Morocco has the reputation of having a significant number of young prostitutes. Maybe this stereotype other Middle Eastern countries have about us is a bit exaggerated, but still, Morocco has very well structured prostitution webs, which transform innocent girls to mighty night creatures, and even export them to work outside the country. What most people ignore is that prostitution was a very prosperous activity in pre-Islamic Morocco. Native Berber tribes used to set tents on the roads after the harvest season to offer “entertainment” to peasants after a year of hard work. Prostitution then, was a social service which allowed money circulation among all the tribe’s members. Islam couldn’t change much in the anthropological habits of local people. In my opinion, the high prostitution rates among young Moroccan girls can be explained by the extreme openness to the west and the cultural predisposition to this kind of activities.

For me it was very difficult to write about the subject. Should I feel pity or contempt, compassion or disgust towards this young girl with a university degree who decided to sell her body to make a living? I’ve just decided to play the role of the objective pen, which describes what it hears and sees without the interference of any subjective feelings. Though, it was hard not to make a comparison between me and her. We were both Moroccan girls, born in the same year, listening to the same music, and with university degrees. Yet, each of us chose a different path, or maybe that path chose her.

Her name was Aïcha. She was very blond, very tall, and very beautiful, the kind of the 1960s American films’ beauty. Aïcha had to move after high school from her small town called Lhajeb to study English Literature in Meknes’ college. “My parents didn’t prepare me to live alone in the city. I come from a poor background where talking about sex is a taboo”, she told me while gazing at the horizon. In the girls’ dorms, Aïcha learned how to dress, to put on make-up, and to talk like a woman. It is also in the university dorms that she was tempted to make some pocket money to pay for the pretty clothes which can make her look like city girls. The first step to the abyss was going out incognito with older men who invited her to good restaurants, and make her discover her charms and feminity. The deadly stab was when she discovered that she had to pay with her body for the few bills to realize her late adolescence fantasies.

Once Aïcha graduated, it was difficult to leave her well-paid night life for miserable desk work or to abandon the lights of the big city for a small house in Lhajeb. She told me with a bitter voice “When I was studying it was just to make pocket money. I didn’t realize that I am a prostitute until it became my full-time job after graduating”. Aïcha is still now living in the city and working as a prostitute to send money to her family and pay for her charges. Her education and beauty make very rich and well-known men from over the world pay for her services. After filling four, 120-minute tapes and finishing the interview, the young girl looked straight into my eyes and said “I fast every Ramadan and pray five times a day for Allah to forgive me, but when the night comes I realize that I have to go work for the money.”

Today, whenever I drive across the girls’ dorms of the university, I wonder how many Aïchas are there waiting to be tempted by the big city’s illusive and misleading lights? How many would resist and how many would fall?

To Inform

To Express

We are 30 000 Moroccan bloggers today. Some blog in French, and they are stereotyped as being bourgeois blogging kids who went to French schools. And some blog in Arabic, and they are stereotyped as being Islamist radicals. In between there is some youth who blog in English, including me, who are stereotyped as being American spies. Well, the reality our diversity is a capital that make our strength, even if we aren’t organized as a community yet. Rachid Jankari described the Moroccan Blogosphere as being in its “Adolescence”, which make it unable to compete with classical Medias, and somehow unable to educate.

To Educate

That’s my story. The story of a blogger who believes that words may bring change, so “spread the word, it may change the world”. That’s how I’ve found my Voice. I hope you’ll find yours!

With her pink traditional dress, which they call Tub in Sudan, Aicha was standing in front of 70 strangers to tell proudly her story with AIDS, during the UNDP HARPAS workshop for Independent Artists, Bloggers, and Journalists, which was held in Cairo from the 5th to the 8th May. “I didn’t commit any crime. I was operated for appendicitis, and they transferred to me blood infected with AIDS. I had to face my family, my children, and the whole society”, she said to her curious audience. In fact in many Arab countries a huge quantity of blood is still used without being well examined. Aicha was lucky enough to have an understanding husband, who supported and encouraged her to tell her story on television and in international meetings without any fear or shame, in such a conservative society full of taboos. Undeniably, “HIV/AIDS’ power is not in the Virus itself, but in the vicious circuit of fear and stigma linked to it”, as Doctor Ihaab Al Kharat from the HARPAS team has explained during the same workshop. In fact, AIDS is just like any other illness that we can live with without any risks if we take the right medicine at the right time.

Nowadays 39.5 million people worldwide are living with the Virus. In the Arab Region they are more than 460 000 people living with AIDS. Yet, I would like to question these figures given by the UNAIDS, because they are all based on government statistics. How can we imagine that a country like Syria only have 300 HIV/AIDS cases, without mentioning the whole Khalij region which doesn’t want to communicate any official figures on the issue? Another alarming figure is that only 5% of the declared AIDS cases in the region have access to treatment. Not because of luck in medicine, but because of the society taboos and of a coward suicidal discourse related to the Virus.

I was so impressed by Aicha that I decided to sit with her and have a long friendly talk. I was like a little child staring at this monument-like lady strong and confident in her 30s. She told me how her husband and she are living a normal sexual life by using condoms during their intercourses. Aicha also gave birth to a little girl, who doesn’t have the Virus, after following the right treatment that reduces the quantity of HIV in the blood during the pregnancy period. However, if science found a way to cope with the situation, the reaction of the doctors, who are supposed to be the most compassionate towards people living with AIDS, was very harsh on her. Once the medical staff learned about her case, they just put her in the quarantine and left her sinking in her blood and tears, shouting until the head of the baby came out.

When I’ve heard that story, I was so angry and disgusted at the same time. I cried fiercely and hugged Aicha. I could not describe that moment. I felt that she is a young woman just like me, and that all the stereotypes of the society disappeared. 48% of people living with AIDS in the Arab World are women, and Aicha is one of the few women who are coping with the Virus in a normal way. I feel I’ve found a hero made out of flesh and blood, who can inspire me in my daily life. For Aicha, and because I believe in life, I will go tomorrow morning to check my blood in one of the local centres, where I can get a free HIV/AIDS test. I hope you’ll do the same!

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