Well, here I am at the Hub in Ouarzazate again. We just spent ten days with our host families- I think it’s good that I can say it definitely didn’t feel like it was that long. Granted, we did take a mini vacation this past weekend, but in some ways, that was more tiring than being with my host family.
Since I last posted, we (as a CBT group) practiced using our PACA tools (participatory analysis and community assessment) that are basically one of the main ways that Peace Corps has us assess our community. It was a pretty cool exercise-we had two groups, one of girls age 16-24 and one of guys, same age. We learned a lot about our community (in terms of how each groups sees the community and what is important to them there, what they do every day and how the seasons change what they do. We also learned about what each group would like to have in the community.
Language learning has been very intensive, but pretty good. We just learned the past tense. I understand more of what my family says, but still feel pretty clueless. It may very well be that we got a lot of information in the past few days and I have yet to fully absorb it.
Our mini-vaca was nice. All seven of us went to a duwar (town) to the north of our CBT and stayed at a hostel overnight. It was really beautiful and had an old casba overlooking an oasis that we were able to walk around. The hardest part of the trip was trying to get A) a taxi that wouldn’t mind breaking the law and take all seven of us in one car and B) the correct price for the trip. We did make it there and back, though not without adventure. On the last leg of the trip the one guy in our group took a taxi with some other Moroccans going to our destination while the six girls took another. Of course, we got the driver that almost hit our friend’s taxi and then proceeded to yell at their driver. As we sped away, the driver started to blast Lady Gaga and the cab turned into a dance party. We listened to crappy American ghetto fab/club songs for the whole trip, while simultaneously almost rear-ending and then passing every car we came upon (including our friend’s taxi which had left a good ten minutes before we did…we ended up at the destination and waited for him for another ten mins), and all of this a crazy fast speed (of course) A great adventure…sort of…
All the health volunteers will be at the hub here for a few days, then we head back to our CBTs and will be cooking some sort of American food for our families on Saturday. I have decided to go with pancakes, scrambled eggs and hashbrowns. I’ll write more about the success (or lack thereof) of that experiment next time. More pictures of my host family and CBT site to come (Inshallah)!
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