27 Months of Couscous: Serving as a couple

As a couple serving in the Peace Corps, we are together basically 24/7. For anyone who knows how our relationship started, spending this much time together is just our thang (if you will).

In light of today being our anniversary, we've decided to do a massive list of all the pluses and deltas (good things and things we would change) of serving in Peace Corps as a couple.

Many of these things probably apply to Peace Corps every where, some are Morocco specific, and some are just Toby and Alexis situations.

PLUS:

We always have someone to speak English with. This is nice because our Darija isn't good enough to express complex thoughts yet.

If one of us gets stressed out or is just feeling less than great, we have a built in sounding board/therapist.

Cooking for two can be easier than cooking for one.

If we want to do a big project in our site, we have someone to work with.

We don't have to worry about our Moroccan mamas trying to set us up - families really want their kids to get married and we've got that one taken care of.

For Alexis, there is significantly less verbal harassment than single volunteers experience. It would seem that teenagers respect that we are married, and it's very rude to be rude to a man's wife (this is helpful for Alexis, though it does cause concern that the boys don't just respect women anyway, but that's another blog post).

We get to share our living allowances.

DELTA:

Because we can speak English with each other, we don't practice our Darija as much as other volunteers.

We have to spend all of our time together. For us, this has yet to be a problem. But who knows what this will be like after two years.

A lot of people want to know about when we'll have kids (though this isn't much different than America, to be real).

Other volunteers assume that everything is easier for couples, so they take your complaints less seriously. (Okay this also hasn't happened to us, but we have heard this from others. We've had nothing but support from everyone in our training group, Peace Corps, and basically the rest of the world. )

To sum it all up, we're pretty stoked to be serving in the Peace Corps, and we're even happier to be able to do it together. Now here are a few pictures of us around Morocco.