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 :)