It’s day nineteen,
almost the two-thirds mark. The end of
Ramadan can’t come soon enough; I’m tired of being exhausted and unproductive. The problem is two-fold. Firstly, there is the abject lack of Dar
Chebab work. Secondly, the work I tried
to do at home (syllabus creation, lesson planning, etc.) didn’t get anywhere
because every time I try to work on them I come out with a bad product. These Ramadan blog posts haven’t been
particularly good product either, I’m sure my writing quality’s degradation is
more informative about the effects of Ramadan than the things I actually write. Even language studying isn’t going so well, I
find I just can’t focus for long periods of time. I’ve essentially given up on doing anything
this month, other than reading, watching movies, and starving. I’m glad I signed up to work at another camp
immediately after Ramadan. The intense
activity should be just the antidote for my Ramadan lethargy.
It will
also help to remind me why I came to Morocco in the first place. Without any work, in the midst of a month
where most other people aren’t working either, I’ve started to forget my role
here. Rather than seeing potential
places for growth, recently I’ve started to focus more on the obstacles in my
path. A few nights ago an incident in the
garden really highlighted some of my frustrations with Moroccan culture. I’d gone to play guitar there in the evening. As usual, a huge crowd of small children
formed around me. For whatever reason,
some of the boys were incredibly boisterous, and put into close quarters they
started to push and shove one another.
It was obviously just kids playing, not serious fighting, and it
wouldn’t have been problem except the crowd around me was so large and kids
kept getting shoved into other kids, who just wanted to listen, and into
pedestrians. I tried to calm them down
(both with words and by playing downtempo, relaxing music), but telling young
Moroccan boys to behave is never successful, so I moved to another spot with
more open space and less people around it, hoping to give the more rambunctious
boys a place to run around without bothering people. Instead the loudest three or four crowded in
really close to me and continued to horseplay and shout over the music. All of the girls, and the majority of the
boys, who just wanted to listen, were visibly upset. I stopped playing in an attempt to engage
with them.
There were
a few older children, English speakers, who wanted me to say I was going home,
so as to disperse the younger kids, and then meet them in another garden to
play for them, but that didn’t seem fair to the younger kids who were
behaving. Instead I tried to enlist these
older kids to help me calm down the energetic ones and explain to them that if
they wanted to listen they could, but they’d have to sit calmly so that the
others could enjoy the music. Otherwise
there was plenty of park for them to run around in. The older kids just shook their heads sagely
and said that kids in our town are crazy and wouldn’t listen. Loosely translated, nope, we’re not gonna
even try and help you. Now the fighting
started to get more serious. The boys
who had just wanted to listen started to push and shove the ones who had been
misbehaving in an attempt to make them go away.
The older kids continued to just say, “See, they’re crazy,” and did
nothing to try to help me stop them.
I put the guitar away and told them
I was done for the evening, hoping that at least might stop them (the older
kids were very crestfallen when I told them I wouldn’t be meeting them in the
other park either). The boys and girls
who had just wanted to listen stopped fighting and looked sad, the rambunctious
ones kept pushing each other. I started
to walk away and the whole crowd followed me.
One of kid pushed another, who hit a third one who fell into me, so I
stopped and tried one last time to tell them to stop pushing each other. As I was saying this the boy who’d been the
biggest problem shoved a girl really hard, she fell and hit her head on the
cement, he giggled and ran away. Luckily
she was fine, she didn’t even cry. I
looked at the kid and told him to come over.
He shook his head, grinning. Just
then, an adult who’d been watching walked over, grabbed him, buffeted him
upside the head, and let him go, without any attempt to explain to him why his
behavior was bad. I realized he hadn’t
come over to me when I called because he thought that I was just going to hit
him too.
The older children nodded, full of
cultural knowledge. “You see, the kids
are crazy here. Nothing will calm them
down.”
I said that we had to try to
explain to them what was wrong with their behavior. Otherwise they would never learn. “Maybe that works in America,” they said,
“but not here in Morocco.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“No, we know our culture and it
just won’t work. Kids are crazy.”
This story highlights two problems
with Moroccan culture. Firstly, the
emphasis on corporal punishment. I know
I’ve complained about this before, and I’m sure I will again, but they don’t
seem to get that it just doesn’t work.
They hit the kid, he or she behaves for a minute, but it doesn’t last
long. There is no attempt to explain the
problem, to help the kid learn better behavior.
Instead the kid just goes around hearing how he is bad and crazy, and
avoiding punishment by running away until his parent or teacher’s anger
subsides. He knows there will be no
follow-up punishment once the risk of being hit is over. Reasonable behavior comes from a fear of
punishment, not from an instilled desire to not be bad, and wilts away when the
authority figure, like me, refuses to use violence. It teaches that the only effective authority
is violent, a bad lesson for kids who will grow up either to be authority
figures or people squaring off against it.
The second problem is this idea
that culture is immutable. This idea is
firmly held here and therefrom arises a justification for laziness when it
comes to facing cultural problems. Kids
here complain all the time about living in the Third World, but whenever I try
to suggest a behavioral change that will start to move them forward, such as
avoiding corporal punishment, or picking up their trash, or (to some
reactionary boys) treating women as equals, they complain that my suggestion
just isn’t their culture. At this point
I almost always want to say that I’m sorry, but some elements of a culture need
to change in order for a country to progress.
It happened in the West, it happened in Japan, it will have to happen
here if they want to move out of the Third World. It doesn’t have to be Westernization, per se,
but some traditional values need to change to allow for growth.
Some of these value changes are
starting to come to Morocco. In larger
sites this second problem isn’t nearly as pronounced, but in rural Morocco
they’ve still only reached the first step of progress. They know that they want change, but it
hasn’t quite hit them yet that change requires them to, well, you know, change. Until they came to this realization, and
start to change, they will continue to complain about being stuck in the Third
World. The beatings will continue until
morale improves.
Or maybe it’s just that Ramadan has
everyone antsy, hungry, and irritable, even if they don’t care to admit it.
P.S. I can, and I’m sure someday will, go much further on
this subject and into the related subjects of Authority and submission to
authority, but it seems to me that such a pretentious and post-modern subject
should wait until I have food in my belly, although perhaps I’d have a more
convincingly post modern writing style and thought process when half delirious
from lack of water…
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