how desperate moroccan men get to marry

Submitted by interesting (United States), Mar 28, 2010 at 13:10

how desperate moroccan men get to marry

Chatting up single women all over the world He may, on rare occasion, ask me if I worked that day, to which any response brings an "llyawn." May God help you in your task. So it was of considerable surprise the day he asked me to teach him how to use the Internet. I couldn't imagine that the Hajj, the grandfather of my hosting family, would have much use or much interest in the Internet. He has, on more than one occasion, seen me answering e-mail and asked me why there was no sound coming out of my "special television." I asked if he knew what the Internet was. "No," he replied. "But my wife is dead, and I know if you know how to use the Internet, you can marry a foreign bride."

Taza, a city of about 200,000 nestled snugly in the only pass through the middle Atlas, has the blessing of a relatively high rate of education, the curse of higher unemployment and a glut of young people. The combination often forces its citizens to get creative to ensure a future. The easiest way is generally to leave, earn your money and then come back to take advantage of the low cost of living in Taza. But it's not that easy in Morocco. People can't just schlep off to the big city for a couple of years to earn their nest egg. Despite the western lifestyle available in Casablanca or Marrakech, getting even menial labor requires connections that most people in Taza just don't have. Education and experience are often meaningless. Given this, the emigration fever runs deeply. Indeed, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving here is that everyone wants to leave. Not that this is any different than other developing countries, but it's more profound here in that the possibility is realistic enough to be tantalizing. Most younger Moroccans speak at least one European language fluently, and often several. You have only to go to Tangier to be able to see the coast of Spain. Every summer when Moroccans living in Europe have their holiday, they are welcomed back like conquering war heroes, the EU plates on their new cars a badge of honor. This is true everywhere in Morocco, but more so in Taza.

Following September 11, few in Taza could meet the more stringent U.S. immigration criteria, for example. Suddenly, just getting your diploma and applying for a visa to France or Belgium wasn't a realistic option any more. Emigration became much more of a forbidden fruit. It didn't take long for Moroccans to figure out that increasingly the most efficient way–often the only way–to get to a country with a currency worth earning is through marriage. But how to meet and marry a foreign woman? Enter: Internet chatting as the responsible career path for young jobless men. From my understanding, it's been about 10 years since the first Internet café sprung up in Taza, funded by a returned migrant from France looking for a low-maintenance low-risk investment for his European money. This is generally the story in Morocco. Most of the investment money is either old or foreign. Owners of cyber cafés are generally working-age men from wealthy families or returned migrants. Cyber cafés are popping up in Taza about once every couple of months, but demand still outweighs supply.

During the day, the cafés are generally quiet. The patrons may number no more than a few children playing generations-old video games while café employees pirate new music or movies for sale. But after the sun goes down and the town shakes off its afternoon siesta, the true character and purpose of the cyber café is revealed. What was in daylight a poorly ventilated room of 20 or 30 decade-old computers becomes the night-time hot spot of the town's upwardly mobile younger class of males. There are always lines out the door. Away from the oppressive heat of the town and 5 to 8 time zones ahead of the United States, these Internet Romeos try to catch women in the dregs of their workday who like to kill time before the end of the workday. Walk into any cyber café, and the scene is pretty much the same: Arabic pop blasting on an endless loop, children hawking single cigarettes and hard-boiled eggs, and a young man in sunglasses making kissy-face to a computer screen for the web cam. It looks like a Harrah's casino offering jackpots to lost souls. English classes are booming in popularity as the chatters, already fluent in French, look to tap into the enormous pool of singles in the United States. Those who already know their English find day work roaming cyber cafés helping chatters phrase a few romantic sentences. Groups of young Moroccan boys forego their movies and coffee shops to hang out with the café's owner and discuss their prospects like fly fishermen in a tackle shop. Among the locals, the word "chat" is conjugated like an Arabic verb. In small-town Morocco, the girls are frowned on if they leave the house for anything more than chores or visiting their relatives, especially in the evenings or where young men are at play in a cyber café. Women grow up under the greater prohibition against marrying a non-Muslim–it is religiously prohibited, culturally disgraceful and illegal. But women are now entering the cyber cafés, apparently frustrated with such a lifestyle. They tend to have less formal education and are, therefore, slower to adopt the chatting procedures. They enter wearing western clothes and makeup for the web cam. Generally, they do not appear to attach the same importance to acquiring a foreign spouse; they are more motivated by the social and entertainment value of the evening. Some, however, still hold out \the vague hope that they can find an immigrant Arab or Muslim somewhere in cyberspace for the sake of their families. Older women, and especially those who are no longer virgins, are more interested in a foreign spouse because they are less marriageable within the Muslim community. A woman who never marries does not live an enviable life in the Arab world. The act of proposing to someone you have never met may sound ridiculous to many, but in Taza it happens. Inspired by the success stories of their friends or family, they are doing so in increasing numbers. Everyone I know knows someone that has married someone through the Internet. I've lived in Taza for a year and I know five men who have acquired internet brides. In the Arab world, marriage has always been more of a contract than a joining of souls. There are certain things a man is supposed to do, certain things a woman is supposed to do, and if they can both do them successfully the deal is half done. They marry for the idea of what kind of life they will have with their spouse rather than how much they love one another. Love comes later, if at all. I had initially used this as a possible explanation for why people seemed, to my amazement, to be marrying carelessly fast. But a trip to the café with some friends revealed that it was more often the American on the other side of the screen that first raised the romantic intentions. What sounded initially like an orchestrated visa-center manipulation turned out to be little more than taking advantage of a presented opportunity. Living in a poor city does funny things to people. The desperation and frustration of it makes them believe in miracles, something from the outside world offering you a quick and permanent fix to a troubled existence. There is a well-known story of a poor Taza girl who was working on the assembly line of a local textile factory. She caught the eye of the factory owner, who had just flown in from Germany to see how the factory was doing. They married and now she occasionally visits her village in a Mercedes. The folklore is not all encouraging. A young man who became engaged to what he thought was a 19-year-old rich girl quit his job, broke with his family and prepared for his one-way trip to the United States. To his shock and surprise, the woman he met at the airport was a 60-something woman recently widowed who had been chatting under her granddaughter's profile. She had come to Morocco because her pension wasn't enough to live on in the States. Embarrassed and without options he married the woman because she was the only meal ticket he had left. They now live a hermit-like existence, she unwilling to learn Arabic, he unwilling to face his former friends. Many of the unions seem questionable at best. Call me insensitive, but I have a hard time believing that all the young men who are now commonly seen walking around Taza holding hands with women easily old enough to be their grandmothers would be doing so if there wasn't a visa in the deal. I would sooner call them desperate measures for desperate times, and often did. But doing so ignores the larger truth that success stories are more common than marriages that end badly. More often than not, these young men make devoted and loving husbands and, increasingly, fathers. They work, they send money home to their parents and siblings, and they live their new life with some degree of success. It remains to be seen if they will ever return to this lovely little town in eastern Morocco, but having that choice certainly beats out living here bitterly. Over a cup of mint tea, the owner of my local store told me about his best friend, Ali, who left for Florida to marry a woman he met through a chat program. Ali has done well with two businesses, a home furnishings store and selling large Allah-emblazoned pendants to hip hop fans in Los Angeles. I met Ali when he came back to Taza for a visit. We talked about his business, his new life in Florida, his youth in Taza. He said he was excited to get back to Florida. "Worried about your business?" I asked. "No" He replied. "I miss my wife "Taza will always be dear to me, but it's not home anymore. My home now is wherever she is.

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