Month 7: Nostalgia for Adam in America

Today has quite possibly been the best weather I've so far encountered in Morocco: impeccably blue skies, gentle breezes, just enough long stretches of stratus clouds to prevent the sun from being its usual scalding self, a high temperature of around 80 degrees, nearly non-existent humidity. The swift breeze last night was cool enough that I closed the windows in the middle of the night; my thin hand-me-down sheet was insufficient to keep me comfortably snuggled. I woke early this morning, around 6am, just before the sun could peak over the gentle mountains that hover just east of my village; a barely existent layer of fog blanketed the dusty little town, though dissipated in no time. I spent the early hours reading the New York Times, checking my email, and of course browsing Facebook, all the while sipping a most delicious frozen banana-coffee breakfast smoothie and crunching on a good ol' country apple (the non quality-controlled, non-GM kind you'd pick off your grandfather's apple tree in the backyard, not the kind you'd pay 2 bucks for at Whole Foods).

After my morning routine that would certainly liken me to a real adult (wake up early, down some coffee, read the newspaper... all before most people are awake), I hopped on my bike and headed to my souq town (market town), about 15km away, where I had a few errands to run. The bike ride made me highly reminiscent of my life back in America. I kept imagining myself running through Wesleyan's campus and into the neighboring Connecticut countryside on a sunny but cool and crisp early autumn morning. After that flashback passed, I began picturing myself, again during early autumn, jumping into my parents old faithful Honda Civic early on a Saturday morning to make it to my youth soccer games. As I biked down the main highway to Casablanca, I could still smell the all too familiar rustic scent of tree leaves beginning their color transition from all sorts of green to all sorts of red, yellow, and brown.

Nostalgic moments like this morning have been particularly frequent during the past month or so. This morning's flashbacks were likely brought on by the beautiful autumn-like weather, though I assure you that my current surrounding landscape has essentially no resemblance to the lush fall foliage of Kentucky or Connecticut. Perhaps this is what folks call "homesickness?" Wikipedia makes a clear distinction between "nostalgia" and "homesickness," the later being related to negative thoughts and sadness while nostalgia is both sadness and joy. I'm very much enjoying my experience in Morocco, but certainly have many nostalgic moments of joy from the past.

Lots of things are triggering these nostalgic moments. Despite the donkey calls and calls to prayer happening outside my house, listening to Bon Iver or Regina Spektor still brings back strong memories of my road trip across the United States last year. Frying onions in the early evening hours here in my house takes me back to my childhood, when either of my parents were very likely to have been sauteeing onions just before sunset so as to have dinner ready at a decent hour. Sipping on a glass of wine in Essaouira inevitably makes me yearn for the days when I had endless amounts of wine bars at my doorstep in San Francisco. Oddly, even spending the day working at the Peace Corps office in Rabat takes me back to the days when I'd scurry around my college campus, meeting with professors, popping in my research lab to check on my cells, or sitting in the frigid library trying to write mildly coherent essays. These flashbacks make a lot of sense; they're memories of positive emotional moments in my life, memories that are resurrecting themselves during a time when my mind and body finds itself in a new world, a new culture, a new language. These memories all happened at a time when I could communicate in my own language, pick up on social clues, understand deeper cultural intricacies, and was very well educated about the historical context that influenced all of that. I knew darned well how to operate in my American world.

I certainly make no claims of truly understanding Morocco, Moroccans, or Moroccan languages; but I am trying. And that's one of the many beautiful things about Peace Corps, and precisely one of the many reasons I applied and accepted an invitation: to challenge my very ingrained lens with which I view the world, to put myself in a position where I can at least try to understand a different way of living in the world, to remove myself from all of that which is familiar in order to better make sense of the world.

So in another moment of nostalgia, I returned home today from my bike ride and whipped up one of my all-time favorite foods, a food that is very near and dear to my heart, a comfort food that my father made for me so many times, a food which I wish everyone could know: Egyptian kushari, كشرى.