Le gasp! Is it really 2011?

I don't know where the time goes but wherever it went it did so quickly!
Whew, where to begin? If Julie Andrews taught us anything it's that the beginning is the best place to begin.
The week after my last post the olive harvest began in my area. This is the major cash crop for most of my villages so everyone and their grandmother (literally) went out to the field to work. I didn't want to be left out of all the fun so I put on my lets-get-grubby- face and trecked out to the fields; I had so much fun I can't believe it! So the way olives are harvested pretty much hasn't changed since the first olive harvest took place in the fields of Ur: the women put big rugs under the tress and hit the lower branches with big sticks to nock all the olives down while the men climbe the trees and do the same to the higher branches. I, being foriegn ands an owner of denim jeans, got to help in whatever capacity I wanted... I was up the nearest tree so quickly the woman who had been stading nearest to me looked around and said; "where'd she go?" I spent the next two days monkying through the green foliege hunting the small black fruits.
I'm sure most ppl who have never helped in the olive harvest think this is not a very interesting story. You have to see it from a big picture kind of way. This is something that has been done for eons exactly the same way! This is something that not only Jesus probably did, but Mohammed, Abraham, and Noah too! Not only that but thousands, if not millions, of ppl were doing the same thing all over the world at the exact same time! WOW!!
After the harvest there was Christmas, we had the most relaxing Christmas I think I have ever had: there was feasting, festivity, and even some frisbeeing. I'm afraid there is no epic tale to share about my Yule tide.
New Years, however, is a very different story. A couple of the PCVs in the area took the weekend off and went south to the Sahara and rode camels out to the middle of the dunes! Oh my heavens it was so very much fun. There was a huge group of ppl from Ireland, Italy, Spain, France, and the US and we all rode camels an hour into the desert where we spent the night in traditional nomadic tents. When we reached camp we were at the base of the biggest dune in the area so a bunch of us decided to climb it... that took 2 hours. From the top we could see Algeria we were so high. We watched the sun set from there. We spent the rest of the night singing traditional Moroccan songs sitting around a bon fire. Definitely a New Years to be remembered.
Last week was back to work for me, I guess my Peace Corps can't be all climbinbg trees and sitting ontop of smelly herbivores.
I spent the week working with KOICA (South Korea's version of the Peace Corps). Frist I went to Rabat (the capital) for some training and team bonding. There I joined up with some other PCVs and we met the 15 or so KOICA volunteers and the 5 Moroccan teachers who were working with us. This was fabulous b/c only 4 of the non-PCVs spoke English; this ment there was a lot of French used when I worked with the Moroccans and a lot of charades used Witht the Koreans. Fun fact: there is no way to use hand gestures for "glitter". This is significant b/c we used glitter to teach hand washing lessons but glitter just isn't one of those words that ever made it onto any of the grammer quiz lists in anyones' studies. In the end I showed them the rhine stones on my glasses and made a sprinkling gesture with my hands. HA! I'll bet you all thought my sparkly glasses were frivelous and silly; little did you know we would have been lost without them. Yes I'm feeling smug. :D
Phew! Alright, that brings you all up to date on my life as of today. I hope you guys are all doing well... you know you guys could tell me how you are all doing. I have email, snail mail,... you could even comment on these blogs... I miss you guys.