Hello! My name is Nicole, and I’m a Peace Corps volunteer serving in the health sector.
The daughter of a musician and an artist, I grew up on an island and graduated from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) with a degree in linguistics and Arabic and Islamic studies. I arrived in Morocco on 4 March of 2009, and should God will it, I’ll be here until April of 2011.
Official documentation regards me as a cooperante de santé, though official documentation also misspelled my name on my residency card — so what I do is anyone’s guess. I live in southern Morocco (The Deep South, in regards to Peace Corps coverage), and down here we speak Tasoussit, which is a dialect of Tashlheit, which is just one branch of a broader Amazigh (or Berber), language.
Simply put, I speak Berber like Kenneth from 30 Rock speaks American English: I’m overly polite, I sound a bit slow and I use many, many God phrases.
On a personal note, I’m sarcastic by design and a creative writer by training. I’m just as apt to write about what I had for lunch, or how long it took me to find a hairbrush at souq, as I am to make astute cultural observations or speak about work projects. If you’re curious about anything regarding Moroccan life, working within the Peace Corps infrastructure or how I got to be so awesome, shoot me an email at nicoleinmorocco [at] gmail [dot] com.
