Casablanca or Bust

I leave for Morocco in an hour. Literally an hour - I'm sitting at the gate at JFK, waiting for my flight to leave. This time tomorrow, I'll be in Fes.

I'm really calm about all this. I expected that at the last hour, I would be awash with nerves and second guessing myself, but all I really feel is excited. I was worried before I left for staging, the one day long orientation in Philadelphia where we turned in our paperwork and got our government employee passports. For the past two weeks, I've had this free-floating anxiety that latched onto to really random things that didn't matter (including how I should have studied more for my planetary geology class 4+ years ago which, while true, is also irrelevant at this point). I wasn't worried about anything specific. I've done the expat thing and I'm pretty confident that I can handle whatever Morocco throws at me, however naive that is, but I was still worried and nervous and anxious.

And then I got to the airport at Asheville and said my goodbyes (which were awful and heartbreaking and I'm choking up thinking about it) and walked through security and poof, all the butterflies beating in my stomach disappeared. The die was cast, I'm was on my way, and while I'm still apprehensive about things* I'm not nervous anymore. Now I'm just excited. It's time to do this thing.

* We had a whole session about our worries at staging. Camel spiders and sexual harassment were chief amongst our concerns.