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.
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