Harassment is always a popular topic when I get together with other volunteers. It is always an issue here, especially for the women. I bet we had more sessions on harassment than anything else during training. Since it seems to be such a big deal here I thought I’d share some of my opinions and experience on the subject. It all started in Philadelphia almost a year ago when, during one of our pre-service training sessions about harassment, somebody said that people in Morocco would yell "fish an' chips" at us. I thought this was incredibly funny at the time, wondering how anybody could think that was harassment. I had heard some strange phrases thrown at me by people in Cambodia. I always assumed they had no idea what they were saying and that it was ... read more

I haven’t talked much lately about work and how things are going at the Dar Chebab (Youth Center). Considering that I am supposed to be here for work, I thought I should write a bit about what’s going on in relation to my “purpose” here. Thanks to book donations to the Dar Chebab and some finagling by my mudir (the DC director) we have opened a library. Our DC is quite small and wonderfully full, though that leaves little room for new programs. All the associations who use the DC rooms for meetings strongly opposed using one of said rooms as a library, so the mudir worked around all the bickering and politics and emptied out a storage room for me to use as the new library. At the moment it is only a few sets ... read more

Pour la version française regardez la blogue de Marie sur http://momaroc.canalblog.com/ I went into Marrakech today to meet Marie, a French woman who is a very close friend of my friend Michèle Lafuste and who I knew briefly when I was in France. She is here for three weeks backpacking around on vacation and also a scouting mission. Next year when her granddaughters are 7 and 8 she is planning on bringing them to Morocco. I am very impressed not only with the way that she is traveling around alone, but also with her granddaughter project. She says that though she takes them camping, they are quite prissy and don’t even like to eat with their hands. That will have to change when they come here. I was recently presented with a fork at a restaurant ... read more

After camp I took a few days to recover and relax before heading back over the mountains to Kelaa. The gorges are just off the main road that goes north from Ouarzazate towards Errachidia, where Maryam took me to have L-Eide Kbir with her family in January. I met another volunteer who had been working at the Errachidia camp and we spent the day hiking through the canyons along the road. To get out of the town of Boulmane and up to the gorges we took a transit, which is a kind of van stuffed with at least twenty people and usually with sheep on top. It was a beautiful ride up through the canyons, following a shallow river. When we saw the road start to leave the riverside and head up to higher ground we ... read more

Up early in the morning I took yet another bus to Zagora where I had promised my mudir (director of my Dar Chebab) I would look up his sister and her sons who worked with tourists before I went on to M’Hamid, where the road ends in the desert near the Algerian border. After a couple phone calls and talking to some of the guys who approached me on the street, a man came up to me and said he would take me to one of the nephews. He led me to a new, black SUV which had a couple French tourists in the back. I introduced myself to the driver, who turned out to be one of the nephews, Hamid. Not having any idea where we were going, but not wanting to be left out ... read more