Lent Day 1: How to Survive a Year in Morocco

This week, with the passing of our one-year anniversary in country, my mind races back and forth over itself, skimming through the memories, ideas, and thoughts that it has compiled in the last year.

It would be easy to say that success has yet to find me here in the countryside of eastern Morocco. Certainly I have accomplished no projects, I have built no schools, and I don’t think I’ve saved any starving African children from anything. On the surface it’s nothing. I’ve washed away a year drinking tea, watching movies, and learning a language that has little value outside of itself and Morocco. It’s not until I take a moment to assess the fecundity of my situation that I am able to see that there is, in fact, richness in the mundane and success lying deep within the context of my Moroccan life.

While this success is not often measurable, nor even perceivable, I know that my efforts are not in vain. I imagine that every smile I conjure, every cup of tea I drink with someone, every Berber word I learn are all hard earned pennies in a jar. In that context, while no I don’t have a $100 project in the bag, things are adding up to something worthy of my efforts and I need not worry that my time is being wasted.

One year. 365 days of the Moroccan sun rising and setting over me. It is changing me. The person I was leaving my tired-eyed parents in the Minneapolis airport the morning of March 3, 2010 is not the person I am now. Or, I should say, not the same. Like American +, I am Colin+: A new version of the same person. Enhanced in some ways, depleted in others. Different. I’m not expecting to understand the full potential of this change until after I’ve come home.

A year does a lot to ones perception of a place. It enhances it, skews it, and exposes it. I look back to that bus ride from the Casablanca international airport to where we would spend our first night in Morocco and laugh at how excited we were to see shepherds simply hanging out with their flocks of sheep and goats on the side of the highway. Now, I would do anything to find a place away from town where there isn’t one always watching me. I remember my surprise when I found it raining outside the airport. No sand dunes, camels, or hot sun. My perception of Moroccans themselves has changed as well. I am constantly amazed at how generous they can be and disconsoled at how bluntly soliciting they can be. On the same note, I’ve noticed how the perceptions of myself have changed. I am not as openly accepting of difference as I thought I was when I arrived here. My values are much more ethnocentric than I ever thought. I am capable of self-motivation and leadership that I had forgotten was in me.

So, here’s to another year of discovery and success for me and all my fellow one-yearers in whatever way it comes.