If you get outside of your own tourist-head, it's hard not to feel guilty in North Africa.
I rode a camel being pulled by three teenage boys in a southern Moroccan village that bordered the rise of the mighty Sahara. They spoke five languages fluently. They knew the rudiments of five more. They dressed in the expected bright blue Berber tunics that the tourist guidebooks boasted they would wear. As the led me on my camel over the sand dunes, I looked back to see twelve more teenage boys sitting idle on a dune near the village.
They took turns leading Western tourists on camels; took turns at making a few dhirham.
And that was all they had to live for. Rural, poor, highly conversant in multiple languages and yet illiterate in Arabic, their futures were in the village. They couldn't even fathom going to university, if they wanted to.
And back in the city, all of my Moroccan peers were in university. One of our professors at the CCCL (Center for Cross-Cultural Learning) was also a professor at Mohammad V University in Agdal. You could tell he lived to teach, and that he loved every minute of life. He brimmed with joie de vivre. And, he brimmed with hope and dreams for his students - particularly his Moroccan students.
He brought one of his classes to the CCCL to do true cross-cultural learning with us. They could not speak as many languages as the village boys, but they were hyper-literate: they could read, write, and speak Arabic, Spanish, French, and English, and some of them also Italian, German, and Tamazight, Riffi, or Tashelhit, one of the Berber languages, which were just beginning to be transcribed in Latin script, Arabic script, or a newly devised Amazigh (Berber) alphabet.
Huge pangs of guilt hit me while I was there, while I developed deeper friendships with my homestay sister and two other young women who were students at Mohammad V University. Just as talented as me, much more knowledgeable, with fluency in at least three languages - these three young women and thousands more young people like them had no hope. None. I knew that after my holiday in North Africa, I would return home to America. And while I might be marginally employed, our economy can swallow me into it, what with my entrepreneurial spirit, interest and education in several specialized fields, and my optimism. Thanks be to America.
But this is not only unfair, but unjust. Unjust that even in an economic downturn, I am able to take my skill set and carve out a living in America. A travesty that in North Africa, young people are fluent and literate in a literal handfull of languages, with bachelors' and masters' degress in diverse and necessary fields, and there are no jobs. Not one.
Doesn't matter how entrepreneurial you are. How smart. How clever. You will not find a job as a young person in North Africa. As a young person in the Middle East.
So, yes, the Middle East and North Africa make me feel guilty. Guilty for being American, guilty for staying in five star hotels and being waited on by young people lucky enough to get a job as a valet, a bellhop, or a janitor.
I'm a glutton for this guilt, I guess. It's a vital, enlivening sense of guilt. It makes me more human. It makes me more thankful. It gets me outside of my American brain, my American life, my American hang-ups. It reminds me to live simply, to live small, to live joyfully, to live gratefully.
And now, instead of returning for the usual sense of guilt that I find in the Arab world - that I found in 2007 in Morocco, 2008 in Egypt, Palestine, and Morocco, and 2010 in Palestine - I will be returning to let my eyes well with tears of joy, happiness, and pride that I do not deserve to feel.
I will swell with pride and awe at the youth of the Middle East - the young Arabs who have taken their lives, their countries, their governments into their own hands and are demanding something more. Something better. Something they deserve - and oh God do they deserve it more than I do, more than any American youth does.
Tears will roll down my cheeks as I remember my friends and peers in Morocco, and then think of millions of young people just like them, across the Arab world, recognizing their power, efficacy, and their righteousness, and fighting for their lives. Truly. For their lives.
After years of Insha' Allah, it is happening.
That is why I am returning.
Keep North Africa and the Middle East in your prayers, if you make them, or in your thoughts, if you don't.
Some notes, to enflesh the revolutions with quantitative data that represents the qualitative way of living in this part of the world:
Country
Percentage of total household consumption expenditures going to food
Percentage of population under age 30
Percentage of 15-29 population not working and not going to school
Morocco
36%+
57%
34%
Algeria
36%+
58%
37%
Tunisia
36%
52%
no data
Libya
no data
58%
29%
Egypt
38%
61%
37%
Jordan
36%+
64%
23%
Palestinian Territories
no data
72%
37%
Lebanon
no data
51%
16%
Iraq
no data
68%
43%
Yemen
no data
74%
49%
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