So I've been in Morocco a year now. Good time for reflection, I think, and a mass email to make sure you all haven't forgotten about me.
Favorite moments in the past year of service:
1.Evening exercise sessions with my host sisters - turning up loud techno music and dancing our hearts out until we're pouring sweat and can't dance anymore, we're laughing so hard
2.The day we started construction on the school toilets, knocking down the old ones, collecting the rocks and pieces of wood, and being excited that it was finally underway
3.Riding my mountain bike down the dirt road into the village - all downhill and fast and absolutely gorgeous
4.Sunset runs out between the plateaus with my dog. Even after almost a year of daily runs, I'm still blown away by how pretty it is every single afternoon. Sunrise is pretty too, but I'm not very good at getting up for that
5.Hanging out with my host brothers when they sell kitchen ware at souq - taking over for them when they go off to run errands, and pretending like there's nothing strange about an American selling tea glasses, cheap plastic Tupperware and silverware in a random rural market in Morocco
6.Long underwear dance parties in winter whenever volunteers get together - turning out the lights and setting our headlamps to "strobe" while we dance to last year's now-out-of-date pop music.
7.Daily afternoon soccer games with the boys, especially when my host brothers come out to play and I get really competitive
8.Watching my neighbors/landlords/family slowly climb the social ladder with every month's rent I pay them, and knowing there's not another family in the world that I would rather see succeed
9.Harvesting barley, weeding the tomato fields, pulling up carrots, or doing whatever random agricultural work there is that day with my host brother, even if it's hard and tedious and gives me horrendous blisters
10.The day a friend and I set out on foot to find a path to this lake that, according to Google Maps, was right over the mountains and through the forest from the village. Drinking tea in a nomad tent, then thinking we'd lost ourselves in the middle of the mountains and then seeing the blue of the lake after six hours of hiking. When we were tired and hungry, being invited to eat lunch at the lake with a fantastic family who then offered us a ride home and invited us to a wedding that weekend, and whom I still track down at their stand whenever I'm in souq, just to say hello.
So those are the great parts of Peace Corps life. Needless to say, this line of work has its frustrations too. A year in, and our couscous business has yet to find a major client, or really anyone who can be counted on to buy more than a couple of kilos a month (I thought for sure we'd be selling in every major supermarket by now). All my hundreds of hours of grant-writing have resulted in less than a thousand dollars of grant money (I thought we'd have a brand new couscous-making facility, and goats and rabbits and a cheese operation by now). And as good as my Arabic is compared to the majority of volunteers here, there are still countless interactions a day where I simply fail to understand or to make myself understood. And the speed at which this past year has gone by makes me afraid that the remaining fifteen months won't be enough to accomplish everything I think I should be able to accomplish.
Ways you can help me, if you're interested:
1.Put me in contact with anyone you know in Morocco, especially if they own/work in a hotel or restaurant or supermarket or travel agency
2.Mail me as many broccoli seeds as you can find, literally. No one here grows any winter vegetables so I want to get some of the farmers to experiment with broccoli, not to mention I miss broccoli more than probably any other food.
3.If you know anyone who's planning a vacation to Morocco, suggest that they take a few hours and stop by the village to make couscous with us - it really is still the best couscous I've ever eaten, and people seem to really enjoy our cooking classes
4.Send me any suggestions you have for anything, really: i.e. grant opportunities, online travel forums I should post to, ideas for other money-making projects or places to sell our couscous.
