I also vote for 'await' here. The 'wait for friends from' construct looks too much like BASIC for my liking. It's not clear which terms are built into the language ('wait', 'for', 'from') and which are not ('friends'). Also, since the eventual result of that line is an assignment to 'friends', using the existing = operator makes the language more consistent.
I'll stick up for the "wait for" syntax here. It seems a lot cleaner to me than trying to shoehorn asynchronous handling into assignment, with all the edge cases that entails.
It's more than assignments looking normal. "await x" is better since it's an expression and not a statement. That is, "await x" will be a placeholder for a value (after the appropriate CPS, of course), while the assignment syntax forces you to use a temporary variable, even if you don't need it.
Unfortunately I don't use those editors — maybe you can write a Vim highlighter next? Might also be worth adding syntax highlighting to the website (even if you have to do it manually for now), if you're set on the current syntax and think highlighting will make that much of a difference.