Hospitality - Melanie

We’ve been with our host families for five weeks now, and we’ve settled into a routine, at least in my house. I’m used to the way my family works, to the schedule of meals and when certain chores get done, and by whom. My family has been extremely hospitable from the start of my stay with them, but I can tell that my host mom isn’t quite as fussy about us anymore. She doesn’t prevent us from clearing our dishes from the table after meals, she accepts our help with doing chores in the kitchen, and she doesn’t always make us special dishes any more.

So yesterday, when Melissa and her sister Jessie came over for lunch, I got a renewed taste of our family’s amazing hospitality. My host mom asked me a week in advance what we should make for lunch, and (of course) I told her to make the tagine with chicken and preserved lemons that has been my favorite since the first time I tried it. Yesterday morning she started cooking, and by the time I got back to the house from a meeting, she had made two different salads, quinces, and most of the tagine. She was worried that our host dad would forget to bring home some bread, so she made our sister go out to the bakery to get some (we wound up with twice as much bread as necessary, because our host dad didn’t forget).

We were extremely well fed at lunch, there was copious bread, and the tagine was amazing as usual. After lunch, our host mom brought us fruit, and then cookies and tea. We were all pretty much unconscious on the couch, and our host mom was in the kitchen making an apple tart for later. After an hour or so of semi-consciousness, two of my sisters and I took Jessie to the hammam, which is the traditional Moroccan bathhouse.

We spent several hours at the hammam, and when we got back home my host mom fed us cake and avocado banana juice. By this time, Jessie really needed to head home, but my family offered (twice) to let her stay for dinner, and even to sleep at our house for the night. They also said that the next time she came to Morocco she was welcome to come over for more tagine and cake. Our sister even drove Jessie the two hundred yards to the main road to catch a cab.

This entire day was an amazing illustration and reminder of Moroccan hospitality. I’ve gotten used to my family’s routines and generosity, so it was really nice to see them doing the same to someone else from a bystander’s perspective. Moroccan hospitality is seriously amazing, and I think everyone else would agree that we’re seriously lucky to be experiencing this for an extended period of time.