My travel

When the taxi dropped us off in the Jemma el Fna, the wide open central plaza of Marrakesh, the sounds and the smells, the robes and veils and fez caps, the donkeys and the horse carts all immediately announced a new life.

Home to a few thousand people, Tannant is a simple farming community, where life goes on much as it has for centuries. Visually, it's a new–ish town, without the charming mud–walled farmhouses that appear all over Morocco. Most of the construction is of unpainted concrete, imposing a dull gray monotony over the background of red earth tones. The main road runs down the center of town—you could drive through the place in about 90 seconds. There's a row of arcaded shops on one side of the town's center, a café where the men hang out, a shack where fruits and vegetables are sold, a pharmacy, a new, very clean hammam (public steam bath), and a basement space where you can connect to the Internet.

As city dwellers, we thought of it as "simple," although according to other Peace Corps volunteers, this was a cushy assignment—running water, electricity and Internet still don't reach a lot places in Morocco. "Don't you get bored here!"

The town really comes to life on Wednesdays, when the weekly souk takes place. We'd walked by the market area the day before and saw a desolate field of wind–blown dirt with some stick–built shacks defining its edges. Surrounding cacti had snagged hundreds of plastic bags and garbage was strewn around the edges of the field. Broad, purple–gray mountains defined a cool distant background to the scrubby dry land. ...