So the last few weeks and been relatively uneventful, but in compliance with my attempted blogging loyalty I shall enter reguardless. One event was that I had my 25th birthday, which was my first 3rd world bday celebration. I met up with 2 fellow pvc’s and went on a bike ride through the nearby desert. The most eventful part of this day would have to be me getting hit by a motorcycle, and not getting a scratch on me.

It was amazing. I was riding in between the two other volunteers, going around a corner, when a motorcycle came flying towards me and hit me dead on, dragging my bike about 100 feet. Somehow, a millisecond before impact, I managed to jump off my bike, land on my feet and watch as my bike was dragged. The chain on the bike was knocked off, but was fixed relatively easily, and that was it. I wish there had been a Berber village person nearby with a video camera, as it was probably one of the most athletic things I’ve ever done.

As for productivity, I am currently working on getting several projects off the ground, the first of which will be a mural of the world painted in the Dar Chebab. My SBD counterpart has an art background, and wants to use her expertise in facilitating this. The second is more of an event, which would be a career day, in which we would have people from different professions in the community come in a talk about what they do. My only concern about this is that we will only have access to a limited amount of careers. It would be great to expose my students to professions that don’t necessarily exist in the dirty south, like law or journalism. The project that I am most looking forward to is the making of a documentary video, with my students as actors, about growing up in Tinjdad. I will make sure to post it up on U-Tube once it is complete, InShaallah.

The most exciting aspect of the last 2 weeks is the fixing of my toilet. Finally! LHumdullah!(praise be to God). After about 3 weeks of waiting, using the Turkish toilet which is oddly located right in front of the front door to my apartment, and bathing by bucket on my roof, a plumber finally came and fixed the problem. He used on interesting technique to get rid of the clog by filling up all the drains in the bathroom with cement, and forcing water down with a hose which was sticking down one of them, also buried in cement. Not sure if they teach that one in plumber school in the states. It also served as good language practice in that I learned the Arabic words for cement (seamen…took me offguard when he initially asked me for some), screwdriver, hammer, and shit. That’s all for now. Peace.