A Summary

            As I’m sure most of my readership knows, I spent the last three weeks (ish) in America visiting family and friends for the holidays. As such, there isn’t too much to write about it terms of my experiences in Morocco. However, I do want to share a couple of anecdotes from before I left and talk about a couple of interesting Morocco and Peace Corps related observations I made while at home.

            Firstly, the week before I left I went to nearby town at a history teacher’s invitation to talk with his students about Moroccan-American relations in terms of the Peace Corps. It was a fun, and I think the students (and the teacher) liked the approach I took, asking students to think of why America might have started the Peace Corps in the 60s, why we continue it now, ect... At the end of the day, though, the students wondered why there isn’t a volunteer in their town, something I couldn’t answer until I discovered that although they had a Dar Chabab built two years ago it has never been opened because there is no mudir. Waste and inertia strike again.

            A few days later I left town, but on my way to Casablanca I stopped at a friend’s site since she and I had discovered we’d accidentally booked the same flight to America and wanted to travel together. Another American development organization (whose name eludes me) had just built toilets at an elementary school in one of the villages outside her town. She had done the same last year, so they asked her to help run a health fair for the students to inaugurate the new toilets. A few other nearby volunteers, she, and I each developed lesson plans for the health fair, but in a neat twist we each partnered with some of her high school students who helped teach the lesson. I was very impressed with the volunteer I worked with, whose English was very strong, and who quickly understood how I liked to teach and actually had taken over the entire delivery of the lesson by the time the last group of students reached us. All of my friend’s students seemed to have similar levels of drive.

            The next day we journeyed out to the coast, visiting the much-storied Casablanca. Even just typing the name gives a sense of romance and mystique, which the city does not deliver on. Not to say I dislike Casablanca, I very much enjoyed the burger joint we went to, just that burger joint would have fit in perfectly in the Lower East Side, which isn’t quite the romantic French colonial capitol in the Muslim world one pictures. That being said, we made our usual hit as Arabic speaking Americans—except in the burger joint, where even all the Moroccans spoke French. Also of note, tons of taxi drivers tried to cheat us, but when we finally found one who would run the meter he turned out to be from the town I’d given the history lesson in earlier in the week. Small world!

            Back in America I talked with a lot of people about life in Morocco in the Peace Corps. Conversations ranged from people who wanted to know more about the hardship of living in a semi-developed country to those who wanted to learn about culture, to those who just wanted details on what exactly I do (besides blog and drink tea). I found it was sometimes hard to explain things about Morocco to people who haven’t lived there for a long time. To be honest, now that I’m writing it, I’m having a hard time explaining what was hard to explain. I hear this is a common problem for returned Peace Corps Volunteers. We see the issues our host country faces, and we want to be honest about them, but at the same time we love the country and don’t want to sell it short when giving a quick talk about it. Maybe I shouldn’t generalize that feeling to all PCVs, but therein lies the problem, knowing when to generalize and when to talk about the nuance that does pervade our host countries. I guess most people would have just as much trouble summarizing the last two years of their lives, they’re just not asked to as often.

            I’m going to wear off that confusing headwind for now and end by saying that I’m safely back in site and was excited to find my students were excited to start back up again. In the past I found it always took awhile to get started again after I’d been away, but this time we jumped right into it. Looking forward to an exciting and fulfilling four months!