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.