May 20, 2008 First full day as a Volunteer. Travelicious.

I haven’t blogged or journaled in days – almost a week, I think. And so much has been going on…if I were going to be alone in SouqTown tonight I’d write for hours, but I think there will be one or more PCVs – fellow PCVs!! – in town, so we’ll probably be hanging out.

What has been notable in the past week? Besides the obvious – passing the Language Proficiency exam, finishing training, swearing in as a Peace Corps Volunteer – there have been a few moments:

* the dlaH. Yes, our training city has been hot, hot, hot, but when I had my first bite of dlaH in almost a year, I knew it was summertime. Nothing tastes like summertime as much as crispy, juicy watermelon. I’d actually forgotten that watermelon wasn’t endemic to North America. If I remember right, I think it was brought over by enslaved Africans on the slave ships. So I’m in watermelon’s continent of origin. :D

Two nights after my first dlaH, I got more, but I had to gulp it down because I’d missed dinner – spent it in the cyber chatting with Dad, which was a fine use of time – and there was a show immediately after dinner, up on the roof of the hotel. The hotel owner – aka our host of the previous three months, off and on – had arranged a feast of tea, soda, and cookies up on the rooftop, along with a troupe of traditional musicians and dancers. So I snacked on watermelon (and a plate of fries, which I’d grabbed along with the dlaH on the way up to the roof) while I watched the dancing…and eventually participated in it. Of course. In the battle between shyness and dance-y feet, the feet always win out. :) I also got to chat with two Moroccans – one who’s Peace Corps staff, and whose grandparents lived in a village where this kind of music and dancing was common, and another who was one of the dancers. She was downright extatic to find a tarumit – foreigner – who spoke even a little of her language. And she loved the henna. :)

Wednesday night, my group took our beloved H** out for a goodbye dinner. It was over too quickly – much like Pre-Service Training itself! – but I’m glad we took the moment to show her, even in a tiny degree, how much we appreciated everything she did for us. She was our language instructor, our cultural facilitator, our go-between on everything we attempted to do in our village, and she made our lives better in a thousand – a million – tiny and huge ways. She said once that she has never had a Trainee who didn’t pass their language exam, and her record still holds true. (Believe it or not, all of our cohort – all 59 of us, counting Health and Environment Trainees – all passed our language requirement. Lhumdullah!) She was available to us for at least 18 hours a day, 7 days most weeks (even though she was supposed to get Sundays off), and never lost patience. Or if she did, she never let us see it. :) She’s the kind of teacher I always hoped to be.

Friday night, I had dinner out with a departing PCV, J**. Her short span as a Volunteer has come to its natural conclusion, and she’ll be leaving the country about a week after I get to my site. She is one of the most forthright of the PCVs we’ve met; she doesn’t pull her punches, which is actually reassuring, in a sort of oxymoronic way. It has been clear from what the other Volunteers have said that they’ve softened the edges on most of the incidents, or glossed over some parts. Instead of making everything sound easier, as was surely intended, it’s actually made me wonder what is hiding in the shadowy corners they don’t mention. J** shines a flashlight on them, addresses them, and is calm and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It’s almost like, if we step into the world of Monsters, Inc. for a second, she’s the one saying, “Yes, there are monsters who will occasionally come out of your closet. They come in different sizes, shapes, and colors. Let me tell you about a few that I’ve met…” Maybe I just tend to fear the unknown more than the known, but I find that reassuring. The known I can prepare for, mentally and in other ways.

My first full day as a Volunteer consisted of waking up early to see everyone off, giving hugs to as many of them as possible (I think I missed a total of 4 out of the 26, and 3 were together – they left for the far bus station while I was helping 2 other friends take their bags to the nearer station, but I did get to hug a bunch of the health people, so I think I ended up with more than 30 hugs for the day), and then embarking on my own bus. Ours was the last group to leave.

BTW, today there was a whoopsie on my part – we’d been given tiny stamps that we will need to get our cartes de sejour, which are sort of like Green Cards. I’d carefully tucked mine in the tiniest pocket I have – a little sleeve inside my camera bag – and when I double-checked it this morning, it wasn’t there. I turned my room upside down, looking for this tiny slip of sticky paper, no more than 1cm x 2cm. No luck. It probably fell out when I changed my camera battery after the swearing in. I told myself that it was for the best that it had happened while we were still in a reasonably large city, since there aren’t many places where you can get these stamps. But it turns out that the one and only vendor in our fair city had already been bought out, when our staff bought the stamps to give to us. Oops.

I was wondering how this would be resolved harmoniously…when the training coordinator summoned me over. I launched into a mea maxima culpa, which he waved off. “They are small, and stick to things; it happens.” I was rather startled; I’d expected something more condemnatory. And then it got even better. Apparently, a year or two ago, six of these special stamps magically appeared on his desk. No one knew where they had come from, and no one knew what to do with them. He couldn’t just distribute them to Trainees, because there is a place in the budget for acquiring the right number. He couldn’t use them, because they don’t belong to him. He couldn’t even take them back to the vendor and exchange them, because there would be no legal way to use the money. (For the record, I’ve been impressed with all of our staff right along, but the shining integrity in this account just dazzled me.) So he stuck them on a cork board by his desk, to be available in case of PCV emergency. Such as mine. He called someone at his office, told them to drop one of the stamps into an envelope, gave them my address, and safi. (It’s done.) Lhumdullah.

About half an hour after that, my group gathered up our bags and headed for the bus station. We embarked without incident and had a smooth five-hour ride. The next leg of the trip was only an hour, so if there weren’t an immediately available bus, we’d just grab a taxi – but the bus heading our way was actually in the process of pulling out when we got there, so they flagged it down, told the driver to wait for us, and threw our bags from one bus to the next. That has to be the shortest layover in history. :) An hour later, I hopped off the bus in SouqTown. In the next hour I said goodbye to my friends (several of whom had been on the bus with me), ran a few errands in town, enjoyed a European snack at my favorite SouqTown café (steamed milk and a chocolate croissant), met up with some PCVs, and made a night of it.

In short: much travel; many, many, many hugs; lots of beautiful countryside; yummy food; good friends. I miss them already... But there is much to be grateful for, too.