One Month

Sorry I haven’t written much I’ve been super busy in the last couple weeks. More excitingly I’ve been in country for one whole month!

All of last week we were doing a community assessment report of our CBT site, which we had to present to our “community” i.e. mainly our host families last Thursday and then to the other PCT’s (Peace Corps Trainees) last weekend in Fes.

Four the community assessment we conducted formal and informal interviews with the community to learn more about certain youth development related topics such as: community participation, education, health and youth. We also did community mapping with some 14-15 year old kids from our site, boys and girls were divided and asked to draw a map of their town and circle the things that were most important to them, common things that were circled were the mosque, their schools and the Dar Chebab, also the girls circled the teleboutiqe and the boys circled this hot spring swimming spot that’s a little outside of the town. We also made a daily calendar and a seasonal calendar that visually depicted the daily and annual activities of our community. The daily calendar was pretty simple, men went to work, kids went to school and women stayed home to cook and clean. The seasonal calendar was a bit more interesting and depicted the wheat and olive growth an harvest cycles, the school calendar, the Dar Chebab calendar, national and religious holidays and some other actives that the community mentioned, like eating hot food in the winter when its cold and looking at the pretty flowers that bloom in the spring. I actually drew the seasonal calendar, and the staging program director liked it so much that he said he was going to make a copy and have it framed for display in the Peace Corps main office in Rabat. Pretty exciting!

Our actual assessment went really well. We found out a number of interesting facts about our community such as, the number one health problem is diabetes (not surprising due to the high sugar diet of Moroccans) and that there are only primary schools in our town and if kids want to go to secondary or higher education they have to go to one in the next town over or possibly commute to Fes to go to school.

Our presentation to the community went really well, we had a turn out of about 45 people, mostly our host families and kids from the Dar Chabab. All of our interviewees showed up which was great since they were able to see that the information they gave us was being used for a positive purpose. We also had a few town officials there as well. Every topic presented was followed by a lively debate amongst the adult community members, signifying that there is not only awareness in the community about their issues but also a strong interest in taking action. Even though most of our presentation wasn’t very comprehensive for our younger audience I think it was very important that they were able to hear about the issues, maybe some of them for the first time, and know that their parents, the community officials and the Peace Corps trainees want to do something about them.

In Fes all of the different CBT groups presented their findings to everyone else and there were a lot of similarities and also a lot of differences. Most of the similarities were that the project was really difficult to conduct because our Darija skills aren't great yet and that we all felt a little uncomfortable telling out host communities our observations about the problems and such since we haven't been in them for very long and wont be staying in them as permanent PCV's and thus don't have a lot of time to implement projects to help ameliorate some of the issues. The biggest difference between the different experiences of the CBT groups were the differences in the Dar Chebabs, one group hasn't even been to their yet and thus has been very limited in their activities, another group had a Dar Chebab that is attended only by mid 20 to 30 something year olds thus they had to completely redefine their idea of what youth is.

Now and for the next couple weeks we will have a current PCV staying with us in our site giving us training about various jobs that we will have to do once we are at our permanent sites. This week we are learning about teaching English in Morocco, then we will be learning about creating/designing community projects and activities which we will later implement in November after our site visit.

We find out our sites in about two weeks and I cant wait. I am requesting a site that is a small town (around 5,000 people), that's warm, with a good hammam, is more green than brown and has a woman's association.

More updates on my family will come soon.

Bslama