December 17-

As this week winds down as my last week in Morocco, I would like to express some final thoughts.  When I first came to Morocco, I did not know what to expect in all honesty.  So luckily I was able to experience Morocco with a clean slate.  Over the months that I spent living and studying in Morocco, I have had a wonderful and amazing cultural experience.  I was able to observe and experience a cultural that is different from the Western one that I am so used to.  I feel very grateful for having the opportunity of being able to experience different traditions.  The primary reason of why I chose to study abroad in Morocco instead of a Western/European country is because I wanted to experience something different that could put me out of my comfort zone.  I also wanted to continue my study of the Arabic language, which I believe has improved since first arriving in Morocco.  The best way of truly improving in a language is to live in a country that speaks that language.  I look forward to learning from my experiences in Morocco and continuing my study of Arabic back in the United States.

December 10-

Today we visited the Moroccan Parliament.  The current term of the Moroccan House of Representatives Legislature begun in 2011 and will end in this coming year, 2016.  This current elected governing parliamentary body since Morocco’s first constitution (in 1962) and independence from France is the 9^th legislature.  Since the early years of the 1900s, the Moroccan government had made great strides in reforming the government and constitution and improving the representation of Moroccan citizens in the government.  The increased representation was a result from creating a bicameral legislator and adding more Representative seats to the Parliament.  The bicameral legislator consists of the House of Representatives and the House of Councilors.  The current number of members in the House of Representatives is 395 and the current number of members in the House of Councilors is 120.  On our visit to the Parliament, we also learned the bodies that make of the House of Representatives: President, Bureau, Group and parliamentary groups, Presidents’ Conference, Parliamentary committees, and Secretary General’s office.  The Parliamentary committees comprises of eight committees: Committee of Foreign Affairs, National Defense, Islamic Affairs, and Moroccans living abroad; Committee of interior, local committees, housing, and urban policies; Committee of justice, legislation, and human rights; Committee of finance and economic development; Committee of social sectors; Committee of productive sectors; Committee of infrastructure, energy, minerals, and environment; and Committee of Education, Culture, and Communication.  I thought that this was particularly interesting because in the House of Representatives (and the Senate) in the United States, there are committees for specific issues only; multiple issues are usual not grouped together into a single committee.  For example, in the United States the Committee of Finance and the Committee of Economic Development are two completely separate committees.  I thought the visit to the Moroccan House of Representatives was very interesting because it is important to see how other country’s governments outside your own is structured and improved over time to modernize.  I also think that it is important to observe how governments’ from other countries operate and how laws and legislation are passed.