The Things I Cannot Change

            I want to preface this post by saying that things have actually, for the most part, been going really well the last few weeks.  I’ve been reasonably busy and, thereby, happy, and shouldn’t really have anything to complain about.  That being said, a lot of the recent good has thrown the bad into particularly stark relief, and I wouldn’t be presenting an accurate view of my service if I didn’t include my ruminations on some of the many things that Morocco still needs work on and that, unfortunately, as a foreign interloper I am nearly powerless to effect.

            The first of the bad things which happened is that one of my counterparts just up and quit the C.L.I.M.B. program.  He didn’t give a reason or seem upset about anything, and my other counterparts and I continue to scratch our heads over it, since he essentially quit once all the hard parts of the program were finished.  While obnoxious, this is not out of place in Morocco, where a lot of times it seems people lack the commitment to follow through and finish large projects, probably because outside forces scuttle projects so often.  What with one of my counterparts getting pregnant and now this though it leaves just three adults to supervise the kids up Toubkal.  We can do it, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as pleasant, and I hope some nearby Peace Corps Volunteers will take my offer to climb with us.

            The problem with getting help from other volunteers is that we still haven’t been able to schedule our exact dates for the climb.  One of my remaining counterparts is an elementary school teacher, the other is studying plumbing at a vocational school, and even though it’s only a month away their respective ministries haven’t scheduled their last days yet!  The ministries just give the extremely vague information of, “around the end of June” rather than a specific date, which is infuriating for getting anything else organized (see those outside forces scuttling projects I mentioned above).  This inability to schedule anything is one of the biggest anchors keeping Morocco in the developing world.

            Despite these problems, we had our fourth practice hike with students this past Sunday.  We went up to Azrou and did the same loop over a monkey-covered mountain and through Morocco’s only cedar forest that I did last year during training.  It was the hike that fate did not want to happen.  We were supposed to go the week before, but were rained out.  Then the morning of our driver was two hours late; he claims because his boss slept in and he couldn’t get the keys to the van.  We had a flat on the way.  We got to Azrou, but to get to the trail head I needed to direct the driver from the very back of the van, where I couldn’t see street signs.  Never having driven in Azrou I told him to turn down a one way street, and rather than tell me it was a one way street he turned, which, of course, ended in us getting pulled over and getting a ticket.  Actually, pulled over is a loose term.  The police stopped us and wouldn’t let us leave the middle of the street while giving their ticket.  The ticket was the same as the cost of transportation had been.  Luckily for the driver, we’ve been way under budget on transport so far, so my counterparts and I decided, in the name of letting his kids eat, to pay the fine, the cost of gasoline, and a few extra dirhams so, while he didn’t make anywhere near as much as he would have made, he wasn’t screwed over.  Unintentionally this ended up being a great punishment, because we didn’t tell him we were giving him extra cash until the end of the day, so he fretted the whole day wondering what he’d do.  He ended up giving us big, tear filled hugs when we told him we’d pay for gas!

            After all this the vast majority of the hike went really well.  We saw some monkeys out in the wild.  We met some British tourists at the touristy place to see monkeys.  They graciously allowed my students to practice their English.  Everything was going well until, on the last leg of the hike heading back into Azrou, one of my students fell and injured her foot.  On a quick observation I could tell something hard was out of place, and she complained of a lot of pain, so while one of my counterparts took the other students back to Azrou the other counterpart and I took her to the ER.  Getting there in itself was a hassle.  We were, thankfully, already on a road, but ambulances in Morocco apparently only come to big car accidents, not little things like people being unable to walk without possibly permanently damaging their feet.  Luckily a passing group of young Moroccans saw us and agreed to bring us to the hospital, even stopping to buy us cherries on the way, “to keep her strength up.”

            At the ER we were asked to pay before they’d take an x-ray.  With all the money to pay the driver in pocket I had no worries about affording it, but they initially refused treatment because I didn’t have exact change and neither did they.  Please, take a minute and let that sink in.  Scrounging my pockets I found the eleven dirhams we needed to continue.  While we waited I ran to the rest room.  There was no soap.  In the hospital rest room.  Again, let this sink in for a second.  After the x-ray the doctors told us there was no fracture, and then casually mentioned that she might have ruptured a tendon.  I worried the hard thing I’d felt in her foot was the scrunched up tendon.  They then did no more tests, wrapped her foot, gave us a prescription for a painkiller, as if this was just a sprain, and unceremoniously had us leave.  There had been a car accident and apparently there weren’t enough doctors and nurses in the ER to deal with two patients at once.

            The others having left, we took a bus home.  My counterpart and I recommended the family bring her to another doctor the next day, since we didn’t really trust the ones in Azrou, so the next day my student ended up going to a local healer.  The healer took one quick feel of the girl’s foot, realized that the hard thing I’d felt was actually a bone that had popped out of place, and simply popped it back into place.  In the few days since then the girl says the pain has stopped, there is absolutely no swelling, and she can walk almost like normal already.  Somehow the ER doctors correctly saw the bone was not fractured been incorrectly saw that it was not in the totally wrong place.  Now I see why no one trusts doctors here.

            In addition to all these systematic failings the last few days, my old cultural pet peeves of children not reacting to any punishment that isn’t corporal and boys being terrible to girls came back with a vengeance this week.  Monday night I was playing with some of the young girls in my neighborhood (about ages 8 to 11), when two boys (about age 14) galloped donkeys right through the middle of them, almost running over an eight-year-old girl.  The boys were laughing.  I told them not to do that again, cause, you know, they’d almost killed someone, and they took that as an invitation to do it again.  As they turned their donkeys to gallop through a third time I realized that I have been wrong for years, there actually is a point at which it is okay to strike a child, and that is when he is continually putting another child’s life at risk and won’t stop for anything else.  So I hit one of them upside the head, hard, as he turned.  I put my hand on the other’s shoulder as he galloped by and held just long enough to unsettle him a little in the saddle, which he correctly realized was a warning that if he did this a fourth time I could and would pull him from the saddle.  That solved the problem forthwith and they galloped off into the night. 

Although I hate the physical punishment culture here I had to become part of it, at least this one time, because nothing else works on these boys.  Actually, I think it made a big impression because I’ve been so vocally against physical punishment this last year.  Onlookers (who did nothing themselves) gasped when I hit the boy, I think realizing that I must have been indescribably angry in order to do it.  Unfortunately no one around knew those boys or where they lived, otherwise I would have followed up with a far worse fate, telling their mothers.  I don’t like reporting kids to their parents here, normally it just results in a thrashing.  This time I honestly think that’s what was needed, and strangely I feel no remorse about that.

The next day I saw something that, sadly, I can now call bizarre walking to the Dar Chebab.  A bunch of teenaged girls playing basketball on the court next to the Dar Chebab.  It was the first time I’ve seen people use that court for basketball (in fact the basket fell off the backboard long before I came to this town), it’s usually just another soccer field for boys.  A bunch of boys were sitting angrily on the side, and when I came up they asked if I’d help them take back their soccer field!  When I refused they tried to overrun the field, but after a couple attempts to get them to grow up I used the nuclear option and, since I know these boys and were they live, I knocked on the door of the one who lived nearest and brought his mother into the fray.  That pretty much ended problems with those boys, and afterwards the only real issue was creepy older men gawking at the girls.

Later I started to play Frisbee with some younger girls on the side, and a different group of young boys decided they were hell bent on ruining at least one group of girls’ fun.  The girls did a good job ignoring the boys’ taunts, until one boy actually ran up and started to hit a girl.  I went over and pulled him off.  He’s a boy I’ve had tons of trouble with in the past, and I asked him if I’d ever hit him before.  He said no.  I told him that I don’t want to start, but in the future I will treat him the way he treats the girls.  To be honest, I feel much guiltier about that threat of violence then hitting that other boy the day before, but it was effective and the boys stopped attacking the girls.  Afterwards I had the girls play while I kept an eye on the boys, one of whom asked me, if I was a boy, and they were boys, why was I on the girls’ side.  Except he said it in a much more offensive manner involving what people have and don’t have.

Through all this a group of men at a local shop sat, watched, and did nothing.  I’ve seen these men step forward to chastise older boys when they play too rough and threaten business at the shop by scaring away customers, but this apparently wasn’t a big enough deal.  After the girls left I went over to these men and I told them, point blank, that they were doing themselves a disservice.  I asked them why they thought the older boys often act like animals, and before they could answer the rhetorical question I told them it was because when the boys were young they were allowed to act like animals without any adult supervision.  Obviously, I said, these young boys don’t respect girls and they don’t respect the foreigner defending girls, and it is the job of the older men in the community to act as both role modals and supervisors to the young, so they’d learn.  I don’t know if this bit of public shaming will get them off their lazy bums next time, but it is, again, one of Morocco’s biggest problems, when adults do nothing but complain that their boys act like animals but do nothing to nip it in the bud when the boys are young.

Sadly these aren’t the only recent examples, but there is no need to bore you all with a litany of all the reasons boys here make me sexist against my own gender.  Instead I’ll give you a Joha joke to make up for this major downer of a post.

Once Joha had a fat, young lamb which he liked very much.   One day some friends were visiting, and they proposed to Joha that they kill the lamb and have a feast.  At first Joha resisted, but finally one of them said, “Look, Joha, the day of judgement will come to all of us soon, so why don’t we enjoy life’s pleasures now?”

Reluctantly, Joha agreed, and the all went to the bank of a river.  The built a fire and killed and roasted the lamb.  After the feast, the other men took off their clothes and went swimming in the river.

While they were swimming, Joha threw their clothes on the fire.  His friends came back and couldn’t find their clothes.  Then they realized Joha had burned them.

“What did you do that for?” they asked.

Joha replied, “The fire needed fuel, and see how well it is burning now to keep you warm.  And since the day of judgment is coming soon, what do you need the clothes for?”

Reflections

            So, I’ve pretty much reached the year in service mark (not counting the two months of training), which means I have about a year left to go, probably a little less since our exit dates are scattered such that the last people leave after exactly two years.  I don’t yet know which end of the leaving period I’ll tend towards, for a long time I thought I wanted a later exit date, but given how work dries up after about the middle of April that seems less important now.  We still have a year to see.

            As you might expect around the year mark I’ve been quite reflective these last couple of weeks about my service thus far and what I’ve done, successes and failures.  Leaving aside the C.L.I.M.B. program, which I write about all the time and which is obviously my big success, how do (or, simply, do) students benefit from my day-to-day presence in their town?  Interestingly, I’ve had a bunch of new students recently who’ve really helped put things in perspective.

            As you may recall from posts of a year or so ago, Moroccans have a huge test at the end of high school, the Baccalaureate Exam, which pretty much determines the rest of their lives, where (if) they can go to university, vocational school, what have you.  Needless to say it is a time of great terror for many students.  Although I’m quite popular in town among kids in their first year of university (who I gave Bac review to last year when I first got to town) and among students in the year before their Bac (high school juniors), I’ve only had one consistent student in her Bac year come to my classes this year.  Now, with the test looming, a lot more of these high school seniors are coming to my classes, which I’ve moved over entirely to Bac review for these weeks proceeding the test.  At the suggestion of their teacher I’m working a lot with writing and with usage of different tenses, rather than the mechanics of grammar, which they are quite good at.

            On the one hand working with these new students has been a bummer.  Many of them have fantastic grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, but they have no idea how to use these either in speaking or in writing (and have a hard time with listening too, because they haven’t heard much of a native accent).  There’s a lot of lost potential, ways I can see that they would have much better communicative English if they’d just been coming to my intermediate classes throughout the year.  However, the juxtaposition lets me really see what I’ve done for the students who have been coming.  Already, pretty much across the board, my consistent juniors write as well or better in English than these seniors.  Since they’ve spent more time with me they can comprehend spoken English much better, despite their smaller vocabularies and knowledge of tenses.  Most importantly, a lot of them, though by no means all, have reduced or eliminated their hang-ups about trying to speak in English, even when they don’t know if they can pull off the sentence.  Although I still worry about not giving as much as I get, it’s nice to have this visible reminder that I’ve done good things for students that don’t involve mountains or trust falls.

            This also helps me to plan ahead for what I’m going to do next school year with my students.  For my intermediate class I hope to keep the kids I’ve been working with in their senior year and, hopefully, attract more students, doing more of the same, though increasing the emphasis on writing, both for greater variation from our speaking classes and because I’ve finally found a way to teach writing that I think works well.  As to my basic class, I’ll see if there is interest in keeping it up.  If there is I’ll keep it going, if not I’ll either replace it with another intermediate class (to give kids more options of times to come), or with time to do a non-English extra-curricular.  My elementary/middle school classes finally completely fell apart; we’ve just been playing Frisbee and cards for weeks, which they seem to prefer.  As elementary school students who spend seven hours in school doing other academics I can’t blame them.  Next year I think I’ll allow what few of those students who actually want English lessons into the older Basic class, something I’d already started, and instead use the time to try and start a music club inspired by the one I saw the Moroccan counselors running at the Taroudant Spring Camp (see my post “Let It Shine” from April).  I think the kids would like it and find it much more enriching and interesting than the English lessons their parents insisted on.  Probably help their English pronunciation in the long run anyways, since we’ll keep to English songs.

            So, that’s that.  Not really too much more to say in this post, but I’ll leave you with a joke from my local Joha, the man I call Nasreddin in previous posts.

            Paying for my tea the other day, Nasreddin asked me what I’d be paying.  Tired, but aware I was walking into a joke, I warily responded “five.”

            “Five, five what?” he asked a glint in his eye.

            I responded, “five dirhams,” and I gave him a five-dirham coin.

            “That’s not five,” he declared, “that’s one!”

            “You know,” I threw back, catching on, “I should know better, you Moroccans give prices in ryals (the equivalent of nickels to the Dirham).  I’ll give you a hundred!”

            “You better not give me a hundred ryal, they’d scatter all over and I’d end up counting all night.  You know, there was once a man who paid me in francs (the equivalent of pennies to the Dirham), it took him days to clean it up, though I gave him his coffee on the house.”

Have You Met Ted?

            Last week I travelled to Rabat in order to sit through my midservice medical exam (yes, I’m about half way through, a little more actually).  I’m healthy, and, somehow, have only lost a pound since arriving in country, a surprise since I feel like I look much skinnier.  My theory is that I’d just eaten so much delicious Rabati food I had a temporary weight gain.  This was my first trip to Rabat since last September, and since I’ve spent so much of the time since out in the bled (countryside) it made quite a different impression on me than it ever has before, one that highlights my old theme of the two faces of Moroccan culture, a modernizing society with a strong traditional core.

            In many ways Rabat is completely unlike the other major Moroccan cities.  Marrakech and Fes, while they are still modern cities, feel like they are built around a traditional core.  Casablanca, from what I’ve heard and seen briefly, is a gritty, economic center.  Rabat, on the other hand, feels overwhelmingly European, despite its modern Middle Eastern look (this look is no accident, when movie makers want to film a modern Middle Eastern city like Baghdad or Damascus they usually use Rabat for safety reasons, so our picture of these cities is often actually Rabat).  In Rabat, women will sit in cafes, wear clothes unacceptable anywhere else in the country, and hold hands with men on the street.  In Rabat, foreigners are not unusual, and because of the high concentration of Embassy staffs, Fulbrighters, other students, and expatriates they aren’t exploited as tourists.  In Rabat, it seems like most people speak at least a little English.  In Rabat, some people have a lot of money.

            These last two, the English and the money, are probably what make Rabat feel so different, and two stories from last week really highlight this.  On our first evening in the city a few of us were at a restaurant in the fashionable Agdal district where we met a group of girls who are studying at the university.  We were a group of mixed men and women and they came over to meet us, which in itself is very unusual outside Rabat, where women would never go up to a group with even a single man they didn’t know.  My experience with university students from Fes, Meknes, and Beni Mellal (the closest universities to my site) is that if they aren’t studying English they can’t really actively speak it.  These girls, some journalism majors and another physical therapist, seemed more fluent and comfortable in English then most graduates from Moroccan English programs I’ve met.  Their pronunciation was so good that I even told them my real name, which I usually avoid since most Moroccans mispronounce it as their word for detergent.  Immediately one of them asked, “Haaaaaaave you met Ted?” because apparently How I Met Your Mother is big in the young, hip Rabati community.

            If that wasn’t enough of a different world, the next night the Peace Corps Volunteers in town for medicals were invited to an event out in an even swankier neighborhood (where the Embassy staffers and expatriates live) to mark the launch of a new Moroccan-American NGO called CorpsAfrica.  The idea behind this program, the brainchild of a former Peace Corps Volunteer, is that talented Moroccan youth could have a much larger impact doing Peace Corps work then American Volunteers.  Basically, once it gets off the ground, it would function as a Moroccan Americorps, where volunteers live for one year in a community helping with projects developed between community members and the volunteers.  The centerpiece of this event was when the Minister of Youth and Sports and a representative of Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, a private institution modeled on American universities rather than the public universities of colonial French design, signed agreements to support and help the new NGO.  Before and after the signing we rubbed shoulders with various important people: heads of NGOs, ambassadors, a friendly regional Governor (the only person I met there without much English), several important government officials, etc.  I chatted with the Minister of Youth and Sports for a few minutes without knowing who he was, then found out when he went forward to make a speech.  He seems extremely passionate about actually developing Moroccan youth.  Coming from the bled (countryside), the concentration of money and power was disconcerting.  It seems that at first, given the cooperation of Al-Akhawayn, which will recruit among its graduating students and graduates, a lot of the volunteers will come from this wealthier, luckier class of Moroccans, and I think it’ll be a great chance for them to give back to their country and appreciate their luck, much the way Peace Corps works for us fortunate enough to be born Americans.

            The next day, one wild souk bus ride later, I returned to my site with a few of the other volunteers who’d been to medicals so they could both have a break on their way home and participate in a few events with my C.L.I.M.B. students over the weekend.  For the last few weeks these students have been preparing a conference between themselves and a few other clubs at the high school to talk about environmental issues.  These clubs included the school’s environment, women’s, and cinema clubs.  My Moroccan counterparts and I did very little for this project, we had the students think of the volunteer project they wanted to do, helped make sure they had an organized schedule and delegated roles, and went with them to talk with the officials at the Dar Taliba (student’s dorm) to make sure they had space, though the students did the talking.  The students did a tremendously good job and I’m very proud of them.  The conference started with a power point presentation about pollution and recycling by a few of my students and a student from the school’s environment club (ironically one of my intermediate English students).  Although I couldn’t follow the rapid Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in which they made the presentation I could follow the basics and the pictures they’d found to see that they had a pretty good approach, though perhaps a little too much text per slide and reading of that text.  Next two students did a short play where one, playing a young, educated woman, taught the other, playing an old, illiterate woman, how and why not to litter.  This one they presented in Tamazight, so again I couldn’t follow much, though I did catch some joke (which I still don’t quite get) about their American friend Younis.  Afterwards they had a discussion panel where people could ask questions about the environment and keeping it clean.  Despite a strange, longwinded speech in MSA from one of the high school’s Islamic Education teachers about how keeping the environment clean is important to Islam and therefore they would not act as Europeans and Americans do and destroy the Ozone (yeah, I didn’t get it either), this talkback also went really well.  Overall a great event, put on and run entirely by students.

            The next day we went out on a hike in the region of Oum Rabia.  Frequent readers might remember these waterfalls, the sources of a long river, which I visited back last June with a group of students.  We started at a gorgeous mountain lake and hiked through long valley to eventually reach the falls.  We had planned on afterwards hiking around the mountains which surround the falls, but unfortunately we ran out of time because although some people who live nearby assured my counterparts that it would only take an hour and a half, two hours tops, to reach the falls from the lake it ended up taking something more along the lines of seven hours!  Either we missed something, or, sadly more likely, the people my counterparts talked with knew absolutely nothing about what they were talking about.  Although the day of I was pretty annoyed by this I actually think it ended up being for the best since it gave the students a chance to practice the group problem solving and leadership lessons we’ve been giving them the last few weeks.  As always the students did a great job dealing with the challenges they faced, and if I wasn’t always thrilled that some of them went a little too far afield while exploring for a way through the valley it’ll be easier to teach them the importance of staying a little more with the group than trying to force them to have a bit more of a sense of adventure.

            Alright I think that’s all for now.  A bit of a rambling post I know, but the last week has been much more of a ramble than a narrative.  I’ll leave you with a Joha story which, if it doesn’t tie everything together, at least should make you laugh.

            Joha came into a café one day looking very happy.  His friends asked him why.

            “The king spoke to me today!” replied the ecstatic Joha.

            “What did he say?” asked his friends.

            “Get out of the way, you idiot.” responded Joha.