Sarah Arabia
This fall I begin my Peace Corps assignment in Morocco.
I applied October 1, 2023 and received my invitation December 19, 2023. At that point, I began collecting all the necessary documents and scheduled the required medical exams. Now only a few weeks and legal clearance stand between me and my in-country training.
Today, I have been reading blogs from Peace Corps volunteers that served in Morocco and thought it would be nice to reflect on my own thoughts prior to leaving. There have been many days where I asked myself why I am doing this. Why am I shipping off far away from everything I know and everyone I love? The only answer that fully expresses my thoughts on it today is to simply say I feel called to do it. I feel like my entire life has prepared me for this. I have repeatedly said I wanted to join the Peace Corps. It was, in fact, the first reason I gave my ex for leaving him. “I want to join the Peace Corps” to which he asked, “where do I fit into that?” and I responded, “you don’t”. The advisor of my senior research project had been a PCV in Swaziland. He met his wife there and they had two sons that ended up towering over him. One of my childhood heroes was Anthony Bourdain, and though not a volunteer, he did promote the same mentality advocated by the Peace Corps. Well minus a few key parts of his personality but he was visiting with locals and learning about them over dinner.
After reading the blog posts of volunteers past, I found myself in tears. It turns out, just like me, people tend to be more likely to get back into writing when they are having big feelings. The start and end to every volunteer’s journey was written, the middle of the adventure was almost always missing. The stark contrast of their first days and their last days in the position. They all seemed to grow so close to a community they only met two years before.
The reason I say my life prepared me for this is because I lived abroad in 8th grade for only six months, and I had a similar experience of cultivating friendships I’ll never forget and will always cherish. Fortunately for me, I went to an American school so language was no barrier, but it will be this time. For that, I just spent 6 weeks in the Netherlands, where they don’t speak the language I do as their native tongue, so that felt like a good warm up. I sense that I may be at my own advantage with the particular dialect of Arabic I’ll be learning because I never really learned much vocabulary in my Modern Standard Arabic class. I mostly learned how to read and write over and over again for the past 20 years. I imagine requesting someone to write down in Arabic what they are saying so I can at least sound it out instead of asking them to repeat it over and over again.
I have a stuffed camel named SASCA (which I feel the need to describe as a toy stuffed animal because I am the daughter of a taxidermist). He was gifted to me by my friends in Kuwait, made at a Build-A-Bear workshop and with a recorded message that plays when you squeeze his belly. “We’ll miss you Sarah” in the tiniest voice from one of the girls I hung out with called 3Alya. I couldn’t say her name very well because it starts with an Arabic letter known as “3Ayn”. The number indicates it’s a letter we don’t have in English. It is a sound that starts in the back of your throat and you kind of have to smile (or grimace in my case) to actually do it right. Needless to say, I butchered her name alot and this is a very common name in Arab countries. That bear she gave me still works to this day, after taking a weird hiatus. Thats right, for a few years SASCA stopped reminding me of this bittersweet memory of leaving a place I’d grown to love. When I retrieved him from storage a few months ago I gave his little dishdasha a washy washy and then I gave him a hug. For the heck of it I squeezed his belly expecting to squeeze it over and over again without any reward but to my surprise 3Alya’s voice spoke to me from his naval. I squeezed it again and she said it again. He didn’t forget and I cried big dinosaur tears of joy!
It takes me back to that place, that feeling and the feeling from before I ever left the U.S. I was just beginning a fresh new relationship in 8th grade. It was December of 2004 and my boyfriend was attending my Going Away party. I’m someone that has had an unusually large number of those. At this time, Kuwait was before me but what I was leaving behind was my broken heart. This boy was from a neighboring county and we’d really only chatted online but I just knew at that time I was head over heels in love. I remember he had to sit down at the picnic table outside in the dark in order for me to be able to reach his lips for a smooch. It was the most innocent peck but a spectacular memory. His birthday was around that time and I remember giving him a watch that depicted the letters of his favorite college football team. We tried to stay in contact for the rest of December but when I returned to school in January I could not stay up all night on Red Bulls to talk to him anymore. Only a few weeks went by before we ended our long distance relationship but every time I hear “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith I smile a little thinking about those two sweet 13-year-old kids.
I know what it’s like to leave everything behind and to live with the perspective of “it’s not fair!” and while I can’t say I’ve completely overcome that mindset, I do think I have learned to work through it in a better way. Now when things feel unfair I can at least look at myself objectively in the moment. There may be two minds working simultaneously, but I am also both of them. They help me to be in two places at once.
Surrendering to the circumstances when they are beyond my control feels better than looking for ways out of an impossible situation to escape. I find myself suspended in Limbo. I can’t be 100% sure I’ll be leaving in September until I actually make it to the day that I arrive at staging. There are still tasks to complete, but every morning I wake up I have to choose my outlook on life. I ask myself if I am acting out of love or fear, like my friend Isa says. Whenever I can, I choose love no matter how much it may also make my heart ache.
I learned a word yesterday that has no English translation. It was just one of those things that popped up on my feed. The Portuguese word saudade, which describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one loves and is now lost. It encompasses feelings of melancholy, incompleteness, and a sense of yearning, often for something or someone that might never return. It is a form of love, the umbrella that encompasses something we all strive for in this life. I’m looking forward to exploring the words for which there is no English translation in this new country and to meeting new people that I will come to call friends. I’m looking forward to miming my way through conversations like I did with the old Romanian couple that sat next to me on the plane ride home from the Netherlands. I even look forward to having this feeling again when I reach the end of my assignment and have to leave my life behind. It is, after all, the bittersweet goodbye that makes life beautiful.
