Bye Grandpa

My (Jana) Grandpa passed away last week. It’s been tough to try and say goodbye from far away, and I’m missing family big time. Just want to say I love you Grandpa – we love you – and we’ll miss you.

I promised interpretive dance...I'm not trying to lead you on, but the download process is a little more intense than I thought. I will get it up as soon as I can.

Here are some pictures from swearing in:


Your very own new Peace Corps Volunteers. :)


Here's some fellow new volunteers getting some quality time in the day we took off to our final sites and went our separate ways!


Let’s see, I said I’d say a little about our daily lives. Most homes here are built around a courtyard and there are several rooms that come off that courtyard, but aren’t connected to each other. The rooms heat up during the day and stay warm, so we usually sleep in the courtyard at night. Most homes offer mats and blankets and pillows for sitting in their living roomish areas, and they are pretty mobile, so we can sit outside or in the large entryway or wherever it is cool!

I think I may have talked about food before, but here’s some more info. For breakfast we drink tea (strong green tea with plenty of sugar), and have bread with butter or apricot preserves or cheese or olive oil and olives. Lunch is usually a local dish with potato, onion, carrots, paprika, cilantro and some other ingredients I probably don’t know about. :) Dinner can be pasta or omelette or a rice dish… Fresh fruit is the typical dessert we’ve experienced so far in Morocco, both where we trained further north, and down here in the south. Watermelons are in season and we’ve been eating TONS of it! :) Breakfast is early, lunch around 1:30 and dinner around 10 or so, so there is usually a snack sometime in the late afternoon. Tea and bread are typical fare for that.

We have settled into a routine here. Weekdays we spend the morning at the local clinic. We get to observe what sorts of things people come in for and practice our language and just see and be seen and become associated with the clinic. We’ve spent the last couple of days doing a short interview with patients as they’re being seen which has been great language practice, and we’re learning more about local health habits (teeth brushing, hand washing, etc.) We come home and eat lunch, and then usually nap a little – it’s crazy how quickly your energy gets zapped navigating in a different language and culture. After napping :) we spend some time with language or reading through and planning some of our health and technical things. Evenings in our douar are visiting time, so some evenings we’ll go with our host mom and visit others, and often others will drop by our home and sit and talk for a while. Once it starts to get dark we spend some time journaling or reading or whatever and then it’s time for dinner. Since dinner is later, usually we head to sleep right afterward. So, that’s it – our life!

We are working on getting a new address. The post office in our town is getting remodeled right now, and so we can't get a post office box...yet. The word is it will be done around the 25th of this month, but at that time we have to hope they have open boxes! Mail sent to the address above will reach us eventually -- it goes to the PC office and a staff person will bring it with them when they come by...sometime. :) We'll keep you posted... no pun intended. :)

We send lots of love to (everyone. always. but especially right now) Mom and Dad and Jevan and Garth, Mary, Ben and Krista, Tim, and Jean, Arnie, Melissa and Stephen, Dustin. We miss you and wish we could have been at what sounds like a wonderful service. (But what's this about Niagra? Troublemakers...) :) Our thoughts and prayers are also with Corny and Mervin, Frank and Lois, and Shirley and Dave.