Trust and Distrust

            I know I’m repeating a theme, but it recurred this week with a vengeance.  The first incident happened on Friday while I was talking with a local university student on break from university.  The night before a group of kids had organized an off the cuff discussion of the dangers of smoking and drug use.  Sadly but needless to say—and sad that it is needless to say—some boys with nothing better to do came in and crashed it by making hooting sounds in the back.  I had to step out to help with another problem with the young kids, and before I got back the hooting kids and the serious kids had devolved into a fist fight, which a local volunteer and I couldn’t break up before it whirl winded out of the Dar Chabab.  The next night the university student told me that he thinks the problem with the third world is that no one can trust the school system to teach them, which leads some boys, specifically the hooting hooligans of the night before, totally bereft of any structure to teach them how to behave.  As we continued talking about the school system we fell into a discussion of the disconnect between speaking in Darija but learning in Standard Arabic.  He thought my idea that reading and speaking different languages causes part of the learning problem was spot on, though like most Moroccans his trust in the superiority of Standard Arabic is so strong he would rather see it displace Darija as the spoken language, since “Darija is merely a mélange.”  I quote directly because this is the sentence that taught me the Darija word for “mélange” is “mélange.”

            The next night my advanced students and I discussed a news story from the New York Times.  The week before, as some of you might know, the UN released the text for a proposed new condemnation of violence against women.  The article was about how the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt objected to many of the condemnation’s provisions.  One speaker, quoted from a class he teaches to female marriage counselors, believes that if a man beats his wife she must share at least 30-40% of the blame.  The Morsi government, in an attempt to save face, had a representative, a woman, say that they only objected to the condemnation’s provisions for abortion, and other such morally debatable topics.  The same representative went on to explain that condemning Egypt for failure to protect against marital rape is imposing western values on them, since marital rape doesn’t exist there.  Yes, in her attempt not to make her party look crazy she said marital rape doesn’t exist in Muslim countries.  My students immediately condemned all this bigotry as not in the true spirit of Islam, but that’s when the debate got interesting.  Rather than attack the speakers’ misguided Islam they claimed that the New York Times must have been misreporting their quotes!  Now, coming from a country where all the news outlets are foreign, poorly written and reported, or just instruments of propaganda (or any combination thereof), I can understand their mistrust of the news, but they would not accept, no matter how I tried to convince them otherwise, that the NYT is a reputable news source.

            The next day, in a nice counterpoint to all this mistrust and institutional failure, my C.L.I.M.B. students proved that once again that while people here might not trust institutions they can and do trust each other on a personal level.  We did a series of more difficult teamwork, group problem solving, and trust exercises that once again the students aced.  They solved a human knot, were able to hold hands and all stand up at the same time, and almost all of them braved falling from a tree into a blanket the others were holding, after I did it first to prove it worked.  Looking at them now it’s easy to see how comfortable and trusting they are with one another, an important first step before we attempt our more difficult hikes.

Last week's trust activities (this week's at the end of the post)

She was really brave, and did a great job catching him, despite the size difference!

            Unfortunately in the next two days my trust in Moroccans was severely shaken.  On Monday a female friend of mine visited town and had her butt grabbed by a local boy.  He’s about ten years old.  Maybe.  She thought he was younger.  I haven’t talked much about sexual harassment in this country because its not something I directly experience on a regular basis, but the female volunteers and Moroccans have to put it up with and struggle against it as a constant fact of life here.  Women have men hollering at them, giving them disgusting, appraising looks constantly, often making unwanted physical approaches, and constantly not respecting their ability to think and do things, abilities that in the younger generation especially far exceed on average the abilities of their male peers.  I’m sure this constant pressure on them is why my female students, while almost universally brighter than the boys, are also almost universally more shy and retiring, to the point where it becomes an act in pulling teeth to get them to voice their ideas.  From talking with women volunteers I often wonder how much my masculine presence stops harassment from being a bigger problem in and out of my Dar Chabab.  Female volunteers who teach sports constantly have their girls hooted and hollered at, even the younger ones, and while boys are jerks around my young girls when I take them out to play Frisbee, they at least not sexually harassing the girls like I’ve heard happens in other volunteers’ towns.  Occasionally passers-by in town, men, help keep the boys in line, and this happens with other volunteers too, but in all the cases the men help us by telling the boys not to disrespect the American.  They don’t focus on the plight of the girls.  I know that girls get harassed in the Dar Chabab in rooms where I’m not; it used to even happen in my classes when my back was turned writing something on the board until all those boys had managed to make themselves personae non gratae.

            The issue becomes even more complicated when we factor in the large group of men who do oppose harassment in theory, even if they don’t actively stand up against it when they see it, but for whom relations between the sexes have become so twisted they don’t even know what harassment is.  Yes, this hypothetical he won’t run up and grab a woman, or holler at her in the street, or voice his feelings about her intellectual inferiority to her face, but asking her over and over and over in the face of repeated “no’s” if she’ll go out with him or kiss him, well, he thinks that’s fair game.  I’ve talked with a lot of iterations of him, and they are to a man good guys, and they realize what the problem is when I explain it to them, but when even their allies have to have non-harassment explained to them women here are in a tight fix.

            The disgusting behavior didn’t end there.  On Tuesday night the same group of boys hollered at me as I returned home, asking if “my girlfriend had enjoyed last night.”  Then one of them, the one who’d grabbed her, exposed himself to me.  In a way this almost made things better because it proves that he has his own issues, probably something underlying inside of him coupled with the permissive culture and parenting that must, even by Moroccan standards, be awful.  I don’t need to be potentially worried about all ten year old boys in my town when women come to visit, just this particularly crazy one.  When I ignored the boys they started throwing rocks at me, and for the first time it didn’t seem particularly harmless.

            A downer of a post I know, so I’ll try to end it on a more hopeful note by reminding you that my C.L.I.M.B club is made of both boys and girls who do trust and respect each other, and that, while outnumbered, the men who respect women do exist and want to learn how to help better.  In fact, therein lies a big part of my job.  If I can help the girls learn to speak and standup for themselves it’ll be a great victory, but it will only stick if I can get them reinforcements for when they do.

International Women’s Day and Trust Falls

            As some of you know last Friday, March 8^th, was International Women’s Day.  As such last week and this many Peace Corps Volunteers across Morocco and the world hosted events to honor the women of their town or to highlight women’s issues in their country of service.  I had decided to focus intermediate English class this week on discussions of a couple of important, successful, modern Moroccan woman, but I was happily surprised when my mudir told me that he was also, independently planning an International Women’s Day event, one that my Dar Chebab holds annually!  The event was a party just for the women and girls of our town, the only men allowed in were me, my mudir, a local teacher who made a speech about the rights of women in Morocco, and a couple of young boys whose mothers couldn’t leave them at home.  The party was a potluck, each woman bringing some treat she’d made at home, and aside from a couple short speeches about women’s rights, women’s role in Islam (from a female Islamic History teacher), and an extemporaneous speech demanded out of the confused American—I took the opportunity to thank the women of my town for being so kind and giving—the party was really just a chance for these women to relax, enjoy themselves, and know that people in town, their children, relatives, and friends, appreciate them.  I always enjoy watching successful events, planned and run entirely by Moroccans, and this might have been my favorite thus far.

            My own class for Women’s day was a bit of a mixed bag.  One of my counterparts from the C.L.I.M.B. project, a local French teacher who has quite good English, made a presentation in Arabic to my intermediate students (mainly girls) about four contemporary, successful Moroccan women; women who challenged and defeated their traditional roles in society.  As a class we discussed what qualities these women have and what they needed for success, using the discussion as an opportunity for the students to expand their English vocabularies.  Interestingly, while some students did correctly identify important qualities in the women, others just gave rote lists of the traditional qualities of good women, many of which, such as humility and obedience, these women had to ignore to succeed.  When asked what the women had needed to succeed, my students promptly listed off money, encouragement, and help, things that these women were actually remarkable for having done without.  My counterpart and I on the fly adjusted the rest of the lesson to focus on the women’s determination to succeed, and how that had helped them get on without money, encouragement, and help.  While I think some of the students learned from this, others remained skeptical.  Again, I blame my students inability to make observations about a story and draw inferences from them on an education system focused on rote learning and repetition.

            Outside of International Women’s Day, the days since my last post seem to focus around the issue of trust in Morocco.  Most explicitly this came out at the C.L.I.M.B. meeting on Sunday, where we worked on team building exercises, particularly a blindfolded maze (where students had to trust teammates directions) and trust falls.  My first surprise was how new our students found these games.  By this age most Americans are bored of trust falls they’ve done so many, but to the students they were a new, exciting, and sometimes terrifying prospect.  As always these students impressed me with their willingness to jump into a new game and their quick learning.  At first many students couldn’t do a fall without taking a balancing step, but by the end of the session all of them but one were willingly to stand in the middle of the group and fall back and forth, trusting in the others.  Although we had a few spills no one was hurt, usually because their partners were always willing to fall with them and take them gently to the floor.

            While the C.L.I.M.B. class was a nice, contained example of growing trust among a group of students it was not the only trust exercise in the last week.  On International Women’s Day a couple of young girls asked if they could read a little in the Dar Chebab library, something no young student has asked before, so I happily opened it up and let them in.  This, of course, was a reverse Pandora’s box and the library soon found itself full of screaming boys who had no interest in reading and just wanted to look at the pictures in our Arabic and English picture books.  While I was running between the party, the library, and another group of students there was a local volunteer sitting in the library with the kids, but since he had only a vague notion of all a librarian’s roles he spent a lot of time neatening up the stacks, which allowed a bunch of the worst boys to slip away with half of our Arabic picture books, which I know they’ll never read or return.  It was a pretty devastating moment; our first day of an open library was an abject failure.

            In the week since then, however, I’ve talked a lot with the local volunteer about what his role is in the library when I can’t be there to play librarian, and I’ve talked a lot with local kids about how to behave in a library, and though I still don’t trust it to be open if I’m not at least in the Dar Chebab to poke my head in from time to time, I’m now confident that the volunteer and a few older students can maintain quiet and lack of theft while I teach my classes.  There are even a couple of younger boys who’ll sit and read now with the older boys and the girls, and I can trust them to call out their more annoying peers to quiet down and pick up a book.  Well, actually, usually the misbehaving boys just leave, but small strides in the right direction are better than stasis, and we now have a partially functioning, though still unlending, library.

            Joha can also teach us all a lesson about trust, this is one of the stories about his Turkish iteration:

            At one time the cruel and powerful Tamerlane ruled Turkey.  He kept a huge elephant in Joha’s village, and forced the people to take care of it.  Feeding it was expensive, and keeping it clean was not easy.  The villagers decided to send the village leaders to Tamerlane to complain.  They appointed Joha as the spokesperson.

            As the group was about to enter Tamerlane’s palace, Joha looked behind and saw the other had disappeared, leaving him alone to face Tamerlane.  “And what do you want?” asked Tamerlane in a rather unfriendly manner.

            “Oh,” said Joha, “the villagers sent me to say that they are so happy to take care of your elephant, that they would like another one.”

Finding a Voice

            I realize I forgot to talk about two important things that happened on last week’s hike, both of them conversations.  At the start of the hike one of my counterparts and some students were talking about generational differences in Morocco.  Specifically, my students, typically among the young here, feel that people in their parents’ generation don’t recognize or appreciate the students’ skills.  The skills that students develop in art, writing, or online were not valuable (or around) to the lives of the parents and so don’t look valuable now to those parents.  Without recognition and support the skills languish.  This is not, of course, a universal problem, but many students face it, especially in small-town Morocco.  Later in the hike I noticed a student walking up ahead bent over and using a stick for support.  When I asked her what was wrong she laughed and explained she and another student were acting, she was playing an old woman from the countryside, he a young city boy, and they were debating who had the better lifestyle.  She was losing with comic purposefulness.

            These stock characters and the discussion of the challenges Moroccan youth face developing their skills and interests are just iterations of something I’ve written about often enough before, the conflicts between traditional and modern values and between the countryside and the cities.  What I thought was interesting was the focus, in the discussion, on creative pursuits and the creative way in which the students had their later discussion of different lifestyles.  With the heavy emphasis on rote learning in the schools, the lack of organized nonacademic extracurriculars, and the lack of support from many parents students here long for an outlet for critical and creative thinking.  That is, of course, part of my job, but starting these projects has been difficult, with my utter lack of artistic talent I haven’t done more for organizing or teaching our irregular drawing club than making sure they have supplies whenever they want, and the students who’ve asked me to help them run theatre activities or teach music have never had the follow through to actually show up to the activities we planned together (for theatre) or to a meeting where we can discuss what kinds of instruments we can try to get for the youth center.  I can’t really blame them for not showing up, so much of their lives are filled with empty promises from authority figures, but it makes things impossible to move forward.

            I want to digress for a moment and talk about another, related, issue that I haven’t talked about on this blog much since training, the almost total lack of a concept of reading for fun.  I might have said this before, but the same verb, kanqra means both “I read,” and “I study,” and although most students understand that there is a difference between these two actions very few actually put that difference into practice.  There are several reasons for this, one of them being that the schools fail to instill a love of reading and an appreciation of its power in their students.  In my intermediate English classes my students asked me for lessons in “communication,” by which I thought they meant a chance to talk in English, and I designed discussion classes accordingly around some songs and poems we could read or listen to and discuss.  While some students really like this, others complained that I hadn’t written dialogues for them to recite, which is what they’d meant by “communication!”  Slowly, by trying out different topics and seeking out easier poems and songs, I’m getting more and more students to participate in the classes, but there is still a hardcore who refuse to accept this way of learning, because for them reading is studying and there isn’t another way to engage with a text.

            I’ve been saying “the schools,” but of course this is an unfair generalization of teachers and their methods here.  The majority, which does not buck this trend towards rote learning, can’t really be blamed for the trend.  It comes both from how they themselves were taught and from the nature of the high school ending Baccalaureate exam.  Additionally, there are teachers who can and do try to engender a love and appreciation for creativity and critical thinking.  One teacher in particular, who all my students love, is an Arabic teacher who uses films and the language therein to engage his students and get them thinking.  Good cinema is just as useful a medium for transferring ideas as good drama and good literature, but it’s sad that here it is the only one of those media to really engage students.  The lack of engagement with written Arabic is something even this fantastic Arabic teacher has trouble overcoming, and this is entirely because the written and spoken languages in this country (and throughout much of the Arab world) are mutually incomprehensible.  The effect on learning is similar to—though mercifully less intense then—the effect that medieval Europe’s obsession with Latin had on it’s own intellectual climate.

            The vernaculars across the Arab world bear varying similarities and differences to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), itself a purely written dialect closely related to, though not perfectly in tune with, the Classical Arabic of the Quran.  MSA is the standard written language across the Arab world, conferring the same advantage of mutual comprehensibility, barring mistakes and miscomprehensions, among the educated classes that Latin did in medieval Europe.  Also like Medieval Latin it shuts the doors on reading for pleasure and higher intellectual attainment to millions of intelligent people who are not gifted linguists, especially in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, who all speak an Arabic particularly different from MSA.  While literacy is higher here than it was in Medieval Europe only a small group of people are actually able to enjoy reading since no matter what language they read it must be in a foreign language.  I’ve seen people who I know are really smart struggle to read and write simple sentences, and trying to get even two educated Moroccans to agree on how to write a sentence properly in MSA often ends in a long debate.  Only in cinema, and to a lesser extent theatre, is Darija a primary language of communication in the medium.  In fact, writing in Darija, like writing in a medieval vernacular, is looked down on as non-intellectual.  I write all my signs and announcements for the youth center in Darija if they’re only meant for students (for parents and government associations a friend translates from one Arabic to the other for me), and while most teachers and adults make fun of me for this I’ve never heard a peep about it from someone who isn’t yet in university.  I bet they appreciate being able to easily understand what they read.

            This of course comes back around to the students’ frustration at their inability to express themselves; writing well is hard enough without having to translate yourself to do it at all.  Sadly, even most young Moroccans are already convinced this is the way it has to be.  The few who are aware that Europe went through this same growing pain are convinced it was only possible because, in one local’s words, “all the French speak French, but” since “Darija is different all across Morocco” it couldn’t happen here.  They are unaware that every modern European language was cobbled together from dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of dialects.  To face the problem of self-expression some local counterparts and I are going to attack it head on.

            A few years ago a previous volunteer ran an English language magazine with one of the local English teachers.  While it was a good project at the time it fell apart after he left because only a very few students had English good enough to write for it—in fact most of the articles came from local volunteers and teachers and the kids used them as reading exercises, or had their own work translated—so they lost interest.  Early on this teacher came to me to start it again, but I’ve delayed while I figured out how to make it more sustainable and gathered a group of counterparts (including the Arabic teacher I mentioned above).  We’ve decided to open the magazine up to several languages, Arabic, French, English, and even Tamazight.  I’m still working on it, but I even have one counterpart willing to back me up in my crazy crusade to allow both Moroccan and Standard Arabic submissions.  This seems to have excited student interest much more than the old, English only magazine did, and the goal is to get an edition out this school year (both print and online) and then in the next school year put out regular editions and pass leadership of the club from myself and the Moroccan teachers to the students so that it can survive past my time here.  If this succeeds it will without question be my greatest contribution to my town, so here’s hoping that, given the opportunity, students will want to find and sound their voices.

            O.k. so that was a bit of a downer of a post, here are the photos I promised from last week’s hike with students who don’t mind appearing on the internet.