Author: Brian Menard

A couple weekends ago we were on on our way to do our weekly grocery shopping when Audrey declared her desire to stop for lunch. Her suggestion for where she would like to eat shocked Brian, for it was an eatery we had not visited even once in our year-and-half of living in Morocco.

Audrey wanted to eat lunch at…KFC.

Driving downtown to Casablanca’s Maarif neighborhood, we cruised along with no place to park, yet without worry: Brian knows a parking guardian who takes particularly good care of him and our car. Arriving at his block-long side street territory packed with parked vehicles on both sides of the road, the parking guardian recognized our car instantly and waved to Brian as we stopped in the middle of the street; got out; shook hands and exchanged greetings in French (“C’est va?” “C’est va, merci. Et vouz?”) instead of in Darija (“Kif dayer?” “Hamdulillah. Unta?”) because he is sub-Saharan instead of Moroccan; handed him the keys; told him (again in French) that we would be gone for about 30 minutes; and walked away with no more than that to give us total confidence that we would find our car parked safely and well-watched when we returned.

We walked a couple blocks to the Maarif’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, one of many in Casablanca; ordered the spicy “piquante” chicken, cole slaw, and fries (alas, KFC has no mashed potatoes and gravy in Morocco); and sat down to eat. To no surprise, most of the branded signage inside was in French. Next to us, though, was a timeline of KFC milestones listed in English, including a bizarre milestone about Colonel Sanders’ death in 1980 placed eerily next to a photo of him waving goodbye from the window of a railroad car. The chicken tasted significantly better than we had expected, and as we ate we steeped in a little corner of America.

We find ourselves in such moments of American awareness from time to time. Sometimes, like our KFC lunch, they result from intentional action. Other times, though, they sneak up on us to wallop us from out of the blue. Case in point: on Friday evening Brian went to Orange – like Morocco’s Verizon – to pay Charlotte’s monthly mobile phone bill. Walking in, he said, “Bonsoir. Je dois payer la facture pour le téléphone de ma fille,” and presented her phone number to the woman sitting at the desk that is the only furniture in the small store. All was good until he told her that he also would like to add some hours to her credit and the woman responded with a barrage of French that immediately made his eyes roll backwards on his head. With his brain stuck in White Noise processing mode, the clerk smiled – not patronizingly, but encouragingly – and asked in a perfect American accent, “Do you speak English?” Brian almost cheered in his relief, but instead smiled back at her and joked with her in his own perfect American accent, “Well, if it would help you I suppose I could switch to English.” It was a good moment of American awareness, and she did not humiliate him.

American awareness strikes not only in Morocco. It creeps into time spent stateside as well. While Brian tends to GWA this week, Audrey is in the booming metropolis of Waterloo, Iowa, at the University of Northern Iowa’s Overseas Recruiting Fair, with over 120 schools from around the world recruiting teacher candidates who fly in from around the country for what actually is a premier event to hunt for our next great crop of faculty to join GWA in August. After a 27-hour day to fly from Casablanca to Paris to Atlanta to Cedar Rapids before a long bus ride to Waterloo, then sleeping for a few hours and going through a whole day in Iowa, Audrey rewarded herself with a steak dinner. It was great moment of American awareness, relishing American beef and its marbled goodness that we only dream about in Casablanca. (While Moroccan produce is tops, Moroccan meat tends to come from animals that look like they just finished a marathon – too much lean means not as much flavor and not so tender.) To share her moment of American awareness, as well as to taunt him with her American steak, she texted Brian a picture of her juicy ribeye slathered with onions and mushrooms. (In response, he texted her a picture of the French Bordeaux he was enjoying after picking it up for a fraction of what it would have cost in Waterloo, Iowa, if it were available at all. But we are not competitive with each other, really.)

The important realization we have had about these moments of American awareness is that they are part of being here. They are not bad; they are not good; they just are. When we first arrived we could not wait to start shopping at souks and hanouts. We spent every Saturday battling traffic on the road for hours as we hit four or five different places to find all we sought for the coming week. We did not merely accept this as Moroccan shopping; as newbies we prided ourselves on our exhausting shopping escapades because it meant we were surviving in our new life. After a while we settled into an easier routine of shopping in the CIL instead of criss-crossing Casablanca. We love buying produce from Zwil and his son Khalid at their souk, getting meat from our Berber butcher friends in their butcher shop, and stopping into the hardware hanout to see if they have anything we might want (because in Morocco, if you see something you might want sometime you should buy it when you see it…since it may be gone the next time you go back). But more recently, as swamped as we have been at school, we regularly have covered our weekend errands at the hoity-toity Carrefour Gourmet store in order to do one-stop shopping. While not a stereotypically Moroccan shopping excursion – no wonder that a large proportion of the Carrefour Gourmet customers are European and American expats – we go there when we opt for convenience over experience. And convenience is a very American priority.

Make no mistake, we still love living in Morocco and look forward to being here quite a while. Yet, after cutting our teeth on the Moroccan experience last year we do not feel any need to prove empirically and demonstratively that we are emphatic expats. We are just expats who are quite happy living where we live for all the Plus-Factor reasons that entails. As (admittedly still very new) veterans in our second year we no longer feel a need to rationalize or justify our presence in the Kingdom by pushing ourselves into something other than what works for us at any given moment. We think that is progress, ironically helping us feel a little less like foreigners and a little more like we are home.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

We have always enjoyed having our children’s friends hanging out in our home. Indeed, we long ago opted to know where our kids and their friends are and what they are doing by having them at our place, rather than not know because they are elsewhere. The happy consequence of this is that we get to know their friends, whom – more often than not – we have found to be delightful.

Over the years, this has meant everything from neighborhood kids feeling free to pop in any time and feeling comfortable enough to consider our house as their other home, with some even rising to take on “third child” status in our family, to hosting huge teenage events like a Halloween party for more than 60 kids, or a Chinese New Year party in which over a dozen international students at Audrey’s last school turned our kitchen into a Chinese restaurant that prepared a feast for dozens (and ex post facto took Brian only eight hours to disinfect completely after raw chicken and pork had been sliced and diced and left to sit on virtually ever kitchen surface). After 18 months in Morocco, we think we have achieved that status internationally as well as we had it domestically. We suppose it was just a matter of time: Morocco’s warm Culture of Marhaba (“Welcome!”) fits perfectly with our own inclination to welcome people into into our home. Those who may be strangers when they first arrive will be friends when they leave.

We are both sick. Bronchitis sick. Gobbling antibiotics sick. The kind of sick where the one thing we wanted last night was to make chicken soup and eat it with fresh a baguette from Amoud Boulangerie et Patisserie and fine French butter. (Living in Morocco DOES have its benefits!) It was a good plan…But it was not the only plan for our house last night. The other plan was not ours; but, being the parents we are meant being open to weaving it into our own plan for quiet chicken soup and good bread.

All week long, Charlotte and her posse of non-GWA Moroccan friends had plans to throw a surprise birthday party for their friend Zak. Zak is a good kid whom we have gotten to know as Charlotte has allowed us incrementally to know him. He is respectful, funny, silly, grounded, hard-working, and lives in the moment while beginning to shoulder a view toward what comes next in life. We like him very much, and Zak knows he is welcome in our house any time. Culture of Marhaba. Last weekend, Charlotte said she and her friends were looking for a spot for this weekend’s surprise party, and asked if our home could be an “if we have nowhere else to do it” location. Both of us being a long way from amoxicillin at that point, “Of course!” we said. Through the week, we experienced as second hand onlookers the great teenage drama of where the party might be, how to keep it a secret from Zak, whether to have it or not after Zak learned of the plan, etc.

On Friday, both of us having moved into “very sick” mode as the week progressed, we asked what the party plan was. Charlotte semi-chortled, semi-choked at the silliness of our query. Of course, asking about Moroccan teenage plans is a humorous act of willing self-deception, for most Moroccan teenagers do not make advance plans. Life is on the fly. And should some semblance of a plan actually take shape, it will change 17 times through the course of implementation. This is at once part of the “Joie de Vivre” charm of Moroccan life for westerners and a frequent irritation to westerners seeking something on which to ground broader plans more solidly than the ubiquitous “Inshallah!” provides. All Charlotte knew was that a big cake was coming to our house on Friday to hide in our small refrigerator until the party on Saturday, wherever it might happen to occur. “I don’t know where the party will be; we’re trying to have it in lots of places, but so far we haven’t found a place where we can do it,” she told us. We prepared our sick selves for teenage company on Saturday.

On Saturday afternoon, Brian left Audrey to her sick bed and went shopping solo for a scrawny one kilo (2 lbs) Moroccan chicken, an onion, carrots, [blink, blink] CELERY (see our last post for the wonder of that!), and a few baguettes hot out of the oven, then headed home to begin making soup. While Audrey put away the other groceries, Brian set to work boiling the chicken to make stock.

SIDE NOTE: As a teenager, Brian learned from his father how to make soup from stock, stripping every bit of meat from a chicken so as not to waste a morsel. Audrey has come to soup-making more recently in our 21 ½ years of married life. So it was more than slightly ironic, and a circumstance requiring saint-like patience, when Audrey spent virtually the entire soup-making time as the culinary equivalent of a backseat driver telling Brian how to make soup stock, the order in which to cut the vegetables, the shape in which to cut the vegetables, how to sauté the vegetables before adding them to the stock, even how to strip the meat, then complimenting him on what a fine meat-stripping job he did. Audrey is not easy to have sick.

Meanwhile, with Brian cooking and Audrey lecturing in the kitchen, Charlotte took Zak – who had met up with her at our apartment – into town as a diversion while other conspirators had responsibilities to fulfill in preparation for the party. Audrey called the guards at the school gate to let them know we had a bunch of young visitors heading our way. Before long we had a knock at the door, and Brian opened it to find a quartet of bearded and mustachioed Moroccan young men smiling in the entryway. “Marhaba!” he greeted them, and they came inside. Charlotte called almost immediately to say there was a bag of decorating supplies in her closet. Audrey fetched it, also gave them the bags of décor that we brought home from a New Year’s Eve party last weekend, and the setup team of Amine and Amine (running around like the Cat in the Hat’s “Thing 1” and “Thing 2”), Mokhtar, and Ibrahim went straight to work blowing up balloons and taping them to the wall. Every couple minutes we would hear a loud POP and a mess of giggles and know that another balloon had gone to Balloon Heaven. They had a plan to spell out Zak’s name in balloons on the wall, but that plan changed 17 times before they finished decorating. One big question: What to do with the cake, a chocolate whipped cream affair on a ¼ inch thin chocolate cake base? Should it stay cold in the fridge? Should it come out and start to warm? Audrey suggested brilliantly to Amine-that-is-Thing-1 (Amine-that-is-Thing-2 is nicknamed “Gucci Gang” – no explanation is forthcoming) that they could put the cake outside on our balcony table – warmer than the fridge, but not too warm, and hidden from Zak at whatever point he would return. The boys loved the idea, and the cake went outside.

While they were decorating, more people started to arrive. Soon, the place looked rather festive and full of a dozen Moroccan youth, most of whom Audrey had seen before. While Brian did not know any of them, he played the role of dithering Welcoming Father as each entered and he greeted them with a redundant “Marhaba!” from his soup station by the stove. Initially, Brian would resist their respectful bizous on each cheek by holding up a hand and saying, “Je suis malade” (grammatically bad French for “I am sick,” really with a worse meaning). Audrey, on the other hand, was bizou-ing up a storm with each new entry. After a while, Brian just started the bizous as well as the kids came to him to pay their respects.

Finally Charlotte called to say that they were on their way back and almost home. The crowd bantered about where they should hide and asked to turn out all the lights, including in the kitchen where Brian continued making soup. Brian complied with all but one counter light going off, wondering all the while why they were hiding when Zack knew he was having a surprise party. Soon, Zak and Charlotte entered the front door. There was not much surprise, because the entire group had at the last minute lurched en masses into the front hall to greet them when they entered. They sang Happy Birthday to him in English, then group-shuffled back into the main room, and the festivities finally were alive.

Alive, though, is an ironic description of what followed. While Audrey and Brian continued souping in the kitchen, the kids group-shuffled into the living room and group-flounced onto every piece of furniture available. This is what Moroccan teens do. French and Arabic rap pulsed from Charlotte’s speaker and lubricated the conversations. And that was a party. Audrey looked at Brian and said, “You know, this is what they do wherever they hang out…” Brian gave a knowing nod. Then the kids decided it was time to sing Happy Birthday. Charlotte went out to get the cake, then came back in cackling with laughter: “IT’S RAINING ON THE CAKE!!!” Perhaps it was not such a brilliant idea after all to put the cake on the balcony. Amine-that-is-Thing-1 disappeared outside, then came inside to place a soggy box on the kitchen island. Everyone held a collective breath while he opened the box lid, then a collective sigh emerged as everyone saw the cake was unharmed by the rain. He pulled the floppy cardboard base out of the box and carried the wobbly cake carefully to the dining room table. There, they decorated it with candles and a couple big shower sparklers, then gathered around with everybody’s phones glowing as brightly as the flaming sparklers while they sang Happy Birthday in French.

Shortly afterward, not long after 8pm, the soup was finished and we escaped to our bedroom with a couple bowls and half a baguette. As we receded, one of the kids bid “Goodnight!” to the old couple that seemed to be retiring for the evening, but instead was going to watch “Man of Steel” on Netflix. Despite having received good wishes for our old-people-sleep, we emerged a few times through the continued evening, and noticed the numbers dwindling as the night progressed.

Eventually, being old people, we slept. Then we woke this morning and found two bodies – unidentifiable under blankets and pillows, but later revealed as Zak and Nezar – sleeping soundly on our living room couches, and two more – Amine-that-is-Thing-1 and Ibrahim – in our guest room. Charlotte was awake and talking with Amine and Ibrahim. We laughed heartily when we discovered subsequently that all four guests were wearing pajama bottoms belonging either to Charlotte or to Audrey. Mess was everywhere. At some point in the night they had made full use of the New Year’s Eve contraband we had supplied, so there were confetti and ribbons and other bits of mess across every inch of floor from the front door across the apartment. We smiled, and thought how nice it was that we would not be cleaning this. Going into the kitchen, we discovered that also during the night a swarm of teenage locusts had eaten our cupboards bare. That was okay as well, for we are happy to make sure they are fed. After a while, we heard the vacuum running and laughter among the kids. “God, I love that sound,” said Brian to Audrey, not specifying the vacuum or the kids…and meaning a bit of both. As parents, we feel quite blessed that Charlotte is fully comfortable in her Casablanca world. She was not merely the only expat kid in the group; she was the only GWA kid in the group, with everyone else having no connection to GWA Island other than Charlotte herself. Most spoke at least some English, and did so readily with us – taking pity on the old parents still building their multilingual skills. Conversation with each other (including Charlotte), though, was in French and Darija, not in English. Yet we feel confident the kids felt welcome, and hope they felt at home in our corner of this big small world. After cleaning up, Charlotte made them Cajun Alfredo pasta, with Tony’s from Louisiana and animal-shaped pasta from the local Marjane grocery store. Then Charlotte introduced them to Yahtzee, and all was good with the world.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

“We have lived in Casablanca for a year and a half, and this is the first time that we have seen real celery,” Audrey marveled while looking at the four huge bunches sticking out of the Carrefour bag, our prize of the day. With stalks nearly two feet long, this was celery like we had dreamed of for 17 months. Yes, we dreamed of celery.

It took us a while to realize that Morocco has no celery. It has celeriac, or celery root, but that is not the same. For months we thought the spindly little celeriac stalks were Moroccan celery. Tastes about right, but five or six anemic little stalks does not cut it when you need CELERY in a recipe. If the dish you are making calls for the Holy Trinity of culinary endeavors – celery, peppers, and onions – wimpy celeriac does not cut it. Morocco has cardoons, a thistle-like cousin of the artichoke that Youssef the vendor in the CIL told us was celery. We believed him at first. Then when Brian bought some to use in his gumbo last winter, along with the okra featured in a previous post, it disintegrated into the gumbo…worked fine to help thicken it, but the Trinity again was not balanced in equal thirds. Over time, we just came to accept that we could not cook with celery in our new home. No crunching celery and peanut butter either. Nada.

Fast forward to shopping on Friday. We had a day off from school in celebration of Eid al Mawlid, the Birthday of the Prophet Mohamed. In anticipation of Audrey hosting a “Freezer Party” on Saturday – several people from the on-campus apartments coming by for a many-hands-make-light-work cooking session to create multiple meals en masse so everyone could take home several ready-made meals to put in their freezers and pop out on convenient future dates – we had to pick up all the ingredients so Audrey could prep them. Because it was Eid al Mawlid, the souks where we usually shop were closed and we had to go to Carrefour Gourmet between the Anfa and Bourgogne neighborhoods of Casablanca. Whereas other Carrefours here are like Walmart without the Walmart people, Carrefour Gourmet is like Moroccan Whole Foods. In addition to local produce sourcing, there is also a variety of imported produce that allows for some out-of-season purchasing. Moroccan limes tend to be very tough-skinned and not terribly juicy, so if we need to juice limes we get the imported limes. Local spinach is sold in bunches of large spinach leaves bundled together; but if we want to splurge on a salad with baby spinach, we can often find clear plastic containers of it at Carrefour Gourmet.

Never, though, have we seen what we saw on Friday. As we filled paper bags with carrots, broccoli, onions, clementines so fresh the leaves pulled with them from the trees are still lush and green, and more produce that we then take to the Scale Lady to weigh the bags and slap on stickers with the price of each bag, Brian saw something remarkable: on the produce displays between crates of lettuce and herbs and cabbages were long bunches of celery…REAL celery! Thinking back on the moment, Brian said, “My heart leapt when I saw it!” Pointing out the discovery to Audrey, as soon as she realized what was there she got serious and said simply, “BUY IT ALL!” We did not buy it all. There were eight bunches spread around the display, and we bought only four. We were giddy.

Casablanca has proved a wonderful post for our first overseas gig, for it provides a good balance between exposure to things very different and access to things familiar. We enjoy the many wonderful things to which we have been introduced in Morocco. Yet, we admit freely that part of being so happy here is having access to the little things that bring comfort and familiarity to daily life. Food is memory for people, and our time here has redefined the concept of comfort food for us as we hold past memories and make new ones. We can buy Heinz ketchup at O’Self and Carrefour and sometimes Marjane stores. We can buy bacon and Smithfield ham for us and Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Pop Tarts for Charlotte at the Commissary in Rabat. We would survive just fine without access to these things…but splurging now and then to enjoy a decadent taste of stateside life brings comfort.

So we loaded our four bunches of celery, with 22-inch stalks (yes, Brian measured them once we got home), into our shopping cart with our other supplies. Like allegedly-Sudanese okra, we were ready to pay any price for the find. The Scale Lady weighed our celery and slapped a sticker on the bag saying our treasure cost a mere 60 Dirhams (about $6.00 USD). We were more giddy.

We took our celery package – about the size and weight of a lanky newborn baby – home to put it in the freezer for future use in Brian’s upcoming Mardi Gras gumbo, various soups, and any other dish that may call for celery as an ingredient. With all the Freezer Party supplies taking up fridge and freezer space, though, we had to store the bag outside on our balcony table overnight. On Saturday, when the Freezer Party neighbors arrived, Audrey showed them our find from Carrefour Gourmet and they declared with laughter their massive Celery Envy over our supply. We are not alone in wishing that Morocco had celery. Today we washed and diced the celery, bagged up about 1 ½ gallons of celery for our upcoming culinary endeavors, stuck it in the freezer, and still kept about half a bunch in stalks for consumption, slathered with peanut butter, over the next few days.

We do not know when we next will see celery here. One rule of thumb for shopping in Morocco is: if you see something you might want, buy it now because it may not be available when you want it later. Who knew finding celery in a grocery store could make us giddy? But it did, and we bought all that we could store because it probably will be gone next week. It is a little thing, but a little thing that will give us much happiness as we continue to make new memories in our Moroccan home.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

Sweater weather has come to Casablanca, and with it has come a load of firewood to heat our apartment this winter. Hicham, as GWA’s industrious Housing Coordinator, coordinated the delivery of two truckloads of firewood to the apartments for residents that ordered it. (Of course, all our residents ordered it because – with no other heat source in our on-campus apartments – that is what will keep us warm during winter.) Brian, having paid Hicham a few days earlier for a full metric ton (1000 kilos/1.1 U.S. tons/2205 U.S. pounds) of beautiful olive wood, stood two nights ago on the roof of our building with Hicham to direct a pair of sinewy guys to where they could stack 25 large blue plastic bags each stuffed with 40 kilos of cut wood.

Last year we bought two tons, but burned only half of the well-dried wood; hence this year’s smaller purchase that adds to the leftover supply enough extra to ensure we can heat our apartment, even if this year’s winter proves longer and colder than last year. Watching the younger men hump the load on their backs a dozen times each (plus one) from the pile in front of our building up 54 stairs and onto the roof to drop it next to our year-old supply, Brian jokingly told Hicham with faux bravado, “I could carry an 80-pound bag up here, and I could probably carry 25 of them up here before my legs gave out, but the wood digging into my back would kill me.” Hicham, avoiding cynicism in his response to his 50-year-old expat companion, said simply and kindly, “Yes, that wood is very hard to carry on your back.”

It is good that the wood has come, because the drop in temperatures just these last couple weeks has brought the evening smell of fireplaces waking up for the season. Last week on a suddenly-chilly night, with our new wood shipment not yet arrived, a friend from one floor below us knocked on our door asking if he could buy a bag of our leftover wood in order to satisfy his wife’s pleading for a fire. We love being part of a community where someone feels comfortable getting wood from us to start a fire, and people generally are happy to share what others may need. A few days ago Charlotte discovered mid-baking that our pantry was short of vegetable oil, so she brought a measuring cup down to our friend Megan on the first floor to borrow some. We laughed later as Megan hung out with us in our apartment and told us how she had filled the measuring cup, not thinking just to give Charlotte the bottle of oil, and then watched Charlotte climb the stairs carefully to the third floor trying not to spill precious oil along the way. Another time, Charlotte borrowed a sweater from our Kindergarten teaching next-door-neighbor to cover the spaghetti straps of a dress that she wanted to wear to a formal function. We share things with people; they share things with us. Folks here are deeply generous with their time and their stuff. Case in point, on Friday, Brian went out with the Admissions & Marketing Office to a staff appreciation lunch at a nice restaurant by the Corniche area of Casablanca that juts out into the Atlantic. Each course, from appetizers to entrees to dessert, began with plates moving around the table so that everyone could have a bit of what everyone else ordered. Polonius’ caution to his son Laertes in Hamlet, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” may fit Denmark; but he clearly never spent time in Morocco, where the prevailing culture is such that if you tell someone whom you barely know how much you like his [fill in the blank], he is likely to ask if he can give it to you.

Living abroad as expats on campus at the American school where we work, we exist at once as members of multiple conceptions of “community” that intertwine. We feel fortunate to have landed on our first foray into international school life abroad in circumstances that fit us well amid this mix of community conceptions. That said, they sometimes complement each other, sometimes conflict, and sometimes just require a healthy dose of Dissociative Identity Disorder to navigate.

One conception of community that we live is as Expats, which manifests in three different ways. First, as American expats, we find community with other Americans we encounter here. However misplaced our American likes and peculiarities may seem in Morocco, we find comfort in enjoying them with others who understand our preference for Heinz ketchup over Moroccan ketchup; who feel a bit of national pride standing in the historic Map Room (where FDR, Churchill, and DeGaul planned the 1943 invasion of Sicily) when attending an event at Villa Mirador, residence of the U.S. Consul General; and who get excited not about Star Wars: The Last Jedi opening worldwide on December 13, but about being able to see it the next day in English instead of with Arabic dubbing at the Morocco Mall’s weekly Thursday English movie day.

Second, we have found friends from around the world in the general expat community, many through the group InterNations that we joined when we arrived in Morocco 16 months ago. One of our favorite evenings in this vein was a Moroccan Movie Night last year that a Moroccan friend set up, with 14 people from eight countries gathered in an Egyptian’s flat to watch a Moroccan film and then discuss it with the Moroccan producer/director who was the guest of honor for the night. Like the American expat community, this general expat community keeps changing as people move to or from Morocco; but, even as people depart, our list of people we can visit while traveling around Europe and elsewhere grows.

An interesting third manifestation of this expat conception of community is as legal residents of Morocco. When our original one-year credentials expired this Fall, we applied to renew our cartes de séjour for the maximum 10-year term. While we do not stop being Americans, we do find ourselves sympathetic to things Moroccan. We love shopping in souks and hanouts. We nod our heads knowingly when someone talks about getting stuck in traffic waiting for a donkey or cow or herd of sheep to get out of the way. We salivate when we hear that another staff member at GWA will host a lunch of rfissa [see our Rfissa post from last year] in the Board Room for all to share in celebration of a new baby in the family. And today we celebrate the Moroccan national team’s 2-0 victory last night over Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) that sends them to Russia for their first World Cup play in two decades. (Happily, Morocco gives us cause to keep cheering after Team USA embarrassingly bombed out of World Cup competition for the first time since 1986 last month.)

School defines the next conception of community in which we exist, and this again manifests in different ways. From an external view, the sense of a School Community unites us with all GWA stakeholder groups as we cast our school in the broader Casablanca, Moroccan, and international school environments. We cheer for our boys and girls soccer teams that this weekend each one championships in the nation-wide MASAC (Maroc-American Schools Athletic Conference) Tournament, and for our Speech & Debate team that travels to Fez next weekend for a national competition. We represent GWA when we participate in events in Casablanca and Morocco, or in venues such as the Mediterranean Association of Independent Schools (MAIS) annual conference to which Brian led a delegation of GWA faculty last week. The bifurcated conception of School Community, though, also includes an inward view that includes several elements different from – and sometimes at odds with – each other, such as academic vs. operations, or expat staff vs. Moroccan staff. As administrators working with a team to steer the school toward GWA’s vision, the “healthy dose of Dissociative Identity Disorder” mentioned above most comes in handy here.

Narrowing from the general Expat Community and then the less broad School Community conceptions, the final conception of community into which we fit is our Neighborhood Community. Just like our Moroccan staff, all our expat staff live in neighborhoods of one sort or another, regardless of where in Casablanca they reside. In preparation for the arrival of this year’s crop of new expat faculty this summer, “Housing Hicham” consolidated the location of many off-campus apartments GWA facilitates for staff to rent into a neighborhood off the CIL so our folks would not be as spread out across the city and can have an easier time getting together. Another sizable group of our expats live 15 minutes south of GWA in the oceanside suburb Dar Bouazza, where they carpool, socialize, surf, and otherwise interact in neighborly ways.

Meanwhile, those of us living on campus have a thriving neighborhood community. We have couples, families, and singles living alone or with roommates. We have people from the U.S., Canada, South Africa, England, Mexico, and more. We have faculty, staff, and administrators. We have people new to GWA and who have been here for years. One common quality amid this diversity is a strong intention NOT to live on “GWA Island.” We love the school, but if we spent all our time on campus the wall marking its perimeter would quickly squeeze us into claustrophobia. That said, having our neighborhood community makes life here quite supportive and sustaining.

Some families, like ours, have older children with lives and friends that may take them off GWA Island. Other families have younger children whose daily reality is the area around the apartment buildings and for whom a trip down the hill to the playground equipment by our track and field is a major expedition. (Remember from previous posts that we have a mere 300-step commute to our offices.) In both cases, with exceptions, both parents typically work for GWA because single-income families generally have a harder time on the international school circuit. We have younger singles seeking friends for a social life while also becoming quasi-members of families that give a home feel, support, and an occasional family-style meal. We have middle aged and professionally mature international school professionals seeking professional and social camaraderie on their latest overseas gigs. Both types provide us with company, conversation, and support in ways akin to an extended family when they drop by to visit or for a meal.

Living on the top floor of our building, one of the best parts of this neighborhood is being able to look down from our windows or our balcony at the younger kids below deep into their very important work of being kids. In the grassy space behind the apartment buildings we watch and hear sword battles between chivalrous knights or Force-wielding Jedi (depending on the weapon of choice on any particular day). In the rough area across a fence from the grass there are great expeditions to find sticks or hunt for large game. On the other side of the buildings lies a race track, disguised as a parking lot, where bikes and scooters and roller blades roll down the drag strip. On one Disney “Frozen” bike with basket on the front, forward movement apparently comes exclusively from propulsion supplied somehow by the constant ringing of the bell on its handlebars. Propulsion for a toddler’s scooter comes Fred Flintstone style as he zooms fearlessly at Mach speeds, even zooming into unsuspecting adults standing around that he presumes will get out of his way. Helmeted kids with pads on their elbows and knees and wheels on their feet play roller tag and jump like daredevils from curb to street while one mom cruises calmly back and forth on her own roller blades like a roller rink referee missing only a b/w striped jersey and a whistle. The coordination of kids’ vehicles all happening at once sometimes rivals that of a Shriners Drill Team in their mini-cars in a Memorial Day parade. Whether pulling out of a parking space to head off campus or driving home up the hill after an outing, cars need to move slowly and be on high alert to avoid kids and their modes of local transportation left strewn anywhere and everywhere on the sidewalk, on the stairs, and in the parking lot.

Our block parties stand as a perfect example of our neighborhood at its best. Sometimes they arise from careful planning; sometimes they just happen spontaneously following a long week of teaching. The most recent one occurred two weeks ago on Halloween. A week before, our friend Emily sent around an invitation to participate in Trick-or-Treating in the apartments. No pressure, just leave your front door open if you want to participate or closed if you do not. Almost everyone really got into it, with several adults wearing costumes and playing spooky music for the kids who came around. For an entertaining half hour, we were treated to a dozen kids from toddlers through Fifth Grade parading through as superheroes, a bee, shepherds, and the requisite princess and noble knights. Afterwards, everyone gathered outside for a Halloween Evening “BYOBowl-and-spoon” Soup Potluck block party with Groaning Tables cluttered by eight pots of soup, bread, salads, desserts, and drinks. As a school night, it was all planned to end by 7:00 pm; however, it carried on almost to 9:00 pm because everyone was enjoying the evening and the company.

When we began making plans for life in Morocco almost two years ago, we decided we would live on campus for our first year so that we had time to explore and decide where we wanted to live after Year One. As we went through last year, we realized how much we valued being part of the community on campus and decided to stay. (We also really like our 180° view of the Atlantic one mile straight out from our balcony.) Our friends who live off campus value their neighborhoods as well. Any particular place can work well for some people while another place works best for others. As we sit by the dwindling fire tonight, having just spent another evening catching up with Megan when she came upstairs to drop by, we appreciate greatly living where we do with friends around us here on campus, around Casablanca, around Morocco, and around the world. It is good to be so blessed.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

We are back! 

After a three-month hiatus, we finally have snatched a moment to log a post on our blog. We have missed sharing our experiences with readers, and wonder how many readers may remain from the numbers that were growing as we entered summer. So much has happened since our trip through Spain in July en route to a month of intensive French study in an immersion program.

Since then, we have prewritten so many posts about our time in France; about the wonderful family with whom we stayed in Sainte-Eulalie-d’Eymet, outside the village of Eymet in Dordogne; about our return to Morocco through Spain; about arriving home in Casablanca and at George Washington Academy to start the new year, our second year as expats, and our first year leading the administrative team with Audrey as the new Head of School and Brian continuing as the Director of Curriculum and Program Development with expanded responsibilities developing further institutional advancement programs; about welcoming this year’s crop of faculty newbies and going through newbie and all-staff orientation as we celebrate GWA’s 20th Anniversary; about the tightrope walk of parenting from afar with stateside college daughter Margaret, of whom we are so proud and who no longer needs us but still needs us; about new things we experienced or things we experienced differently from our newbie time last year, and how last year we lumped “veterans” into a single experienced and all-knowing category distinct from us as newbies, while this year’s newbies look at us one-year vets as if we have all the answers as we say, “But we have been here only one year, and still have so much to learn!” so that our confidence level living as expats in Morocco is better than that of newbies by only a year; about how much easier we have found expat life because Morocco has become Home for our 11th Grade daughter Charlotte; about the challenges and successes we found early in this new school year; and about being busy.

Very busy. 

So busy that we have not had time to type any of those mentally prewritten posts into our blog.

Audrey, settling in as GWA’s new Head of School, describes our startup three months as not having enough time, trying to find alignment, and running around in circles, all while setting the course for the next phase of GWA growth in pursuit of the school’s vision. To be fair, it has been a spectacular start, just one that has stretched many of us to the brink of our individual and institutional capacity. For those familiar with the change cycle of School reform, a niche for both of us in our education careers, it carries all the excitement and all the challenge of Year One. It stretches us as far as we cans stretch, and we could not be more happy while feeling total exhaustion from all we are doing. When meetings run back-to-back from 8:00 am through 4:30 pm, we cannot start addressing new emails of the day until the day has largely expired. Shwea Shwea – little by little – gets us where we want to be over time…Inshallah.

One recurring theme, carried over from last year and magnified in our new circumstances, is that of TEAM. The administrative team that last year’s HOS hired gelled well in our first year together. This year, the relationships we established with each other have blossomed and the ties have deepened. We love the spirit of constructive collaboration that envelopes us as we take on challenges and seize opportunities. That makes all the difference between feeling invigorated by what we have taken on, and just feeling spent. All of us have run a flat-out 1000 mph, needing to talk and share daily with each other, and dedicating ourselves to taking care of each other as a team as we proceed through our gauntlet of activity. Frankly, it is not only refreshing, but unprecedented in both our professional experiences in what we experience daily. Yet, beyond both of us taking on significantly more responsibilities, the one big change from last year is that Audrey’s move back into a HOS role means she has lost much of her daily contact with students that she enjoyed greatly as the Upper School Principal last year.

Still, we enjoy great satisfactions:  the ability to steer where we think the school should go; a deepened appreciation for Team as we all take on greater responsibility; bringing in new faculty and staff people who quickly have become great partners devoted to furthing GWA’s vision; and support from the Board in where we want to lead.

Working together for over a year now, we have done quite well at balancing our personal and professional relationships at home and on campus. With higher transience than stateside schools and mini-culture settings that blend school and home-life contexts in ways that would not work at schools in the U.S., international schools value highly the sort of husband-wife teams that would often give pause to stateside recruiters. We love being able to have lunch together, work together with the leadership team, and strategize over what next steps to take in pursuit of GWA’s vision statement. Our good friend Kevin, the Lower School Principal who joined GWA’s leadership team along with us last year, often comments positively on his amazement at how well we work together. That said, it can get overwhelming. Coming home after a long day, we SHOULD talk about anything except school; yet, typically, school talk inhabits much of our evenings because that is what we do.

Tonight we made a pact: no shop talk all evening, even if we were doing work without talking about it. It has been very difficult for both of us to stick to it. Hundreds of emails waiting in the inbox. People relying on feedback or assistance to shape their professional development requests to meet tomorrow’s submission deadline. Musts-Do things to check off before we leave for Portugal early on Saturday morning. Yet, we did pretty well. No shop talk…or, at least not much.

Meanwhile, we are trying to prepare ourselves mentally for our upcoming Fall Break holiday in Portugal. One of the great benefits of expat living in the international school solar system is the ability to travel easily and frequently, and so that is what we will do during GWA’s Fall Break. Audrey asked Brian tonight, “Do you look forward to going away for a few days?” Brian responded, “Sadly, more than going away, I just look forward to catching up on emails without hundreds more coming in each day.” But that will morph into appreciation for the holiday trip once we get underway.

And so we prepare to depart on a flight to Porto before sunrise on Saturday morning to launch several days on the western Iberian Peninsula in Portugal. In addition to Charlotte, we have two of her friends traveling with us. We have found that, as much as we love our nearly-17 year old daughter and she loves us, travel is better when she has at least one friend with her to distract from the fact the she is traveling with her boring, meat-eating parents. Renting an apartment in Porto, we will explore Porto’s history and culture and Portuguese wine (and, of course, Portuguese port!) and make a day-trip to Santiago Compostela in Spain so that Brian can scope out the terminus of El Camino, the Way of St. James, which he plans to hike with a stateside hiking buddy in a few years. It will be very good to get out for a few days. In all likelihood, it will take most of the days away to decompress enough that we stop thinking of work all the time despite being in another country across the Mediterranean from Morocco.

We look forward to returning home and returning to our offices and the GWA campus refreshed and ready for the sprint through December. One thing we know as we prepare to depart, and that we will underscore when we return with personal fuel tanks refilled, is that we love being where we are and doing what we are doing. A year ago Brian said to other leadership team members that we would all look at this period together as a golden time in our careers. One year in, we still feel that way, only more strongly.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

Writing from Barcelona for an overdue blog post. Day three of a journey from Casablanca to Dordogne, France, where all three of us will spend a month studying intensive French in an immersion program. GWA’s Board wanted Audrey to do it as preparation for her new position as GWA’s Head of School, so it just made sense that Brian and Charlotte would join the endeavor instead of bidding Audrey “adieu” (voila, that’s French!…get it?) for the month during which we had planned previously to vacation together. The final days of our first year in Casablanca came as a torrent of activity while we tried to close out the school year; get our apartment ready for “We are staying put” renovations; and start transitions of people and processes to prepare for the new year to commence upon our return home in August. Amid all this bustle, we read a poignant and worth-reading post about the end-of-year transitions that hit every international school (http://www.thecultureblend.com/the-transition-that-never-ends-the-ongoing-cycle-of-expat-stayers-goers-and-newbies/) and leave everyone – regardless of whether they will stay on or leave for new adventures – in a state of transition. In our case, with everyone leaving either for summer or for good, the sounds and visions of life on campus changed rapidly: Instead of bells marking the beginning and ending of periods through the school day, we heard faculty kids splashing in a pool set up on the lawn in back of our apartment building. Instead of people heading up and down the hill between apartment and school buildings, people moved furniture and other belongings between faculty housing buildings as the annual summer apartment trade began. Picture a multi-building, 3-D version of a nine-square puzzle that moves everything possible into the first empty space available in order to clean and paint the lucky first apartment in the first of many sequential moves of furniture and painting.

We chose to keep our third floor apartment – nowhere could we find a better view than the 180° Atlantic Ocean vista from our balcony – yet, our own chain reaction began in earnest two weekends ago when Audrey, as the incoming Head of School, hosted a Thank You dinner in honor of departing Head David Welling and his wonderful wife, Marian, attended by the leadership team David had constructed and close friends he made over his six years at the helm of GWA. A favorite restaurant of ours, Chez Marie Jean, stands 15 minutes south of us in the town (now, really, the Casablanca suburb) of Dar Bouazza. We had gone there a couple weeks before to plan the Wellings’ goodbye party over a date night dinner. The staff – parent owners (dad from Morocco and mom from Belgium), son chef (who grew up in Belgium and came of age in his family’s restaurant there before his formal culinary training), and staff (a trio of lively and welcoming men from Senegal) helped craft what we were sure would be an evening to remember. 

One essential question at the start: Set up inside, or outside on the large wood deck patio with space to eat and dance to 70s/80s music? The easy answer: Outside…because when does it ever rain in Casablanca in June? From there, Chef Sami created a fabulous menu plan with choices of roasted duck with fig sauce or broiled fish with anise sauce, and Sami’s mom made suggestions for wine choices to complement everything well. They even would find a DJ for David’s choice of 70s/80s music. On the designated evening, after students had finished their last exams, our group of two dozen gathered at Chez Marie Jean. The night was beautiful, and the patio looked great. We looked forward to a spectacular evening of great food, great music, and great people.

Then, after a congratulatory toast to David and Marian and testimonials of thanks to them shared by the group, we heard rumbles in the sky as we waited for the first course to come out. Quickly, the rumbles grew in volume and frequency, and then the rumbles turned to rain. Real rain. No-fooling-around rain. Thunder-and-lightning-while-we-are-outside-on-a-wood-deck-around-lights-and-DJ-equipment rain. When does it ever rain in Casablanca in June? Apparently, when we have a big outdoor evening planned to wish our friends well. No worries, though. We headed under cover while the DJ covered his equipment and the magnificent staff set up tables inside for us to begin feasting on a spectacular salad of warm goat cheese pocketed in phyllo towers served over lettuce, garlic, and apples with a balsamic drizzle. While we ate, the rain stopped and we migrated back outside for the rest of our meal and dancing.

David told us when we first arrived in Morocco last July that he hoped we would organize a progressive party that went from the rooftop of one GWA apartment building to the second and to the third. Though it took us a year to do it, we finally gave him his progressive party…albeit in a different form. Beyond the spectacular food, almost everyone at our tables danced like crazy. The Senegalese staff danced with us. The owners danced with us. Other guests at the restaurant danced with us. People peeled off and headed home as the need to relieve babysitters mandated their departures. While not quite according to plan, everyone indeed had an evening to remember. The unexpected storm served as a metaphor for our year, coming seemingly from nowhere to disrupt the thorough plans we had made, but in the end washing things clean to start what comes next.

By the end of the night, all that remained with David and Marian were the top administrator team that will lead GWA going forward and the spouses that will travel that path with them. And we all kept dancing. Perhaps symbolically, if unintentionally, even after the Welling’s called it a night, the new leadership team kept dancing until we closed down Chez Marie Jean at 1:00 am. It was great new-team bonding fitted into our goodbye to David and Marian, and we said only half-jokingly that we should have leadership team dance parties next year.

Last weekend, on the eve of their last full day in Morocco, we enjoyed one final gathering with David and Marian for an evening of cards in our apartment. The campus and faculty apartments were quiet, with most everyone else having left; but, we were glad to have one more night with them in the style we all liked best. Then they headed off to begin their new adventure back in the U.S.

At GWA there have been three epochs since it began 20 years ago: the Founding Era that stretched through its first decade and saw it move from a temporary base in downtown Casablanca to its home campus on the south side of town; a turbulent time lasting a couple years; and the Welling Era that stabilized the school and brought it to today’s position, perched to pursue great things. We had no idea 18 months ago, when we signed contracts with this enticing school in Morocco as our first international school experience, that so quickly we would command such an endeavor – let alone do so at a school we have come to love deeply in a new home we have adopted as much as it has adopted us. Yet, here we are, ready to lead into a new era. The handoff of leadership of this magnificent school has happened, and one amazing year of learning, growth, and transition comes to an end as a new one beckons with more learning, more growth, and more transition visible ahead but not quite in reach yet.

Tomorrow we arrive in France.

Our expedition continues.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

Tonight George Washington Academy holds it annual Commencement ceremony. In addition to marking the graduation of our senior class, we feel like it marks a graduation for us as well. The GWA Class of 2017, having achieved great things and accumulated much knowledge and experience during their time here, will go on to colleges and universities from Morocco to the Middle East to Europe to Asia to America. In our own way, in our first year at GWA and – more broadly – living in Casablanca, we have achieved great things and accumulated much knowledge and experience that commences a transition in our perspective on our lives and professions here. Despite our stateside status as seasoned educators and school administrators, as international school folks we entered as apprentices and – learning the craft quickly by necessity – came of age through this year as journeymen. Now, looking ahead to Year Two in August with great anticipation, our training has readied us to move past this journeyman status to lead. 

GWA’s graduation preparations this week have reinforced two things we have learned and relearned through our years at previous schools.

First, no matter where we are, graduation is graduation. As with all our previous schools, running seniors through commencement rehearsals makes herding cats a dream job by comparison. Phones away please. The band practices playing Pomp & Circumstance. Learning how to process spaced evenly, how to walk to a point and cut corners instead of veering sloppily toward stairs or chairs, and how to shake with the right hand while grabbing a diploma with the left are ubiquitous challenges. Phones away please. Sound check. Nod to the obvious: make sure you wear something under your graduation gown because you are on stage with people looking up at you. Phones away please. Let’s practice standing and sitting together one more time so each row does it together! (For those schools with outdoor ceremonies…) Pray the rain stays away while making contingency plans in case it does not. Phones away please. Emotions run high as graduates start to realize their hour is approaching, time with friends around them ticks down toward goodbyes, and then life will change forever…Not better or worse; just different, with angst over departed friends and unfamiliar futures jumbled with excitement looking ahead to new friends and new beginnings. Remember to SMILE when you process and when you freeze-frame shaking Dr. Menard’s hand so the photographer snaps a good pic for your parents. Phones away please.

Second, one ironic truth at every school is that graduation also is different at every school. GWA is a rarity in Morocco for holding commencement ceremonies (a very American tradition), so it is a big event for which tickets are highly prized in the greater Casablanca community. We have dignitaries and luminaries attending. So it becomes not merely a campus undertaking but a cultural statement and cultural education endeavor for our local community. As such, it is also a high fashion event. Upon the recommendation of Moroccan friends and school staff, because this year’s graduation falls during Ramadan, Audrey had a traditional Moroccan kaftan made for the occasion, acknowledging implicitly our simultaneous pride both in being an American School and being in Morocco.

And then there is Ramadan. The Muslim holy month of fasting having started last week, most of our graduates, their families, and guests cannot eat or drink anything from sunrise to sunset. Because Ramadan tracks on the lunar calendar, it shifts about ten days earlier each year, so this is the first year in a long time that graduation falls within Ramadan and no protocol existed at the school for how to make adjustments. Considering that most people attending will fast – and also that many people will not go to sleep until 4:00, 5:00, even 6:00 in the morning after breaking the fast at the preceding sunset and celebrating with family all night long – GWA moved the start time of graduation to night hours to begin at 9:30 pm. Not only does delaying to a nighttime event avoid having a daytime graduation during which the majority of people in attendance are hungry, thirsty, and on a spectrum somewhere from less-patient to testy to combustible (an adult trying to get on campus this week before pickup time cold-cocked one of our guards, then blamed his behavior on Ramadan…to which GWA’s awesome Director of Operations responded to him, “Yes, it is Ramadan, so God is watching especially closely!”), it also lets people join family at home when the sun sets for the traditional meal to break the fast (iftar in Classical Arabic, ftour in Darija, Morocco’s Arabic dialect). Our festivities will run late tonight, with post-graduation refreshments probably continuing past midnight; but we will enjoy a happy event where people stay and celebrate instead of skipping out as soon as possible to wait for ftour.

Thinking more broadly about our first year winding down, for us this graduation tastes bittersweet. While proud to move toward our Year Two with excitement and great plans, like the seniors preparing to say goodbye to their GWA friends as life takes them on new journeys, graduation reminds us that in a few short weeks we must bid adieu to David Welling, the Head of School who recruited us in December of 2015 to come to Morocco and GWA. We will miss very much David and his wife, Marian, who nurtured us through our Living-in-Casablanca orientation and was always available to lend a helping hand or patient to answer “How do we…?” questions. Through six years as GWA’s Head, with a rather pastoral manner and an even keel that let him navigate through a host of challenges that would capsize those less-equipped, David has moved the school forward along its master plan to the point today where it stands poised to do great things. Most important for us, he constructed a special leadership team of which we have relished being a part, and that will continue his legacy of ensuring that the school’s vision statement drives all that we do as we seek to engage minds and build character. His tutelage in international school leadership has prepared us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for the hard work ahead, and we appreciate that David’s return to a stateside school will leave him still just a Skype away.

We find that especially reassuring as GWA’s Board found David’s successor right here on campus. Brian is particularly proud to announce that beginning this summer, Audrey will take the reins as GWA’s next Head of School. In the transition, because Audrey will (at least initially) remain as the Upper School Principal, Brian will also take on a broader array of administrative responsibilities to fortify our institutional advancement program under the program development side of his Director of Curriculum & Program Development role. Along with the rest of the great team David constructed, we look forward to leading together. Yet, we know from our previous runs as heads of schools that the job is a lonely one. You must balance the desire to be friendly with your faculty and staff with the reality of a barrier that walls off from various school stakeholder groups things meant only for the Head of School. With our previous schools that we have led always being distinct enough that they never really competed for students or faculty, we complemented each other as free consultants when as school heads we did not have many others with whom we could confer. We look forward to bending David’s ear about GWA – and letting him bend ours about his new school – as both colleagues and friends when he assumes his new post westward across the Atlantic next month.

Between now and our start of Year Two, we have the last few weeks of this school year to finish – overseeing exams and grading, planning and executing year-end professional development, checking out teachers before they depart for the summer, and getting Charlotte’s residency paperwork advanced to the next step (as nothing more has happened on that front since our post on Moroccan Bureaucracy a few months ago) – and then we disappear to France for a few weeks where all three of us will spend the month of July in a language immersion program to beef up our French. We are building some actual vacation in there as well, heading to and from our Dordogne locale at a sauntering pace to allow for overnight explorations of Gibraltar, Valencia, Barcelona, San Sebastián, Santiago de Campostela, Porto, Lisbon, and Sevilla before we flip back into GWA mode to welcome new faculty in August and launch Year Two and the 20th Anniversary celebration of GWA.

While we have seven weeks before marking our one-year anniversary of arriving in Casablanca, in truth our journey began stateside, weeks before, during our preparation for the move. Our first post in June of 2016 showed us filled with anticipation for what would lie ahead on our intentional adventure. A year ago, as we readied ourselves for the start of this Expat Expedition, we could not foresee all that would come in our first year. In July, August, and September, each day brought new things and new learning experiences that we had to absorb and consider with extra focus as variables added to the Calculus of our daily personal and professional lives. We had newbie eyes, wide with wonder over the most basic things. Each day, each activity, and each baby step seemed momentous…because each one was momentous. We felt very much like the new arrivals from the U.S. that we were (and that, no doubt, we very much looked like to Moroccans and experienced expats around us). A year later, while by no means experts with the wisdom of years living here (or anywhere abroad), to us tonight’s graduation also marks our progression from newbies learning the expat life to genuine expats in our own right.

Onward to Year Two in the intentional adventure of this Expat Expedition…

On your mark…get set…here we go!

Last weekend marked ten months since we arrived in Morocco. We love living here. Still, as much as this has become “home” for us, all our domestic moves through our first 20 years of marriage help us recognize that life changes like this are not events; they are processes. 

Almost 40 years ago, William Bridges published the first edition of his classic Transitions, in which he presented any significant life transition as a balance between grief/loss and new beginnings. Such is the case with selling/storing/donating our belongings and moving to Morocco. So our process of transitioning from educators in the U.S. with friends and family from coast to coast, to expats starting anew in a country and culture very different from what we have experienced in the culture changes of our previous domestic moves, has been hyperbolically different. For the most part, we have enjoyed a spectacular experience. Yet, as a process and not an event, notwithstanding how happy we are with our lives here, at times we do feel the twang of missing people stateside. The thing of it is, you cannot sell, store, or donate the people in your life. They are pieces of you, and you bring them with you where you go…or at least you try to as much as you can. In reality, while the post-digital age allows for regular contact wherever a wireless connection exits, virtual interface suffices to maintain relationships but does not equal face-to-face and embracing-arms contact with friends and family.

So as Brian approached his 50th Birthday on May 22, he started feeling more homesick than at any time since we arrived. Not because he regretted moving to Morocco; but because he wished that he could share his milestone with people who had been in his life throughout his life. He thought about his parents moving from the Midwest to the East Coast more than five decades ago, leaving behind family (some of whom had never traveled beyond the county in which they were born) in pursuit of new horizons. As a boy, monthly telephone calls to/from grandparents kept relationships viable between summer trips back to see extended family and Christmas trips by grandparents flying eastward to see grandchildren who lived so many states away. Fast-forward to our move from America to Africa, and our world allows for much better and much easier contact with those we left stateside, and for cheaper than the “Reach out and touch someone” twenty-five cents a minute cost for an AT&T phone call. Nonetheless, the closer he got to his milestone birthday, Brian became acutely aware of the physical distance between him and so many people he loved back in America.

Wishing his turning 50 to be a wonderful experience for Brian, Audrey asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday to make it momentous. He said what he really wished was that he could bring together friends from his five decades and revel in the wonderful life he has had; but that would not happen in Casablanca. She was ready to buy him a ticket for the U.S. to celebrate with such a crowd; but overseeing end-of-year academic progress testing and evaluating senior capstone project presentations mandated that he be at GWA instead of flying west across the Atlantic. He did ask his mom if she would be interested in coming to Morocco on a whim to celebrate with him, but she likewise had commitments keeping her stateside. She did, though, appreciate his asking, and he appreciated that she wished she could come if she were not already booked.

Another factor that got him down was the juxtaposition of his birthday amid a very busy calendar time. The night of his birthday, a Monday, we both had to judge senior capstone projects. The preceding Saturday we both had to Chaperone the GWA prom. And the next weekend (now) brought the start of Ramadan, making a big 50th birthday celebration a bad fit culturally at the beginning of the month of fasting in this Muslim country. So there did not seem to be much opportunity to gather expat and native friends here.

A couple weeks ago, Brian started moving past his funk toward broader thinking, asking Audrey if she thought friends would come to a Friday night party, and if we could pull that off after working all day. She did, and so Brian started pondering options for a Friday party after work, rather than a Saturday party for which we could prepare all day. Brian did not want a big show; just a comfortable evening with friends to enjoy good people. He decided he would make chili; his friend M’hamed Rachad, GWA’s Director of Food Services, would make a chocolate mousse cake, and the assembled folks would play charades (hearkening back to our pre/post-marriage days when we hosted charades parties with friends).

So Brian made an invitation and Audrey send it out to a new crop of friends in our life here. All but one couple confirmed they could come, and Brian shopped for chili supplies. On the Friday before his birthday, as soon as he could leave his office and walk up the hill to our apartment, he headed home to make five gallons of chili (figuring also that we could enjoy leftovers for a few freezer meals). Soon our apartment was full of friends – with the special bonus of Charlotte prioritizing her dad’s 50th birthday party over high school teenager social things. Five gallons of chili disappeared. (There would be no leftovers for freezer meals.) Rachad’s cake was the best Brian has had in 50 years of birthday cakes. And, best of all, Brian’s charades team beat Audrey’s team by one point. It was a great birthday party. On his actual birthday three days later, the office staff surprised Brian with another birthday party…and another chocolate mousse cake.

After feeling homesick for a few weeks because he could not celebrate his half century with friends and family back in the U.S., Brian instead felt the blessing of having good folks here to celebrate with him. Feeling homesick was real, it was natural, and it was okay to recognize it for what it was without letting it put a big damper on enjoying our life here. Keeping things in the proper perspective is so important. Last Fall we wrote about “October” as an important month for new staff at GWA. Since then some people have actually left GWA after reaching a point when they felt Morocco just did not work for them or their families. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and think for a fleeting moment, “What are we doing in Morocco?!” Then we look around at the blessings that fill our life here and feel quite competent answering that question. While Brian felt homesick leading up to his birthday, he understood why he felt that way and never blamed Morocco for things not Morocco’s fault.

Two weeks ago, amid feeling homesick, Brian got rear-ended while stopped in road construction traffic directly in front of the entrance to the King’s summer palace that sits on the coast downhill from GWA. According to one of the King’s guards who witnessed the accident, a taxi driver plowed into the back of our Honda CRV because he was more engaged in talking on his phone than in looking for traffic stopped in front of him. The wrong perspective could lead Brian to blame Morocco for the accident and the nearly three hours afterwards on site waiting for an insurance agent to arrive (on a scooter) and write up an accident report. What makes such things happening here difficult is when we are not equipped with the skills or support to get through the things that happen: the language skills to understand what has happened and when life’s routine might return; and the familiarity with bureaucracies and procedures to know what to do when you get rear-ended, when your power or water goes out in your apartment, or when you get pulled over for making a left turn when the “No Left Turn” sign is obscured on the right side of the three-lane road and the car in front of you made the turn without getting stopped.

The truth is that Brian really could get rear-ended anywhere in the U.S. (or the world) by someone engaged in a mobile phone conversation instead of in driving safely. It is not a bad thing about Morocco; it is just a bad thing. Perspective.  Regarding his birthday, Brian could miss people back in the U.S. while still appreciating the good people in our lives here in Casablanca. Last summer, during one of our orientation sessions, Brian commented to the group that the strange things we encounter here are not worse, they are just different. That perspective has helped a lot at times this year.

The photo at the start off this post is Brian’s favorite from the last ten months. It shows a shepherd sitting while watching his herd of sheep feed in the field by the road up the hill toward GWA. The field is just a field, not more than it is; yet, the scene prompts some deeper thinking. It is the same field that weeks ago was lush with tall grass and colorful wildflowers; now it is a brown feeding place for sheep and cows who come to eat the stalks left behind by the straw balers. The field keeps changing with the seasons, each stage fulfilling a different purpose. Likewise, Morocco keeps changing, keeps providing us with new circumstances and new adventures. We will continue to enjoy them as part of our process, just as we will probably have future times when we feel more homesick than other times. And that is okay, so long as we remember that despite that feeling we remain blessed with good friends and good lives right here as well.

Things happen here, as things happen everywhere. Just like anywhere, changes and transitions happen not as distinct events, but as cumulative processes. In our process, we feel very blessed. With good friends to push us forward, we can handle the emotions that pop up and into our lives.

On your mark…get set…here we go!

As we have mentioned in previous posts, Morocco is a Muslim country that lets people practice other religions (as long as they do not proselytize).  Here in Casablanca we have several weekly Catholic Mass options in French, English, Spanish, and Italian at various churches, though so far we have hit only the French Mass and English Mass.  Today we prepare for this evening’s Good Friday service and Sunday’s celebration of Easter, seemingly a good time to share a bit about last Sunday’s start of Holy Week on Palm Sunday…
…Or, rather, as it turned out:  Olive Sunday.
While last Sunday the remainder of the Roman Catholic world, and much of the the rest of Christendom, blessed and distributed palm branches before reading the Gospel account of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem before his arrest and crucifixion, at Casablanca’s Eglise Notre Dame de Lourdes we had the blessing and distribution of olive branches instead of palm fronds.  This could make sense, given the prevalence of olive trees in this Mediterranean country; however, palm trees appear just as ubiquitously here as olive trees, so we have no shortage of them that mandates a substitution of olive branches for palm fronds.  It strikes us as just one more curiosity, if not irony, that makes living here so interesting.
Our church options themselves fit among these curiosities.  The weekly English Mass takes place at the French-named Christ Roi church.  Of course, this translates to Christ the King, but the name is the name.  At Christ Roi, really a big room off a courtyard and up some stairs in a larger building downtown, a French priest leads the English Mass with a heavy accent for a congregation of mostly Filipino parishioners.  We do not know if they shared in Olive Sunday, for our church home has become Notre Dame, a hegemonic 1950s construction of heavy concrete and stained glass that sits on a busy corner also downtown not too far from Christ Roi.  Notre Dame, a much larger parish, appears also to have a French Pastor, though he presides comfortably in French instead of in accented English, and often the other non-French clergy preside in French in the celebration of Mass.  These other clergy, like over 90 percent of the congregation, hail not from France or Morocco, but from French-speaking sub-Saharan African countries.  The very sub-Saharan African feel in the middle of Mediterranean Morocco not only enriches the cosmopolitan experience, but also normally makes for quite a lively culture for American and European expats that pop in for Mass. Double the intensity of that for Olive Sunday, with an all-out cavalcade of singing in harmonic cacophony and intensely energetic olive branch waving while processing into the church building from the blessing of the pal…olive branches…in a grotto on the far side of the fenced church compound.  Once inside, the broadly-waving olive branches and spirited music in French, Latin, and languages from various sub-Saharan counties continues to belie the American notions that Catholics must sit stoically during Mass and – of course – that Catholics cannot sing.  After 2 ½ hours of celebration, at the end of Olive Sunday Mass, like with many other Sundays, a crowd gathered around the choir with phones out to shoot videos of their closing music.
This summer we plan to spend a month of family time studying French through an immersion program.  Until then, we have the very Catholic benefit of knowing when to stand, when to sit, when to say, “Amen” or “And with your spirit” or other things Catholics say in their worldly vernaculars, and try to pick out familiar words and phrases in prayers and homilies as we go along.  Meanwhile, the music continues to draw us in and suits our purpose abridged from St. Augustine that one who sings prays twice.
We cannot wait for what the lively Easter celebration will bring…But, then, as happens during the Triduum, we will have to wait from today until then.
On your mark…get set…here we go!