Regional Meeting

Not long after the New Year I had a nice meeting with my region mates. I live in the Ouarzazate region of Morocco and all the volunteers in the area (Health, Environment, Small Business Development, and Youth Development) got together to discuss regional projects and plans. There were around 16 people including several volunteers from other regions joining us to get an idea of how these meetings work.

Regional meetings are entirely volunteer driven and while encouraged by Peace Corps Morocco, the volunteers are responsible for making it happen. Our goals were to share project ideas, best practices and offer help to other volunteers when possible.

It was helpful to me because I not only got ideas about how to get Dar Chebab students active, ideas for SIDA (AIDS) and environmental projects to do at site, but I was also able to meet the different people in my region who are my ultimate support and go to people.

This meeting was also beneficial because it was the beginnings of a large SIDA project as well as planning for the Rose Festival that takes place in RoseValley every year. It is really nice to have a large group of volunteers to work with because the work can be divided and it is possible to reach a wider audience when we work together. I also really like this project because I can be more involved with some of the planning aspects and logistics but the attention is never directly on me (I will tell you more about this project in the next post.)

Hopefully these regional meetings will continue and allow us to keep up the regional collaboration. Each person has their specializations and it is advantageous to all of us to be able to share the resources and knowledge we have.