Individual vs. Collective: Discovering Community in the High Atlas Mountains
When I took the red-eye out of JFK heading toward Morocco, a world away from my hometown and college communities I’d grown so comfortable in, I left knowing that the experience would change me in some way. Having left home numerous times before, I learned that with each venture away from home I returned with a quiver of new experiences and lessons strapped across my back. The act of engulfing oneself in uncertainty and learning by fire is one that I’ve come to see as integral to my development as an individual, but even so, the experiences you have and the realizations that follow after embarking on such a journey remain unknown until you are back and able to reflect on what transpired. This time around, walking the downtown streets of my hometown ten days after my return, I marvel at what it took me 26-months and a whole lot of language slip ups, cups of mint tea, and loaves of bread to see: that community is all around us, and that it is up to us to tap into it.
I was born and raised in the small North Idaho town of Moscow, Idaho. Even with a university, tons of outdoor accessibility, and an active arts and music community, I never saw it as a place where things happened. As a child, even one with a relative wealth of travel experiences, my worldview was narrowed by the blinders of selfishness. By the time I completed high school and decided to leave for university, the focus on building myself a new life pulled me out of my home in Moscow and pushed me toward what I, at that time, perceived to be the promised land: California. Four years later and disappointment on the California-makes-everything-better front and I was off again, only this time the destination for my search of self-actualization was the North African country of Morocco.
I moved to Morocco as a Youth Development Specialist in the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps Morocco structure was as follows: a week of orientation, three months of language and cultural training, then two years of time spent in your little corner of the country figuring out work projects and sporadically reuniting with staff and fellow Peace Corps volunteers for a week of training and binge eating. During the three months of training, we were taught a way of viewing interactions that became a sort of mantra: intentional relationship building (IRB). Chatted up an old man while buying potatoes? IRB. Stopped off at a neighbor’s house for a cup of tea? IRB. Lamely attempted to juggle a deflated soccer ball with the children down the street? IRB. Intentional relationship building was my framework for non-traditional work which mostly came in the form of social interactions on a community level. The transition from being an inattentive, inactive citizen to someone who viewed social engagement and community building as my measure of success was vast. The deep contrast in modes of living I experienced living in a Moroccan village for two years and what I knew back home led me to reflect on what my own community in America was like and how it differed from the one I integrated into in Morocco.
Morocco is considered a highly collectivist country. Collectivism is the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it. Gathering around one dish for the communal meal. Village wide ceremonies: for the good (weddings, baby-naming) and the bad (funerals). Shared living spaces and multigenerational homes full of newborn babies and half-deaf grandmas. Morocco was drenched in collectivism in a way I had never experienced. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I was given the luxury of a private room in my host family home while all of my host-siblings slept together in piles of blankets and people. Eventually the mealtime dynamics became nearly second nature, yet the implication of waiting for a brother or a cousin to arrive before the meal began didn’t fully set in until at 1:00am, my stomach aching with hunger, we remained seated before mounds of unbroken bread. The boisterous and vibrant nature of Morocco’s community is connected to its collective roots, but collectivism is by no means a required preliminary for community. It was on the periphery of Moroccan collectivism that I realized what I had been missing all along: that my community in America was not only accessible to, but also worthy of my investment.
Back home in Moscow after 26 months and everyday I am looking square in the face of the foundational nature of American life: individualism. Individualism is a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control. What does that look like in the United States? It’s the fenced off, clearly separated houses, all but making impossible neighborly relations and a sense of community. It’s the landfills full of on-the-go coffee cups, the result of a society in which everyone is in such a rush to get where they need to be that there isn’t the time to drink coffee (or tea) with loved ones. It’s the guilt young people feel as they sheepishly unload their belongings back into their parents’ house, the rising cost of rent finally outweighing the need to prove their independence and industriousness. These are realities of American life, yes, but they don’t have to be the defining characteristics of American community.
Living in a close-knit Moroccan community gave me a new lens through which to view my own community back in the states. Instead of seeing Moscow as a jumping off point, a limbo of sorts, I am now acutely aware of the nonstop flow of action and activity in my small yet bustling town. Its downtown functions like a beehive, with citizens swarming in and out of coffee shops, restaurants, yoga studios, gyms, law firms, and real estate offices, engaging with one another in the constant give and take that defines small town relations. Instead of speeding by, I walk by walls plastered with posters for swing dance classes and knitting groups, craft fairs and lentil festivals and stop to take in all that this community has to offer. I am no longer a passive bystander, watching each day melt off the calendar before I’m able to board a plane taking me to somewhere that, due to the singular fact that it is not here, not my hometown, is somehow more worthy of investment and innovation. I don’t know how much longer I will have the privilege of living in Moscow, but for as many days moving forward that I retain that privilege, I intend on embracing the opportunity to be a part of a community that is, and has always been, right here in front of me.
