Greetings from Morocco!
So far, my days have been filled with learning and excitement over what the next two years will bring! (Ironically, this has at least started out as the most sheltered of all of my travel experiences, although of course that has already begun to change!). I am currently in the middle of a training process that will continue until I am sworn in the day after Thanksgiving, in sh’allah!
With a group of 52 other small business and youth development trainees, I arrived in Casablanca on the morning of September 13, and from there took a bus to Rabat, where we were more or less under lockdown (from what little exploring l managed, it had the feel of most other big cities I’ve ever visited). After a few days of preliminary training information, about half of us (the small business development trainees) traveled to the Middle Atlas town of Azrou. This is a large town of about 50,000 – a pleasure to be in with a little more “personality,” but retaining all the conveniences. We still don’t have a lot of free time, but manage to venture out periodically. One walks the streets to see numerous vendors, the occasional bakery or cyber-café, and hoards of men sitting at cafés everywhere surveying the passers-by. Of course the women are conspicuously absent from the café scene – and indeed my only attempted venture to a “women’s” café with a few other women landed us at the Café Afrique, which turned out to be at a gas station (albeit one with a lovely view!) on the extreme north end of town, far away from all the city bustle or even the more “suburban” homes! In any case, the men at the cafés in the city all look bored silly, so I don’t think we’re missing out on much (this has actually been confirmed by a couple of my male colleagues). I’ve already had a chance to visit the local artisans cooperative, to begin to get a sense of the type of crafts I might ultimately be involved with, but probably the most interesting thing I’ve stumbled into so far has been a circumcision celebration on the street as I was returning home with some friends a few evenings ago. Because we are now in the mountains, the weather is dry, and often rather cool at night – which has made for some pleasant sessions of rooftop yoga and Pilates at the Auberge which is our on-again, off-again residence of the next couple of months.
Our days are quite full, with 4 hours daily of language training and Arabic script (which is pretty cool, even though I still feel like a 5-year-old who shows up at kindergarten being asked to write in cursive right away!). I spent about a week learning Darija, the local Arabic dialect, but have now switched to Tamazight, one of the three Berber dialects spoken in the country. That will be my primary working language once I receive my final site assignment, and so far it appears to be even more of a throat workout than the Arabic was! The rest of our training is a combination of job skills, safety, and other cross-cultural and development-related tools. All of our trainers are Moroccan, and the one with whom I’m working most closely, Malika, is an absolute riot! She fools you with her glasses, veil, and generally demure look, but it turns out she speaks American slang (fo shizzle!) far more convincingly than I do!
I’ve already been able to meet a number of current Peace Corps Volunteers in the artisan sector, who all seem to have had unique and rewarding experiences (and they give me some hope that the language skills will eventually come!), and I’m now about to leave for what Peace Corps calls Community-Based Training. For that, I will travel with a group of five other trainees to a village called Ait Hamza (way too small for you to locate on a map), where we will do some preliminary technical evaluations with local artisans (one of us will end up staying at Ait Hamza for the next two years), and of course, experience a little more immersion in the local language. And the most exciting part is that I’ll begin staying with my first host family there! Like everyone here, I’ve really been looking forward to this, although no doubt it will present many challenges as well, especially during these early weeks where it’s so difficult to maintain even the most basic conversations! (We’re not really supposed to use any other languages we might have in common…)
For the remainder of our training period, I’ll be moving back and forth between Ait Hamza and Azrou, with an additional “field trip” mid-October to visit a currently serving volunteer in the small business sector. By early November, I’ll learn my final site placement (which could be either in the Middle Atlas or more towards southeastern Morocco, as Tamazight is somewhat widespread), and I’ll be visiting my final site in early November to begin to get a sense of things. I do have to say that while I didn’t have strong feelings about where I’d be placed or which language I’d be learning, somehow I did have a stronger sense that I’d end up in a Berber community (I believe Imazighn or Amazigh is the politically correct term, but…). This will probably translate into a slightly more relaxed, liberal environment for me, so on the whole I am very pleased with how things are going so far!
