A New Site, A New Life

This week marks the end of my second full week at my final site. On May 6th, I left the city of Ouarzazate to travel to my final site. In Ouarzazate, I left many comforts behind, including…the comfort of my fellow trainees (who I can share experiences with and relate to, the comfort of having a language/cultural coordinator (who could always translate for me if and when I got into a bind)…and (most importantly) I left behind the comfort of being a novice to this language and culture.

I’m now officially a volunteer, on my own, and am expected to act as a representative of the Peace Corps and our country. The time for making mistakes (language mess-ups and cultural faux pas) has come and gone. Although, there are still many mistakes that I have yet to make (and surely will in the future), it’s up to me to live with the consequences of those mistakes (whether it is accidentally drinking un-treated water or miscommunicating a meeting time because of my lack of language skills). I’ve found that I have to be on my ‘A’ game all of the time. I have to pay close attention to every word that is said to, always think about what I’m doing/wearing and what impression that gives to other people in my community, and I have to try to look through the lense of another culture. I often ask myself, what would I do if I were a child that had never left the mountain top before and I saw someone from another country, who speaks a different language, and looks nothing like me. I would probably stare in silence as well. The same goes for adults, if I had only ever heard my native tongue and I meet an adult who is only able to talk at a fifth grade level, I would probably expect them to know more and would become frustrated easily.

I’ve never had to think quicker or react calmer than I have in the past two weeks. It’s tough, but the rewards are immeasurable. I live by the motto that everyday has its downs, but they can never outweigh the ‘ups’. I have learned to value the small successes and to try and put the failures/frustrations into perspective. For every person that I meet who is unwilling to listen to my broken Tamazirght, there are three people who are more than happy to welcome me into their home, drink tea with me, and help me learn more about their town, culture, and language. These past two weeks have been a delight. For the next three months, my job will be to perform a community assessment and learn what the health concerns, needs, and resources of the community so that I can formulate a plan (along with the sbitar staff and other community members) on how to address some of these needs. It’s hard to think about what my everyday life will be like after I have performed the community assessment…I imagine that my language will be much better, I will know all of the bike routes between towns (like the back of my hand), and that I will have a much better bearing than I do now. But it’s hard to look that far ahead in the future because everyday poses a new challenge and a new lesson…so I try to stay near-sighted and focus on the here and the now.