Saturday, January 28, 2012

Simple Pleasures

The Peace Corps is preparing for new Peace Corps Trainees to arrive here in Morocco in March. As part of that preparation, Peace Corps is asking us to find out if families are interested in hosting PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) in their homes for several weeks, when the PCVs arrive in the towns where they will live for their two years of service. The Peace Corps then decides with which families PCVs will live when PCVs arrive in their final sites to start living there.

I went to one family's home in the last couple of weeks and asked them if they would be interested in hosting a PCV in their home. They said they would. When I then took out the information sheet so I could write down their basic information, they said to do that another time. Later I realized that that was their way of saying that they really weren't interested. Moroccans are often indirect. Rather than directly saying that they cannot do something, they'll respond indirectly to a request, such as by postponing the time for doing something.

Yesterday I went to the home of another family. They already hosted a PCV in a previous year. Also, I had previously asked them multiple times, and each time they had said that they would host another PCV, so I was a bit more confident that they would indeed host another PCV. After gathering their basic information, of course when I got up to go, they told me to stay for tea. So I sat back down. With the tea, they also served bread with olive oil. The olive oil was delicious! After the snack, I was enjoying simply sitting in the sun, looking at the blue sky, and noting the other brilliant color, the electric blue on their window frames. It was so serene and calming, to just sit there for a little while, and take it all in. I love simple pleasures!

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