(Invisible) Moroccan Friends

A minute to catch our breath in Rabat. Site Announcement received, Community Based Training completed, Language Proficiency Interviews passed. Swearing-In tomorrow, Shipping Out the next day.

It's an exciting time. Thursday we move to our home for the next two years. We'll be about an hour south of Marrakesh, in a town of around 10,000 in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. There's much to look forward to, and plenty to chew our fingernails over.

But I wanted to tell about the Moroccans who took us in during CBT, nameless and faceless on the blog for the sake of their privacy, but for us an indelible part of our first months. (Just as an aside, it is incredibly strange and depressing to feel so beholden to this "pics or it didn't happen" age we live in. The power of the internet to define what feels real makes me want to cry).

It was striking during our last weeks with the host family how profoundly they conveyed, in spite of the language barrier, that our saying goodbye would be bittersweet. We returned home after site announcement and delivered the news that we'd be eight hours south and west, and our two wonderful English-speaking host cousins paused wistfully before launching into the pep talk about how great (but hot!) Marrakesh is. Our host mother wanted to learn the name of our new host mother, and just repeating it throughout the day, reminding us and herself, seemed to comfort her greatly. Again and again, they brought up the previous volunteers, and we were admonished that when we leave we should not cry like they did.

One evening this week as we all sat around after dinner moping and dreading the inevitable,  our host father decided he didn't like the look of it one bit and he gave us a rousing speech, worthy of halftime at the Rose Bowl, standing up and gesturing broadly, pacing and pounding the table. "Do not be sad! Life will be good for you in Marrakesh," he told us. "Remember when you came to Morocco? And the Peace Corps gave you a piece of paper, and you read our names? You didn't know who we were, but now we are family. So you should not be sad. Did you cry when you left America?" "Yes," Britt told him, "A lot." But he wouldn't hear of it. "Everywhere you go in Morocco you will find good people," he said. "Well, not in Casablanca. But in Marrakesh, you will find good people. And life will be good for you because you have each other."

That last week we took family portraits and exchanged gifts (you'd better believe there was more peanut butter involved) and Britt let our host mother cover her eyes in dark black "khl" eyeliner just to make her smile, and we made promises to return, Inshallah. And the morning we left, there were tears, lots of tears and runny black "khl" on top of everything else, and none of it was really at all big enough to properly thank them, but it came across, as the important things seem to here in Morocco.

Our last week in CBT, our LCF taught us how to cook tajine. He's secretly an awesome cook.

Tajine party on the roof.

Pre-tears, obviously.

They probably have cows where we're moving, but just in case.

Miss it already.