Hello Rabat

Spent the past weekend in Rabat. Headed up there for a couple of different committee meetings and a meeting with my programming staff regarding some complications I'm having in site. Rabat, about 10-15hours of realistic travel from my site, truly is a different world than the countryside sites of PCVs. Rabat is a modern, cosmopolitan city, filled with well-heeled and well-educated Moroccans, international diplomats and business people, and young and energetic students from the Western world looking for their entrance into the Middle-East. This weekend especially, Rabat was littered with a motley crew of American Peace Corps Volunteers, decked in Chaco's, weekend backpacks, greasy hair, intense farmer's tans, and armed with an odd vocabulary of Tashelheit, Tamazight, Arabic, and French.

Rabat has clean, organized streets, a highly functional train station, and is built-up like any well-established medium-sized European city. The city is a 173 degree flip from my countryside (bled) home further south. In the bled, I wake to the sound of donkey calls and screaming roosters and the rustic scent of burning brush as my host mother fires up the mud-oven to bake her daily batch of fresh flat bread. I currently spend my days in site chatting with men in the fields, eating tajine and couscous, convincing folks of my purpose (which, let's be honest, I'm still not sure what it is), and generally wondering aimlessly as I try to make sense of my presence in such a rural village, virtually untouched by foreigners. I've spent more time in the bled than in any Moroccan city, watching herds of sheep and goats trek through olive and fig groves, fields of wheat and barley. I go weeks at a time without conversing in intellectual English in a site where women, covered in veil and cloaked in loose Berber textiles, will not eat in the same room as men. The women in my site turn their heads when in passing, a tall, bearded man with a funky accent greets them with a textbook, scripted mouthful of Godly jargon. And then I step off the train in Rabat Centre Ville, where women dressed in high-heels, tight jeans, low-cut t-shirts, and eye-makeup sit in cafes sipping espresso drinks, intellectualizing over the conflict in Gaza or chatting about the latest Zara or Mango fashion.

In Rabat, everything seems familiar to my past life in the US, but simultaneously stands in stark contrast to that with which I'm most quickly and painfully becoming familiar in the bled. And these upside down worlds of Morocco confuse me. A lot. As my comfort level in Morocco increases, this blur will, insha'llah, come into focus. I'll be better able to situate myself and my worldviews in relation to the unique dynamics and diversity of Morocco. So while Rabat and many other Moroccan cities currently perplex me bizzaaf, I readily welcome the challenge of figuring this country out.