Morocco, Interrupted

Dear Reader,

When University of New England students embarked, in January 2020, on the journey of their college life in Morocco, they had only a vague idea of what was awaiting them. They had heard about the life-changing experiences in UNE’s semester-abroad program from their peers and through word-of-mouth on campus, but they could not have known the real impact of the experience until they lived it in the concrete. That didn’t take long to happen. Half-way through the semester, Mackenzie Mahoney wrote a powerful essay outlining her remarkable transformation and concluding with a tribute to Tangier and its magical effect on her. “This city,” she wrote, “has transformed me from a shy, weak-kneed woman who, at one point, was afraid to even hail a taxi, to a courageous and valiant woman who doesn’t let silly fears control her actions.”

In one of the letters below, Sarah Murphy, like Mahoney, beholds the emergence of another side of her in Tangier, which she playfully calls the Moroccan Sarah.

In our troubled world today, where people are locked up in their homes to avoid meeting strangers and shaking hands, there is no better antidote to narrow parochial views of oneself and the world than boldly exploring new lands and meeting new people. When our students returned to the United States, they wrote letters to the people and country they left behind.  Confined in their American homes, they remember our campus’s gate guard, our professional staff, nurses in clinics where they volunteered, the orphans they visited (and who are now doubly quarantined in their cribs since they are deprived of visitors), pharmacists, and just people in general. Our students tried their best to finish their semester in Morocco, but as  Molly Cadogan wrote to the orphan baby she can no longer visit, “the virus had different plans.”

I invite you to read some of our students’ letters below to measure the impact of the virus on their interrupted educational and cultural experiences. We will publish more letters and essays in this section as they become available. I have no doubt our brave students are far from done reflecting on what they learned and what has befallen them during the pandemic that has paralyzed the world. I am also certain that they will tell more stories when they reconnect again at UNE’s main campus in Maine. Theirs is a tale for the ages.

Anouar Majid