My Morocco--Are You Still Mine??

It just occured to me that my nostalgia is dying slowly either consciously or unconsciously. I could have made some efforts to go for a visit for a week but I chose not to for some reasons because nothing is the same, and everything is foreign to me in my native country. Somehow, I don't feel safe internally being there all alone...I feel something is missing in me. I am sure I won't survive too long on my own and I will end up booking myself a ticket to come back next day. I don't know if I changed over time or maybe Morocco has changed so much that I lost track of time from where I remember it and I just need to condition myself to get used to it. I know for sure it's an amazing feeling to smell the fresh air of Rabat. It just feels right to be there. It feels home. It brings back a lot of awesome memories. But unfortunately I can't link anything of those memories to my present...NADA...which is normal I guess because that's the course of life.

I just realized that my family is falsly attached to a culture they hardly live. So what is this lie about preserving our culture if we hardly go on visits to Morocco and 90 % of time we speak English instead of Darija excluding my cousins generation who speak it 100 % at all times (some pretend to not know it, others pretend to have hard time twisting their tongue, while other the most blunt one think of themselves as quite not cool to speak a foreign language of country where they were not born.)
How can we be lying to ourselves?! How how we stress out the necessity of having a Moroccan living room area in the house with all the Moroccan traditional decorations, and show off about our ethnic food to the Non-Moroccans, and brag about the beauty of the country, the hospitality of its people, etc., yet we hardly live the Moroccan life.

So what does it take to be a Moroccan? parents' origin? birth place? language speaker? Moroccan salon? collection of tagines in the house? authentic food with the nice aroma of safron and olive oil?

I don't know...I do know; however, something is missing. Just like I know it's a lie to say we are holding tight on our culture or traditions since we hardly speak the language and we pretty much don't have any Moroccan traditions we live by...oh yeah except for the couscous tradition. But wait a second! that's food!!! forgot to mention we cook other ethnic food more than Moroccan one!!! and we still consider ourselves Moroccans!

Where is The Right Person???

yep...right person...looking for the right person with the perfect match list.

He has to be Educated, rich, handsome, well-built, cute accent, caring, not stingy, good family background....

She has to be educated, gorgeous, nice body, nice accent, family orientated, good cook, ready to give up the world for me....

and of course the list never ends for both parts. How can you find him and how can you find her???? Well for those of you who have been looking so hard...those of you who are so stressed out that they will die single...and those of you who are literally desperate for just a glimce of light...an ounce of hope and love, I say don't lose faith.

and for those of you who lost hope, I say don't give up and never say never.

Live day by day, and trust me it will happen when you least expect it to happen.


I'm always picked on to talk about my personal life either at school or with friends, and I quite hate it sometimes. I have no magic in my hands to spare and no golden advices to give. I just happened to be a normal person, whose heart got broken, and instead of getting bandaided it went through a major reconstruction to freshen up and be ready to embrace a new life and beat again...so I am a survivor on so many levels. I thank God for everything.

I find it quite pathetic that people become so desperate to have someone in their lives. Just like I find it so foolish to have an annoying list to stick in front of your nose to guide through the crowd to find the right person. What happened to faith in God? What happended to mystery? What if you were to live your life normally and enjoy every tiny bit of it, and switch the negative energy to a more positive one...smile to life so it can smile back at you. Give yourself a chance to beathe!!!! and stop stressing about marriage! Stop stressing about deadlines to find her or find him, and give a chance to people you meet in your life. You never know where the wind will take. You might land where you never expected yourself to land.


I am quite overwhelmed with the negativity of some people around me and I am sick and tired of listening to their dull boring whinening about finding him and finding her..It's really getting out of control!! The most annoying part is when people literally allow themselves to express jealousy right on my face, or even criticize my life with my husband to make a point about how they want to have their lives to be as if I give a damn...

Cut the crap and live your life!

Leishmaniasis in Rachidya, Morocco

I was really stunned when I came across a video featuring the epidemic of Leishmaniasis in a small city called Rachidya in Morocco, and inability of affected people to get the right medications for it because there is no doctor in the area. It's quite shocking that the so called Health Ministry is not moving a finger to send appropriate health care providers to start treatment before it gets complicated. Mind you that Leishmaniasis is treatable in most cases except in HIV infected patients.

What really caught my attention about this video is how desperately those patients are using all sort of topical creams or natural ones hoping and praying that something will work somehow some day. How could we be living in 21st century and still be faced with this poor health service to society. This is outraging!

When The Dream is Over

So you grow up your entire life believing in a dream, and you get so closer to it, then all of the sudden it shatters right in front of your eyes. It gets stolen from you, and you can't do anything about it but leaving it away and turning your back to it. I saw her crying like a baby from the bottom of her heart for the first time, and it was weird to me because I am used to her big smile from ear to ear. She was broken to small pieces, devastated to an unimaginable point and wanted to vanish from the surface of earth. I spared her few advices and I continuously questioned myself whether I was a hypocrite trying to make her feel good about herself and give her a lift up to erase some of her sadness or maybe I should have just criticized her and blamed her for her misery. Unfortunately there is no light by the end of her tunnel. It's quite sad to see people getting filtered out every term from the program. It became like a race, at the beginning of every new term you become eager to see who made it through and who was whipped out.

I will definitely write a detailed blog entry about my friend's story.

Awaiting That Light By The End of Tunnel!

There is a price for everything... Sometimes, I wonder if I made the right decision or was I too selfish wanting everything in my life to go the way I want it to go?!

Either way someone will always be disatisfied...so I chose to sacrifice my marriage for the moment, and it really breaks my heart and I feel like crying blood at this moment because I know I am selfish. I am becoming numb to the world, and to everything around me...I just want this freaking dream, which is a nightmare for me now, to be done. I am physically, emotionally, and psychologically beaten to the bottom... I want my normal life back so badly. I know it's just a matter of time..but I am becoming impatient and stress is eating me up so fast.

I impatiently waiting to see the light by the end of this ugly dark tunnel...

Dying Consciously

I looked at the mirror this morning and I almost wanted to cry ... My face was sick pale, my skin looked dry, and my eye-lids were half-closed (literally ptosis as if I had Horner's Syndrome)...slight fever, with nothing in the stomach but Soda (my natural amphetamine) for literally the past 3 days...what did I get myself into? I was very nauseous and about to vomit..my whole body started failing me when I needed it the most...I needed strength and I needed confidence to get myself up and go on with the day..as I was stepping out of the house, my heart couldn't stop beating...I couldn't control my body...I just couldn't.

Although I love the challenge but sometimes I just want to say F**** it I am done with this, I want my normal life back.

....but I am trying to survive....I just hope my body doesn't fail me for the last week of this term.

Evil in The Heart

It was a joy to finally meet a Moroccan in my medical school program & also have her in my class. I must admit that this is the first time I have ever encountered a Moroccan in my field of studies let alone any school I have been to. A naive person would think a strong bonding will be formed between us but to my shocking experience I got nothing but bitter competition based on jealousy and big mouth watery with gossips. She is a quite unique package that contains a great deal of misrepresentations of Moroccan culture and islamic religion. However, I must admit that she still has one little thing inside her that make her a proud Moroccan---her Fassi heritage. Since day one, the so called- Fassi American dissected my last name to figure out exactly where I am coming from with the help of her mother who too was eager and curious to trace my ancestry, and road-map to where my family lives exactly back home. I am not sure if they succeeded in their hard work study-case of mine though!

My fassi-American (Moroccan born but pretends to not speak much darija because she migrated to the US at a young age, even though I have heard her speaking it on a several occasions while she was on the phone with her mother) perceives me as a little nomade and by that I mean a true nomade . She is constanly criticizing the way I dress up even though I don't see it any different from her or style or the rest of our colleagues as we all wear same uniforms but her watery mouth has to throw a comment here and there all the time to make me feel I am somehow lesser than her. If I, little nomade, got dressed up for any occasion or get-together, the fassi-American finds it quite shocking to her little brain to believe that I have something called "clothes" to wear and I am not some little nomade her brain portrayed me in her mind. Good or bad, I am always criticized in a way, that I over-dress up for an occasion if I am wearing something nice or I am just not taking care of myself if my face looks swelling during exams season. Needless to mention the torture she gets me to endure when she makes me sit and listen to her family stories (the rich uncle who owns half of Morocco, and the rich aunt who built the first orphanage in Casablanca, or her asshole non-Moroccan husband who is making her life miserable)...It's beyond my little brain that starts swelling quickly as soon as I start listening to her family's autobiography.

So I take my distance, and I isolate myself from her suffocating environment and I find peace in my little horizon..

Junky Learning How To Take Care of Others' Health!

I was pondering in my thoughts today about how my life had became after starting my medical school and really I am quite shocked how unhealthy of a person I became. My daily stress has turned me into a junky person--who basically eats anything that is junky without sparing it a second of thought. My mother calls me every weekend to check on me and of course review my diet (mommy is a nutristionist freak) and spare me couple of advises on how to manage my stress (which never sink in)...but really, is there time for it?? Oh...Let alone my appearance-- I used to be one of those high maintenance girls, who will have to apply 100 layers of creams and make sure my make-up is well done before getting out of the house...but now I am so lucky if I get to comb my hair once a week! I am not even joking!!! Eye liner are applied in case I get puffy droopy looking eyes after longs hrs of studying and sticking my eyes to a computer that is by my side literally 24 hrs a day and has never been shut down since it got turned on during first day of class.


Oh well, just a random thought at a random time of my life-- an excuse to blog to run away from my studying :( Totally bad!!! Bad me!!!

A Post From Moroccooooo

Ahhhhhhhhh no bills to worry about, no morning traffic, no school, no waking up early, ohhh just no stress....I haven't enjoyed Morocco as much as I am enjoying it now. The first second I landed in Rabat airport is the very same second I felt my brain cells getting wider and wider embracing Morocco's freedom. This visit unlike my previous one to Morocco is somehow very unique and special for several reasons. The main one is taking a BREAK from school's deadlines and hectic lifestyle as well as celebrating and enjoying the happiest moments of my life with all my reunited (finally, a long deep sigh) family members in our home country, Morocco.

Tazmamart, A Story of Horror

I watched each and every episode of “Shahid Ala Asr” on Aljazeera channel featuring Ahmed El Marzouki’s, (former political prisoner) testimony of the horrendous 18 years of his imprisonment in Tazmamart prison along another 57 military prisoners, from which 28 only emerged alive…and quite frankly I cannot find the right words to express the mixed feelings I grew inside me while watching and living each and every moment Ahmed El Marzouki was describing about their life and struggle inside the cell.

El Marzouki’s descriptions were highly detailed and extremely vivid to enable us visualizing the brutal life of “cave men” as he calls it in a forgotten deserted that lasted a period of 18 years. It’s extremely hard for me to process it all in my head. It’s just hard for me to believe that such brutality took place on the ground of a country I dearly loved and believed in with every fiber in my heart. No…sorry let me reword it, what’s harder for me is to believe that some people hide beasts inside them that know nothing about humanity.

The 58 political prisoners had no major contributions to the planning of the attempted coups against the king of Morocco, Hassan II. They were following orders and had no preconceived idea they were ordered to attack the king. Even though some of them were sentenced for 5 years only, Hassan II sent them in Tazmamart prison, a prison built specially for them lacking basic means of survival to teach a lesson they never forget.

I highly salute Ahmed Mansur for stepping out to interview former prisoners of Tazmamart and both Ahmed El Marzouki and Pilot Saleh Rachad for their courage to share bitter injustice that took place in now demolished Tazmamart prison.










.