Sure, it's a cliché immortalized in Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," but it's true: You don't know what you got 'til it's gone.
While studying abroad this semester, this concept has manifested itself in losses ranging from the trivial, like the loss of Saturday afternoon reruns of "America's Next Top Model" (sometimes you just need a little runway coaching from Miss Jay, or life wisdom from Tyra Banks), to what I experienced on a five-day trip to Morocco in early March: The loss of women in public life.
It became evident on the first day of our trip in Marrakech. As the group took our first tour, we passed countless cafés and restaurants. Plenty of people were outside enjoying the beautiful weather and bustle of the streets. Not a single one was female.
The rest of the city, however, was not too bad, based on what I would see later. Our tour guide was female. Women walked around in pairs, by themselves or sometimes accompanied by a man.
Sure, all the shop owners were men, but there were women on the street. Although every girl in the group, including myself, received plenty of stares and yells ranging from "Hey, beautiful!" to "Nice pussy," the Moroccan women seemed unbothered as they went about their business.
As our trip progressed, however, the presence of women became increasingly limited. After one day in Marrakech, which is the fourth largest city in the country and full of European tourists, we drove 12 hours to the Sahara Desert, close to the border with Algeria.
It was on this trip that the women virtually disappeared. We drove through tiny desert village after tiny desert village, and all seemed to be populated almost solely by men. On one stop, we counted three women walking by on the bustling street where we sat for at least half an hour. Men, presumably their husbands, accompanied all three women.
During one stop at a restaurant, I left the group to use the restroom. The other diners' heads whipped around at the sight of me, a young blonde woman, who was not only in a restaurant, but walking around inside it without a man.
In addition to the stares and catcalls, the lack of women in public made the trip surprisingly more difficult. There was no one with whom I could share a glance to say, "Yes, that man is being a real boar. I've been there, and I understand." While I could chat with these experiences with other members of the group, not being able to see local women who had shared a common experience made me feel even more like the outsider.
Whether these women stayed inside based on their own religious beliefs or because some religious or societal norm in which they had no input keeps them there, it is certainly a loss to everyone to have such a large portion of society so hidden.
Undoubtedly, some women in Morocco, whether or not they live in the big cities, hold different religious beliefs or simply clash with the norms of their societies; they lead vibrant public lives and go about their day-to-day activities as most women in any other part of the world would do. But any society in which some portion of the population is kept from the rest, unable or unwilling to add their contributions to the collective good, is surely not reaching its full potential.
