I stumbled across this great young women and her environmental project over in northern Morocco by the Algerian border. Plastic and pollution is a problem across the world but it is highly visible in developing countries such as Morocco. Plastic bottles and purple, white and black plastic bags suffocate the beautiful landscape and adorn trees. Plastic, called mika (me-ka) is a prevailing issue and are consumed at large rates daily here. You go to buy two eggs in the morning, you have a mika, each vegetable and fruit item has its own, bread another. Then they are discarded into the environment or burnt, both with negative repercussions. But alas, there is progress! This young lady Fazia Hajji at 27 years old dropped her telecommunication engineer job to work on a development project in her home town.
It is a project that combines environmentally conscious action and addressing this issue of illiteracy. Her village was referred to as “Douar Mika” or “Plastic Neighborhood” as plastic bags taking on the form of plastic birds had due to flight migration settled there. She wanted to find a way to address this issue and tried out applying the local weaving techniques with this new, non biodegradable material. What she ended up with were these great bags.
She now has 22 women working on the project which also includes literacy classes. With this project, she hopes to help the environment and provide income and education for the mothers so that they will continue to send their children to school. Many in the area are pulled out of school at 12 as the families do not have the means to financially provide for the children to go to school.
"From when I was a kid, I wanted to help people. Life gave me things and took things away from me, but not this wish to help people," she said.
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