I wrote this blog right after site placement and am now posting for your enjoyment....
Site placement day has come and gone. For anyone who has ever gone through site placement day, you know the amount of excitement, anxiety, and fear that every PCT has that day. This site placement day was different from my last one in Albania in several good ways. I had absolutely no clue where I was going to be this time. I didn’t know north, south, mountains, desert, anything! I knew this time that no matter where my site would end up being it was up to me to make it a good site. Sites are what you make them and this time I knew that. I also knew that I had told my program managers, aka the A team, everything that was important to me in order to have a successful service. My life was in their hands so to speak.
On Friday, all of us YD volunteers tried to concentrate on all our sessions through the day to get to our 6pm site announcements. It was a very long day. After some admin and health sessions, we had to sit through committee elections (I’m the 2nd alternative for VAC) and then we had over an hour to kill before our fates would be decided. A group of us decided to walk to McDonalds to kill pre-site announcement jitters. On our walk back, I started getting super excited.
Site announcement was delayed, as it happens in every case, by about an hour. Before they gave us our envelopes with our future homes, they went through some details for our site visits which over half of us would be leaving for the next morning. Finally the moment came to get a simple white envelope with a small strip of paper in it with our names, regions and sites. To draw out the final moment even longer, they handed them out to us instructing us to put them on our heads so that we could all open them together. After what seems life forever, Abdelghanni finally gave the signal to open the envelopes.
Chaos erupted as we all tore open our envelopes and screamed out the names of our final sites. Most of us, myself included, had no idea where their site was but just seeing a name made it real. They put up a map of Morocco with all of our pictures next to our sites after a few minutes and we all ran up to it to figure out where they placed us. Now imagine my surprise when I went up to the board and saw my name, one of two, at a site right next to the Atlantic. How have I been so lucky two times in a row?? I have no idea but I was so happy that I would once again have my body of water for those stressful days. My surprise was well granted because I was told numerous times that volunteers are not placed on the ocean. My new site mate, Beth, is also from Wisconsin. We are definitely the two luckiest trainees in our YD staaj.
Saturday morning we left early for our new site, which for security reasons, I will refer to as Mango. We made it as far as Marrakesh on Saturday and then traveled the rest of the way Sunday. Today is my first full day in Mango and I am so excited to see the town and meet the people. Something I should mention about my town: Darija is not the first language and so I will now have to learn Tashellhet. Most people will speak Darija so at least I will be able to communicate. My host family is super sweet and I’m happy that they will help me integrate once I move down here after swearing-in. There’s a million other things to say about Mango but I will save them for later.
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