"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!