Back from site visit...

It's been an interesting week. Visited my final site from Sunday through Friday morning. Life in my new site is a bit different than CBT. Well a lot different. It's quite a bit bigger, in the mountains hour away from another town any direction. It has 2 schools, a highschool, the local government officials, a sbitar with 1 doctor, 1 nurse and 2 midwives. They have 5 internet cafes. Granted one of them only has one computer, but still there are a lot. There is a teleboutique (basicly a phonebooth) on every corner.

My host family is nice, but a lot different than my CBT family. I knew that I had it so good in CBT, that my new host family would have to be super duper amazing to top them and I wasnt really expecting that to be possible. My family has a lot of older extended family and my dad is a nice guy, just seems intimidating. They're a relatively quiet family and actually speak quite a bit of Arabic. Also the little kids only speak Arabic. So I'm definitely going to have to start learning both and work on my French. Unfortunately no one at our sbitar or in the local government speaks the berber dialect I've been working on. It'll be tough but I'm up for the challenge.

I also see why there are two volunteers there. There is no shortage of project ideas and health education oppurtunites. Also the trash problem in town is a little over the top and the wild animal situation. Lots of baby chicks and chickens running around and cats and dogs.

Anywho it was a challenging week and I know I will have to start pushing myself to find people in the community who are willing to help me talk and soon find a Darija, Berber tutor.

Today in Hub, we all shared stories of our sites and it was good to hear. While I thought my town was rough around the edges, I heard worse and then I've heard great stories of people being super excited to already start working with volunteers. It's nice to know we are all in the same boat.

Leaving CBT for a week

It's about a month and a half now in Morocco... and the theme of these past weeks should be "I don't know where I'm going, why we're going, what to say, but HEY I'm in Morocco and this is awesome."

I've been on trips with my host mom to different family members near my CBT and usually I have no idea where we're going exactly or why, but I'm along for the ride. I've had quite the adventure. One time we crossed two very rickety bridges over this almost raging river to get to a town after trekking through fields for almost a half hour and that was only after we finally got a tranzit ride (we waited 2 hours). There are almost too many stories to count.

Just to make sure everyone at home realizes how great my host family is.... so yesterday we went to a really goregous motel of a guy we played soccer with and the point was to practice language and so forth. Well it actually rained! and so it was pretty darn cold out. So we're sitting in the salon drinking mint tea and eating peanuts waiting for our friend to be done with tourists, when he comes in the room with my jacket and he's like... "Hafida here you go." (My Moroccan name is Hafida) And I was quite confused... I didnt wear a jacket or have one the last time we were there. So it turns out my host mom went to the school to bring me my jacket, because it was raining and cold, then walked all the way to the motel when she was told where we were. They are super sweet. I really feel like a little kid that is part of their family. She brings me my coat when it's cold, she runs to the school when I'm sick, and yeah they're all great. My host family set the bar really high for the new host family I meet on Sunday.

One more fun adventure I had this week... I COOKED FOR MY FAMILY. Haha The plan was to make pizza. I mean who doesn't love pizza and they've never had it. After arriving in the hub site to go to the big supermarket, I soon started to doubt this idea.... I mean my family doesn't have an oven. They just make break over a fire and it's sorta like an oven? I still don't understand how the bread making process works. So finding the big supermarket closed, I decided on plan b, spagetthi. I made the sauce from scratch and as I started to grate the first tomato... wow it was rough. So it took almost 2 hours, but by the end I had an awesome enourmous communal plate of spaghetti. Tomatoes, tomato paste, oil, salt, sauteed onions and green peppers, Italian seasoning mix, and it was topped with steamed zucchini. A tad on the salty side but it went well. Even having communal spaghetti! I'm bringing back communal dishes to Illinois, less dishes to wash.

Anyways.... we just got the big news today. Final site announcements. Where we will be living for 2 years! No big deal.... WOW....

I won't say much now, because we're visiting our sites on Sunday and staying for a little less than a week. I'll write after I have my real first experience. But I will say... I'm basically in the mountains, I have a site mate (another health volunteer in my site) so it's sort of biggerish, I hear it's pretty gorgeous? and my new host family in demographics is similar to my family now.

So the site mate part was a bit of a shocker, because we're the only two health site mates, but it'll be fun and if there are two of us, they must have the work. More to come later....!