As some of
you know last Friday, March 8th, 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.”
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