Day 21 and 22: Saadli and Satellites

Thursday and Friday of week 3 were primarily spent on working on completing the first draft of both our comprehensive whitepaper and Executive Summary for our final client presentation.    The information is coming together well but it is a lot of information to pull together.   We had almost 20 interviews, meetings, and site visits in the course of our three weeks so far and we have gathered a lot of great information during these discussions.

Our goal is to complete the first draft of both documents to give to our client next Monday.   We could tell when we first put together our project calendar that we would be working this weekend and we will indeed.  :-)  I think we are in a good place though.

We were also very excited when two of our clients invited us to their personal homes to experience Moroccan meals with their families.   Mohammed has invited us to lunch on Sunday afternoon and Redouan has invited us to eat dinner at his home next Tuesday night.  We are really looking forward to both!

Since working on final deliverables 10-12 hours a day doesn't lend itself well to interesting pictures, I will try to capture other interesting pictures that I have taken during my stay in Morocco.   One of the things that has fascinated me while here is the number of satellites that you see on all of the buildings.   Even the most modest of homes have satellites and we have been told that it is very important to the average citizen to have access to information from all over the world.   Listed below are some of my satellite pictures from the last three weeks.

Enjoy.  :-)

Every morning Saadli picks us up at the hotel to drive us to the Ministry of Agriculture.   He also brings us home every afternoon.   He speaks French so we are able to communicate a bit with him.   He is very nice and is an excellent driver.   It's a good thing because we all agree that it would be very difficult to drive in Morocco.... and probably even more difficult to be a pedestrian in Morocco.  :-)

This is a picture of our group in the meeting room at our hotel.   On Friday we are trying to have a Skype status call with Jailan who is back in Washington and it was almost humerous.   Between four PCs who were setup for Skype, only one was able to get it setup because of the lack on wi-fi and connectivity at the hotel.   Even the one Skype that we were able to get working, we were only able to use voice because the picture would not go through.   We have learned to improvise when it comes to technology.  :-)

This is a picture of rooftops that we took from a rooftop restaurant in Marrakesh.   You will notice that even the most modest homes have satellites.  They are everywhere you look.

A closeup of a rooftop in Marrakesh.



Another picture of the 'sea of satellites' that was taken from a rooftop in Fez.   I know they are difficult to see because the pictue is small, but there are literally thousands of satellites across the city.



This was a picture of a nearby rooftop taken from the rooftop restaurant from our hotel in Rabat.

This picture was also taken from the rooftop of our hotel in Rabat.   You can see that nearby buildings also have satellites off of their balconies.

One last picture taken from our hotel rooftop in Rabat.  I like this one because you can also see how close our hotel is located to the ocean.   We commonly walk to the medina which is right on the water.