I Feel Lucky

Over lunch with Simone, we tell her about our meeting with the assaulted child prostitute and the NGO we’ve recently been introduced to. She nods and says that Morocco can inspire deep thoughts, even in the shallowest person. She wonders aloud: “By what crazy fluke was I lucky enough to have been born where I was? Why is one person given a life of prostitution and suffering and another one of fortune and opportunity?”

Last night, we glimpsed another definition of “lucky,” one that further illuminated its relative nature. We were talking with Hamoud about the bombings in Lebanon and the United States’ complicated ties with Israel and the Arab world. Here in Morocco, the U.S. is considered both an ally and a friend. Despite this relationship and the U.S.’s tepid reaction to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, both houses of the Moroccan congress joined the King and publicly denounced the bombings and the failure of world leaders to put pressure on Israel to stop.

This is the official stance. On the streets, reactions are a bit grayer. If people dislike American foreign policy, it is not a sentiment that’s shared in public. Moroccans rely on American business and tourism. The only comment we’ve heard about the situation came from a tile manufacturer who had praise for Bush’s strength, if not his reasoning ability. He shrugged and said that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. For him, that was a given, and the question of what to do about it intractable. He certainly wasn’t complaining to us about how our President was handling the situation.

Images of bombings and their bloody aftermath flicker across the evening news and we catch a few minutes of BBC with Hamoud. After watching the devastation, Hamoud tells us how lucky he feels to have been born in a peaceful, calm country, not one of war and constant strife. Hamoud is himself a sort of microcosm of Morocco, an Arab Muslim rooted in the culture of his homeland who has, at the same time, made himself a friend and trusted ally of Westerners. Lucky indeed.