前途: A Year in Morocco

Eggs in Morocco are were cheap.

I get them at my local hanoot.

(Non-Moroccan audience: a hanoot is what happens when you take the contents of a convenience store [コンビニ] or gas station store and stuff them, sometimes very high up the walls, into a store that is maybe 10x10 feet. They have fresh eggs and bread, packaged snacks, cough drops, cigarettes and lighters, cleaning supplies, laundry soap, shampoo, lightbulbs, bottled water, juice, soft drinks, diapers, propane tanks and accessories, coffee, tea, cards of minutes for your phone, and sometimes a small selection of produce).

Normally my eggs are one dirham each. A dirham equals approximately 12.5 cents, or .125 USD. Ten eggs, ten dirhams, a $1.25 USD. At the grocery store, the eggs come in a nice, environmentally hazardous, tough plastic carton, costing an extra dirham, and are available in packages of 6, 9, and 12. Twelve eggs, 13 dirhams, etc. One dirham is, quite literally, pennies to me, so I tend to pick up my eggs wherever is most convenient.

But today, let me tell you, the eggs at the store were outrageous! Four dirhams more expensive than the number of eggs! Haha, I said to myself out loud in the store (#thingscrazyforeignersdo), I’m not buying 12 eggs for 16 dirhams. I’ll just stop by the hanoot on my way home.

My face when at the hanoot, my 10 dirhams got me 8 eggs: ಠ_ಠ

I guess that’s still pretty cheap, but it doesn’t stop me from being mildly outraged at this price increase. Although it doesn’t significantly impact my finances, I am aware that a price rise like this is not good for the average Moroccan family, which earns anywhere from $760 (for an urban family) and $480 (for a rural family) USD per month, according to this website.

Food prices have gone sky-high worldwide, and here government food subsidies were increased at least twice this year, but I’m not sure how aware people are of either thing. Subsidized foods are staples like flour, sugar, olive oil, and probably a bunch of other interesting things I could list for you if my internet wasn’t in such a bad mood.

One other thought to leave you with is the difficulty encountered when trying to collect accurate statistics in the Arabic-speaking world. People tend to want to keep their private matters private, and anecdotal evidence from researchers says they are generally suspicious of people asking many questions. We can speculate about the reasons for this, but the end result is that statistics should be taken with a grain of salt, perhaps a slightly larger one than when you are dealing with statistics in countries which regularly conduct large-scale surveys and censuses.