dar luby: home sweet home

We’ve missed you.  And we are sorry it has taken us so long to give you a little update.  Where did we leave off?

Oh yes.  Spring Camps.  Those were two long weeks, those two weeks of Spring Camp.  Instead of celebrating Pete’s 28^th birthday with a night on the town in Marrakech, we were bed-ridden with a case of Salmonella.  Luckily, we were still staying with another Peace Corps Volunteer at the time.  The three of us suffered together.  We couldn’t ask for more than working WIFI and a clean restroom, and we are grateful to have suffered in solidarity with another volunteer. 

But Pete still got to celebrate!  After returning to our home city, we were delighted to find some birthday packages that had made their way to us all the way from the USA.  Filled with peanut butter (!) and books and treats and clothes and peanut butter and surprises and kindness and peanut butter.  If you want our address, shoot us an email and we'd be more than happy to share it with you.

Birthday Boy!

Once we made it home after Spring Camps, the countdown to finding Dar Luby began.  Dar is the Darija word for house, and we needed to find a place of our own in less than 10 days.  With the help of friends and strangers, we saw about eight different apartments in our town before choosing the one that we will call home for the next two years.  House-hunting in a new country where you barely speak the language is hard.  Really, really hard.

Less hard when this is your hometown, though.

Can you believe this handsome young man is 28 years old?!

I spend my last few days with our host family baking bread, like a good Moroccan woman.

How did we find Dar Luby, just how did we do it?  The news of open apartments in Morocco spreads by word of mouth.  We asked some of our new friends if they knew of anything.  Then they would ask their friends.  We went up to hanut (small store) owners and asked if they knew of places because hanut-owners are pretty plugged into their community.  We consistently relied on the kindness of strangers to help us navigate neighborhoods and negotiate rents.  Once, after a stressful day of looking at places, one of our new friends invited us into his home for a snack.  Over soda and cakes, he and his family made us feel so welcome I wanted to stay forever.  

And now, thanks to everyone's kindness and lots of hard work, we have a home!  For the first time in three months, we are not living with a host family.  We promise to post more photos soon.  Right now, it's pretty empty. 

Pete in our new home.

I also clean like a good Moroccan woman.  Luckily, in Dar Luby, Pete helps.

Now, we are filling our days trying to fill Dar Luby.  Once again, we rely on our new friends and strangers to help us out.  Our host mother here was sad to see us move out on our own, but she isn’t done helping us.  She gave us boxes of plates and pots to use in our new place.  She also has been helping us buy things in the souk (the weekly market).  She is a tough negotiator and can usually get the price down a little bit for us.  Today, another friend we just met, a young man who takes the bus to Marrakech every day for university classes and also lives in our neighborhood, came knocking on our door.  He wanted to see if we needed help buying anything from the souk. The answer, of courses, is yes.  We always need help.  With everything.  He came along with us and helped us ask for prices of things, and he insisted on carrying our bags. 

Cooking in Dar Luby, right on a buta tank.

Reading in the courtyard at Dar Luby.  I'm actually starting to notice a gender pattern in these photos that I'm going to have to address. ha!

The highs are so high here, and the lows are so low.  I’ve heard this about Peace Corps before, and it’s strange to see my own emotions play out so drastically.  Yesterday morning, we woke up to no water in the house.  Our landlord had been working on the plumbing, and we simply didn’t know the water had been shut off.  I wanted to cry with frustration.  Having a landlord is hard enough when you DO speak the same language, so this has been a tough week as we get settled into our place--- for every step forward, it seems like we take about seven steps backwards.  But today, the young man that helped us at the souk knocked on our door again in the late afternoon.  He delivered a bottle of homemade olive oil and insisted it was a gift.  I wanted to cry with gratitude.   

 

We buy most of our groceries at the weekly souk.  Here's what this week's load looked like.

View from our new roof.  Come visit!

Highs are high: snack on the roof at sunset.

Little by little, Dar Luby will become our home.  Little by little, we will get to a point where we don’t have to rely on other people to take care of us all of the time.  Little by little, we will begin to repay the kindness that has been shown to us.