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From Abroad

Happy Halloween! What a strange holiday to explain to foreigners.

“What is this ‘Halloween’?” My roommate asked as I wore a mask. Others have inquired about the rituals surrounding the holiday. “What do you do on Halloween?” “Well, we, uh, dress up, eat a lot of candy, watch horror films, go to haunted houses where there are real ghosts, monsters, and goblins. Quite horrifying.” I responded. “Why is that you dress in costumes?” Another girl asked me in front of the dining hall. “So that the dead people don’t get us,” I replied straightforwardly. It is bizarre to come off the serious holiday season of Ramadan and then explain ‘our holiday’.

While I am not in the States, the Halloween spirit was still alive on campus and in Ifrane. My literature professor gave us some horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft, which are macabrely described and established the Halloween atmosphere. The dining hall always offers up a horrifying experience so they have been building up the suspense for months. One of the international students here rented a villa for the evening’s festivities. Upon entry, I ran into a few Chechen rebels, Eve, a southern belle, Jean Paul Sartre, a pirate, Ibran dressed as Shobby, Meat Stick dressed as Wak, and a pregnant woman with an ‘I love Earl’ tattoo, amongst many others. Some of the Moroccan students dressed in Middle Eastern clothing. Earlier in the day, Majid, a Saudi Arabian student, went with Olbera and I to the marche to search for costumes for the evening. I found an alien mask and a small green gun, thus settling as an alien invader, which didn’t top last year’s costume of ‘The King of Bubblewrap Land.’ We drove back in Majid’s car, which greatly improved upon our normal mode of transportation (squeezing seven into old, diesel-fuming Mercedes without seat belts and intact windshields). I miss driving. Majid shared an interesting story with me about being a Saudi Arabian in the US before and after 9/11 and the type of reception he received from people.

Before leaving for the party, a few of us met with Dr. Bouzidi, an economics professor, at La Paix, a local restaurant, to talk about politics and life in general. It was a pleasant evening of chatting about foreign policy and sharing hammam stories. Afterwards, in costume, I ran about the campus, receiving the strangest looks. I tried to scare a few people but they just stared at me in utter confusion.

• I’ve really started to appreciate Morocco’s location in the world and the various influences that make up its society and history. It most certainly is more Western than many North African and Middle Eastern countries, with Arabic meeting French to produce the Darija dialect. It has vestiges of both Africa and Europe, but is neither African nor European. It seems as if everything comes together in this country, creating an interesting culture.

• I gave away all my travel and camping gear to Fencer for the weekend, forcing me to stay on campus this weekend to study Arabic and for the GRE. We have a four day holiday break for the ‘Green March’, which is the Moroccan holiday celebrating the annexation of the Western Sahara during the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians had marched (with the color of Islam, green) into the territory , then held by Spain, eventually resulting in the Madrid Accords, which ceded the region to Morocco. This is still a touchy subject as the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara still demands autonomy and conflicts flared until a cease-fire in the early ‘90s.

• If you study abroad in a country with a foreign language, be prepared to be the official English paper reviser! While in the library, many non-native speaking students have asked for help on their English and economics papers. I have also spent almost an hour a day with my roommate, helping him correct his papers. I am trying to force him to speak Arabic and French to me, but he always slips back into English, so it isn’t necessarily reciprocal. I’m just not going to respond to him if he says something in English. “Je ne comprends pas l’anglais!”