Crossing Borders

The clock on the wall struck midnight. I’m almost there, I’m almost there! After waiting in line for nearly an hour, scanning the room in customs and the white, tall ceiling looming above, I scuttered to stand in front of the guard at customs. He spoke to me in Moroccan Arabic.

“Hi, how are you?”

“Good, thanks.”

“Where are you going?”

“Rabat.”

“Where did you learn Arabic?”

“I learned it at university.”

The guard turned toward his colleagues and back toward me again as if he weren’t convinced. The other travelers within earshot were locking their eyes on me.

“Why did you choose to study Arabic?”

“I chose to study it at university for my degree.”

One of the other guards came in my direction.

“Follow me,” he said. I did as I was told and along with four other guards, went into a small, windowless, sweltering room with three other guards––all of them staring at me. The events unfolding were unsettling. The questions were never ending.

“Why did you come to Morocco?”

“What do you want to do here?”

“Why do you speak like a Syrian?”

“What is your objective?”

“Where are you staying in Morocco?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Are you here with somebody?”

What is this? Every fiber in my body shuddered. My attempt to untie the situation was fruitless. I had studied Arabic (the written, official language otherwise called MSA, short for Modern Standard Arabic) for an average of six hours a week in class, and ten hours a week for homework for two years. The summer of the previous year I studied in a program in which classes took place every day for five days a week, with the same amount of time spent on homework outside of class. But the only Arabic dialect in my linguistic repertoire was the Levantine dialect, the Arabic spoken in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. I had spent the previous five months studying it.

“I’m here to study. I like Arabic and I want to learn the language,” I said in Arabic. “Do you speak French? English?”

Nobody replied.

“I came to intern here in the summer, in Rabat, at the Body and Association for Development in Morocco (BADM). I will be studying Arabic at the Alain institute when the workday finishes. After my internship, I will study at Husn alNia for the academic year. Southeaten, my university, organized this study abroad.”

The guards spoke to each other, but what came out of their mouths was unfathomable. The sounds were harsher, with fewer vowels, and coming out faster than Arabic and Levantine Arabic.

What are they thinking? Why are they holding me in this room? What’s going to happen to me? The guards handed me my passport and let me go. I left the airport. It was impossible to foresee what was coming next. It felt like being a fish out of water. My driver was waiting with a cardboard sign that had the name of the association where I would study Arabic that summer: the Alain Institute. The man was bald, in his fifties or sixties and was a little taller than me, at 171 cm, barely five-foot seven. He greeted me, and as he took one of my bags I said:

“Chukran.”

He smiled and asked: “You speak Arabic?”

“A little.”

Unlike the guards at the airport, he started speaking in pure Darija (the word which locals use when referring to Moroccan Arabic).

“How was your flight?”

“Good, good.”

“What are you going to do here?”

“What?”

“I said, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nta talib, yak?”

I smiled, not understanding, and said “good.”

He stopped talking. The situation was irking.

If only I could speak to him. After an hour and a half’s journey, we arrived in Rabat. This is where I am going to spend the next year or two of my life. This is where my journey begins, at twenty years old. Finally, after all those years in high school dreaming about traveling the world, connecting with people from a different background, and exploring a reality completely different from my own, it was time to do these things. The time came to finally do what had eluded me for so long. Those years dealing with depression and loneliness and the realization that life might be too daunting: all of that was behind me now. The time has come to focus on what I really have yearned for all this time.

The car stopped. The antiquated infrastructure and the decrepit low yellow walls of the neighborhood, Dar alWifaq, jutted in front of me. This is where I would be living throughout the summer. There were various women wearing the headscarf. Roars, screams, and air pollution came from inside Dar alWifaq. Three big and opened garbage containers lay right next to the entrance of Dar alWifaq, emanating a nauseating stench. The streets had barely any space to walk on. The street vendors screamed at the top of their lungs and instead of pavement there was dirt on the ground.

This is different. I got out of the car. The driver and I each dragged a piece of luggage. My bronze backpack was tightened on my shoulders.

As we entered Dar alWifaq, the feeling of how different Morocco was kept on sinking in. The buildings were very low; most were just one floor that wasn’t taller than a common European bus shelter, and those that had two floors were often motels. They were all sun-bleached and the tiles of the buildings themselves were of different lengths, stacking against one another messily as if they were taken straight out of a game of Jenga. The floor was covered with litter mixed with concrete. Mounds piled up at every corner of every street. The odors coming from the garbage containers fused with the street food; this, alongside the crowdedness of the street, meant the pungent smell became reminiscent of sweat. We took several turns; they were difficult to track.

I’m going to need to memorize and practice this. Some people shouted, various people bumped into each other because of the congestion and many street vendors attempted to sell their merchandise by screaming as loudly as possible. We continued to jostle our way through. After nearly a quarter of an hour of this, the driver stopped at one of the houses and knocked on the door. I presumed that this was going to be my home for the summer. A young woman in her late twenties, with a long face and wearing glasses and a headscarf, greeted us in Arabic. She wore a light but wide djellaba, a long loose-fitting Moroccan robe. She had a paunchy belly.

“You must be Marco Chiudinello, come in. My name is Aliya. You speak Arabic a little, yes?”

The Alain website said that this family had five people in the apartment, or so I thought. There was Aliya, her parents Fatima and Suleyman, her brother Abdellah and her six-year-old nephew Anis. We entered the house. We passed by the kitchen, which could barely fit three people, and the bathroom, which allowed for just one thin skeleton to enter at a time. The bathroom had a toilet, and next to it was a plastic tube attached to a handle and a bucket.

“A lot of the time flushing is insufficient. You must fill the bucket with water and throw the water in the toilet so it flushes; if it doesn’t flush, pour the water into the bucket to the brim and sling the water in the toilet as violently as you can. We use the same bucket for showers,” said Aliya in Arabic.

My room was the first one next to the kitchen and bathroom, to the right. It didn’t have an actual bed; instead, there were only couches. This is certainly going to be different.

We dropped my luggage and backpack in the room. The driver left, while I went to the living room, which had a giant portrait of the king hanging on the wall. There were two other rooms to the side of the living room. Both were as narrow as breadsticks.

“Marco! Come!” said Fatima, the mother of the family, greeting me.

She was pudgy and her creased skin along with her bloated stomach made her assume the appearance of a robust Yoda, from Star Wars.

“How are you? Come here!” Their utterances were incomprehensible. Everybody talked very loudly, screamed at times and moved a lot. Silence was imaginary.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a household with so much energy and movement in my entire life. I was happy at first, but the movement and noise continued deep into the night. To my surprise, the family ate at three in the morning. Although my Moroccan was nonexistent, I got by with Arabic and with French when talking to the father, Suleyman. The language barrier won’t be too problematic for communication, and they certainly seem like they will try to include me.

Everybody ate the bread and spiced lamb on the table, the food vanishing rapidly. In a matter of minutes, the family turned off the lights and everybody crawled to their couches. I went to my room and lay on the couch to the right of the door. The soft, pillow-like upholstery caused me to sink as I twisted left and right, searching for the optimal position to go to sleep. Hey! This isn’t too bad!