I have a permanent site!!!

  
Two weeks ago, on a late Friday night, we all found out where we will be spending the next two years.  After a blitz orientation to our new sites thanks to our stellar program managers, we were promptly set free to figure out how to get there on our own the very next morning.

I’ll be serving in a small town in southern Morocco.  If you look at a map of Morocco, look for Agadir near the southern coast, and then I’m about an hour and a half SE of that via taxi.  It takes two days of traveling overland to get there from Fes.  It’s hot, super-conservative, and there’s a large chance that if I end up working in certain places, I’ll be learning Tashelhit (Tash for short), one of the three Berber dialects spoken in Morocco.

Me and my new site in the deep South.

Interestingly, I’m already learning what’s considered the hardest Peace Corps language, Darija, and then I might be learning another crazy-difficult one, Tash.  Did I also mention that my site is now experiencing “winter,” meaning that during the days, its about 85/90 F. IN NOVEMBER. 

On the plus side, laundry takes about an hour to dry, and I won’t be racking up a high electricity bill because it’s too hot to take a hot shower. Score!

All ranting aside, my new host family is wonderful.  My mom and dad are lovely and we already joke around quite a bit…at least I think we do.  My Darija is still a work-in-progress, and I’m never quite sure if I fully understand what’s going on. Ever.  Otherwise, I have one younger brother, Youssef, and he is a ninja.  Seriously, he is the craziest 5-year-old I’ve ever met, but also the sweetest. 

Otherwise, during my weeklong visit to my new site, I toured the central area quite a bit.  There are about 3,000 people in my town, and a main road goes through the middle of town.  This is wonderful because the closest taxi hub is about an hour due West, and you can only get to there from that hub if you hop in a cab going towards Taroudant, (a pretty, touristy place 20km East of me) and if you suck up and they are gracious enough to drop you off on their way.  It’s a bit complicated, to say the least.

I visited the Nedi Neswi (Women’s Club) and the Dar Chabeb (Youth Center), two places that I’ll most likely be spending a lot of my time.  As I previously mentioned, Sebt is very conservative.  You rarely see women unaccompanied outside, except for packs of girls going to and from school.  Only men hang out at the cafes, and in public in general, so I’ll have to figure out how to deal with not having a place to spend my free time besides my house, while still being “culturally appropriate.”  Thankfully, Taroudant is only 20km away and I can go to any café I want there, woohoo!

All the tajines you could ever want at our self-described "Pottery Barn" in Taroudant's souk.

Otherwise, I’m almost finished with my 2½ months of training.  We only have a little over a week to go.  We just spent the last 6 hours with over 100 kids having a belated Halloween party at the Dar Chabeb.  We made masks and origami, played pin-the-nose on the pumpkin, and bobbed for apples.  My fingers are basically bleeding from cutting out 200 eye holes in those masks.  Thankfully no one got hypothermia from bobbing for apples in the freezing weather! 

Some of my kids at the Dar Chabeb.  This is what happens when you attempt an activity with shaving cream.

                                      
Next week is our last week of studying Darija intensively with our CBT groups, and then we have our language proficiency exam (LPI) the following week.  If we don’t at least get the “Novice High” ranking on our LPI, we get sent home.  No pressure or anything.  

Love and hugs from Ras el-Ma, i.e. “Head of the Water,” where the water shut off today.  How ironic.

Hannah