Dear Friends,
Greetings of love and peace from Rabat, Morocco.
I arrived here about 8 hours ago after about 13 hours in the air and nearly missing my connecting flight in Paris. I arrived, without luggage, to the warm welcome of Naoufal el Hammoumi, a 2010 URI Youth Ambassador who has helped anchor the local logistics for upcoming Young Leaders Training and URI MENA and Europe Assembly and two friends.
Blessedly, today my only responsibility was to greet a wonderful array of URI young leaders from MENA, filled with energy, apprehension and hope about the future, as we ran into each other in the hotel lobby, to prepare for tomorrow’s Standing Committee conference call, and to get some sunlight and exercise, both essential elements for me to reset my biological clock with as little disruption as possible.
On first impression, Rabat is a delightful, relaxed city. Our hotel is near the Royal Palace, the train station, the Parliament building and many shops and restaurants, a surprising percentage of which sell pizza! Local restaurants sell shwarma. And then there are Spanish and at least one Lebanese restaurant. You get a lively sense of EuroMed (Europe and the Mediterranean) as a region walking down the wide boulevards and narrow neighborhoods streets of Rabat.
A five-minute walk will expose you to tradition and modernity – in everything from architecture to how men and women and boys and girls dress.
On the broad median that divides Mohammed V Boulevard as it runs past Parliament, I came across a few hundred men dressed in traditional long white robes demonstrating. Signs made it clear that they love their king; and that they want full rights for former political prisoners. One banner that looked, as most of them did, as if it were painted on a bed sheet, made a plea (in French) for those rights and praised God, Rights and King.
Even walking by the demonstration, I feel completely comfortable and safe here. There is a gentleness and calm in the air that speak of a future being made real in the free way people walk down the street.
So much for first impressions, I’m off to bed to rest for a big day tomorrow.
Faithfully,
Charles
