Featured Blog: Rock The Kasbah

This is me and my family a few years ago in Colorado Springs. And yes, I am the proud stay at home mom of two sons and two reindeer. This was before we got the opportunity of a life time. We've always wanted to give our kids a global perspective. So when the Peace Corps came calling, we were ready. We rented out our house, said good-bye to our friends, loaded up on sunscreen and headed here, to Morocco for two years.

Having done this whole moving overseas things before I can tell you that it is much easier to move to Europe with younger more oblivious children than to move to Africa with tween kids. See my oldest is now 12 and has that obligatory preteen angst. I have two others following close behind at 11 and 10 and then the baby of the family is 6. Except don't call her a baby or she will sumo wrestle you to the ground until you eat those words. I said eat those words!

The idea of living the simple life in Africa was so appealing. Then we moved here and I realized, nothing in Africa is simple. The long list of complicated things includes food shopping, driving, finding stuff for my kids to do, trying to get money out of the atm and attempting to buying something with my credit card, just to name a few. And what complicates the complicated list even more? I
don't speak French or Arabic.

In the meantime I have become fantastic at charades and smiling both genuinely and sarcastically and everything in between. Although the American cultural phenomenon of smiling can get you into trouble here. In the incommunicado interum, my kids have already become swear lingual on the bus to school. Yes, it’s universal that kids learn the first words of a new language in swears and on the bus to school.

But our biggest goal? To do as much travel as possible.
So we've been to:
Spain (Where my prepubescent boys saw their first glimpse of topless sunbathing.)
France (Where we ate our first and hopefully only $100 breakfast.)
Italy (Where we saw St. Catherine's centuries old severed decaying head in a church.)
Sahara Dessert (Where we rode camels and got the condition known as camel crotch.)
And Egypt (Twice actually. See the first time they didn't let us through passport control and we lived in the terminal at the airport for 40 hours before being deported. Our second trip there was right after the revolution and we thwarted the US Embassy's travel warning not to go.
As for me, I document the journey and it's always an adventure. So come check out what we're up to now at www.rockthekasbahafrica.blogspot.com

Oh and here’s my grab button: