Creating Leadership In the Mountains and Beyond

            This past week was definitely the high point of my service thus far.  This was the week when, after six months of preparation, we finally made the trip down to Mt. Toubkal, the tallest mountain in North Africa, with my C.L.I.M.B. students.

            Toubkal is 4,167 meters (13,671 feet) tall.  It takes two to three days to summit and return to the base.  A daunting task, and one my students handled with their usual aplomb and spirit.

            We left my site on the last day of June to travel down to Marrakech and then immediately onto Imlil, the village at the foot of the mountain.  It was a long day, made longer both in actual time when the bus came an hour late and in exhaustion when the waiter at the food stand we stopped at on the way down tried to pull a fast one and double the price of lunch when he realized the American had all the cash.  Once all gathered in Imlil we were an impressive group, 14 students (the 15^th in the club had a family event he couldn’t miss), two Moroccan teachers, two other PCVs who came to help out, and myself.

            The first day of climbing we went from Imlil to a refuge about a kilometer and a half below the peak.  The first day is a long, steep ascent, but the students had tons of energy and the hardest part for me was restraining the fastest boys from running up the mountain in their excitement.  We met some other American hikers on the trail, who you’ll see later in the story become very important.

The Refuge in Imlil

Imlil

The two girls who hadn't wanted their photos online say they've changed their minds, which means now I can post group shots!

            At the refuge we rested and recuperated with other hikers, some of whom had done the same climb we had and others who had summited that day.  One group was another student group, this one of British middle school students who were on the most awesome field trip of all time.  Their leader, an ex-military guy turned school teacher, has done extensive climbing in Nepal, so leading a group of 13 year old school kids up this peak wasn’t actually that over the top for him.  I was extremely impressed, though also a little jealous of their British public school discipline, especially when it came time for lights out.  I wouldn’t change my students for the world, but it was a reminder of one reason (besides money) that Western students tend to have more frequent and more awesome field trips than Moroccan students.  It’s way less of a logistical nightmare with students who’ll keep to a timetable.

            At the start of the second day we had a frustrating revelation.  Despite our constant reminders to bring cold weather cloths for the top three students had decided not to bring them.  The worst part, they actually had lugged jackets on the trip, but without asking us leaders had left them with some other luggage we were stowing in Imlil since it had seemed so hot at the foot of the mountain.  In good conscience we couldn’t let those three climb, so we had to leave them behind.  I guess we should have done another gear check as we started climbing the first day, but this was a mistake I hadn’t expected.

            So with eleven students and five teachers we started the difficult second day’s ascent.  It starts with a steep scree slope, and except for a couple of boulder fields continues in that vein for the whole way up.  It’s an exhausting climb through barren, black mountains that recall the entrance to Mordor.  The wind was howling most of the way up.  Still we pushed through, though at a pretty slow pace.

The Refuge on the mountain

The peak finally in sight!

            At the very beginning of the day we caught up with a group of extremely unprepared Moroccan hikers.  They were wearing very little, and carrying almost no food and water.  When we saw them they were taking a very dangerous and difficult route straight up the scree, and I had to stay behind a second to help guide the last one in the group down to a safer path with us.  The others refused to try the easier route.  The guy who did come with us eventually went on when we took a break so he could catch up with the friends who’d abandoned him.  He must have caught up at some point, because when I next saw him he had a bottle of water.  He also had lips and nails slowly turning blue in the early stages of hypothermia and his friends had abandoned him again.  Sending the kids forward to a safer ledge to take a break I opened up one of the safety blankets I’d brought and pulled out some nuts and raisins for him to snack on.  I looked ahead and was very happy to see the two American girls we’d met the day before chatting with our group ahead, coming back from an earlier summiting.  Since I’d learned the day before that they knew what they were doing I had no concerns asking them to help the man down, especially since he had pretty good English.  He was lucky they were there to take him down safely.  I was lucky they were there so that I didn’t have to forego my own summiting to bring him down.

            This Moroccan group was not the only group of fools on the mountain.  One German sounding family had brought their kids, neither of whom could be older than eight, who looked absolutely miserable as we passed them.  An Australian man came galloping down the mountain and was lucky not to twist his ankle when he tripped and fell.  All in all I guess it was good for my students to see how much they’d learned, how they knew what not to do, but the amount of dangerous practices I saw on the mountain was staggering.

            The very last part of the ascent is extremely slippery scree, made all the worse because at that point I at least was starting to feel the lack of oxygen.  We had to stop every few minutes to let ourselves catch our breaths, so it was a hard push, but eventually, just as the wind died, we were able to reach the very top.  The view is spectacular, and since the winds had finally gone down we ended up having lunch up at the very top of Morocco.  The kids now have bragging rights for life.

Our group, with some random dude sleeping in the way (we think he's the dude who abandoned the other guy lower down)

Me and my counterparts

Peace Corps Volunteers

The further town is Imlil

Kids with a Geocache

            Going down is also a tricky operation, especially since we’d never been able to practice descending a scree slope, but the kids did a fantastic job and we were able to break up our trip by finding a geocache someone had hidden about half way up the mountain.  The students were shocked to learn that some hiking obsessed Westerners play a game hiding things on mountain and leaving GPS coordinates for others to find, but were really excited once we’d found the cache.  We returned afterwards exhausted but accomplished.

            On our third day on the mountain we walked back down from the refuge to Imlil.  Once there we discovered the innkeeper with whom we’d left our stuff with was in Marrakech, two hours away.  We called her up, and I got permission to climb up a few tables and enter a high, open window, successfully burgling our own stuff from an inn I had permission and ability to enter only through the most ridiculous means possible.  A fitting end to our time on the mountain.

            After my flirtation with a life of crime we went back to Marrakech, a city I was surprised to learn almost half my students had never visited.  We took them through the raucous street theatre that is the main square and split into small groups to explore the souks.  The group I was with somehow stumbled on a shop full of antique Jewish artifacts, so now I can say I’ve explained the purpose and history of the menorah to a bunch of Moroccan students in Arabic.  Afterwards we had dinner and fresh squeezed orange juice under the stars back in the main square.

            When I told my students we wouldn’t be leaving until the following afternoon they rushed me in a football scrum of hugs.  For a second I wondered if they registered the bit where I told them we were doing this to give us time to visit an historical monument.  We took them to the Bahia palace, a place I’d visited with my parents but which even most of the students who’d been to Marrakech had never seen.  As with any group of teenagers in an historic site about half were really interested while the other half were bored out of their minds, but it was still a good trip and I’m glad I finally got a chance to make history a little more tangible for the kids.

            All in all, this trip to Marrakech and Toubkal was fantastic and easily the highlight of my service.  Since then a couple of students have told me it was the greatest thing that they’ve ever done, which I guess means I can go ahead and say I’ve had a successful Peace Corps service, regardless of what else I can get off the ground.  The Sunday after getting back to site we had an after party where the students told us how much they’d like to keep the club going, even in a non-funded form, to learn more about the environment and to keep doing local hikes together.  I’m glad I’ve had this chance to work with such a great group of kids, watching them grow both as individuals and as a team, as leaders and as good followers, and I hope to keep working with those who aren’t going to university next year, but for now we have to take a little break.  Ramadan has come.