Hi Sumaya,
Thank you for your message and your interest in my blog. I hope the following information is helpful to you in someway. The requirements for living with a host family during your initial training and service, varies from country to country within Peace Corps. Currently, for Morocco, you are required to live with a host family during your ‘Pre-Service Training’ (PST), which lasts for two months. Once you have completed PST, you move to your final site where you are then required to live with another host family for five weeks. In response to your question, PST is not meant to prepare you for interaction with your host family, as you live with them after only four days of arriving in country, so it’s up to you to mentally prepare yourself for that! The purpose of PST is to get you to the Novice High rating of whatever language the Peace Corps arranges for you to learn during PST and also to teach you about the basic cultural differences and behaviors between your new country and the USA. The two months of PST is extremely intense-you are in ‘school for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and in the evenings you return to your host family, where you must balance interacting/integrating with them and also study what you learned that day. Realistically, you have little to no ‘down-time’ during this period. While living with the second host family (in your final site), you are given five weeks to identify housing. The Peace Corps gives you safety and security guidelines, which your house must meet in order for you to move into it. They also give you a monthly maximum rent allowance. So it’s up to you to find a house that meets the safety & security and rent guidelines. If for any reason you have difficulty (in most cases there is no problem) locating housing, you can extend your home stay until housing arises. The time spent during the second home stay is intense in a completely way. You are with your host family 24/7, interacting with them, integrating into the community, studying the language, beginning your work assignment, and taking care of logistics for the next two years.
Again, I hope this information is helpful to you and I encourage you to meet with a recruiter and discuss Peace Corps further. While the past three months have been challenging, they’ve also been the most enriching three months of my life. And I’m still loving every minute of it.
Bslama,
Maryeem
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