Coronavirus and our Casablanca Command Center
At 2pm, 23 of us were checked into Ryanair flight 3553, scheduled departure time 12:55pm. There was very little leading up to this. We confirmed our booking at 5:45am in the van from Casablanca to Marrakesh that morning after a buzzing 1am hotel conference room session. The previous evening our program director in the US prepared us to hunker down in Morocco until April 1 at the soonest. Rapid changes filled the week leading up to this, and our itinerary hit the fan from initially going to Peru on April 7, to potentially staying in Morocco for the remainder of the semester, to leaving asap. However, the Moroccan government suspended all international passenger flights faster than our asap departure. Also, with no warning. After the suspension, a few select airlines were permitted to fly for all the dimwits like us stuck in Morocco (I heard 3,000 US citizens but forget the source, plus loads of Europeans). In the meantime, our program di