Sunday, November 20, 2011

Thanksgiving in Morocco, Part One

Today here in my province, other PCVs and I got together to have an early Thanksgiving celebration. Given various other activities and commitments we all had coming up, we decided to celebrate Thanksgiving together the weekend before Thanksgiving. Most of us at our celebration were PCVs about halfway through our service as PCVs.

I was grateful that a few of the PCVs decided to cook dinner for all of us. Our host just asked us to contribute 50 dirhams each to help defray the cost of the ingredients which were used in cooking our delicious meal. Speaking of which, here is the menu of the delicious food we ate:

First Course (Appetizers):

pumpkin-apple soup
mixed salad with garlic herb vinaigrette

Second Course (Entrée):

turkey with bacon on top
squash cornbread stuffing
whole wheat lentil stuffing
sweet potato casserole
green beans seasoned with garlic and butter
twice baked potato casserole with bacon bits
cranberry sauce
freshly baked hard rolls

Third Course (Dessert!):

apple pie
pumpkin pie
banana bread
caramel apple cake

I didn't even think that I was eating that much, and after we had finished eating, my host (who knows that I love to eat) asked me if I had had enough. I thought about it for a moment, and replied that I was only slightly stuffed. I added that I was able to eat more, but then I would have been really stuffed. In retrospect, I suppose that it makes sense that even though I didn't think that I was eating that much, I still wound up being slightly stuffed. I was only eating the equivalent of one full plate, followed by a sampling of three of the four desserts (I didn't realize that there was any banana bread, or I would've tried that, too). But I rarely eat that much at once here in Morocco. So even though it was less than I usually ate on Thanksgiving Day in the US in past years, it was a greater quantity of food than I usually eat during any particular meal here in Morocco.

There was plenty of food! I certainly appreciated the delicious cooking. I thanked my friends for it. When I said grace before we chowed down in earnest, I thanked God for the delicious food. I also thanked God for the wonderful people who had prepared all of the food, and for the other wonderful people there with us. Immediately before our Thanksgiving celebration, I'd had a stretch of a few weeks where I didn't see any other PCVs (or any other expats at all), so it was nice to get to see them all.

That night, we settled down in beds and sleeping bags for our slumber. I was spending the night in a room that was maybe slightly smaller than 9 feet by 9 feet with 5 other PCVs. At one point, another PCV and I were reading as others were already dozing off. A few minutes after she finished reading and rolled over, I turned off the light and settled down for the night. By the dim light of a streetlamp filtering in through the small window high above us, I discerned the rough shapes of my fellow volunteers under landscapes of sleeping bags, sheets and blankets, as they unconsciously comforted me by reminding me of their presence through their sonorous respiration like bullfrogs croaking in a moonlit marsh, a pleasant chorus of reassurance which gradually lulled me to sleep.

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