SSFF: Shwiya B Shwiya

Articles, Ongoing Series, Snake Snake Fish Fish

SSFF: Shwiya B Shwiya

May 16, 2025

3–5 minutes

Snake Snake Fish Fish is an ongoing series based around Thai idioms/phrases/colloquialisms, written about and illustrated by Kiera Hurley and guest contributors.

GUEST EDITION: This week, Dani Meyer is the contributing author of the Snake Snake Fish Fish column. This article was not written by a Peace Corps Thailand volunteer currently serving in country. Instead, we get a small glimpse into service, language, and culture in a country where Peace Corps Volunteers have served since 1963, nearly as long as we have been in Thailand. Thank you Dani, for sharing a bit of your experience with us!

If you’d like to learn more about life in Morocco, check out the literary magazine PeaceWorks Morocco, follow their Instagram account, and head over to Spotify to listen to the PeaceTalks Podcast – including the episode where Dani and Destiny interview part of the Sticky Rice Admin team!

From the PC Archives, Morocco in the 60s

Dani Meyer, YinD Morocco

“And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.”
– Author Brandon Sanderson

Ask any PCV in Morocco about a Moroccan saying they learned within their first week of being in Morocco, and they’ll tell you about shwiya b shwiya (شوية بشوية).

Before I came to Morocco, I worked in the deep unending grayness of corporate America; I had a strict schedule that involved waking up at six in the morning to take the train to work, followed by sitting in my cubicle until I could log out for the day, and doing it all again the next day. Coming to Peace Corps, many of us come with the dream, or even expectation, that we are going to make huge, sweeping changes in our communities; that we are going to, singlehandedly, with our American productivity and efficiency and work ethic, enact wonderful programs that will make a huge difference in peoples’ lives.

In Morocco, everything moves just a bit slower.

I walk over to my host family’s house at noon for lunch, and we don’t eat until 2 or 3 pm. We sit around, drinking tea and chatting for hours, with no work-oriented goals in mind, just to spend time with each other. I go to work and wait for half an hour for students to even show up. This was a hard adjustment at first; I was used to everything running on a tight schedule, to having specific times in which everything would be done. I had to slow myself down, to realize that it’s okay if not everything happens in the most timely of manners.

Everything about my life in Morocco has been a lesson in shwiya b shwiya – little by little. Whether we’re talking about learning Moroccan Arabic, adjusting to the culture, or getting used to eating dinner at midnight or even 1 am, my life has become a study in doing things slowly. It’s been lovely, really, to have the time to take these two years and three months just to breathe, to take stock of my life, to slow down and enjoy the times I spend sitting around a table with fifteen other people, eating couscous out of one shared dish.

And, when I think back on my corporate life in the US, I realize this was something I was missing and, indeed, one of the reasons I applied to Peace Corps in the first place. To have the time to call my parents and grandparents every week; to help my host mom make bread by hand; to read all the books I never had time to read while working a 9-to-5. Isn’t it funny? The very things I was deeply craving that were a source of deep frustration at the beginning of my service.

It is only after, just over a year and a half of living here, that I think I’m beginning to truly take to heart that maybe life is not just a collection of waiting in between the big moments; maybe the little moments, the living slowly, are really the moments that make life worth living.