New Site!!

New town versus old town

I am currently experiencing my "site visit" for Peace Corps. For one week, towards the end of training, Peace Corps gives us our permanent assignment and then has us go and get to know our new 'city' a little bit. So I'm here for a week, living with a new host family and figuring out logistics with the volunteer who I'm replacing. Then, I'll return to my training city for another couple weeks of language learning. Then I'll be officially Sworn In as a Peace Corps Volunteer on November 24th, and on the 25th, Thanksgiving Day, I'll begin my trek back to my permanent site for two years. I will live with this same new host family until January 1st, when I will move into an apartment here.

So, where am I? Well, the exact location I'm not allowed to reveal on a blog for safety purposes. But, I can tell you this: 1) I'm in the desert 2) I'm in the south east 3) I'm closer to Algeria than the next closest Moroccan city... by far! I'm so close to Algeria that they I'm going to have to learn different vocabulary so I can speak Algerian Arabic. Basically I am in the middle of NOWHERE. I took a couple of buses to get here from Fes, and as we were driving east from Errachidia, it was kilometer after kilometer of NOTHING. Occasionally we saw a few dyors (houses) out in the middle of nowhere, but I'm talking sandstorm-sanddune-camel middle-of-nowhere. I'm five hours from the next "big" city. (In Morocco, anyway. But we are NOT allowed to go to Algeria....)

So now I can compare:

My training city is an hour and a half north of Fes, which means in the north of Morocco. We are training further north than any volunteers. They can't put volunteers that far north because after my city it's all towns funded by hashish. And that could get messy. Even some of the youth of my training city who have finished school and are now unemployed can go on the weekends to harvest hash and take home a sizeable wad of dirhams. (This is very common, and it provokes me to wonder what the real unemployment number is, since so many who are "unemployed" in the region are employed by the hashish business.) So, in comparison to my permanent site, my training city is fairly snazzy. It's hilly, at the edge of the riff mountains, and relatively unpolluted by litter. My host family has what I thought were very small and simple accomodations-- and they are. But in comparison to my new host family in my Morocco-Algerian (haha!) permanent site, my training host family has some nice stuff.

Training Host Family's House: only two rooms, mine and a main room where all the sleeping and living is done. Floors are tile and covered with nice, thick carpet.
Permanent site's host family house: Larger, three rooms plus an inner courtyard, you could call it. One room is my bedroom, one room is for the TV/Eating/Living, and one room is for sleeping. The "courtyard" is in the center. It's a cement floor with an open ceiling (i.e. no ceiling) and I think this is more typical to the Arab design style. (The Arabs in this city are proud and claim they have no Shilha (berber) in them....) In this center courtyard you could look up and see the clouds pass by, and hang your laundry on the clothes line, all without leaving the house... It could rain, but no worries, there is a big drain in the middle. No plants or anything, but I can't come up with a better word.

While my new digs might sound nicer, in terms of luxury items, they aren't. I thought my old host family was semi-roughing it by not having beds. We all sleep on "ponges" (like sponges) and they are like narrow, backless couches that line the walls of the living room. They don't put sheets on them, and they just lie down when they're tired and cover themselves with a big blanket. My new host family doesn't even have ponges. We all sleep in the floor. They made up my room, which, when I first got here, just has a small table in it. By the afternoon, it had a rug on the floor and then two thin mats, about the thickness of an aerobics mat, a pillow and two blankets. And they whole family sleeps in one room on these thin mats, on the floor. The family, by the way, consists of a mom, who is 34 and recently divorced, and an 11 year old daughter named Oumayma (yes, my first host family also has a daughter named Oumayma), and a six year old daughter named Iness.

I hope this doesn't sound ungrateful. I am incredibly happy and lucky to have not just one, but TWO, wonderful families who are willing to take in a young foreigner who speaks like a three year old. Both families have made me as comfortable as possible and are completely giving of themselves and whatever resources they have. I'm merely making a comparison in a blog to show how every new experience like this that I have I am finding out more and more about how people here live and how much "stuff" (or lack thereof) we really need to be happy. I slept 11 and a half hours on the floor last night in my new Maroc/Algerian homestay after traveling for two days to get here and am happy to sleep here again tonight.

I am also lucky because Melanie, the volunteer that I'm replacing, is still here this week, and she doesn't go back to the U.S. until next week. More on how I'm preparing to pick up where she's left off next time.