Street Food is a Panacea

Turns out a little goat's head and an eyeball were all I needed for a better mood.

Brad and I ran out of the house to grab something from the market (souk) and found the aforementioned bucket of goat heads empty next to a grill warming said heads up. I bought a goat head scrapple sandwich for 15 dirham (around $2), then asked if he had eyeball and was handed one for free; nice and hot with a sprinkle of cumin. Brad didn't want to try the sandwich or watch me eat the eyeball.

I'm pretty sure you can have a 4-course meal in our neighborhood, all off the street, for about 30 dirham, or $4.

I think I like it here.

A bucket of goat heads...

The taxi dropping me off kicks up dust behind me. Squinting through the smoke of grilling kebabs, I see the man in front of me carrying a bucket of roasted goat heads in his left hand. He tilts his body to the right, his feet unsure, trying managing the weight of the load of food.

The roasted goat heads are food. The taxi drivers might not know where things are. The hot water might not work. The train from Fez to Rabat might hit a cow and be delayed 4 hours. That same train may not have air conditioning or enough room for everyone to sit. You may spend two hours standing in the aisle; like on the Friday afternoon train from Rabat to Fez, for example.

Things are new to me here but in some way they are old. I think I'm not as excited about this summer as last because its not as shocking anymore. This is life and this is normal. I think I might be missing like-minded peers too. There are no anthropologists here.

Also, for some reason, things feel hectic - as though I'm rushing back and forth from AMIDEAST to home and then from their to spend the weekend somewhere - and its only been a week. I think I'm going to stop coming home before 7 PM. There is too much of Rabat and neighboring Sale to explore. Maybe (mumkin) that's what is missing - the sense of adventure I felt last year. My feet are not sore at the end of the day - that's disappointing.

My Arabic is getting better but the local dialect we're learning, Darija, is quite different. I've also noticed I understand more Arabic than I could speak, which I think suggests a lack of vocabulary, something I'll work on over the fall semester.

Until later this week,

Simon

Looking up...

I fell back onto the bench lining the lime green walls of the terrace; post tea - before dinner - no homework done yet. I'm staring at the sky. Sparrows flutter above our heads.

Out on the terrace, we'll sit down to dinner around a circular table.

Advice: you put your right hand in and your left hand out...and you keep it that way. Use some bread to gather the meat and vegetables on the large plate being shared amongst the family. Speak Arabic. Learn Arabic. Don't forget to use your right hand.

So far I've said "new teacher" instead of "good teacher", "prayer" instead of "honey", heard "fruit table" when my host father, or sidi, said something about breakfast, which, fi arabee, is fudur. Brad, my roommate and partner for this Moroccan adventure sits there and does one of two things. Either he lets me make a fool of myself or acts as my dictionary, providing answers to questions that let me structure my sentences correctly and use the proper vocabulary.

I am beginning to like it here. I used to associate Arabic with something dreadfully difficult but now have formed a different association. I am reinforcing it daily in my Arabic classes and every evening around the dinner table. The association is with a conversation I had with a taxi driver in Amman. He and I spoke only Arabic on a 15-minute taxi ride from from the 7th Circle to AMIDEAST in Wadi Abdoun. It was my first Arabic conversation. Here, I feel like I've already had many more. They aren't perfect and they never will be but after nearly two years of studying the language, I'm happy to see it start paying off.

Tomorrow we (Brad, some folks from AMIDEAST, and I) head to Fez by train. Fez - where the fez hats are from.

To Africa!

So here I go again. My sugar mama, Sallie Mae, is sending me on a two-month adventure in Africa where I’ll be studying Arabic in Morocco, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and studying primatology and wildlife conservation in Kenya. I'll be accompanying Becky on those last two.

This time is different from last summer and I haven’t quite determined why. Maybe it is because I’m older. Maybe it is because I’m closer to graduation and feel like the next two months need to fit into in a job description one year from now. Maybe its because I haven’t studied Arabic for 10 months. Maybe last summer set such a high standard that these next few months can’t meet. Maybe…what I should be doing is shutting the fuck up and living this experience instead of thinking about it. Yea – that’s the one.

The hour drive from Casablanca, where my flight landed, to Rabat, where I’ll be staying, was pleasant. The driver did not speak much English but between my dusty Arabic and his French we communicated and I started taking notes on Darija, the Arabic dialect I will be studying along Modern Standard while I am here.

What's next?! St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

This semester, Rebecca and I are enrolled in Leadership and Sustainable Development, a class that is mostly online, but also meets a few Saturdays out of the semester, that travels to St. Croix, an island in the Caribbean to interact with members Cruzan society who will speak to the class about economic and sustainable development and environmental protection. As I did in Jordan (see below), we'll have the opportunity to interact with laypeople, taxi drivers, bartenders, etc. to talk to them about life on the island and in the region.

So, I figured I'd update this blog during the trip - maybe drum up some page views before another summer of travel and adventure. The region is exemplary of neocolonialism, historical inequality, and the externalities of free global trade, something often free only to corporations and not to labor.

To start it off, I'm throwing in the below essay I just finished for the class. Its meant to point out the negative effects of tourism. Yes, its a tad sensationalist but that's the point. I'm flying out this Saturday, so expect a few posts the week of March 17 through the 24.

...

So You Think You’re Helping?

“Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn’t bother them at all. They untied the door, opened the flap, barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude ever.”

- Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

Overview

Though he is not from the Caribbean, Mean’s words are no less meaningful. There is an assumption made on behalf of economically stagnant but environmentally exotic locations that tourism can and should be their economic savior. Ignoring the complexities of global trade and economic policy, economists point out that tourism is the only solution for locations that cannot grow their own food, have no real manufacturing base, or have other poverty inducing conditions.

Tourism is not a panacea. The industry is not separate from the place it profits from. In fact, it very distinctly shapes cultural evolution over time. The definition of tourist: noun, a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure. Pleasure is what tourists seek to find when arrive in what has been marketed to them as an island-paradise. What happens when tourists do not find pleasure? Local economies reliant on tourism manufacture it.

Culture adapts. Food and drink needs to be just exotic enough to fascinate the wide-eyed, sunburnt, drunken tourist but not enough to scare them off. The tourist expects some sort of cultural immersion, despite their cruise ship’s arrival and departure being only a few short hours apart, and the happy-go-lucky local will put on a show, even though that particular ritual only happens on high holy days or with the death of a relative. Adaptation leads to commodification.

Nothing is genuine and heartfelt anymore. Everything is a good to be traded or sold in order to encourage the now hung-over, bloated tourist to tell his or her friends to come to (insert destination here) where they even serve Coronas and there is a Burger King down the street. This continues over time, subjugating local residents and native-born inhabitants to the staging a dog and pony that their ancestors would be ashamed to see, with low-wages, perpetuated income inequality, and cultural degradation being the socio-economic order of the day.

While the aforementioned tourist passes out in his air-conditioned cabin on a cruise ship to his next scheduled “cultural” immersion, only one-fifth of the money he or she has spent over the course of their vacation makes it into the economies of the places they visited.

How many thousands of dollars did they pay to their airline company, cruise line, or all-inclusive resort owned by a company based in their home country? What percentage of the cost of last night’s ten Coronas goes into the pocket of the local bartender and how much went to paying for the import of said Coronas to an island that brews its own beer, but a beer that tourists have not taken a liking to? What percentage of the sum total of dollars spent go into the pockets of the local residents who need more disposable income? And how much go into the pockets of already-wealthy resort owners, both local and international?

The environment is a topic of its own. Pollution, undue stress on local waste management systems, on top of overuse of already low-levels of potable water are all factors that the tourist uploading photos to Facebook has never even thought of, let alone concerned him or herself with.

Opinion Statement

This essay, filled with hypothetical questions, generalizations about tourists, and worst-case scenarios is meant to prove a point. Nothing should be taken at face value and everything has layers upon layers of complexity worth questioning. If we accept that tourism is the only viable economic engine for places like St. Croix, USVI, then we have two choices: ignore the externalities or understand and acknowledge them and do our best to rectify and prevent them. I believe tourism is the easiest way to generate revenue for islands in the Caribbean but not at the expense of local culture and life for tourists’ amusement.