Fez!


It’s official, I am Peace Corps Volunteer. I spent the last week in Fez to swear in as a Volunteer which of course was great. It was great to be in a big city for a few days. The medina there is amazing, the oldest and largest in the world I believe. We somehow found our way to the tanneries in the medina and of coursed managed to get lost for a while afterwards. It was all very good though, we tried to go out and enjoy the city. It was great to just roam around and feel the pace of the environment. It was also good to have McDonanald’s… yeah, I went there and it was damn good. I also went to Marjan (a chain of stores only in very large towns in Morocco). I experienced just a little culture shock when I walked in there… it’s huge, and you can get everything there, it’s a giant supermarket meets Walmart. I suppose Fez was really a good break from everything, for a second I almost felt like I had left Morocco, you know minus the constant catcalls and all.
The bad thing about swearing in was simply saying good bye to everyone. We were a group of 67 in Fez, no I’m down to a group of 1, me. Well, not exactly since I do have two site mates who are really cool. I am currently in Rich, I’ll travel to my town tomorrow morning. Finally, I can unpack my bags and call a place home. I’m very happy to be done with hauling it all around but it comes with the sadness of no longer being in training with my friends. So it goes.
Thanksgiving was great the other trainees made us a fabulous meal. We were all very impressed; everything from turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and green beans to apple crisp and pumpkin pie. It was cold and rainy in Fez the whole time we were there which just made it feel all the more like it was really Thanksgiving… or fall or winter or whatever.
So I stayed in Errachidia last night, when we arrived there it was a complete downpour. People say it hasn’t rained there like that in years. It was crazy; just imagine 10 or 15 volunteers getting off this bus right as it’s getting dark, being absolutely soaked from the rain which is just beating down, and then trying to carry all their baggage to the hotel 2 blocks away. I dragged my bags through huge puddles of mud and managed to get soaking wet. I was freezing all night long, this of course didn’t help my efforts to get over my current cold… yup it’s the second one since I’ve been here. It’s definitely pretty cold here and apparently it has already begun to snow at my site. Brrrrr.
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Getting Berber with it. Or at least my hands would say so. Here they are covered with Henna in the typical Berber way, you place a blob of gooey Henna in the middle of your hand and cover it with plastic bags overnight. I however, took it off after about 3 hours… it’s really hard to do anything when you have bags tied over your hands and all you have is little numbs. Anyway, I did the Henna as part of our going away party in Hdida. Yup that’s right, I’m done with training in Hdida… and I’m very happy to move on to my final site, Assoul.
But first there’s Fez for swearing in as an official Volunteer and Thanksgiving. Nothing much to report other than I had a language proficiency test today, which I guess I survived. I basically know just enough to get by, which is sad but the dialect I’ve been learning and what I will have to learn in my new site are pretty different. So I get to learn the whole language over again. But what can you do?
Anyway, not much else is going on. Just finishing packing all my stuff to take to Fez, it will be my second to last time that I have to pack it all up, amen. I can’t even count how many times I’ve packed and unpacked in this country, ugh. So, that’s it for now… tomorrow I’ll travel 12 hours to Fez!

Pictures:

- Spreading the corn on the roof of my new house in Assoul to dry it for use in the winter.

- The kids in the house playing on the chalk board

- The view of Assoul from my window, not too bad huh?

In the bled… or at least that’s what they call it around here. The bled basically translates to the sticks, the far off places that people rarely travel to. The funny thing is that I actually really like it. I was afraid that Assoul might be too far out, too far away from my comfort zone but it isn’t. I remind myself that I really had no idea what to expect when I got to Morocco, so here I find myself about two and half hours from the closest internet service. The good news is that I have cell phone reception and electricity. The only glitch is that running water is limited. Some houses have running water for several hours, some for only an hour. Of course there are ways to deal with this and I will make it work even if it is a little difficult at times. The other good news is that I am allowed to travel to my nearest internet site once a week which means that I will stay there, a town called Rich one night a week at a hotel with a hot shower.
I have a new host family in my site; I will be living with them for my first two months here. I officially move to Assoul the end of November and will live with this family until the first of February. My family is great; they have hosted Peace Corps Volunteers before and seem to be accustomed to Americans. My host father speaks English almost fluently which is great for my lack of language in the Berber dialect I’ve been learning. His wife tries to speak to me but the dialect here is different than what I have been studying which is challenging to say the least. She is convinced I know nothing… which is sometimes true. Regardless, they are very nice people and the food here is really good (even if I am still having some stomach issues). Anyway, my host family also has 3 children, 2 girls and 1 boy. They are really sweet, and I can’t wait until I can speak with them more. Overall, the family is calm and respectful and I enjoy them very much.
I am replacing a volunteer at my site; she has been here helping me everyday find my way and introducing me to everyone. I don’t know what I’d do without her. She has been my translator and friend through this whole process. It will be strange to come back in a couple weeks and she will have left. Still, I am so thankful that she has been here to help me figure out what I’ll be doing for the next two years.
A little about what I’ll be doing…I am assigned to work with a women’s weaving cooperative. They are in fairly preliminary stages which means I can hopefully help them with product development (color & design), organization, and marketing as well as funding for a building and looms. It sounds like a lot but really it’s just little steps (many of which have been paved for me by the previous volunteer). Really those descriptions are wide open and just ideas that I’ve had since I’ve been here. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out or if anything works out. Inshallah.
So, only about two more weeks until I am an official Peace Corps Volunteer. We’ll go up to Fez to swear in and have a smashing thanksgiving. I honestly can’t wait to move to my site. I’ve been moving around so much the past couple of months that I feel like I’m a gypsy… Oh wait a minute, I am a gypsy (just for a little while longer though).

The camera is up and running again... so, if everything works accordingly:

The first picture of the map has push pins with each of us trainee's pictures on them. This is how we found out our location for the next 2 years.

The next one is me with my training group in Hdida. My teacher is the woman in front with the skirt on.

Next is a picture of my trainig group again, inside our artist's association with their new sign we made for them.

Next is our classroom in Hdida, yeah we're freezing, and yeah that's me and Briana under a blanket because we can see our breath.

Finally, our lovely Halloween picture, that's Briana, me, Kristian and Blake... we were all kitties with booties (it's a long story and honestly a stupid inside joke) but hey we had fun:)

So, two weeks later…I’m currently back in my luxurious life in Ouarzazate. However, I leave tomorrow for my first site visit to where I will be living for the next 2 years.
First a recap on my last 2 weeks… and some dirty details. I showered once in 12 days. Here’s the problem, it’s either ice cold bucket baths or nothing. I’m sure in due time I will get use to the bucket bathing system but for now it’s definitely difficult. Another dirty detail, my stomach just keeps going to the dark side. I don’t know if it’s the excessive amount of bread I eat (because really that’s all they eat here) or the vast amount of oil that everything sits. Regardless I’m trying to tell myself that in a couple more months I can make my own food and solve a lot of my g.i. problems. Oh yeah, and to top it all off, I’ve been sick for the past 2 weeks. Really it’s just a cold but colds are never really fun. I’m going to make an educated guess and say that maybe the reason why I’ve been sick is because my classroom stays at about 48 to 50 degrees all day. While that may not sound too cold, when you are sitting for 10 hours a day in it wrapped in blankets and every article of clothing you own, you know it’s cold. For this reason I hope I get a mud house at my site, my current classroom is made of cement which is supposed to be hot in the summer and cold in the winter, mud houses are the opposite. Who knew I’d ever ask for a mud house?
Anyway, we are almost done with training, my group has more of less finished our project and when we return to our training site in 2 weeks it will only be for 4 days. Kind of crazy when things are suddenly coming to a very quick end with group activities. It’s scary because of the language also. I try hard but this language is ridiculously difficult. And little by little I hope to understand more of it.
So, we’re here in Ouarzazate again, we got here on Halloween which meant me and couple others went “out” and then came back to the hotel for a little Peace Corps party. Needless to say we had a good time, definitely not my craziest Halloween but it was good.
Drum roll please, tomorrow I leave for the very small town of Assoul in the middle of nowhere (you might be able to find it on a really big map of Morocco). My nearest town with internet is 3 hours away. I think it’s a dirt road to get from there to Rich, my nearest town for internet. I’m trying to stay positive about my situation even though the one thing I requested for my site placement was to be in or near a large town. It’s ironic that I am the one person in my sector (small business development) that is the furthest from anything. The up side is that I will have a couple other volunteers near me from different sectors (health and environment I think), can’t wait to meet them. Also, I have met the volunteer that I am replacing and am very excited to meet up with her again before she leaves in a couple weeks… of course to talk about all the ins and outs of the community.
Enough for now, I’ll try to post something as soon as I can about my official site.