Wedding Bells

… and drums, trumpets, tamborines, violins, oboes, and keyboards. Weddings in Morocco are beautiful.

 The first weekend that we arrived in our CBT site, our host family invited us to a wedding of their relatives. The celebration had started on Friday tattooing all of the bride and groom’s family with intricate Henna, dancing, and food. After getting dressed up in traditional Kaftans, we went on Saturday night to the beautiful tiled villa it was being hosted in. Immediately after arriving, the men and women were separated, and remained that way with some family exceptions for the rest of the night. First, the women ate the wedding meal; 3 whole chickens and afterwards a platter of lamb meat and prunes. Then, the men and women switched. The women hurried outside to see the procession of the bride and groom through the streets; the groom was on a horse, the bride carried beside him, followed by a band and their family dancing and clapping. When everyone had finished eating, the dancing (and waiting) began. Brides in Morocco, with the resources, wear seven dresses for the occasion representing different regions in Morocco. When the bride appeared in her first dress, I glanced at the time. It was 10:30 PM. With a lot more dancing (and waiting) in between each dress change, we left early at 1:30AM, only on the 3^rd dress. The others would be there until dawn after breakfast is served. In short, it was long, loud, colorful, crowded, and I loved every minute of it.

I loved it so much that our host family recreated the experience for us in their living room a week later. We got to have our own mini Moroccan wedding.  With our limited language, putting the pieces of their plan together was perhaps the best part. They told us that the next week we would be doing henna. Yes, awesome; I love henna. A few days later, they asked us to invite the other PCTs to our henna party. Ok, that is nice they want to share the henna. A few days later I understood that with the henna, I would look like a bride. Brides get henna; made sense. All along there seemed to be a lot of excitement about the event, and when they said that Zach would look like a groom and would kiss me on the forehead…we turned to each other and laughed. We were having a wedding. We got home from language lessons for lunch, and sure enough, the house smelled of chicken tagine, dresses were laid out, and the community wedding/party planner was at the house readying her henna. I was instructed to go put some makeup on. Zach was given our host fathers suit to dress up in. The girls in my group and I were dressed to the nines with dresses, crowns, and pounds of jewelry. Zach and I sat on our throne and fed each other dates and milk. He kissed me on the forehead to make it official. We all were indeed henna-ed, and we danced the afternoon away with each new visitor that came. My cheeks were aching from smiling too much/big. Thank goodness I only had 1 dress and the party only lasted 5 hours.