So it’s
been awhile since I last wrote, but there really isn’t all that much to write
about. It’s been cold, very cold in
fact. There is snow on the mountains
around my town, though none here yet.
I’m told we don’t get much snow in town, if any. It mainly stays in the surrounding
mountains. It makes them look much more
regal, so I don’t mind, but I wish it wasn’t a mile’s hike to enjoy the
snow. Instead it’s just cold. The problem with cold here is that unlike New
England, which is much colder, there is neither insulation nor central heating,
so you can never escape the cold (or in Arabic the menacingly named brrd); in fact my house is colder than
the outside during the day, though about the same at night. One lucky weekend—just before Obama’s
reelection—it was warm and sunny and a bunch of us volunteers got together and
went kayaking on a mountain lake. It was
awesome and beautiful and discombobulating.
I certainly never expected to kayak in Morocco.
Other than
the weekend of sunny kayaking there has been little to break the dreary, rainy
days. I’ve started teaching regularly,
and there are moments of that which I really enjoy. I have an intermediate class which meets once
a week, a beginner class which meets twice, beginners at the artisanal
cooperative who meet four times, young beginners who meet just once, and, as of
yesterday, an advanced class. Each of
these classes is an hour to an hour and a half, depending on the age and level
of the students, though any class is about fifteen minutes shorter than
publicized since the majority of students are late. So far classes have been running
smoothly—except for young beginners, which, even though the students are all
over ten, feels more like day care with an English focus—sometimes even well. Occasionally hilariously. For their first lesson the intermediate
students requested a lesson on asking for/giving advice, a topic they’re
learning in school. At the end of class
I made a series of scenarios in which they had to advise me. In one where I had guests coming over but no
food in the house all the boys said I should take my friends to a
restaurant. Almost all the girls said I
should buy food, and then tell them and they would come over and cook, since
obviously as a man I couldn’t be expected to cook for a large group.
In addition
to class time I spend time at the Dar Chebab just hanging out with students,
time which I hope to convert into clubs now that the first rocky weeks of
making a class schedule that actually works have finished (the surveys I talked
about a few posts ago did almost nothing for helping me create reasonable
schedules). I’m hoping to start a chess
club, a creative writing club, and a journalism club, as per the interests of my
students. That should leave me with a
little time when I might try to either give music theory lessons to the few
students with musical instruments (no guitars unfortunately, but the two kids
with electric keyboards have good enough technique that if I show them some
scales, chord types, and how to venture off the white keys I think my inability
to play their instrument shouldn’t matter).
Other possible ways of using that time could be a current events club or
a series of life skills and employability classes created by previous
volunteers. It will depend on student
interests. Eventually some local
counterparts and I also want to get a hiking club/environmental education club
up and running too. Until the clubs
start though this has been a time when I sit, chat with students (pretty much
all boys in this unstructured time), teach them card games, and, on the rare
warm day, Frisbee. The other day there
was one quite strange moment during this time.
We were playing Egyptian Rat Slap (an American card game) and I noticed
a boy cheating. I called him out on it
and he asked if I was Muslim. Thrown and
wary I said no. He then declared I had
no right to make a judgment on him cheating.
Before I could make it a teachable moment I quickly had to defend him
from the other boys, who shouted down how obviously rude this was.
My other
failure to make a teachable moment came earlier this week when I came home from
a short post morning class hike and found a group of boys beating another boy
with sticks just around the corner from my house. I yelled at them to stop, and ran in to snatch
their sticks away, but since now they know I won’t hit them I couldn’t scare
them into good behavior and they dodged around me. This gave the boy they’d been hitting a
chance to throw in some punches and kicks of his own, so I found myself
ineffectively trying to stop both sides of the fight. I looked to the surrounding adults for help
reining in the kids, but none was forthcoming.
Eventually the crying boy got on his scooter and sped away, so I walked
home, ignoring the small rocks the other boys were throwing at me. As many of you know from my Facebook post
about it I was very upset at the time, but thanks to your messages of support
and advice for ways I might move forward against bullying and adult
indifference I think this event might mark a turning point in my service where
I find more of a purpose. Or it might
not; I’ll have to see how receptive the community is to it.
Since I’d
hate to end on a downer I’ll tell you a positive story from yesterday. I was walking towards the cyber so that I
could print a couple of things when I heard the unmistakable sound of a live
guitar, a sound I miss here whenever I’m not playing one myself. I backtracked and found an open door where a
couple of boys were playing together.
One was using a guitar body with three strings as a drum, while the other
played on an unconventionally tuned guitar with just four strings (but still
places for six). As I got closer I
realized this was an intentional modification, someone had also ripped out the
original fret board and put in a new one where the frets were spaced
inconsistently. Inconsistently, that is,
for Western scales, but not for the Tamazight one, with it’s quartertones and
mysterious harmonies. While not as
versatile as the “Moroccan guitar” I’d seen in Fes so many months ago this was
another clever way of making it possible to play traditional Moroccan music on
a western instrument. It was essentially
a loutra grafted onto a guitar body. The
boys played and sang several popular Tamazight songs for me and voiced an
interest in coming to English lessons at the Dar Chabab. In the future they might help me start up a
music club too, so it was a lucky day.
Then I went and had stomach and intestine and cous cous at my host
family’s house, and for the first time actually enjoyed the taste of those parts
of the cow. Auspicious, I’d say.
Auspicious,
just like one day when Joha walked into at teashop and sat down beside a
friend.
“How are
you?” asked the friend.
“Well, to
tell the truth,” said Joha, “I’m a little thirsty and hungry. I haven’t been able to drink or eat a thing
for the past three days.”
“My dear
Joha,” said the friend, “let me buy you some tea and pastries,” and he ordered
some. “You must have been quite ill,”
the friend said. “What was wrong?”
“Oh, I
wasn’t ill,” said Joha. “I was broke.”
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