Today, March 22nd, is my father’s birthday. I spent the weekend driving from Fez to Sidi Ifni with Pauls, Karissa, Emma, Ryan, and Sam for the opening of Dar Si Hmad’s fog water system. We spent Friday driving down, making a stop in Marrakech to visit the CLC and all the old faces, before arriving late at night in Mirleft, 30 kilometers outside Sidi Ifni, where we stayed in a house with a view of the beach. Saturday, we spent the morning at the Gala, talking to people of varying VIP status. For lunch, Pauls was put at a table with ten men who quickly realized that he would politely eat anything they put on his plate. Pauls hasn’t eaten since. After the event, we spent the afternoon at the Legzira Arches, natural stone formations that jut from seaside cliffs into the sea. Today, after having a coffee with some of the Dar Si Hmad staff, we are making the long trek back to Fez, and I won’t be able to skype with my dad like I had promised him.
It’s been hard to keep him out of my mind this weekend, which has so far been the best of any in Morocco. The Legzira Arches were particularly magical; I remember commenting, while we were there, that it was the type of experience college catalogues had always promised me I would have, but I never believed them until that moment. At one point, we crossed under one arch, crouching and keeping to the edge so the waves wouldn’t splash us, and we could see a second arch off in the distance. But we had no idea about the tide– would it only get higher, making crossing back under the arch impossible? Or was it already high tide? We spent five minutes standing in a circle, still wearing our best business-casual clothes, trying to figure out the tide based on the position of the sun in the sky and where we thought the moon might be. Finally, we decided that regardless of the tide, our desire to explore beyond the next arch was greater than any desire to get back in a timely manner. It was the type of conversation that my father, who taught me about our solar system on a camping trip with a lantern and an apple, would have loved, just as he would love learning about the fog collectors on top of the mountain or watching a man turn on a water tap in his home for the first time.
Much of my time here has been characterized by moments similar to this, where I find myself thinking about the home I’ve left behind. Dad, in particular, works his ways into my thoughts a lot. He’s been an educator his whole life, and he taught me from a young age to love learning and to be inquisitive– the moment where I decided to go through the first arch was driven partially by the thought of him asking me, “Why didn’t you go through?” In this country, every waking moment has been filled with learning, which is what makes me think of him. Thinking about him then makes me think of the rest of my family, then of Monterey, my hometown, then of Portland, then of my friends. I think of the past or the future, both of which are grounded in America. I think about the coffee at the Dovecote or all nighters in the library. I think of drinking wine in my back yard or of eating bacon for breakfast. I miss it all, and remembering makes me yearn to come home. When I think like this, the month that I have left here seems enormous.
At the same time, I know beyond a doubt that this country has left an indelible mark on me. Right now, as I write these words, we’re racing along in a rented van that Pauls is driving, with impossibly green fields in all directions around us. It’s been a particularly wet rain season here and it has made the country exceptionally beautiful. Everyone I’ve met has told me I’m lucky to be here at this time, that normally the country is brown with only a few patches of green. It has reinforced my feeling that I will never experience this country in the same way again, the way you only hear a song for the first time once. And because of that, I don’t want to leave. I don’t want there to be a last time that I hear the afternoon call to prayer in Fez, when you can listen to the sun move across the sky as the calls begin like a wave across the city. When I think like this, the month seems miniscule.
Dr. Ennaji, one of the teachers in Fez, told us a joke once about an American who told his friend that Moroccans have two heads, one that says America is the greatest country in the world and another that says nothing compares to Morocco. It’s a joke that loses a lot in translation. It’s a pun on the fact that the derrija word for “head” is the same as “self:” rassa. I think, however, that if he read this, Dr. Ennaji would tell me that I have two heads.
Our stop in Marrakech was the second weekend in a row I had been back. The weekend before, Ryan and I went to the city together, and we stayed with our host-brothers. Mourad ordered a tanjia, a special dish which takes eight hours to make. We stopped by the CLC, and we watched the talent-show, hosted by our teacher’s young daughter. On Friday, we all ate lunch with Si Hamza, the first person we met in Morocco and the man who helped us adjust to our new lives here. It was the perfect moment of closure on Marrakech. I think that if I want to have the same closure on Morocco, I’m going to have to come back. When I do, I want to bring my father with me, so he can see everything here I’ve come to love.