welcome

Welcome to Ait Ali, home of the most confusing Tamzight/Darija/Tarifit spoken in Morocco! A bit of an exaggeration, but that’s how I felt like welcoming my site mate. It’s great, actually, that the Peace Corps has taken my suggestion and placed a Health Volunteer in my site. She’s great! She’s smart, enthusiastic, and most importantly, game to take on the formidable task of learning how to talk to people here.
She’s been here for about a week now, and people are slowly getting used to the idea that I’m not the only volunteer in town anymore. They keep saying, “oh, she doesn’t know Tashelheit.” I remember how frustrating it was! Oh man, it was so hard. I’m more than happy to try to help her with every single little language trick I have learned here. The cool thing is that, as she methodically goes through the language learning words, I’m learning things too. My goal, last year, was to learn how to be understood. I stopped worrying about grammar, exactness, and worked on mastering the sounds, the basic words, basic phrases, and basically just trying to survive. Now that my site mate is here, she is attacking our version of Tashelheit methodically and aggressively. It’s great. I’m filling in so many holes in my language!
The other fun thing is that she is a dance instructor and longtime yoga student. So I can learn both dance and yoga from her! Hopefully, I mean we’ll see. Also she loves fantasy books and likes hiking. If you know me, you know that I think these are important character traits. :) Hopefully we can also collaborate on projects, working on improving things, educating people about both health and the environment. I’m excited!