadan ended somewhere around November 15. It so happened that I missed the Eid (feast) at the end of Ramadan. Rather than being in Tunisia for the festivities, I flew to Los Angeles to compete in the ASME International Student Design Contest. My team ended up placing 5th out of 13 teams. The best teams from around the world that won their divisions were allowed to compete at this contest. We could have placed maybe one or two higher had we managed to get two perfect runs, but the other teams there had some good machines. We won the unofficial awards of most engineering and shiniest robot though. I was only in Los Angeles for a total of three nights and two days. In that time, I ate as much Mexican food as possible. Tunisia only has one Mexican restaurant and it’s not very good. I don’t know how the Mexican embassy staff survives here!

Being in Los Angeles really gave me some reverse culture shock. Everything was so big and people were so distant from one another. There were so many cars and the cars were so big. I wonder what it will feel like when I come back in the summer after nine months in Tunisia.

I was gone a total of five days, including two and a half days of traveling. Going to Los Angeles, I carried two suitcases completely stuffed full of carpets and pots and a multitude of other purchases made by some of my fellow students. I played courier for them so that they wouldn’t be overweight returning to the USA. My fellow teammates and friends that were in Los Angeles with me hauled all the stuff back to Oregon in their car. I also picked up a bunch of stuff to bring back over. In addition to some odds and ends that I wanted, such as duct tape and plastic ziplocs, I also brought over about 50 or so pounds of gifts for one of the girls. That included a crystal vase which I hand carried in my backpack. It was quite the ordeal. Back in Tunisia, I took a flight from Tunis to the island of Djerba. The program was on an extended fieldtrip of the south. I only missed the first day of the trip and successfully met them at the hotel in Homut Souik in Djerba. Unfortunately, not everyone had been having as good of a time as I over the Eid holiday. Four out of the nine of the students were very sick with intestinal and stomach problems. Three of them must have had some bad harrisa, the other had something else, on the night I left for Los Angeles, which did her in.

They eventually all got better, but not before Jeff had to get a large penicillin injection in the glut muscles in Gabes. He said it wasn’t his best memory of Tunisia!

We traveled all around the south of Tunisia for a total of about six days. Starting in Tunis, the group drove south, stopping off in El Jem, the site of the second largest coliseum in the world, second only to Rome. It quite often doubles as its more famous brother in Rome in movies and documentaries. I wasn’t with the group on this part of the trip as I was still flying back from Los Angeles. Next stop for the group, after dinner in Gabes, was Djerba, where I met up with them.

Our transportation throughout the south was rather interesting. We had a typical 20 or 30 passenger bus with large roof rack and the like. They are very common in Tunisia to be used for schools and for tour groups. The twist was that our bus on the outside had a long proclamation of who gave the bus to the university (the glorious president Ben Ali, etc etc). It also said what the bus was being given for – mentally and physically disabled students. We were asked once or twice if we were mentally retarded. We always answered “yes!” We got lots of funny looks due to the writing on the side of the bus.

On the island of Djerba there is an interesting old synagogue which is said to be the oldest in the world. The site has been continuously occupied by a synagogue since 586 BCE. The current building though was constructed early in the 20th century. The site’s true claim to fame is a recent terrorist attack by Al Qaeda back in 2002 when a truck bomb exploded next to a bus full of German tourists. 19 total died in the attack. Since then, security has been tightened. There were enough armed guards around that rather than dieing of a terrorist bomb, I was more concerned about accidentally getting shot by a guard!

On from Djerba, we went down to the town of Tataouine, the namesake of the misspelled planet in the StarWars movies. There isn’t that much interesting to see within the town itself but the surrounding hills and mountains are heavily laden with interesting historic and ancient villages. This is the land of the Ksour. Ksour (ksar for singular) are fortified granaries, usually built in hard to reach places. They are basically bank vaults full of grain only to be broken open in time of need. Only a few ksour are still in use today. Most lie in ruin with even the villages that supported them being all but abandoned. With opportunities aplenty in Tataouine or Gabes or Tunis, there is very little to keep people farming and living on such marginal land. The worst of the consequences of the exodus from the mountain farms to the cities can be seen in the neglect of the many check dams built to capture the precious rain and topsoil. These dams were built hundreds if not thousands of years ago. They vary in size anywhere from a meter across and half a meter high to ten or twenty meters high and a fourth of a kilometer across. There simply aren’t enough people left in the mountains to continue maintaining the dams. Aside from providing the only fertile agricultural ground in the region, these dams are also very important to keep areas downstream from flooding. Without them, flash floods are becoming more common.

On our fieldtrip we visited the ksar and village of Chenini. It’s firmly planted on the major tourist routes which has made it a rather sad place. Most of the people left in the old village are only there to soak up the few tourist dinar that they can grab from the package tour groups and the land rover convoys that frequently come through. We arrived at the village just at sunset. It was a very pretty place. The old village and ksar are built up the sides of a very steep mesa. The ksar is built on the upper most reaches, circling all the way around the mesa. This isn’t actually a true mesa as the top is a knife edge with only a few feet of actual flat ground. All of the old grain storerooms were in tatters and varying states of collapse. The only thing in the entire village that was being kept up was the whitewashed mosque sitting in the saddle of two sections of the mesa.

Onward from Chenini, we went to Matmata, home of the underground troglodyte dwellings that were made famous in StarWars. We made it there long after dark due to the distance and the complete lack of a modern highway system. Outside of one or two roads, the entire country is a conglomeration of two lane and single lane roads. At least almost all of them are paved now. We slept in a hotel built in a troglodyte house complex. In fact, that hotel also contained the set for Luke Skywalker’s Aunt and Uncle’s house from episode IV. We ate breakfast in the set.

From Matmata, we swung north and west back to Gabes to visit the oasis of Chenini, not to be confused with the ksar of Chenini. This is where one of our professors, Karim was born. We had a feast at his brothers patch of oasis which consisted of an entire roasted lamb and many side dishes. After lunch, we walked across the oasis for a couple of minutes to the cave where my professor was born. He lived there until he was about 7 or 8 and they got housing above ground in Chenini Nouvelle.

We stayed the night in Gabes. The next morning we got in the bus and headed out to Kebilli and Douz. Douz is the gateway to the Sahara in Tunisia. We rode camels at sunset in the sand dunes just outside Douz. It was fun but the ride was a little painful. We were more or less sitting on a few blankets piled up on the back of the camel. We almost had an incident though with some of the horsemen trying to sell horseback rides on their Arabian horses. These riders were pretty nuts, barreling across the desert at speeds that I didn’t know horses could travel at. They also have a tendency to get too friendly with female tourists. The secret police had to come out and shoo them off after Karim and the horsemen got into an argument. We found out later that a few of them had actually been arrested earlier in the day for groping some female tourists. The camel drivers were much nicer than the horsemen though. They have a syndicate which regulates prices, times, and who’s turn it is to take tourists out. If any of them were to step out of line, all the others would let that person know he did something wrong!

After a brief foray into the souk at Douz, we continued on to cross the Chott. Chotts are basically huge flat expanses of salt pan which periodically get a few inches of water in them when large rainstorms occur. The road between Kebilli and Touzer, our destination, runs straight across the largest Chott in Tunisia for about 90 kilometers. We stopped in the exact middle of the crossing at a wide spot in the road where an enterprising Tunisian had built a roadside stand to sell desert rose and other such geologic doodads from the desert. The moon was nearly full, the Chott was full of water, and we couldn’t see a single light anywhere. It would be a very romantic place to pass the night.

Supposedly, the Chotts of Tunisia are actually below sea level. Possibly up to 20 or 30 meters below sea level. Back in the 1800’s, the French attempted to build a canal into the Chotts to flood them and give a place for the French fleet to hide so they could attack the British fleet and rule the Mediterranean. Fortunately for Tunisia’s Digla Date production, this never happened. The chief engineer on the project died before they had even begun digging. The plan was later revisited in the 1960’s, this time by American interests under the guise of the Ploughshare Program, a front setup by the American Atomic Energy Commission. They proposed to build the canal by means of controlled nuclear explosion. Basically, they wanted to detonate a bunch of atomic bombs across Tunisia to create a canal. Needless to say, it never happened. It is interesting, however, that the Tunisians never speak about the elevation of the Chott. I think that many people are afraid that someone will once again try to build a canal into the Chott and once again flood them with ocean water Evidence of the wreck of a Roman galleon on the north shore of the Chott has long been held up to show that yes, indeed, these were once connected to the sea. Today though they only produce mirages.

We continued around Southern Tunisia for several more days stopping in at the mountain oases near the Algerian frontier, the ruins of ancient Sbeitla, and visiting the grand mosque in Kariouan which we had skipped the last time we were there. All in all it was a good fieldtrip but it extended my traveling from just five days up to eight or nine days total. I slept quite well after all of that.

Back in school, and without a Ramadan schedule, we finished out the term in the first week of December. Other students started leaving the same night that the program finished. The last one to leave, Kellen, took off just before Christmas. I’m the only one left from the original group still in Tunisia.

A few days after the program ended, my parents flew over and joined me in Tunisia. We toured around the country for a little over two weeks, hitting up many of the same sites that I had been to with the group before. We also managed to get to a few new places including more of the Ksour. In particular, we went to the village of Douriet. The ksar there is very fascinating and looks exactly like the famous renascence painting of the Tower of Babble. When I get another chance to post pictures, there will be many of that place. It hasn’t gotten on the main tourist routes yet so the place is still pretty pristine but I think in the next few years, it will finally be discovered by the 4×4 convoys and the tour busses.

Another highlight was coming within 50 meters of the Algerian border in the oasis of Mides. The entire oasis was filled with secret police trying to act natural by farming or selling things in stalls. What gave them away though was the presence of a multitude of walkie talkies.

We had originally planned to go to Libya for two weeks but after our visa applications were rejected (we only had a group of three and to go to Libya, they require a group of at least four), we went to Malta for five days instead. The island nation of Malta is quite a fascinating place. About 500,000 people live on a small cluster of four islands in the middle of the Mediterranean. The maximum speed limit on the islands is something like 60 or 80 kph which can almost never be reached as the place is so small! We visited all the major sites on the island including the Knights of St. George cities and fortifications which nearly completely engulfs the islands and the ancient temple complexes on the islands of Malta and Gozo. They are the oldest freestanding structures in the world, even predating the pyramids. Going to Malta was a nice break from Tunisian reality for me. It used to be part of the British Empire and only gained its independence in the middle of the last century. They still hold many British traditions dear such as high tea and red telephone booths. The language there is also fascinating. It has an Arabic grammar structure and many Arabic words but also lots of Italian, French, English, Greek, and a few other things mixed in. It uses a more or less Greek character set as well. It’s a very strange and mixed up language but it was fun being able to understand some of it. The counting system, for instance, is borrowed, in its entirety, from Arabic.

My parents left Tunisia just after the New Year. They went back to Oregon and to a diet nearly devoid of tuna and harrisa. I stayed in Tunisia. I now am officially in Tunisia on a Global IE3 Internship program coordinated through the Oregon University System. I am interning at the Tunis-Carthage Marble Factory a 20 minute metro ride from downtown Tunis. In the mornings I go to school at Bourguiba School in the Lafayette neighborhood of Tunis. Bourguiba School is the top place in all of Tunisia to learn a foreign language. People from all over the world come to it to learn Arabic among a host of other languages. I’m taking modern standard Arabic. The classes are challenging as they are taught almost entirely in Arabic. The professors speak a little English but do all of their explanations in French. Some of the other students in the class translate for me. On my first day of school I met a guy from Sweden. He’s in a higher level Arabic class, having studied Arabic for three years in college and studied in Syria for a number of months. He’s in Tunisia now to refresh his Arabic and hopefully get a job as a translator in Sweden. I helped him move into an apartment with a couple of my friends, one from Algeria and the other from Morocco. I’ve also met people from many other parts of the world. There is one girl in my class from Tokyo, Japan. Her grandparents live in Kyoto which is not too far away from Wadayama where I went on a sister school program back in middle school. Another girl in the class is from Amsterdam and is married to a Tunisian football player. She is anything but a typical Tunisian wife, often wearing European outfits with a good dose of pink and going out on her own around town. In fact, her husband lives in Djerba while she goes to school and lives in Tunis! There are also people from Spain, Germany, Brazil, France, Italy, and a whole host of other countries at the school. It’s a very amazing place were lots of cultures mix together.

In another twist, I’m also moonlighting at CEMAT, the American research center for the Magrib in Tunisia. I’m helping them with their computers and website. In exchange, I get a small stipend which helps with my living expenses. Maybe in the coming months I’ll also get to tag along with the director of CEMAT when he goes to other Arabic speaking countries. There is some talk of him hiring me fulltime for part of the summer to help with a few programs he has cooking. Time will tell though. I am definitely in Tunisia until June, but beyond that, I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing or where I’ll be.

Well that’s all there is for now. As always, email me if you want to hear more details on Tunisia, and be sure to email me if you’re thinking of visiting Tunisia. -Douglas

Yes, I know I’ve been a bad boy. This is my first real letter home since arriving in Tunisia over a month ago. I can’t believe it’s only been a month. It feels like a year has already passed by!

The flight over was uneventful aside from my wristwatch dyeing. Three years of flawless performance and then battery death! Since landing in Tunisia, I haven’t had a clock. I haven’t needed a clock. Things here run on their own time. If you tell someone you’ll meet them at 2 o’clock in a cafe, that means you could show up anywhere between 1 and 3pm. Saying “Insha Allah” after agreeing to do something is basically the same as saying “I’ll do it, but in fact, no, I won’t do it”. It’s used as an easy escape, invoking the name of Allah absolves you of any blame or problems down the road for not performing the task.

The first few weeks of my time in Tunisia were filled to the gills with field trips around the north and west of Tunisia. We went to such sites as the ancient Roman and Phoenician cities of Dougga, Carthage, and Utica. One day we drove for about 20 kilometers along the old Roman aqueduct running to Tunis from a spring more than 40 kilometers from town. It’s a truly impressive structure rivaling any other roman monument I’ve seen to date.

On one of our field trips, we stopped off at an old Berber hilltop fortified settlement. It bore a striking resemblance to the Hopi dwellings on the mesas of the desert southwest of America. The construction, the colors, and the people all were the same. The only difference was the language.

The last couple of weeks have fallen in the Islamic month of Ramadan. We’re near the half-way point of the lunar month. Every night I have a big dinner, starting exactly at sunset, with either the family who I rent a room from, or one of the many Tunisian students I’ve met. It’s very interesting to observe who fasts and who doesn’t in Tunisia. I would have expected most of the population to fast as they do in most other Islamic countries. Instead maybe only 50% fast, and of those, most don’t strictly fast. Up until maybe ten or fifteen years ago, the government banned fasting to increase productivity and keep the country strong. Since the overthrow of the old president, Habib Bourgiba, in 1987 by his one-time prime minister, Ben Ali, Tunisia has become more Islamic. It’s still a far cry from even Egypt or Morocco though.

Classes have been going well. I’m taking a women’s study class, an environmental case study class, a Mediterranean cultures class, and an Arabic language class. I’m registered for a total of 17 credits. Between class, Ramadan, and other responsibilities, I’m kept very busy! Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent trying to get from point A to point B and back again.

Transportation in Tunis is actually very easy but it takes a long time to get anywhere. To go from my apartment to school, we get a ride with the family in the back of their little delivery van to where they work. That takes anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic. Rather than stick to the big highways which are always bumper to bumper and most of the time complete gridlock, we drive through neighborhoods at reckless speeds. Traffic here isn’t as bad as in Egypt or Morocco, but it’s quite different than Oregon! Lanes are disregarded as well as most stop signs and stop lights. Instead, whoever is the boldest goes first. Sometimes, two way roads are turned into one way streets when enough traffic decides to go down the wrong lane. Pedestrians are completely disregarded unless there’s a real danger of hitting one. No one wants to get a dent in their car, especially from a pedestrian. When there is traffic control, it’s provided by the many police officers. Instead of having a welfare system like the USA has, Tunisia hires unemployed people into the police force. As you can imagine, almost every street corner has two or three uniformed officers. Watching some of these people try to direct traffic is really funny. A perfectly fine intersection can be changed into a traffic nightmare within minutes of a police officer arriving on the scene. People joke that since there’s no crime to speak of in Tunisia, the police have to create traffic jams just so they have something to do. The police also make a habit of pulling over cars at random for searches and, at times, arrests. Whenever I’ve been pulled over in a car, as soon as they see that I’m a “tourist”, they wave us on our way. Otherwise, we could expect a 20 or 30 minute search of all of our possessions and the possible forfeiture of our documents.

Anyway, once we get dropped off, it’s anywhere between a 20 minute and 40 minute walk. The majority of our time seems to be spent trying to cross one very large and busy intersection. A major highway to the north and another major highway to the west intersect in a stoplight. We have to cross from one corner to the exact opposite corner. Sometimes we end up stuck in between two lanes with cars whizzing by going opposite directions. It’s a real adrenaline rush in the morning.

Our school is in a neighborhood called Hayatt Al Khader (The Green Town). The neighborhood, in fact, is anything but green. It’s a typical dusty borough. Most of the houses and buildings are finished, but many are in various stages of construction. The joke among Tunisians is that the entire country is in a perpetual state of construction. Since independence from France in 1956, Tunisia has had a sustained building boom, trying to catch up for the previous 100 years when Tunisians weren’t allowed to build anything for themselves. I wonder how much longer this housing boom can be sustained. Government statistics say that something like 19 out of 20 people own their own home or flat in Tunisia. I expect that the good times will run out soon. Most likely, the government will try to prop up the housing market for a while before they let it collapse or change its focus to civic projects.

The school itself consists of a couple of different blocks of buildings roughly in a C shape. In the middle of the C, there’s a large chunk of ground taken up by an elementary school. Our school is part of the University of the 7th of November at Carthage system. In the rapid expansion of Tunis, the different departments and colleges of the University were flung far and wide around the city. Our branch is only for languages such as French, English, German, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and others. Other schools are only for engineering or the humanities or whatever. The buildings are all whitewashed and are multi story. The building that we have all of our classes in is three stories tall with a central open section housing the only staircase between the floors. It’s also the building that everyone is forced to enter through. There are security guards at the only unlocked entrance to the school to make sure rabble rousers aren’t allowed into the school grounds. On several occasions we’ve seen them take potential troublemakers outside. Most likely the kids are just kicked to the curb, but if they’re known radicals, they’ll be arrested and beat up. That said, some protests are allowed. I’ve seen several protests for school reform on the bottom of the staircase. Usually it consists of one or two students yelling for smaller class sizes and more options. Maybe twenty or forty students will stand around in a semi circle listening.

Sometimes I feel like a rock star and other times I feel like the new playtoy of the school. Everyone wants to talk with us and try out their English. It’s hard to get them to talk to us in Arabic or French. Also, it’s hard to speak Arabic so I suppose English is the best answer. Usually, I go directly to the classroom to avoid the many students, mostly women, who try to talk to me and say hello and whatnot. It almost feels like a reality television show! Outside of school, most people try to talk to me in French. They’re shocked when I talk to them in Arabic. My Arabic is still really basic though so communicating is challenging at times. One nice thing for communicating but bad for learning Arabic is that almost everyone in Tunis speaks at least three languages, one of which is English. The problem with this trilingual city is that there isn’t a real distinction between French or English or Arabic. All three are blended together in this funny fusion of languages. Farther south or west in cities such as Bizerte or Kairouan, the people speak Arabic and a little French. The Arabic outside of Tunis is much easier to understand as less dialect has managed to creep into the day-to-day language.

In the next few weeks, I’ll have a five day vacation to celebrate the “change” on November 7, 1987, when the original president since independence, Habib Bourgiba, was “retired” by the current president, Ben Ali. Originally, several of us had planned to go to Libya but that fell through this last weekend when it became apparent we wouldn’t get the visas in time. It takes about 30 days to secure the appropriate papers to travel to Libya. I think once the program ends in December, I’ll head to Libya with my parents for a few days. Since Libya is out, now we’re looking at Malta or Sicily or one of the other nearby islands in the Mediterranean. I think by Thursday we’ll know where we’re going.

Mid November will see me back in the USA for two days to attend a design contest in Anaheim California. I will be gone from Tunisia a total of four days, two of which will be spent in airplanes. It will be very tiring but I hope that it’s rewarding too. Hopefully when I go back to the USA, I’ll be able to give someone a few CD’s worth of pictures that they’ll post online for me. I’ve been getting a bunch of good shots but I don’t have the ability to upload them from Tunisia.

That brings me to a good topic. The internet in Tunisia is painfully slow. Internet Cafes run off of a single shared 56k modem connection. Anywhere between five and 15 computers will be sharing one dialup modem! It’s painful. To check my email it usually takes me two hours and about three dollars. That might not sound like much, but in a country where everything takes a long time, those two hours are a lot! Also, checking the internet every day or two would quickly add up into a large bill. I usually find myself checking my email once or twice a week. Hopefully once I’m on my own starting in December, I’ll be able to get a place with its own phone line and get DSL. I hear DSL is something like 250 dollars a month but it’d be so worth it. You have no idea the pain involved in checking my email!

Well that’s it for now. Email me if you have any specific questions or want to hear more about something and I’ll see about including it in the next update. Maybe next time I’ll send one sooner.