Sunday, May 9, 2021

study abroad

Village Life in Morocco

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By MARK MINTON

SIT journalism students in Morocco have returned safely from their week-long village stay, in which students are immersed in the culture of a rural Moroccan village where they live and work with a local family, participating in the rituals of rustic Moroccan life.

Students lived for one week in Birta Village, part of Sbaa Rouadi Commune in the Boulmane region near Fez. While there, students participated in group activities, visited local NGOs, and navigated the lifestyles of their individual host families, intimating themselves with the routines, joys and travails of village life in Morocco.

Moroccan Farmers Would Benefit From Insurance

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By GRANGER TRIPP

Photographs by JP KEENAN

Rachid Lazaar, 26, needs only a steady flow of water and a small hoe to flood his entire field before the next crop is planted. He carves countless narrow valleys into the barren land to funnel the water exactly where he it needs to go, it seems more a work of art than fieldwork.

With the hottest and driest part of the year over, watering his land like this is a relief for Lazaar. Drought is a dangerous reality for small, rural farmers in Morocco and it appears he has escaped it, at least this year.

Jackie Kantor, UNC Chapel Hill

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 I would say my two big things have been the journalism experience I’ve gotten and then just the fact that I came here expecting a challenge, and I came here expecting the culture to be very different, but I never expected I would actually love it. And also, that I could take a story from the beginning to the end and put it somewhere where it wasn’t my school paper.”

  Jackie’s story was published in the New York Times.

Maddy Crowell, Carleton College

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Walid and I had a final goodbye coffee just before I left, and had a long conversation about how lucky we feel to have had the opportunity to work on a project like the one we did together.  I am certain we will be in touch, likely for the rest of our lives. The program was brilliantly designed. I think journalism is a potential path for me. Thank you for showing me this. Thank you also for showing me how to apply the questions in my head to the real world.

A Vegetarian’s Guide to Morocco

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By SADIA KHATRI

Food streets in Morocco are a vegetarian’s nightmare. Butcher shops flaunt meat in every form: cut into sausage, minced, sliced, finely chopped. Roadside restaurants advertise an assortment of chawarmas, paninis and burgers while customers loiter about. Biased menus flap in defiance, offering modest salads as their sole vegetarian option, as smoke from barbequed chicken lingers invitingly above grilles, and snail and fish smells waft in to tantalize passerbys. In Morocco, meat is more than a popular cuisine: it is a lifestyle

“It’s very shame[ful] if you have people in your house and you put Tajine without meat,” stresses Ibrahim Adaoui, 46, referring to his favourite stew of chicken, tendered to perfection.

The Simple Life

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By MARK MINTON

A small fire and the faint smell of burning marijuana signals the presence of a group of fishermen on the shore of Rabat, Morocco’s coastal capital. As the twilight hour begins and the sun casts a shimmering golden glow across the various tidal pools on the rocky shore, five Moroccans sit down to enjoy a fresh catch from the evening’s haul.

“We enjoy the simple life here,” says Hamada Benhima with a winsome smile as he presents a slightly charred fish called Halama. Nimble sand-covered hands pass thefish back and forth, tearing off small pieces that practically fall off the bones.

Sugar in Moroccan Diet Causing Major Health Concerns

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By GRANGER TRIPP

Four oversized sugar cubes sit atop the mint leaves resting at the bottom of Fatima Hasson’s tin teapot.The taste is tough to beat – the cool refreshment of mint combined with the sugar’s sappy sweetness.

But, the excessive sugar consumption in the Moroccan diet comes at a price. The rate of diabetes is high in the country and is expected to double by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

“About one and a half million people suffer from diabetes in our country,” said Dr. Jamal Belkhadir, President of the Moroccan League for the Fight Against Diabetes, in an article he published earlier this year.

Sugarcane and Conversation

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By AMULYA SHANKAR

A sugarcane juice stall can be an oasis in a bustling market, and there are a myriad of vendors peddling freshly pressed sugarcane juice to weary shoppers looking for a cool drink and a rush of energy in Rabat’s medina. Hassan is one such vendor, combining the distinctive sweetness of sugarcane with a hint of lemon and a pinch of salt for five dirhams a glass.

“It’s cheap, and everyone loves it. Sugarcane is easy to sell,” he says. Hassan’s stall, resting in the shade amidst various shops selling everything from shoes to snails, is marked by a large bundle of green sugarcane stalks, ready to be fed into the pressing machine to be made into juice.

Fruit: An Unlikely Economic Indicator

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By MADELEINE THOMPSON

In Morocco, it is fruit that distinguishes a big-budget wedding from a more modest one. Bananas from Cuba, three kinds of apples from France, mangoes from South America and pineapples from Hawaii are paraded around under gauzy tents — nothing from inside the country.

For 35,000 dirham (4,170.07 US dollars) Brahim Hafalat’s traiteur company will plan, decorate and supervise a wedding or party for 100 people that pulls out all the stops. “You start with … the tables, the servers, the napkins,” Hafalat said. “Then you have the appetizers — pistachios, mineral water.

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