rockin' the moroccan life

i recognize that moroccan puns are no longer funny, but you can't hold me down.

this has been a very good week, i am getting used to living with my host family (who is very nice to me), and i'm getting used to the huge amounts of children running around. this week i spent a lot of time reading (both for work and pleasure), especially a peace corps book about capacity building in the community. it's very interesting. i also met with my doctor for several hours, and we dicussed what some of my hopes are... amazingly, i find it easier to communicate with him than anyone else in the community even though we have no language in common (he speaks arabic and french, and i speak, obviously english and a little tashelheit). so he would just speak french to me and i would respond in tashelheit. it worked out pretty well though.

i'm finally starting to enjoy moroccan food, i really like my family's tagines (the main dish, it's basically cooked vegetables, usually potatoes, carrots, tomotoes, etc, with meat underneath cooked together in a type of pot that we don't have an equivalant of in the states). i haven't really been eating much meat, which greatly concerns my family, and they think i may die of this. i'm still really looking forward to cooking for myself again, though.

this week i also hiked my first mountain, i hope to hike all of the mountains around my site, i started with the smaller ones. it was a nice hike up, and i met a shepard right near the top, who of course, knew my name, where i lived, the family who i live with, etc. it's a little frightening that almost everyone knows me and watches me, but i guess that comes with the territory of being a foriegner in their community.

next week i am going with the doctor and nurses on the equipemobile (it's a land rover that they drive to the further off villages that don't have easy access to the health clinic, and vacinate all the children in those villages). i'm looking forward to seeing some of the more remote parts of my site and meeting people.

i will start spending every tuesday and thursday at the health clinic, talking to women, practicing my tashelheit, and trying to get a fell for the community. i'm looking forward to starting some projects, the easiest would be to start with some health-related murals on the schools (they love murals) like children washing their hands or brushing their teeth, because this doesn't involve any language and it's a postive health message. so, i'm starting to get a feel for community a little at a time. and for now, i just have to get used to the same questions, and people trying to force me to harvest barley (i'm asked a minumum of thirteen times a day).

signing off from a very hot internet cafe.