“3awd 3afak? Mafhhmts walu.”

That means “Can you repeat, please? I didn’t understand anything.” Basically it’s the story of my life these days.

Let’s see here, it’s been awhile. I spent a week at the beach/Rabat finishing up training. The hotel we got to stay in in Rabat was super-zwin: western-style toilets! Continental breakfast! Free internet! Hot showers! Too bad we were only there one night.

The morning after the swearing-in ceremony (by the way, I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer now) I made my way to site—a seemingly simple grand taxi ride. Of course, we got a flat tire about halfway there and I got to chillax on the side of the road with five randos while the driver exchanged the flat tire for a somewhat less-flat spare. Nevertheless I made it to site in one piece!

I have a new host family now: mom, dad, gramma, three little brothers and one little sister. Everyone is so, so, so, so overwhelmingly nice I barely know how to react. Gramma won’t let me sit anywhere unless I have a sheepskin rug under my feet, and the other night we were walking somewhere and she randomly picked a flower and gave it to me. I wish I could understand anything she said.

It’s not just my host family that’s been incredible so far, either. Everyone keeps trying to claim me as their kid—people either refer to me as “bnti” or “mskina” which mean “my daughter” and “poor kid” respectively. I take a little offense to being called mskina all the time, but I also can’t help but admit that it’s basically true.

I think I’ve found a bizarro me in my host dad. Last Saturday I needed to get ID photos taken for my carte de sejour—basically my Moroccan ID—but none of the stores were open yet because everyone was still eating lunch or napping (oh, Morocco) so we went and sat at his favorite café for a bit. We just sat and drank coffee and I didn’t think it could get any better, but then he pulled out a—wait for it—CROSSWORD PUZZLE. Of course it was in Arabic, but just seeing a crossword puzzle was like a little taste of my old routine.

So I guess I could talk about some potentially interesting information. I haven’t really started WORKING working yet, but I’ve gone to Dar Chebab pretty much everyday to hang out with the kids. The site I was assigned to already has a very active Dar Chebab, so it’s difficult to figure out where I fit in and what I can do to help them out, especially since my language skills are so weak. I can’t believe I actually scored HIGHER on my Peace Corps language exam than what I needed in order to go to site without any problems. Luckily, the guy that’s been helping me out a lot around town says my accent is very good, so I guess when the vocabulary and grammar comes along I will be in good shape. Swiyya b swiyya.

Thus far this post has been very upbeat, but I want to note that community integration is freaking difficult. I thought training was difficult, but now I’m going to go ahead and say that this past week (my first week in site) has been one of the most difficult times of my life. As scary as training was at times, I had five Americans and a patient Moroccan on hand for support 24/7. I don’t mean to imply that the people in my site haven’t been amazing, but at the end of the day I only have myself to rely on. Swiyya stress.