Leaving America Behind

There I am, standing at the corner of a bustling street in Philadelphia, laden with well over one hundred pounds of luggage. Nearby, other people my age are hurriedly heaving their own luggage from their cars onto the sidewalk. This is our Peace Corps Staging: our first glimpse of the life that awaits us.

Inside, I meet some of the people I will be spending the next 27 months with. We share a quick sandwich across the street, some watered-down coffee from the Wawa, and stand outside our conference room. A long buffet style line is prepared for us, where we could turn in our paperwork and get our first official Peace Corps "allowance," since technically we're not really being paid. And then the doors open.

Not knowing what to expect, we are bombarded over the next several hours with the Peace Corps' mission and philosophy on development, that ambiguous term dealing with how the "First World" thinks it can and should work improve the "Third World." We do learn, however, that the Peace Corps is not about aid, but rather assistance. We are not to be so much agents of change, but rather agents of assistance, an eager and smiling face prepared to go where no one else will to help those people who have grandiose dreams but neither the resources nor the know-how to turn their dreams into reality.

Once we are turned loose, it's off to a swanky restaurant. We pass by a local diner, and vow to return to it later on. The meal is okay, the beer overpriced. To heck with that, you've got dozens of young Americans about to leave their lives behind. Where's the nearest pub?

Luckily, I had asked someone who had spent time in Philly already about good pubs nearby before we went out to eat. He had advertised an Irish pub called - what else? - The Tavern that was within walking distance. We get there and find several other soon-to-be trainees already there. I scope out the bar and lo! Hoegaarden. $5 a pint. And Virginia Tech is getting crushed by LSU in HD all over the place. I'm in heaven.

The next day is eight grueling hours of team building exercises meant to strip our perception of "culture" bare, and then at the end, we get the first glimpse of what our lives will actually look like. For weeks on end, all nearly 70 of us had asked ourselves the same questions: where will I be training? what will be my final site look like? And, most importantly, what language will I be learning?

Morocco actually has five functional languages, of which the Peace Corps is exposed to four. The first is the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, sometimes called Darija, and the second is French. The other three are all Berber dialects, and besides the important fact that these languages are only spoken and have no written alphabet, they are also spoken prevalently throughout the majority of the Moroccan landscape. My sector, Youth Development (YD), had been under the impression we would be learning Berber. The other sector, Small Business Development (SBD), had thought they would be getting Darija.

And then the hammer fell. YD would exclusively be learning Darija. SBD would exclusively be learning one of the Berber dialects. YD would be going to Fez, one of the largest cities and the spiritual capital of Morocco, located in the central northern (and temperate) portion of the country. SBD would be headed for Ourzazates, a city in the desert hours to the south. Mock high fives abound to my fellow YD friends. SBD folk in some cases looked absolutely crestfallen. Of course, any experience is simply what you make of it, and one could argue that SBD would be receiving the true Peace Corps experience that many in the room had signed up for all along.

That night, a group of us trekked to the Philly Diner, the local dive we had spotted the night before. Philly Cheesesteaks, french fries, and tap water. Grease, ketchup, and plastic tablecloths. Wonderful. And then back to The Tavern for more Hoegaarden and the Dallas Cowboys game!

Once we got to The Tavern, we decided to sit outside, which in the end was probably a good thing for a Cowboys fan in the heart of Eagles country. And wouldn't you know, within an hour nearly half of the training group had shown up and were seated all around us, with even more inside! I had my Hoegaarden, and spotted on the drink menu a delicacy I recently developed a taste for: Jameson's Irish Whiskey. I have to really give this pub credit: not only did they have Jameson's, but they had the 12- and 18-year aged versions as well! I wrangled over the merits, and finally decided to cap my night (or so I had thought) on a glass of Jameson's 12-year on the rocks. I'll miss that.

Before we left The Tavern, another group informed us of cheap margaritas around the corner, with a more open patio area and better access to the football game. A few of us eventually joined them, and so I can proudly say that as I watched my Dallas Cowboys prevail in a hard fought battle my last drink in the United States was an ungodly alcoholic and dirt cheap margarita.

Later that night, to the tune of several Balearic songs (made famous by the after hours lounges on the Spanish party island of Ibiza) in the background I was able to talk to my beautiful and loving girlfriend over Skype. We have vowed to stay together while I am in Morocco, so this was not so much the tearful goodbye as it was a tearful "see you later."

And then I packed and laid out my clothes for the next morning.

Philly Cheesesteaks. French fries. Tap water. Internet. Bars. Expensive beer. Cheap (and expensive) liquor. Cars flooding the streets. Football (of the American variety.) HDTV. College towns. Modern cities. Boyfriends and girlfriends. Friends. Loved ones.

We had drank it all in, and now we were preparing to leave it all behind.

We slept.

The sun rose.

September 10th. The day that we would be leaving the United States, and everything in the world that we knew, behind.