In honor of the YES Abroad In-Person Selection Event (IPSE) coming up soon, when 110 YES Abroad semifinalists will be traveling to Washington, D.C. for an interview, I thought I’d step back and look at a birds-eye view of my time in Morocco and offer a few tidbits of advice for the YES hopefuls just beginning their journey.
I’ve lived another lifetime in the past 7 months. I stepped off of the plane in September into a country I knew almost nothing about. On the ride from the airport to my new city, I craned my neck to look out the window and refused to close my eyes, even though it was 2 AM, because I was afraid to miss Morocco. I wanted to see it all as soon as possible. But Morocco isn’t see-able in the early morning from the windows of a speeding bus. It isn’t view-able from the pictures I took on my first day. And it isn’t knowable after a week spent walking in its streets, or eating its food. So I settled in for the long haul.
I learned so much during those first months. How to eat, how to speak, how to act. When it was okay for me to be alone, and when I needed to be with my family. What time I was expected to come home at night. What I should do if someone catcalled me in the street. Where I should buy lunch, how to take the tram, where to hail a taxi, how much I should pay for a cup of tea, how to hang up my laundry… I was learning every day, at breakneck speed, the things that I learned over an entire childhood in the United States. I walked through the stages of growing up all over again, complete with the toddler’s propensity for turning everything into a tantrum (at least in my head) and the pre-teenage anxiety over my identity. No wonder I was tired at the end of every day.
And then suddenly, at some undefined junction, I knew the basics, and I was thrust into the larger universe of learning to live in Morocco. At the beginning, I had focused on the motions, things you would be able to program a robot to do in my place. The next step was to add my soul back into the equation, and learn what it meant for me, Sadie, to live in Rabat. This was hard too, because there was no guide for how to proceed. Nobody could tell me how to spend my afternoons, or what would make me relax in the evenings, or what bonding with my host family would look like. This stage was marked by months floating along, trying one activity after another, dipping my toes into many different pools.
One of the best things about exchange is that, at the half-way point, you know that the best months are ahead of you. The drudgery of the first half pays of in weeks of happy, unplanned contentment in the second. Not that my days are all happy-go-lucky now. I confront as many problems, as many mundane challenges, as I did in October. But now I have a framework for processing them, and I know that what seems dire in the moment will always pass. This year has shown me that time moves on, whether you want it to or not. All the bad days and all the hard parts will someday result in me waking up and realizing it’s not bad or hard anymore. And all the best moments, including this whole year, stay with me only in the present.
Would I do it all again? YES. And even that answer isn’t as easy to give as it appears on paper. This experience has been harder than I ever could have imagined when I confidently gave answers to my interviewers a year ago at my In-Person Selection Event. The strangest change is that I’m less sure of everything I say. I used to be so quick to argue in the US, so quick to know what I thought and express it. Here I hem and haw before I ever say anything, and when I do say something, it’s more likely to be ambivalent than definitive. I think I thought that this year would make me more sure of all of my opinions. In some ways it has. But I can see many more sides to everything than I could 10 months ago, and so my mouth is filtered by my experiences here. Morocco hasn’t made me instantly more knowledgeable, or more competent. My choices are still my own here; how I spend my time, what I say when I’m frustrated, how I respond when I’m tired. So I grew in ways that only I could grow, and I failed to grow in me-specific ways too. So, to the future YES-Abroad students, be warned that what you’re embarking on is not a light walk in the park. It is your life, and your character that you will confront in a foreign country. But if you fling yourself off the edge, I think you’ll find yourself again, even if it takes longer than the year you’ll be in-country for.
When you sign up for a year abroad, be cognizant that this is not another activity for your resume. It isn’t like taking a two-week choir trip to Germany, or being president of art club. There will be no ‘home’ to come back to after school, there will be nowhere to retreat from. The year is a marathon, not a sprint. So if you want to go, be ready to really live in your new country, not just to learn or be changed by it.