2010

When the last group of Youth volunteers went back home, there was a poignant and too-honest article printed in that issue of our magazine Peace Works. This was the ''real'' Description of Service that each volunteer completes and that is kept on file for the rest of our lives in Peace Corps HQ. I've already got one there, before too long I'll have another and this weird time in my life will be condensed into two pages.

The sanitzed version of this vol's D.O.S. likely bears little resemblance to the actuality of spending nearly 800 days in this country. What he wrote in this one went something like:

In my two years of loyal PC service, I've :

--gotten ghiardia 4 times
--seen every episode of the Office twice
--seen all 10 seasons of Seinfeld, some of them multiple times
--Watched Friends on repeat during the month of Ramadan
--read all four Twilight books again before watching the newest movie
--learned to wash clothes by hand / almost never did this, though (since its cheaper to spend one dollar on a new pair of jeans at souk)
--Etc. etc.

Try as I might otherwise, mine is shaping up to be similar. With no computer anymore--good riddance!--I've not been able to consume whole seasons of anything. Even when I did, I watched one movie a month. Books, though, are different: when everyone goes to sleep at 9, and you stay awake another 4 hours, well, you're not going to be teaching English to anybody.

If you're curious, you can see the books I partook here (http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2550185-benji?shelf=2010), plus another dozen I've not finished and another dozen that I read during training.

But these are things I could have done anywhere! Over the next week or two, I'll try to think of the things More Moroccan that Ive done here that cant be replicated anywhere else. So watch out for it!

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A nice conversation from yesterday:
A: i have relinquished all control of scheduling with my host family

i only hope to get things done on time

10:00 PM B: on time? what does that even mean here...?

7 minutes

10:07 PM A: exactly

10:09 PM B: B-) soon you'll say, ''alaska inshallah*'' just like the best of them

2005 Ben near Merzouga (Detail)

*Ah, it can wait till tomorrow, no hurry. God Willing.