Tuesday, August 27, 2013

European Escapades and their Consequences


            It has been a while since I last wrote.  To be honest it has been quite hard to write because I’ve been pretty feeling pretty low since coming back to Morocco from my Ramadan trip to Europe.  The trip to Europe was absolutely fantastic and a welcome break from life in the developing world, but coming back has seriously highlighted some of the intense issues that Morocco must face in order to move beyond this developing stage.  Since this is a blog about Morocco the majority of this post will be about these issues, rather than a blow by blow of the trip and the camp I worked in Khenifra upon returning.

            Chief among the issues facing Morocco is harassment in its many forms, religious, political, and sexual.  One of the best parts about being in Europe was simply liberation from constant scrutiny, judgment, and pressure to live differently.  Not once did I feel uncomfortable for being a different faith.  Since coming back I’ve had to readjust to people constantly asking if I’m Muslim and then pressuring me or even trying to trick me into converting when I say I’m not.  Someone even told me that the Christian faith I profess was evil and ugly.  This lack of tolerance and harassment of the different puts a severe check on the forward movement of the country. 

While in Frankfurt I had the fortune to meet two young men from Cairo.  They were both very left thinking and were supporters of the military coup, which they did not feel was a coup (this was before the massacres in early August).  They were both secularist Muslims, and as such were intensely against the Islamist government, which they felt had repressed even moderate Islam in favor of a more fundamentalist approach.  They felt that they weren’t safe in the streets, one had even received death threats for wearing his hair long, and his mother was threatened for not wearing hijab.  Since the men threatening them were fanatics the boys were convinced the government would not pursue justice against them, and that put their lives in danger.  The upshot of all this was that they’d felt dehumanized, and from there they dehumanized their oppressors.  They seemed incredibly angry at the Islamist and didn’t seem to care one way or the other if the military used violence against them.  To me this shows the dangers of intolerance; these boys hadn’t had their differences tolerated, and now in turn when their side was in power they saw no problem in repressing their former repressors.  I tried to talk with some Moroccans about this, but my conversation with actual Egyptians about Egypt was dismissed in a wave of Islamist fervor.  The wouldn’t accept that Mr. Morsi hadn’t done a good job maintaining his democratic mandate, and because they felt more compelled to say their beliefs as truths then to listen to my different (and thereby necessarily wrong) ones they couldn’t understand that I liked neither the Morsi government nor the coup.  Rather than listen to another point of view people shoot it down and attack the person saying it.  This is a product of the dichotomizing effect of harassment.

There is another form of harassment endemic to Morocco which severely damages its tourist industry.  This is the constant attempt by many Moroccans in touristic areas to prey on tourists.  One of the truly great things about Morocco is how welcoming, kind, and helpful Moroccans are.  One of the truly terrible things about Morocco is how a significant minority of people will attempt to cheat tourists by faking this helpful and welcoming attitude up until the point that they can get the tourists in a bind.  While standing at a map in London trying to get our bearings we talked about how nice it was to not have dozens of young men throwing themselves at us trying to drag us away from the map so they could take us somewhere and charge us a service fee for doing it.  The upshot of course is that in Morocco there wouldn’t even be a map, and the young men would just try to drag you to the popular tourist places, where you actually want to go be damned.  It’s frustrating, annoying, and if there are women in the tourist group possibly traumatizing as the young men harass them.  After almost three weeks of not having these kinds of issues it was really disheartening when our first experience with Moroccans as we left the airport was a bunch of men agreeing to a fair price for a taxi back into the city and then trying to raise it once we got into the taxi.  These actions hurt the tourist industry, which could otherwise be a major shot in the arm for the economy.

The other major issue that this trip threw into relief is the inequality between the sexes.  While there is still a ways to go in both America and Europe towards full gender equality, compared to Morocco the disparity is very small.  It felt safe going out at night with the girls in our group, and we saw women doing all kinds of things that they cannot do in Morocco.  Perhaps the most surprising and strangest thing I noticed in Europe was that it was equally interesting to talk with women and men in our hostels and in the cities.  In the camp I worked at back in Morocco I noticed that, as always, I tended to find the girls much more interesting to talk to then the boys.  Also, unlike in Europe, the young women’s English, on average, is notably better than the young men’s.  I think that this problem is a direct result of gender inequality.  Since the boys face so many less challenges they tend to work less hard, meaning that the girls, in general, have better English, greater drive, more informed view points, and a wider range of interests.  This is, of course, a gross generalization, and there are many exceptions but in the younger generation it is largely true, and would probably be true in older generations if not for the higher levels of repression that kept women from attaining higher (or any) education.

I was hoping to end this post on a positive note, but I’m having a very hard time writing it.  I think instead I’ll just mention that although I’m having pretty negative feelings about Morocco of late the trip was an inspiration to redouble my efforts at development work with my students here.  In the coming year I hope to especially work in two areas, giving students more opportunities to explore their interests, be they art, music, sports, theatre, or what have you, and working with students on issues of gender equality.  If possible I’d like to do this by helping the boys understand the importance of respecting girls and of engaging and working hard, like the girls do, but should that fail with the boys here I’ll instead focus on giving the girls more opportunities to develop their talents and interests.  So I guess in conclusion I escaped to Europe, and as a consequence now want to work even harder.