Greetings!!

Hello friends! Welcome to my blog! This is the first post and therefore will serve as an introduction to who I am and the reasons I have for creating this blog.

First off, my name is Sarah. I’m currently a grad student at American University studying Public Anthropology. However, as a little bonus to my program I have joined the Peace Corps! I am leaving super soon (September 19th) so a lot has been happening recently but I wanted to get this post up before I left. Hopefully, after my time in the Peace Corps is over I can still use this for any more adventures I have in life.

That Sou9 Life

If you are anything like the Moroccans in my site, you are probably wondering how I manage to sustain myself while living alone in my little corner of nowhere. Well here I am to give you some insight into this problem. Most towns throughout Morocco rely heavily on sou9s for both food as well as for clothes, household items, and other goods. Many of these sou9s are held on a designated day of the week, usually Sundays, but bigger towns can have them 2 days of the week or even every day.

A Little Christmas Update

So again, it has been a hot second since I updated this old thing. I would apologize but honestly, when I do get access to internet there are many other things that I prefer to do than writing a blog post. Many milestones have happened since my last posting. I made it through Ramadan, my first summer, traveling back to the US (twice), my one year mark in country, my one year mark as a volunteer, and my one year mark in my site. This means I am officially over half-way done with my service.

I swear I’m still alive

Hello friends!

Like usual, I would like to start off by apologizing for not updating you in quite some time. The closest town to my site with internet is approximately 2 hours away on transportation that only runs once a day in each direction so it’s not really that convenient (and to be honest, there are other more pressing internet matters to take care of before writing a blog post). Anyway, you’re probably asking yourself “what has Sarah been up to the last couple of months?” Well, I’ll tell you.

Thoughts from a Muslim Country

I have been a member of the largest group of Americans working in an Arab country in a non-militarized fashion for almost 5 months now and in light of (somewhat) recent events (my internet is lousy so I’m slow on the news), I would like to share some of my feelings and experiences with living in an Arab and Muslim country. Goal 3 of Peace Corps is to help promote a better understanding of your host country on the part of Americans, and I would like to do some work on that now. 

Welcome Home

As of February 1st I have been living in my own house. I don’t really have a lot of pictures as of yet because I’ve been more focused on settling in and then I had a small bought of sickness. After living with host families for 4 1/2 months finally getting some freedom has been such a relief. I am able to cook what I want, when I want (within the limits of what is available in site and at souq the town over) and spend a gross amount of time watching the movies and tv shows on my hard drive as well as reading. I still don’t have internet but wit the help of my regional manager we are trying to figure out a system that will be reliable, but not necessarily super speedy. Hopefully that means I will be able to keep this blog more up to date in the future. 

Topics of Conversation

So over the past two months I have been diligently studying Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, and I do feel proud of all of the accomplishments I have made in the language. However, my skills are still very limited. Despite this, I have been able to talk about a wide variety of topics with my host family. I want to share some of these with you to show that you really don’t need to be fluent in a language to get to know someone. So I have talked about:

I’m official

First of all, sorry about the lack of updates over the past two months. CBT was a whirlwind of learning and integration coupled with intermittent internet access, making it difficult to find the time to write a new post.

Second of all, as of yesterday at about 12:00pm GMT, I was officially sworn-in as a Peace Corps Volunteer. So no more trainee status for me. I have already begun my journey to my final site and I am looking forward to starting my service. Hopefully I’ll be able to write some more posts in the coming days and let you know how CBT actually went.

1 Week Down

Salamu 3alaykum!

Okay, so I’ve officially been on this journey for a week (out of about 108) and things seem to be going well so far. We’ve been staying in a hotel outside of Rabat so it’s been really rough. I mean there’s air conditioning, wifi, and a pool with two, I repeat TWO, water slides. Not to mention the fact that the dining room where we eat all our meals looks over the ocean so we watch the waves roll in three times a day. It’s been really hard to find things to complain about. 

First Stop, Philly

So on September 19th I woke up bright and early (at 4am) to drive to the airport and start the adventure. Contrary to popular belief, I was not departing for Morocco on my first day as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Instead, we were all flown to Philadelphia for a day of staging before flying all together across the Atlantic. I’m pretty sure pretty much the only reason they have this day is to make sure no one is delayed in getting to JFK for the flight that actually matters.