The Festival

The festival itself was an exhausting but totally amazing experience. Most days, we had several rows of people (up to four deep) surrounding the weavers and listening to me talk about carpets, weaving and Peace Corps Morocco. (On the second day, the Smithsonian staff started handing out throat lozenges to all the participants because we were talking so much.)

I can't say enough about how well Smithsonian took care of us during the festival. We had breakfast and dinner provided everyday at the hotel and food tickets to get lunch at the fair. They arranged transportation to and from the fair everyday and always had people walking around to make sure we didn't need anything at the fair itself. Best of all, they gave all the participants spending money so that we could sightsee and the women could buy souvenirs to take back to the families in Morocco.

For me, one of the best parts of the fair was that my family and friends came to visit! My mom, Emily and Sophie came up the first weekend of the fair with two of my cousins, Christina and Patty. They helped me explain about Peace Corps Morocco to visitors (which was great, since there were so many, I couldn't talk to everyone), they brought sandwiches for Fatima and Khadija when they found out neither particularly cared for the food at the fair and they took me out to dinner every night so that I got my 'fix' of Mexican and Italian food. My mom really wanted to take Khadija and Fatima out to a nice dinner, but they were always too tired after the fair ended. They just wanted to go back to the hotel and sleep.

After the fireworks on the fourth, Mom, Emily and Sophie drove the 16 hours back to St. Louis. The next weekend, my Dad and Katie (another sister) flew up for a night. It was great to see everyone and lots of fun for them to see the fair. Dad and Katie bought lunch for the ladies, which both really appreciated, and helped me at the cooking demonstration. (We had 6 cooking demos during the fair, where Fatima and Khadija prepared dishes from Morocco and I talked about food in Morocco and my PC experience as a whole.)

I think the crowd really enjoyed hearing my Dad talk about visiting Morocco and drinking tea with my host family. Often, we PCVs get so used to the culture we're living in that we forget to mention some pretty amazing things. For example, I'm so used to the amazing hospitatily in Morocco that I sometimes forget to mention it when I'm describing my time here. When my family came to visit last summer, the hospitality we received at my host family's house is one of the most special memories for them. His comments about Morocco really added something special to our demonstration.

I also got to spend time with my friends Greg and Lauren from undergrad. I hadn't seen either of them in several years and I really enjoyed catching up. It was wonderful hearing what they've been up to and about their lives in D.C.

The fair was closed on July 5th and 6th, so we got to go sight-seeing. Sarah, an RPCV from Morocco, and her husband Brahim, came down from NYC to visit. I think everyone had an amazing time and we had a lot of fun trying to figure out how to describe all of the sights in Tashelhit.

One of the souvenir shops we went to had an oval office we could take pictures in.  We got shots of Fatima and Khadija pretending to work at the desk and this great group shot. Lynn, in the hat, is an RPCV from Morocco who lived in Fatima's town. Fatima was beyond thrilled to see Lynn. Her smiles didn't stop the two days Lynn was in town.

This is a shot of most of the Peace Corps participants at the fair during the reception they held on the 6th. The reception was beautiful and it was great to hang out with such an amazing group of people

This is us at the cooking demonstration. Generally, there were about 40 or 50 people watching us make sffa (a delicious dish made with couscous, powdered sugar and cinnamon) and a chicken tajine. 

These were some of my favorite people at the fair. Samba (on the left), from Mali, read a beautiful poem about what Peace Corps means to him and his community during the reception. It had most of us near tears.