Staging to Ouarzazate

Sorry about the scattered sentence structure and grammar, just trying to give a quick update on a lot of information right now:

Since I arrived in Philadelphia for Staging on Feb. 28th it has been hard to keep track of where we are or what day it is. (Doesn’t help that the date on my watch doesn’t seem to be changing) After a full day of travel, a packed day of registration forms and training in Philadelphia, we took a bus to New York and checked in 71(?) volunteers each with hopefully only 80 pounds of checked luggage. Our nonstop flight landed us in the famous city of Casablanca. Here we met the wonderful Peace Corps staff including Director David Lillie who knew far more about each and every one of us than I think anyone thought possible. Our bus then took us to Marrakech, where are lodgings let us know Peace Corps was really trying to ease us into deprivation slowly: Pool, massive amounts of food, basketball court (no basketball though), internet in the lobby etc.

The next day’s bus ride took us over a 7,500 ft pass in the Atlas Mountains. The landscape is absolutely beautiful. Far more greenery than anyone expected. The start of the ride found us surrounded by crops and grazing fields for sheep with herders who looked as though they were directly out of the tour books. As we hit the mountains the fields thinned out to where there would be lush crops, trees and mountain villages lining the river valleys with desert like hillsides rising steeply on either side. Soon we could clearly see the snowcapped peaks of the High Atlas beyond the brown hillsides. We dropped down to the level of our training center, Ouarzazate (the Hollywood of Morocco, and the Gateway to the Sahara), and passed the film studios that helped produced movies like Gladiator, Babel, Star Wars, and Lawrence of Arabia, coming to a stop in front of our Hotel on the central plaza of town. Pointing to a tent on the roof of the building David Lillie gave us a look into what would be our training area for the next several days.

That brings me to today. It is weird to think that starting tomorrow we will be split in half and our time together as a whole group will be little to none for the next two years. All the other volunteers are just amazing and I feel as though we are all making fast and lasting friendships. Excitement and stress is at times palpable. Information is held back until the last possible moment as per usual. Just two hours ago the other health volunteers and I just found out where we will be doing our community based training (CBT), which gives us hints as to our final locations. I was very lucky to be one of seven to get a site speaking Darija or Moroccan Arabic. There are two other Berber dialects Tamazight and Tashilhit (sp?), which are generally mid-south and middle of the country respectively. Darija will likely land me somewhere relatively close to a larger city but it could really be anywhere in the 10 districts Peace Corps operates in.

So I head out to my first night with a host family tomorrow and have to run now and go work on the Arabic script alphabet with someone who has actually taken Arabic before. Hopefully I’ll be able to memorize it without too long, inshallah.

Tags: Ouarzazate, Peace Corps