Thursday, May 1, 2008
I was supposed to have a meeting this morning at a café with my group, but when I arrived the café was closed and apparently the meeting had been postponed. I met a few more AISECers and they took me to the megamall, where we hung out for a few hours. I talked with Ahmed about the different things he thinks about the US. He says that he dreams to go to the US and he feels as though America is an idealized place where anyone can make money and where everyone wants to go. I was kind of surprised to hear this because it is different from what I have heard from other Moroccans, who generally have a negative view of Americans. In general, they seem to think we are self centered and don't care about other countries or learning about different cultures. Unfortunately, it has been difficult for me to prove otherwise because, although that is a generalization, it's kind of true. For example, Americans don't focus on learning different languages as much as people do in other countries. We also spend more time in school studying the capitals of the states and US history than we do learning the capitals of other countries and learning about world history and current events. It has been brought more to my attention over the past few days by conversations I've had with people I've met. I am supposed to make a presentation about American culure tomorrow at the PBOX opening ceremony, and I'm having a lot of difficulty finding positive things I can say about the US because most people here have such a negative view about it.

While we were at the megamall, the leaders of the AISEC team for PBOX had a meeting completely in french, which I sat in on. I was able to understand about half of what they were saying, and I'm hoping that I can improve my french a lot while I am here. Shortly after I got back to the house after the meeting, the girl from Singapour, Nadia, arrived. She's going to be working on the same project as me. Two of the Moroccan AISECers took us out to lunch/dinner or whatever a meal is at 5 pm here at some kind of shopping mall/food court sort of place. Today was memorial day, so a lot of places were either closed or dangerous to go to because of protests, so we drove kind of a long way to get there.

Tonight, a few of us sat on the roof of the house overlooking the entire city of Rabat. We layed out blankets and had really interesting conversations about so many different things for a few hours, looking at the stars and the clouds. It's amazing to me that I am able to have such intimate conversations with people from such different cultures who I have only known for three days or less, yet it is so comfortable. There are people I have known for years who I do not feel this comfortable talking to. Maybe it's the fact that we are all in a different place and are here to experience new things, or maybe it is these people specifically, but something is very different about how people are here versus how people are at home.

I started thinking a lot today about what I want to do with my life, and I wonder why I have always just assumed I would live in the US. There are so many other places in the world and so many different things to experience that there is really no reason I should limit myself. I feel like I have already learned more just from spending four days here than I could learn in a semester of a history class. I want to make sure that I spend the time to really experience and learn from various cultures around the world while I am still young. Hopefully I'll have more opportunities like this one because I already wish I could stay for longer.