Both the study of as well as the failure to successfully communicate have long been characteristic of my existence, and such was the case upon my arrival in Morocco. The problem started a bit before. Normally, in the travel plans that my mother and I make, my mother tends to handle the housing arrangements and reservations, and so it was here when we made hotel arrangements. It was only when I arrived in Ponta Delgada, where I had only about an hour free between the arrival and passport control and boarding my flight to Lisbon, when I found out that my mother’s flight was delayed. It was not until I arrived in Morocco and even when I arrived the hotel that I was able to convey what had gone on, since none of the paperwork and reservations I saw had any means to directly communicate with the hotel.

And so it was that a taxi driver who was both pushy and incompetent managed to drive me to my hotel. This should have been a straightforward task. I had shown the driver the name of my hotel–he did not recognize it at first–and it included the address of the place and what zone of the extended area of Casablanca that the hotel rested in. Yet the driver neither listened to what I had told him nor had read the papers I showed him, and proceeded to drive me to a hotel that had the first word of the hotel I had registered for was not the same hotel nor was in the same area of town. While trying to angle for giving me an expensive tour of the city, the man clearly did not know what he was doing, talking to fellow taxi drivers in his company, driving furiously on the road and making all kinds of somewhat dangerous driving maneuvers around traffic circles and highways and all. He also angled, despite the unreasonable cost he had demanded to drive the modest distance to the airport, to have me reserve a taxi to the airport for the following morning, stating that there were no taxis in the area.

At long last, despite several wrong turns–from the driver’s original desire to get a lot of money to drive me around the central area of Casablanca, the grand Mosque and Casbah and all of that–and then the attempt to sell me on another hotel simply because of his own miserable convenience and failure to understand where it was I had asked to go–we arrived at last in a remote part of the wider area of Casablanca. The highway gave way to a small road that snaked through neighborhoods build like small fortresses into a countryside where dense housing gave way to open farmland, where finally the hotel compound was reached. I paid the driver and he turned around to go, while I sought for a way into the compound, seeing as all of the gates were locked, and there was no button to press for communication with the hotel within. A bit concerned about this, what should happen but that one of the hotel employees should come, needling me about why it was that I did not get in touch with him about the shuttle from the airport, and dealing with the rude taxi driver, who then drove off.

On the one hand, communication problems can be a source of entertainment. It is often a rich mine for me to reflect upon the challenges that people have of conveying information to others and in recognizing what others are trying to say. On a consistent basis in my life–and even more so when I travel–communication can be a matter of both high importance and extreme difficulty. I wonder, does everyone else struggle the way I do to make myself understood and to get what is going on around me? Should it be as hard as it is to convey or to gather information about the complex worlds within and outside of me? While it can be funny to deal with hotel staff or incompetent taxi drivers, communication is a serious problem that has massively affected the course of my life. And try as I might to understand it, it is still a challenge for me both to understand and be understood, for all of the gifts I have with words.