Ashkeed, Miriam!

March 17, 2008
St. Patrick's Day

Today was an interesting St. Patrick's Day! It was the first full day of CBT (community-based training), and it went really well. We're in small groups doing homestays at various sites for the next five days. We'll go back and forth between seminar and CBT sites for the next two months. There are four other PCTs (Peace Corps trainees) and one LCF in my group. We meet every day to do language and other types of training.

I spent the evening studying Tashelheet with my host family, who help me with pronunciation in exchange for transliterations of English words. With my little siblings, we count first in Tash, then in English. We act out verbs and there's a lot of giggling to replace the words we lack right now.

I looked through my language book and got excited about making flashcards for lots of new words. Basically, I'm happy to be back in school. And I've been given my old Arabic class name of Miriam once again.





March 20, 2008

Eid al-Mulud


One of the few Tash phrases I understand without translating in my head is "Come on!" On Eid al-Mulud (the celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday was today), my host siblings were out of school, and I spent the day with the family. There was no "Tash school" (this is what they call what I do every day), and so I was at home as well.

As I followed my little sibs out to play ball: "Ashkeed, Miriam!"

As I followed them on a trek around the adwar (the Tash word for a village): "Ashkeed, Miriam!"

Of course, walking around the adwar is no easy task; we're in the High Atlas on the side of a gravelly mountain, and my two guides are small, adept climbers. Every once in a while, when the path was too narrow for my feet and I stopped to plan out my route, they'd turn around and give me another "Ashkeed, Miriam!"

Somehow, we all made it back to the house intact and in time for Tom & Jerry (gotta love that satellite TV ;)

"This is where it really begins..."

March 11, 2008

This was the greeting we received from one of the PC Morocco staff when we arrived in Ouarzazate after a 10-hr bus ride from Rabat that took us up and over the Atlas Mountains. I'm so excited to finally begin Pre-Service Training (PST)!
We started class with our LCFs (language and culture facilitators- the Moroccans PC hires to teach us). We have some form of class every day of the week from 8:30-6:00. But we get a long lunch (Moroccans siesta each day) and two mint tea and cookie breaks (and what Southerner can complain when there's sweet tea breaks?).
It's hard to imagine I've been gone just 10 days! We started in Rabat for a few days and visited the PC office there, and were given a very basic introduction to PC Morocco. Even at that point, what I'm doing hadn't exactly sunk in. I think now it has, though. Maybe it was waking up to the sound of the muezzin (the call to prayer plays over loudspeakers from every mosque) early in the morning. That, and the intense 8-hr language session our first day in Ouarzazate with breaks/assignments to go out and use our new vocabulary skills on the locals. It's getting intense, but I'm getting more and more excited to be starting!

After PST each of us in the Health Sector will begin work with our local sbitar. These are health clinics in rural Morocco. They range in size and scope of services offered. Some have a doctor and nurse on staff and others may even have sage femmes (traditioanl birth attendants). The conditions of the sbitars vary greatly from site to site. Generally, our counterparts will be the nurse at the sbitar. My counterpart is a HCN who will work alongside me and, potentially, help me out with questions and project plans.

March 13, 2008

Today we got our language assignments, and I was very excited to discover that I'll be learning Tashelheet for the next two months! It's one of the two Berber dialects spoken here. I plan on finding a tutor to help me learn Arabic once I'm at my site, but this assignment gives me a vague idea of where my site will be-- most likely in the south/east of the country somewhere. We all had started out learning Moroccan Arabic to get around, but now there are three languages that'll be taught.

On Sunday we go out to our first homestay families in small groups of 5-7 to stay for about a week. We go out to our CBT (community-based training) sites for a week at a time during PST and then come back to Ouarzazate for a few days to debrief.

My small group and LCF are great, so I can't help but get even more excited about training and working! My homestay family is large, with several kids, which I like a lot. More on them at a later date.

Right now we're getting ready to break out and do CBT. I'll continue to take notes each day and post like this when I get a chance.

Later guys!

Staging

Hey everybody!

It's day two in Philly, and I'm ready to head out tomorrow morning! With every training session we've had, I just keep feeling that this is the right thing to be doing at this point in my life. I'm so lucky to have such a supportive group of family and friends behind me! I'll miss everyone here so much, but at the same time I cannot wait to get to Morocco and be with my host family, learning (what I hope is) Berber.
As it turns out, I'll be learning either a Berber dialect or Arabic, depending on where I'm placed. I hope it's Berber, so I can study up on my Arabic and improve those skills at the same time. But I know no matter where I am, I'll have a great time learning a new language.

I'm with a training group of 60 Health and Environment sector workers. We're together for now, but will be split according to sector for training. We've been learning a lot about each other, and this is a pretty fabulous group. I have so much in common with so many people, and I'm thankful to have this dynamic group as my Moroccan support network.

We've all been speculating what it will be like getting settled in Morocco. We've talked about our placements and what our communities and job sites will be like. Some of the people in my training groups have been talking about riding/getting donkeys once we're in-country. Of course I had to tell them to be safe, because a friend of mine had recently told me a startling statistic about donkey safety. I shared with them how more people are injured every year in donkey-related accidents than in incidents involving airplanes. I think they were all grateful for that bit of knowledge ;)

I'll write more extensive posts when there's more to report. But now we're going out to dinner and to (maybe) karaoke on our last night Stateside! While you probably would like to hear more about my Karen Carpenter aspirations, I'll leave it to your imaginations and head on out :)