Determination.

 I have been spending a lot of time with Moroccan people by now. I engage every day with local people  be it at work or at home with my host Family. But since I am a girl and there is a strict gender separation on most social occasions, I have spent most of my time with Moroccan women. And to me there was something different about  women here that I couldn't quite grasp for a long time. 

There is something in the way women move, the way they accomplish their tasks, the way they find solutions at work. They are incredibly determined to get the job done. As soon as something appears on their list they immediately seem to have mapped out everything to address these issues as soon as possible. The women I encountered are tremendously capable. They are loud and passionate when they have to, fierce and strong to the point where they won't even get out of a mans way on the street. They know their rights.  But why did I take so much time to notice ?

I have to admit that I was surprised at my discovery. And after realizing that I was surprised, I immediately felt shame. My own unconscious bias had led me to belief that women were living a slow and spontaneous life, not ever doubting their husbands ways and abiding by the patriarchal rules, just as the Moroccan way promises. The stereotype of Arab people being lazy and unproductive is so omnipresent in the media that I didn't see what was right before my eyes. One expects an Arabic woman at its best to be capable only as a housewife and mother and less so in a professional workplace. 

It is the single-story, the narrative that alienates Arab people from the western ones. The narrator of these stories are mostly white, European men, who don't bother to observe a woman's daily life closely. This lack of diverse storytelling is nourishing an European arrogance towards the African continent, the idea that the west is in its essence more capable than the native population. We need more stories told by African women, to abolish the idea of the obedient housewife. Until those stories are shared let me give you just a short insight on my personal perception:

What strikes me most about that observation is how it makes me feel: watching this incredibly capable woman I am painfully aware of my own incapability.  I cannot fulfill tasks as fast or neatly as they do. This is true for my work as well as domestic work. My sisters and mother have to teach me how to cut vedgetables as fast as they do, and mostly they see me fail at catching up. I am constantly just catching up to people in terms of efficiency, and I hope having said that makes a few more people reconsider their superiority towards arabs.