“Our Brains Aren’t Full Yet”

            This update, I think, will be a short post, at least by my standards (cheers erupt across my readership).  It’s more a collection of anecdotes than a coherent post, but my life has been anecdotal the last few weeks.  Often times my service feels as if there is a grand, overarching plot, lasting months, culminating in either a triumph or a disaster, but recently each day has seemed it’s own, in many ways unrelated to the days before and after, unrelated vignettes.  I’ll stop short of the temptation to make this into pseudo-philosophic babble (translation: my attempts to create a profound sounding next sentence all degenerated into pseudo-philosophic babble) and get going before I fill your brains with your rolled eyes.  H’m, it seems that my attempts to write compelling introductions to these posts are getting more and more strained.

            Anecdote the First: While walking back from souk this Saturday one of the town’s consistently well behaved young boys ran up alongside me and started to chat.  I threw out a couple of the new Tamazight words I’ve learned, which impressed him, but he wondered why I couldn’t learn faster.  We started to talk about the difference between learning languages at our respective ages (he’s around 7).  He decided that “young children learn languages faster because our brains aren’t full yet,” an explanation I rather like.

            Anecdote the Second:  On Sunday we had the first meeting of a new environmental education and hiking club.  Our eventual goal, after a five month long course on environmental education, critical thinking, and leadership along with five training hikes, will be to claim Jbel Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa, sometime just before next Ramadan.  We are modeling this program on a project created by two volunteers in a previous group.  These volunteers found that since Moroccan youth are not exposed to many of these environmental ideas as children and since they are used to more rote learning in school environmental education classes benefit from being taught in a more “fun-oriented” manner.  As such we met in a olive tree glade just outside of town and split the group into “cats” and “mice” and played a tag variant where each round a cat had to catch a mouse.  Any caught mouse became cats in the next round, any cats that failed to catch a mouse “died” and reverted to a mouse the next round.  I kept data of how many cats and mice there were each round.  Afterwards the Moroccan teachers presented the numbers to the students and as the sun started its final descent we talked about the implications.  As we’d hoped the students themselves made the connection between numbers of “cats” and “mice” and how too many predators for too little prey ended in a drastic decrease in predator numbers.  Also unsolicited they made the important jump from the animal world to human management of natural resources.  My local counterparts led the entire discussion in Arabic, though I was surprised and happy to find I needed just one or two translations to follow along myself. 

In future classes we will continue along the idea of resource management, along with classes on biodiversity, human impact, and what students can do to help the environment, before moving into classes on leadership, critical thinking, and decision making.  Interspersed with these classes we will take hikes out into the local wilderness as a lead-up to climbing Toubkal.  I’d like to thank those of you who have already donated to this project (we will use the funds to pay for transportation and food on all the hikes and for lodging on Toubkal, which takes a couple of days to climb), with your contributions we are already over three quarters of the way to collecting all the projected funds we need!  If anyone else is interested in learning more about the project or in donating please follow this link.

Anecdote the Third:  On the walk back into town from the club meeting just before dusk I discovered that one of my counterparts has been hiding his fluent Spanish (picked up from couch surfers) for the last few months.  He then forced an amusing role reversal where I had to translate his Spanish into Arabic for the benefit of another counterpart who usually translates my English.  I discovered, interestingly, that while I can still understand pretty much anything said to me in Spanish I cannot produce my own, every Spanish word I spoke came out in Arabic first and then I had to translate myself!

Anecdote the Fourth:  Come Monday, my one true day off now that I’ve started the hiking club (and possibly soon a Frisbee club or two) on Sundays, I decided I’d hike over to the next town, which I’ve yet to see.  Although some friends had told me there was a path between here and there they neglected to mention the bridgeless rivers between the two towns, at which the trail disappears.  After I eventually found a way across the first I found the second even more impassable and had lost my way, the water tower of the next town mocking me less than half a mile away.  Luckily I ran into a couple of shepherds—both named Mohammed—who were amused by my attempts at Tamazight and were able to point me in the direction of the main road which I could reach again without crossing either river.  Also on this hike, well before losing myself at the first river, I met another shepherd who’d heard about the Arabic speaking American in the nearby town and wondered if I was he.  The shepherd said he was unsure, you see, because I’d greeted him in Tamazight, not Arabic!

Anecdote the Last:  Joha was resting beside a great salt lake.  He was very thirsty, but there was no water in his flask.  He dipped it into the sea and took a sip.  Of course it was very salty and one swallow made him even thirstier.

Joha got up and walked away from the lake to a spring.  He filled his flask and took it back to the lake.  He poured the water from his flask into the lake.  Just then a man passed by and asked Joha what he was doing.  “This lake thinks it is so great.  It’s big, it roars and splashes upon the land, but its water is worthless.  I am showing it what real water is like.”