Yes, I acted a fool.

I am going to write this story, despite that fact that I indeed look like a fool during it, because I believe it is a story that needs to be told. The fun all started last night.

I was sitting in the kitchen watching my sister cook dinner, after an afternoon collecting all of the wheat that the women in the village had harvested. My brother, Moustapha, comes into the kitchen and tells me that my host uncle has letters from his “friends” in America that are in English and he cannot read them. He wants to know if I will read them and help him understand what they are saying. I am immediately daunted by this task, since after all I know slightly better than Kindergarten Tashlheet and translating letters sounds way out of my language league, but of course I agree.

About 30 minutes later my host uncle shows up with a shoebox size box full of “letters”. I then ask my host uncle if he has friends in America, and he says “no”. So then I start wondering, where are these letters coming from if he doesn’t have friends in America. I open the box and to my surprise and delight, it is an ENTIRE BOX full of junk mail. Yes, anywhere from 40-50 pieces of junk mail that were sent to my host uncle’s PO Box in southern Morocco, saved from 2005 to now. I immediately burst out into a fit of laughter. Of course everyone around me has no idea what is going on, so I tell them, “This is trash, all of this mail is just trash letters from America”. They still don’t understand.

This is where I start to look like a fool. In my defense, I have no prior knowledge about my uncle and his feelings (this was only the second time I had met him, the first time he yelled at my about George Bush for like 25 minutes), I also had no idea that Moroccans have no concept of junk mail. Americans are well aware of the concept of sales calls, junk mail and the constant solicitation that we receive every day for products, ect. In Morocco, they do not have these same problems. I suppose in Morocco they use the postal service for actual letters instead of just advertisements and solicitations.

All of you can empathize with my initial reaction of laughter. After all my uncle thought these were letters from his friends, but they were just junk mail. My question is why are American companies (one was based in KCMo) sending this mail to a Moroccan man who lives in a small village far away from the USD?

We then brought all of the mail into the living room, where there were about 7 of Moustapha’s friends and my uncle assembled eager to figure out what these letters said. Here is a synopsis of the letters. “If you mail us $30 and all of your personal information, including your Social Security number or Passport number, then we will mail you a new flat screen TV or $10,000.” All of the letters promised lots of money in exchange for a little money. This is the sort of stuff that American’s don’t even open, they just throw it away.

At this point, I had been trying to explain (in my limited language) that this was trash mail and not from his friends, for about 45 minutes, but no one understood. It was too late to call anyone I knew who could translate, so I tried to make a point by crumpling up one of the pieces of paper and throwing it towards the trash can. This was single handedly the stupidest cultural thing I have done since I got to Morocco.

My uncle immediately became extremely mad that I was treating his letters this way, walked over grabbed the rest of the mail and the crumbled up piece of paper and left the room. At this point, I didn’t know what to do, so I went upstairs and called Sami and Dave. First to remove myself from the very awkward situation and to tell the story to someone, in hope that it would help me calm down my laughter. After I got off the phone with them, I went back downstairs and started apologizing to my mother and my sister, they both told me it wasn’t a big deal and that I didn’t do anything wrong, but that was not the impression I had gotten.

I then start explaining to my mom in different words that these are just American companies who want information and money from people, even Moroccans. I told her that in America we get lots and lots of letters like that, and we just throw them away. I told her that there is no company in America that will just mail you $10,000 for no reason (one of the letters even promised $1.5 Million USD). She then started to catch on and understand, asking me many more questions about the companies and letters. I explained the best I could. She then told me that my Uncle had been mailing his information to these companies, despite the fact that he couldn’t read the letters. To my Uncle’s credit, he had NO idea what he was getting mailed. He had no concept of junk mail, or scams or any of the above. He assumed, rightfully so, that if he got a letter in his mailbox, it was a legitimate letter. The fact that he was sending his info back explains why he had so many letters. I am sure every time he sent something back, they mailed him even more stuff.

I had then asked my mom to call my host uncle and explain the situation and apologize for anything I did that I didn’t mean to do. She agreed. Today I called one of the people who works for PC and can translate more complex ideas than I can. She talked to my host mother and explained in greater detail the situation and the caution I send to the uncle about passing his information to American companies. Turns out my broken Tashlheet had come through and my mother indeed understood what I had told her the night before.

The moral of this story is that my cultural insensitivities had made me look like a fool in the end. I had failed to fully digest the situation before I reacted in laughter. In the end, it turned out fine. My uncle is not mad at me, my family thinks its hilarious and most importantly the point has been made that these letters were not from his friends, they were scams. Hopefully I have explained it well enough to prevent future sending of information to scam artists in the States.
I learned my lesson and taught something at the same time, accomplishing goals two and three of the Peace Corps Mission.

Love you all.