CAES Morocco: Advanced Leadership Theories, Ethics, and Culture

  I was raised in a very loving family who is richly blessed with faithfulness. We are of the Methodist denomination which was founded by John Wesley. We pride ourselves with the slogan, “open hearts, open minds, open doors” ( more here ). All of my life, I have heard and tried to practice the John Wesley quote, “Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.” In the chance that I do have power, I try to maintain this approach – how can I use my power to do all the good that I can? I love what Essed (2010) wrote in our Leading Across Differences text, “social justice and dignity require, among other things, an understanding of systems of privilege and oppression, which are invariably connected to the notions of power and authority in organizations. Listening to those who feel discriminated against and hearing the message, the ability to be crit...

In my last blog post, I talked about my assumptions of gender roles before I arrived to Morocco compared to the reality of what I'd seen here so far. In this post I am going to talk about the social status of female agricultural workers, and what comes with cultivating the land as a woman.  Women usually get stuck with the hardest, most labor intensive tasks. An example that we didn't get to actually see, but that Dr. Navarro mentioned was about the female argan workers. She explained that women are the ones who produce the oils. Not only is it time consuming, but shelling the nuts is difficult, tedious, and painful. Women have smaller hands than men, so its considered to be more efficient for them to do the work. The method of making argan oil was started by Berber women, and that same method has been around for centuries. Today, the fruit of their own labor has decreased over time. This is because more than 90% of Morocco's argan oil export is in international bulk, which...

While being in Morocco I have observed that most of the workers we encounter speak many languages including their native language, French, English and/or Spanish. For example, Marco, the waiter in Rabat, spoke multiple languages, and he was able to speak to most of the guests in the room. He definitely made my meals by talking and asking how I was doing it. He was able to connect with me even though English was most likely not his first language. Furthermore, the guy at the tannery in Fez was showing us where they dyed the animal fur, and he stated that he used to do that until he learned English. He went on to say that if workers do not know English they will stay dying animal fur because they cannot communicate and make sells to a good portion of the tourists that come through. A problem is the ability to find resources to learn another language, so that impacts your stats within a business.   English is in high demand, and people will not be selected by large employers, (Badr, 2...

 For my blog I would like to focus on Ability, more specifically ability that farms have to water. The first two farms we visited, the woman and the entrepreneur, they had a real struggle for water. To me that seemed to be the biggest struggle of farming here in Morocco. In the dryer parts of the county there in an average of 100 mm of rain per year.  https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/morocco/climate-data-historical Then we went to some of the larger scale farms and I saw another perspective. These farms had giant pumps to send water to where it was needed and the had multiple large water basins throughout the farm so that everywhere had easy access to water. Now, i realize that these bigger farms need a lot more water so it still may be a struggle for them although it is clear that it is not near as scare for them. Some of these farms had rivers running through them which give a much higher level of ability for what they can do. A side note, some area are m...