Site Announcement and Phone Number

The last two days have been big. We have our site placement. I'm not allowed to give specific info, but I can say that it is about 2 hours from Essaouria: a seriously beautiful tourist destination on the Atlantic coast south of Casablanca. Our site will have electricity although running water may or may not be available. The town is large: it has a market and lies at the foothills of the high Atlas mountains at around 4000 ft asl. There are calcarious rock formations although I dont yet know if they are karstified. Also, people can call us now. I am not supposed to post my phone number, so email us and will give it to you via email.

SALOM everybody... site announcments Friday morning!!!
We got a cell phone so give us an email if you are interested in the number.
Will update as soon as we hear something!

I had a very touristy morning... a group of us went to the big film studios nearby where they filmed Cleopatra, passion of the christ, parts of gladiator etc
It was fun and a good way to decompress after our language tests!
I just found out that we can fly from here to paris, london or barcelona for 13 euro, I am so excited, I'm not sure if 2 years is enough time to explore all of Morocco plus Europe and then africa of course... if anyone wants to meet up in any of the above listed places we could possibly swing that; just putting it out there!!! love you all
Carrie

Half way through training now, we have 13 more days in community based training and the rest is seminars during Ouazazate. Tomorrow we have our practice language tests... just to let us know where we are so far and what we still need to really work on. We can actually make sentences in Tashleheet now. Training is completely exhausting!!! These pics are from Bens fieldtrip. The picture of us girls is my CBT group in our wedding garb, we are having a mock wedding this week so our families let us borrow wedding clothes to wear. Today's a day off for both me and Ben, we spent the morning doing laundry and this afternoon we're going for a walk. It's nice to have a day completely off...we don't get enough of them. Training has been really difficult and frustrating for me, but I'm making it although counting the hours and the days til it's over. I think all of the groups have been pushed to the edge though, it's extremely difficult to spend ten hours a day with people you may or maynot care for too much and then put learning a new language and being in a totally different culture on top of that... it's been a test. The one picture I described earlier, its the mural our group painted. The group pic is of the environment trainees only, so I'm not in that one but our group is about the same size.

FYI we'll be out of contact for the next 8 days... we're doing great!

Everthing’s going well here. We’ve been in Ouarzazate for 5 days and are getting ready to leave for our next community based training which will be 8 days (apart! ) We’re getting better at the language and can ask/answer simple questions and make short sentences, TashlHeet is hard! It’s a lot different than other languages, but we’re hanging in there. I have become the hotel barber and have cut about 5 people’s hair and since we can’t make money in the PC, I’m paid in chocolate! Not a bad deal. One of the volunteers was a personal trainer so he’s been doing daily workouts on the roof (Billy has nothing on him!) I’ve gone 2 days now and am SORE but it feels good especially after being stuck sitting in a room 8 hours a day. My group learned about different ways to get health messages out including posters, games, paper mache and murals. We got to paint two murals on our hotel roof (I’m not sure why they agreed to that!) But I’ll put a picture on. It was fun and I got a sunburn. It’s been pretty hot the past few days here, so people are thinking it’s going to be a hot summer. I’m hesitant about living in the desert, I’m not sure if I can deal with 150 degrees??? Our staff convinced our hotel restaurant to make American food for us so we’ve had some new additions such as spaghetti, scalloped potatoes mac and cheese and French fries. Each of these has filled me with joy. Hope everybody’s doing well! GW--- send spring break photos! looks like I cant get our photos uploaded...maybe next time!