Morocco: Final thoughts

I still remember my Irish dancing teacher’s last words to me before I left for Morocco last January. 

“Of all the people I know, I’d have never thought it’d be you to go all the way to Africa,” she said, grinning wide. “If you told me you were going as far as Revere [MA], I’d have been just as surprised.”

For 16 years, I feared Rita O’Shea about as much as I admired her. From a young age, I knew that dance class time wasn’t the time to fool around... she made that pretty clear to me the day she kicked me out of class for misbehaving on the dance floor. I was only 4 years old and probably hyped up on sugar, but I was wasting her time and she wasn't afraid to tell me. During the years I danced under her name, Rita’s propensity to speak her mind is what scared me most. To be fair, it still scares me. She has never been, and probably never will be, one to sugar coat things.

But these days, it also happens to be the quality I admire most about her. She’s candid; she tells you exactly what she thinks whether you’re ready to hear it or not.  It might not always be what you want to hear and sometimes what she says might be best taken with a grain of salt, but every once in a while, Rita says exactly what you need to hear.  

Still, her parting words came as a shock to me. I moved nearly 1,000 miles away from home three years ago; what was another few thousand miles? I let it go, though, because I imagined that despite how normal it all seemed to me at the time, she probably couldn’t help but think back to the 4-year-old she first knew me as — the quiet girl who all but refused to dance on stage at the family ceili and only reluctantly agreed to do so with tears in her eyes and the promise of taking home one of the ceramic pumpkin centerpieces. She was likely referring to the teenager whose anxiety manifested itself in some pretty unfortunate ways before and after every major Irish dancing competition, and the now 21-year-old college student who visits dance class every time she's home because she isn’t ready to say goodbye to the community she grew up in. All of this was, and still is, a big part of who I am.  

So when Rita said almost the same thing last May, I just smiled and shook my head. I knew that her words were merely a reflection on the version of me she had known so well for 16 years. That girl, I realized, will always be a part of me, increasing in complexity from the experiences that shape her. In other words, Rita showed me, likely without intending to, that I can be both the girl I just described and the girl who boards a flight to Morocco, nearly 5,000 miles away from everything familiar to her. Sometimes, it takes the help of others to peel back the layers of ourselves we don’t realize we haven’t yet shed. 

After hearing it for the second time, I found myself less concerned with what Rita said and more interested in remembering why I had chosen Morocco in the first place. It was a question I had been asked quite a bit, sometimes out of genuine curiosity and other times, unfortunately, as if to suggest I was crazy. I initially chose Morocco because of the program it offered: field experience in journalism and language study in Arabic. But I wanted more out of my study abroad than a line on my resume; I wanted to immerse myself in a different culture. I wanted to live and learn in an area of the world and among people who are too often misunderstood and misrepresented by the media. I wanted to escape the safe walls of Loyola's campus with the expectation of getting lost, frustrated and challenged at every turn. In Morocco, that's exactly what happened.  I woke up most mornings to the sound of the call to prayer. I walked home from school each day on roads covered in a day's worth of trash. I ate dinner each night with a family who didn’t speak the same language as me and I relearned how to accomplish basic daily tasks like how to shower and use the bathroom, how to shop and how to eat. Tasks that initially appeared impossible soon became routine.

For all those reasons and many more, Morocco wasn’t the study abroad experience I envisioned for myself as a high school student preparing to begin classes at Loyola. I didn’t come home with a long list of wild nights out on the town, nor can I say I visited a different country every weekend. What works for one person might not work for another, and I knew that wasn’t the experience I had set out for. I returned home missing Morocco in the same way I had missed Chicago — my other home away from home — while I was there. I ached for things like the sound of my home-stay sisters’ squeals of laughter, the taste of mama Naima’s tagines, or for one more night listening to Gnawa music in the desert. I never imagined I could miss a place that challenged me as much as Morocco did. 
 
In the weeks that passed after my return to Boston, I found it harder and harder to respond when people asked, “How was Morocco?” I no longer felt satisfied simply saying that it had been incredible, because that barely scratched at the surface. If people asked for stories, I gave them stories. The more Morocco began to feel like a distant memory, though, the more I was forced to think about the experience in its entirety rather than the individual days that made up the 15 weeks I spent there. Morocco was a learning experience in every way imaginable as an American student abroad, a journalist, and ultimately, as a human being. So this post, which is just as much for me as it is for all those who kept up with my travels abroad, reflects on just a few things I learned as I stumbled my way through a semester in Rabat. In a way, this is my final goodbye to a spring spent in the North African Kingdom. 

1. The universal language isn't English, nor is it any of the other major languages of the world; it's the language we understand in the words not said. Despite the fact that most of the Moroccan students I befriended spoke English with pretty high fluency, we conversed in a combination of French, English and basic Arabic (standard and Moroccan). Conversation with them was easy; we seamlessly blended the three languages, switching from one language to the next at the drop of a dime. Unfortunately, conversation didn’t come quite as easy at home, where only my host brother spoke a language other than the Moroccan dialect. For several weeks, I anticipated family meals with knots in my stomach, dreading the discomfort of feeling like an outsider looking in and preparing myself for the inevitable exhaustion that would follow the hour I’d spend trying to keep up with the conversation that whizzed past my head. I soon came to realize, however, that my worries were misguided. I could participate in the conversation if I connected with the family in a way that didn’t rely so much on words. I consider myself pretty good at reading people, but I was too caught up in the need to understand every word of the conversation — for that to matter. As soon as I accepted that this wasn’t a realistic expectation for myself, I began to pick up on when to laugh, who to comfort or, if I was feeling particularly confident, what to say. On my last day in Rabat, I didn’t have the words in my vocabulary to express my gratitude to the family who took me in for two months. I understood Naima when she said that their home would always be mine, but beyond that, words were only going to get us so far. I could see in her face and I could feel in her embrace that we didn’t need words at all to convey what we wanted to say. The most important part of our conversation, it turned out, was the conversation that took place in the silence that fell between us.
2. Differences between us are merely a way to uncover similarities.  We desire human connection because it gives us a sense of purpose, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. More often than not, however, we connect with people who are similar to us (in looks, in beliefs, in culture, etc.), for the sole reason that its an easier conversation to start than the alternative. But when we let this happen, we confine ourselves to one way of thinking; we close our minds to anything we perceive as different and thus reducing opportunities for personal growth. In Morocco, the people I met and the friends I made proved to me that regardless of how different we appear on the surface, we’re all more similar that we realize. Our differences, I learned, could be used as the starting point of a conversation that would inevitably lead to discovering something we shared in common. Sometimes, it was trivial things like a mutual dislike for guacamole; other times, it was discovering that our religious upbringings, although different in faith, were pretty similar. At the core of it all, we share at least one thing in common: we’re human — striving to connect with, to understand, and to be accepted by others. In Morocco, it became all the more apparent that the effort I make to connect and the kind of friend I am to others is far more important to me than any line on my resume. 
3. When there's more than one way to accomplish something, who’s to say there’s a right way? This could, of course, be applied to most aspects of daily life in Morocco for an American. From how I showered to how I ate, I had a lot to learn in the first few weeks I spent with my host family in the medina. This also happened to be one of the major lessons I learned as a student journalist reporting in a foreign country. The story I set out to accomplish for my independent study project wasn’t free of a few curve balls, but the challenges I faced in what felt like the final moments of the semester gave me practice in thinking on my feet and planning for the unexpected. Several panicked emails to my Academic Director later, I realized that although my situation hadn’t been ideal, I had inadvertently been handed an amazing opportunity that I wouldn’t have had if everything had gone according to plan. 
4. Asking for help speaks more to a person's courage or strength than it reflects on a weakness. A few months into the semester, a friend asked me to define strength. In the moment, I came up with a half-formulated response that I thought answered her question. I revisited my definition a few weeks later, realizing that there was more to the word than I initially thought. I modified it so as to include the following: Strength is asking for help. Its having the courage to expose a weakness, or to admit that you don't have all the answers you need. The latter is twice as hard when you believe that everyone around you already has the answers. I believed all of this to be true and still found it incredibly difficult to put into practice, especially when turning to chocolate was a cheap, tasty and, quite frankly, easier option as someone who prefers to keep most things to myself and opens up to very few. Learning to ask for help turned out to be one of the hardest adjustments I made, but also one of the most worthwhile. Whether it was asking my host brother to translate a message to my host mother, sending a panic-stricken email to my Academic Director to inform her that my story might fall flat, or confessing to a friend that I was struggling with something personal, I was constantly reminded that it’s okay — and sometimes necessary — to reach out for help. I don’t think I would have been as successful in Morocco as I was without the constant support of friends, family and staff in Rabat and in the U.S., and for that I’m grateful.

So then, you ask, how was Morocco? It was experiencing something new almost every day. It was scrambling to find ways to communicate with someone when I didn’t have the vocabulary to. It was hectic family dinners at 10 p.m. and quiet breakfasts of bread and tea before school. It was long bus rides, soccer games on the beach, and beers in Ceuta. It was the chaotic, trash-covered medina of Rabat that I learned to love in spite of what the crowds did to my blood pressure. It was meeting people who challenged me to think differently. It was watching my host sisters sing and dance to Gangnam Style until we were called downstairs to eat. It was walking through the deserted medina late at night after all the shops had closed and the street cleaning had begun. It was couscous Fridays that gave a completely new meaning to the phrase, “I'm full.” It was establishing friendships with shopkeepers and becoming regulars at King’s Sandwich. It was long days at NGOs and late nights on the terrace. It was the kind owner of Arab Cafe instinctively offering me toilet paper when I approached the cafe counter to ask to use the bathroom behind it. It was this happening, and me shaking my head to say no, I only came to ask for another cup of coffee, please. It was conversations in French and broken Arabic with cab drivers, and spontaneous nights at the club that turned into mornings. It was street harassment at a level I'd never experienced before and it was cats, oh so many cats. It was meeting some of the most welcoming people I’ve ever met, but also meeting some of the least. It was creating lasting friendships in Morocco and strengthening the old ones at home. 

In one sentence, Morocco was my home away from home.