Oujda, peanuts and go carts at the border crossing

Twenty hours on night trains and one Algerian border go cart amusement park later I am back in Casablanca, completing a successful but short trip to Oujda, part of my follow up evaluation of the camp I ran last summer. I felt like a small celebrity thanks to the director of the American Corner (an American cultural center) Mohammed Bendaha who set up interviews with local sports journalists and gathered quite a crowd for my talk on women's sports development in Morocco. I gave the talk on Saturday morning, all in arabic, with a nice little picture power point. Besides the complete butchering of Moroccan Arabic, the talk went well with representatives from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Football federation, and coaches/directors of the Oujda professional men's team Mouloudiya. Of course, the girls football team that I work with was there, all 35 of them (girls from the team, their friends, other girls from the school) and random local students and curious passerbys. After my talk, there was a great question and answer session and discussion involving everyone. The girls were shy at first but really made some great points as everyone got more comfortable.

After the talk I sat down with two journalists from a multilanguage online journal as well as RTM (local radio) and Radio Plus (a southern radio station with an Oujda correspondent or some reason). After the journalists I sat down with the girls team and their coach for a discussion on what we can do in Oujda for women's football. After that, I sat down with the Football federation rep and the director of the men's team Mouloudiya (a really impressive woman with a master's in sports management who did her thesis on professional jet skiing in Morocco and is essentially one of the only women in a man's world, tabarkal3liha!). Lots of sitting down with people but there were some very important points brought up and I realized some important things about my role in Morocco, my purpose etc. It might have taken three years, sleeping in numerous night train compartments, cheap hotels and hundreds of omlette sandwiches later but Oujda, next to Algeria, victors over Egypt in the World Cup qualifying underdog match of the year, was a small little victory for me at least. Below are highlights of the discussions I had and some of my ideas. Bare with me...