Elections, cooking, & more

Hi everyone! Wow it has been a while since my last post. Let’s see, what has happened since last Tuesday.
Friday of last week was election day in Morocco for local elections. The embassy in Rabat and consulate in Casablanca sent representatives to observe the polling locations in their respective areas. We split up in groups of 3-4 to travel in certain nearby cities with 3 groups remaining and observing in Casablanca. I went with the head of the Econ section and we went out to two cities: El Jadida and Safi. We also stopped at some polling locations on the way to those cities. Overall I think we checked out maybe 7 or 8 polling locations. We would generally just walk to the poll and introduce ourselves as reps from the American consulate and that we wanted to observe how things were going. We asked if there were any problems throughout the day. We also observed security forces outside and we would take note of anything out of place. In one location, a voter thanked us for coming and observing. In another location, a police officer asked us if their elections looked like the ones in America. Not all reactions to our presence were positive. At one location, we had to show our IDs and the police we talked to called their bosses, then their boss’ bosses were called and eventually, maybe 15 minutes later, we were allowed inside the polling location. This hullabaloo eventually reached the ears of some very important people and our bosses called us up and told us to lay low when we observe. For the rest of the day, though, there weren’t any problems like this for the most part. Most of the locations that we went to were schools, both rural and urban. We also went to some magistrate buildings that were polling locations. I enjoyed observing the elections but I also enjoyed seeing more of the country. It was determined that there were no irregularities at the polling locations observed by all the consulate people. A significant amount of the voters were female. Additionally, adults would bring their children to the polling location. I thought that this was good because it would create a culture of voting in the society starting at a young age. Unfortunately my personal discovery of the day was that I so naively believe in and support democracy that I didn’t critically observe the practice here in Morocco as much as I could or should have. I heard later that vote buying can be prevalent and that oftentimes voters are persuaded to vote one way or the other. One woman we spoke with, who is I would say mid-upper class, said that she and her husband didn’t vote. Usually poor uneducated people vote here in Morocco. She asked us how the uneducated voters could understand what they are voting for if they can’t read. It is an interesting situation. People don’t vote because they don’t believe what they are doing makes a difference or they do vote but may be persuaded to vote because they don’t entirely understand the system.
For more information on the Moroccan elections:
http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2009/06/14/feature-01
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/06/200961322143190653.html
After the election observing on Friday, I went with a group of consulate people to go to a different city called Meknes to take a cooking class & tour the imperial city. (More Meknes info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meknes) Meknes was very beautiful. My favorite part was seeing the Moulay Ismail’s mausoleum. I will post pictures so you can see for yourself how beautiful it is (unless you have already seen the pictures on Facebook). The city itself is one of the four imperial cities of Morocco. It was founded by Moulay Ismail. The story goes that Moulay Ismail wanted to marry King Louis' daughter of France. He wrote the king asking for her hand but Louis refused him (Moulay Ismail, legend says, had 550 wives). Moulay Ismail’s was upset and his response was to build a city that would rival Louis’ Versailles, thus creating Meknes. In its day, Mekens was elaborate and extravagant. It has been nicknamed the ‘Versailles of Morocco.’ Today it is still beautiful, and the water reservoir, stone wall and elaborate entrances built by Moulay Ismail as well as his mausoleum are still standing two and a half centuries later. After the tour we had our cooking lesson. The owner of this cooking thing is an American that moved out here to live and teach people how to cook. Check out their website: http://www.savormorocco.com/ and if you are ever in Meknes, I highly recommend taking this class. We broke up into two groups, one toured in the morning and the other cooked in the morning. After lunch we would switch. My group cooked beef tajine and the other group cooked chicken tajine. A tajine is a traditional Northern African stew-like that is named after the pot in which it is cooked. We didn’t use a tajine (pot) when we cooked but a pressure cooker instead. My favorite was the chicken tajine. Although these are stews, they are traditionally not eaten with utensils. Usually pieces of bread are used to scoop up the veggies and meat, making this meal significantly more fun to eat. :-) I had one on Friday when we were observing the elections. It was actually a kind of funny situation Friday because we stopped in this very small town for lunch. As couscous is a traditional meal for Fridays we were kind of on the hunt for that. We drove around looking at the “normal” restaurants in the town but some were closed and none of them really looked appealing. So we kind of come off the beaten path and pull into this strip with a fruit stand, a butcher stand and a convenience store, and some other misc shops. In the back corner wedged between two shops there was a tajine restaurant. But to call it a restaurant would be a gross overstatement. It was just a couple guys in a hole-in-the-wall kitchen cooking tajines. Seating was limited to plastic patio chairs and tables with Coca Cola advertisements on it. I was there with one Moroccan and one Foreign Service guy so I felt comfortable just eating whatever they gave me (if you know me you know that I am very picky about strange food.. I don’t even eat seafood! But it seems that Morocco has released some of my reserve). Anyway, I ate this tajine with some kind of meat in it (possibly beef haha) and with the most delicious vegetables imaginable. (I am really going to miss these fresh vegetables when I head back to the hyper-productive, commercialized, industrial America.) The whole meal and experience was just absolutely wonderful. Afterwards we were allowed to walk into their hole-in-the-wall to use their one rusty sink to wash our hands. Man, oh man I love this culture. So anyway, the cooking school will email me the recipe for the meals that we cooked; I will be happy to forward them on to anyone that is interested. Here’s the wiki page for the traditional tajine meal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajine
On Sunday we slept in after getting up ridiculously early (for college kids) for the past 10 days. We headed out to the shopping district here in Casa around 2pm. We just kind of wandered around shopping and we headed back to the apartment early. I am sad to say that after such an elaborate description of the wonders of Moroccan food illustrated above, on Sunday night Nora and I ordered pizza. Not just any pizza, though, Pizza Hut delivery. We decided on delivery because we were just not interested in going out and we pretty much had no food at the apartment. So we ordered the pizza and 45 minutes later, we were still sitting around wondering where why it hadn't come. Nora called them back and apparently the Pizza Hut delivery boy couldn’t find our apartment. So after some huffing and puffing (on my part) we decided to walk to Pizza Hut and pick up our pizza. The guys at the restaurant were very nice and sorry about the mixup. They gave us a free 2 liter 7-Up for our trouble, and they also asked us if we were American to which of course we said yes, and they promptly said “you are very welcome.” In the two+ weeks that I have been here, I have not encountered any hostility or negativity due to being American. Truly, I think for the most part that Moroccans like Americans. I walked into a grocery store alone one day and the workers were falling all over themselves to help me. To add to it, this culture is very consumer oriented. Service people, I have noticed, are the ones that are the most helpful and least likely to stare. They are friendly and all around just genuinely nice. I definitely see a class divide, though. There are the Moroccans (usually men) that I see sitting at the same café every day, every time that I walk by. No job, no income, really some of the lowest social and economic standing. Men like this are all over the place. Next are the service people, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. They are making money (probably very little) but nevertheless have an income and there may be room to develop and improve. Next are the educated. These are the doctors, politicians, any government worker, police etc that can be seen at social gatherings but not seen on the streets. Most of these people have been educated in France or America and speak several languages. The economy here in Morocco, for the most part, is service. There is not a very high demand for educated people. For this reason when Moroccans leave to study, they often don’t return because they have a better chance in these other countries to get jobs. The major cities are the places that educated people can get jobs but one must keep in mind that the rest of Morocco is mostly farmland and countryside. If a person leaves their farm for the city, they probably won’t come back. And it is unrealistic to say that they leave the farms to go to school; the illiteracy rate is exceedingly high. Additionally, as observed at the elections, the poor people are the ones that vote in Morocco. And a significant amount of the voters are women, which surprised me. In some rural areas that we observed, the rate was as high as 40%. In the cities the rate was lower, more like 20-25%. This was surprising as well. The official number I think released is 53% but I never saw a rate that high during my observations. Overall we noticed, as non official observers, that the elections seemed free, fair and consistent.
After this exhausting weekend of traveling all around the country, we tried to get back to work. Things at the consulate are going well. I am still working with the motor pool. Maybe next week I will be getting into the Homeland Security stuff. I am pretty much just taking the work as it comes for the moment. But as of this week, the summer semester at GMU for my internship credit has begun and I will be writing papers every Sunday for a grade. Oh so much fun…. Luckily they are only 2-3 pages and the topics are narrative/analysis/reflection on different topics or experiences I have had. So anyway. As the excitement of being here kind of dies down and the work begins, I am really missing everyone! 10 weeks is going to be a long time away from America. Nora and I have begun craving food that we really can’t get here, like Chipotle burritos or Taco Bell. Although the food is good here and almost any restaurant style can be found, Mexican/Tex-Mex is the one major exception. But I’m sure I will have plenty of chances to eat that stuff when I get back, but it is just kind of funny.
I am going to try to write my blogs more often so that they aren’t as long, like this one. This has taken me about three days to write because there is just so much going on and so much to write! Anyway all is well out here. I am still having a good time and everything is working out. I miss you all and thanks for reading and also thank you for the comments!