A Touristic Interlude

            Last Sunday I went to Meknes for the first time. Meknes was a capitol of the country in the days of the powerful Moulay Ismail, a contemporary of Louis XIV, who tried, unsuccessfully, to become the Sun King’s son-in-law. Now Meknes is one of the least visited of Morocco’s popular destinations, but somehow even though it is only three hours by bus from my town I’d never visited it. Faced with a free Sunday and some Christmas shopping to do I thought I would spend a day exploring.

            Upon arriving it became apparent why tourists skip Meknes in favor of Marrakech and Fes. The old medina, while antedating America’s Founding Fathers, is a young cousin to Fes and does not hold the same medieval charm. Marrakech has easy access to the High Atlas, the desert, and Essaouira, while northern charms like Rabat, the Middle Atlas, Chefchouen and Volubilis are just as easily accessed from Fes. All this means that the Meknes medina hasn’t become overrun with shops and restaurants catering to tourists, which is exactly what I loved about it, though it made the Christmas shopping harder than I thought it would be. More than a major city, Meknes’s old city reminded me of a larger version of nearby Khenifra, a historic center still frequented by locals.

            Since people trying to make their living off tourists weren’t trying to overwhelm me I had much more of an opportunity to talk with people then I normally get in tourist centers. After making my compulsory stops at an excellent artisanal crafts museum, Moulay Ismail’s triumphal gate (Bab Al Mansour, the Door of the Victorious), his tomb, and his cistern I took the long walk out to his granaries (makhzen). These makhzen are interesting because Ismail’s closest retainers became so closely associated with them that the term Makhzen is still used to talk about the powerful and influential in Moroccan society. They are intermittently lit, and while inside them a tour guide addressed me in French. When I asked what he’d said in Arabic he replied, “Oh, you’re a Moroccan. The water wheel is over there.” Then he walked off. Later when I left he was surprised to see I’m not Moroccan, but answered a quick Arabic question for me, since I’d somehow gotten it into my head that makhzen translated to “stables.” It turns out I was confused because Ismail also kept horses in his granary.

            On the walk back into town I wished peace upon a group of soldiers loitering by the edge of the king’s palace—I guess guarding might be a more accurate word. In the sunlight they were even more confused than the guide had been in the Makhzen. “You’re not Moroccan, are you?” Basically Meknes was a huge ego boost for my accent and me. We chatted for a little while, and I went on my way.

            Shopping in the not-particularly-twisted streets I asked the price of a symbol I’ve always heard called the Hand of Fatima. The lady I asked was confused, saying it was called Khmsa (the five) and that it represents the five pillars of Islam. I’ve heard the symbol called Khmsa before, but I’d never heard anyone favor it over the Hand of Fatima name. Her Khmsa wasn’t what I was looking for, but later I stumbled into an artisan’s shop in a quieter corner and after he took some time to show me how he makes his silver on iron etch work—patiently and beautifully—I asked him about the Hand of Fatima-Khmsa confusion. He said that Khmsa is the proper name and that “Hand of Fatima” was a name used to help sell it to tourists. I don’t know if this is the real origin of the alternate name, but it seems as plausible as anything else. I thanked him for his time and his tutorial and ran to catch the last bus back to Khenifra.

            So all in all it was a symbolically and lexicologically informative interlude, though I still have a couple people I need to finish Christmas shopping for!

Weeks which Elude a Title (WET)

            Actually, only one of the weeks was very wet, but it seemed as good a title as any (read: I’m running out of title ideas).

            Most of last week I spent in Rabat for the joint affair of a SIDA Committee Meeting and Thanksgiving. The meeting went all right, but obviously Thanksgiving with 200+ volunteers was the real highlight. Not too much to write about, but I’ve got one funny story. Last time I took the bus to Rabat I noticed that we pass right by the end of the tramline in Sale, the city across the river from Rabat. Since it takes almost an hour to get to the bus station from there and an expensive taxi ride into the center to finish the trek, this time I hopped off to catch the tram. As expected, it was cheaper and faster, though I confused the hell out of a bunch of commuters as the strange European who boarded the tram with a pressure cooker (filled with apple sauce for Thanksgiving). Upon exiting the tram it was only a short walk to the hotel, and I congratulated myself on how well I’ve learned Rabat. Immediately on finishing this thought I came to the wrong street corner, and had to turn and walk uphill into the sun to reach my destination. Hit me right in the hubris.

            After Rabat, I returned to Khenifra (the nearest big city to mine) where some other volunteers and I assisted a group of Moroccan students teaching about SIDA. Before going to Rabat, some other PCVs and I helped the students clear up their questions about SIDA and prepare lessons for peer education. Their lessons centered on discussions and educational games. On Saturday, the students led a fantastic World AIDS Day event, teaching over 40 local teens and adults about SIDA’s biology, transmission, and prevention. I was very impressed with their work.

            The next day, I returned to my site and ran a drawing event for young children with my mudir. We had planned the event for the International Day of Tolerance in mid-November, but a couple of hiccups (read: power outages) prevented us from running the event until this Sunday. It went well, though there was an unforeseen strangeness. In Morocco, the idea of tolerance is wrapped up with the idea of anti-terrorism. While an important message, I think this oversimplifies all the forms intolerance can take. It also let to some frighteningly graphically violent pictures from a bunch of 10 year olds; one girl’s picture reminded me of “The Bombing of Guernica” in terms of violence. On the flip side, this all has an understandable origin in the greater fear of terrorism here (it is closer to home), and the increased violence children are exposed to on T.V. (parents generally don’t censor which violent Western movies their kids watch, even from a young age).

            Nothing else to report really, classes have started back up and I’m looking forward to a full couple of weeks before I head home to visit for Christmas!

Harmonies, Discords, and Realizations

            After many false starts and delays my schedule of classes for the second year has gotten off the ground, and, thus far, is going rather well. Having learned a lot from last year’s mistakes I’m looking forward to a very fulfilling year. I want to tell you a few anecdotes, but to start I’ll lay out my schedule so you have a framework for these stories.

            My one big disappointment this year is that I have not yet gotten morning work off the ground; I often feel like a bump on a log until work starts around 4PM. I go every morning to a café in order to have breakfast and check my e-mails. On some days my teacher friends get off work early and we chat, but other days their schedules don’t have any openings in the morning. When the English teacher gets off we talk about how the students are doing, what topics he is working on (so I can provide follow up to our mutual students), and trade ideas about how we can approach these topics. I usually follow this breakfast time with a stroll through the surrounding mountains, or stopping to say hi at the artisanal cooperative where I taught last year.

            After lunch I finish preparing lessons and materials and head off to the Dar Chabab. Theoretically, my first real job of the day is a young kids’ English class, but we’ve changed this into a singing club since they are more interested in music than English. After that I either teach one class at the Dar Chabab and then move to the Dar Taliba (female students’ dormitory) for a second, or teach two at the Dar Taliba. Originally, I’d planned on making the Dar Chabab classes a place where I would direct all the misbehaving students and direct all the behaving ones to the Dar Taliba, but most of the misbehaving boys seem to have gotten bored with disrupting classes, so instead I offer a general basic course at the Dar Chabab for first time learners and older students who need review and grade specific classes at the Dar Taliba. I finish up around 9 PM, at which point my town is a ghost town. I do this Monday through Saturday, though on Monday the Dar Chabab is closed and on Saturday the Dar Taliba is. Sunday I have off, though we’re talking about starting a morning sports club.

            Speaking about clubs, a few members of the C.L.I.M.B. program have decided they want to try and run a version of it! “Graduates” of last year’s program will now lead their own hiking and environmental club, and though they won’t have outside funding to allow for a big trip like Toubkal they still hope to do some longer day treks by splitting transportation costs. I’m helping them design lessons and will come to their first few meetings to lend them authority as student leaders, but the goal is to make this a sustainable project without the need for a Peace Corps Volunteer.

            Now on to the anecdotes: I’ve discovered that teaching music to young Moroccan children is very difficult. So far in our music club I’ve been teaching them songs we learn as kids in America like “The Ants Go Marching,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and “Are You Sleeping, Brother John?”. Surprisingly, the biggest challenge hasn’t been with the pronunciation of English words but rather with the concept of pitch in general. Since students haven’t been exposed to learning music before they don’t really get the idea of singing together on one pitch to sound nice, or, in some extreme cases, the difference between singing on pitch and yelling rhythmically. One big surprise was the first time I taught them a melody they tried to sing in my register rather than up the octave as I’d assumed they’d naturally do, though honestly I don’t know if this would be a natural reaction as my music teachers up through my voice changing were all women. After a lot of repetition the students did get pretty good at “Brother John,” so I tried to introduce the round. They looked at me like I was crazy, and the resulting train wreck only confirmed their suspicions. Going to have to go back to the drawing board on teaching singing, but at least I’m getting to teach some music!

            On the opposite musical extreme, I had some students get really excited over the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” the other day in class. I’d given them lyrics with all the verbs and verb contractions omitted as listening practice, and they got so excited by the song that they insisted we listen to it again multiple times after the class was done, with them singing and air guitaring along.

            In my highest-level class I learned something about English grammar myself the other day. My students explained that they understood how and when to use the Present Perfect tense in a complicated sentence with multiple verbs, but wanted to know how to know when to use it as opposed to the simple past in a simple sentence with just one verb. It wasn’t until they asked that I discovered I had no idea how to answer it. By thinking of examples I quickly realized what the rule I’ve unwittingly followed all my life is, but it was a pretty humbling moment.

            Which brings me to another realization I had about language the other day while talking with some teachers in the café. They were defending the Moroccan practices of writing all books in standard Arabic as opposed to the local dialect, and to teaching math and science at the university levels in French rather than Arabic. They explained that those students who wanted to reach the very highest rungs of modern mathematical and scientific study would need French (and, they added, English too), to follow modern research at the highest level, it is best they be forced to grapple with it at the undergraduate level to prepare them for the future.

I’d never really thought about the fortune of having my native language be the language from which higher-level academia is usually translated. At the highest levels of academia even a major world language like Arabic is limited. As Americans, I think we tend to think of foreign languages as a very useful luxury; even in fields where they’re necessary we only use them as a tool to access information, not as the language in which we must conduct all our work. To most of the rest of the world foreign languages, particularly my native language, are necessary tools to learning, and the expectation that students be able to learn in another language, rather than from it, is not so far-fetched as I’d first supposed.

Of all the privileges I never realized I had growing up in America this might be the most important.

Ashura

            Finishing the full week of Moroccan holidays, this weekend we celebrated Ashura, the tenth day of the first month of the Muslim year. Ashura is a very important day; in Islam it is the day the world was made, the day Adam was made, the day the world will end, and—according to the friend who explained it to me—a whole bunch of other important events he couldn’t remember the specifics of.

            Despite being such a significant day, Ashura celebrations in my town are quite simple. I was coming home from the Dar Chabab on Saturday, thoroughly surprised by the evening since a few students had shown up, when I encountered a rag tag group of little boys and girls walking up and down my street beating drums. I had my guitar with me—I’d brought it to the Dar Chabab as a defense against boredom/teaching tool if the one kid with a keyboard showed up and wanted to learn more about reading music—and because it was a holiday I ignored my better knowledge about the behavior of some of these little boys and took it out when they requested I play with them. It went about as well as expected.

At first, one of the little girls would start playing a beat, I would join in playing my approximation of Tamazight music, then a little boy would stop the girl’s playing either by grabbing the drum from her hand or playing and shouting a different beat loudly over her. I would stop, try and explain that to play we need to all play together, and tell the girl to start again. Rinse, wash, repeat, which obviously exasperated the little girl. Bored that there was no music, some of the boys whose behavior worried me started to shout that they should play the guitar, and being of the body of boys who enjoy breaking things they proceeded to punch the guitar and try to snap its strings. I put the guitar away and told the bad boys that I was leaving because of their bad behavior, then turned and apologized to the good boys and girls. Sadly, I’ve found this is the most effective way of dealing with behavior problems, I won’t hit the kids, I won’t tell their parents (because I’ve found that’s just delegating my hitting), they won’t respond to other punishments, so I do the least unhealthy effective thing, and turn them into pariahs. In my defense, it has changed a couple of kids’ behaviors in the past, not wanting everyone to hate them, but I don’t like it as a method.

I went up into my house, dropped off my guitar, and went on an evening stroll to see the celebration, now unencumbered of my guitar-loadstone for bad boys. Through most of the town’s main streets nothing was going on, so I went home, convinced I wasn’t a fan of Ashura, when at the corner of my street I encountered another group of boys, this one a little older. It included my host brothers, a couple of C.L.I.M.B. boys, and a few other boys I know and like, so I accepted their invitation to clap and dance and drum with them, to the great amusement of them, the surrounding adults, and little children. After some spirited ahedus (traditional Moroccan dancing, at which I have become in no way adept), the boys dispersed, but by the then the young girls from the first group had returned, having left the young boys to go off and be terrible somewhere else, so I joined their parents and older siblings and watched them dance and drum for a little bit.

The next day was a slow and sleepy Sunday, without much of note, except for when one of the little girls in my neighborhood asked how we celebrate Ashura in America and was very confused to learn that we don’t. In the evening I had plans to meet some friends for tea, but I left a little early knowing I would get shanghaied by the group of mothers and daughters drumming on drums and metal dishes outside my house. I clapped along with them for a bit, deciding that I really enjoy Ashura, when suddenly they stopped and requested that, since they’d been showing me so much Moroccan music, I should show them a traditional American song. The time of year being what it is I had to reject the first bunch of songs that came to mind, since singing about the birth of Jesus on a Muslim holiday seemed offensive, and I desperately grabbed onto the first secular song that came to mind. Inexplicably, this was “Home on the Range.” They thanked me for the song and we went back to Moroccan tunes, though I had to leave shortly thereafter to get to the café.

There you go, a little slice of Moroccan life. Along with “Home on the Range.”

P.S. For those of you who didn’t see my Facebook post and enjoy images of life not making sense, yesterday I saw four men wrestle two live goats into the trunk of a small sized sedan. The goats didn’t seem happy with the arrangement, and protested. In the face of goatly protest the men didn’t seem happy with the arrangement either.