The last
week of February was probably one of the busiest and most meaningful weeks of
my service. As I mentioned a few posts ago, a fellow volunteer down in the Beni
Mellal area had been planning a camp to teach boys life skills and how to be
honorable men, and I had the opportunity to help out with this important
project. He called his idea BRO (Boys Respecting Others) Camp, and modeled it
on the Peace Corps standby GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camps that have been
enormously popular and successful with female PCVs and Moroccan girls. This was
the first camp of its kind for boys in Morocco, and I’m glad to say it was a
great success, mainly on the strength of the organizing PCV’s tremendous
efforts beforehand and the passion of his fantastic Moroccan counterparts.
On a
day-to-day basis, BRO camp had a packed schedule. Each of the five full days
centered on one topic important to growing up to be a good man. The first day
focused on health and healthy life styles and in the morning featured classes
on topics like exercise, hygiene, nutrition, drugs and alcohol, and emotional
health. In the afternoon the students made and preformed informational skits on
one of the topics they’d studied (all the groups chose drugs and alcohol), and
in the evening a doctor gave a talk about SIDA and sexual health. On the second
day we focused on the world of work, with classes in interview skills, resume
writing, goal setting, and the like. That afternoon students created
commercials to sell a fictional product or service.
On the third day we started hitting
the harder topics and approached gender. The morning classes got the boys
discussing gender stereotypes in Morocco, the different worlds of men and women
here, how to be an honorable man, and, of course, sexual harassment. Afterwards
a couple of Peace Corps’s female regional managers came in and gave a talk
about their lives as successful, independent women in Morocco, which the boys
seemed to find riveting. Later in the afternoon the boys went through what we
called “The Gauntlet of BRO” (since “gauntlet” doesn’t really translate in Arabic
we called it the only slightly less awesome “Competition of Honor”). In the
Gauntlet of BRO small groups of boys cycled through different rooms in the camp
where they were faced with a common situation and expected to recognize the
situation and respond as an honorable man would. In one room the teacher came
late, the students hopefully spotted the loose change on the floor and reported
the missing money (almost all groups did, and no one stole it). In another a
couple of teachers ordered them about to serve tea and biscuits, without any
‘pleases’s, ‘thank you’s, or recognition at all. In the discussion afterwards
the groups all realized that this is how a lot of Moroccan men treat their
wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers, and having now experienced it vowed to
try and behave better. Another challenge had students making requests and
seeing if they would say “please” and “thank you” themselves (this was only partially
successful, mainly because they found tasks they were asked to ask the tester
were rude requests to make). The last two rooms both involved bystander
intervention. In one a Moroccan co-teacher “accidentally” brought in the wrong
supplies and got chewed out by the PCV, students were expected to stop the
“fight.” In the last the PCV (me) stepped out of the room in the middle of a
silly ball game. The game was the “bait,” and after I stepped out came the “switch,”
a female PCV walked in and my Moroccan co-teacher pretended to harass her. This
was probably the most depressing room, because although all the groups recognized
the harassment only two stepped in to stop it. Interestingly, they did it in
markedly different ways. One group actively called out the teacher. The other
subtly invited the girl to join the ball game, and then put her as far from her
harasser as possible, which I thought was a very clever solution to dealing
with this issue with an authority figure. In the evening the boys put on skits
about different forms of sexual harassment and methods of intervening.
The fourth day was all about
teamwork and leadership. The morning classes were on topics like public
speaking, project planning, and community organizing. In the afternoon a local
business leader gave a talk and then we took the boys on a nature walk, where
we occasionally stopped and threw in exercises like the human knot and trust
falls. In an unplanned twist, at the last moment we decided to make the whole
thing an exercise in discipline. Earlier in the week, one of the other PCVs had
taught the boys how to stand at attention, on the hike we taught them to march,
occasionally called them to attention, and even doled out pushups.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the boys really enjoyed the strangely
paramilitary exercises. On the last day, we taught about community service and
the boys participated in a trash pickup. The speaker was the local delegate to
the minister of Youth and Sports, who talked about the importance of
volunteerism.
Throughout the camp, the boys
worked in teams on a project called the Build a Better Morocco Competition
(BBMC). In this project the students picked an issue in the Beni Mellal
province (topics included: lack of transport to schools, unemployment, and the
high high school drop out rate, among others), researched that issue, and tried
to come up with a youth based solution to the problem. The presented these on
the last day, an impressive capstone to the camp. The BBMC was actually a big
part of the camp’s success. In addition to the points their team could earn in
the competition we also rewarded, or removed, points for team actions
throughout the camp, things like doing their chores (we had a rotating cleaning
schedule), helping out, and behaving particularly well (or poorly). It really
helped to build team spirit in their cohorts, and to keep everything running
smoothly.
Now, this all makes the camp sound
very serious, but of course all these things were interspersed with regular
camp activities like sports and games and banging on drums. One day one of the
PCVs who hails from the American South even taught the kids a line dance. Sort
of. Since he didn’t remember an actual one he sort of made it up on the fly,
but the boys enjoyed it. One thing I found very interesting was how much more
faith based this camp seemed than any other I’ve worked in Morocco. Part of
this, I think, was that the Moroccan counterparts were a particularly devout
group, and since they were often making time for their prayers the boys decided
they would too (in one particularly beautiful moment a large group prayed
together on top of the mountain on the nature walk). The other part could be
that instead of saving their prayers for the end of the day, as often happens
at camps, the boys didn’t have girls to flirt with, and without distractions
decided to pray at the prayer times. In any case, it was probably the most
systematic I’ve seen the practice of faith here.
After the camp was over and the
boys all marched (of their own volition this time) to the taxi stand I was very
happy with how it had gone, though very exhausted and sick. I actually came
down with a flu the last couple of days, and had to miss the community service
day and only just trundled myself out in a blanket to watch the BBMC
presentation. Since the week after school breaks is always slow back in site,
and since this would be my last chance to travel in Morocco, I went down to
recuperate in Sidi Ifni, a beautiful seaside Spanish colonial town from the 1930s
built in a wonderful art deco style. I don’t have too much to say about it,
other than that it was incredible and relaxing, but I’ll finish off this post
with some pictures of it. For now I’m back in site, my flu mostly passed, and
I’m excited to get back to work finishing out my last two months in the Peace
Corps!
