Word: casablanca
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Entering the Ben M'Sik caves on the outskirts of Casablanca, a visitor goes through a hole in a crumbling concrete wall and down a flight of stairs covered in a slippery layer of mold. At the bottom lies a dimly lit room that houses roughly 100 people. The walls are splintered, the floor damp, and thick blue tarpaulins, pregnant with leaking water, hang from the ceiling. Every morning, the people who call this place home stuff their mattresses into a corner to turn the single 97-sq.-ft. (9 sq m) room into their kitchen, washroom and dining area...
...this city of about four million, Morocco's biggest, thousands of people live in suburban shantytowns and slums. The urban squalor and poverty fuel extremism; the suicide bombers who killed a total of 48 people in attacks on downtown Casablanca in 2003 and 2007 all grew up in such places. While Moroccan authorities claim to have eradicated terrorism cells in the country's most depressed urban areas, millions of residents remain cripplingly poor. Unemployment in the slums stands at 32%. And the illiteracy rate of 64% is more than 10 points higher than the rest of Casablanca's. (See video...
Community organizer Boubker Mazoz knows these neighborhoods well. For seven years he has been wandering through the city's slums and reaching out to Casablanca's severely disaffected. When he arrives at dilapidated homes where food and money are scarce, his hosts serve him tea and honey-drenched bread. "I am after those who are left aside, forgotten, marginalized," says Mazoz, 58, whose day job is public-affairs specialist with the U.S. Department of State. "With some help, these people can produce miracles." (See pictures of Islam's soft revolution...
Mazoz believes Casablanca's bombings "could have been avoided entirely if we had just paid attention to these people." Within weeks of the 2003 attacks, he began devising ways to keep the slums' marginalized youth from turning to terrorism. Three years later, with the help of private funding and the town's mayor, Mazoz built the Sidi Moumen Cultural Center on the site of a former garbage dump in one of Casablanca's poorest ghettos. The center boasts a library, computers and a theater, and serves as headquarters for a corps of community organizers dedicated to luring impoverished kids away...
...lessons learned in Casablanca are being applied elsewhere. The project has proved so successful - over 150 volunteers have joined to mentor around 350 kids so far - it has caught the attention of Casablanca's sister city, Chicago, the old stomping ground of the world's most famous community organizer, U.S. President Barack Obama. This September, a delegation of high school students from Chicago will visit Sidi Moumen to study Mazoz's methods and implement them in deprived neighborhoods back home. "The grand vision is to make his endeavor into an international model," says Marilyn Diamond, co-chair of the Chicago...