Oh Africa: Morocco

After we ate breakfast in the hotel we walked to the port, which wasn't too far away and met us with everyone. There were two groups of 15 on the trip, but half of our group came by plane from Madrid so only half of our group took the ferry. Interesting experience. Our leaders were Alan and Rachel. Alan is like the director of the program so it was nice to have him because he knows pretty much everything and Rachel was training to become a "guide", but was amazing and spoke the Arabic dialect of Morocco and french.

We had orientation and coffee on the boat which did not like to run smoothly. The trip was pretty rocky. Even I felt kinda sick and there were girls with us who had decently bad motion sickness usually. Couple people sitting on the group with heads in trash bags...

About 2 hours later we arrived in Tangier. We walked through a market and bought some dates and figs...the meat section smelled pretty nasty, but the fish market was fun. We went to a woman's center second where we got a tour and a chat with some students from Tangier.

The women's center is a place where education is given to women who have come from hard backgrounds including divorce, single mothers, etc. It's not a place to empower or build feminism, but a school to incorporate all women into the workforce so they can care for themselves and their family. There were classes for reading and writing, traditional sewing, how to use modern sewing machines, etc. Very interesting place.

We got a tour from 3 students: Majid, Khadija, and another girl that I can't remember her name. There were very interesting though because after the tour we sat and had lunch and talked with them about Morocco and life and different things. It was nice to have a male and two different female perspectives - Khadija is 27 and wears a hijab and the other was a senior in high school and a bit less traditional. The disagreed on topics like dating, what to do for fun, voting, and the state of the government. VERY interesting.


We had chicken tajin? for lunch (a dish of chicken and vegetables like it was in a crock-pot)and Khadija talked with Camilia and I a bit about living in the US as a Muslim. Afterwords we hopped into our mini-bus and went driving south.