The 'Before' Picture

15 days from the moment my feet hit the ground in Rabat, Morocco, I’m sitting in Tea Brick, a café that serves tea in corgi-adorned plastic jars in Rowland Heights, a stone’s throw away from my home in Rancho Cucamonga, California. I’m spending each of my last days visiting favorite bubble tea joints, restaurants, and boutiques in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, savoring my last points of contact with the flavors, sights, and sounds that I’ve always been surrounded by. In two weeks, they’ll be an ocean and a continent away.

Some of my closest friends are moving into Wellesley College this weekend and I could be there with them, whipped up in orientation activities and reading through syllabi. Instead, I chose to defer college for a year to go to Rabat. Each time I reveal this fact to a relative or friend, the inevitable question comes. Why? Why when I can study abroad in college? Why when I could graduate on time and get an earlier start in the workplace? Why take a gap year? And in Morocco of all places? I’ve thrown different reasons at each curious inquirer, but the truth is, I acted on an impulse. I’m counting on this coming year to answer those questions for myself, to explain my inexplicable instinct because as of now, I’m some combination of anxious, terrified, and overwhelmed by the prospect of moving to a new country where I’ll know nothing and no one.

Knowing that I needed to do something more than sinking in that jumble of emotions to prepare for the next few months, I took to the pre-departure portion of CIEE’s Global Competence course. One of the last assignments the course gives is to come up with five qualities, traits, or ways of being that I want to hold onto or develop during my time abroad. Here were mine, in no particular order:

Chip away at the darkness in the world: This one came out of reflecting over conversations that I had had with underclassmen at my high school over the past year. When they approached me for guidance and advice, I felt so happy to be able to comfort another person, to be able to take away just a little bit of their confusion. I also thought about attending marches and protests in Los Angeles and in Washington DC and encouraging youth to vote. There is so much to repair around us, so much that I feel helpless about, and yet there is something so reassuring about standing in loving solidarity with others who have the same vision for humanity. All of the other little happy moments in my life, too—making a friend laugh, sharing a meal with someone, giving a hug—they all add just a touch of light that wasn’t there before. In Morocco, I want to relish in and give others these little moments of light because they give me purpose.

Redefine Success: For the last twelve years, I’ve taken pride in academic success. I used my grades to define my worth and to measure others’ worth. However, at the end of my senior year in high school, we took a class trip to Yosemite National Park and hiked Half Dome, one of the hardest trails in the state and even in the country. At each milestone along the hike, I looked around and felt genuine pride about carrying myself so high up despite never seeing myself as physically strong before. The experience opened my eyes to a different definition of success. In Morocco, I won’t have a transcript to use as a tape measure for success anymore, so I’ll have to find something else and I’m so excited to find out what that something else is.

Acceptance: Acceptance amongst my peers is something that has always been integral to my happiness and yet I never truly discovered it until I left home in my junior year for a semester school in Washington, DC. I wrote in my journal that feeling accepted for the first time made me feel “invigoratingly, excitedly happy”, that it “completely changed the way I see myself, not to mention the way I see the world”, and I felt that I had found the “epitome of the ‘be yourself’ cliché”. Though Moroccan society is worlds away (and much less progressive) from the one I knew in DC, I hope that I can find acceptance in the same way. I hope our shared humanity can pull through past our cultural and ideological differences.

Shared learning: A good or successful relationship, in my mind, is one where both parties can learn something from the other. I am completely invested in immersing myself in Moroccan culture (I did, after all, choose to live there for a year), and I hope that I can bring a lot of who I am and where I come from to the country as well. I want to teach my Moroccan friends to speak English and Chinese as they teach me French and Arabic. I want to show them how to make authentic Chinese cuisine as they present Moroccan specialties to me. At the end of my time, I want to leave a small piece of my identity, of my heart behind in Rabat and carry a piece of my Moroccan community’s home with me.

Ownership over my beliefs: I’ve mentioned before about how the place I call home is much more socially progressive than Morocco will be. New rules about how to exist as a woman, or even as a person, will be foreign to me, but I will still aim to be as culturally sensitive as possible out of respect for my new community. At the same time, I know in my heart that choosing to dress more conservatively, for example, won’t change my belief that women can command respect regardless of her clothing choices. I am more than willing to bend out of respect for Moroccan society, but I hope to find some way to ideologically reconcile that with the fact that I don’t believe in all of the reasons or cultural implications surrounding more conservative rules. I know that by instinct, I am capable of respecting others’ beliefs while fully disagreeing with them. What I want to figure out is how I am able to do that. At the same time, I’m interested in finding out how empowerment or more progressive ideals can still ride in tandem with traditional beliefs. Again, shared learning, right?

These five things give a little glimpse of my mind as I dive headfirst into this new adventure. The only thing I feel I need to add is that, due to the nature of this assignment, all five of those things are very much centered around me and how I will impose myself on Moroccan society. However, I know that this trip will be about so much more than me. It’s not about what I will bring to them, but about what they will bring to me.

Sitting beside the uncertainty and anxiety that clouds my mind is excitement to meet new people, learn a new language, eat new food, and so much more. I feel at times that this experience will be so new to me that I won’t know what there is to be excited about until I’m facing it head on. I have no idea what to expect, but that thought itself has preceded all of the most brilliant experiences of my life. I’ll hopefully come out with a new update soon after I get to Rabat.

À la prochaine!