T - 33 days

I'm leaving on March 14 for staging in Philadelphia with the rest of my training group for Peace Corps/Morocco, all health and environment sector, then flying out the next day. We'll all be together in one of the big cities for a few days, then split up according to the language we're learning and the job we'll be doing. We'll train in small groups (less than 10 I think) for about two months before we're actually assigned to our sites. So no, I don't know where I'll be living after about May or June. Or before then, for that matter. One thing I'm getting used to is the number of unknowns inherent to this whole experience, which I don't expect to change any time soon.

Though I haven't been that into blogs since early high school (some Kent friends might remember that), this is going to be my attempt to keep all the people in my life posted. As basically everyone who knows me knows, I'm not the best at returning emails and phone calls in a timely manner, so hopefully a blog will suffice in the meantime.

A few things about Morocco and the Peace Corps, basically my answers to some frequently asked questions that I've gotten a lot over the past five months: 

• Morocco's about the size of California (shocking! most map projections make Africa look much smaller than it is). 
• Similar to California, it has sandy, beautiful beaches, temperate in-between zones, a serious desert (the Sahara), and pretty tall mountain ranges that remain snow-capped all year. 
• Because of this, the climate varies a ton and can get pretty cold in the winter, so I'm bringing some solid winter gear after reading the advice of current volunteers. 
• Urban and educated people in Morocco speak French, but I almost certainly won't be in a city, so I'll either be learning Moroccan Arabic, which is pretty different than the standard Arabic I took in school, or one of two Berber dialects. 
• I'm working as an Environmental Educator, but who knows what that will actually mean. 
• Although Morocco is one of the largest Peace Corps programs by number of volunteers, I'll probably be the only volunteer in my village, or maybe even region. 

So we'll see how the blog updating thing actually goes ...