From Iowa to Africa

Oct. 19—While in college at the University of Washington, Jocelyn Wertz of Iowa City made an "on-the-fly decision" to join the Peace Corps.

Months later, she found herself on a 100-mile dirt road to the village of Beni Tajitte in Morocco. Now, she's living in western Kenya with her husband who is researching a malaria vaccine for the U.S. Army.

Thursday, Wertz spoke via Zoom to a group of women at the Gibson Memorial Library about her adventures and misadventures in Africa. Library Director Gabriel Chrisman and his wife, Sarah, went to college in Washington with Wertz.

How it began

"Growing up, I really didn't know anything about Africa. I didn't know anyone from Africa or anyone who had been to Africa. I don't think I had any exposure at all to even thinking about Africa until I went off to college," Wertz told the group. "Three months after I graduated university, in the autumn of 2004, I hopped on a plane and I got off in Casablanca."

From the start, Wertz distinctly remembers standing in the airport with about 50 other Peace Corps volunteers, getting their first glimpse of how life in Africa was vastly different than life in America.

"We were just standing there watching a man in a business suit casually loading two live sheep in the back of a taxi," Wertz said. "I didn't understand anything I was seeing."

Morocco is on the very northwestern edge of Africa and it's actually only three miles away from Europe, from Spain, across the Strait of Gibraltar. "In many ways, the people of Morocco consider themselves to be closer to Europe than they do to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. They do not like being lumped in to Africa as a whole," Wertz explained.

The spoken language is a form of Arabic called Darija. "It is not a written language and it is not intelligible to any other countries in the Arabic-speaking world," Wertz said. "In the Peace Corps, your first three months are spent just in language and cultural training."

Beni Tajitte

Wertz's placement was in the small village Beni Tajitte in the Sahara Desert near the Algerian border. "It was a dirt road only distinguishable from the desert because there were pot holes in it," she said. "Getting there was very challenging. And then once you were there, you never left."

The village itself was a bigger town in one of the poorer provinces of Morocco. It was predominantly peopled by the Amazigh — the indigenous people of Morocco.

"When I first got to my first peace corps village, I was very intimidated, still wasn't super comfortable with the language," Wertz said. "I would be rehearsing every conversation that I was going to have 10 times in my mind before I could work up the nerve to leave my host family's home and go make my attempt."

Wertz arrived in 2004, shortly after the start of the war on terror. "Morocco is actually very supportive of the United States," she told the group. "They're one of the very first countries that actually recognized the U.S. They signed a treaty of friendship and peace with America in 1786. To this day, it remains the longest, unbroken relationship the United States has had with a foreign country."

Wertz said she's often asked about what it was like being a woman in a Muslim country. "The culture in Morocco and the culture through a lot of the Muslim world is very gender-segregated," she said. "The public sphere as you think about it in terms of shopping, cafes, restaurants, almost everything in the public really belongs to men in most places."

However, Wertz said the people of Morocco are not confrontational. If she were to go into a male space, no one would ask her to leave. They would show their discomfort and wait for her to figure it out on her own.

"The women are very social," Wertz said. "The homes are entirely run by the women. They are the queens of their castles." She explained when the men come home from their cafes, the women begin to boss them around, and the men listen. They respect the woman being in charge inside the home.

"The men just do it," she said. "It's nice to see there was some power balance because I was initially quite worried about it."

Wertz said the people of Morocco were incredibly friendly and welcoming. "In a place as unwelcoming as the desert, you have to be incredibly hospitable," she said. "If you're walking in the desert and you meet someone, the first thing you do is offer them your water. Strangers will invite you into their house, feed you dinner, they'll insist you stay the night and then they'll send you out the door in the morning with a kiss and some bus fare."

Women's Center

Wertz was assigned to work in the women's center which was predominantly for young unmarried or recently married women to go learn crafts so they could sell them at the market for their family. There was also a literacy class for women who wanted to read and write, and they learned basic bookkeeping.

"It became very apparent to me very quickly that these women did not need to learn English," Wertz said. "In my village, one girl out of 20 who started school will finish high school. They were unlikely to leave the village." English was primarily spoken in tourist areas outside the village, so Wertz quickly scrapped the English lessons and focused on arts and crafts and cooking.

"As an unmarried 22-year-old woman, I was already considered to be a spinster by their standards," she said. "When I got to the women's center, they wouldn't let me teach anything at all until I proved my worthiness by knitting a baby sweater. My entire first month in Beni Tajitte was learning how to knit and then knitting the world's ugliest, tiniest baby sweater."

After that, she started teaching yoga and anaerobic. The women taught her more knitting and in exchange, she taught them origami — a hobby of Wertz's.

In her first cooking class, she taught the women to make carrot cake. Then the women decided they were going to teach Wertz how to make a Moroccan food called harcha — similar to cornbread, but thicker.

"It's a place where almost everyone is illiterate, so all of the recipes are handed down verbally from mother to daughter, generation to generation. Every family's recipe is different," Wertz said. "If you can imagine for a moment, 25 women coming in and they choose one women who is going to teach me how to make the harcha. As soon as she starts telling me the recipe, all the other women are like no no no no no. It devolved into this gigantic cat fight and I just had to back away. It was probably the only time I feared for my safety — the great harcha incident of 2005."

Kenya

Once she left Morocco, Wertz decided to go into medicine. She went back to school and went to New Orleans where she met her now husband and got her medical degree. After that, his job in the Army took them to Washington D.C. where they spent nine years and had two children.

"The opportunity came up for him to transfer to Kenya," Wertz said. "So last summer we jumped on that right away."

After Wertz tried to prepare her young children for life without consistent running water, electricity and internet, she discovered their accommodations would be much different than hers in Morocco. The housing is embassy-sponsored and much larger than where they were living even in Washington D.C.

But not all of Kenya is that way. "There is incredible wealth disparity in Kenya," Wertz said. "I volunteer at a hospital where the women cannot afford the $5 cost for an ultrasound so they don't get ultrasounds when they are pregnant. We have shockingly high infant and child mortality rates simply because people don't have safe water to drink and they're getting dysentery or because they are getting malaria."

Wertz volunteers at a hospital about three days a week where she works on the maternity ward as an OBGYN doctor delivering babies. "The hospital that I volunteer at routinely does not have running water," she said. "I'm literally washing my hands with just a bucket of water that someone has left on the counter. Goodness knows how long it's been there."

The timeline for Kenyan women is much different than that of American women. Wertz said she is frequently delivering third or fourth babies to women who are 22 years old.

Wertz happened to be at the hospital volunteering on her 40th birthday. "I had been joking that any babies delivered on my birthday were obviously going to have to be named Jocelyn, but the nursing staff convinced all four of the women to name their babies Jocelyn," she said. "There are four Jocelyns all with my birthday but 40 years younger in the same small village in western Kenya. And about five other women have named their babies Jocelyn in the past nine months I've been volunteering there. So there's just a whole generation of Jocelyns coming up."

Wertz will be leaving Kenya in January for a job in the United States. While she loves the access to nature and wildlife in Kenya, she misses shopping at Hy-Vee and eating pie made in Iowa.