I witnessed a cultural chasm in Morocco and returned grateful to be American | John Gurda

It took our Land Rover half-an hour to reach him. We left the paved road in a dusty frontier town and plunged into the Sahara, following a barely visible track on the windward side of a massive dune. After a kidney-pounding ride at 30 miles an hour, we finally pulled up to an adobe hut the same color as the surrounding desert. Aamar was waiting for us. We were about to meet a Moroccan shepherd whose roots in the sand extended to antiquity.

My wife and I were in Morocco on a spring trip with Overseas Adventure Travel, or OAT, an acronym also said to stand for Older Americans Traveling. Our group fit the profile: 14 Americans with homes scattered from San Diego to Brooklyn, all of us in our seventies or nearby. Sonja and I had chosen Morocco because it’s an Islamic nation with Western sympathies, making it an attractive blend of exotic and accessible. As we discovered, it’s also a beautiful country: green in the north, brown in the south, with snow-capped mountains in between and roughly 2,000 miles of coastline on both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

We saw plenty of sights, but one of OAT’s strengths is its emphasis on local culture. Through our guide, Abdou Akkrouch, a Moroccan with half our years and twice our energy, we had noteworthy encounters with at least 20 of his fellow citizens, some prearranged and others completely spontaneous. Aamar was one of the regular OAT hosts. Seventy-eight years old and widowed, he was the head of a small household that included his son Hamad, 39, daughter-in-law Fatim Zahra, 28, and their three young children, Mohmed, Khadija, and Brahim.

Host family belongs to nomadic Berber tribes in Morocco

The family belonged to a long line of Berber tribes who lived in Morocco ages before the Arabs brought Islam from the East. Although their tradition was nomadic, Aamar had decided to settle down after his wife’s death 12 years earlier; he and Hamad stacked up their bricks on a wind-scoured plateau overlooking the open desert. Why build there? “Because no one told me I couldn’t,” he replied through Abdou.

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The family’s wealth was centered in its animals: two camels, a small herd of goats, and a few chickens, all used in some combination for meat, milk, eggs, wool, and transportation. Animal husbandry was not just generational for Aamar but millennial. Those shepherds that Jesus mentioned in his parables? These were the same people, 2,000 years later and 3,000 miles west.

The family’s living quarters were as simple as their way of life was ancient. A five-foot wall of baked mud, high enough to keep out the animals, enclosed three rooms and a small courtyard that was hung with wash when we visited. The yard’s centerpiece was a makeshift loom on which Fatim Zahra wove small Berber rugs for occasional sale.

On a nearby rafter she had hung sausages of goat intestines stuffed with goat hearts, liver, tongue, and assorted other body parts. It was in this cramped compound that the family weathered the frosts of winter, the blowtorch heat of Sahara summers, and regular blizzards of blowing sand. There were a few concessions to modernity — a single solar panel for power, a small propane stove for cooking, and a motorbike for getting around — but in its basic configuration the scene was Biblical.

After a brief tour of their living space, Aamar led us to a long, open-sided tent made with multiple panels of camel wool, each of which had taken Fatim Zahra a month to weave. After she demonstrated how she carded camel hair and spun it into yarn with her fingers, she and Hamad served us mint tea, the liquid medium of Moroccan hospitality wherever we went.

We begin an uneasy conversation where cultural chasm grows

Then the conversation started. We learned, with Abdou as our interpreter, that Aamar had arranged the marriage of his son and daughter-in-law, and that their children had never attended school. (As we talked, Mohmed and Khadija walked barefoot across the stony hardpan to wave to a passing Land Rover.) It occurred to us later that there were no books in the home because no one could read. Toothbrushes were just as scarce. The nearest well was nearly two miles away, and the family lived without running water or anything resembling a Western toilet.

The gap between their lives and ours grew wider and more uncomfortable the longer we talked. Aamar and his family were rooted like palm trees in a place with fewer material comforts than the most basic American campground. Everything the family owned, minus their camels, could fit in a space no larger than my living room. Everyone in the OAT group, by contrast, owned houses, cars, computers, roomfuls of furniture, closets filled with clothes, and appliances galore, not to mention investment portfolios. We were, comparatively speaking, as rich as sultans.

So there we sat, perched on opposite sides of a cultural chasm, the simplicity of their lives incomprehensible to us, our affluence unimaginable to them. I, for one, began to feel like a well-heeled voyeur. This was, after all, a vacation we were on, not an errand of mercy. We were building no houses and we brought no medicine, just a box of groceries and a little cash. At breakfast a few of us had commented on the dryness of our pastries and the hardness of our beds. Those complaints now seemed like the whining of spoiled children.

Not that radical inequality is unknown in Morocco. The nation’s per capita income is less than $400 a month, and King Muhammad VI owns 23 palaces of various vintages and burns through a million dollars a day in living expenses. But that contrast seemed academic in comparison with the vivid human tableau in which we found ourselves immersed.

A cultural exchange led to uncomfortable questions for this American

My mind began to churn with questions I couldn’t ask out loud. That fixed expression on Aamar’s face — was it dignity or stolidity? Did he delight in the freedom of the desert and the crystalline darkness of the night sky, or was he rooted there out of ancient habit? Unlike so many rural Moroccans, neither he nor his son had decamped for low-wage jobs in Europe or taken their chances in the shantytowns of Casablanca, but how much of that stability was a conscious decision and how much simply inertia?

Unless I learned their language and shared their lives, I would never have clear answers to those questions, which left me to ponder my own American reflection in the mirror of these desert-dwellers’ lives. What need possessed us, I wondered, to possess so much stuff? What were we losing in our helpless, headlong pursuit of material wealth? When do the artifacts of our civilization cease to be supports and instead become encumbrances?

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And what did Aamar and his family make of us, these oddly dressed, pale-skinned visitors who had descended on their desert home like well-meaning locusts? I lacked the presence of mind to ask the question, but Abdou later supplied what he thought would be their answer. Moroccans love the United States, despite our bloated lifestyles —or perhaps even because of them. They watch our movies, wear our T-shirts and, more and more each year, speak our language. Time after time in our travels, we met young people, in particular, whose heart’s desire was to see our side of the ocean, either as visitors or as workers. Moroccans line up for the precious few visas our embassy doles out annually, and winning one is equivalent to winning the lottery. Without any effort on our part, without even making a decision, all of us were lottery winners by the simple fact of our birth.

We travel to learn about the world. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we end up learning more about ourselves. Coming home to snow (in March), returning to a place that is unmistakably northern, I had a day or two of cultural clarity before the walls of my accustomed life closed in around me. In that brief period of insight, I could see America as others see us: a fractious, rollicking capitalist carnival that is the envy of the world.

The bonds of our union are strained today, and too many Americans have either too little or too much. But we pledge a common allegiance to a homeland that millions would gladly trade for theirs. Safely returned to my comparative palace in Bay View, I look back on Aamar’s desert dwelling with neither guilt nor condescension but with respect for our differences. I brought back colorful memories and a few souvenirs from Morocco, but that’s not all. I flew home from Aamar’s country with a fresh appreciation for my own, feeling proud, humbled and, above all, grateful to be an American.

Reach Milwaukee writer and historian John Gurda at mail@johngurda.com

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: I visited Morocco as an American. Here’s what I learned