I almost walked to the church—to see if pastor Brown (not Wald III) was there—but then I realized that that would be choosing to talk to a pastor rather than write. I’m not sure it’s even enough that I chose to come here, to Arab Café, where I have been at least 50 times, because I considered going to a pastor—going to a pastor—at all. But so I’m just going to trust this. Yesterday and today I am or, was, participating in this conference: Find Your Voice: A Cross-Cultural Forum on Political Participation and Civic Activism. It was something to do [View Full Entry]

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I met this guy Nabil when I was in Granada. He was talking about terrorism and immigration when I met him, about how Morocco has one policy towards both groups adopted from the US and Europe, one and the same, but he really looks like he's a big 12. He is very clean, and nice, and speaks perfect Spanish though he himself is from Rabat, and the other day I was sitting in Le Grand Comptoir and right there in he walked. He started speaking to me in Spanish and I understood what I was saying before I understood that he [View Full Entry]

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I've been putting this one off. But my mother is convinced that people—i.e. the three of you reading this—want to read my ill inward looking thoughts about being in Spain, coming from Morocco. For better or for worse, I really did see Western Civ—represented by Spain—in a light I had never seen it in before. But I can only do it in snippets: 1) On the top of the steps of some glass-windowed well-endowed museum, two Moroccan teenagers spread out staring up into the sun. The time of day when Spain empties for its siesta, hard to shake the awareness that [View Full Entry]

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On my way to write this I passed a protest—on my way to write this I walked out of my way to pass the protest my friend Alex texted me about. This one was unusually stationary; compact. A mass of people were stilly standing directly across from parliament, waiting. The state police, unable to run at a block of people, had made a perimeter around them that was clearly not rehearsed. They’re figuring it out! At one point a new van of state police pulled up and a few men and women separated, scattered—but they were quickly brought back in. You [View Full Entry]

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On my way to meet Abbas at home this Wednesday I passed by—or really, walked through—another protest. They’ve been getting really bad lately. You can tell this not from media coverage or anything, which is nonexistent, but because the watching crowds are getting bigger on Mo V; because if you’re in the old medina and you hear intermittent screams or police sirens you see several people, now, dropping what they’re doing to go and watch—at least putting down what they’re doing to look up and listen for a moment. Also, people are talking, which gossip her [View Full Entry]

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Me and my friend, Sarah, who is half-Iranian, half-Louisianan, and socially Ba’hai, had been talking about going to synagogue in Rabat since we got here. On Sarah, briefly, superficially: her father, who she says looks like George Clooney when he (her dad) doesn’t shave, fled Iran because he was Ba’hai at the onset of the Revolution, she says, and the Ba'hai save the Jews from persecution In Iran (she says), and now Sarah is a Republican from West Virginia who goes to Barnard, who is dating the sort of Jewish man (from Columbia) who since he has been dating her has [View Full Entry]

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Before I write about this past weekend, about women, woman, dead dogs, and "saints", I need to write about this. There are protests on avenue Mohammed V nearly every day. They're pretty pro forma, which is not to say that the men and women protesting aren't serious, or that they don't badly need the attention, but, simply, if you live in Rabat you see a protest almost every day. Usually, you hear the protests before you see them, because no matter how many protesters there are they sing as long as they are standing, and it travels, the singing, in a [View Full Entry]

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On Friday night, we (our friend, Sheffia, who works at the L’Hotel Majestic, which we stayed at our first week; Michael, from Minnesota; Leungo, from Botswana and Williams college; Jude, who writes for al-Jazeera and is from the south of England; and Sheffia’s two friends, Jawad and Sufyan, the former the owner of the “beach house” for which we were destined) went to Mohammedia, a small city just next door to Rabat, which is known as “the city of flowers and sports”. If this sounds like a traditional romantic nickname for a charming suburban hamlet, it isn&r [View Full Entry]

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Said, my sister's husband, the one who is threatened by the possibility of being threatened by me, who works for the Moroccan ambassador, i.e. greets French-speaking important peoples at the airport, invited me and the two shlumpy midwesterners living with us to go to his hammam with him last night. The one he's been going to since he was old enough to walk. His mother's house is a stone's throw, and when he enters not only does everyone know him but the people who don't (know him) line up to introduce themselves to him. He has a personal man, smaller and [View Full Entry]

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Steph, I already told you this but—finally, my brothers and me are speaking gibberish. When I come home, if it is Omar and Reda who opens the door, we grunt and mumble at one another in an imitation of the ceremonial greetings adult Moroccans exchange. It is, I think, even more fun for them than it is for me. And then the other day Omar and me were taking a walk and he put his hood up and began to shadow box. Naturally, I hummed him the Rocky theme, which even if Omar has never seen the movie he recognized it…and [View Full Entry]

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