Marilee I Rolled Along

The Administrative Officer of Peace Corps Morocco is a friend of the Programming and Training Officer in Peace Corps Thailand. After her service, Megan (the AO) worked with Marilee (the PTO) in Chicago; when Marilee retired she was then inspired to join Peace Corps. She went to Morocco in Small Business Development before the 2003 evacuation and worked as a staff member on PST when the program restarted. She had already decided to buy a retirement apartment in Paris; she added one in Agadir and had reason to stay in touch with Morocco. She decided she had more to give before retirement and became a Peace Corps Country Director, working in (I may not have them all) Micronesia, the Philippines (!), Moldova and Benin, and was in charge of the Peace Corps Response (!) program in Sri Lanka for a while. Before I left for Thailand, Megan introduced us, with Morocco and Chicago in common, and mentioned that Marilee had a big apartment. Marilee invited me to stay for as long as I wanted; I told her I would love to stay for a couple of days while I got my bearings. She’s the one who told me it was safe to come despite the alarmist news about protests.

Well, a couple of days turned out to be the entire time I was in Thailand – I liked Marilee right away, her apartment was indeed big, and when I told her I had a fantasy that I could leave my big suitcase there while I did road trips and then come back to Bangkok every week or so to do laundry, regroup and repack, she readily agreed (I should mention that even though she had one of those machines that magically washes your clothes, I had brought enough Woolite to do hand wash through Southeast Asia, so I did, except for the time in Yogyakarta when the inn where I stayed had laundry service so inexpensive it was silly not to take advantage of it).

In addition to her being willing to host my bag, she was fun to be with, and she used her visitors as an excuse to get out and do things. She’s retiring for real in June, so I suggested we do things she wanted to do before leaving Thailand. She met me at the airport, and that first weekend we did the Bangkok musts – and then I talked her into a day trip to Sukhothai, one of the UNESCO World Heritage sites – and we went to one of the places she really wanted to see before leaving - Luang Prabang, Laos (I had never heard of it before, and it might have been my favorite place on the trip!); we did more things in Bangkok after I came back from up north (I plan to detail all of these!) and we’re still in touch. Leaving the big bag at her apartment made the travel so much easier – if I had it to do over again, I might have packed differently, but I was, after all, on my way back from two years in Morocco, and I had jettisoned as much in Rabat as I could at the time. Even though I had been told Thailand was great for women traveling alone, I never felt alone, because I had a friend.