Things I was not ready for.

Things I was not ready for:

1. Creative Cooking – See next blog.

2. Living with Bugs. – I was ready for a lot of things when I started this journey. I was ready to dig my own latrine, go without Internet for weeks at a time, and ready to be alone for long periods of time. What I was not ready for was living with bugs. I hate them. I don’t think that hate really gets the point across; I mean I really hate them.

3. Being sick and living by yourself. – Usually you have crackers and a can of soup hanging out in the kitchen for those times when you might get sick, and if not you have the supermarket close enough.

4. Management of all this free time. – I knew there would be a lot of free time, but I didn’t know I was this good at wasting it.

5. Balancing two very different worlds. – There is the world of being an American in other countries which is unique on its own. That is the world that you live in when you go on vacation or to a town that doesn’t have a PCV. (You live in it whether you like it or not because people no that your not Moroccan and most of the time think you’re a tourist.) Then there is the PCV world, where you live in this little town and try to fit in. You want to act like a local but are still trying to figure out which parts of the American you should show. Its strange, not in a bad way, just makes you a little crazy sometimes because you have this set of lenses that see something one way (from your culture) and the people in your community has a set of lenses that sees things from their culture.

6. Forgetting my English – I knew that I would be learning another language and I knew that that would be one of the biggest challenges I would have, but what I didn’t see coming was forgetting my English. You can ask Mom and Brenda if you like, I speak English like one would speak Darija and sometimes I can’t even remember the word at all. It’s very odd going from a Comm. major who spend the last four year perfecting how to communicate messages (mainly in English) to get the result you desire to someone who has a problem remembering how you talk about someone who is sitting in the room with you.