A good video from GRIST

I like this video, and it ties into PC Morocco because there will likely be many small ecoprojects to pass the time and enlighten the children there as a Youth volunteer.

With five months before I go, I feel like I am close enough and the motivation is high to really get started on the language, the culture and everything. I looked at different things about Morocco online, especially Friends of Morocco and the FB group. It sounds like Youth Development goes to Azrou for Pre-Service Training, and I discovered that is less than 60 miles from Fez, and not too far from Tangier, the famous city where the European intellectuals went to, below Gibraltar.

I also found my important, missing first Disc of the Living Language Arabic textbook that I bought a couple of years back. And instead of keeping up with the CDs, I've put the lessons on my iPod so I can read the book simultaneously. Unlike other audio lessons, this group only repeats the words in Arabic, not wasting your time listening to someone saying everything in English.

But it's tiring to think of these grand changes. I'd rather not. But it is exciting, too, and I know it will be a meaningful thing, just like before.

I think I got kickstarted out of my complacency by Diana, who texted me telling me she had just heard I had accepted the invitation to go there. And she sounded more excited than me! Also, the past week my friend Konte was married in Angola, and so it got my brain involved again in dreaming of the two years awaiting me of living in Africa. And not only that, but things like seeing Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, and he mispronounces Ougadougou, the city in Burkina Faso that I know because of Chris, my good friend from Icla in Bolivia who went there the first thing when he finished his service (abruptly, just like all of us... I said to him when I saw him again for the first time in consolidation: "A couple of more weeks and you would have missed history!").

I can tell you for a fact, that when we were together in Sucre--the few times there was a big group of PCVs drinking beer and eating chocolate chip pancakes--and Chris pointed to Africa and described the trip he'd be taking, including the Festival au desert, in Mali, I had no idea at all that I'd soon be calling those Saharan nations my neighbor.