A Brave New World

            I’m a Peace Corps volunteer out in the Moroccan countryside with no one to talk about art and literature with, which means I’m allowed a pretentious blog post title now and again.  I feel like I spend a lot of time defending my titles, perhaps because I have a knack for coming up with pretentious titles and a plethora of friends and family who’ll call me out on them, or perhaps because I can never think of better introductions and poking fun at my own pretentions is a time honored classic.  As it is a blog post I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s distinctly not an attempt to make the audience aware of the artificial, constructed nature of the written work.  H’m, a post structuralist analysis of my own blog is still a little too pretentious for my blood, so I’ll stick with my Shakespearean (Huxlodian?) title and get on with the post (cheap introduction trick achieved!).

             Actually, after this past weekend I really have no excuse for these pretensions since one of my fellow volunteers stopped by for a visit on his way back from training in Rabat and we spent quite a lot of time talking politics, philosophy, and other topics which I can never really get into with my Moroccan friends.  It was a well-timed visit too since my computer battery refused to charge all weekend.  Since I eventually got it working again by wrapping it in blankets and shoving it to the bottom of my sleeping bag I assume it is too cold to charge.  Glad I had someone else to talk to (and commiserate with about the lack of central heating).

            The big activity of our weekend was outdoors, were the weather was distinctly warmer than in my house.  Along with one of my Moroccan friends we travelled out to a nearby town and then climbed over a short mountain (one of only three or four around that isn’t snow capped at this point) into the next valley.  The view at the top was terrifyingly breathtaking, and I’ve got the photos to prove it.  We had a picnic lunch up there, where we were accosted by goats.  We left orange peels for them as an apology for getting in their way, which seemed to reconcile us and them.

You can see a typical "large town" for my region in the distance

That same town, in "View of Delft" lighting

Looking into the next valley

            The valley on the far side of the mountain is a world apart from my town.  While my town is still on a fairly well travelled main road the only way to reach the villages on the far side is by a dirt road so steep I’d be terrified to take any automobile down it.  We saw many more donkeys than trucks, though since the recent rains had made large swathes of road impassable mud that may be unusual.  Since my town is on the main road it has a much larger population than the mountain villages, many more amenities (though each and every house I saw in the countryside still had a satellite dish), and the central market for the entire region.  I never quite realized how cosmopolitan a place without central heating could be compared to the outer towns.  Actually, I was a little jealous of their mud brick construction, I’m sure their houses are much warmer than my cement block.  I know many of my students actually come from these outside villages to study at the school in my town and stay in rented apartments (for the boys) or in the girl’s dormitory.  I’ve been told that up there you don’t hear very much Arabic; they speak Tamazight, but we didn’t run into anyone except a couple of confused looking toddlers who didn’t want to speak anything and their mother, who just nodded, wished peace upon us, and continued with her business.

            In the next valley we saw a town that used to be a Peace Corps site when they had volunteers in other sectors besides youth development.  It is too small to have a Dar Chebab, but had plenty of work for health and environment volunteers.  These small Tamazight towns don’t get much from the central government (as I said before, they don’t even have their own schools or convenient transportation to reach schools), so it’s a real shame that the Moroccan government asked the Peace Corps to phase out its other sectors and focus on more developed places.  I’m sure the kids who can’t make it to my town for school would appreciate a local English teacher, and the health education would be invaluable, but I don’t think there’s a conceivable way I could even run a weekly program there, it’s too hard to get to (and we don’t share a common language!).

            Heading down the mountain towards this village we passed by the ruins of an old mosque and center for religious teaching (and education in general).  This ruin is called Zouia, which means religious learning.  My Moroccan friend said that this was a local intellectual and religious center about four hundred years ago, though all that remain now are some incredibly evocative, crumbling remains.

            It was interesting to hang out with my Moroccan friend and another PCV from a different part of Morocco at the same time.  My friend’s grandfather originally moved to this region from a town quite close to where the other PCV lives out on the edge of the desert.  He explained that in this region, at least in the bigger towns on the main road, there are a lot of people from the South because there is more consistent work up here.  Even many local families have mixed origins since some men go down South to find a wife.  I’ve heard claims that they do this because they think the women down there are more beautiful and more intelligent than the local women.  I can’t speak to that, but I do know that they are also considered more docile than the women from around here, most likely because they are hundreds of miles from their own families and don’t want to act out in the midst of their husband’s.  Regardless, that bit of local lore often belies itself; my students’ Saharan mothers who I’ve met are just as fiery as their local sisters.

            After a couple of fun though freezing days my friend returned to the desert and I got myself geared up for the coming week, which looks like it’ll be very exciting.  I’ve been using a book of translated Joha stories to help teach my intermediate students, and this week we’re going to get into one of the longer, meatier ones as a spring board for a class on writing a persuasive essay, a skill they’ll need for their bacc.  Last week I hit the present tense with my beginners at the artisanal cooperative and I was so excited about this weeks lessons with them where we can actually do more interesting classes that I wrote most of the lesson plans yesterday (I’m sure they’ll have to be edited when the realities of class kick in).  Actually just last week it occurred to me that I think I finally have a definition of what a successful service here will be.  Those girls at the cooperative work really hard, and it would be invaluable to them and to the cooperative as a whole if at least one of them walks away from my two years here with somewhere in the neighborhood of fluent English.  If they can combine English with some of the skills in internationally attractive product development and marketing that the association from Casablanca I wrote about in my last post is teaching them they might actually be able to expand their market out of this little pocket of Morocco.  Successful service will be giving as many of these girls as I can the English skills to do that.  Successful projects and classes at the Dar Chabab, where the students will need to start working a lot harder for fluency to be an attainable goal, will all be icing on that cake, inchallah.

            As usual, I’ll end with a couple of Joha stories, first the one I will be using in class today:

            For a while Joha served as an advisor to the king.  One day the king’s chef prepared a very tasty dish of eggplant and other vegetables.  As Joha and the king were eating, the king asked Joha, “Isn’t this dish the best you have ever eaten?”

            “Oh, yes, Majesty, the very best,” said Joha.

            “Then I want it served every day,” said the king.  But after ten more meals the king turned to Joha and said, “Take this away.  This food is terrible.”

            “Yes, indeed it is,” Joha agreed.

            “But Joha,” the king said, “just a few days ago you said this was a wonderful dish.”

            “Oh, I did, Your Majesty, but I serve you, not the vegetables.”

            The essay prompt is to discuss how they feel about Joha’s last line and whether they agree or not with the sentiment.  The other story comes from my tutor, who thought it was fitting in the cold weather.

It was a cold winter day, and a heavily dressed man noticed Joha outside wearing very little clothing.

“Joha,” the man said, “tell me, how is it that I am wearing all these clothes and still feel a little cold, whereas you are barely wearing anything yet seem unaffected by the weather?”

“Well,” replied Joha, “I don’t have any more clothes, so I can’t afford to feel cold, whereas you have plenty of clothes, and thus have the liberty to feel cold.”