Week One Feelings

View from one of the major roads that leads to the newer part of the city. 

The thing people didn't tell me about going to Morocco is that it is going to be physically hard to live here. Yes, I've reached this point and accomplished so much, I should be excited! But now that I've been here for a little over a week, if I could go back to the beginning of last spring semester, I would tell myself to be prepared for much more than Arabic classes, host families, new friends, lots of sweating, and (sorry) diarrhea. 

If I could go back, I would tell myself to be prepared to feel utterly inadequate in my Arabic skills, to yell at taxi drivers that try to overcharge me because I speak English, to have everyone and their grandmother default to French when speaking to me, to pack a LOT less, to expect feeling homesick, to never have clean feet, to be heartbroken by the amount of poverty around me, to wake up to a falcon casually sitting in my window (!!), to ALWAYS carry around a packet of tissues, to expect lots of interesting... smells.., and so much more. But ya know what? I would also tell myself that all of these things are okay. Why are they okay? Because my roommate is going to be awesome, my classmates are also going to be getting rid of food just as quickly as they ate it, I'll be fortunate enough to own a fan, my host dad is going to be one of the most interesting people I've come across to date, my host mom is going to be so sweet and handle my gluten sensitivity so well, I'll be singing Moroccan songs in cafes with my language partner in no time, I'll laugh at every dinner, and I'll have the opportunity to learn a LOT about people living lives very different than my own. 

If I could go back, I would tell myself it's okay to cry and to feel homesick. It's okay to miss my boyfriend and my family and everything that seems comforting. It's okay to feel like I'm living a life that isn't quite my own as I pass stray cats and begging children on the sides of major roads. It's okay to be upset when I see demolished buildings and houses. It's okay to feel sad and angry when someone knocks over the homeless man's water jug and to see him watch as it spills onto the ground while he throws his hands up in the air and cries. It's okay to feel like I'm in complete and total culture shock and as if I will never get used to seeing these things. 

If I could go back, I would tell myself that no one instagrams the difficult things in Morocco and that life won't be as glamorous as social media makes it seem. I would tell myself that I will be guilty of this too, but to never shy away from talking about those difficult aspects. I would tell myself to take movies like Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets more seriously. I would tell myself that I was straight up going to be seeing a lot of challenging things, things that would trigger a lot of emotions within me. 

One of the main markets in the old part of the city,
filled with people out shopping after breaking their fast. 

My point of saying all this is not to complain, or to say woe is me life is so hard here, my point is to highlight how I personally was so incredibly unprepared for this experience. I could have done so many things differently or been told to be ready for all of these things, but as someone who has never been to a country even remotely close to Morocco before, I don't think that anything or anyone could have prepared me for this. These feelings, thoughts, and sights are all things I needed to experience for myself in order to understand how I would react to them. So if you're a pre-Capstone student reading this, take everything I say with a grain of salt. How I feel may not be how you'll feel, but if you do feel this way, know that you're not the only one. 

There are so many beautiful and fascinating things in this country, the people being the first that comes to my mind. The geography is so diverse and the attention that people pay to their human relationships is something truly special. Don't let the difficulties overshadow these things. This year won't be a walk in the park, but I'll walk through some parks pretty frequently!