????? Ho!

After a long week in Azrou, we're heading to our CBT (Community-Based Training) sites tomorrow morning. The program manager placed us into groups yesterday, assigning us to specific dialects and cities/towns/villages. My group of five is heading to a small town/village about two hours away. I guess for security reasons we're not supposed to say where, specifically. *shrug* As of tomorrow evening I'll be living with my host family for a period of two weeks initially, and three weeks later after a short training break back in Azrou. While at our CBT sites we'll be meeting at the LCF's (language & culture facilitator's) house during the day for language sessions, venturing out as a group to interview local artisans and spending the rest of the time with the family. It's sort of a practice run for life at our permanent sites. My host family is a clan of eight, which seems huge to my contemporary American perception. It will be a great opportunity to develop the language skills I'll be needing; supposedly the families are very welcoming and eager to help. We're slowly being introduced to situations where the amenities are less than before, and speaking the language becomes more necessary. I'll continue to learn Darija (Moroccan Arabic), the language spoken throughout the majority of the country. Others were assigned to Tamazight, one of the Berber dialects. Berbers are roughly the Moroccan equivalent of American Indians; they were here first but now are sparsely located throughout the more remote areas of the country.

The last few days here have been more of the same-- language and technical sessions. A few of us have been running in the evenings before dinner; we head to the outskirts of town on a dirt road. Nothing like open skies, cool air, surrounding mountains, and three or four snarling dogs charging toward one to get that heart rate up. People don't generally keep animals as pets here; scraggly dogs and cats roam the streets in search of scraps, often joining together in the late hours to yowl and wail at the night. The trick is to pick up a rock (or pretend to, but #%*!@ that), which is exactly what I did when running the other day. It definitely gets the point across; they stopped almost immediately, choosing instead to bark from a distance.

Laundry in Morocco is done by hand. The rooftops, at least in Azrou, are the laundry areas. Clothes are soaked in a big bucket with detergent, scrubbed clean against themselves, and hung to dry. I did mine for the first time yesterday, and though it was "neat" I can't say I'm a fan just yet. I think when I have more time (we'll eventually have a LOT of it) it has potential for a cathartic experience.

In our new town we'll only have running water for three hours a day. Planning ahead seems key. Supposedly there is a cyber cafe, so I'll keep up contact online when I have the chance. I hope everyone back home is doing well; I think of you often.