El Hajeb

Town in the Fès-Meknès region of Morocco, south of Meknes. See Morocco.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Peace Corps - The Great Adventure	Peace Corps	setting	Orin Hargraves’s town, where a neighbour’s shouted request makes him feel he belongs.

Source: Peace Corps - The Great Adventure · Readwise highlight

I lived in the upstairs apartment of a beautiful colonial-period villa in the part of the town that had been built by the French.

Role: setting
In the book: In “Neighbors” (Orin Hargraves, Morocco 1980–82), the author returns to El Hajeb in late August after summer training in Rabat and finds it a comedown. He lives upstairs in a French-built villa and walks to the post office along tree-lined streets as a storm comes in. His downstairs neighbour shouts up in Arabic, asking him to tell Aisha to put the goats in the shed, and the casual request makes him feel accepted.
Why it matters: The whole essay is set here, and its turn depends on his being the lone American in a small town. In a big city like Rabat, the moment of being an ordinary neighbour would not land.