Peace Corps Love Match

We get a healthy number of neighborhood visitors at our house. Not enough to be annoying, but enough to feel included in the community. Most of the time, they are careful to come around late morning or late afternoon, which ensures that they won't wake us up, or interrupt any meals. Occasionally, though, they aren't so thoughtful.
One morning a few weeks ago, we got a heavy knock on our metal door at the unreasonable hour of 8am! In the summer, we would probably have been up by then, but on these dim, blustery, winter mornings, we like to sleep a little later in order to give the sun a little time to wake up and do its thing. Needless to say, the knocking woke us up. When we didn't respond, the knocking got louder and more insistent. Eventually, our guest even picked up a rock to bolster the sound. Still, I was not about to jump out of bed, get dressed, and try to speak TashlHite in my current state. I stayed in bed hoping that the visitor would give up.
Sure enough, the knocking stopped....that is until it resumed on the wall of my bedroom right next to my ear. Now I knew it was serious. Whoever was knocking must have been on a limited schedule. I jumped up and did exactly what I refused to do moments before. When I was dressed, I swung open the front door and jogged around to the back of the house where the second episode of knocking occurred. Nobody was near our house, but one of our friends and neighbors was poking around, working outside in her yard nearby. I walked over to her to see if she new what was going on. Seeing me coming, she yelled out, "Sorry. Did I wake you up"? By the time I got to her, Amber had finished dressing and was coming around the house, running to catch up. "Yeah", I said, "buts it's okay. We would have gotten up soon anyway. What did you want"? What she wanted, was our help in procuring a husband...
So why did she want our help in this regard? In fact, she has been proposed to many times, and tentatively engaged twice. The first engagement was to a distant cousin living in Agadir. The second engagement, which lasted only one day, occurred the prior week to the son of a neighbor. The brother of the man was getting married, so his father told him that he needed to get married too; since all the family was already coming for the wedding, and since a dual-marriage would save money. The man heard that our neighbor was a good choice for a wife, and proposed to her one week before the wedding date. Initially -- perhaps out of shock-- she agreed to be married. That night, however, she stayed up thinking about what a huge mistake she had made. In addition to having never met this man before, she was also haunted by the fact that he was unusually short. She lay awake in bed imaging herself walking down the street with him, and imagined passersby assuming that he was her son. She even considered not inviting her family to the wedding, so they wouldn't witness the horizontally challenged nature of her groom. The next morning, she begged her parents to call off the wedding. When the man came back the next day to get the business of the dowry out of the way, her mother informed the man that their agreement had gone south. Her mother's insistence was enough to dissuade her suitor temporarily, but she expected him to be back in the days to come.
The night before our rude awakening, our neighbor had talked to her friend in the Tiznit province, another PCV (Peace Corps Volunteer) who had lived with our neighbors for her initial two months in country. They had discussed the problem, and her friend in Tiznit had offered an alternative groom (if she could get engaged before the man returned, she would have an excuse not to marry him). The PCV vouched for this new mans personality, and offered to send a picture of the man to see if he met our neighbors qualifications in terms of appearance. Now she needed our help getting the picture.
First, she needed the picture as soon as possible, so she could make her decision before the other suitor returned. Secondly, there was the issue of how to send it. Her whole family gets their mail sent to her fathers post office box, and only he picks up the mail. In a Muslim society like this one, you can't just opening send pictures of single men to young women. To solve the problem, we offered to try and get the picture via email, and also offered to let the picture be sent to our post office box in the event that email failed (which it did).While our neighbor waited as patiently as she could for the next few days, we diligently cooperated with the PCV in Tiznit to make sure everything went smoothly. When the picture arrived in our mailbox a few days later, we hastily gave it to its intended recipient, putting her future back in her hands.
Imagine it! If she likes the boy in the picture, they may very well be married within the year. And all thanks to a well-connected volunteer down south, and a couple of drowsy volunteers next door. Talk about making a difference in the lives of the locals!