2/28/09 Community Meeting

Earlier this week, one of the biggest and best-funded Moroccan NGOs in the region hosted a discussion on tourism in the Berberville region. The presenters all spoke Darija (Moroccan Arabic), but the powerpoint slides were all in French, so I got a lot out of it.

I had conversations with my counterpart, the professor whose project I worked on over the summer (and which has received funding for next steps, lhumdullah!), women from artisanal cooperatives throughout the province, the president of another influential NGO, and the caid. Yes, I'm grateful I was there. :D

What's funny is that I'd planned to go into SouqTown on the 11:30 to meet with my counterpart and discuss our next project, a tree-planting on March 21st. I got a buzz from my sitemate about this conference at about 9:45am; she'd known about it for all of 24 hours, but didn't know the subject. (Advance planning is not a local forte.) Once she was there, and knew that it was about tourism, she called me. I planned to attend till 11:15, and even had pre-packed my backpack so that I could hop the tranzit. But since it turned out that everyone I needed to talk to was *there*, I stuck around for the entire day-long conference. (It was supposed to end at 1, at which point we'd break for lunch, but, well, adhering to a schedule is not exactly a local forte either.) So around 3:30, we did break for "lunch", which I ate with various conference attendees, and then I moseyed back to the old homestead. Oh, but not before I scheduled meetings with two important contacts. :)

And there was great rejoicing.