Heat etc......

Over 4 months in Morocco now………..really though, it feels like we just arrived.  For example….someone had the movie Juno, and I commented, isn’t that in theaters?  Apparently it has not been in theaters for 4 months now.  Hahaha, amazing how time flies. 

 

So yeah, it is hot.  Really hot.  I believe the highest temperature a volunteer in the region has recorded thus far is 129 degrees Fahrenheit.  Yikes.  But it makes me feel better that I am not the only person uncomfortable in the heat.  All people talk about now is the heat.  Some sleep on the roof, others, like me, just don’t sleep a lot of the time because of the heat.  Yesterday we ate dinner on the roof for the first time…..I was very conscious of the potential presence of insects, but it was an extremely pleasant experience.  Light breeze, stars so close you can almost touch them, TashlHit music playing, and just plain relaxation.  When I get the questions, “Is it hot like this in America?” I have trouble answering….well yes….but there is this thing called air conditioning (anyone know the TashelHit word for air conditioning?). 

 

Overall things are going quite well here…I am still meeting new people almost every day and I am understanding TashlHit better all the time.  Last week I had lunch at my midwife’s house along with a female doctor from a neighboring town.  She seemed quite intrigued by me and my job here.  For a lot of Moroccan professionals, working in the “bled,” or rural areas, is punishment.  Since wealth and consequently education are so unequally distributed between the urban and rural areas, most professionals are from the cities and are forced to work in the “bled.”  Can you even imagine, you are from Chicago, you go to college in Chicago, your family, friends, everything is in Chicago, and the only way to have a job is to work in Appalachia for an indefinite period of time? There is nothing voluntary about their work, so my desire to work in the “bled” is quite puzzling to many people. 

 

This past weekend 9 of us new volunteers met in Agadir for a weekend getaway.  After our Ministry of Health meeting on Friday in Tiznit, the other volunteers in my region and I headed up to meet the rest in Agadir.  Talk about forgetting you are a Peace Corps Volunteer, and that you take bucket showers and dress covered from neck to ankle……it was somewhere between eating Pizza Hut, drinking some wine (for the first time in 6 weeks!), dancing in a club, and wandering the aisles of a giant supermarket (think Walmart), that the incredible contrast hit us.  Many people in our sites have never been to Agadir, let alone heard of McDonalds or Pizza Hut.  We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but I am just as happy to be back in my site.  Tomorrow I am planning to go on a hike with the girls in my community into the mountains (after the sun starts to go down, of course).

Oh, and I dyed my hair brown this weekend.....why?  I dunno....just kind of felt like it :)