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!