Bringing hope into Casablanca’s slums

CASABLANCA, Morocco – Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, conjures images of Rick’s Bar, couscous and the third largest mosque in the world, built at fabulous cost on land reclaimed from the sea. Only those in Mecca and Medina are bigger.

Critics complain that the close to billion spent in the 1990s on the Hassan II Great Mosque, which has a thousand ton sliding roof and the world’s tallest minaret, could have been better spent on helping people more directly, like cleaning out Casablanca’s legendary slums.

The mosque is indeed spectacular, with praying room for more than a 100,000 people. But the problems of the slums are spectacular too – places of mindless violence, desperate poverty and hopelessness.

All 12 suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Casablanca in 2003, killing at least 33 people, were Jihadist products from the local slums. So were the bombers in 2007 who killed a dozen more. 

The government is working hard to move the country’s slum-dwellers to better homes. But to see the lives of the people still left behind, about half a million people nationwide, is truly shocking – yet in a few cases, humbling and inspiring.

That’s because of Boubker Mazoz.

White-haired, mustached, bronzed, slim and charismatic, the 58-year-old voluntary community organizer is a dead ringer for Omar Sharif, the famous actor. Seven years ago, while continuing with his day job at the public affairs office of the American Embassy, he founded an organization with the goal of bringing hope into the lives of the hopeless.

“Education is everything,” he said, as we strolled in one of his classrooms among 10-year-old boys and girls being taught English, French and Arabic by high school seniors, all volunteers, many of them slum-dwellers themselves. “They must stay in school, become independent and especially, not be dragged down by all these stereotypes people have of them that they are failures, criminals, the bottom of society.”

Mazoz grew up outside Casablanca in a poor Moroccan village and through his education he made a better life for himself. He’s worked at the embassy for the last 30 years – while most of his extended family is still back in the villages. When Mazoz came to Casablanca, he wanted to help people make the best of themselves – especially through education.

At the community center I watched as one young girl, her hair covered in Islamic traditional style, enthusiastically pointed at letters. She mouthed them, and two boys and a girl, leaning across the table, one half-sitting on it, stroked the letters with their fingers and imitated her. A drone of English and French and Arabic vowels rolled across the room.

“They’re all from the neighborhoods,” Mazoz said proudly. “They are such good kids, they just need a chance.”

“Who is the girl teaching them?” I asked. And therein lies a tale.
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