I am sorry I haven’t been blogging this month! It’s not because I am so busy, I have just neglected my blog. Today I read my sister’s and was reminded how fun it is to be able to read about people’s experiences so I’ll try to be good and blog a little more.
I finally went to the church here which was an interesting experience….well weird is really the right word. It was great but weird b/c the service was so American and I was expecting it to be more, I dunno, African? Anyways I’ll be going back so maybe I’ll have more to write on it later. There were no Moroccans in the church because it would be illegal for them to be there. It was all Europeans, Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans. It was strange sitting in church and hearing the call to prayer from the mosques outside and yet there is something so right about that. There are very few places in the world where a mosque and a church can sit so peacefully beside each other. That is how Morocco is, a place full of so many contradictions and yet delicately balanced in a peaceful position. I must say that the king of Morocco does an incredible job of keeping peace in a place that faces so much pressure from every direction. He has the Islamic/Arab world on his back constantly pressuring him to be a good Islamic country and from the other side the Western worlds of America and Europe who have been good allies (well America at least).
Two of my friends that I met at the cyber by house got married last weekend! I didn’t go sadly because I was in a different city, but I got to see lots of pictures. It was a two day event and weddings here last a very long time with a ton of music and food involved. The wedding on Saturday was a wedding thrown by the groom’s family and it was in a different part of town while the one on Sunday was thrown by the bride’s family and was here in the medina. The wedding started at 6pm and went until 3am! The bride changes dresses several time, my friend had 6 different dresses (or kaftans rather) and they were all different colors. I saw pictures of her in a red one a white one and a green one; they were all beautiful!
So I went to the city of Fes which was so so cool. I think I would like it better than Rabat if it was on the coast and if I knew people there. It is so quintessential Moroccan. The medina is the largest in Morocco with somewhere around 9,000 different streets/alleys, which we thought would be a problem but after living here for so long we seemed to get a lot more lost when we were outside of the medina than in it. Our friend’s told us to go to this awesome scarf shop that they loved and where they know the guys that work there. With their vague instructions which went something like “when you see a tricked out door on your right take the creepy alley way on the left…”(you get the idea) we managed to find it. Just goes to show how use to the layouts of the cities we are. Fes was a great city but I always love coming back to Rabat, which has become home.
We are on our independent study time right now which has been rather stressful and I’m nervous I’m not going to get all the information or interviews that I need. Plus I’m one of those people that needs pressure on me to get work done so 4 weeks with no schedule, well let’s just say I don’t know where those first 3 weeks went! Thankfully I have an incredible advisor for my paper and sometimes it helps to be an American abroad because the people at the UN think I’m more important than I really am. Today I got a call on my cell phone from the project director at the UNHCR trying to set me up with an interview for next week. So I’m pretty sure my project will get done .
It has been great getting to know locals my own age more. Through my traveling if I’ve learned anything at all it’s that it doesn’t matter where you are but rather who you are with. Like an old Moroccan saying goes, “choose your travel companion before you chose your road”, or something along those lines. I’ve had some great conversations with my neighbor who is 23 and speaks almost perfect English. Sometimes we talk about his future, which he is very pessimistic about. It is sad because he has no hope for his future. He is graduating from college soon and is searching for an internship preferably outside of Morocco. He is looking into places like India and China. If anyone knows of a marketing internship in the states he could have let me know! He doesn’t believe he will be able to find a job and he has given up hoping and dreaming for things. He told me he doesn’t like to hope for things because they never happen. At home I think if someone said this people might respond with something like “oh just work really hard and you will be able to get a good job”. Here it doesn’t really matter how hard you work it is very rare that people work themselves out of poverty. It is all about who you know and how much money you have.
My program is ending in 2 weeks but I am staying until the end of June insha’allah (God willing). I can’t imagine going home in 2 weeks! I am not ready! It will be nice to be here and not have the pressure of school. I have one more week living with my host family who has been so great to me and been such a blessing to have. I will be moving out of the medina and into an apartment in the Kasbah with another friend who is staying all summer. The kasbah is just across a big street from the medina, overlooks the ocean and is a lot prettier and cleaner than the medina. The only down side is that there aren’t markets in the Kasbah it is all residential with a few shops along the main street. It will be a beautiful place to live and less hectic than the medina. I could probably stay with my family here in the medina if I wanted but it will be nice to have the freedom to come and go as I please and eat what I want when I want… that kind of thing. Also I will probably be spending my time tutoring a child in English 3 time a week, going to the beach (if it ever gets warm! It is warmer in Boston than here now!) and maybe traveling a little.
I leave for Turkey in two weeks and please keep it in your prayers since there was just a terrorist attack there in the city of Ankara. I’m meeting Brishon, Alizabeth, Mark (who currently are all in Nepal), Barrett, Barry and Patty all in Izmir. Hopefully I will meet up with Barrett and Barry in Istanbul and then we have the same flight to Izmir. Ok well I will try to blog more a little later b/c I have a lot more to say but this is long enough :o). Baslaama!
