Hey you,

Let’s start of with a picture of this place to get you going.

And this was our guest house. We were right on top of the sea, and when it was high tide, the place was packed with surfers fighting for a wave. As you can guess we spent quite some time just sitting around, enjoying the view.

However, this story isn’t just about Imsouane (say ‘Im-swan’). Imsouane was just the magical place where we were when something amazing happened. Something we had never expected to occur.

It started out in Essaouira (say ‘Eh-swirra’), a larger town attracts a lot of tourists because it offers you everything Moroccan, minus the chaos. Why is that? My guess is because long ago the town was started by the Portuguese and they did something unknown to Morocco at that time: they planned the city. They drew up roads, designated areas for public use and made it all a little more recognizable for the western mind. So the city is quite organised, and that makes it all really easy and chill.

In Essaouira, as everyone went out to discover the fish markets and stroll along the beach, I decided to put pen to paper and make a little flyer for the idea Ellis and I had for helping charities for free. We’d already been working long and hard on it, but most of it was still in our head. This flyer just outlined what we wanted, what we could and what we were searching for. When I was done I showed it to Ellis, she refined it, and then we pressed ‘send,’ to get the word out.

As I always do when I’m done with something on the computer I close it, go do something else and forget all about it (strangely, people don’t like this. You send a message, they reply and then your next reply is four days later…sorry, mom ????).

When we were in Essaouira, some people liked the post, some family and friends who shared it, but it wasn’t until we came to Imsouane that it went all over the place.

Now, Imsouane is not just any place. For instance, we met a guy here who’d been to the other surfer towns along the cost between Essaouira and Agadir but fell in love with Imsouane. We met him three hours after he got here and said, with no hint of sarcasm: “I can see myself living here for years.” He was there for three hours. That’s the kind of place Imsouane is.

‍

What’s so special about it? It’s just really relaxed. There’s not much there, and that’s the charm. All you can do is surf, hang around and eat some nice tajine’s, couscous and msemen (why were we never told about msemen before? We LOVE it!) And surfing is kind of all everyone does, except me. Ellis also went out and caught some nice waves (or do I need to say ‘groovy’?)

In Imsouane, on the second morning, I opened my laptop and then I saw them. Messages. Lots of messages. We got all over the world, and suddenly we’re in touch with all kinds of charities we could help out on our journey. We were amazed. Not least at how amazed other people were at what we wanted to do.

For us, our trip around the world helping charities for free doesn’t feel like a big thing. The impact the two of us can make is just not that enormous. So when we saw people talking about how big our hearts were we felt overwhelmed (and kinda scared, can we really pull this off?)

Now, three days later, we are in contact with charities in Liberia, Uganda, Mozambique, Indonesia, the Philipines, Nepal, Bosnia, and Colombia. That’s EIGHT charities. If, God willing, we reach them all, we’re already 3/4ths done for the goal we set for the entire year.

Though, as you can see…these charities are quite far apart, and flight tickets aren’t cheap. But we’ll fix that problem when we get there. Because if we can find eight charities, eight foundations doing amazing things all over this world, then we can surely find a way to reach them.

We have a fantastic year behind us, with our wedding and starting our never-ending honeymoon, but we’re going to work our asses off to make 2019 our best year ever.

Let’s go!

Here’s some pictures of our time in Imsouane:

‍