Moroccan Girls

1. To instil confidence in the girls by actively giving attention to individual artwork made by participating girls. The art making workshops were tailored to draw out each girls’ talents and curiosities while teaching the elements of art and design principles. The workshops were disseminated through design thinking processes of collaborative doing, reflection and ideation.
2. ​The development and implementation of creative arts practices as a means of teaching skills in problem solving.
3. Posing to have your portrait painted is traditionally a position held for a person of economic privilege. Each girls’ portrait was painted to symbolically raise their status.
4. ​Painting of a 33-meter mural inside the compound of the Girls Center at Ziat designed and executed by the girls, with the help of the Community Service Club and myself. This is an opportunity to give the girls first-hand experience with all the steps of accomplishing a large endeavor from the first steps of developing ideas through the developmental process of the sketch, transforming the sketch into a design, finalizing the design and execution of the design onto the wall.​
5. ​Building self-reflection skills and iteration skills of making changes according to the conclusions of the reflective stage. The hope is, with participation in all stages of the process the girls will be able to build problem solving skills and transfer this knowledge to other tasks and challenges.
6. ​Local gallery exhibitions: By displaying the girls’ artistic accomplishments with mine, this raises the status of the girls, transforming the local social stigma so that they are seen by the local community from a new perspective. The goal is to create empathy from the local business, and community groups to access their support.
7. ​Raise funds to support girls through an exhibition in the USA. At age eighteen, each girl is released from the prison with no support. I teamed up with local women who were able to get the funds to the girls as they were released from the Girls Center at Ziat. 2016 I had the exhibition of the portraits I painted of the girls at Roland Park Women’s Club in Baltimore Maryland USA.

Firdaous and Meryem met me. The three of us proceeded to walk through the outskirts of the medina to Ziat, the girls prison. I can’t tell you why children are sent there. A girl could be any age below 18 and girls as young as 9 years old. Some of the girls are allowed to go to school. Hard “criminals” stay in the barb wired compound all day and are taught to sew. The 9 year old told me she was raped by her uncle. She had the courage to tell her mother, but her mother then accused her of stealing her jewelry, that’s when she was sent there. Another young girl told me her mother couldn’t feed her. She’s back with her mother now, we kept in touch.

The first day we arrived I had no idea what to expect. Someone saw us from a window and let us in, we proceeded to a front desk. I brought water-based paint brushes and paper. We got the girls working easily, they were so eager. In the end I asked the management where to get soap? They had none. The next day when we arrived, I had a huge bag of about thirty bars of soap, from the market. The first sight of the soap by the girls, nearly caused a small riot. Dodging over each other grabbing the soap. The next day when we arrived the girls had all washed their hair and were picking the lice out of each other’s heads. After that day after we arrived myself Firdaous and Meryem were met with at least ten minutes of kisses and big hugs from a gang of girls jumping up and down. ​

The place was filthy. I tried to not drink anything, so I didn’t have to use the bathrooms because the one time I did there was excrement in piles on the floor. The whole place was a shambles. Sturdy block building with a block fence, you can’t see out unless you go up to the second floor and at tall enough to see over the barber wire.

The management was horribly negligent. There was a tall, bigger girl than the rest. She had to have some kind of psychiatric problems. She all would be making drawing or painting or using clay peacefully but with a slight chaos and laughter. Suddenly she would barrel in and punch one or two of the girls most of them would run behind me for cover. The management could see us in the yard when this would happen and absolutely do nothing leaving me there with a twenty-four year old university student who was as clueless as to what to do as me. One occasion an older man came out into the yard pulled a young branch from the tree and began lashing the air with it threatening the girls. That was enough to make everyone stop.

It was under these circumstances that we had the most rewarding experience getting to know these young girls and watching them create. A few that are super talented, shining out over the rest in design sensibilities. It was our pleasure to donate our time to these young women. I hope the experiences did build confidence in their own voice and somehow they will remember the processes right when they need it of evaluating, trying again, evaluating, trying again until it works. ​