It's Myyy Biiirrrthhhhddaaayyyy!!!

My Henna Hands

Hello again!

As many of you know, I am extremely happy here in Morocco! I have the most wonderful host family I could ever have wished for, the food is delish, the language is coming along shwiya b shwiya (little by little), and everything in general is just amazing!

Yesterday was my birthday and it was a fantastic day. I started the day with my first "shower" in 4 days...actually it was a bucket bath on the landing of our stairs in my new home! When I got to my LCF’s in the morning, everyone sang Happy Birthday to me. We had a freshly baked birthday cake for breakfast and as gifts my CBT group gave me a wooden beaded bracelet and two packs of almonds J In the afternoon, we all went to my host family’s house for tea. When we got there, there were around 20 members of the community all waiting for us/me and we had a Moroccan birthday celebration! It was fantastic! Hafida, my host mom baked me Birthday cake and iced it with “Happy Birthday Miriyam” (which is my new Moroccan name!). She also made all kinds of other sweets and breads, which were all yummy. There was traditional Moroccan music playing and all the women were dancing and smiling. Hafida gave me a beautiful Kaftan (traditional gown worn by Moroccan women). Hafida and my LCF, Malika also coordinated a Henna artist to Henna all of our hands…pictures to follow! I received many phone calls from all you lovelies in England and America—Thank you! It was so nice to hear all of your voices.

On a funny note, I asked Malika if we could play a traditional American birthday game of pin-the-tail on the donkey, which she had never heard of. After, explaining it to her I joked and said that with all the real donkey’s around here we could play pin-the-tail-on the-Real-Donkey, to which she got very excited and said, “YES!! I’ll ask the landlord if she has a donkey we can borrow and we will play it next week!” Hahahahahaha. So next week a highly competitive game of pin-the-tail-on-the-Real-Donkey will take place J Can’t wait!

Armnbd (Until later),

Love-Hugs-and-Kisses

Miriyam xXx

Malika (LCF), Stacey and Me with Henna hands

Stacey and me waiting for the Henna to dry

Getting Henna

Birthday Celebrations

Birthday Cake from Hafida

The girl's in my CBT Group and my Birthday Crown

My LCF's/School

Shower...

Door to my bedroom

My bedroom

My bedroom

Welcome to my CBT Site!

My CBT Site :)

Big Deep Breath. And Again. This is it-my Peace Corps experience has officially begun. I am in the Real Morocco…and it is breathtaking. Lovettsville is a metropolis compared to where I am now! After a 5-hour bus ride, I am sitting in bed, typing by candlelight in my new home. The drive from Mehdia to here, in my opinion, is best described as driving through the landscape of Disney’s, The Lion King, but with monkey’s horses, sheep, and donkey’s rather than zebra and lions…does that make any sense?! The dour (village) is at the base of the mountains and is tiny. I’m not sure I can even put into words what this place is like, and one thousand photos wouldn’t do it justice. It’s surreal. I honestly don’t know what to say…

We arrived at our community based training site (CBT) around 5pm today via a grand taxi (a run down Old Mercedes, and I mean run down). After paying the driver, we managed to drag our luggage across a small farm field and into our Language & Cultural Facilitator’s (LCF) home/our new classroom, where our new host moms were waiting eagerly. Awkward, is the only word to describe this situation. We had a crash ‘survival phrase’ course of Tamazight en-route, but nothing stuck and all that was left was smiles, stares, and nervous laughter! I was the first one to be introduced to my host mom, who in reality is more like my host sister, as she is only 24!

So here are my new families statistics per the Peace Corps:

Father’s Name: Mimoun

Mother’s Name: Hafida

Others Living in Household:

Son: Hamza, 6

Son: Omar, 4

Grandfather: Laheen (pronounced Lahsheen), 70

Grandmother: Aicha (pronounced, Ayeesha), 60

The dour is a maze of similar looking adobe buildings surrounded by farmland and is at the base of the Mid Atlas Mountains. The views are incredible. Their house is quite big for the area, I think. The floors are bare, but there are various rugs in the rooms around the furniture areas.

After introducing myself to the family, Hafida insisted I sit on a very small stool and watch her prepare the dinner. She explained all the vegetables and spices she was using in Tamazight to me. Then her sister and two cousins showed up and I moved into the living room to sit on the Poonj’s (cushioned benches with pillows for back rests all lined around the room against the wall, Moroccan couches) with them while she finished preparing dinner.

Dinner was served on the ‘coffee table’ sitting on the poonj’s. Hafida’s cousin held an empty bowl in front of me with a jug of water in her other hand and insisted that I rinse my hands, while she poured the water over them. I was given a small individual dish of diced cucumbers and tomatoes, but it appeared that normally this might have been served in a communal bowl. The meal was a chicken (there was no oven and I never saw the chicken being prepared so I am still uncertain as to how it was cooked!) on a bed of onion, tomato and other vegetables (not sure what they were yet as I have never seen them before) broth, which was slightly chunky and everything was topped with fresh green olives. A plastic tablecloth was placed on the table and the chicken dish was served in a communal bowl in the middle for the 9 of us.

Thick, flatbread was the utensil for eating and everyone only eats the triangle portion of the round dish from directly in front of him or her. You start by breaking the bread (using only your right hand of course) and sopping up all the juices and pinching up all the olives with the bread. Once all the juices were gone, Hafida, using her hands picked the (small) chicken up and shredded the meat off distributing it in even piles in each person’s portion of the dish. I put my left hand under my leg to 

deter me from habitually trying to use it and as warned they continually tried to get me to keep eating, but I had my notes next to me and made sure they knew I was full-up and very grateful. “Safi Burraka L’Hamdullah!”

My CBT Site

Entrance to my neighborhood...

View from outside my LCF's (school) house

My CBT Site

Lunch at our Hub site in Azrou

Annie & Me at our Hub in Azrou

Contact Info for the Next 9 Weeks

I will only have internet connection on the three trips back to my hub center during the next 9 weeks so don't be alarmed if you don't hear from me.

However, my new Moroccan mobile/cell phone number is 00 212 618779308 and will be active around 2pm tomorrow. It's free for me to receive your calls and I will answer whenever I can. If you get calling cards make sure they are valid for calling Moroccan cell/mobile phones.

And don't forget you can always put some money on your Skype account and call me, which is probably cheaper than calling cards.

My mailing address is still...


Annemarie Athey
s/c Corps de la Paix
2, Rue Abou Marouane Essaadi, Agdal,
Rabat 10100, MOROCCO


Can't wait to hear from you!

xXx

Last day of orientation...

Hello!

It's the last night being with all the volunteers and the last night being walking distance from the beach! Yesterday, we had another day of various training and yummy meals, followed by a sunset swim in the ocean.

This morning I got up at 6am and went for a sunrise swim with another group of Peace Corps Trainees, until the guards made us get out as there was a really strong undertow. The place is humming with excitement today as we got our community based training (CBT) site placements---we were all very anxious to hear where we will be spending the next 9 weeks.

And for the big news: 

My CBT site (which again I can't tell you the exact location in my blog) is about an hour Southwest of Azrou, in the Mid-Atlas mountains and has a population of.....300 people!!! Aghhh!! Crazy-Boy-Oh-Boy am I freaking out :) Not only that, but out of the 34 Small Business Development Trainees who are here, there are only 5 of us going there and we are the lucky five who get to learn Tamazight, a Berber dialect, instead of Moroccan Arabic! Deep Breath! This is going to be intense! But, soooo rewarding.

About my site:

The Douar (small village) has a Peace Corps approved doctor and there is a Post Office, Co-op, and a couple of small shops. The host families all have running water and electricity so that is a plus :) They also all have Turkish squat toilets...not sure if that's a plus! Regardless, we all got a lesson in how to squat with maximum efficiency today. The men in the village are all either farmers (potatoes and onions) or shepherds. Most of the women are weavers and apparently they are excellent weavers as they are already  exporting.

At first I was apprehensive about learning Tamazight, but after talking to my language/cultural facilitator (LCF), Malika, I am a bit more at ease. She told me that it is a bonus to learn the dialect as after CBT, the Peace Corps will be paying for a personal tutor to tutor me in either Moroccan Arabic or French depending on my permanent site placement. I am very happy about this!

During the next nine weeks my schedule is intense. Here's a glimpse into what life will be like...

Everyday, we will eat breakfast with our host families and head to our LCF's for training at 8am. The four other trainees and I will live no more than a 15 minute walk from our LCF's house. We train in mainly language, but also cultural and technical skills until 6pm, Monday-Saturday. Once a week we will all take a taxi to the next town over, where there is a souk (market) and buy our communal lunch groceries for the week. The Peace Corps provides a cook and he/she will prepare our lunch for us at our LCF's house, from the food we have bought at the souk. At 6pm, we return back to our host family for dinner and to study. The families are supposed to help us practice our language in the evening's and I have no doubt they will as they don't speak English! Sunday's are 'free days' although they aren't really free as we are expected to do whatever the family is doing...or at least make an effort to!

I am very anxious to meet my host family tomorrow---I hope they are nice!!! It is going to be such a struggle communicating and I am nervous as to what tomorrow night and the next nine weeks will be like, but I know I can handle it :)

Wish me luck!!!

These are a few pictures from orientation, we didn't leave the training site except to walk down to the beach so there aren't too many exciting pic's yet...

Skyping and Typing in Our Room

Villa on our street

Our Home

Moroccan Sunset..taken from our house :)

Cheryl & Me...after a just for fun scarf wrapping class

LCF demonstrating different scarf styles on Katy

Camels on the Beach

The Last Supper
Annie, Me, Cheryl

Annie & Me 

Annie, Me and Margo 

The Last Supper

Today's actual blog!

Going to make this one short as it's late and I've got an early start tomorrow...


The day started with a breakfast of bread with cream cheese and chocolate croissants, coffee and sweet mint tea. Then we had our first Arabic language class which was pretty entertaining as none of us know any Arabic and can't make the right sounds! After language training we had more medical and safety training. I got my Hep A and Typhoid shots...then after lunch we met the American Ambassador to Morocco, Sam Kaplan, and his wife and also the US Regional Security officer who gave us a safety briefing which was very very informative. That lasted two hours and was really exciting, I've never met an Ambassador before. Then there was more paperwork and our Country Director, David Lille, who is an extremely intelligent and friendly man, went through more policies with us. We finished up around 5pm and all went for a walk on the beach again, which we all needed after all that hot sweaty sitting in the conference room all day! The guards followed us all over the beach again today. I am pretty sure they think we are funny because we always catch them smiling...although, today during our walk there was thunder and lightening in the distance and then all of a sudden it poured. We all got completely soaked (and so did the poor guards in full uniform!), but we all laughed the whole way back to the house :) After dinner I sat outside and practiced Arabic with a small group of people. And now I am going to go to bed...with the sound of the ocean waves crashing outside my window :) Ahhhhh.....

First Blog From Morocco!

Drumroll please for the first Moroccan blog!...This is actually from yesterday, but the internet connection wasn't good enough to post it-so think yesterday when reading it! 

Today they went pretty easy on us since we are all running on empty. The flight here was delayed so we spent 7 hours sitting around at the airport. With a 2 hour bus ride to the airport and then a 7 hours sitting in the airport then the 7 1/2 hour flight, then another 2 1/2 hour bus ride to our location (Note: For security reasons we aren't allowed disclose our specific locations in blogs or facebook or anything like that) you can imagine how sleepy I am. I have had two really good meals though and I also got to go walk along the beach for a bit which was beautiful. OH-get this-our bus from the airport to the place we are staying was escorted by 4 cop vans-2 in the front and 2 in the back! It was pretty exciting. But, even more crazy is that we have our own personal guards---and there are a TON of them. They are at all the entrances to our street and all in front of our two buildings (the place we are staying is like a big beautiful house/hotel-but think Moroccan (ie., no AC, cold water showers, etc..)) anyways if we leave the 'hotel' on foot some of the guards follow us. So picture like 5 of us walking on the beach and 3 guards in full uniform just a few feet behind us! It will only be like that here though and that is because there are 67 of us all in one place so we are kind of a target. But, don't be stressed they don't anticipate any trouble, it's precautionary because of some Americans (in the USA) were trying to stage a mass burning of the Koran on 9-11. So like I said it's just precautionary cause that is all a little fresh.

The flight over was pretty bleh! The airplane was very old with communal tv's--I've been spoiled with flights that have individual tv's  :) My food tray was broken so I had to eat off of my lap. That was pretty amusing and I had everyone around me laughing. I told them that the not so nice airplane was our ease into our new life. Then I told them to check the toilets on the airplane out-that they are just holes in the air with two ceramic tiles for our feet. Everyone was laughing. But, we made it here safe so that's what counts! 

We had lunch as soon as we got here and it was delish. First, we had fresh bread and a salad of shredded carrots, diced cucumbers and beet root, boiled eggs and cauliflower. The second course was grilled fish (not sure what kind, but it was good). Then we had lamb tagine with dates (no couscous though as that is served only on Friday's). Finally, banana's for dessert! Then we had orientation which lasted a few hours. It started with a Moroccan welcome which was Moroccan men in traditional costume playing the drums and dancing. They were fantastic! And then all the formal paperwork, introductions, safety speeches and staff introductions. After that we had some free time so that is when a bunch of us went for a walk down to the beach. There were camels and miniature horses and sand and ocean :P You had to watch were you were stepping as you walked along the shore as there were camel poop trails all over the place (Francesca and Nicole, don't worry I took pictures of it for you :)

Then when we got back I decided to have a shower...and since the clothes I'd been wearing since we left Philly were sweaty and smelly and we don't and won't have washing machines, I decided to multi-task and shower with them on-hahaha. So I've done my first Moroccan load of washing! They are hanging in the window drying as we speak. All the girls thought it was a pretty genius idea. We have showers here but they are kind of like the ones at the pool or in a shared dorm. 

Dinner was Chickpea soup, then Beef burgers with cheesey pasta, and yoghurt for dessert. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day which I like...

I will post pictures tomorrow or Saturday so keep an eye out!

Welcome!

Hello and Welcome to my blog!

As most of you already know-I am getting ready to depart to Morocco for 27 months of service in the United States Peace Corps on September 14th, 2010. After a grueling two year application process I finally found out I was in and going to Morocco in July 2010! So I packed up all my belongings in London (where I have been living for the past three years) into boxes and bags and put them into storage at my grandparents house in Essex-thank you Grampy for letting me invade your garage!

After a very tearful goodbye at Heathrow airport, where I had to say not goodbye, but 'see you soon' to my lovely Nana and darling Jerry, I hopped on a plane and headed back to Virginia for a twelve day visit with my family and friends stateside. I am on day four of my visit and let me tell you it has been a rocky start! After flying in what was apparently 'way too tight'a jeans' for a 7 1/2 hour flight, I landed in Washington DC with painfully swollen feet which stayed that way for two and a half days. Even better than swollen feet, I managed an allergy attack (who knows what the allergy was, as I didn't know I had any) in which I rubbed my burning eyes so hard, I gave myself an eye infection in both eyes. After a trip to the eye doctor's yesterday I am now on the road to visionary recovery thanks to some prescription antibiotic eye drops.

And so now that I am 'all-better' I look forward to an uneventful next 10 days! Lots of catching up dinners, impossible packing (two bags for 27 months?!), then goodbyes all over again and on Monday, September 13th, 2010 it's off to Philadelphia for staging and then off to Morocco on the 14th.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog and please post comments as I will be eager to hear from everyone!

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