The life and times of a twenty-something college grad trying to figure out life while traveling the world and grieving the loss of her mother. Watch the journey unfold.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Last Day Before Morocco

Wow. We had our very last preport tonight. How strange. It is impossible for me to believe that tomorrow we will be in our very last country. I am very excited for Morocco, but at the same time, I'm dreading it because it means the end. Along the same lines, we stopped to bunker in Gibraltar once again today. It was strange looking out the window and seeing Spain again, as that was where we began. It's so crazy to think this voyage is coming full circle. I'm not ready to accept it yet.
 
Today was busy. Class, work, and paper writing took up a large chunk of my day. Race, Class, and Gender was intense today. I left the class shaking. We had a class activity where there were sheets of paper with different terms on them (such as anti-oppression, cultural pluralism, social justice, diversity, etc.) and we had to go around to the different papers and write what they associated with those terms. Remember when I brought up the girl in my class who gave her spiel about how women should be paid less than men? Well she was back in action today. She wrote something extremely offensive on every single paper. She wrote that people need to stop blaming race, class, and gender for the problems in their lives and make their own lives and wealth for themselves. She wrote that groups of people who have faced issues in the past need to stop asking for benefits, ie. the Jews need to stop being angry at the Germans for the Holocaust because the people today aren't the Nazi's who did anything wrong. She wrote that it's not fair that black students or Asian students can have their own student organizations, while it would be considered racist for white students to have a "white club." She and her equally ignorant boyfriend drew an extremely offensive picture of caricatures of different races. They drew an "Asian" with slits for eyes, a "Mexican" with a sombrero, and various other "races" all together, as if this was supposed to represent cultures coming together. It was extremely out of line, and I drew an arrow next to it and wrote "offensive" on the paper. I don't understand how people can be so ignorant. I'm trying very hard to apply what I have learned from some very admirable people and try to understand where they are coming from instead of immediately going off on them, but sometimes people make it so difficult.
 
Today there was an announcement over the PA system saying to take everything heavy or fragile and put it on the ground because we are heading for rough waters tonight. So far it has been very rocky, but nothing that would cause big objects to fall over. I'm thinking it will get worse during the night. I'm excited for it though...it's so much fun to sleep while it's rocking a lot.
 
I went to my Social Activists Abroad meeting tonight, but it ended up just being a social hour because everyone was so distracted with school work and with the fact that we'll be in Morocco tomorrow.
 
I got to talk to Staci for a little bit today, and we are going to get together while we are in Morocco, which I'm super pumped about. We might even get together tomorrow. I am so excited about having someone that I can relate to and talk to.
 
We lost another hour tonight, so now we are only 4 hours ahead of EST.
 
When I will up tomorrow, I will be in Morocco. I will be in AFRICA!!

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