Moroccan Students in France Stranded as COVID-19 Blocks Travel Home

"I haven’t been back for a year and a half," Fatima-Zahra, a Moroccan student at Esix, the engineering school in Cherbourg, told Actu.fr. She had planned to return to Morocco in April, but remained blocked in France due to the lockdown. Despite everything, the 20-year-old future engineer is burning with the desire to return home. "I miss it so much," she said. Faced with this inability to return home, Fatima-Zahra went to stay with family in Rennes. Like her, there are many of these Moroccan and other international students living this situation.

"There are a lot of canceled flights," said Rime Chbihi Moukit, a Moroccan second-year student in the Marketing Techniques DUT program at the IUT. As a result, she resigns herself to spending her Christmas holidays far from her family, in her Octeville apartment. "I don’t really know how to occupy myself. I have nothing to do and it weighs on me mentally," she confided. Her wish, she said, is to find a student job.