First Hike With Students, and Other Matters

            This past Sunday my students and counterparts in the Environment Club and I took the first of the six hikes which will eventually see us to the top of Mount Toubkal!  Pictures with students will come in the next post (after I’ve had a chance to confirm which students are ok with their photos appearing on this blog), but I’ll show off some of the beautiful terrain this time.

            Stunning, right?  All within just a few hours walk of my town!  We started the hike bright and early (actually, for the counterparts and I at least, dark and early carting all the food to the meeting place) and had both breakfast and lunch out on the trail, which started out deceptively easy on a dirt road but ended with us scrambling and seeking out goat and sheep trails.  We followed that river you can see in the photos, and doing that required constant ups and downs along steep hillsides still muddy from rain the day before.  Messy but fun!  The first scramble took a lot out of students, many of whom, I was shocked to learn, had never learned such basics as travelling zig zag up a steep hill face—though this gave me a great opportunity to learn from one of my counterparts that the word for zig zag is zeeg zag—but after a rest at the top and a quick discussion from me and the other adults about both simple hiking techniques and the importance of working as a team the kids were ready to go again.  I was really happy to see that at the next steep hill the better climbers held back and helped the weaker ones, showing that they’d taken the speech about teamwork to heart.  After another rest where one of the students and I played a brief round of “pebble baseball,” much to the bemusement and enjoyment of the others we continued, pausing occasionally to skip stones across the river.

            Awhile later as we reached the next hill I was taking up the rear to help stragglers—and because I was carrying all the sandwiches—I noticed a girl having a hard time and was about to make my way to her.  Before I could the boy who’d been leading the group and stopped them at a convenient clearing for lunch doubled back and helped her cross the scream and climb to our rest spot, showing some great teamwork and natural leadership.  All of my counterparts and I were beaming as we relaxed and started to pull out lunch, the kids were knitting together into a very tight unit before our eyes.  We took a long lunch break on a beautiful hill overlooking the river, and in a very Moroccan fashion the kids threw an impromptu talent show of singing and dancing!  We continued along, met some friendly farmers who let the kids refill water bottles from their well, and about an hour and a half or so later took another rest on a lavender scented hill overlooking the next town.  By this point most of us had picked up sticks for walking, and a counterpart who knows I’m a fencer challenged me to a duel, which amused the kids so much almost all of them took a pass at me, to varying levels of success.  We played the Moroccan version of truth or dare, which could just be called dare or dare, where most of the challenges are something along the lines of “dance like Michael Jackson,” or “sing like Justin Bieber,” though occasionally end up being, “please grab me the peanuts from my backpack.”  After that we tromped home, tired but all seemingly very happy!

            The next evening I was hanging out with my host family when my host uncle beckoned me over and told me we were going to a party at his uncle’s house.  Upon entering I learned that one of my irregular, though well-behaved, students is a cousin of the family, a detail he’s never mentioned to me.  Most of the time I chatted with him and another man who knew the former volunteers, talking about them, some of my project ideas, the problem that Darija poses as the spoken but unwritten language of the country—I’m interested to see if in the quatra-lingual (Arabic, French, English, Tamazight) Lit magazine some teachers and I are starting I can convince some students to try their hand at writing in their vernacular, but I don’t foresee success—you know, the usual topics.  After awhile we started dinner, and one of the guests from another table called over and said in English, “I was listening to you, you say you’ve only been in our country for a year, you speak our language very well.  It’s quite hard for English speakers, I think.”  Shocked by his minimal Moroccan accent and word choice I asked where he’d learned to speak English so well.  “Oxford,” he replied.  He has studied in both Oxford and Berlin and only just returned to town, though he was around when the first Peace Corps volunteer came here a decade ago.  It was a neat encounter and I hope to see more of him before he leaves again, his family lives quite close to my house.

            That’s all for now, I leave you not with a Joha story, but a funny anecdote about my own Joha like miscommunication.  This morning I was helping some students write a dialogue (it’s sad to see how many students have stopped asking for homework help now they know I won’t do it for them but just help them go along, but these girls appreciate being forced to learn) about buying food from a market.  After I’d gotten them to tell me where they’d be I asked them who the characters would be.  One girl immediately answered, “a fish!”  She’d meant to say a fish seller, but for a moment I was really excited that I’d be helping some students write a dialogue about a talking fish, perhaps trying to convince people not to eat him.  When I told them that’s what I’d thought they’d meant the students laughed at how silly the American is, that only happens in folk tales!

Anecdotal February

            As I’ve said before, this has not been a month for long-form narrative, though it has been a great one for shorter stories.  That trend has continued, so I’ll continue with my short form blogging.

            Last Sunday I took a walk up into the surrounding hills, and was shocked to discover how many people know me in the outlying villages.  In some cases I teach their kids, who live with relatives in town during the week for school and return home on weekends, in other cases they see me weekly at souk, in still others they’ve just heard about the local American.  I know I should be used to this by now, but it never fails to take me by surprise.  Now that I’ve started to learn some verbs and conjugations in Tamazight I can actually speak a little with people outside too.  Interestingly, now that I’m starting to learn Tamazight I even understand their Arabic better since I’ve got a better grasp on the local accent, and I think Tamazight is finally starting to kill my (bad) Fassi accent and replace it with something easier for locals to understand.

            After my morning romp I had just an hour or so to relax before meeting up with the hiking club I’ve been writing about.  This week we planned our hike for next week and had a discussion on interdependency and on ways that corporations and other people using the environment can and should protect it both for the sake of the environment and, counter intuitively, so as to maximize profits (Jared Diamond’s book Collapse was invaluable for getting examples of this).  As always the students were active in the discussion and had tons of ideas, but like environmentally passionate high school students the world over while they rightly see big corporations as such a major threat to the environment that they could not imagine situations where companies improve profits—or at least protect against losses—through stewardship. 

We taught a global example, but also had a local one.  Globally it behooves oil companies to ship oil in double hulled ships because the greater cost of those ships is offset by the reduced likelihood of a terrible accident which a.) means they’ll have to pay for cleanup, and b.) will lose sales for months or even years while the public purchases gas from competitors who haven’t recently caused huge catastrophes.  Locally, a company building a water pipe recently accepted bribes from some farmers to not dig near their lands, possibly causing parts of their fields to be unusable this year.  Instead the company dug in less good places near the farmers who hadn’t bribed them.  In the rainstorms these places, as predicted by a company environmental advisor, flooded while the places where the pipes would have been better placed did not.  This ended up destroying the dirt road, the nearby fields (both of bribers and not), and the company’s profits.  It is now bankrupt and the farmers must rebuild the road at their own expense so they can sell their produce, all because no one listened to the company’s environmental advisor, who had told them they would have flooding.

After the meeting my counterparts and I went to get some tea, and in the process picked up a new Nasuredin (my local Joha) story.  He came out with our pot of oregano tea—yes, I now it sounds weird, but it’s a Tamazight tradition and a delicious one at that—and as he gave it to us I said a quick “Thanks to God,” as you do in Morocco when you’re quite thirsty and the tea comes.  Nasuredin asked if I was saying it, or the teapot.  Not to be outdone I quickly replied, “both.”  He than berated me as a teacher who can’t count, since if two of us are saying “Thanks to God” I should use the plural expression!

On Tuesday night I had to cancel my evening classes to accommodate a presentation by local first responders in commemoration of a national day of remembrance for automobile accidents.  While that is the purpose of the day, the first responders actually gave a class on basic first aid and response techniques, (the Heimlich, CPR, and other like things).  An important class, but not particularly well done, it went on much too long, and bored the students, who ranged in age from 6 to 20.  Apparently, unlike at least my high school experience, this is not taught in schools ever here, a local friend told me later that he’d only learned this while attending a vocational school for agriculture that thought these are important techniques to know!  That was after he was partway through university.  At the obligatory talk back at the end of the event some students spent some time berating the government for not providing local responders with the necessary gear to speed up response times—I’m noticing a constant theme in these talk backs—but I couldn’t help but think that the bigger mistake was not making sure these important first response techniques aren’t taught in a more conducive setting for learning, as a required health class like it was for me.

That’s a bit of a downer, so I’ll end with a lighthearted Joha story:

Joha was in the market one day when he noticed a man with a cage in his hand.  There was a parrot in the cage, and the man was selling his parrot, shouting out to the market goers, “100 gold ducas!”  As Joha watched, someone bought the parrot.

Joha suddenly saw a chance to make some money, so he rushed home and got a turkey from his backyard.  He returned to the market and began shouting, “200 gold ducas for this beautiful turkey!” but nobody showed any interest.

Finally a friend came up to Joha and said to him, “Joha, are you crazy?  You can’t sell a turkey for that price!”

Joha said, “Why not?  My turkey is as beautiful as a parrot that was sold for 100 ducas this morning, and my turkey is bigger.”

“But Joha,” the friend said, “that parrot is valuable because it talks like a man.”

“Is that so?” said Joha.  “Well, my turkey thinks like a man.”

Lessons Outside the Classroom

            I sometimes wonder, given my lack of training as a teacher and the weird nature of my classes, how much of a difference I’ll really make in my Dar Chabab students’ English abilities.  The young women at the cooperative are a different story since they don’t go to school, and hence don’t learn English there, have class with me twice as often as the DC students (four times rather than twice a week per class), and are a consistent class, so I know that they, at least, are benefitting from my classes.  This self-doubt is part of the reason I work so hard at my other activities, the writing club taught jointly in English (by me) and Arabic (by a Moroccan) to improve writing skills in any language, the library to promote literacy in any language, ultimate Frisbee, just sitting around playing chess during off times, and the hiking club, as these are, in the long run, probably where I’ll have a bigger influence on these kids.

            One place where I know I’m making a difference is in some student’s behavior, both inside and out of class.  As I’ve complained countless times before, the Moroccan system of behavioral correction centers on corporal punishment, a method I think is utterly ineffective.  I’ve also mentioned, I think, the strange phenomenon where some boys would rather ruin everyone else’s chance to have fun than have fun themselves.  I’ve come to realize that this also has a root in how some adults work with children here.  When I tell a young boy, “I’m sorry, today I’m playing Frisbee with the girls, but tomorrow I’ll play with you,” he hears, “I’m sorry, today I’m upending the social order by putting girls first, but next time I see you I’ll make up some poor excuse explaining why I wasn’t there tomorrow.”  An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that while girls will always come to an activity we planned in advance, young boys almost never do.  I think it’s because while the boys are used to adults making plans and then bailing the girls so rarely have an unrelated adult male make a plan with them that they don’t know to expect him not to follow through.  I even once had a boy who hadn’t shown up to an activity complain that I hadn’t come, and it took me calling over two boys who had been there to get him to concede that no, he’d been the one not there!

            This was a major hurdle at first, I wouldn’t hit the kids, and they thought my attempts at bribing them into good behavior were honeyed lies.  The obvious solution was to keep pushing through and showing up to planned activities, even when I had to collect a new group of boys to play there, and now, since kids know I keep my promises, there’s a much larger group I can get to behave by promising them the same activity another time.  Of course, there are still setbacks and kids who are resistant—one time a reclaimed boy asked if he’d been as annoying as the boys who were now stopping him from playing—but slowly this combined carrot and stick method (behave and you get to have fun, misbehave and you don’t) is gaining ground.  One particularly recalcitrant boy spent so much time interrupting girls’ games and flinging the Frisbee onto rooftops that I eventually had to make good on a threat and ban him from all my activities for a month.  For the first week his behavior was even worse, but it got to the point where no other boy would play with him and would even leave whenever he showed up rather than deal with him being a brat.  In the second week he begged me to let him play again and said he would ban himself for three months if I even once thought he was behaving badly.  I gave him the deal, and so far I haven’t had a problem with him.  While making a kid into a pariah is not an ideal form of discipline either it’s still a big step up from beating him and seems to have had the needed long-term effect.

            Perhaps the biggest success with this method was in the selection of students for the hiking club, which with the expense of transportation to Toubkal and other sites and the need to have a number of students we could handle on the mountain, had to have limited enrollment.  My Moroccan counterparts (mainly local teachers) and I held a lottery of interested students, but before the lottery we’d culled the list of students we knew tended to either make commitments and not follow through or who misbehave consistently in classes.  When we made the announcement of who made the club two of the culled students refused to accept the decision, noting, astutely, that the lottery had not been done in front of them and this “was not a democratic process.”  As they continued to storm and refused to leave the room so we could plan logistics with the students who were in the club I made a long-shot gamble and told them they were right, we had taken them out of the lottery, and this temper tantrum they were having proved we’d made the right decision. 

For the next few days one of them looked very sad, and the other very angry.  After that the angry one started coming out to play Frisbee with the other older boys and, since he seemed contrite I let him back into classes, which he’d been banned from since before the club selection.  Although before he’d never spent long enough in class not being a major disruption for me to know I’ve now learned he’s quite bright.  Now, about a month later, I’d call him one of my best students and a good influence on other boys.  The other has started participating again as well.  It’s a pity they had to miss out on the rare opportunity of the hiking club to learn that their actions have consequences, but I’m glad they’ve learned the lesson well, and plan on taking local, unfunded hikes with them and the other disappointed students come Spring.

While the young girls don’t need many lessons in behaving well I’ve had things to teach them as well, though sadly less successfully than with the misbehaving boys.  Since they are unused to playing team sports the simple skills of getting themselves open and thinking strategically about how to move downfield have been major hurdles that the soccer mad boys already knew—though these boys are obsessed with “Hail Mary” passes which in the long run make them almost as inefficient players as the girls.  These also allow opportunities for the standard “pre-teen” angst to manifest itself.  “She never passes to me,” becomes double edged when it’s both a sign of middle school exclusion and the simple fact that the complaining girl never gets herself open enough to receive a pass.  I’m hoping that, like the boys’ behavior, I can eventually turn the Frisbee pitch from an arena of middle school melodrama into a learning environment, but it’s slow going!

No discussion of outside the classroom learning would be complete without a report on the second environmental/hiking club meeting, which, as I’ve mentioned, literally happens outside in an olive grove.  This time we discussed pollution and its effects on the environment.  To demonstrate how various activities accumulate into disastrous pollution a few brave volunteers drank from a water bottle I slowly “poisoned” with more and more Kool-Aid mix (half a packet for each activity that reduces water quality that the class suggested), until they couldn’t stand it anymore.  We then discussed why the “animals” they represented had died, ways of reducing pollution, and ways of recycling.  We ended the session with a trash pick-up.  Although this isn’t really “outside the classroom” to Americans it’s a wildly new way of learning for the Moroccan students, and one that I hope the teachers working with me will take back to their classrooms.

Joha always gave lessons of the classroom too.

Joha and a friend were returning to their village when they stopped for lunch.  They spread out a few things to eat, including a pot of yogurt.  Now, this friend was well known as a very stingy person.  As Joha took out his spoon, the friend sprinkled sugar on half of the surface and told Joha, “I like to eat yogurt with sugar on it.”

“May I have some on my half?” asked Joha.

“Oh no, I don’t have much and it’s expensive,” said the friend.

Joha thought for a moment, and then pulled a bottle of vinegar from his sack, and started to pour it on the yogurt.

“Wait!” said his friend, “What are you doing?”

“I happen to like vinegar on my yogurt, and so I’m pouring some on my half,” Joha said, as the vinegar slowly spread across the surface of the yogurt.

Joha Found (Another Slice of Daily Life in Morocco)

            A friend of mine here who on occasion practices his English by reading my blog suggested the other day that I should stop searching for Joha because I’ve already found him, and been hiding the secret for months at that.  He argues, not unreasonably, that the owner of our favorite café is probably the most Joha like character I’m likely to meet in the course of my service.  While I’m not totally convinced, I think I’ll share a few stories about this potential Joha (who I’ll call Nasuredin for convenience) and let you all decide.

            Nasuredin is a skinny man of average height.  He sports a tightly packed helmet of curls, and at all times walks around with a trickster’s gleam in his eyes.  Very few things he says aren’t puns of some sort, usually requiring the listener to quickly move from Darija to Tamazight to Standard Arabic to colloquial Egyptian Arabic and back—this, unfortunately, will spoil some of the jokes.  He’s very glad I’m just starting Tamazight since my Darija is getting good enough that he can’t fool me quite as easily in it.  Now he’s got a whole new language to mislead me in.

            Some pieces of Nasuredin’s wisdom:

A friend and I walk into the café eating a traditional snack of fried potato balls (makuda).  “You two must be very complicated (ma’koda in Standard Arabic) men.  You always bring complications into my café.”

“You know, if I hit you with this broom stick you could never have children.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To test a superstition.”

“A beautiful (gmila in colloquial Egyptian Arabic) Moroccan girl went to visit Cairo.  She wondered why everyone kept calling her stew (gmila in Darija).”

One day while we were sitting outside he came out of a door I thought was to the next house over carrying our tea and announced, “A mouse needs many holes.”

On another day I asked for some tea (dqa atay, in slang Darija).  When he brought it out he apologized to my friends, but said he had to give one of them a beating with the tea (dka atay).

While sweeping up he asked if we should pack up some of the dust and send it to the last volunteer, “since he probably misses it by now.”

“What are you two doing here so early?  You’re always my last customers.  If you keep coming this early you’ll put me out of business!”