Eleven days. That’s all it took. Eleven days alongside a cohort from University College London’s master’s program in health and urban development to witness exactly how solidarity tourism strips away the artificiality of fieldwork, leaving something permanent behind for everyone involved.

On April 27, 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 10-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........

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