One of the highlights of this week has been having the opportunity to see a little bit more into the life of people in the house, in Asni and in Morocco in general.

The most poignant story so far has been that of Amina, one of the girls here who has so impressed me by her keenness to learn and determination to get on, and it was only on a bike ride with her that I really began to understand the reason for this. Her father died when she was two, leaving three small daughters and a son. Amina was lucky to be the only one who went to school while the others stayed at home with their mother looking after the animals in their remote mountain village. Unusually there were no grandparents to help support them. Amina is determined to go to university to be a teacher in order as she puts it 'to change the situation of the family'. She is already doing what she can as she's teaching her sisters to read and write and works incredibly hard on her homework, often getting up early in the morning. I was terribly touched by what she told me, yet Khadija said that in fact many girls in the villages have a very similar experience. Thank goodness at least a couple of hundred of them have been helped by Education For All.

Last night Khadija organised two of the girls to give a presentation on the subject of girls getting married in their teens. I just wished that I could have understood a bit more of the whole thing as they had a really lively discussion, but I was struck by what Amira said about her own sister who was apparently forced into an unhappy arranged marriage by her father as he had discovered a love letter from a boy in her bag. However he has since realised that he made a mistake in this and is now encouraging Amira to make the most of her opportunity to go to university. She also is an impressively confident and hard working girl who should go far. At least things are perhaps changing slowly. Unsurprisingly all the girls were unanimous in their wish to continue their education and get a job before contemplating marriage. However, I have to say that there is a marked difference between the girls who really work hard in the house on homework and those who tend to sit around and chat a lot of the time! But perhaps they are just being normal teenagers yet their circumstances are so different from teenagers in Britain and they really only have once chance to change their lives.

One evening I found one of the girls in tears, which is actually very unusual as they are normally unbelievably cheerful and smiley. Her parents are separated but the mother is contesting the divorce settlement as the father is not giving her enough money and she had just had a phone call from her father who was telling her how badly her mother was behaving - what a terrible thing to do to a child. Divorce is unusual here so that must only make it worse for her.

At the level of the school, Khadija told me about a meeting she attended there where the teachers had invited housemothers of both the state boarding house and the EFA houses as well as parents to let them know that the baccalaureate students where not doing as well as they had hoped, with the exception of the EFA girls. They were particularly disappointed that only a couple of parents had turned up and they didn't say anything. According to Khadija and Latifa the parents don't see it as their job to make sure their children are working hard and not messing around in Asni in their free periods. It seems that the teachers are willing to give the students extra help but the students don't bother to turn up for it which must be very frustrating.

And the final insight which I got this week was that of the health service, in that Khadija had to go to the doctor in Marrakech for joint and tendon problems with her leg. She had to wait for three hours just to see the doctor; the appointment cost her 200 dirham as did the prescription. Fortunately she gets half her medical costs paid by the Association, but this would not necessarily be the case for everyone, which makes good medical care very costly. The same can be said of the dentist, and the girls do complain about toothache - not surprisingly with all that mint tea, but I think that many would not be able to afford to go to the dentist. People here find it hard to believe that both GP visits and prescriptions are free for us, as is the dentist for under 18s.

So in short this has certainly reinforced how incredibly lucky we are and how we take so much for granted. Morocco is a remarkably developed country yet there are so many things we regard as necessities that are beyond the reach of much of the population.