CAES Morocco: Leading Across Differences

  Motherhood & Morocco All life comes from women. This is a fact we all know and see the evidence of daily, yet it is also a fact we choose to ignore or employ only when it is of convenience to society. Women are the backbone, the lifeblood, the prana, and the chi of all life. As we endure heartbreak, trauma, and illness, we call out for our mothers. As men die on battlefields and in army hospitals, they yearn for a touch of their mother. Across cultures, the mother figure is a respected tenet of the community, and in Morocco’s Argan Cooperative, the motherhood experience is respected and supported.  Though the history of feminism in Morocco is varied and contains times of both celebration and tension, yet the importance of family has remained a central tenet.  At the Argan oil cooperative, women bring the fruit from their argan trees into the cooperative, weigh, process and eventually, sell them for cosmetics and food oils. In this system, women own their own trees a...