Reflection #5- Hanna

SO! I finally met up with Khalid, aka themoornextdoor. We met up on Friday afternoon at a DuPont Starbucks. I'll admit...I was expecting him to be a middle-aged well-established gentleman. Instead, He was something like a 26 year old boy genius...or he looked young at least. After a very awkward introduction, I asked him if he recommended any additional readings for my country group.
He highly recommended the following for those interested in Algeria:
Algeria: Politics of the Socialist Revolution by someone I was not fast enough to write down
The Algerian Civil War by Martinez
Managing Instability in Algeria published by Rutledge and too expensive for me.

I then lead in with a simple, "Could you elaborate on Algerian Civil Society and what can you teach me about Algeria that I can't learn from a Google search?"
So then he started talking, and talking, and talking. He filled any potentially awkward silence with information about Algeria. He spoke for a solid two hours. Quickly yet smoothly, I understood every word...but my note taking did not always keep up. I drifted between complete focus and fantasizing about how he was going to stop talking soon and say something very suave and non-robotic.
Despite being one of the top five most awkward robot people I have ever met, I got a lot of good information. Here it goes:

• The Algerian mindset is 30 yrs behind- They still believe in big government and they want more regulation
• Civil Society is mostly groups relating to religion or neighborhoods and they have many youth associations
• Society is fragmented; no solidarity, everything is local except political groups
• FLN monopolizes Civil Society groups and assimilates them- most have connection to FLN. Civil Society groups are not seen as independent by the people.
• Major Youth Associations: UNJA and SNAPAP, both of whom have many groups that have broken off from them with very similar names.
• These student groups are linked into Arab Unions.
• the 2011 strikes came from Independent SNAPAP (one of the break off groups)
• Ministries are very important because they are the closest thing to civil society that actually is able to get things done. Ministry of Agriculture and Peasants is most influential
• The cities are overpopulated and there has been a housing shortage since the 80s
• No housing development- there is a lot of illegal housing and the politicians are all in the business of selling cement and PVC pipes. The housing problem is too big of a problem for government to know where to begin.
• Official count of votes is steadily declining. Government will say that the voting percent is, say, 56% but it is actually much lower and lower than 36%. Khalid says that on voting day the streets are empty.
• the only people who vote are old people and people who are apart of political parties. 
• Similar to Moroccan Society and would be more so if French had never been present.
• The military is the elite and is viewed positively by most members of the public. 

I have three more pages of notes and I don't think that any of you care enough about Algeria to read them if I posted them....
Anyways...After two hours of talking non-stop. He just stopped talking, said it was nice to meet me and basically ran out of Starbucks. Like Ran. Leaving me very confused as to what had just happened over the past two hours. I'm still not really sure what that was. He isss a blogger so I don't know why I expected him to be a non-awkward member of society. Either way, GT's with themoornextdoor.