8/5/09 The Newbies

Last year, when I was a newbie Environment Volunteer, I waited six months after my 11-week Pre-Service Training (PST) to see my buddies again, at our week-long IST (In-Service Training).

Thanks to the rearranging of the training schedule, this year’s newbies only got 8 weeks - not 11 - of training when they first arrived, then three months of living with their host families and working on language and integration, and now they have two weeks of “Post-PST” training. Yes, that means Post-Pre-Service Training training. Sometimes government bureaucracy just makes me smile. :)

I’m assured that they’ll end up with the same amount of training we got – either because they’ll get a 2-week IST or because I miscounted the number of weeks of PST – but the big difference is that instead of getting their “technical sessions” mixed in with their language and cultural sessions during one massive training haul, they had 8 weeks of language/culture and now, once they’re settled in-site and integrated into their communities, they’re getting all of the technical sessions in one huge batch.

As my loyal readers may remember, during PST, I shuttled regularly between my Training City and my small riverbank village. Three days in the City followed by a week in the village. A week in the City followed by two weeks in the village. Etc. We spent three months packing and repacking almost daily…but it also meant that we got to take breathers. Too many hours on learning a language that shares no roots with English? Take a week to train on how to set up EE clubs and conduct SIDA lessons. Too many PowerPoint presentations? Time to chill with your host family and bounce a baby on your knee.

I’m not sure which training model is more effective, though I do know that the newbies’ language skills are amazing. 8 solid weeks of living with their host families while getting 8 hours every day of direct instruction on language gave them a fluency and vocabulary range that I’m still working on after a year.

So why am I bringing this up now?

Because I’ve come to the newbies’ Training City to conduct some of those infamous PowerPoint presentations. I’m talking to them twice, actually. Today, I get to discuss the club that Fatima and I have run over the past year, and show them pictures of the murals, soccer tournament, tree planting, SIDA lessons, and other games and activities we all did together. Tomorrow I’ll co-lead a session on Monitoring & Evaluation. (A few months ago, a newbie & I went up to Peace Corps headquarters for a workshop on M&E, and now we get to pass along what we learned.)

I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with the newbies. For all that I call them by that slightly condescending term – newbies – I have nothing but respect for the new crop of Volunteers, a fresh group of wide-eyed innocents who have left their families, friends, and homeland for two years in hopes of bringing the world closer to peace.

When I was a wide-eyed Peace Corps Trainee, I *loved* getting visits from 2nd year Volunteers. They all seemed so confident, so blasé, so assured of things that I still found bewildering and shocking. I peppered each visitor with questions, trying to define the undefinable Peace Corps Experience. These newbies aren’t in quite the same position I was – they’ve had 3 months in their sites to knock the edges off their shiny newness, so they’re not as mystified by The World Outside of Training as I was – so I haven’t gotten as many What’s It Like?? questions. Instead, I’ve gotten to hang out with them. We’ve eaten meals, walked around town, chilled out on the hotel roof…we’ve gotten to know each other. And I’m reminded all over again what an honor it is to be a PCV.

Spending time with a room full of Volunteers…just isn’t quite like anything else. You have the full range of personality types, from fresh-out-of-undergrad-fratboy-type to retiree-calmer-and-wiser-type and everything inbetween. But young, old, goofy, serious, partier, workerbee, funny, chill…they’re all Peace Corps Volunteers. They all chose to surrender two years of their lives to live and learn and love a new country.

I can’t figure out how to say this without sounding like I’m self-aggrandizing, but please just trust that I don’t mean to be: PCVs are amazing human beings.

For most of my life, when I entered social situations full of strangers, I'd hang back, looking for the one or two folks in the room who I could connect to on a meaningful level. I’m capable of small talk, but I dislike it and prefer a friendly silence to stilted chatter. I'd nearly always find someone I'd enjoy talking with, and then spend the rest of my time with that individual.

It’s different here. When I walked into this hotel full of strange PCVs, I remembered something I’d forgotten since the beginning of stage: a group of PCVs isn’t like any other group I’ve ever met. I’m already connected to them all, on a profound level. These aren’t strangers at all; they’re members of my Peace Corps family, unknown to me but bonded nonetheless. It’s like going to your ancestral homelands and meeting your distant cousins. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never seen each other before or that your accents are different; you’re still family. You’ll figure out what else you have in common soon enough, but it hardly matters, because you’ve already flown across the first social hurdle. They’re already an us, not a them.

PCVs, despite the thousands of ways that we 8000 people are so different from each other, share similarities on a level that I just haven’t found anywhere else. And of course you find exceptions. A handful joined Peace Corps because they wanted an in to graduate school, or because they were bored and confused and didn’t know what to do with themselves. But those are the exception…and they don’t usually last very long, either because they go home early or because Peace Corps Service works its magic on them, and they find themselves serving the world as PCVs, even to their own surprise.

So I’m grateful to be here, not only to get to “pay forward” the generosity of the 2nd-year Volunteers who helped my Training, but because I’ve gotten to meet 26 new friends. 26 new amazing, selfless, generous-hearted brothers and sisters.

[[Little brothers and sisters, of course, regardless of their age in calendar years, because I’ve been here a year longer and am therefore clearly entitled to play the big sister card. ;) ]]

5/23/09 Word of the Day: Newbie

As you know, a Peace Corps Volunteer serves for two full years, in addition to their 2-3 months of training. As you also know, Morocco has four kinds of PCVs, which arrive for their training in two batches: Health PCTs and Environment PCTs arrive in March, while Small Business Development PCTs and Youth Development PCTs arrive in September.

As a result, there is a new batch of Trainees every six months, and therefore a new batch of freshly-sworn-in Peace Corps Volunteers also every six months, swearing-in in May and November, respectively.

Well, until now.

Peace Corps Morocco's upper eschelons decided sometime last year that they'd completely rearrange training. Now, it's only two months long, and focuses exclusively on learning the Moroccan languages and cultural traditions. All "technical training", aka how to *be* a Health/Environment/SBD/YD Volunteer, will come three months after the Trainees swear in, as they're ending their home stays and moving into their own homes.

Since this change was made recently, the newest batch of PCVs are the only ones who have gone through this newly redesigned training. They swore-in in April. Shockingly early, I know. ;) The soon-to-depart COSing Volunteers swore-in in late May of 2007, so their service doesn't end till late May, 2009.

Which gives us a solid month of overlap between the arrival of the newest batch and the departure of the oldest batch.

Given the six-month cyclicity of service, PCVs here have appropriated the terms Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Once you swear in, you're a Freshman. But no one ever really uses Freshman - the other three are far more common - when they can use newbie. Six months later, when a new batch swears in, you're suddenly a Sophomore. Etcetera. But these terms are only really ever used right around swearing-in, when you'll hear lots of comments like, "Oh, my goodness, how can I be a Junior already!"

The rest of the time, we just refer to ourselves as "First-Year" or "Second-Year" Volunteers, usually by sector. That is, now that I've passed the one-year anniversary of my own swearing-in, I'm officially a Second-Year Environment Volunteer.

Last week, I was still a First-Year....sort of.

Because the newbies have been here for a month already. And they're the real First-Years.

So our lexicon has become a bit addled.

The solutions appears to be referring to our newest PCVs as newbies. And the ones about to reach their Close Of Service are the COSing Volunteers or just the COSers.

My cohort have sort of fallen through the linguistic cracks. As of two days ago, we're the new Second-Years, but even that hasn't worked all that well, because no one dares utter the blasphemous old Second-Years, and Third-Year is just silly. Once the COSers close out their service next week, everything will shake back out, and I'll be a Second-Year and the newbies will all be First-Years, and all will again be right with the world.

For now, I'll just wait out this month-long limbo, where there are three sets of Environment and Health Volunteers scattered throughout the country. Like all things, this too shall pass.

2/5/09 What Comes Next: Your First Nine Months in Peace Corps

Every other day throughout February, I'll be posting information specifically targeted to potential Peace Corps Volunteers. My last PCInfo post (see labels below) was devoted to the timeline for applying to Peace Corps. Today, I'll discuss What Comes Next: Your First Nine Months.

So you've applied, interviewed, been nominated, been invited, and accepted your invitation.

Congratulations! So what happens now?

Pre-Service Training - 3 days: Welcome to Peace Corps, Trainee!

You're In The Peace Corps Now...but you're not in your country yet. In fact, you're not even a Volunteer yet. You won't become a Volunteer until you've sworn in, at the end of your training. For now, you're a Peace Corps Trainee. You'll spend two to three days in an American city, learning some basics about the Peace Corps, making sure that all of your paperwork was filled out correctly (and they collect it at the orientation session, so be sure it's done before you get there!), and meeting your fellow Peace Corps Trainees. These folks will be your support network for the next 27 months, so start getting to know them as soon as possible. I have more details about these days here, written back when I was going through it.

Pre-Service Training (PST): Welcome to Your New Country, Trainee!

This varies a bit by country, but the principles are the same. You're now a Peace Corps Trainee - PCT - and you'll spend something between 8 and 12 weeks being introduced to your new home. In Morocco, we spend the first few days in a major city near the coast, so the Peace Corps staff has easy access to us for medical things and overview sessions (and so anybody who gets cold feet can be quickly flown home), then move onto our Training City.

Once in your Training City, you'll begin learning your target language and some of the major ideas you'll bring to your work. What is the role of a Peace Corps Volunteer? What is the role of a PCV in development? What projects can you expect to work on? How will you engage in cultural exchange? Etc, etc, etc. Expect eight-hour days broken up into 2 hour sessions. If you've ever attended any kind of workshop or Management Training, you have some idea what to expect. Flip-chart paper, big markers, big ideas, group discussions... That's while you're in your Training City, ie a minority of PST/stage. (Given how many acronyms there are, everyone in Morocco refers to PST as "stage", with a French pronunciation - stahzh. I don't know how widespread it is, but I like it. The corollary is that your fellow PCTs are also known as your stage-mates.)

So if you're only in your Training City for a minority of the time, where are you for most of stage? Community-Based Training, aka CBT. You'll live in a village where they speak the language you're trying to learn. You'll live with a host family, with whom you'll spend evenings and weekends, and you'll spend your days studying language and culture. When I went through stage, we alternated between a week or two in CBT and a few days in our Training City...but the stage scheduled to start in March will be only be in the City for a week or two, and will spend the entire rest of stage in their CBT village. Here is the information about stage that Peace Corps sent me a week or two before I left the US.

Pre-Service Training + 5-8 weeks: Site Visit

A week or three before the end of stage, you'll take a visit to the site you've been assigned to. This is your chance to learn the route, experience unaccompanied travel in your country, meet your host family, and see your village. Most of us had a great site visit, but a few folks had a really wretched time, due to food poisoning or other complications. Two actually refused to serve in their village, because of the severity of their medical problems and the fact that there was no phone service (landline or cell phone) with which they could summon help. Peace Corps staff listened to their concerns, had some long conversations with them, and ultimately assigned them elsewhere.

Swearing-In: Par-tay!

Congratulations! You've successfully completed PST/stage. You've mastered a new language (more or less), you've learned what you're expected to do for the next two years, and you're being sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. This is a Life Moment, so don't be afraid to savor it. You'll hear speeches from your Ambassador or his/her designate, from your Country Director, and from the PCT with the highest score on the Language Proficiency test. Your host family will have been invited, so they'll get to see you with all your fellow Peace Corps folks. After the ceremony, you and your family get to feast at a banquet. When the banquet ends and the families go home, the newly-fledged Volunteers get to celebrate however they see fit. My swearing-in was held at a fancy hotel with a gorgeous pool (and I do mean *fancy* hotel - it's where Brad & Angelina stay when they're in Morocco!), so we all busted out the bathing suits and had a pool party. The details will vary, but trust me that this will be a celebratory moment for you - plus your last chance to socialize with your stage-mates, except for those few who are placed near you.

Swearing-In + 1 day: Leave Stage

It's time to say farewell to your training city, the Peace Corps staff, and your stage-mates. You'll probably travel with other Volunteers - there aren't *that* many transportation options in developing nations - so you'll get to postpone your goodbyes with a few for another couple of hours or even a day, but after that, it's time for homestay.

Swearing-In + 1 or 2 days: Homestay

Welcome to your new home! You've just arrived in your site. Your host family, who you met a couple weeks ago during your "site visit", helps you bring your belongings from the bus/tranzit/taxi station to their house, where you'll be living for the next two months. Here is your opportunity to enmesh yourself in the life of your village. Use it as best you can. Visit your neighbors. Help your family with their chores/work. (Girls, yes, you can go to the fields; guys, yes, you can help in the kitchen. You may need to insist, but they will eventually let you.) Befriend your siblings and their friends. And here's a tip: keep studying your language diligently. It's easy to slack off without the structure of stage, but trust me, the faster you're comfortable in your new tongue, the faster you'll be comfortable.

Swearing-In + 2 months: Leave homestay

It's time to say goodbye to the family that has hosted you, fed you, cared for you, and made you one of their own. Or, if you're in the unfortunate minority, you get your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free-Card. Most of us enjoy our host families - I really love mine - but a few poor souls feel like they've been under house arrest. But however you feel about it, it's time for you to move into your own house/apartment and start taking care of yourself...unless you're in the tiny minority - no more than one or two per stage - who choose to stay with their host families for their entire two years of service.

Swearing-In + 5 to 6 months: In-Service Training (IST)

Spend a week in a Moroccan city with your entire stage. This is a blast for several reasons, not least of which is that you probably haven't seen more than a handful of your stage-mates since Swearing-In. But now you're all back together, in a city which undoubtedly has more going on than wherever you live, since Peace Corps doesn't place PCVs in major cities (for security reason). You'll present information on your site, discuss challenges and potential solutions, learn about applying for various kinds of funding, and hang out. You'll also get various vaccine boosters and your first in-person access to English-speaking doctors since stage.

After IST, you'll meet back up with your stage-mates at Mid-Service Medicals, at the one-year mark, and then again at your Close-of-Service conference, three months before you leave country. The rest of the time, your only exposure to other Volunteers comes through people posted to your region and any traveling you do. Does this sound lonely? It shouldn't. It just means that most of your friendships and interactions will be with Host Country Nationals, aka the people born and raised in your new country. This is a good thing; after all, two-thirds of the Peace Corps goals focus on cultural exchange. More on that next time, on February 7th...

November 4, 2008 Election Day!

IST continues… The sessions are great, as are the social interactions with fellow PCVs, but all the excitement right now is focused on the election. I’m very grateful to be in a group of Americans right now…I’d still be following the results avidly, wherever I happened to be, but being in a building with sixty or so PCVs (counting the RPCV Peace Corps staffers), in a room with 29 other Americans who have committed at least two years of their lives in the service of their country and world peace…

I know that the election night parties in America must be pretty amazing, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

Sessions ended about six hours ago. I probably should have taken a nap, but instead I went out to eat American food (one of the perks of being in a real city for IST, as opposed to a little rural town like SouqTown), did a little shopping (got a pie pan, a mixing bowl, and Qtips, all at bargain prices), and then came back to the hotel, where I settled down for a long winter’s listening-to-CNN-coverage night.

I spent the past few hours working on grant proposals for some projects I want to do in Berberville. (Several of the sessions have dealt directly with how to do just that – IST is nothing if not responsive to our needs!)

I might not have been quite so diligent if my wireless were working…the hotel offers wireless internet (ah, Moroccan hotels of the 21st century – still no bathrooms in the rooms, but wireless internet is here!), but my little internal antenna isn’t doing anything useful. Ah, well. I have one grant proposal nearly finished and another about half done.

The hotel owner has gone all out for us…there’s a huge flatscreen TV on the wall, two big carafes of coffee (plus a mountain of sugar), ginormous bowls of popcorn… And we’ve gone all out, too. A couple volunteers drew up our own Election Map on flipchart paper, and we have crayons at the ready to color the states in red and blue. Some others commissioned an ice-cream cake that read “[Candidate] 2008”.

(While I won’t deny that most of us here feel strongly about our presidential choice – and most of us agree – I’m still trying to keep this blog apolitical.)

…and now it’s 11:22 PM, aka less than half an hour after the first polls closed in the Eastern states, and we’re riveted to CNN and their goofy holograms. :D

PS: Quote of the Day: “Honestly, I have fun at Moroccan Ahay Deuce weddings. All the dancing around…” [voice trails off in face of withering skepticism] “OK, yeah, there’s also the confusion, bewilderment, and general feeling of fear, but there’s definitely fun mixed in.”

November 3, 2008 Training

I’m back with friends from training! Six months (well, five, but who’s counting) into our service, we’re gathered together for In-Service Training, cleverly referred to as IST. We’re having sessions on lots of useful topics, but I confess that I find the most valuable aspect is the quality time with so many good friends.

Only a few of these folks are anywhere near me…my nearest stage-mate is B*, from my CBT group, about 3 hours across the mountains; the next closest is 4.5 hours away down the mountains. So they’re not exactly close by. Well, it’s also because Berberville is one of the most isolated sites in the country. We’re not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but we are definitely in the middle of big, lonely mountains.

So getting to see them all – getting to re-establish and renew the connections built during our first three months in Morocco – is a real joy. The only thing that would make it better would be the presence of the five folks whose Peace Corps careers ended early. You guys are missed.

But still, being back with the other Volunteers is fantastic enough to more than make up for the fact that our training site is one of the coldest cities in the country…not quite as cold as Berberville, but awfully chilly. As M*, Peace Corps staff member and true-blue-lover of American idioms said, “It’s freaking cold!” (I have to say, hearing “freaking cold” come out of the mouth of a five-foot tall Berber lady is a genuine source of joy in my life.) I spent all last night shivering under three blankets, though I was warmly dressed: tank top, long underwear top, sweat pants. Tonight I’ll add long underwear bottoms and wool socks. And another blanket.

Quote of the day: “I’m not a chameleon-ologist, but…”
“Benhamin” telling us of his frustrating conversation with a Moroccan who didn’t believe his assurances that chameleons aren’t poisonous. The guy had coaxed a chameleon into a plastic bag, in hopes of killing it and eating it (or part of it) for medicinal purposes, but was terrified of it. “Benhamin” was trying to reassure him, but was vociferously argued down.

August 13, 2008 Word of the Day: Uru

In PST, we learned that uru can mean to write or to give birth. We all laughed when we heard that, although the nine months I spent gestating my senior thesis give the truth to that interesting word.

Here in Berberville, though, I’ve only heard it used in the maternal sense. My xalti is da-turu, which literally means “she is giving birth” or “she gives birth”, but when conjugated in the present tense like that *functionally* means “pregnant”. Yes, that’s right, my xalti is giving birth for nine months straight. And to think American women complain if labor takes more than 24 hours! (Kidding, kidding…don’t hate me.)

After two months of hearing da-turu consistently referring to pregnancy, I’d nearly forgotten its other meanings.

Then this afternoon, Ama stopped by my room and asked if I was da-turut. My hand instinctively went to my belly, even while my language centers reminded me that the expression can just as accurately be translated as “writing”.

Which, in fact, I was doing.

My family usually uses the words qra (read/study) or xdm (work) when referring to what I do in a notebook or on my laptop. Occasionally, they’ve used ktb, which is the Arabic verb for write. But today I got uru’d.

(Which might, I’m now speculating, be an idiom for becoming pregnant.)

(Don’t panic, Mom. I’m not.)

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.

May 19, 2008 Swearing in

Monday morning, between 9:15 and 9:30, we made our way from our little hotel to a huge 5-star palace of a hotel. (When we had done a mapping exercise early on in training, and had had to construct a map of our training city from memory, we had referred to this swanky place and its neighbors as the “Fancy Pants Hotels.” Because they are. When movie stars come to town, this is where they stay.) The Fancy Pants hotel lived up to its name. The decorations were breathtaking, the ceilings were enormous (in a country where 12-foot ceilings are standard, that’s saying something), and the courtyard was landscaped by an artist.

After a few rounds of oohs and aahs, along with a bunch of pictures taken of each other in our own fancy-pants finery (ranging from a three-piece suit to jellabas to the full spectrum of the business casual rainbow, we made our way up to a meeting/banquet hall where the chairs had been set up for our event.

Health and Environment trainees faced each other across the front of the room, separated one more time, in front of the podium for the speakers and assembled notables. Our families, Peace Corps Staff, and other invitees all faced the podium from a little further back. Come to think of it, I think the chairs were set up pretty much the same way for my high school graduation.

I took a bunch more pictures of the assembled Trainees, the big Peace Corps banner, etc, and then it was time to get down to business. There were a series of speeches, from Moroccan dignitaries (translated by our Training Coordinator, since only ~12 of us have learned Darija, which is what he was speaking); from our Country Director, who spoke in careful Darija as well as English, addressing our host families and us, respectively; from the Ambassador’s representative, who spoke in French and didn’t translate his remarks; and then from three Trainees. One representative of the highest scorers on the Language Proficiency exam, in each of the three languages we’ve been studying – Darija, Tamazight, and Tashelheit – gave talks. The Tam speech was the funniest, according to the laughter of the invited Morrocans. (It was also the only one I understood more than a quarter of, which may also be part of why I enjoyed it.)

And then came the big moment. The Country Director – who will be leaving Morocco before the next group swears in, so this was an emotional moment for him, as well – instructed us to raise our right hands and repeat, line by line, the oath we had all signed and sworn a few days before, to protect the Constitution and to serve the people of Morocco. Most of us were misty-eyed before we got through the paragraph-long oath. The girl next to me was clutching my hand for emotional support.

And then we were no longer Peace Corps Trainees. So long, PCT status, hello two years of service as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Then there was feasting, more picture taking…and there was great rejoicing. :) Eventually, we said goodbye to our host families – mine was one of the last to leave – and ran back to our little hotel to grab our bathing suits. The Fancy Pants hotel, of course, had a pool. And we were allowed to avail ourselves of it for the next four hours. And there was great rejoicing. ;)

May 21, 2008 Volunteer!!

After three months of long days and short weeks - days that were filled to bursting with language lessons, conversations with Moroccans, hanging out with fellow Trainees, new foods, new reactions to food, and language language language, days that were individually exhausting (I haven't gone to bed at 9:30 every night since high school!) but which collectively flew by as week turned into week and month passed into month - and suddenly it's not March 1st anymore. I'm not a wide-eyed newbie looking around the hotel in Philadelphia, wondering which if any of this crowd of people was going to be friendly. Over the past three months, that crowd has shifted from strangers to friends, spanning the spectrum from acquaintance-you-smile-at to people who I'd trust with anything (and have). And now that crowd is scattered across the Moroccan countryside.

Monday morning, I raised my right hand and swore to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to serve the people of Morocco. It was very moving - yes, I got misty, as did many others, male and female - and very sudden. What happened to the four hours a day of language training? That was good! That was helpful! That was ... what Trainees get. And now I'm a Volunteer.

I'm still not sure why the Peace Corps makes such a distinction between Trainees and Volunteers - after all, we're all here to serve, we're all here to learn - but now that I've crossed the divide, I'm really missing all the security and comfort that comes with having dedicated instructors and a room full of friends.

It wouldn't be fair to say that Peace Corps dropped us in the deep end of the pool. They provided an amazing and devoted staff to train us as well as people can be trained in 11 weeks. A more accurate metaphor than the cliched "deep end" would be to say that the Peace Corps gave us 11 weeks of swimming lessons and then dropped us somewhere in the Pacific. We do, actually, have the skills we need to survive, and even thrive... As long as we don't lose our heads or forget anything we've been taught over the past three months, we just might avoid drowning. Inshallah.

So yesterday, Tuesday, we all loaded up everything we own or plan to need for the next two years, and piled into buses heading to all parts of the country. I had over a dozen people on my bus, including some of my closest friends, lhumdullah, so I wasn't about to miss the chance to give them hugs goodbye, even if it meant that I got stares from everyone behind our group.

And today, Wednesday, I've met with my awesome counterpart, met a professor friend of his (and two of the professor's grad students), and set up a project that will fill the months until school begins again. It's about identifying and cultivating what they call "aromatic plants", aka plants that can be harvested for "essential oils", ie roses, argon olives, rosemary, mint, etc, etc. How exactly I'll conduct this survey in a language I barely speak...that'll be interesting. But it's good to have a project, especially since the primary project I've been given requires contact with schools, many of which have already let out for summer.

So I've got a full plate, a mountain of luggage, and a waiting host family. Off I go... Keep me in your prayers! :)

5/14 Winding down...

The clock is ticking down towards the end of Pre-Service Training. We've seen our CBT villages for the last time (barring future social visits), attended sessions on everything from How To Create an Environmental Education Club to Water Purification to Dealing With Sexual Harrassment, and will swear in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer within the week, inshallah. (I'm not allowed to say exactly when, since all events where large numbers of Americans will congregate are off-limits on blogs. Sorry.)

Today was our final language test. It went well, lhumdullah, and that means the end of formal language instruction. I'll still be getting weekly (probably) tutoring from the same person, lhumdullah, my fabulous and brilliant LCF H**, once I get to site. :)

5/10/08 Henna

Fellow PCT J** told me earlier that watching me type is distracting. My hands are covered with brown-stained leaves, flowers, vines, fans, swirls, and zigzags, so the movement of my fingers is eye-catching. Apparently. :)

Sunday afternoon, B**’s host sister henna’d my hands. She spent the better part of two hours on it, and the patterns are gorgeous. Each part of the hand is independent – no two fingers are alike – but they still harmonize in fascinating ways. She was incredibly thorough, too. When she started, I’d thought she’d do a simple pattern in the middle of my palms, but she just kept going and going. Towards the end of each hand, she would turn it this way and that, looking for more open skin to decorate. When the side of a finger looks like an inviting palate, you know you’re being comprehensively coated. :)

I left the henna on overnight, and put my hands in mikka bags, but the bags weren’t tied, so they slid up on the backsides of my hands. This means that my palms are covered with a bright orange design, the backs of my fingers are dark brown, and the backs of my hands (the backsides of my palms, to be accurate, but I don’t think that’s a real expression) are light brown. My wrists are so pale that the patterns almost blend in with my freckles, which are more or less the same color.

In the morning, I removed the henna itself – which is a paste made from a plant – which had dried into black, crystalline lines across my skin. As I flaked it off, it looked exactly like chocolate jimmies. (Chocolate sprinkles to the non-yankees in the crowd.) They were really well stuck on, so I ended up spending the better part of an hour prying them off my hands. Once I had more than 80% removed, I went out and used water to try to get the rest off. (I’d been trying to avoid using water, because the water isn’t working well this week – a pipe burst in the kitchen, so they’re keeping it turned off most of the time.) It took another 20 minutes before the black was gone and my hands were just orange-brown.

As I type this, it’s been a few days, and it’s still dramatic and dark. It makes me happy. Henna usually lasts for 3-6 weeks, depending on lots of factors, like how often you wash your hands and how long you left the henna on. Since mine was overnight, and I used rubber gloves when I did laundry (since Tide can erase henna like nobody’s business), I expect it to last for quite a while. :)

Oh, and one other aspect of the henna experience – you’re helpless while it’s drying. Anything you touch with your hands can get dyed orange, so you don’t use them. Someone else had to tie my shoes. When my phone rang, a (female) friend had to pull it out of my pocket for me. I had to eat with a spoon (in a culture that virtually never uses utensils). As H** told me, "Brides have to accept that they can't do anything for themselves." Because brides, like departing friends, are always henna'd. :)

5/10/08 Packing

I’d left myself lots of time to pack up, since this is the last time I’ll be in this village, barring a visit sometime in the future. But when you have three outfits and four books, it doesn’t take that long to pack – even with dawdling and picking outfits for the next two days (to give myself a buffer on doing laundry). I’d also brought a fleece jacket – a Christmas present from my big sis – which was utterly superfluous as a jacket but made a great pillow. :)

5/11/08 Mothers’ Day, aka our last full day in our CBT villages

The day started with a trip to our souk town to buy going away presents for my family. I’d hoped to get one big gift for the family--a playpen for the baby--but that didn’t work out, so I went with individual presents instead. I gave two scarves – one dark pink and one navy blue – to Sis-in-Law, mostly because she’s always been so sweet to me. Mma got a lovely black scarf with a subtle black rose embroidered at the corners. Little Sis got a pearl grey scarf with an embroidered pink rose. (Her choice.) I wanted to give her colored pencils, but there were no open bookstores/papershops in town. Little Bro and the baby both got tomobiles (cars). Little Bro’s is remote controlled, and the batteries are already fading. Bummer. I also got the baby an adorable little outfit that he’ll fit and/or grow into, inshallah. The gift I’m the happiest with is the drbouka for Middle Bro. Ever since I saw him rocking the rhythms on a table, I’ve wanted to give him a drum. Ideally, it’ll be a gift for the whole family; they’re such a dance-y, musical bunch that I think having a drum and drummer will be a source of joy for many evenings to come.

The buying and giving didn’t go quite how I’d intended, but this is a country without Christmas, and I’m not sure how birthdays work, so I’m willing to be flexible about that. Sitting here, I realize that I do possess the language skills – vocabulary, grammar, and syntax – to be able to say, “If you were buying a drum, which would you choose?” But when I was standing in the shop, all I could come up with was “Whatever you want” – Aynna trit – so Middle Bro knew from the get-go that it was for him. But that’s really not so bad. And he did give me a big Shukran! (Thank you!) as he tucked it under his arm and rattled out a walking-along beat for us.

This morning’s walk into the town – about 5 km – was as beautiful as I’d hoped. Gorgeous sunlight and skies, gorgeous flowers blooming everywhere, gorgeous countryside. One of the photos I took looks like an 18th (19th?) century landcape painting, and not due to any skill of mine – this place is just lovely. One picture I’ve shot repeatedly but never captures the effect is the view of the fields from the top of the bluff. You walk and walk along this rocky soil, and then a velvet green, lush valley appears, first as a sliver between this cliff and the matching one across the river, and then as a broader and broader swath of verdant life. It’s such a miracle, this recklessly spendthrift oasis of grasses and trees and flowers and vegetables. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, it always feels unexpected, like a surprise pary or an unannounced visit from an old friend. It’s the gift of life to this village – my village – and I’m always grateful for the sight of it.

Today I got to stroll through the fields, brushing my fingertips along the sheaves of barley, ducking the bamboo leaves, dodging the muddy patches underfoot. I took pictures as I fancied – I think my most frequent word of today was “Blatti” – wait – but a photograph can’t capture the experience of the sun shimmering on the poplar leaves or turning the tumbling river into angel-white sprays. I can’t shoot the coos of the mourning doves or the chatter of the sparrows. Pictures of the storks only show long-limbed flight, not the majestic circling of those enormous creatures as they drift across the countryside or lower themselves delicately onto a mosque-topping nest.

My brothers and sisters are happy to pose for me, but I always manage to get them blinking or mid-word, so their beauty looks like heavy-lidded ordinary-ness. So maybe it's for the best that I haven't figured out how to post photos yet... There's so much more to Morocco than I can photograph. :)

5/10/08 Goodbye Party

This afternoon, we had a “party” to say our official farewell to our village. All of our family members were invited, plus there were a few crashers. As parties go, it was very, very chill. Everyone was sitting on one of the cushions along the wall – men on one side of the room, women on the other – and the only people moving around the narrow room were in the process of serving food. I took a few turns making rounds with beverages and snacks, as did all of the female PCTs and a few women from the village. There was no music, because there was a death in the village yesterday, so music would have been inappropriate. So basically, it was people sitting down, snacking, and chatting with the folks within earshot.

At B**'s prompting, I gave an impromptu announcement, letting folks know who has been assigned where, so that everyone would know where we were leaving them for, and then I reiterated the invitation (which they’ve all received hard copies of) to our Swearing-In Ceremony next week (inshallah). Other than saying the date wrong – I treated it like it was in the 20s or 30s instead of in the teens – it went well. Lhumdullah.

Stupid epiphany of the day: It’s really hard to understand someone when they’re speaking a language you don’t expect. At a party this afternoon, I was talking to someone across a room, and he answered me in French. I’d asked the question in Tamazight, and was trying hard to understand him over the noise of the intervening conversations, but just couldn’t figure out what he was saying. When he finally reduced his answer to a three-word sentence with one-syllable words, it penetrated. It gives me more compassion for villagers who will be expecting me to speak French, like most of the Westerners they encounter; when I speak in my shaky Tamazight, they’ll be trying to recall the French they learned in primary school.

May 8, 2008 Wess n Zitoon and the thunder go boom

The bloom is definitely off the rose. OK, not literally. The Rose Festival was last weekend and there are still roses blooming for dozens of miles in every direction. But figuratively… Today was not the best day I’ve had in Morocco.

There were plenty of great things today. We had our Great Tree Distribution (hence the title “Wess n Zitoon”, which means “Day of the Olive Tree”), plus an awesome electrical storm that provided a lightning show to rival the Midwestern United States, and thunder that rumbled continuously for over an hour. So that made me happy..

But some parts of the tree sale were frustrating, and I had a run-in with a teenage boy that made my skin crawl, and the flies keep swarming the table when we eat, and the baby peed on me. Which was kind of depressing and funny at the same time. Because babies are babies, the whole world over. And they’re wonderful and adorable and huggable and curious and beautiful … and sometimes they pee on you.

So why was I frustrated with the tree project? Well...

Here’s a quick recap of the timeline of our tree planting project:

CBT Week 2: The Genesis
§ We met with the president of the association, Mohammed
§ He proposed giving trees to the poorest families in our village.

CBT Week 3: Association Meeting
§ We love the idea of targeting the poorest families, but the association points out that they represent the entire village, so every family should get at least one tree.
§ We’ll sell the trees to ensure buy-in (pun intended) from the village families.
§ Appropriate price: 2DH
§ We’ll have a sliding scale, of sorts: 1 tree per wealthy family and 2-5 trees per family in need, with the need being assessed by the association.
§ Over the next two weeks, they’ll work out the ratio of wage-earners to dependents in each family.
§ They won’t give us a tally of how many trees they want – just the more trees, the better.
§ We’ll apply our full budget to the tree-buying, and should be able to get 200-250 trees, depending on the price from the nursery.
§ We’ll sell them the Sunday after we get back.

CBT Week 4: Association Meeting II
§ Peace Corps bought 200 trees, but for some reason, 198 trees have arrived.
§ Change in plan: They’re getting dry…let’s sell them on Thursday instead of Sunday.
§ Change in plan: Let’s not sell the trees. People might be suspicious if the association makes a profit.
§ Potential change in plan: Should we open the sale to families outside of our village?
§ Change in plan: OK, let’s sell the trees. For 3 DH.
§ Change in plan: Tomorrow’s tree sale wasn’t publicized, so no one knows about it. Association members will mention it at afternoon prayers today.
§ Change in plan: There was no sliding scale assessment. People might be unhappy about getting different numbers of trees. Let’s let everyone buy three.

CBT Week 4: Tree Sale Day(s)
§ Families from outside our village are participating, which means that there aren’t enough for everyone to get three trees.
§ Change in plan: Let’s only provide two trees per family.
§ Maybe people can come back for a third … later.

Sales reports:
§ By noon, 27 families had their trees.
§ By the end of the day, 31 families had them….Which meant that more than half the families still didn’t have their trees. Over 130 trees are continuing to dry out.
§ The second day, the tree sale started at 3pm.
§ By the afternoon of the third day, ~ 2/3 of the families had their trees.
§ By the morning of the fifth day, there were only 15 trees left. And that’s the last I heard.
§ Lhumdullah, we successfully distributed (sold seems like a strong word given that these are priced ~20% of market value) almost 200 trees.

I’d hoped it would take a few hours, not five days…and I’d hoped we’d target the poorest families, not sell two trees to each family…and I’d thought it would be limited to our village, not the surrounding countryside…and I’d thought the pricepoint would be 2 DH, not 3DH…and when I talk about my own hopes and thoughts, I also mean what we put in our proposal to Peace Corps. And when you write a project proposal and it gets funded, that’s more or less a contract. So when the plans suddenly change, we’re more or less in breach of contract with the Peace Corps. Of course, this is the Peace Corps we’re talking about. And a third-world (or second-world, depending who you ask) country. And our big picture was fulfilled. The tree planting happened. But I’m still not entirely happy. We did provide a source of income-generation to the people of our village, which is a good thing. A single olive tree, once it’s mature (ie in about five years) produces enough olives to pay a year’s dorm fees at secondary schools. So we may have just paid the way of our village’s girls to junior high and high school. Inshallah. And we provided trees, which are good on multiple levels that have nothing to do with income generation: they provide oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, stabilize soil, and provide habitats for thousands of tiny creatures. Lhumdullah. But we didn’t do a lot of what we pledged to in our project proposal, and that upsets me.

And then the baby peed on me.

May 7, 2008 Shades of Summer Camp

Sometimes, at odd moments, Peace Corps Pre-Service Training reminds me of summer camp. I’m not sure why. It might be the smell of the kitchen or the fact that we’re all sharing communal meals at big tables, but something reminds me of the camp I attended a few times as a kid. I’ve thought of camp more often in the past two months than in the previous 10 years.

There are obvious dissimilarities. We’re all full-grown. Nobody has to pass a swim test. (Blood tests, yes.) Waterskiing is definitely not on the agenda. But there are some obvious similarities, too. We’re a group of peers under the very laid-back supervision of a few adults. The adults are different from us in obvious ways. (At camp, they were all 10-20 years older. Here, they’re our age, more or less, but they’re all Moroccan nationals.) We’re here to learn, but it’s not school. We’re showering less than daily. We’re walking on a lot of unpaved paths. Also, we play a lot of goofy games, usually as “energizers”. The day we all returned from site visit, there was a round of Sardines, which I haven’t played since camp. We’re sleeping semi-communally; at camp, we were in cabins with 7-15 beds, and here, we’re in rooms of 2-4. I’m in a room of 4. (Quick shoutout to J**, N**, and B**, my fabulous roommies!) And y’know, learning to conjugate in Tamazight shares a lot with learning to shoot a bow and arrow. Both are hard, both take practice, both can be frustrating, and both are tremendously gratifying when you nail a bull’s-eye.

PST, like camp, has routines that shift regularly…food that ranges from awesome to avoidable…laundry that has to be washed by hand. Our CBT groups, like our cabin groups, put us into intense proximity with people we might never have spent time with otherwise, and therefore forges powerful relationships. My CBT group, lhumdullah, has worked harmoniously, and we’ve made some good friendships. My friends in other groups... have other stories to tell.

Oh, and we have scheduled snack time. :)

May 6, 2008 If I had a million dirhams…

It’s our last week in our CBT villages, home of my original host family. So to practice our lesson on the conditional tense, our homework consisted of asking family members, “If you had a million dirhams, what would you do?” I got great answers…

Middle Bro – I’d (1) buy a house, (2) buy a car, and (3) travel to America and France.
Little Sis – I’d buy a husband.*
Little Bro – I’d go on hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) with Mma and Bba.
Mma – I’d feed my children.
Sis-in-Law – I’d travel to America with you [me]. Awwww.

* For the record, she’s 10. When I pointed out that with 1,000,000 DH, she wouldn’t need a husband – she could have her own car, home, life, etc – she just blushed and ducked her head.

April 30, 2008 Inshallah*

Around here, whenever you talk about the future, you say “Inshallah”. If God wills. It doesn’t matter how likely the event is. “I’m going to the souq in half an hour, inshallah.” “I’ll sprout wings and fly tomorrow afternoon, inshallah.” (OK, maybe they wouldn’t say that one.) It’s also used as a graceful way of avoiding invitations: “I can’t stop in for tea now, but I’ll come by later, inshallah.” It’s mostly cultural, but it was originally religious; the Qur’an teaches that no one knows the precise time of his or her death – the Bible has a similar verse or two – so there’s no way to know if your plans will come to pass, and it is impious and arrogant to claim otherwise. The cultural implications of this mean that appointments and plans are pretty much always tentative. It also reflects a grater humility and expectation of God’s influence in daily life than most Americans or Europeans would acknowledge.

It’s just one of the thousands of ways that Moroccan culture is different from American culture. That’s what makes it so fascinating to be here – I never know what I’ll learn next! :)

April 30 Random observations (aka excerpts from letters)

I don’t remember how much of this has made it into earlier blogs. Please forgive any redundancies. :)

I can’t believe it’s been two months already. Where did the time go? Why didn’t I spend more of it studying? Eek!

I’m loving my village. It’s a high desert, with virtually no vegetation outside of the irrigated fields. It’s ringed by mountains that have been battered by repeated rounds of crashing into Europe and North America over the past 500 million years. And there’s no grass or trees to obstruct the view – just a few bramble-bushes. It’s a geologist’s dream come true. :) As an environmental educator, though, I’m concerned for what this means about drought conditions and local ecology. (Though it did rain for half an hour this afternoon) But I have months to work all that out, inshallah.

My village still doesn’t have internet access, but they promise that it’s coming. Sometime. I won’t hold my breath, but it’s possible it’ll be in town before I finish my service. It already has 1200 residents, three schools, a police station, a hotel, several hotels and cafes, a few markets, and two paved roads.

April 29 Long day. Ighzif wess

6:00 Wake up. Linger in bed, praying and thinking happy thoughts.
7:30 Get up and ready for the day.
8:00 Go into the main part of the house. For the second day in a row, breakfast was waiting for me. After breakfast, I helped Ima in the kitchen. She’s making ksuksu (couscous) from scratch.
9:30 Went with “Fatima” – the adopted name of my sitemate and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer – to the school and post office and to meet a couple teachers. All the teachers we met today speak English – most of them are English teachers – and that’s a real blessing, because like most teachers in these Berber villages, he doesn’t speak Berber. Darija, Classical Arabic, French, and English, but no Tamazight or Tashelheit. The poor students have to hear everything in a new language.
10:30 Met the gendarmes. Language became an issue again, because they also don’t speak Berber, and Fatima doesn’t speak any Darija or French. Fortunately, I remember high school French (I keep meaning to write a long thank you letter to Mme. Lyons and Mme. Chartres), so was able to communicate well enough to fill out the paperwork we needed. My rusty French was sometimes hard for them to follow, and I had trouble coming up with all the words I needed, but we could communicate, lhumdullah. Volunteers who have learned Tam (Berber) but don’t know any French or Arabic – like Fatima and most of the other PCVs I’ve met – have a really tough time. Or is the Peace Corps trying to subtly tell the Moroccan government that everyone should know some Berber?
11:45 We’d finished our errands, and I wasn’t expected home until 1pm, so I decided to walk up the mountain and look at my home from above. Either I’m at 10,000 feet* or I waay out of shape. Possibly both. The big resistant layer above town is very cool, though – it’s easy to see from anywhere in the town, because it makes a big shelf jutting out of the hillside (hence the name “resistant” – it resists eroding more than anything around it), and it’s got bazillions of brachiopod fossils in a sandstone, plus one trilobite and a really mysterious thing that looks like an octopus leg. For the non-geologists in the crowd, trust me when I say that’s odd and really cool. :)

* I’ve looked at Berberville on a couple of topo maps, and depending which map I look at, I’m living anywhere from 7500’ to 10,000’. There’s a difference.