I've been on the road for the past two weeks with about another week to go. And in two days I will hit the exact half-way point of my time in Morocco. I've been out of touch for a while, so I'll just put up a couple short scenes from the past two weeks here:
Krista and I arrived at the Tetouan spring camp, held in a 'welcome center' belonging to the ministry of youth and sports. The students were sitting around, looking visibly embarrassed and not talking very much. I sat next to a man who turned out to be the father of one of the advanced girls. I was not prepared for the conversation- as normally I'm gathering myself for inappropriate comments on Jews and Islamic proselytizing. Instead, he told me that the biggest lie ever told to the people was religion. He said it is used to control people, make them submit, and keep them from rising up. Moreover, he also explained how all of human society is like a virus on the earth and it would be better off without us. I didn't know that it was possible to even say things like that in the Arabic language. But apparently you can and I was blown away. I knew right there that the camp would be with a different cohort of kids than I'd seen before.
Last summer we worked at the orphan camp where kids didn't have toothbrushes or soap and were regularly beaten by the staff. In Tetouan, I taught kids who had iPhones, Blackberrys, and I even saw an iPad. This was not the Morocco I know. Krista even saw the head of the camp poke fun at somebody else for praying. Totally different from every other work experience here. And because of that, it was awesome! Working with privileged kids is easy.
However, on one occasion during the week we were thrust back into real Morocco. We went on a field trip to a small village where the ministry was training future camp counselors. They were being trained to run camps more similar to our orphan camp than our iPad camp. Krista and I stuck close together for most of the day but near the end I drifted away from her for a minute or two, only to turn around and see a tight circle of male future-counselors pressing in on her. I wandered up to them only to hear myself being pointed out as her 'husband'. That is to say, they were trying to figure out if she was available. It is not appropriate to ask a Moroccan woman if she is married but apparently it's fair game to ask a white woman. The guy who had asked turned around and tried to offer me his hand, and I recognized him as the one who had been shouting the old 'ca-va, ca-va bien?' in the sickly-infantile-while-simultaneously-aggressive manner of the Moroccan street-harasser. So I didn't shake his hand. Then I was told that I should really be humble, we're all here together, blah blah blah and I asked why the hell everybody was circling around my wife (albeit my fake wife), which won one of the guys over to my side. Then the original asshole asked me if I wanted to go smoke hash in his apartment, tried to explain how wonderful Islam is, and then told me his father has three wives. As always, the conversation, if you can call it that, moved to Islam and how we must become Islamic and how sinful it is that Krista isn't pregnant yet because that's the whole point of marriage. They pushed and pushed and I eventually told them that I have read the Quran. Then I got a question from one of the young women: 'so, how did you feel? how did it make you feel when you read it, didn't you feel something special when you did?'. I said no and the interview was over shortly afterward.
There's a serious empathy-deficit going on here. A close-mindedness which is sometimes astonishing. They thought, how could somebody read it and not be instantly swayed over to Islam? There is zero, zero recognition that different people have different beliefs which they hold with just as much conviction. This is a serious problem with Morocco if it ever wants to exist comfortably in the modern world, and it's a major reason why I think, were there to be a revolution here similar to Egypts, and a popular government were to arise, it would be significantly more fundamentalist than the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
After that camp we headed up north to some of the Spanishy towns like Tangiers, Asilah, and Larache. (You can see my travel map at the top and right of this page). We spent a night in a volunteer's small village outside of Tangier. Once again, doing so put our site and service into perspective. She gets her water from a well, lives among sheep and cow fields, has to cross a stream to go to work, and is only given 3 or 4 hours a day of work at her youth center. Those hours are conveniently during the school day so no students can come. It is a tough site and fortunately she's being sent somewhere with more work opportunities, although it has taken the Peace Corps almost a year to acquiesce.
It was during this time that I heard about the Boston bombing. It is strange to watch the story unfold from afar. I don't know what else to say.
I arrived in Rabat/Qenitra and Krista headed back to site. We spent a day in Rabat and met somebody who's in the process of being 'medically separated' from the PC - his country had been Liberia. He was adamant that his service was oh sooo much more intense than ours and their lives down in Liberia are sooo difficult we aren't really in the Peace Corps. Kind of maddening. Every person has a different experience, every country is different, and they're all difficult for their own reasons.
Now I'm waiting for a training in Rabat to start on Monday. Then it'll be back to town. I apologize for the rambling, poorly-written post.
