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.
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