12 April
Back to work after a great weekend off. I should note that a “weekend” during PST means as much as you can squeeze in between the end of Saturday class (12:30 pm) and sundown on Sunday (one of our most strictly enforced rules for Morocco—not just during PST—is that we’re not allowed to travel between cities after dark). So maybe 18 hours, but you can get a lot done in that amount of time if you’re desperate for any kind of new entertainment. Tiffawt, Hanan, and I skipped lunch on Saturday and took a series of taxis to Kalaa Mgouna, about 90 km. east of Ouarzazate. It’s called the City of Roses; they grow them all around that region and produce a lot of rosewater and other rose-scented beauty products. Every other shop in town is a gaudy pink tourist trap selling that stuff, and it probably wouldn’t have been worth traveling that far except that just about every other CBT group was converging on the same place, so of course it turned into a PCT convention. The trainees in that region learn Tamazight, but I seemed to get by alright with Tashlheet. The subtleties of the difference between those languages--who speaks which and who doesn’t and why—is something I still don’t understand well, and no one has bothered to explain it.
It was great to hang out with some of the trainees I haven’t gotten to know as well and see them in a setting other than Ourzazate. A bunch of us had dinner in the home of a current Volunteer from the Small Business Development sector. The SBD folks tend to be placed in bigger towns and even a few cities, and live in proper apartments with all the amenities, so his place was not at all representative of what I expect my eventual place to look like, which is unfortunate. He had a lot of space (more than my last apartment in the States), nice furniture, a second bedroom he had converted into a painting studio, and easy access to all kinds shops, restaurants, and cybercafes.
Of course all anyone could talk about was our impending site placement announcements and the interviews that had taken place over the last week. There’s a lot of nail-biting going on over that, with nothing but the tiniest scraps of non-information to base it on. I’ll be glad to have this ordeal over with on Thursday afternoon. Even then, all we’ll really find out is probably just the name of some village and the province that it’s in; we won’t know whether it’s good news, bad news, or somewhere in the middle until we get there and check it out. Which we actually will do starting Saturday. We have site visits scheduled from the 17th to the 23th. This is the real thing: I’ll go alone, to what will eventually be my site, and spend a few days living with the family that will be my next host family. I’ll have no PC staff or other trainees around. I have no idea how much or little this family and their community will know about me and what I’m coming there to do (in part depends on if I’m replacing another volunteer), but I have to assume it’s next to nothing. Everything we’ve done so far in training has been leading up to this encounter. I’m thinking of what Michelle supposedly said to Barack backstage at the DNC in Boston 2004 just before he went out and gave the keynote speech that changed everything: “Don’t blow it, buddy.”
7 April
Site placement interview today with Rachid, the Assistant Program Manager for the Health Sector. What a nerve-wracking and suspenseful process this is. The general consensus among trainees, which Rachid confirmed for us, is that they already have likely sites picked out and the interview is mostly to feel us out about them. Of course, all the information is travelling one-way; we won’t learn a thing about where we’re going until the sites are officially announced on the 15th. He asked me questions like “Are you okay with walking long distances?” and when he asked about my ideal site and I said it was within half an hour of a big city, he gave a hearty laugh. So I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty remote. There are six possible provinces for Tashlheet speakers: Ouarzazate, Azilal, Essaouria, Tiznit, Taroudant, and Tata. All except Azilal are south of Marrakech, and since he confirmed with me that I preferred hot to cold and Azilal is in the mountains, I think I can rule that one out. Tata is the furthest south, the most in the desert, and farthest from other cities, so I’m preparing myself for that. I may be preaching to the rocks and the Sahara Vipers about toothbrushing and nutrition for two years.
As this second month of PST is now well underway and seems set to fly by, the fact that we’re all going to be all alone at our sites and scattered to the four winds very soon is starting to sink in, and it’s kind of scary and a little sad. Before coming, whenever I imagined myself in the Peace Corps, I always skipped ahead to the part where I was on my own, doing my own work on my own schedule and living among host country nationals. That’s the environment I pictured because that’s the way I like to work—independently. It never occurred to me that I would get so attached to a group of other volunteers, and so it never occurred to me that being separated from them would be hard. But it is going to be. We’ll all get together every few months after service starts for additional trainings and conferences, and we’ll be able to visit each other individually and in groups, but distance will make that hard. And the volunteers around each province will probably wind up forming small groups of their own not unlike our current CBT’s. But it’s not ever going to be quite the same as it is now. Soon we get thrown into the deep end of the pool, and we get to see who learned how to swim.
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