The King is Coming

His Highness Mohammed VI will be visiting town between Monday and Wednesday of this coming week.  This is very exciting news for everybody. All the curbs have been re-painted.

He tours around fairly regularly to officially open various buildings and check up on those that he opened in the past.  Included on this list is the women's center here.  I'm still entirely unsure how active this center is, although I was told yesterday that they do indeed regularly help very poor women in bad situations.  Naturally, the King will want to see how his center is doing.  Unfortunately, people are worried about the King meeting poor people; naturally, poor people might not know how to conduct themselves around him.  So, the center is spending a good deal of money hiring rich women to pretend to be poor women for the king's visit.  This seems quite silly, but is supposedly normal.

A similar story involves an organization that works with handicapped kids.  For whatever reason, they didn't have as many handicapped kids as they had hoped, to show the King, that is.  And so they called up another organization in order to "borrow" their handicapped kids.

Mohammed VI drives around by himself all the time, and has a fairly realistic idea of how his people live, despite the absurd lengths people go to.

The timing of his visit is quite unlucky for us.  Nobody is willing to work with us on anything because they're just oh so busy preparing for the King. I won't know what camp I'm supposed to work at in July, nor what is expected of me, until the end of June.  On the upside, we have time to do whatever.

Some of this time was spent meeting a French woman who lives and works for an NGO that employs rural women in making bags out of recycled plastic bags.  Last night she had Krista and I over for dinner and I had the first pork I've eaten since March 18th.  The prosciutto was magical.  Tomorrow night might be a wedding, who knows?