Slowly becoming citizen of the world?
October 22, 2010
This morning as I was reading my latest issue of The Economist, I saw a picture that made me pause and reflect for a moment. It’s a picture of a woman (here, from Zimbabwe), preparing a large pot of sweet potatoes. Nothing special. What caught my eye, though, was that her sweet potatoes look exactly like the sweet potatoes I bought yesterday in Tiznit. A bright purplish red on the outside and almost pure white on the inside. Not at all what the sweet potatoes I grew up with in America look like (bland brown on the outside and a comforting sort of orange on the inside). If I’d never seen a sweet potato here in Morocco, I wouldn’t have recognized what exactly the woman was cooking in this picture from Zimbabwe.
It’s all rather banal, but there’s some meaning in it to me. What moments like this one make me think of is how my life here in Morocco has exposed me to the simple, daily bits of life that are similar across much of the world, but quite different from life in America. I’m excited to be able to recognize and relate (even in trivial ways like the types of available produce) life in other places in the world. My thought is, “Hey! I just bought sweet potatoes like those! It’s cool that they’re down in the very south of Africa, too.”
Sweet potatoes, Zimbabwe and Morocco style.
Another such moment that I remember distinctly was an Economist photograph of people sitting on a woven plastic mat. I don’t remember where, either India or somewhere else in southeast Asia or the Pacific. Here we have the exact same woven plastic mats, except that in Morocco the designs tend to be geometrical (diamonds, triangles, squares, etc.). The ones in the photo were covered in big flowers that looked like hibiscus. When I saw the mats in whatever far-away country I turned to my friend Hanneke and said, “Hey, look! Agrtil!” I’ve never seen anything just like argtil in America, but it looks like much more of the world lines floors with these plastic mats than I’d ever thought to realize. Now, if I’m ever lucky enough to really traipse around the world, I imagine I’ll feel a little more at home when I see familiar household furnishings.
In America we have rather uniform (if often quite varied) produce selections and the highest selling goods often have some brand name. It seems like from what I’ve seen in Morocco and my Economist images, perhaps in much of the rest of the world people have access to a selection that is very different from what’s available in America.
Again, these sorts of things are pretty trivial. But I’m happy to connect with other parts of the world in different ways, especially when most Americans either can’t or won’t understand how life is different for most of the other inhabitants of the world. I certainly had a limited understanding before I came to Morocco, and my understanding now is only just growing. I’m enjoying the process and looking forward to seeing where it leads.
