Salmon festival hosts Moroccans

Although traveling to Issaquah Creek is a yearly ritual for thousands of salmon, for two Moroccan artists, this week is a first-time adventure to the Pacific Northwest.

Mohamed Khzoum and Aziz Amrani will attend the 38th Issaquah Salmon Days Festival to represent their hometown and Issaquah's newest sister city: Chefchaouen, Morocco. The painters will present finished paintings while creating new pieces.

They will join the 150,000 people who are expected to attend the festival when they set up shop in a Moroccan-style tent on East Sunset Way, across from the City Hall building.

"I'm really looking forward to seeing their artwork," said Iman Balali, a 15-year-old sophomore at Issaquah's Liberty High School and the initiator of the sister-city relationship.

Balali, who travels to Morocco once a year to visit family, found a great deal of geographical similarity between Chefchaouen and Issaquah. After learning from Mayor Ava Frisinger what it takes to create a sister-city relationship, the young woman stated her case.

"I was just very impressed by what she was presenting and found it really heartening to find that a young person would be doing something that would be fostering friendship and cultural understanding between nations," Frisinger said. "She persuaded everyone that this had a lot of merit."

Chefchaouen became an official sister city April 11, when Frisinger, Balali and council members traveled there and signed an agreement with Mayor Mohamed Saad El Alami, who will also be at this weekend's festival.

Criteria for sister cities include similar size and geography. Although it has a population of about 36,000 (nearly 10,000 more than Issaquah) and a Mediterranean climate, the river, mountains and forest of Chefchaouen made it a good candidate, Frisinger said. Issaquah has one other sister city: Sunndal, Norway, where salmon have great cultural significance.

Balali began Issaquah's relationship with Chefchaouen when she, with her parents' help, created her own nonprofit at age 12. After encountering stereotypes of Arabs in the United States and Americans in Morocco, she started the American Moroccan International Exchange (AMIE) with the hope of changing each culture's view of the other. For three years, AMIE has supported summer exchange programs for adolescents.

"I think it's important because Americans and Arabs have a very different view of each other, but ... if you get to know each other, we're all just people," Balali said, adding that the exchange program's American and Moroccan students tend to have similar tastes in clothes and music.

The Chefchaouen artists create abstract art. Khzoum said he focuses on landscapes and portraits with signs and architecture that are specific to North Africa and the Middle East, while Amrani paints colorful portraits.

Artists were recommended to Chefchaouen's mayor by local art organizations. The mayor then chose Amrani and Khzoum to represent the city.

The two, who arrived in Issaquah on Monday night, said they are proud to be in the United States and hope other artists at the festival will learn as much from their work as they hope to learn here.

"I think it's going to be more than just art and artists," said Mohamed Balali, Iman's father and a board director at AMIE. "It brings a glimpse of what Morocco is about."

Meghan Peters: 206-464-8305 or mpeters@seattletimes.com