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