Revelations at Spring Camp

All last week, Amber and I, along with 8 other PCVs and 10 Moroccan councilors, participated in an English Spring Camp for Moroccan students ages 13-17. About 80 students attended from all over the country, (primarily Taznaghkt, Ouarzazate, Casablanca, and Rabat). Of these, English levels ranged from complete beginner to conversational. For the entire week, all the students and councilors lived together in the same building. Each day, students participated in English classes, sports, activities and afternoon clubs. During the course of the week, there were also two talent shows and a full day field trip to Ait Ben Haddou (the famous kasbah/village that has acted as backdrop from movies like Gladiator and others). Too much happened to possibly explain in one blog post, but two major revelations should be noted.
First of all, I think I learned more about Moroccan culture in this one week, than I have in almost any other time since I arrived. The fact is, I have been learning about only one side of Morocco. This is a country that has naturally divided itself between urban and rural since before it’s borders and governmental structure were even defined. I live and experience the rural side of Morocco, and while I sometimes visit the urban centers, this camp was my first and only chance to closely observe and interact with urban Moroccan culture. More importantly, this camp was unique in that it mixed rural and urban denizens into one function, with infinite opportunities to compare and contrast. Not to mention the fact that camps (think about summer camps you did as a kid) are inherently social/culture activities.
On the first day, almost all the girls from the country wore conservative clothes and “hijab” (headscarves). The Rabatis on the other hand, were all without “hijab“, and in fact, were dressed no more conservatively than American teens at the mall. By the second day, girls from the country were exposing their hair and boys were flipping their collars up, wearing cologne, and gelling their hair. All the city kids were dressed better than me and the other PCVs, who have learned to dress a little “country”. These kids looked fantastic! And they had a change of clothes for every conceivable activity. In addition to their well fitting, brand-name clothes and chic hairdos, city kids also tended to carry with them expensive portable electronics, and in general, had surprisingly high-quality educations compared to the education expectations in rural areas. They were also much more likely to know about the world, to have traveled, and to be trained in some skill or sport like singing or tennis. So am I saying urban Moroccans are better than the rest?
Not by a long shot. What rural students lacked in sophistication and style, they made up for with culture and ingenuity. On the first night, three of the boys from Taznaghkt mesmerized the entire student body for hours in a music circle, with just one hand drum as their instrument. They continued to entertain for the rest of the week with their energetic and captivating music and dance, and a knack for social loafing. They also proved to be excellent language students, making incredible strides towards English proficiency over the week period. Since the majority of students did not speak TashlHite, it could have become the marginalized language, but since most of us volunteers speak Tash instead of Darija (Moroccan Arabic), rural Berber students were often put in leadership positions translating our lessons. And since all Berber speakers also speak Darija, knowing Tash isn’t a detriment, they just have that much more accessibility.
What I got from all this, was a clearer vision for the Morocco of the future. Obviously, Morocco has taken great strides towards development in urban areas. While there are still huge populations living in urban slums (check out the movie “Ali Zaoui” about the homeless of Casa), a respectable percentage of urban Moroccans are getting quality educations, living healthy lifestyles, and being given most of the rights and opportunities that any person can hope for. On the other hand, in the bargaining for quality of life, they traded away important aspects of their culture. Meanwhile, the rural areas are also making large steps towards development, but they are far behind. While they still need to progress in terms of access of education, health care, and infrastructure, it is important that they keep a firm eye on the special assets they do have; a unique quality of life that comes from depth of culture and social unity.
These two sides of Morocco can help each other to create one great Moroccan society. I witnessed rural children who taught kids from Casablanca how to drum, play the banjo, and sing traditional Moroccan songs. But I also witnessed children from Rabat teaching rural students about the dangers of AIDS and the negative health effects of eating too much oil or sugar. Most importantly, I witnessed students whose parents speak different languages and with opposite socioeconomic backgrounds, become best friends over night. These are people who can help each other. They just need to be told they are helpful. Which brings me to my second revelation...
I have been here in Morocco for over a year now. I have been working in my site for over 10 months with the singular goal of local community development. I have tried to approach this goal with a constant consideration for sustainability and future impact. As a result, I have focused most of my efforts on large scale projects, which are seemingly more sustainable because they can effect an issue more holistically. But working with students at the Spring Camp made me question this approach.
Without a doubt, we made a huge difference in these students lives. One student was completely unknown by the volunteer in his town, and by the end of the camp, he was so inspired, he single-handedly conceived of recording interviews with students and teachers to show on the last day of camp. A timid young girl from Rabat whose artwork shined in my AIDS/Art club, became a confident advocate for AIDS awareness at the end of the week awards show when I recognized her for her talent and asked her to tell the audience what she learned. A week long troublemaker exercised his demons when he discovered a natural talent for English numbers in the Beginners English class I assisted. A self-proclaimed “awkward computer nerd” from Ouarzazate, spent the entire last afternoon of camp rehearsing a play he wrote in English with the most popular girl from camp. In the play, which they performed live at the Finale Talent Show, and which received loud ovation, he proposes to her over a romantic dinner. And all I had to do was be there to encourage him when fear reared its ugly head. Each of the PCVs connected with students in this way. These kids blossomed into greatness in just one week!
Our success with these students was not derived from a holistic approach, but rather, from a one-on-one approach. With this new wisdom, when I think back to the most important impacts that I have made in the last year, none of them are the fruits of large projects. They are human-scale interactions. Like recognizing artistic skill in my friend who works at the cyber, and teaching him how to use Photoshop. Or empowering our neighbor/tutor enough for her to create a women’s association, just by being here and believing in her intelligence and perseverance. This leads me to believe that people do not need help, but rather, they need to know how they can help. They don’t need to be taught skills, they need their existing skills to be acknowledged. They don’t need to be shown how to do things, they need to be seen for what they do. They need to be respected and celebrated. The rest, they can do the for themselves.

Technological Advancement in Barbarism

This story starts out a bit like a fairytale, but I assure you its not! My host sister is married to a man whose family lives just next door to the house where she grew up, in a kasbah overlooking the fields. She was married in triple wedding so that her husband and his two brothers were all married to different women at the same time. While the three brides now live in the kasbah, taking turns doing household chores and animal husbandry, the three brothers work and live in Saudi Arabia doing fancy plasterwork for rich Saudis. The company that employs them has even worked on Saudi royal palaces. That is, according to one of the brothers, who recently came home to spend his three month vacation with his wife and daughter. While he was home, we had the opportunity to meet him at his house.
We met him as we were walking in and he invited us to sit down for some tea and cookies. We quickly recognized him as a really nice guy; generous, with an easy smile. Once we got past the usual get-to-know-you questions, he pulled out his fancy Saudi cell phone and proceeded to show us pictures and videos he had taken there. He showed us some pictures of some of the plasterwork he has done. He showed us a video of him and a few other guys making coucous in their apartment in Saudi. Then he should me a mildly religious video, in which a huge crack opens up in the middle of a multi-lane highway and swallows up a car; a phenomenon that the video claims is an act of god for whatever sin the driver committed before attempting to drive to work that day. While I didn’t buy the last part, I have to say, he had my full attention.
In the final video, a man wearing all white was kneeling outside on what seemed like a prayer mat. In fact, I assumed he was praying. A circle of men stood around him watching, which made me thing he might be an imam or a street performer. Suddenly, a man standing a few feet away on his right made a quick, grand motion, stepping toward the kneeling man and swinging his arms down. Like that, the kneeling man’s head was gone. He had been publicly executed. The executioner had used a sword, barely visible in the video. At first I thought it was a clip from a movie or the internet, but my tea-drinking acquaintance set me straight. He had taken the video, in person, in a public square in Saudi Arabia. That’s because, as you may recall, public execution by beheading is still normal in Saudi Arabia. I asked him if the stealing thing still holds true, and sure enough, he told me; depending on what you steal, you can get anything from a finger to your whole arm cut off. So I asked the next logical question (despite still being completely shocked and appalled), “Is there any theft in Saudi Arabia”? The answer, he said, was absolutely not. He said you could leave a stack of money unattended on a patio table at a coffee shop all day, come back that night, and it would still be there! A fact that I can only assume is fortified by sharing footage of the consequences everywhere you go on your blackberry. So is that enough reason to sign on to brutal retribution for crimes? Hell no! And remind me to think twice before I cozy up next to fancy cell phone during tea time.

Barbershop Cultural Exchange Part II

So thanks to fellow PCV Mike who recently did an excellent job directing the Oz Spring Camp, I have discovered one of the few upsides to being a male volunteer in Morocco.... the barbershop shave! I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out? Probably because it such an unlikely luxury in the US. But here in Morocco, you can walk into a barbershop and get a nice relaxing straight-razor shave for just 5 dirhams! That’s less than a dollar! Plus its a great chance to hang out with the locals and practice your language. I treated myself to my first barbershop facial shave yesterday after finally returning from a long tiring week of Spring Camp. Of course, I went to the same barbershop I usually go to (there’s only one in town), which luckily, I really like. When I got there, I was pleased to see the younger barber from my last time there with the rap music. He was just finishing up with another customer, so I jumped into the chair as soon as it was free, and he strapped on the bib. He started to grab for the scissors and I said. “Ghir tamaert assad” (just the beard today). He seemed happy with that. First, he trimmed it with the machine, while we watched some news regarding a footrace through the Sahara dessert. When he was done with the machine, R&B artist “Usher” was being shown singing at a concert. Then a “Kid Rock” song came on, which I translated for him. I asked him if he liked the music and he said “I’ll show you what I really like. The other men around here don’t get it.” And with that, he switched the station to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller the Movie”. Visions of childhood Halloween flooded in. Meanwhile, Mohamed the barber grabbed the straight-razor and got to work. Watching the man in the mirror dance with the living dead, I said, “Have you heard the gossip about Michael? They say he might have been Muslim”(partially because I just learned the TashlHite word for “gossip“ and wanted to use it). This is kind of a big deal around the water-coolers in Morocco right now. He had heard of it, but neither of us were convinced it was true. When he was done, he slapped some aftershave on my newly smooth cheeks and offered me the sink to rinse my face. “Good talk Mohamed”, I said, “Until next week”. Classic pop music and a shave: my new favorite weekly habit!

Saltown(not the real name): The Great Adventure

Last Saturday, Amber and I woke up early for an adventure. I stumbled out of bed, rushing through my morning routine (picking up/petting the cat to get him to stop meowing at me, feeding him, starting hot water and coffee, brushing my teeth, and washing my face), and then I quickly started mixing together a big batch of semolina cookie dough. When the dough was finished, Amber baked the cookies while I dressed and packed an overnight bag consisting mostly of water. As the cookies cooled, I threw together a quick snack to hold us over until lunch. We grabbed our backpacks, now laden with cookies, our helmets, and our bikes; and finally headed out the door around 11am.
About an hour later, we were walking our bikes up the last, steep, two kilometer hill to the beautiful mountain village of Saltown. At the top of the hill, there is a collection of adobe houses, a stone-walled animal pen, and two stand-alone schoolrooms. The first is bigger and newer, made of concrete. The second is made of a strange composite; thin concrete-foam panels, braced by intermittent boards of wood. I can tell how the room was constructed because its missing most of it’s front wall and ceiling. There are old rotted school desks piles on one side of the classroom. Staring at me from the back wall, through a gaping whole in the front, is a 10ft painting of Mickey Mouse smiling. I can see straight through this classroom. Behind Mickey is a bright green oasis blooming from the depths of a deep canyon ripped into mountains. One nonsensically tall and narrow kasbah pokes out of the green mass felting the canyon base. Other tightly clustered adobe structures dot the edges of the foliage and cling to the steep canyon sides. The crumbled classroom stands teetering at the edge of the canyon overlooking it all. The children have to hike up the steep canyon walls to get to school each day, and many have a long journey before that. Teachers usually choose to live in the houses up here near the school.
We whizzed by this view on our bikes. Nearing the steep road down the canyon, I passed an old women with a bag of harvested grass on her back. She carried it from the canyon bottom to feed her sheep. I smiled and said hello as I pass but didn't slow down. By the time Amber got to her, she suspected who we were and asked her "Where are you going?". "We're here to visit the new teacher at the school", she said. "Oh. Well she lives over here with me" the old women responded. I back-tracked to them and she walked us to her house. Inside, we were warmly greeted by our friend/neighbor/language-tutor. She recently got a job as a French and Math teacher in this town. She rents a room from the old woman who lives alone near the school. She calls the woman Xalti, which means “aunt on my mothers side”.
We are shown into our friends room, where we present her with the gift of cookies. Then she makes us tea and starts an egg-tagine cooking. Over tea, bread, and eggs, we discuss the news of our duwar. We mention that we saw a grey donkey running through our neighborhood, his owner desperately chasing him, the bottom end of an empty bright orange oil jug strapped around his snout. In other news, I mention that we randomly walked 45minutes down the road into the middle of a vast rock field with two of her sisters. There they met with two of her cousins to chat about secret matters. News trickles in our town.
When the tea and tagine were consumed, we had a language lesson consisting mostly of reviewing our answers on a test we did the week before. We are getting pretty good at reading and writing TashlHite. Its a shame that Tash isn't a written language, and that I don't have time to formulate each sentence in a conversation the way I do when I write. Next weeks homework will be to watch a TashlHite movie and practice listening (by far, the hardest thing about this language).
After the lesson, Xalti’s daughter arrives. She invites us to her house halfway down the canyon wall for tea We pass gaggles of women perched on the path, enjoying the cool afternoon air. When we get to her house, to young boys are chasing each other around giggling. We go into the living-room, which hangs over the path, with windows that expose beautiful views up the canyon. Along with tea and bread, our host offers fresh almonds and walnuts gathered from the tree groves below. We point out the beautiful table cover. Our host knit this herself, but modestly dismisses her skills as the result of boredom. She is soft-spoken, humble, and giving. On our way out, after tea, her husband comes home from work. Also humble, with a small stature and kind eyes, he works at the nearby salt mines. We express interest in the mines, which immediately prompts an invitation to accompany him to work the next morning. We agree to meet him on the road at 7am the next day.
On the way back up the hill, we run into a gentleman sitting outside his house with a few of his sisters. He speaks to us in French despite numerous attempts to explain that we don’t speak French and requests to please speak Tash. Finally we manage a short conversation in Tash (still dotted with French words) and I realize he’s slurring his speech. As we walk away, he calls up to our tutor, “I have a gift for those foreigners. I am an artist. I will bring it to you later tonight”. Our tutor skeptically agrees and passes the message on to us. I ask her if he was drunk and she says “Yes, he is an alcoholic. Everybody here knows it and his family worries about him.” She is surprised I could tell.
When we arrive back at her house, she begins some fried bread and tea as a late snack. Just as the bread hits the table, a knock is heard at the door. Our friend from the road has come with our gift. He presents me with a heavy slate of rock on which he has painted a colorful scene. Its beautiful and quintessentially Moroccan. He joins us at the tea table and spends the next two hours discussing heartfelt, complicated, ethereal matters in multiple languages, with me straining to finding new levels of concentration to try to understand. Shortly before leaving, he admits to me that he has a problem. He has a nice house in Marrakech, but he is here in the country with his family to try to “change his brain”; to find peace. As he leaves, I wish him luck on his journey and express a hope to meet him again happily in Marrakech some day.
It’s late and we have to be up early tomorrow. A quick dinner of pasta with milk and sugar is serve. (Surprisingly, this is the one meal I have discovered in Morocco that I simply cannot stomach. I can’t explain it in words, but I literally gag at the thought of it). Luckily I had already filled up on bread and tea so after choking down a few bites I go to bed satisfied.
The next morning, we wake up and prepare ourselves with the predawn air still chilling our bones. As promised, our guide for the day meets us on the road and takes the lead. We wander to the base of the canyon, through a series of passageways under adobe dwellings, through the fields, over a log spanning the river, up the other side of the canyon, and into the mountains to the north. After an hour of strenuous hiking, our trail begins to glisten. Piles of dark grey and pinkish salt crystal line the road to a large truck standing idle. Behind the truck wooden shacks have been built into the mountain. These are cave entrances. We enter one shack, where a crane hangs over an bottomless hole. Our guide explained that this is where the salt is brought up from the mine. Workers enter another cave to the south, wind down into the depths of the mountain, collect their salt, and bring it to the crane to be lifted out. We hang around the opening of the cave for twenty minutes waiting for the rest of the workers to arrive. A confident man with course speech and mannerisms shows up and offers to take us down into caves. “Is it dangerous“, we ask. Our guide replied, “I don’t go down there. It scares me”. This is the first time I’ve heard a Moroccan male express fear; which only amplified my curiosity. Another man says, “Just be careful. We’ll let you borrow some flashlights. You’ll be fine”. The course man lights a gas lantern, hands me a cheap plastic flashlight, and leads the way. We walk fifteen feet into another wood cabin before the true decent begins. Suddenly, the ground seems to fall way. The trail thins to no more than a foot wide and continues to get steeper. It hugs the chiseled wall on the left and drops into shear darkness on the right. I can see only a few feet of the narrow trail in front of me. With each step, my sandals slip on ground worn smooth from use, lubricated by a quarter inch of damp cave soot collected over decades. The trail levels and I breathe a sign of relief, but we turn a corner and the ground drops off again. When we finally reach the true bottom, my heart is in my throat. I shine my flashlight out into the darkness and a huge arching cave wall sparkles back at me from the distance. The cave narrows to the left where two perfectly square diverging passageways have been chiseled into a flat salt wall. Every surface is like staring at a crystal ocean from an airplane; millions of waves creating an intricate omnifaceted plane. Our new guide explains how to remove salt evenly. We take a few moments to marvel at the subterreanian sights, and head back up the perilous trail.
At the top, we thank the men for showing us their work and we start walking back the way we came. When the canyon town is again in sight, we stop at the top of the hill and eat a snack. We have been hauling bread, tea, and a can of sardines for this event. A couple of young girls are harvesting weeds nearby and we invite them over to nosh. When the food is gone, they accompany us to the bottom of the canyon and split off to the left. We continue on, up the other side, back to the house. My legs are exhausted from a combination of climbing steep mountains and clenching my thighs in fear.
We help our tutor prep vegetables for a tagine. When the tagine is prepped and cooking, she brings us into the TV room to relax until lunch. Xalti wanders in and turns on the TV to entertain us. A while later, she ushers in two strangers. They are also teachers. One works here in Saltown. The other works in a neighborhood near ours. He biked here this morning to spend the day with his friend. Amber is sitting closest to the portable propane tank, so she is put in charge of making tea. We chat and drink tea with the men until finally lunch is served. It is a colorful and delicious beef and vegetable tagine, topped with crisp golden fries. When we are all full, Amber makes more tea, and we explain that we should probably head home before its too late. The teacher who biked here suggests that we all go back together and asks that we wait about an hour so they can go pray first. Meanwhile we wander over to the canyon edge for a last look at the beautiful sight. We run into Xalti’s daughter and thank her again for her generosity. We ask her also to thank her husband for the exciting salt mine experience.
When we get back to the house, Xalti has a bag of walnuts for us to take home. Our tutor fills our empty cookie tupperware with local dried figs. We pack it all up including the rock artwork from the night before. Then the teacher reappears ready to leave. We say our final goodbyes and strap on our backpacks, heavy with gifts, and I think to myself, “Its a good thing the road from this magical place is mostly downhill.”

Barbershop Cultural Exchange Part I

So I was getting pretty shaggy around the neck and ears after a cold winter of not getting my hair cut. Finally I bit the bullet, made the 30 minutes walk into town and stopped off at the neighborhood barbershop. I walked in to find my normal barber not there. Instead, his early-twenties counterpart was sitting alone in one of the waiting chairs flipping through satellite TV stations.
"Are you cutting hair now?" I asked. "Yeah. Come have a seat". I noted that my normal guy was gone and he offered to let me wait until he returned, but I guess I'm not too loyal about these sorts of things so I sat down and let him strap on the bib.
Moroccan barbershops can be pretty nice. Our barbershop is the only establishment in my whole community with glass and carved-wood doors, where ugly sheet metal doors are the norm. Inside are two leather barber chairs strategically placed in front of a wall-to-wall mirror above a tiled countertop. On top of the counter, among the trimming paraphernalia, is a fancy plastic double-wall insulated thermos. This contains piping hot water so that when they sprits your hair or wipe away trimmings with a wet towel, it will be warm and refreshing (a pleasant and thoughtful amenity in these cold months). On the back wall, across from the mirror are three waiting chairs and a coat rack. Above the mirror, looming large in the left upper corner of the room is a medium-sized satellite TV with remote.
Today the remote belonged to my young hairdresser friend. He put it down to settle me in to my chair and got started snipping away at the fringes of my head. Soon another man came in and sat down and we all made small talk. The topic of me being American was broached (as it was fairly obvious), and before long the young hairdresser was developing a plan to make me feel more at home. He grabbed the remote from of the tiled counter and deftly punched in a series of numbers which left the TV above us loudly broadcasting MTV. He thought I would appreciate the "sounds from home", which in fact, were the rhythmic spittings of rap great Jay-Z. MTV had deemed it entertaining to create a "Top 20 Video Countdown" highlighting his extensive work. I'm not sure how the elderly Berber man waiting for his haircut felt about it, but my barber seemed to enjoy at least the beat.
To be honest, I was feeling at home, as a result. Especially when during one song, they asked to translate what he was saying. I hesitated for a moment and then said "ntta, dars bzzef n mashakil, welayni, urdars walo mushkil n tirvatin", which I though was a fairly direct, if not slightly more respectful translation of the original wording "I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one".
The American wisdom seemed to resonate strongly with these men. They bobbed their heads while I kept mine as still as possible for the remainder of the haircut. After trimming my neck and sideburns with a straight razor, he invited me to come to his house for a meal. I said that I was in a rush, paid my 10Dhs, left through the carved-wood door, and wandered down the dirt road with a head free from a heavy load of hair,
but full of catchy beats.