• Volunteer Stories

White Welcoming- first moving to site in December 2019

Written by CorpsAfrica/Maroc Volunteer Mr. Redwane Hamma

It was 15th December 2019, I woke early. It was still dark because my country used summer time. I got dressed quickly then I did my religious obligation. After that, I drank a cup of hot coffee as I always do, and called a taxi to take me to the bus station. After a few minutes, the taxi arrived. I greeted my parents by kissing their heads and got in the taxi. As soon as I arrived at the bus station I got a ticket. Then I put my suitcase on the bottom of the bus and took my seat. The driver came and rang to passengers to take their seats and the 8 o’clock trip began. My destination is Marrakech but I got down in Inzgen because me and Ali (who is my mate in service) decided to meet there in order to take another bus to Marrakech together. It was a very long trip but fortunately, we broke the boredom by talking and we still felt the long trip. We were very tired because it took more than we expected. Finally, we arrived to our destination at about 8 p.m. Without any hesitation, we took a taxi to Jamaa El Fena and looked for an appropriate hotel to rest. A few moments later, we went out to take dinner and to withdraw some money, then came back to our room in the hotel that we booked.

The followed morning was 16th December, 2019. We woke up early I took a quick shower then directly we arranged our suitcases then we went out to meet our mate Samba who is an Exchange Volunteer from Senegal. After approximately half an hour our coordinator sent us the location of the place where we met so we joined him right away. It took about five minutes to be there. We found he already booked three seats so we just arranged to put our luggage in the trunk of the taxi, but it was not enough so we just put the rest next to our seats. We didn’t have to wait for the other seats to be full because there were two people already waiting, so the driver started the engine and went to Setti Fadma, which surprised me and we discovered the transportation to our sites. At this time, we didn’t know yet how our sites would look!

We waited more than we expected and no transportation yet. We took breakfast and lunch and we waited more than two hours. Finally the transportation came on our lucky windy day. We did not have a choice to look for better transportation thus we did not refuse to go in. We put our luggage in the back and we got in on the back above some boxes and bottle gases. We spent about two hours to reach Agrd Norton, where Ali is serving. It is the same site where we collected data during pre service training. We decided to go to Samba’s site first.

The first house we entered in the village was not our host family, we just enter because the driver who took us knows the owner so he helped us to find a house. The driver and another man went out while we are still setting in this home without knowing our next destination. After a while the driver and the other man came back informing us to go out with them to our host family and where we will stay during our service. It was going to be dark and was also windy and it seems it would snow. We talked for a little bit with our host father, because both of us were tired, we went quickly to sleep. I felt as if I did not sleep enough even I slept all night. I was the first one who woke up then I found the whole village white. I called my friend Samba who said it is his first time to see the snow.

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