A lot has happened lately. There’s a thousand little stories to pick from. My friends leaving. New ones coming to visit. Glasses being distributed left and right. Emails that show up with exciting or wonderful news. Emails that show up that cause you to take a step back and take a few, slow and deep […]
A Slew of New Videos
As many of you know, the glasses project proved (and continues to prove) to be an incredible fruitful part of my service. While Eyejusters were in Morocco, they took several videos, some of the Olive Orchard where I live, some of the actual glasses project. I’ve been meaning for some time to get these up for the […]
Turning Points
This morning, I sat in the cafe next to the taxi station with Caity, Avery, Nicole, and Jonathan. It’s weird. The past few months have been, in some ways, building up to their final morning in Outat. And now that it’s here and gone, none of it seems real. We waited for Caity’s taxi to […]
“The Glasses Project,” Official Recap
They say every volunteer has one big project all their energy goes into, a pinnacle of sorts to their two-year service. Actually, I don’t know who “they” are, and I’ve never heard anyone say that, so I’m entirely making that up, but it seems to me to be the truth. Almost all of the volunteers […]
The Calm Before the Storm, or Awaiting the Arrival of 700 Eyejusters Glasses
All’s been quiet on the western front lately. Lots of my classes have been canceled due to rain. Even a light mist or lots of dust can keep students from coming, and it’s not advantageous for me to ride my bike all the way to the youth center if there’s not going to be anyone […]
19 Months
If you’re a regular reader, you already know why my grandfather was so important to me, and you ought to know that he spent time in Casablanca working on planes as a mechanic during World War II. It’s just a little thing that gave me a strong sense of purpose in coming to this country, […]
The First Official Look at the so-called “Orchard House”
Anyone who reads the blog or knows me at all probably knows about the Olive Orchard house and how much I absolutely adore it. But I adore the community, too. The village leader brought me olive oil, fresh bread, and olives this morning as a kind of house-warming gift, and I couldn’t be more […]
Betwixt and Between, or the March House
So, here’s the skinny: as many of you knew, I was “evicted” from my house sometime in November because my landlord sold his house to someone else, but the landlord was giving me until February 1 to move out. I went on a huge house-hunt, found a house in an olive orchard that needed considerable work […]
Waves of Change
They say that Peace Corps Volunteers need one skill more than any other: the ability to adapt. Something tells me there’s a resounding “duh” on the other side of the computer screen with regard to that sentence. I mean, okay, we signed up for two years in a new culture with a new language, and I […]
A Full Picture, or the time a Moroccan tried to bomb the U.S. Capitol but was in no way representative of Morocco
One of the major goals of the Peace Corps, if not also one of the sole reasons for its existence, is simply to educate folks back home about the countries we live and work in during our two-year tenure. If I had ended up in Peace Corps Eastern Caribbean like I was supposed to, I […]
