A Life, A Trip, and A Change
Biafra Okoronkwo
Screeeech! Dum! Dum! Dum! The moped slid, then flipped on the wet Moroccan street, hurling its passengers, a man and a woman, onto the cold, hard asphalt. I stared at the woman, lying on her side, unconscious in the street. She wore all black, was possibly in her mid-twenties, and didn’t move. Saad (pronounced Sod), my friend and I had been walking across the street when the incident occurred. A crowd of anxious Moroccans congregated around the woman, but deferred to us, the Americans, the task of administering first aid. We both dropped to the ground on the side of the major Avenue de France as cars raced by us. The noise of the night in Rabat buzzed in our ears, but soon faded into the background as we focused in on the situation before us. Almost immediately Saad started giving me instructions:
“Check her pulse first,” Saad said; he sighed in relief, “She’s breathing.”
“What’s next?” I asked.
“We need to find out if she can hear us, can you hear me? (أيمكنك سماعي)?” we asked, hoping for a response. Nothing.
We spoke Modern Standard Arabic, a language we had learned for seven weeks. Saad and I were part of the National Security Language Initiative for youth or (NSLI-Y), an initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that selected high school students to study critical languages abroad and become immersed in language and culture