Justine McGowan

A Passion for Africa

By Shannon Adducci

The author (center) and her Moroccan host family at an
engagement party for her host uncle.

Dressed in a pink t-shirt and a brightly hued wrap skirt, Justine McGowan was the only Westerner at a Sudanese wedding reception. Out of respect, she wore a hijab loosely around her head, and she greeted the bride and groom upon entering the white tents that functioned as the outdoor banquet hall. “Mabrouk,” she told them, or “Congratulations” in Arabic. It didn’t matter that she did not know the bride or groom personally. In Sudan, she says, weddings are one of the only occasions when the Sudanese can get together to celebrate and socialize according to the Islamic government; parties are usually open to anyone who is connected to the bride or the groom in some way, and it is common for people to attend multiple weddings each month.

McGowan’s tie to the wedding was Marmar El Mahdi, a young woman from a prominent Sudanese family and a relative of the bride. McGowan worked with her cousin, Aymen, at the non-governmental organization Salmaah Women’s Resource Center in Khartoum. This is where McGowan spent the summer helping review the organization’s strategic plan and compile information for potential donors. Her professor, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, who at the time taught in the Gender Studies department at Brown University, where McGowan is now in her senior year, is Sudanese and helped her get the internship.

During her time in Sudan, McGowan lived with the executive director of Salamaah in Omdurman. Family was an integral part of daily life, and McGowan’s hosts and employers encouraged her to experience all aspects of it. On Fridays, the day off in Sudan, McGowan joined her family in getting together to talk and eat fried Nile tilapia.

Nuba wrestling match in Omdurman, the old capital of Sudan just north of Khartoum where the author ( center) lived.

Sudan wasn’t the last stop on McGowan’s itinerary. When her internship at Salmaah ended, she flew to Morocco via Cairo to begin her semester abroad in the country’s capital of Rabat.

Families in Morocco and Sudan have begun to break away from living in multi-generational homes and now reside mostly in nuclear family units. However, both cultures strongly value family life and traditions, as well as family meal times, especially during the fasting month of Ramadan, explains McGowan, when comparing the two north African countries.

“Morocco is much more developed and appears a lot more like a European city than Khartoum. Power outages occurred several times a week in Khartoum, and often we would get to work and have to go home until the power came on—not only because we couldn't use the computers, but because it was so hot that working inside without the electric fan was unbearable,” says McGowan. “Overall, being a Western woman is much easier in Rabat than it was in Khartoum.”

“In Morocco I could go running alone and out to restaurants or bars at night and feel safe to wander solo throughout the city during the day. In Sudan, it was never considered appropriate for me to be by myself in public, and this really got to me after a while.”

McGowan studied in Rabat through the School for International Training (SIT) Study Abroad. She and her peers lived in homestays in the Medina, the traditional labyrinthine neighborhood of the ever-modernizing capital. While she was initially able to get by using French to communicate, she said that daily intensive Arabic classes helped her to become more comfortable using Moroccan Arabic.

The program also took the group on cultural trips to different regions of the country, staying in rural villages. “It was something I wasn’t always excited to do,” says McGowan, “but it was actually incredible. We were shepherding and weaving carpets. And we were forced to use our Moroccan Arabic.”

Following her stay in Morocco, McGowan traveled to western Kenya in May 2007 to film a documentary with a team of five other Brown students for four weeks. The team documented the work of two micro-finance institutions that were partners with Kiva, a U.S.-based microfinance organization that uses the Internet to connect lenders with borrowers in less developed countries. “Kiva facilitates its loans though domestic field partners in dozens of countries around the world,” says McGowan. “Our team was part of a national organization called Students of the World that is composed of university student teams that go on trips to document creative solutions to problems facing developing countries.” McGowan and her fellow team members also worked as Kiva Field Journalists in Kenya, making online journal updates about entrepreneurs who had received loans through Kiva so that lenders could read about the work borrowers were doing.

Now back at Brown, McGowan, a Development Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies double major, is writing her thesis on the effects of economic crisis on notions of masculinity in Kenya and how it manifests in the risky sexual behavior of urban men. But McGowan won’t be in the States for long; she’s already planning to travel abroad again—this time to Syria in September 2008 to study Arabic for a year and research the experiences of Iraqi women refugees in Damascus.