So here is my house! and my PC issued car....just kidding, that is my neighbor's. We share this "compound" so to say with 2 other apartments--two lycee teachers and an elderly couple. I share my apartment with my site mate Jenna, whom I am sure you will hear a lot about over the next 2 years of my service.
Safety! look guys, multiple locking doors and a wall. The window you see on the upper left is our kitchen.
This is my street! That dairy co you see ahead of you is Jenna's host family cow named "Shakira" --Our youth center is towards the hill on the right side of the picture.
This is probably the room in the house that I get the most questions about... so here it is. Although we have a shower, we dont have any hot water so we bucket bathe (although on some hot days I dont care and go for the shower), this is also the laundry room. The toilet that you see is our turkish toilet and it flushes with the bucket beside it.
Here is our kitchen. It is well stocked with a fridge, stove, oven, blender, and toaster oven. We have to drink boiled well water and make all of our food from scratch, which will definitely take some getting used to. Ive been reading blogs and forums about people in the US who make all of their food from scratch to get some tips. Making the most basic thing can take forever here. I decided that Mondays, because the dar chebab is closed, Im gonna experiment with food. I made some handmade potato chips last monday that took about 2 hours to make a batch and it was gone within 20 minutes. Ive been experimenting with good pizza and tortilla recipes and will continue that tonight. Ive been drinking smoothies galore both because of the heat and because the fruit is so fresh and delicious here. Ive been virtually a vegetarian since living on my own and I find myself really enjoying this experience of cooking, albeit frustrating at times how long the process takes.
The two pictures above are my bedroom. The top picture is a sort of collage that I made with gifts people have given me both in morocco and right before and little mementos.
Here is another picture of my house with the blue doors on the left and then my street and Jenna's host family looking after Shakira.
Here is the front of the Lycee, mere feet from my doorstep.
Here is the view from the front of the Lycee. (Lycee btw is the high school and it is a french word so you bilingual Menschen out there might have already figured that out)
Here is the courtyard between the Lycee and the College (high school and middle school, respectively) and a soccer game going on in the distance with a crowd of fans.
This is one of the buildings in the college with the mountains in the background and the Misqua village behind that. We went on a lot of hikes up there and there is a reservoir about 25 minutes walk away.
Here is our home away from home: the dar chebab. This is the youth center that I work at. It has an office and then a classroom and a big auditorium hall where events are held.
Here is the view from the dar chebab ^^^
In the left in this picture you will see the largest store in town and then to the right you will see the people slash animal pharmacy of my village.
This is the "beb" which just means door in arabic but its considered an important part of the village
This is the post office slash bank slash private residence. Me and Jenna took this picture yesterday when trying to pick up an envelope. The director of the bank/post office as still eating lunch so we were told to wait a little and so I went over to play with the two goats in this courtyard, at the bank of course, and the attendant came over and grabbed the goat's udders and asked me if i wanted any milk. Another day at the post office!
This is the police station. Its pretty nice, and it has a western toilet. We go there a lot. They give us free coffee or orange juice and stuff and we just talk to them about ho we are doing. The like it because we are information sharing and we like it because we get fed!
This is the main street in the town, not much to say about it other than its pretty much full of men all the time
This is the mosque of my village, its really pretty, but we cannot go inside because we are omen and we are not muslim.
So I hope that answers some questions about the village and my life here. If you all have any questions or want me to take pictures of different things just let me know, i got two years.
So one thing that Ive been thinking a lot of the past few weeks is about the concept of developmental work and what role I play in that. I feel like lately there has been self reflection by the west as to how much "change" should be implemented by the developmental projects. Me and Jenna are constantly faced with women who dont know basic things about their bodies like what their period is. There is a belief by some here that if you shower when on your period that you will bleed out and get cancer. As Jenna says, knowing how your body works is a basic human right. Her host sister is 20 years old and pregnant with her husband's baby. She has no access to information guiding her through this process. We live in a small village where if children want to go to college they will likely be the first in their family and need to navigate convincing their family that moving to a different city and spending a lot of money on education is the right step.I dont know really how to end this paragraph. I have a feeling that "development" is going to be something that the west continues to examine, but I can say that with my own eyes Ive seen very basic things that I personally believe should be helped.
More on that later I suppose.
Life is good. I have a post box so message me if you would like to send me anything!
