The View from Fez reported recently that a new Guesthouse Association had been set up. Jennifer Lapostol is Vice President and liaison for the English-speaking community. Here's what she has to say about the Association and her own role.
Jennifer LapostolFor the first time, foreign owners comprise a large part of the Board, and we are all very excited to be recognised as an important part of the community and to be given the opportunity to work together to improve living and working conditions in the medina. The key now is to maintain the optimism and momentum generated by the meeting and Board elections in late May.
The Board has met several times since the elections and has developed a comprehensive list of objectives, primarily to promote, defend and represent maisons d'hotes owners. One of the first projects will be to create a website in French, English and Arabic to disseminate information to all home-owners and prospective home-owners. The site will include PDF documents of current regulations and procedures for opening and running a guesthouse. This is extremely important since, to date, information regarding this has been difficult to find, obscure and even conflicting.
We have also drafted 'quality standards' for guesthouse owners to ensure that all visitors to Fez, whether they are staying in a simple dar or the grandest riad, will be assured of comfortable, safe and professional accommodation, and that employees of guesthouses will be offered appropriate compensation and training for the important services they provide.
Of course, security is a major concern for everyone at the moment, and the Association made this a priority at their last meeting.
Importance for the whole English-speaking community of Fez
Apart from The View from Fez, the growing Anglophone community in Fez does not really have a focal point - though on any given day, you can run into a good number of them at Cafe Clock. The position of Vice President/Anglophone Liaison was created to address the fact that many English-speakers have felt excluded from meetings conducted in French and confounded by difficult regulations published in French or even Arabic. My job is to represent the English-speaking community in the Association and to disseminate all relevant information to English-speakers.
I have been creating a mailing list of all Anglophone home-owners in the Fez medina, though I still have large gaps, so I encourage anyone interested who has not received an email from me to contact me at info@darroumana.com. In the next few days, everyone on my mailing list should receive a short survey regarding their experiences and concerns about the medina. Everyone's responses are vital to help me get an idea of what our priorities are and to help shape policy in the future.
In addition, I would like to invite all home-owners, guesthouse owners and prospective owners to an information gathering at 18h00 on 16 August at Dar Roumana (see the map here). It will be a great chance for everyone to meet and discuss ideas. See you there, insha'allah!
Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news
3 comments:
You mention that security is a major concern at the moment. Could you elaborate on this - is this relating to the recent mugging at an ATM, or is there a wider security issue?
Yes, I am referring to the recent mugging - to my knowledge there is no "wider security issue" facing the medina. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify that!
Many medina residents have at some point been burgled or robbed (particularly mobile phones). We are fairly easy targets as our faces and routines are known.
Jen is a great initiative - and thanks too to The View from Fez for always keeping us up to date with what is happening. Like most of us I check it every day. I hope the Guesthouse information will always be available here so we only have a one stop shop! Keep up the good work.
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