I cannot believe that it is already April. I am more likely to believe that it is February 4- when I see the date written with the day first and then the month it still confuses me. You can take the girl off the farm but you can’t make her learn things like the metric system or to write the date differently. Speaking of which, I had a strange lesson about the difficulties of globalization today. there are issues harder to make sense of than even the 24 hour clock.
Just before dinner I was called over to the computer by my host brother and he gestured to the screen and asked me to read. He had gotten some junk e-mail, but it was in English, and it was that kind that talks really personally, “Hey, I just got this I-pod from this website and it’s so great. Stuff here is really inexpensive and you get just what you pay for! Etc. etc.” My host brother asked me to translate it for him, so I kind of chuckled and gave him my best attempt at a translation, expecting that he would get the point that it was just trash. Instead, he opened up several other e-mails from the same address, all in English, all telling him to buy whatever electronics from one website or another. He kept asking me earnestly what they were saying, telling me they were e-mails from his “friend”. I asked him if he knew this person, and he said he did, so I tried to more politely to tell him that he should just ignore the e-mails. It then became a family affair, and both my host mom and dad asked me what Muhammad’s “friend” had said. I asked my brother how he knew this guy and he said through the internet, a chatroom or something. And I felt bad explaining that in America, online, you can “meet” people but it’s not real and when they ask for your money, you should be careful and probably just ignore it. Now, Moroccans aren’t stupid, and the internet didn’t come here yesterday, but there are deep cultural roots in the intimacy of personal relationships and friendship and I think this has the potential to make people, especially less educated people, like my 14 year old brother, more vulnerable to online scams. In America, we are used to impersonal relationships, but even still you hear horror stories about meeting crazies online and thinking they are people they are not. It’s hard to think what this might mean for a Moroccan whose culture is that if you call someone a friend, it’s very real, and business transactions are no different. Also, the abundance of technology in the West, in reality, is too good to be true to lower class Moroccans, so it’s really hard to separate that from swindlers who are literally “too good to be true.” I don’t actually know how general this case is, but at least with my host brother I felt like he needed a lesson in American/electronic culture more than an English translator. He also might not be the brightest crayon in the box, though, I don’t get the impression that school is his favorite subject and in general sometimes he just acts kind of like a doofus. Maybe there are some things that are cultural universals; 14 year old boys are kind of just doofuses and little brothers are obnoxious at times. Don’t poke me when I’m brushing my teeth, I don’t like it, what part of my frowning, foaming mouth don’t you understand, Muhammad?