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Three days in Essaouria

The three days we’ve spent in Essaouria, an ancient walled city on the Atlantic Ocean, has been purely a tourist experience, different from our immersion in the Medina in Marrakesh. We stayed in a very old hotel created by combining two buildings with a wooden bridge. The curved marble staircase, carved dark wood trim and shutters, thick stucco walls and heavy colourful rugs felt very calming and warm. The sea breeze filling our room at night made sleeping easy.

The highlight for me was experiencing a hamman, a traditional Middle Eastern steam bath for women only, followed by a scrub with a  sandpaper-like mitt (somewhat painful till I got used to it), and black olive soaping with buckets of very warm water poured over me. The steam room was so hot I wasn’t sure I was breathing air at first. The rooms for sauna and bath were made entirely of black marble from ceiling to floor and remained quite cool, but so dark and slippery when wet that I was hesitant to turn over for fear of plunging to the floor. But just when I thought I may have been forgotten, the pretty young attendant, Sanna, came to take me by the hand to lead me to the bath and then the massage parlour beyond. The experience finished with a long and languorous back massage.

I met a lovely woman in her forties in the undressing room. She helped me figure out what to take off (everything, as it turned out). She was from Dublin, a single mom of two young boys who was a professional masseuse specializing in women’s wombs! No kidding. She said there are a number of women in Ireland who are trained in providing emotional and physical support for women who are about to have hysterectomies or mastectomies. The purpose is to celebrate their bodies as women and prepare them psychologically for the losses they are about to experience. She was so sweet and nurturing a person, I can only imagine how vital she was to the women she worked with as they faced their surgeries in the sterile male-dominated medical environment. 

She also mentioned to me that she was in Morocco celebrating the memory of her mother, who died unexpectedly two years before. She was doing the things her mother would have loved to experience with her, the hamman, eating lots of fish and swimming in the ocean.




Of course it crossed my mind how privileged we both were, as women from North America and Europe, to be able to afford this experience for ourselves, an appropriation from someone else’s culture. What if the Moroccan government made it a priority to provide this service monthly to every female resident of the country as an essential component of the healthcare system. Universally free and accessible so that there was no stigma, and paid for by taxing it back from those who could well afford it. Not “either/or” among healthcare priorities, but “both/and.” It would be a job creator for women, as well. I’m sure researchers could track a positive improvement in women’s health and a savings for the Moroccan healthcare system over time. Just a thought.

Of course, the Moroccan king has six residences in Paris alone, according to the Guardian, and spends most of his time governing from a palatial apartment near the Eiffel Tower. Government resources have recently been given over to building the infrastructure for the 2030 World Cup instead of improving hospitals and healthcare. Inequality rules here as it does everywhere else on this capitalist planet.





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