CAES Morocco: Advanced Leadership Theories, Ethics, and Culture

Before coming to Morocco, my assumptions on Muslim countries were that gender roles are incredibly strict. My aunt, who has lived in Bangladesh for over 25 years now, has spent my lifetime explaining the culture and exposing my family to traditions and cultures outside of what we have in our everyday lives in America. In Bangladesh, she is not able to go out of her home without being accompanied by a man, and when she does go out, she is covered from head to toe. I always thought this was a forced thing upon women, as my Aunt is a non-Muslim in a Muslim country and is required to wear the traditional dress. Now I see just how wrong my assumptions were.  The women I have seen and spoken to, discuss the pride they have in their religion and culture. It is a sign of self-respect and respect to others to dress conservatively and to cover hair. I have noticed the level of sacred respect that the men (particularly the generation above my own) have for women. Of course there are outliers ...

    Sometimes I take the opportunities available to me for granted. Although I may wake up every Monday from September to May complaining about needing to make that morning’s first class, the fact of the matter is that my own ability to attend those classes is a gift unto itself. This has been a thought rattling around my brain for the past few months but it has especially come to mind as we’ve toured several of Morocco’s places of higher education on this trip (something I only have access to thanks to me being a student at UGA.) As we saw both sides of Morocco’s loosening education system, it was hard not to notice similarities in the differences between the fully public ENA and the semi-privatized model of AUI. One of the ENA graduate students that came with us to visit AUI would joke about how the students there were all “rich kids” because they could afford the cost of tuition in a country where public universities are tuition-free, a sentiment I myself held against...