Sudden Death and HIV

One of the more peculiarly named holidays I’ve run across has got to be Youth Day (or Young People’s Day, depending on the translation), a day that is celebrated every year in honor of the Kings birth. Now, don’t get me wrong I appreciate a good holiday as much as the next under worked, yet strangely overwhelmed PCV. But all the same, a holiday named Youth Day, which honors the day every year that the King gets farther away from his youth strikes me as a little odd. But, in honor of the Kings disappearing youth I did what all-good, dedicated, young people who see their own youth rapidly diminishing, do on that day – I went on holiday, and then just for good measure I took the next day as well.

The holiday itself was refreshing, serving to recharge all those proverbial batteries that seem to so rapidly diminish. So that Monday morning when I stepped into my Post Office, smiling and greeting all those that I saw I was completely unaware of the change in atmosphere between the inside and outside of the Post Office. At least until my postman brought me back.

“Hassan, is dead” My postman simply said staring through me with his own often twinkling eyes for once solemn and somber, twin pools, deep as the ocean.

“What, how?” I stammered out, not entirely sure I believed him. I’d seen Hassan, sitting in the very chair his friend now occupied not a week before – healthy and smiling behind his blackened, braced teeth.

“He went, to sleep, and he did not return – he did not wake up”

In Morocco we as PCV’s face many challenges. We live in a society whose fabric is deeply intertwined with that of Islam, one of the few countries that PCV’s serve in that can be unarguably called a nation of Islam. A nation ruled by a descendent of the Prophet, both head of state and leader of the faithful. A place where the roosters’ role as alarm clock is replaced by that of the call to prayer; a call, that in Rabat, echoes from Mosque to Mosque – with their electrified clarion calls – for three quarters of an hour accompanying and welcoming the dawns outstretched rays.

While Moroccan society seems in deep conflict with itself today – with the modernizing urban sector rampaging through the nation and the traditional rural village in a state of siege, the small community in which I find myself remains set in its ways. Ways very different from those of America, or even Dar Beida. A place where alcohol remains haram and women remain behind closed doors. Where as in much of Morocco the Jew is not welcome, a creature of myth and Israel – not of reality. A place where inter-gender education is difficult for a women and nearly impossible for a man, and where any mention of sex or the diseases of it is an instant challenge to the social order.
Taxing as Morocco can be, it thankfully does not hold the greatest challenge I can imagine – the challenge of having to say goodbye everyday to those we have grown to love. The challenge of death, the challenge of SIDA, the challenge of AIDS. More then anything else walking into my Post Office, to find a man who had grown to be a part of my life, gone forever, reminded me of how lucky we are to find ourselves in a country not haunted by the specter of AIDS. How lucky we are to be in a country where we are not forced to become numb to death.