Site Visit

Site Visit!
I have actually been to the site where I will be staying for the next 2 years, Inshallah. Hooray!!! It was very exciting to actually be on a bus on the way. It is very far away from our training site. It took two very full days of travel to get there. If we were allowed to travel at night, it would have been shorter, but it is not very safe at night, and to Peace Corps doesn’t allow that… For good reason, really, since the incidence of car accidents goes up a lot at night, and Morocco has some of the most dangerous roads to be found on the planet. Or so it seems… I haven’t actually looked at any statistics, but even Moroccans I’ve talked to will say the same.
As we drove up to my site, the landscape went from hilly, gully filled desert to flat, arid plains that are almost desert, almost grassland… the mountains on my left hand as we drove north. We went over mountains, and then back to the plain. Wide open and dry and hazy from all the dust in the air. I admit that a few times a thought drifted across my mind: wow I hope there’s more greenery in my actual site. Arriving in my souk-town, 40 k from my actual village it was still flat plains, dry and dusty and already quite hot. And it wasn’t even May yet. And then waited for the transit to go… we waited for a couple hours. I was traveling with a Moroccan woman, very sweet person, who was being my translator for the introduction to my host family. We got into the transit, and then went up, and up and over, and up and up and over and then finally, around one more foothill, and we were between the mountains of the Middle Atlas, and there is my little village, tucked between huge peaks of stone and scrub. Along a river, mud houses (think adobe) and well-established fields in by the river. Green! Huge mountains!! I am so lucky.