What good things do Moroccans hope for their country? Well, the place could use better hospitals, and more of them. And if that, then it needs more money and more doctors and nurses. Making a stronger economy is going to take some creative ideas, collaboration, planning, ...literacy. American education can offer those tools.
I thought I was helping. I thought that by being an American teacher, just what they asked for, and fostering relationships with people of another culture, religion, history, this would be spreading the love of God. But right now, I'm afraid all they'll see is that I'm an American. I am an American.
Will my students shut me out because of what my country seems to think of Muslims?
Will their American education be useful to them, after all? Will American universities admit them? Will America give them a student's visa? And if they get into the country, will they be violated because of their skin color or their religion?
I'm asking because for the past week, they've been asking me. And I've come home and cried, planned, graded. I promise I'm being brave and circumspect. I'm not bad-mouthing our president-elect in public; I am only decrying his suggestion to stop Muslims from entering the country, and to keep a tab on all Muslims within the country. That's oppression. I stand against that. I stand beside Muslims, and anyone else who is being oppressed. (Did he miss singling out any minority? Well, today I'm talking about Muslims, who aren't asking for pity, I know, but I don't want them to ever have to.)
Here are some of the things I hope, in regard to international relations:
- I hope my students' very good dreams can still happen.
- I hope Morocco and other Muslim countries won't give way to fear in the same way my country has, and start lashing out at me, an outsider of a different skin color and religion, whose country appears to hate them.
- But if they do lash out at me, I hope the US doesn't get madder at them. Because they have plenty of grounds for saying we started it.
