Seeking an Adventure

How could I have known, on that gloomy, gray December day when I walked into the Elmira Public Library, that a notice on the bulletin board would lead to an adventure that would shape the rest of my life?

I had gone there to catch up on courses I’d fallen behind in. The warmth inside felt good after the chilling upstate New York air. Then the announcement on the board caught my eye.

“Spend Next Summer Living With a Family Overseas as Our County’s Community Ambassador.”

I sat down and opened a textbook, but my mind kept drifting back to that poster. I liked the idea. I had been to Expo 67 in Montreal the year before, and seeing what another place outside my country had to offer had made me feel truly alive.

Instead of getting to work, I wandered around the old, cramped library, which had been built with the support of Andrew Carnegie. Looking back, I think I was just restless. I wanted something besides a textbook and a table to sit at. After one more try at the textbook, I gave up. On my way out, I stopped to write down the address and phone numbers from the poster.

Then I walked down the cold gray stairs into the biting wind. I watched my feet, dodging splotches of ice, snow, and slush on the sidewalk, and I realized I had accomplished nothing. All I’d done was satisfy my curiosity that nothing exciting was going on in there. My one positive thought was that maybe, just maybe, I could be the one chosen. And I was already thinking they might send me to Japan, where I could visit my friend Ichiguchi, who had filled my head with pictures of what lay beyond the U.S. borders.

Ichiguchi had been one of my wrestling coaches and friends at Lycoming College. We spent a lot of time together: wrestling in open tournaments, driving to Florida for spring break in his small Renault Dauphine, working out, and visiting bars and restaurants. Ichi was a three-time world champion and an Olympic gold medalist in Greco-Roman wrestling.

It was usually over drinks or on the road that Ichi told me about life in Japan and the other countries he had visited as a world-class wrestler. He could never tell me enough. The year Ichi was at Lycoming, I let my studies go almost completely. I pulled a 1.25 grade point average in the fall and a 1.5 in the spring. Learning about life, Japan, and so many other things seemed a fair trade for terrible grades. I wanted to be a history teacher and a wrestling coach, but I wasn’t sure how I would make it. Still, I was drawn to the international world Ichiguchi had opened up to me. So I sent away for an application, thinking I might see for myself the wonderful things Ichi had told me about.

I was called in for an interview with the committee that would choose the ambassador. The project was part of The Experiment in International Living program. All expenses, except for personal spending, were covered. During the interview, they asked what I would do if it wasn’t possible to send me to Japan. Would I agree to go to another country? I told them I would go anywhere, but that I hoped for Japan.

One day in late April, my roommate, Gary, told me I had a message to return a long-distance call to Celia Hutchinson of the Community Ambassador Project. I decided to go to the student union to call her back instead of talking in our dorm hallway. There was a phone booth there, and I could have some privacy. In the hallway, there was no telling what kind of noise I’d have in the background. Gary came with me. He was a very supportive friend, a real brother. We had been roommates since freshman year. Gary was from South Jersey, and he had taught me a lot about race and culture in America.

After some greetings, Mrs. Hutchinson said, “Gregory, we’ve selected you as our Community Ambassador, but I must ask you something very important. We can’t send you to Japan. Our budget won’t allow it, and we’ve already had an ambassador spend a summer there. Would you be willing to go to Morocco?”

I paused for a second or two. It felt like hours. I said to myself, “Where is Morocco? Come on, you know where it is. It’s at the top of Africa or South America, isn’t it? No, it can’t be South America. It’s got to be Africa.”

“Sure, Mrs. Hutchinson. I’d be very happy to go to Morocco.”

“Do you know where Morocco is?”

“Yes, I believe it’s in the northern part of Africa.”

“That’s right. They speak French there. How’s your French?”

“Well, I took it in high school. I had almost three and a half years of it. I believe I can get it going again.”

“Okay. Congratulations on being selected. I’m very happy you’ll be going to Morocco. You might want to start reading up on it. I’ll be in touch soon.”

Gary was sitting over at the snack bar, waiting for me to finish.

“Well?”

“I’m going to Morocco! Can you believe it?”

“I knew they’d pick you. Where’s Morocco?”

“It’s somewhere in North Africa. I wonder what it’s like.”

Gary and I spent the month of May, at least off and on, trying to find out about Morocco. I looked for books, and Gary talked to people. One day he came back to the dorm and said, “Emmanuel says you’d better take a knife.”

“What? Come on. Are you kidding me?”

“No. He says you’d better be careful.”

Emmanuel was an old Greek man from the island of Karpathos in the Mediterranean. He owned and ran the Hilltop Sub Shop, where we were regulars. He had won it in a card game.

“Emmanuel also says you’d better stay away from the women over there.”

“You’re joking, right?”

Emmanuel knew more than we did.

Later Gary said, “Don’t believe Emmanuel. You can’t tell until you get there. You know, they’re always saying stuff like that about Black people. But you’re safer in some Black parts of town than you are in some lily-white areas.”

About an hour later, he said, “But you’d better take a knife.”

Then he rolled all over the floor, laughing.

Sam, my other close friend, was 100 percent Lebanese-American. He passed along what he’d heard about Lebanon from his parents and grandparents. He figured there must be some similarities, since Morocco is an Arab country. Sam painted a picture of what it might be like: warm people, big families, philosophical outlooks, lots of hospitality, and some Eastern thinking.

There wasn’t much in the library about Morocco. I did get some literature from The Experiment in International Living that gave me a little concern. To stay healthy, we were told to peel our fruit before eating it, boil our vegetables, purify our water, and get lots of shots: cholera, yellow fever, typhus, tetanus, and gamma globulin. I wondered if I really wanted to go. But it couldn’t be that bad, I thought.

The literature also recommended reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Gary had a copy from a course he took on minority cultures, and I started reading it. It taught me a great deal about America and gave me my first introduction to the religion of Islam.

I had to find a way to Vermont for the week of training that would come before the trip to Morocco. My sister said she would drive me. On the way, we talked about our lives, our family, and each other. We passed beautiful hill and lake country in upstate New York. At one point we pulled off the road just to look at the rows of hills resting near the horizon. Soon after we crossed the border into Vermont, the roads turned winding and country-like. The trip took much longer than either of us expected.

Just before sunset, we pulled into Saxton River and entered the campus of Vermont Academy. People were walking around. Some were unloading suitcases, saying good-bye to their parents, or meeting new friends.

I took my bags to my room. No one was around. I looked out the back window. It was a pretty sight: green trees, bright green grass, and a picturesque dirt road leading off to somewhere peaceful.

While I was putting my things away, a roommate showed up. His name was Steve. He was a French major from a college in Kansas, and he was going to Morocco too. Later a fellow named Brian came around and introduced himself. He would be our group leader. Brian was a Canadian, a law student from Toronto, and his family lived in Winnipeg. He said we would meet the rest of our group later in the week. Their French was good enough that they didn’t need the French training Steve and I would get at Vermont Academy.

Vermont Academy was apparently an exclusive boarding school that rich people sent their kids to. I tried to imagine what it would be like to attend a school like that, and it didn’t really interest me. I couldn’t figure out why parents would send a child they loved off to live in an institution, or why a kid would want to go. It was probably an all-boys’ school. It sat in a very small hamlet. There were no TVs in convenient places, no hamburger hangouts, and no student cars. Maybe those were the reasons parents sent their kids there.

We spent most of the day in French classes. They used a method I had never seen. We repeated dialogues over and over, and the key was to memorize them for later use in Morocco, or in France, where most of the students were headed. One sentence still sticks in my mind: “Nous voilà chez nous, 36 Avenue Jules César.” (“Here we are at our house, 36 Julius Caesar Avenue.”)

Some of the students seemed a little arrogant. But to me it was a vacation. We were away from home, and we weren’t being graded. Things could be worse.

There was a kid in my French class with an adventurous streak. Between classes and sometimes during them, we talked about how we could have some fun. He told me he had found a quiet spot next to the creek in Saxton River where we could have a party. His name was Peter, and he was a neglected rich kid. He told me his parents kept sending him from prep school to prep school and to summer camps so they wouldn’t have to deal with him. They lived in Chicago. I felt sorry for him. What a rotten life. He had money and every material advantage, but no love and no care. He was a neat guy, though, and probably the only one I met there with any interest in a social life.

One of our French teachers seemed a bit more “with it” than the others. He also seemed a bit lonely, so we decided to invite him. Peter said he would take care of inviting the others.

I didn’t invite Brian or Steve. I figured I didn’t need any trouble before leaving for Morocco. Steve was the type who seemed afraid of doing anything even slightly risky.

On Friday, there was a dance. It was a lot like a high school dance, but I had a good time. I met a Jewish girl from New York named Nina. We danced and had fun. She was on her way to France but said she’d be back before the Woodstock Festival. I asked her what the Woodstock Festival was all about, and she described it much the way the news reports did later. I invited her to our party. We left the dance and headed down the hill to Saxton River’s main street, crossed it, and walked toward the creek.

When we got there, Peter and a couple of others were standing around in the dark. Nina and I each had a beer, and we talked about our lives, our interests, and what we thought was ahead of us.

One of our French teachers, Claude, came for a little while. He didn’t stay long. I guess he figured it might be a quick way to get himself kicked out of the program.

After a while, Nina and I decided to split. We walked, talked, and laughed our way slowly back to campus, stopping now and then to kiss. It was a cool evening. When we got back, we kissed each other good night.

A couple of days later, the French program ended. Brian, Steve, and I were driven to a camping area near a small town called Bellows Falls. It was a rustic place, and we stayed in cabins. The woods sometimes made me feel I was in paradise, far from any city. At night, you could see what seemed like millions of stars.

Sometime after we arrived, four other group members joined us: Phil, Leonard, Carol, and Mirjana. Leonard was a student from Brown University. He was Jewish and seemed really sophisticated about things like literature and world travel.

Phil was from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He had done a lot of traveling too, and he seemed comfortable and excited about our trip to Morocco.

Mirjana was an international relations major at American University in Washington, D.C. She was from Cleveland. Her parents were from Yugoslavia, and she spoke fluent Serbo-Croatian.

Carol went to a small school in the Pittsburgh area. She was very warm and friendly.

All four of our new group members spoke French well. So did our leader, Brian, and Steve was a French major. Only Steve and I had never traveled internationally, and I was the weakest one in French. I felt inferior when the group decided to use French for all of our meetings. I kept my mouth shut. I was afraid to speak. I figured I would sound stupid, make a lot of mistakes, and probably not be understood.

When the group noticed I had stopped joining the conversation, they switched to English and told me they would support me, and that I was expected to make mistakes on my way to becoming a French speaker. They assured me that each of them had gone through the frustrating experience of pushing past the embarrassment of sounding weird and getting things wrong. They really put me at ease. So I started speaking the best French I had at the time. It was choppy, it was missing words, and my pronunciation was atrocious. But I was speaking, and that was all that counted.

I was proud of myself after I survived a couple of group meetings. Nobody laughed. Everyone kept encouraging me. They were patient.

The few days we spent in Bellows Falls were good ones. We were building camaraderie and getting ready for a stay in what would be, to us, a strange culture.

The day before we left, we had a chance to meet a Moroccan man who worked for The Experiment in International Living. I was really excited. For a couple of months I had read about Morocco, talked about it, thought about it, and looked forward to visiting it, but I had never actually met a Moroccan.

We met Mohammed Alaoui in a field. It was beautiful. The grass was soft. The birds were singing. Insects were making summer noises. The sky was blue, and the temperature was perfect. For a few minutes, I thought I was in paradise. Brian introduced each of us and said the funny thing about us was that none of us smoked. As Mohammed lit a cigarette, he said, “Well, I’m sure they have other vices.” We all laughed. I thought, “Yes, I’ll bet we do,” and it struck me as an interesting way to look at things.

Mohammed told us about his own experience as an “Experimenter” in Binghamton, New York, several years earlier. He talked about some of the challenges of living with a family from a strange culture. He seemed very relaxed and intelligent. When we asked how we should act, and how we could avoid making a faux pas, he said, “Just be yourselves. Whatever you do here, do there. Relax. Your family understands you are American. They will expect you to be American and will excuse you for anything you do. Just relax and have an enjoyable experience.”

Mohammed put me at ease. He had given me much less to worry about. I decided to take his advice and just be myself.

The next day, we lugged our bags up the hill and climbed onto a big bus bound for Montreal. We shared it with a group on its way to Ireland. After what felt like an all-day drive, we reached the airport in Montreal. We checked our bags and killed time in a restaurant lounge. It was raining hard. The red airport lights looked watery on the broad, high windows that separated us from the runways.

We boarded around 10 p.m. I slept most of the way, with excitement in my stomach. When I saw light coming through the windows, I looked out at part of the Belgian countryside below. It was supposed to look different. It looked a little like home.

We took a bus to the Hotel du Midi, and as soon as we got settled, we went out to see what Brussels looked like. We saw big sidewalk cafés and many sights that were new to me. Phil and I walked all over town. There seemed to be people everywhere. The record stores were full of people browsing and listening. Political slogans were painted on many of the walls. We saw a wedding party get off a public bus and walk into a restaurant, the bride still in her gown. Many of the people in the cafés were drinking a very dark beer. That evening, Phil and I went to see the movie Che, about the life of Che Guevara, a medical doctor turned revolutionary.

The next morning, we caught a Sabena Airlines jet for Casablanca, with a stop in Tangier on the way. I sat between two Moroccans, both workers from Belgium returning to Morocco to visit their families. I talked with one of them almost the whole way. He was a very friendly guy. He was from Inezgane, near Agadir, and he invited me to his family’s house if I could get there. He gave me his address.

We landed in Tangier. It looked like a small airport. We stayed on the plane. It looked dry and hot outside.

We took off for Casa. About halfway there, the plane dropped a few hundred feet in just a couple of seconds. I thought it was the end. Across the aisle, I saw a Moroccan man praying. I started sweating, until I looked at my new Moroccan friend on my right. He gave me a “Don’t worry, it’s okay” sign. For some reason, I believed him, and I felt reassured. The plane continued without incident to Casablanca.