One month of Peace Corps down, 26 months to go. . .

October 9, 2008

So a month ago today we landed in Casablanca and began what has already been quite an adventure and will undoubtedly become even more interesting. We're almost halfway done with Pre-service Training and I think I've already learned more Moroccan Arabic (the dialect is called "Darija") in these four weeks than I learned Chinese during my entire year in China. We spent the first two weeks all together in a hostel in Azrou, this relatively small town in the middle Atlas mountains. Azrou is a great town with nice places to run and hike, and even though we're pretty busy with information sessions and language classes and everything else that goes along with training, we manage to have Yoga and Pilates on the roof every morning, and I go running with a couple of other volunteers every evening, and just about every minute of free time we have during the day is spent throwing a frisbee outside or playing some pretty intense games of doubles Ping Pong. We usually have a couple of hours free after dinner every night when we'll head up to the medina (the old, commercial part of town with little alleys and lots of little shops) or to a cafe somewhere in town.

But as pleasant and fun and sports-filled as Azrou was, our "community-based training" in this tiny town called Itzer was so much cooler. I spent the last two weeks in Itzer as part of a small group of six volunteers with one Moroccan language teacher. My host father is the president of the town's association of carpet weavers, and is basically THE man in town - seriously everyone in the region knows him. Our town is two main streets and a bunch of back dirt alleys, and is right next to a really cool plateau that we climbed one afternoon. We spend five weeks there total and are supposed to use this as a mini Peace Corps experience, where we implement little projects to help the town's association after we do all these community needs assessments and interviews. Our projects include making a website for the association so they can advertise their rugs and crafts and also a trekking company that they're trying to start up, other marketing and advertising activities, working with the weavers to make some improvements in product quality, documenting the motifs and colors and making a catalog and order forms. Should be fun.