orientation/PST

I can't believe it's only been a week since I left New York! It's trite, but so much has happened since last Monday that it feels like at least a month. I'm now sitting on the roof of our hotel in Ouarzazate, where we've been since Friday night. After one day and night in Philadelphia, where we did intense but very general orientation with PC Washington staff, we took what was luckily a direct overnight flight to Casablanca. We got to Casa at 6:30 am local time (2:30 am EST) and got straight on a bus to Marrakech, and immediately started a full day of training. They definitely don't joke around with stuffing as much into these days as possible. This afternoon was the first time we've had free since we got here.

We're now officially Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) and are almost a week into Pre-Service Training (PST). (They do a lot of acronyms.) There about about 60 of us, split between Health and Environment, including 4 married couples and about 6 or so over the age of 50. There's a man here who's coming for his second stint in PC, and a woman for whom this is her third. It's definitely the most diverse crowd I've ever been in as far as geographic origins in the U.S. Talking to the other environment trainees has been particularly exciting, since some of them have some really awesome technical experience. After a lot of general training, we finally split into sectors yesterday to talk about the actual projects that PC Morocco does, which got me more amped about the rest of training and work. Sometimes it can be easy to get lost in the overload of information they throw at us, so the reminder was nice.

This morning we finally got our assignments for Community Based Training (CBT). For the next two months, we're split up into groups of 4-6, each in a different village outside Ouarzazate. In our CBT sites we work with a Language and Cultural Facilitator for up to 8 hours per day, learning the language and working on specific skills for our future work in sector. Of the 11 different CBT groups, some are learning Tashelheyt or Tamazight, which are Berber dialects that are spoken in specific regions of Morocco, and some are learning Darija, which is Moroccan Arabic. I was placed in a Darija group, which is exciting, since it means I'll be able to use a little more of the Arabic I learned in college.

We leave tomorrow for our CBT sites and go almost straight to our host families' homes, which should be interesting, since no one can say more than a few words in their assigned language. We come back every ten days or so to Ouarzazate for "hub days" where we debrief with the other trainees in our sector and occasionally get a few hours off. I'm sure the next few days before our first hub day will feel like ages as well.

The square in Ouarzazate from the roof of the hotel

The Atlas Mountains, seen from Marrakech

The mountain pass through the Atlas (yes, that's snow)