My Trip To Morocco with Connor Swenson

Last Week’s Program on August 7^th was a presentation by Connor Swenson, the son of our member, Molly. Connor graduated from Wayzata High School three years ago, is a student at Tulane, and decided that he wanted to learn more about the culture in Northern Africa. He applied for a year’s study abroad in Egypt, which had been welcoming to exchange programs. However, the recent unrest took Egypt out of the exchange business, and Connor’s second choice was Morocco. He spent the last school year in Rabat, Morocco.

 Egypt is at the east end of Northern Africa, and Morocco is at the west corner of the continent, across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain and Portugal. The largest city, Casablanca, houses about one half of the country’s 32,000,000 population. Rabat, his town, is the second largest city. He showed us pictures of his exchange-family, and of some of activities where all of the U.S. exchange students gathered together. He also was able to do a great deal of traveling to parts of the country, and to Europe as well.

He said that his goals were to learn the language, and to learn about the political structure. The dialect is different in Morocco than in the other countries, but the basics are the same. The political climate in Morocco is calm while the rest of Northern Africa is having riots. Connor said that the monarch in Morocco is more socially aware, and has granted concessions in his country, and the citizens respect the king because of his more democratic leanings.