Right at Home

My heart was dancing. If hearts could sing, then it was certainly bursting forth in song. Though I was in Morocco, I felt right at home.

Well, except that is, for the language barrier.
And the unfamiliar games.
And the hard-to-pronounce names.

But take that away, and I felt right at home with the children in Madiha's family. We began playing card games and from what I could gather we played a variation of Uno, though I'm pretty sure they changed the rules every time. I kept having to pick up two and I couldn't quite figure out who's turn it was. After a while we changed games and played Spoons (or ma3alKet).

From there it we played Ring Around the Rosie, both in Arabic and English. We tried untying ourselves from a human knot, which proved extremely difficult seeing that we even struggled to say "under" or "over" and "arm" or "leg." After the knot was untangled, the games began to unwind, until two little sweeties began a game of tag with me. We ran all over the yard until we were told to be careful of a giant hole somewhere (still not sure what that was all about). A fun game of kesh-kesh followed, which was very similar to hide-n-seek, except you yell out "Kesh-kesh!" when you find the people.

Soon, many of the children had to leave and I actually felt my heart sink a little. I loved playing and laughing and giggling with them. The thing about children and language barriers is that they don't see one. Adults won't talk to you if you don't speak the language. But kids? Kids will blab all day to you, not caring if you don't understand what's going on. It didn't stop us one bit from having fun and laughing for a couple of hours.

As they were leaving I had several kisses planted on my cheeks and really big hugs.

Ah, I cannot wait to see these cuties more often.