Our new sleepy life

Greetings from CBT –Community Based Training- and our home for the next nine weeks, a small town about twenty minutes outside of Fes. CBT means we’ve pared down from our class of 97 trainees to a group of five, plus a language and cultural facilitator to really get down to the learning of Darija and the figuring out how to exist within Moroccan culture for the next two years.

How’s it going so far? Shwiya b shwiya. A word about our town: it’s a green, quiet place, with not much going on beyond pastoral beauty. Literally pastoral, as you’ll see from the pictures below. We’d be posting more except there’s just one crummy cyber café in town that doesn’t work. We’re hopeful to find some alternatives soon.  

We live with a really lovely host family in our town, a married couple with no children, but who live on a kind of family compound with brothers and sisters and their families, so there are cousins and Aunts and Uncles and lifelong friends popping in and out of our world. Our house is like the eye of the hurricane, but there are always interesting folks to talk to -a few who speak pretty good English- and sweet folks to at least try to talk to.

We spend about six hours a day in language and culture class, and most of the rest of the time we are eating. Four meals: lftor (breakfast), lrgdda (lunch), kaskrut (tea!), and l’aisha (dinner). Our host mother is a fantastic cook. We’ll have more to say about her amazing cooking later. More to say on everything later, but we have to dash.

In one of the houses on the compound, there was a party this weekend for an engaged couple. We got separated so that Britt could get Henna-d and I could get stuffed full of delicious food with the men. Later, I got some Henna on my left palm, I gather as a newly-married couple will. This picture, our faces: typical. Confused, out of our element constantly, but mostly very happy to be so.