ABSTRACT

Dr. Mouna Benamour considered the streaks of color under the blue sky as her taxi swished from one lane to another along one of Rabat’s busy avenues. “This won’t be easy,” she thought, as she considered her mandate to get a closer view of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Morocco. She had grown up as an only child in Paris, with Spanish and Moroccan parents. Now, as a medical anthropologist and AIDS activist with a Spanish HIV/ AIDS advocacy organization, she was in the country of her grandparents for six months to use her language skills and anthropological and cultural knowledge to understand the roots of the epidemic. Her organization was worried: some recent studies had identifi ed warning signs of a hidden or potentially serious future epidemic in Morocco (Robalino, Jenkins, and El Maroufi , 2002; Obermeyer, 2006).