Well, my computer crashed the day after I submitted my Independent Study Project (phew, that was close!) and I’m actually back home sweet home in Olympia, WA for the holidays. Rather than abandon the last couple of posts I had planned to make last week, however, I’d like to use them now to reflect upon my final weeks in Morocco and upon the semester as a whole.
I have tried to focus upon people I met in my travels for the chief of my blog (but in as beautiful and fascinating a place as Morocco this has been difficult), and this specific post is dedicated to the friends I made this past semester; Moroccans, Americans, Djiboutians (I don’t actually know if that’s the correct term)…friends who live close to my home in Oly and friends who live half a globe away. In my experience, I’ve found that dealing with the stress and wonder of a new place (whether in another country or in one’s freshman year at college) tends to make people form ridiculously but fabulously close connections in a very short period of time. The friends I made in Morocco are some of the most intriguing people I’ve ever met, not to mention shared my first apartment with!
To top it all off, meeting people in a study abroad program means having connections to places all around the world. As I was talking to an old friend who studied abroad in Spain this semester and just arrived home to Washington after having a horrendously long and unexpectedly re-routed flight, she said; “After they cancelled my flight from Paris, I was really frustrated because I knew that all I needed to get home was to get back to the States. I literally could have landed anywhere and chances are one of my friends I met this semester from the East Coast or the Midwest would be close by and could help me get where I needed.” I might note that when I thought I would be stuck in Paris a couple days ago, I also knew that I needed only to call my friend’s family in Burgundy and I would almost certainly be taken care of. I could go on and on and on about the perks of making friends during a semester abroad, but instead I’ll just strongly encourage you to go abroad so you can find out some of the less obvious perks in person. I’ll leave off this particular post by adding a little album of some of the wonderful folks I got to know in Morocco and by saying, in case any of them are reading this, that I’m so glad to have met all of you and to have shared such a great and challenging experience and I hope to see you all again in the near future!
