'tis a shame

i sincererly apologize to all of my loyal readers for not providing an update in a shamefully long time. while excuses aren't worth much, i will provide one anyone: you see, i think that it's very difficult to write a quality post in an internet cafe with limited time, so all of my posts tend to say the same thing and are boring... but i will make a deal... i have inservice training next week... i will write out posts before hand (long hand on paper, can you believe people still do that?!) and post at least a few next week. i will provide updates on my projects, traveling that i have done in morocco, plans i have for my time here and the future... thank you for your patience and loyality.

so, today's almost my nine month anniversiry with morocco... exciting huh? it's been a good time.. my parents just left after their trip to visit me in morocco. we had a wonderful time, we visited casablanca (and the huge mosque devoted to the late king hassan II), marrakech, my site, and essouaria. it was wonderful to see them. they both were able to visit my site and see how i live and meet the people that i live with. coupled with the excitement of seeing my parents, eating good food, buying some fun stuff, and sleeping in real hotels, i showered almost every day(!!!) ...so now i'm very clean!

my inservice training is next week in agadir (on the coast south of essouaria). i'm looking forward to it, i get to see all of my good peace corps friends in one place at one time. additionally we get exciting (i use this term loosely) updates on saftey and security. also, we finally are going to recieve information on how to submit project proposals and apply for funding. before this we could only do funding free projects, but mostly we were focusing on getting to know our community and getting better at the language. we also have another language test this week, hopefully i'll do better than the first one i took.

ok, i'm going to update books read (i'm up to 36 or so... but i haven't read a new one in a while)... and next week, i promise to give a full update over several posts. thanks again for all of your support, the emails, letters, messages through my parents are really appreicated and makes a huge difference to my sanity. have a fantastic holiday season and enjoy some fruit cake for me!