Eleven days. That’s all it took. Eleven days alongside the Master of Science Health in Urban Development cohort from University College London (UCL) to witness exactly how solidarity tourism strips away the artificiality of fieldwork, leaving something permanent behind for everyone involved.

On 27 April 2026, 18 students and seven staff members from UCL arrived in Marrakech. By that point, I had already reviewed the itinerary endlessly. Because my role at the High Atlas Foundation (HAF) involves planning and coordination, my previous weeks were dedicated strictly to logistics. I had to brief our partners in the villages with the HAF team, lock in the lecture schedules at the office, and prepare the rural communities to host this group for a ten-day period. Yet, administrative preparation work only goes so far. Seeing the transport vans finally park in front of the hotel was the exact moment our theoretical framework shifted into a real, unpredictable human dynamic.

What you are reading isn't some detached, bird’s-eye view report. It is a dispatch from the soil of the agriculture fieldwork group. I had the privilege to walk with these students—facilitating, translating, and quietly conducting my own observations right alongside them.

A Partnership Built on Shared Values

Our inclusive community engagement stems from a very deliberate collaboration between HAF and UCL. For the visiting cohort, it’s the hands-on anchor of a master's program wrestling with a massive question: what does "health" even mean when urban and rural landscapes are completely transforming? For HAF, it is one expression of a much longer commitment to participatory development, building with communities.

Initially, the students moved with that hesitant, wide-eyed pace of people trying to read a new city. Day 2 meant a Koutoubia Mosque tour, then a Kelchi Beldi Cooperative cooking class. Day 3 hit much harder. A morning of back-to-back lectures at our office, the intensity broken only by rounds of mint tea to lay down the conceptual tracks. You absolutely need these early days. Why? Because before you can ask a woman in a rural douar (village) to define her wellbeing, you have to first sit with the uncomfortable reality of your own assumptions.

Akrich: A Nursery on Sacred Ground

We visited Akrich on Day 4. This is the exact moment the trip's theoretical layers cracked wide open.

They call the tree nursery there the "House of Life". The land was provided by the Moroccan Jewish community, and it borders a Jewish cemetery that’s been there for over 700 years. I remember watching our visitors from London squeeze past all of these tiny fig and olive saplings. The graveyard walls are bright white right in the background. You could tell the heavy history of the place was finally registering with them. In academic papers, people throw around phrases like "interfaith solidarity" all the time. But in Akrich, it's not just a phrase. It’s actual earth. It’s 55,000 new saplings a year. It’s Muslim families guarding and upkeeping a Jewish burial site, generation after generation.

We then drove out to the Achbarou Cooperative. Inside the rooms, the women walked us through the extensive process of making a carpet. We followed the raw wool. We learned how they boil down old pomegranate peels, onion skins, and hibiscus to pull out  vividly bright dyes. These UCL grad students are trained to map the world using strict numbers and indicators, yet standing in that workspace altered that mindset as they started to realize that an economy isn't just spreadsheets and math. Sometimes, it is a literal narrative, pulled together by hand, thread by thread.

Tafza: Earth, Hands, and a Village Tour

We spent our fifth day in Tafza. Inside the women’s cooperative here, the students sat right at the pottery wheels, covering their hands in the exact clay these villages have sourced from the surrounding slopes for generations. If you simply read the schedule, it sounds like any basic commercial tour: visit a village, eat lunch, do some pottery. What we observed on the ground, though, showed the actual line separating solidarity tourism from the conventional industry. Nobody was putting on an act; this was their regular working clay, the bread we ate was just their daily food. Instead of walking into a market transaction, the students were simply absorbed into an existing dynamic of rural hospitality.

The Agriculture Group in Talat-n-Mimoun

The core fieldwork comprised the next three days.. I was lucky enough to stick with the agriculture group. Our 18 students fractured into three teams targeting Amizmiz, Mellah, and Talat-n-Mimoun. My specific team made the drive out to Talat-n-Mimoun daily, carrying one overarching inquiry: How exactly do water, farming, and the domestic lives of women here intersect with health?

Any honest investigation of rural Morocco starts with water.

The students tracked the irrigation lines back to the absolute source: a ten-meter well, a  pump pushing water to various beneficiaries. Midway, the flow hits a relay well before dumping into a communal reservoir, sustaining a mosaic of small, family-owned plots. I watched the students desperately sketch this out in their notebooks. It made me realize just how much trust, negotiation, and quiet engineering lives inside a mundane plastic pipe. Decades of trial and error have taught this community how to share water without losing a drop. No policy brief can capture that kind of daily, localized diplomacy.

After the water, we headed into the douar to sit with the women.

What the Women Taught Us

The students showed up with notebooks full of prepared questions, but that didn't last long.The actual conversation didn't fit on a clipboard. They ended up just asking about basic morning habits, what everyone cooked, the physical walk from the house out to the fields, looking after older parents, and the emotional side of it like what makes a day feel manageable, and what makes a day completely exhausting? They wanted to know about emotions. 

What unfolded is a dynamic I rarely encounter, and I’ve thought a lot about why. A student would ask, "How do you feel when you do this task?" The response? Often a startled laugh. A long pause. Several women explicitly pointed out that no one had ever bothered to ask them that. Fetching water, kneading bread, managing fields, organizing the cooperative; these weren’t "tasks" to be evaluated. They were simply life, like breathing or drinking water. You don't pause to analyze the mechanics of every sip.

Over those three days, the mere act of noticing shifted the room's gravity. The women began analyzing their lives through the foreign lens of the students and once again through their own. We ran focus groups in the cooperative space. We did intimate two-on-one interviews and spent a phenomenal afternoon with the local association's president. It was always an exchange, never an extraction.

Ultimately, the students distilled the women's concept of wellbeing into three distinct pillars: water security, care, and, surprisingly, creativity. That last one struck a nerve. For Talat-n-Mimoun's women, wellbeing is more than just surviving hardship. It is having the carved-out space to imagine, learn, and create. The cooperative itself was that sanctuary—a place to exist as themselves, separate from their roles as wives and mothers.

In the end, the women of the cooperatives brought their products, and the students and professors had the chance to buy crochet work and small handcrafted souvenirs — not from a shop, not from an intermediary, but directly from the women whose hands had made them. The transaction was simple and transparent, the money going straight to the maker. It was a small detail with a large meaning.

Lunches Under the Tagine Lid

I want to mention the lunches, mainly because they weren't just breaks between our formal activities, they were an active part of the fieldwork. Every single day out in the villages, we ate meals built entirely around local crops. We had a new tagine every time, rotating through vegetable, beef, or chicken, always alongside local salads, fruit, and bread baked fresh in a traditional outdoor oven. The students saw that oven firsthand. They looked right into the kitchen spaces. 

On one particular afternoon, a traditional Amazigh family welcomed us into their home, and the students suddenly understood something without anyone having to deliver a lecture about it. They realized that what they were eating wasn't some broad tourist category of "Moroccan cuisine", but rather the literal, everyday meals of the family sitting right in front of them, put together from whatever their own land had managed to provide that week.

The Closing Days

On Day 9, the students gathered at the hotel to prepare their final video presentations, distilling three days of fieldwork into something they could share. On the final day, we returned to the HAF office for the presentations themselves, followed by lunch. 

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir, HAF President, shared a statistic at the closing that stuck with several of us long after the students went home: According to the United Nations, women hold only about 5% of property in North Africa and the Near East. The students had just spent the week with women who quietly and persistently build spaces to exist on their own terms. That number gave their work an even sharper edge.

A Personal Reflection: Solidarity Tourism as Research

I should say plainly that this experience was not only professional for me. My own research is on the valorization of the biocultural heritage of rural territories and the mechanisms by which it can be transformed into an economic resource through solidarity tourism. Walking with the UCL students through Akrich, Tafza, and Talat-n-Mimoun was, in many ways, ten days of fieldwork exploring my own question.

Solidarity tourism, as I understand it, is built on a simple but radical inversion of the conventional tourist contract. The visitor does not come to consume an experience; they come to participate in a community's life, and the economic benefit flows back into that community rather than to intermediaries. The visitor leaves as a guest who has been welcomed, not as a customer who has been served. Conventional tourism can be, in its worst forms, extractive, taking images, time, and authenticity while giving little back. Solidarity tourism opens a different door: the community welcomes you, and you, in return, are willing to be welcomed, slowly, on the community's terms, listening more than speaking.

What I saw during the UCL program is that this model is not theoretical. It works. It works for the women of Achbarou, who set the price of their own carpets and meet their clients face to face. It works for the potters of Tafza, who teach a workshop on their own clay. It works for the women of Talat-n-Mimoun, whose words and definitions of wellbeing have now travelled to London, to be carried forward by eighteen students into whatever careers they build in urban development.

What HAF Makes Possible

None of this would happen without the patient, often invisible work of the HAF. HAF is what S., a UCL student I had the pleasure of interviewing afterwards, called a translator; between international ideas and local realities, between visiting researchers and rural communities, between aspiration and implementation. HAF doesn't just use terms like participatory planning, interfaith dialogue, and women's empowerment as organizational buzzwords. They actually operationalize these concepts on the ground, securing community trust through years of consistent local presence. 

The UCL visit only succeeded because we leaned heavily on this pre-existing infrastructure. We depended completely on established ties with the cooperatives, the baseline trust of the rural women, local families agreeing to let us inside their houses, and a massive amount of background coordination for the transport and tutorials. It worked because HAF has spent more than two decades building it.

What I Carry With Me

The students flew home on 7 May. The vans returned to the airport, the hotel returned to quiet, and the office returned to its ordinary rhythm. But something in me had shifted.