An AMAZING coincidence this past week:

taking a bus along the Tishka pass in the mountains between Ourzazate and Marrakesh, its nearly dark and its a day in Ramadan so the bus pulls over at whatever town it is so the people can hop into the restaurant there and break the fast. We'd been traveling through a beautiful valley and from the top of the hill we saw a dust storm in the distance, over the verdant center with the sun shining from behind, making it even more ethereal and gorgeous.

And it's nice to arrive at this restaurant, since I need to go in and use the loo. BAM, walking up the stairs is one of my best buddies here in Morocco. He'd been on the same road traveling the other way. We had a nice 30 minute chance to catch up with each other, he eating a few of the hard-boiled eggs for sale, me looking at the little plates of Ramadan food but content to wait another 10 minutes' travel to arrive at our destination before eating (I'd not been fasting, shhh don't tell anyone).

It was only when we separated, not to see each other maybe for another few weeks, like always happens, when I realized that I'd never have known he was traveling the same road as me if the call to prayer had sounded a few minutes before or later. People then would not have broken the fast until we had already traveled a few miles down the road in each direction, going away from each other. But of all the roads, and of all the different buses riding them and the different times they depart, we both happened to be on the two buses that met at this town coincidentally, and we both stepped off and walked into the same restaurant, because the call to prayer coincided with our crossing at the moment it mattered most.

Pretty awesome. Now I'm painting my second world map in a little mountain town, and enjoying good food and a normal sleep schedule, things I didn't expect.

MORE UPDATES:
Work: I discovered that I can make templates for a Morocco map that can be used by volunteers that already have a world map painted at their Dar Chebab. And it might be consulted with much more interest than the world one. I just have to make a grid using the morocco maps that all volunteers have.

Islam: This month's TIME magazine is about whether America is Islamophobic. Check it out!