One weekend in the summer of 2018, Miller Greene and some friends decided to climb Toubkal, the highest mountain in Morocco and all of North Africa.
Greene had no experience and no equipment to speak of.
“It was on a whim,” he recalled. “I was just along for the ride.”
The “ride” was a rather bumpy one.
Near the end of the climb, Greene, low on water, started getting altitude sickness. He made the summit, but he felt terribly sick all the way back down.
“It took me a full two to three days to recover,” Greene said. “It definitely taught me the importance of being prepared.”
Impulsive miscue aside, Greene was already preparing for his long game that summer. It’s what brought him to Morocco in the first place. By the end of this month, he’s going back.
Greene finished his studies at Ole Miss in May and earned a Boren Scholarship to study abroad in Morocco through the Arabic language flagship program. When he returns home in the spring, he will have a bachelor’s degree in international studies and Arabic, and his scholarship will then require him to work a year in a field related to public service or government.
After that?
“Maybe a job at the State Department or some sort of diplomatic role, hopefully,” he said.
How a kid from Columbus, who had scarcely ever been out of Mississippi, became interested in learning Arabic, is a question Greene fields regularly. It began in high school in Caledonia — where his mother teaches — when he was learning Spanish.
“I enjoyed Spanish, and I thought I had a natural talent for it,” he said. “It was sort of my gateway to learning other languages.”
Combined with his interest in international politics, he went to Ole Miss in 2017 to major in international studies, which required him to choose a second language to learn. He chose Arabic, both because it is a “critical language” he felt would best open doors to his target career path and also because, well, it’s hard.
“It was something interesting and new,” he said. “Plus, it’s a challenge, and it was appealing to learn something that difficult.”
His first immersion in Arabic culture came during the two summer months he spent studying in Morocco. The next summer, he spent two months in Jordan. COVID-19 quashed his study abroad plans last summer.
For the Capstone program — just like his first two study abroad experiences — Greene will stay with a host family, eating meals with them and participating in their daily routines. He will study Arabic language at a center for American students.
Greene remembered having some anxiety in 2018 when he first went to Morocco, especially in how he would deal with cultural differences. Once he met his host family, he found an easy subject to start the cultural exchange.
“Food is a big one for me,” he said. “That’s a great way to get to know a place and its culture.”
He also had arrived during the Muslim holy of month of Ramadan, which led to discussions about fasting and sharing information about each other’s religious practices.
“They were very hospitable,” he said of his host family.
The experience was an important tool for building empathy and understanding for the people of both Morocco and Jordan because he saw the issues they face are “more nuanced and complex” than what he could have ever understood from a textbook.
“Face-to-face interaction is the only way to truly understand another culture,” Greene said. “It puts a human face to ideas you’ve only read about or heard about secondhand.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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