Tidili

I'm sitting in my hotel room right now waiting for my site mate Andy so we can head out to Tidili, my new home for the next two years. Andy is a third year volunteer and i learned it was because our site is apparently very tough to get information from the people at, they tend to send you on a wild goose chase to get information on anything, so its taken him a long time to gather all the information he needs for his project. And now that its all gathered he doesnt want to just leave it up to me (which is probably a good idea with my minimal tashleet) so he extended for another year. We (myself, Alexa, Ayanna, Andy and Evan -Ayannas site mate) all went to dinner last night and this is what i've learned about Tidili so far:

• I will not be able to get the good bread that I like in my site, they dont make it because its too hard to make. i think i'm going to try and get this down with my current host family in Tazentout so i can have it on special occasions at my site (its delicious)
• We are indeed in the mountains and we get a few inches of snow in the winter. My site doesnt get too much but the road that we have to take to leave does, so we get snowed in at times
• I have a sbitar at my site (this is where I am supposed to be working) but it only has one nurse and he doesnt want to be there, so I work a lot with other sbitar
• I have A LOT of primary schools in the area so I will be doing a lot of handwashing, teeth brushing types of activies
• My town is indeed very large, 17,000 people to be exact. But its also very spread out, so i'm interested to see what that looks like

Thats it for now... I'm headed out for the week, be back in Ourzazate on Friday!

Amzwaru, Wissen, Wisskrad....

Amzwaru (first): if people dont start commenting on this blog I'm not going to continue it since its quite a pain in the butt to type everything out, get to internet and then have 0 comments (except the one from zeke and my sister, thanks)

Wissen (second): I've posted new pics on my FB http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2344931&id=19214791&l=816aeded48 (its a lot faster on FB so check em out)

Wisskrad (third): I've learned my final site and will be going to Tidili, which is in the ourzazate province. It was rather anti-climatic to learn this at first but after we realized we already knew the dialect and would not have to travel by bus for 13 hours it became a lot more appealing. I also go placed by a friend of mine, Alexa. She is only an hour and a half away so thats super exciting. ALSO- I will have a site mate. I have yet to meet him, but his name is Andy and hes been here in Morocco for his two years but is staying for a third. So thats pretty exciting.

Im off to meet Andy and head to my site tomorrow... Hopefully I will come back to some comments :)


<3 Loves!

Friend Photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lostnav

Here are my friend Aarons pics... he's our professional photographer so he has lots of pics!
<3

Ait Ben Haddou and Klaa

April 6th:
Today we had our interviews for our final sight. They asked us mostly basic questions, like if we want/need electricity and/or water at our sight, what our ideal sight would be and what the worst sight we could imagine would be what we are bringing to our community and lots of other stuff. We finally find out where we are going on the 15th (when I will probably be able to post this, since I only get internet at Hub in Ourzazate anyway).Its super exciting that we are finally going to have information on what we’re doing and where we’re going for the next two years but its also kind of scary because who is going to be around us and where we are going to be is really going to make or break the next two years. I’m trying to think as positive as possible but it’s tough. Alright- that’s all I'm going to write for the night, I don’t feel good at all and I’m just all over the place tonight. Off to bed I go..

April 11th:
I feel like I have to catch you up on a lot! Before I begin I have to let you all know that I’m writing this blog as my toes dry (bright red) and I couldn’t be happier about it. I found nail polish today in Ourzazate and I am SOOO excited that I will have painted toes for tomorrow.
Well to start off, I was really sick the last week, I think I just caught the flu or something caught up with me due to all the hand shaking, cheek kissing and lack of sleep. I’m fine now though, I came straight home from school and went to bed for two days in a row to try and sleep which sucked for my poor host family, but they knew I was sick so it wasn’t too big a deal. We only have a little bit of time left with our families, which is crazy. I cant believe I’ve been in Morocco for 5 weeks now!! Only 26ish months to go, haha. Quick catch up:
Language is definalty coming along. My family is amazing and so patient with me, so its really helpful when learning verbs and different tenses. My brother is also awesome about trying to learn English so we constantly quiz each other on words, numbers and days of the week.
We went to Ait Ben Haddou for our first weekend we had off. We don’t have school on Saturday afternoons or Sundays but we have to stay in our sights and hang out with our host family most weekends. However, for two weekends during or CBT (while I’m in tazentoute) we were able to travel. So for the first visit we went to Ait Ben Haddou which is where a lot of movies are filmed (Gladiator, The Mummy, Prince of Arabia) were filmed. Ait Ben Haddou is only a 20 minute taxi ride from Tazentoute so it didn’t make sense not to go, plus there are volunteers there for CBT so they found us a cheap hotel. The town is gorgeous, their CBT experience is definalty different from ours, they have cyber cafes and restaurants in their town where we have 3 small Hanuts (small shops) and that’s about it in ours. Plus almost everyone spoke some English so it was a lot easier to communicate. Highlights of the trip were my new purse (that I got ripped off on, bad- but oh well, I love it), visiting the casba, seeing other Peace Corps people, showering at the hotel (with semi warm/mostly cold water) and having wireless internet in our hotel.
This weekend we went to Klaa which is the city of roses and they have a huge rose festval around May.. On Saturdays we also have time built into our school day to do something related to culture, which can be our American culture or Morocaan culture. Last week we made a cake, Moroccan way (2 cups of yogurt, 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of oil, 10 eggs, 7 packages of yeast, 2 packages of vanilla yeast and flour) and this weekend we decided we wanted to try and make an American lunch. What did we decide on you ask? Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans of course! (hey, we have limited resources here in Tazentoute!) Lunch turned out AMAZING and we danced around to Lady Gaga, Britney Spreas and Spice Girls while we waited (poor Aaron). After lunch Alexa met us in Tazentoute and we jumped in a taxi on the way to Klaa. Originally we were going to have to change taxis in Ourzazate but our amazing taxi driver got permission from the gendarms to take us all the way so we arrived in Klaa at about 3:30ish. A LOT of other Peace Corps trainees also had the idea to go to Klaa so there ended up being about 20 of us staying in our hotel. The hotel was alright, it didn’t have hot water and the beds were a little lumpy but it was a roof over our heads so it worked out. We walked around Klaa for a few hours, stopped to have some tea and just checked out the city. We found a super marche that sold ICE CREAM so that was a really nice treat. We also ran into 3 current Peace Corps volunteers so it was nice to chat with them for a little bit and get some questions answered. After walking around the city we found a cyber to make some calls home and check email. After our internet fix we found a restaurant were we had dinner. It’s so weird going to any café here because woman typically do not sit at restaurant or cafes, they are reserved for men. In my final site this is a luxury I will not be able to have, but in tourist areas its usually more acceptable for tourists to sit at these cafes. I had dinner with 4 other girls, Monica, Tina, Alexa and Caity. Dinner was good; the Barcelona/Real Madrid game was on TV as we ate in the other cafes so there was a lot of yelling and screaming that went on over dinner. After dinner we went back to the hotel and called it a night.
The next day (Sunday) we woke up up at about 9 to hammering and lots of noise and got dressed for a hike/exploration of Hdida. We finally got a taxi to take us (along with a lady and her 2 children, a younger boy and another man) so were pretty cozy- there ended up being Nina in the front seat with the little boy, Monica, Eric, Alexa and the man in the front row of seats and Myself, Caity and the 3 children in the back seat. Some of the taxis here are like Hurst’s and have an extra row of seating. The ride up to Hdida (its in the mountains) was a crazy twisted road so there was a lot of head hitting and falling on top of each other that occurred. After our interesting 30 minute taxi ride we arrived in Hdida to begin our exploration. Caity is learning Darija and she speaks wonderfully so she got the taxi drivers phone number to call him when were done to take us back (very good call since there were no taxis in town). We began our walk through the town and saw a sign for a Casba of roses. This sounded like it might be something fun to check out so we walked in and were greeted by a small family (2 ladies and a younger boy). They seemed confused about why were there and kept saying something about calling Christian. Since we have no idea who that is we kept insisting they didn’t. They offered to show us the view from the roof so we agreed. They also showed us that they were building a hotel in their home, which was beautiful. The view from the roof was nice. After looking out and taking a few pictures Nina (side note: Here name is really Tina but it turned out Tina is slang for a woman’s private parts so we now call her Nina) and I asked where the bathroom was thinking we were going to get the typical Turkish toilet…. But what did we get? We got a SUPER nice western style bathroom, with a toilet, sink AND shower. We were obviously pretty surprised by this so the lady showed us two other rooms after, one of which we learned was Christians bedroom, with a super nice bed and carper and the other with couches and a flat screen tv! It turns out Christian created a natural bath product with the roses from Klaa and he lives with these people. So after our potty break the family invited us to stay for tea and snacks (not un-usual in Morocc) so we had tea and chatted for a bit. This is where it started to get weird, we thought the people were going to join us for tea but instead they dropped things off, and served us. After tea we decided it was probably best for us to leave, btu we wanted to see if we could buy the bath products (since there was some oil by the sink that we used and really liked.) So we asked if we could buy the product andthats where the language and everything just stopped. An older man came out and started talking to Monica, a grandma started talking to me and everyone was just confused. We didn’t know what was going on, but they wanted us to stay for lunch and thenthey wanted us to wait for Christian to come home and well… we just left. After that weird adventure we decided to walk around by the river and saw a group of French tourists with a tourguide so we followed them and they went through some beautiful fields, waterfalls. Rose fields and poppy fields. We walked around for about an hour to another town, got some candy at the Hanut and then walked back. When walking back to town we saw some other volunteers that left earlier to hike. We all got in our cabs back to Klaa. At this point we were a little hungry so Monica and I ventured out to find some sandwiches (delish) in Klaa and then jumped online for 30 minutes before we needed to leave. We caught a taxi back to Ourzazate and I just thought I would share the highlights of our 1 ½ hour taxi ride: I saw a little boy peeing on the side of the street which we ran the same direction he was peeing, a dead dog on the side of the road (legs up in the air), other PCVs walking back to their town, a beautiful river, mountains in the backdrop, hills, desert and a casba that our taxi driver told us is used to film movies. Once we finally arrived to Ourzazate we had coffee while waiting for the rest of our group and then caught another Taxi into Tazentoute. I got back home at about 6:30, talked to my family, showered and then went to bed without dinner since I was exhausted at about 830 and couldn’t bear to wait until 10 for dinner.
Since our arrival back to Tazentoute we’ve had class yesterday and today. We have been having class from 8-12 consisting of Tashleet language and then time in the evenings to work on creating 2 projects for our town. So far we have created a handwashing class for preschool children and began a trash awareness session for the elementary school and woman in the community about what to do with their trash (ie, burn, recycle, bury and feed to animals).

March 10 Update

Hello dear friends of mine,

So since last post we have gone to meet/stay with our host families in our towns, visited the town of Ait Ben Haddou and have come back to our hub site (Ourzazate) three times…. Sorry! I didn’t bring my computer with me the first trip back to our sites so it was hard to try and update the blog when we got back to hub. I’ll catch you all up for now and try to get better at posting when I’m at hub. So let me tell you all about my FABULOUS family. I live with an older sister, Nejma (she is about 27) and my brother Abdelhay (he is 12). I also live with my wonderful mother and father. My mom used to live with my other 3 sisters and 1 brother in Casablanca but has come back to Tazentoute and now lives with us. I live in the small (approximately) town of Tazentoute which is about 20 K away from Ourzazate (for those of you familiar with Morocco ) I live in a small home with a courtyard, 2 rooms beside mine, 1 bathroom (aka hole in the floor with a faucet), kitchen and backyard with a donkey, 3 goats and chickens. We also have a cat who is the most well fed cat I’ve ever met (even more so than Ernie!! This cat gets fed at the table like crazy). I’ve now been living with my host family for about 3 weeks and its going great. Day one was the most terrifying day I’ve ever experienced. After the 20 minute cab ride into Tazentoute we got picked up by a member of our family (Nejma picked me up) and taken to our homes. Silly me brought my backpack AND my rolly bag… wouldn’t be such a terrible idea if we didn’t have to CARRY the damn thing across the town of Tazentoute through hills and unpaved roads. Needless to say, they probably were wondering what the hell they get themselves into with such a high mantainance volunteer. Upon arrival to my house there were two ladies on the couches, I had no idea who they were ( I have since learned it my neighbor and my aunt). After being introduced in Tashleet (which I didn’t know a word of) I saw and smiled for a bit, since that’s about all I could do at this point. I don’t remember much more because I was TERRIFIED. I got to bed at about 10 after a huge meal of them talking and me smiling. I went to bed so nervous and worried about what I got myself into… there are really no words to describe that feeling.
The next day we began our formal language training. A typical day (Monday-Friday) looks like this:

7:00 AM: use the Bitlma (bathroom), wash my face and brush my teeth with a bucket of water over the toilet hole, go back to my room and change into my clothes for the day, join my sister, mom and sometimes brother for a breakfast of agrom (bread) and Atay (SUPER sweet tea), walk to class.

8:00: Arrive to l-mdrasa (school) and begin language (Tashlheet) classes with 4 other volunteers (Jackie Shay, Monica, Aaron and Martha) taught by our LCF Fatima.
9:45: First tea break, usually have some hard boiled eggs (tiglay), bread(agrom), jam(l-kohfiter), butter(zibidah), Nutella (shklat) and tea (Atay)
12:00: Lunch break, we eat and usually do laundry on the roof during this time too
2:00 Lunch break ends, we have more language, cultural training or site training during this time

3:45: Second tea break, we sometimes have coffee during this time too!
5:00 End teaching sessions, usually have tutoring until about 5:30 or 6
6:00 Go to our host families home (or each others houses) and have 3rd tea, which sometimes includes Tea, Coffee and cakes. Often there is a 4th tea between 3rd tea and lunch and if you’re out in the town there is DEFINATLY a 4th tea and sometimes a 5th (can you see the tea pattern here?? I drink A LOT of tea)
6-9:00: During this time we sometimes go on walks to the river or through the fields, I try to get some studying done here too. If I’m lucky I’ll also get to read and/or hang out to music for a little bit (the idea of personal time is foreign to my family and a lot of rural Morocco). I try to help with dinner at about 8 too.
9:30-10: we usually have dinner during this time and are done anytime between 10 and 10:30. After dinner I sit in my room and journal, read or just lay in bed and listen to my ipod for a bit.
11:30: I’m usually passed out by then to start the whole day over again 
On Saturdays we only have review and language training until noon so that’s nice to have a break. And on Sundays we don’t have language at all, we have self directed learning where we get to hang out with our host families and do what we want (as long as we stay in ours towns).

I don’t want to make this entry too long so I’ll try to post the HIGHLIGHTS of the last few weeks: (side note- as I’m writing this I’m beginning to realize that my English is becoming worse and worse by the day!)