Today the workshops end. Really, we stop working in the computer centre, but not working with the kids nor with the local team. We have been lucky, because in this land working without permits or letters of recommendation in this kind of centre was definitely an accomplishment of Tarik and his rifenian diplomacy.

Maybe things are changing, some years ago everything was organized by the ministry in charge, but now it is the associations (and international cooperations that take charge of running places like this). I personally feel allergic to these kind of places, the more when I see the state of things outside these clean "missions" with the plastic coating still on the new seats. I am not criticizing, I hardly have a personal impression of it, but I simply feel more relaxed in the cybercafes. The people are there, chatting with their cousins (I have just seen a whole family: mother, father, kids,... they have been sitting in front of a webcam, shouting with someone on the other end of the videochat - real, very real). It is not like you could not find this in a cybercafe in Figueras or Lavapies for example, but if I see the kind of hole this city is, the cafes are a good metaphor for the escapism you can sense all around.

The guys of Rifsystem, real enterprisers in the local computer business run several cybercafes. Some, like our friend Hicham, a computer expert that you could imagine having a great job in Europe, left in patera seven times. The last time he arrived, closely escaping death, but 14 other passengers did not. He arrived unconscious after swimming randomly for seven hours at a beach in Malaga. There he was cured, but once so, he got on the first bus back home. He has not left Al Hoceima again.