Here we go.

I know I said that last time, when we left for CBT, but this time, I'm like, for real.

Today afternoon during training all of us lovely PCT's (if you don't know what all these acronyms mean, you need to reference previous posts, samHi [sorry]) discovered what our "permanent sites" are. 

The place where we will stay for two years, enshalleh [God willing].

The place where we will all xdm [work] and l3b [play].

The place where we will all develop meaningful and hopefully lasting projects, relationships, and friendships.

And also the place where we will visit after tomorrow.

For six days.       

Monday morning we'll all head off on our dandy paths toward our respective (I know, how respectful) sites. 
Saturday and Sunday we will come back to HUB (where I am now), and then a few days later, off back to CBT (got that?).

Please oblige and allow me to introduce my lovely "city" that outshines Denver, the Mile-High-City, anyday.

My final site is a small town wayyy up in the High Atlas mountains. My elevation is about 2300 meters, or about 1.42 miles above sea level. That alone will be exciting, perhaps to a dizzying level (go altitude sickness, go!).

The town is located on the hillside and overlooks the river and surrounding fields, where the population - mostly subsistence farmers - grow wheat, potatoes, apple trees, poplars, and turnips. 
 
Johnny Appleseed may be found here and there on the weekends.

There is a large cavern that is in the process of being developed as a tourist sight just outside of town. The tourist industry is growing, but the majority of people are still supported by farming and grazing.

The winters are "difficult, with high winds and potentially heavy snowfall." Summers, on the other hand, are "beautiful". In Tamazight, that would be iHla bzzzzzaf. 

My site is considered pretty "out there", as my program manager put it today, but that is exactly what I wanted...and requested in my site preference interview. 

I am also in a new site, meaning the community has not had a Peace Corps volunteer before (besides some in the 1990s).

I don't want to prognosticate too much about how the site will be in terms of amenities like access to water or internet, as only time will tell, but I told my program manager that I was completely OK with having a lack of amenities. 

For me, it was being true to my expectations I had set for Lesotho - having no running water, no electricity - and that I would have had felt guilty being in a large souk town where life really wouldn't have been all that (necessarily) different from the U.S....at least in terms of comforts. 

I also pretty explicitly said I loved mountains and that I would appreciate waking up in the morning and seeing the mountain range outside my window.
 
Quickly, and without a proper transition sentence, I'll share with you two noteworthy times I've had during CBT:
  • One of our CBT sitemates found a litter of stray dogs in one of the abandoned buildings of which I've posted pictures. We went one day after lunch, during break, to visit the puppies.





     

  • One of our recent taxi rides to CBT from HUB, we stopped by on the road where there were camels. At some point, I'll try to make an überawesome video [which will definitely include some dog, frog, and camel action] at some point and upload on YouTube, enshalleh.





     
 Ah, safi [finished], SaHa [regional thank you], shukran [Arabic thank you].