It’s Sunday afternoon and the beaches of Casablanca are packed. They are the inhabitants of the largest port in Africa, who come to the sun to recharge their batteries and clear their minds. They let themselves be carried away by the swaying waves with the certainty of permanence. The Atlantic Sea is there, present in life, ready to receive them. Tourists prefer the comfort of hotel pools, fake holiday havens where everything has to be perfect. There’s no goal of perfection in the arena – it’s a vibrant, diverse and energetic community to play in. About four million people live in this port, crowned by one of the largest mosques in the world.

As I walk along the dock, a 200-meter tower or minaret built by Hassan II appears before my eyes. 1993, the second monarch since Moroccan independence, to accommodate 25,000 people in the prayer room and about 80,000 in the esplanade during Ramadan. It is surpassed only by the mosques of Mecca and Medina, and the one in Algeria is its equal. The sun is receding in the west, shedding its last glow on this temple, built of the most luxurious materials in the entire kingdom.

In addition to visiting its interior, I also dare to have a traditional experience hammamTurkish baths followed by vigorous massages and washing, which consist of cleansing the body and skin with holy water.

I arrive at Rick’s Café and look for a table where I can listen As the time goes by on the piano. I remember the symbolic sentence of the film White House (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz, with one of the unforgettable roles of Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart: Play it again, Sam (Play it again, Sam.) During World War II, his ex-lover, Ilsa Lund (Bergman), and her husband, Víctor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), show up at Rick’s cafe, desperate to escape to Lisbon and then the United States States. Rick (Bogart) has two safety behaviors. Laszlo begs him to at least take his wife, but Rick could not forget the past: when Ilsa Lund left him in Paris, the day the German occupation of France began. She never told him that she was married, because she thought that her husband had died at the hands of the Nazis.

I came to Morocco to serve with Amir Herdoiz on the board of Coalition Plus, an organization that articulates responses to HIV/AIDS worldwide. We represented Kimirina Corporation, which does the same in Ecuador. The opportunity allowed me to explore a small part of Morocco, its history, culture and gastronomy. Every journey implies a reconfiguration of life and the possibility of self-observation. I am a constant struggle between the strength I project and the weakness that supports it. Perhaps these are dualisms: life and death, strength and fragility, memory and forgetting. Rick, at the end White House, helps Ilsa Lund and Victor Laszlo escape. Free yourself from attachment and gain the opportunity to build a new future, because we are all called to improve ourselves. (OR)