Different Worlds

            Since my last post I’ve been in near constant motion.  First I went to Rabat to attend a meeting of Peace Corps Morocco’s SIDA (AIDS) Committee.  The purpose of this committee is to create, organize, and present resources to help volunteers in Morocco counter SIDA and teach about sexual health in general, a very difficult topic to broach in this culture.  I was appointed as a representative for my stage (the group I came in with) a couple of months ago, but since the meetings are quarterly this was my first.

            The meeting went very well, and I’m excited for the extra work I was able to pick up from it, which will keep me doing something useful during the upcoming slow summer months, but what I really want to write about is Rabat itself.  I’ve talked before, and at length, about how Rabat is very different from the rest of the country, but again this hit home in my last trip, perhaps even harder than before.

            The very first thing I did this trip was finally visit the Rabat archeological museum.  The museum is small but fantastic, especially a room full of bronze sculptures from Volubilis.  During my visit there was also a school group (they were Moroccans, but, strangely, the teacher was speaking in Spanish).  I couldn’t help but think about how different these kids lives are from those in my town.  For these city kids, history is something tangible, something real, and they can see evidence of the various civilizations that have lived in Morocco.  They have something to get excited by in history.  In contrast, a few kids in my town don’t even know the Arabic word for museum.  I was talking about it with a group of students, and I know I said the word right, because about half of them knew what I meant.  The others just didn’t know what one was.

            Later, I met up with my old LCF (Arabic teacher).  As always it was a pleasure to hang out with him, but he had some bad news for me.  He has been applying to graduate school in the States, and he even got accepted to a program, but it was only at that late stage that they told him the fellowship he wanted wouldn’t be available to him until after a year of extra study because his Moroccan undergraduate degree isn’t considered equivalent to an American B.A.  Apparently one of the sticking points is that Moroccan degrees are done in three years, rather than four!  Without the fellowship he can’t afford to go, though the school says that after a year of graduate study in Morocco they’ll consider his credentials again.  This whole debacle is awful for two reasons.  Firstly, the fact that they didn’t tell him until so late that he’d need an extra credential, forcing him to spin his wheels for awhile.  Secondly, that they even need this credential and won’t instead judge him on the quality of his academic record as it stands.  I’ve read both long research papers he wrote at the end of university, and both are fantastic and of comparable quality to American undergraduate theses.

            I tell this story because it is indicative of a larger problem facing the third world, how hard it is to get out.  Qualified people like my LCF should not just be able to get out of their countries to study, it ought to be encouraged so that eventually they can come back and hopefully do much better development work than we foreign interloper Peace Corps Volunteers ever could.  The hoops people have to jump through make this very difficult, and all the people who keep pushing through and trying, like my LCF, impress me a lot.

            After hanging out and talking about Hemingway—in the last year my friend has discovered a new love for 1920s American literature, go figure—we parted ways and I met up with another acquaintance, another young, university educated Moroccan.  We talked about my experiences living in the bled (countryside) and like at the museum I was quickly reminded how different things are in the big city vs. my rural village.  A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a student in English and casually used the word “evolve,” which he didn’t know.  I explained both the sense I’d meant (something changing) and the scientific theory.  Surely, I was told, I couldn’t believe that.  I’ve since talked with a bunch of people in my town, and so far as I can tell, regardless of education level, everyone here is a creationist.  One person believed in a symbolic, rather than literal, seven days.  I don’t even know where this comes from, the seven-day creation is not even in the Quran as I recall, though it could be mentioned in a hadith or a Moroccan folk tradition.  Another believed in the possibility of animal evolution, but told me in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t believe humans evolved from animals because that would mean there was no God.  I couldn’t see the connection, but tried to explain the idea of intelligent design as a middle ground, but no one would have it.  In Rabat though my friend, a passionate Muslim, found no disconnect between evolution and Islam.  Here was a place where the divide between rural and urban Morocco lined up nicely with the divide between rural and urban America.  Perhaps a lot of the things I find so strange in rural Morocco would seem less bizarre if I came from a different part of America.

            Returning home I discovered that the scheduling issues plaguing my Toubkal climb had worked themselves out, so a counterpart and I travelled down to Marrakech to make reservations.  I’d been less than twenty-four hours home.  My counterpart and I climbed up to the refuge where we will spend the night before attempting the summit with students in a month.  The service and amenities there are pretty bad, but nothing out of line with either cheap, backpacking hostels in Europe, or cheap Moroccan tourist hotels.  Admittedly, the staff did treat us particularly poorly, at dinner they gave bread to all the tables, and the basket on our table was obviously of much older (rock hard) bread, and they wouldn’t give us any of the better bread from another table until we promised to shut up if they ate some of the stuff they’d given us.  Which they couldn’t, unless they wanted to chip a tooth.  For me, nothing of note in the world of cheap Moroccan travel, but I’m fairly certain my friend has never been more offended in his life.  Moroccans don’t stay at the same cheap hotels as foreigners do, and on the rare occasions we foreigners do stumble into a Moroccan hotel they tend to try and fleece us so the cheap tourist places end up being better.  Never having travelled with a foreigner before this was all news to my counterpart, and I think by the end of it he was as angry with how his country’s cheap tourist industry treated me as I am with how my country’s education system treated my LCF.  By the end of our two day sojourn my friend would insist I stay back whenever negotiating prices so that the person wouldn’t see me and double the price, though happily I noticed that after we got out of the trap of transportation to and from the mountain the prices my counterpart got for things were the same as what I usually get.  I wonder how much of that is people being more honest away from the mountain and how much is my Moroccan Arabic.

            In defense of the budget Moroccan tourist industry, while at times it is awful it hits the opposite extreme just as often.  Our students had asked if we could spend the night after the climb in Marrakech rather than at the foot of the mountain before heading home; we told them we’d look at the cost.  There is a budget hotel in Marrakech that gives good deals to Peace Corps Volunteers, so we swung by them first to see if we could get a deal.  I’d hoped to get a price somewhere between the ridiculously low Peace Corps price and their regular price, which would be too much money for what we have with the grant.  After explaining the project they offered us the Peace Corps price for all the students, saving us forty dirhams per person from the projected price on the grant.  Although most of these savings will find their way back into the Peace Corps country fund I’m going to ask the grant manager if I can take a little to pay the entrance fees for a landmark or two in Marrakech, see if I can’t make history a little more tangible for these bled students.