I want to
preface this post by saying that things have actually, for the most part, been
going really well the last few weeks.
I’ve been reasonably busy and, thereby, happy, and shouldn’t really have
anything to complain about. That being
said, a lot of the recent good has thrown the bad into particularly stark
relief, and I wouldn’t be presenting an accurate view of my service if I didn’t
include my ruminations on some of the many things that Morocco still needs work
on and that, unfortunately, as a foreign interloper I am nearly powerless to
effect.
The first
of the bad things which happened is that one of my counterparts just up and
quit the C.L.I.M.B. program. He didn’t
give a reason or seem upset about anything, and my other counterparts and I
continue to scratch our heads over it, since he essentially quit once all the
hard parts of the program were finished.
While obnoxious, this is not out of place in Morocco, where a lot of
times it seems people lack the commitment to follow through and finish large
projects, probably because outside forces scuttle projects so often. What with one of my counterparts getting
pregnant and now this though it leaves just three adults to supervise the kids
up Toubkal. We can do it, but it’s not
going to be anywhere near as pleasant, and I hope some nearby Peace Corps Volunteers
will take my offer to climb with us.
The problem
with getting help from other volunteers is that we still haven’t been able to
schedule our exact dates for the climb.
One of my remaining counterparts is an elementary school teacher, the
other is studying plumbing at a vocational school, and even though it’s only a
month away their respective ministries
haven’t scheduled their last days yet!
The ministries just give the extremely vague information of, “around the
end of June” rather than a specific date, which is infuriating for getting
anything else organized (see those outside forces scuttling projects I
mentioned above). This inability to
schedule anything is one of the biggest anchors keeping Morocco in the
developing world.
Despite
these problems, we had our fourth practice hike with students this past
Sunday. We went up to Azrou and did the
same loop over a monkey-covered mountain and through Morocco’s only cedar
forest that I did last year during training.
It was the hike that fate did not want to happen. We were supposed to go the week before, but
were rained out. Then the morning of our
driver was two hours late; he claims because his boss slept in and he couldn’t
get the keys to the van. We had a flat
on the way. We got to Azrou, but to get
to the trail head I needed to direct the driver from the very back of the van,
where I couldn’t see street signs. Never
having driven in Azrou I told him to turn down a one way street, and rather
than tell me it was a one way street he turned, which, of course, ended in us
getting pulled over and getting a ticket.
Actually, pulled over is a loose term.
The police stopped us and wouldn’t let us leave the middle of the street
while giving their ticket. The ticket
was the same as the cost of transportation had been. Luckily for the driver, we’ve been way under
budget on transport so far, so my counterparts and I decided, in the name of
letting his kids eat, to pay the fine, the cost of gasoline, and a few extra
dirhams so, while he didn’t make anywhere near as much as he would have made,
he wasn’t screwed over. Unintentionally
this ended up being a great punishment, because we didn’t tell him we were
giving him extra cash until the end of the day, so he fretted the whole day
wondering what he’d do. He ended up
giving us big, tear filled hugs when we told him we’d pay for gas!
After all
this the vast majority of the hike went really well. We saw some monkeys out in the wild. We met some British tourists at the touristy
place to see monkeys. They graciously
allowed my students to practice their English.
Everything was going well until, on the last leg of the hike heading
back into Azrou, one of my students fell and injured her foot. On a quick observation I could tell something
hard was out of place, and she complained of a lot of pain, so while one of my
counterparts took the other students back to Azrou the other counterpart and I
took her to the ER. Getting there in
itself was a hassle. We were,
thankfully, already on a road, but ambulances in Morocco apparently only come
to big car accidents, not little things like people being unable to walk
without possibly permanently damaging their feet. Luckily a passing group of young Moroccans
saw us and agreed to bring us to the hospital, even stopping to buy us cherries
on the way, “to keep her strength up.”
At the ER
we were asked to pay before they’d take an x-ray. With all the money to pay the driver in
pocket I had no worries about affording it, but they initially refused
treatment because I didn’t have exact change and neither did they. Please, take a minute and let that sink in. Scrounging my pockets I found the eleven
dirhams we needed to continue. While we
waited I ran to the rest room. There was
no soap. In the hospital rest room. Again, let this sink in for a second. After the x-ray the doctors told us there was
no fracture, and then casually mentioned that she might have ruptured a tendon. I worried the hard thing I’d felt in her foot
was the scrunched up tendon. They then
did no more tests, wrapped her foot, gave us a prescription for a painkiller,
as if this was just a sprain, and unceremoniously had us leave. There had been a car accident and apparently
there weren’t enough doctors and nurses in the ER to deal with two patients at
once.
The others
having left, we took a bus home. My
counterpart and I recommended the family bring her to another doctor the next
day, since we didn’t really trust the ones in Azrou, so the next day my student
ended up going to a local healer. The
healer took one quick feel of the girl’s foot, realized that the hard thing I’d
felt was actually a bone that had popped out of place, and simply popped it back
into place. In the few days since then
the girl says the pain has stopped, there is absolutely no swelling, and she
can walk almost like normal already.
Somehow the ER doctors correctly saw the bone was not fractured been
incorrectly saw that it was not in the totally wrong place. Now I see why no one trusts doctors here.
In addition
to all these systematic failings the last few days, my old cultural pet peeves
of children not reacting to any punishment that isn’t corporal and boys being
terrible to girls came back with a vengeance this week. Monday night I was playing with some of the
young girls in my neighborhood (about ages 8 to 11), when two boys (about age
14) galloped donkeys right through the middle of them, almost running over an
eight-year-old girl. The boys were
laughing. I told them not to do that
again, cause, you know, they’d almost killed someone, and they took that as an
invitation to do it again. As they
turned their donkeys to gallop through a third time I realized that I have been
wrong for years, there actually is a
point at which it is okay to strike a child, and that is when he is continually
putting another child’s life at risk and won’t stop for anything else. So I hit one of them upside the head, hard,
as he turned. I put my hand on the
other’s shoulder as he galloped by and held just long enough to unsettle him a
little in the saddle, which he correctly realized was a warning that if he did
this a fourth time I could and would pull him from the saddle. That solved the problem forthwith and they
galloped off into the night.
Although I hate the physical
punishment culture here I had to become part of it, at least this one time,
because nothing else works on these boys.
Actually, I think it made a big impression because I’ve been so vocally
against physical punishment this last year.
Onlookers (who did nothing themselves) gasped when I hit the boy, I
think realizing that I must have been indescribably angry in order to do it. Unfortunately no one around knew those boys
or where they lived, otherwise I would have followed up with a far worse fate,
telling their mothers. I don’t like
reporting kids to their parents here, normally it just results in a thrashing. This time I honestly think that’s what was
needed, and strangely I feel no remorse about that.
The next day I saw something that,
sadly, I can now call bizarre walking to the Dar Chebab. A bunch of teenaged girls playing basketball
on the court next to the Dar Chebab. It
was the first time I’ve seen people use that court for basketball (in fact the
basket fell off the backboard long before I came to this town), it’s usually
just another soccer field for boys. A
bunch of boys were sitting angrily on the side, and when I came up they asked
if I’d help them take back their soccer field!
When I refused they tried to overrun the field, but after a couple
attempts to get them to grow up I used the nuclear option and, since I know
these boys and were they live, I knocked on the door of the one who lived
nearest and brought his mother into the fray.
That pretty much ended problems with those boys, and afterwards the only
real issue was creepy older men gawking at the girls.
Later I started to play Frisbee
with some younger girls on the side, and a different group of young boys
decided they were hell bent on ruining at least one group of girls’ fun. The girls did a good job ignoring the boys’
taunts, until one boy actually ran up and started to hit a girl. I went over and pulled him off. He’s a boy I’ve had tons of trouble with in
the past, and I asked him if I’d ever hit him before. He said no.
I told him that I don’t want to start, but in the future I will treat
him the way he treats the girls. To be
honest, I feel much guiltier about that threat of violence then hitting that
other boy the day before, but it was effective and the boys stopped attacking
the girls. Afterwards I had the girls
play while I kept an eye on the boys, one of whom asked me, if I was a boy, and
they were boys, why was I on the girls’ side.
Except he said it in a much more offensive manner involving what people
have and don’t have.
Through all this a group of men at
a local shop sat, watched, and did nothing.
I’ve seen these men step forward to chastise older boys when they play
too rough and threaten business at the shop by scaring away customers, but this
apparently wasn’t a big enough deal.
After the girls left I went over to these men and I told them, point
blank, that they were doing themselves a disservice. I asked them why they thought the older boys
often act like animals, and before they could answer the rhetorical question I
told them it was because when the boys were young they were allowed to act like
animals without any adult supervision.
Obviously, I said, these young boys don’t respect girls and they don’t
respect the foreigner defending girls, and it is the job of the older men in
the community to act as both role modals and supervisors to the young, so
they’d learn. I don’t know if this bit
of public shaming will get them off their lazy bums next time, but it is,
again, one of Morocco’s biggest problems, when adults do nothing but complain
that their boys act like animals but do nothing to nip it in the bud when the
boys are young.
Sadly these aren’t the only recent
examples, but there is no need to bore you all with a litany of all the reasons
boys here make me sexist against my own gender.
Instead I’ll give you a Joha joke to make up for this major downer of a
post.
Once Joha had a fat, young lamb
which he liked very much. One day some
friends were visiting, and they proposed to Joha that they kill the lamb and
have a feast. At first Joha resisted,
but finally one of them said, “Look, Joha, the day of judgement will come to
all of us soon, so why don’t we enjoy life’s pleasures now?”
Reluctantly, Joha agreed, and the
all went to the bank of a river. The
built a fire and killed and roasted the lamb.
After the feast, the other men took off their clothes and went swimming
in the river.
While they were swimming, Joha
threw their clothes on the fire. His
friends came back and couldn’t find their clothes. Then they realized Joha had burned them.
“What did you do that for?” they
asked.
Joha replied, “The fire needed fuel,
and see how well it is burning now to keep you warm. And since the day of judgment is coming soon,
what do you need the clothes for?”
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