Blah, blah, blah ...Girl Power!

Ever since we got back from Post Pre-Service Training, I've been trying to set a personal and professional goal for myself each week. This week's personal goal was to work on the blog. After all, getting this blog turned into a book/movie a la Julie and Julia is one of my potential roads to fame following the Peace Corps. Theoretically, my life in Morocco should be more interesting than stories about a woman learning how to dress a chicken and what-not, so I feel fairly confident that this blog will eventually be somehow transformed into a bestseller. Anyway, I bring up this whole blog thing so that you'll notice that I've added a list of things you can send me. I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life, but I'm sure sending things to a lonely, bored Peace Corps Volunteer is good karma. And before you complain that I haven't given you my address, it's on Facebook. Or you could just ask me. I'm online like all the time.

Anyhoo, on to an actual story. Today is International Women's Day, and though my plans to do a larger event for the day fell through (don't ask), I resolved that I would make today's English lesson be about IWD. As I so often do here, I walked in there thinking everything would be easy and people would be excited about whatever I'm talking about just because I'm excited about. Unfortunately, my English class is comprised of solely 15-year-old boys - perhaps the demographic group least likely to care about discussing International Women's Day. Getting them to read the short paragraph I had written was like pulling teeth. During a particularly frustrating 10 minutes, they pretended to be thoroughly confused by words which are cognates in French. "Yes, boys,  the English word 'access' is the same as the French word 'acces,' 'international' in English is 'international' in French, etc." And yet I consider today's class a success. While I doubt the boys will remember much of what we talked about today, they are, at least, aware that today is some sort of holiday for women. And what's more, we made it through a whole hour of class with no one making strange body sounds, which is a rare accomplishment. As they say here in Morocco, "chwiya b chwiya" (little by little).

I've never been good at wrapping up blog posts with some great philosophical statement (something I need to work on before I get my book deal.....) But I leave you with this thought today: I ate SO MANY French fries today, because I'm a woman and today is my holiday and I couldn't think of any other way to celebrate. And yeah, it was kinda a lame way to celebrate something, but it was also kinda an awesome lunch. I have no regrets.

I'm updating again!!!

...though this time not from the comfort of my home. I don't know why, but the home Internet is so slow. I mean, I do know why. It's dial-up, and I live in the middle of nowhere. Anyhow, sorry if I was chatting with any of you and then I suddenly disappeared, that's just how the home Internet rolls.

For reasons I don't quite understand and which no kid has been able to explain to me, the kids have had school off for the last day and a half. Since most kids live up in my 'hood and don't go down to the dar chebab unless they have school, that means no work for me. Here's some things I've done with my time off:

-Scared the bejeesus out of a donkey (I still don't understand how this happened. And no, it wasn't intentional.)
-Had a dance party in my house. Forgot that my floor is uneven and wiped out in the middle of a rousing rendition of "I Just Can't Wait to Be King."
-Discovered the secret to getting the right consistency in my marinara sauce. (Hint: Stick it in the food processor.)
-Got mocked by two children for making tea with tea bags and not putting sugar in it.
-Ate a lot of bread.
-Thought about showering this morning but then remembered that it's only been 4 days since my last shower so I'm probs good for another couple of days.

OMG, I'm actually updating my blog!

I bet you all thought I forgot about the blog! To be honest, I kind of had. My Internet options here in G-town (I can't tell you where I actually live lest you should try to use this information to stalk me...) are pretty non-existent, so until I got Internet set up at the house last week I couldn't really update the blog. Even now my Internet is so slow. Like seriously, the only thing slower than my Internet is the speed at which my sleeping bag is drying after I washed it to get out the puppy poo. But even if the Internet is slow, I'm gonna try really hard to get better at updating this thing.

So, some of y'all in America have been asking me what I do here. That's a decent question, as I'm not always sure myself. The last couple months I've been focusing on "community assessment," which is basically me hanging out with people and asking them stuff about G-town and what goes on here, what kind of stuff is important to them, what they want me to do, etc. This has been somewhat complicated by the fact that I originally found the way they talk out here in almost-Algeria to be incomprehensible. I won't go into all the linguistic differences, but here's an example: There's no second-person masculine out here. So that's been an on-going struggle. Even today, I was telling a kid I liked her shoes and she told me that wasn't the word for shoes, and I'm like, "Um, that's def what it said in my book," and she's like, "Yeah, but that's what people in the West talk like. We don't say that." Cut me a break, kids. This book is from Rabat. Rabat is in the West. Can't you just be impressed that I know any word for shoes, even if it's not the right one?

But it's not all hanging around and assessing stuff. I teach English sometimes, too. I play monkey-in-the-middle a lot, like pretty much everyday. I got some theater projects in the works. But yeah, honestly, there's a lot of hanging around and trying to integrate into the community. And....the strength of my Internet is fading fast, so even though there's probs a lot more I could say, I'm gonna go ahead and post this while I still can....if I still can.... 

I guess I'm keeping up with this whole "one post a month" thing. Fear not, once I get my own place and actually have more regular access to Internet, the updates should increase. In the meantime, I direct you all to my Facebook where you can stalk me through photographs.

So, what's happened in the last month? First, I found out where I'm going to be living for the next two years! I'm up in the northeast, pretty close to Algeria, which should be exciting. I got to go visit my site for a week, and although I didn't get to see/do a whole lot while I was there, what I saw looked chill. Then I came back to my training site, turned 23, and got super sick. Fortunately I was healthy in time for eid, which was this past Wednesday/Thursday. 

Eid L'Kabir was pretty exciting. My family had bought a sheep a few days earlier, and my little brothers and sisters kept prancing around the house/running up to me and saying, "Meetra! Meetra! Today the sheep (draw finger across throat)." The kids also got new clothes and money, but they were far more excited about the death of the sheep. And then at long last it was time for the family to gather on our roof. My little brothers wrestled the sheep to the ground, my dad drew out his knife, and before I knew there was sheep blood all over the place. I'll save you the rest of the details, but suffice it to say that after the whole affair was over my mom and I ate cake and that was awesome. We've been eating sheep ever since which has been less than awesome. A word of advice - brains look a lot like eggs. I learned this the hard way.

But alas, training is (almost) over now. I've left my CBT site and returned to Mehdia, where I'll spend a few more days chillaxing with the other trainees until Wednesday when I officially become a Peace Corps Volunteer! Then I'm off to the cold north to begin actually doing stuff. It might be awhile until the next post, but go to my Facebook and look at dead sheep pictures to tide you over until then.

Yeah, I know it's been a month....

.....and you're all always asking me why I don't update the blog, but then again, you don't comment, either, which leads me to believe that you just want me to update the blog so that you can theoretically read it if you feel like it, but you aren't actually reading it. I'd be annoyed, but I'd probs be the same way.

So, Morocco. It's pretty awesome. It's been so long since I wrote anything that I don't really know what to say, but I think all my stomach issues have resolved themselves, which is super exciting! Of course, now that I say that, I'll probs wake up this morning at like 2:30 to vomit. It's both super convenient/super annoying that I always tend to get ill in the middle of the night/early morning....

But no one wants to hear about my digestive issues (slash you've all probably heard all about it). So let me tell you how adorable my host family is! They're adorable. I have five little sibs, aged 11 to 4. My "mom" is 28 and super hilarious. More importantly she thinks I'm super hilarious. Like this one time I accidentally locked myself in the bathroom and had to be "rescued" by my little sister and a wrench, and my mom laughed about that for hours. And then she told everyone about it and they all laughed, so I'm just glad that I could bring some joy to my Moroccan family.

Well, that's it for now. PS - You all should comment on my blog posts so that I know that you're actually reading them. Just saying. Peace out!

My first post!

Friends, family, people who found this blog through PCJ,


I apologize for taking so long to write my first post. When I started this blog I had high ambitions that blogging would be a daily (or near daily) activity so that all of you back in the states could follow along on this journey in excruciating detail. But after the first day I discovered that one of the last things I wanted to do after 10 hours of orientation was to write a blog post about my day. Anyhoo, here's the abridged version of the last 6 days -


I left the 'Nati on Monday to head to Philly for a brief orientation before we left. On Tuesday night after spending way more hours than necessary at JFK we flew out to Casablanca. (Note - Doesn't knowing that there are direct flights from the U.S. to Morocco make you want to visit me more?) So we got to Casablanca on Wednesday morning, then took a bus to Mehdia (hey, isn't it hilarious that the town's name is 6/10 of my last name?)


Since then we've just been doing a lot of orientation type things. I could tell you all about it but most of it probably wouldn't be very interesting to any of you. (Unless any of you want to know more about the proper way to wipe after using a Turkish toilet, because we spent a whole lot of time talking about that....)


So tomorrow I head out to my CBT site. I'll be living with a Moroccan family there for the next 10 weeks, and I'm not sure what my Internet situation will be. Which brings me to the real reason I wrote this post.....


I have a cell phone now! It's insanely expensive for me to call you but only 12 c/minute for you to call me if you use Google voice. (I think it's 19 with Skype.) My number is on Facebook, and you should all call me. (Remember that Morocco's 4 hours ahead of Eastern time....) My arms still hurt from all the shots (meningitis, rabies, and typhoid), so that's gonna have to be the end of this post. Maybe I'll try to be all savvy in my next post and include pictures and stuff.