Lazy Sunday

I had a great day yesterday. I started teaching an English class to teachers from the area. I wasn’t looking forward to it because my first session with them did not go smoothly. I expected them to have a higher English level than they did and we clumsily stumbled through the hour and a half in frustration.

This time I went about teaching in a different way. I had originally tried bringing in an article to read and discuss. This time I brought in a list of vocabulary. I chose the topic, primary education, because they are all primary school teachers. I figured that way, while in their own classrooms; they could glance around the room and remind themselves of the different words we went over.

After class I went to my Moudir’s house for lunch. He wasn’t there but I sat for hours with his wife and daughters, dozing in and out, while watching the Moroccan equivalent of American Idol. When I felt rested I ventured into town and stumbled across a couple of trainees. I sat with them for a little while, doing my best not to corrupt, scare, or mislead them in anyway. They were good company and I appreciated sitting with them for a little while.

On my way home I started to feel kind of weary. I think it stemmed from the fact that I had been around PCVs for the last few weeks straight and in good PCV company at that. As much as I love my own little, sacred, apartment I wasn’t too sure I wanted to go sit by myself there contemplating what to do with myself.

When I walked up to my door, my Moudir was sitting out front. He was polishing a pair of shiny, silver, suede (?) shoes. I sat down next to him and he started telling me about this pair of shoes. They were a pricy pair of shoes ($32), from Ouarzazate. They were a worthy investment however, because he has had them for three years and has taken good care of them.

That same morning he took the back pockets off of a pair of his daughter’s pants. He sewed them back on to the side of the pants. I squirmed as I watched, thinking…if you do it that way you are going to sew up the whole pant leg and she wont be to put them on. Silly me. This guy knows how to do absolutely everything. He sewed those pants right up, good as new.

After he finished polishing his shoes he brought out some grapefruit syrup he had made. You mix it with water…a nice touch of flavor. He explained how I could do it with lemon as well.

Next he got his guitar and started playing. Some days he takes apart computers and puts them back together. When my power goes out he shows me how to fix it. When the kids get rambunctious he whips them into shape. He went to school to be the director of a youth center with an emphasis on sports. So, I asked him, “Where on earth did you learn how to do Everything?” He explained that after he finished his studies, he was unemployed for two years. He likes learning and he held many different jobs during that time. A friend invited him to work for his company in France as a Mr. Fix It but he said he had everything he needed right here in Morocco.

As he played his guitar, a neighbor woman came out and joined us. And then another and then another. It began to get dark and bats started to circle around head. As the sound of the women’s gossip grew louder my Moudir slipped away into his house.

After he disappeared out came the kiddos. Little girls that wanted to draw surrounded me. I gave them each small, flash card, size paper and a pen. They copied the titles of the books they were writing on, to the paper. M_O_R_O_C_C_O. P_H_R_A_S_E_B_O_O_K. It was quite an achievement, writing the French alphabet, left to right. I tried to get them to sound out the words they were writing. MO RO SSO. I explained the difference between C and S but I don’t think it stuck. I’ll try again today. When they got bored with that…mostly because there was no light to see what they were writing, I brought down a coloring book, crayons and a flashlight.

One of the older girls brought over a candle. We melted some of the wax on the slab of cement in front of my house and stuck the candle in it. How many times that coloring book almost went up in flames, I can’t say. Soon boys surrounded the coloring book too. I was grateful to have one of my young English students deciding who got to color when and with what. I jus sat back and watched. They each wrote their names at the bottom of the page they colored. Some of the kids were so diligent about staying in the lines, other were just excited about the colors and didn’t particularly care where they ended up on the page.

Finally Mom’s began to corral their children. I promised the coloring book would still be there tomorrow. I went up to my house, not feeling so alone after all. Actually, feeling really excited for the lengthening days, warm breezy evenings, and a summer full of sitting on my slab of cement, hanging out with the ladies and children, chatting with my Moudir and listening to the strumming of a guitar. I never thought I would crave hanging out with Moroccan’s and my community as a whole. Alhamdulillah.

Camp Fun

Fauve and baby host siter Aya

Bike Ride with the Kids

The River

The Inspiration

There was one 13-year-old boy who took a liking to us volunteers. I remember the first day sitting at a table and having him ask me questions that were being fed to him by another camper. His enthusiasm, friendliness and good attitude were a blessing. He could just go and go and go and nothing seemed to get him down.

Towards the end of camp he got this great idea that he should make a video of different campers, PCVs, and staff all speaking different languages and talking about their experience at camp. He worked with a PCV who did the recording to produce this little movie but it was his idea, he did all of the interviews, picked out the people to be interviewed and got the ball rolling himself. You don’t see motivation like that among youth here in general. He was an inspiration to all of us and gave us all hope that there are motivated, Moroccan, youth that can change the future of this country.

We hope that we had an equally positive impact on him and that he will start going to the Dar Chebab in his town, where there is a PCV that can maybe help cultivate his talent. He is certainly worth the time.

Clubs

Afternoons were spent in clubs. The students were split up into three groups and they switched clubs everyday. This made it easier on us volunteers because we only needed one lesson plan and could just improve that lesson as went through the week.

I helped out a couple other volunteers to lead a health club. The leader of the club talked about general health and the importance of eating balanced meals and not putting a quarter pound of sugar in your tea every time you make it. That part lasted about 20 minutes and then we brought out different fruits and veggies: Green Peppers, carrots, cucumbers, oranges, bananas, raisons, peanuts and toothpicks and we put the students to work building different sculptures. They did a great job and were more creative than I ever imagined them being. It was rewarding to see them getting into it and building things from little people/faces, to boats and cars to beach scenes etc.

Actually, the creativity and ability of the kids to entertain themselves for hours on end was amazing. They had drums with them at all times and were never short of a song or chant to keep things moving. From breakfast until bed time there seemed to be some sort of “camp sound track” being played. We went on a field trip one day to a place called Ait Benhaddou, where we had to hike around and they still had their drums and were singing the whole time. Other tourists stopped and stared, trying to figure out whom this musically inclined, group of youth was. That was probably one of my favorite parts of the experience, the ability of the children to break into song at any moment.

Spring Camp- English Class 3

For the third class students asked to look at song lyrics, learn them and then sing along. Due to poor planning, short attention spans and a general lack of organization this class failed miserably and while I certainly learned how to improve it next time…I don’t feel it is necessary to elaborate here.

Spring Camp- English Class 2

My second English class went equally as smoothly. I read Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree,” to the students. It is a great story about a relationship between a boy and a tree. We went over the vocabulary and then the students broke up into pairs and read different sections of the story. Next they were required to act out the scene of the story that they had. We put them all together so that the class acted out the entire story and so that everyone would understand.

After acting out the story we took some time to write poetry about trees, nature, really whatever they wanted and then they presented those. This was also a good class, students participated and there was an end product, which is always rewarding for everyone involved.

Spring Camp- English Class 1

About six of us were teaching English and three of us ran clubs. I was responsible for an Intermediate-Mid English class and I helped out in a health club in the afternoon. We also had a SIDA/ART club, and an Environment club, we tried to tag team most classes and clubs because…well…kids are just that scary.

For my first class I decided to talk about gender roles and play a “gender-bender” game. I know, I know, I would incorporate that into my English class on the first day. For the activity I had 27 note cards with different jobs/gender roles on them. Some examples were: Police, cooking, cleaning, teacher, doctor, nurse, airplane pilot…and some harder ones (at least to explain)…determines the sex of a fetus upon conception, prostate cancer, breast feeding and giving birth. I created three categories, Mostly Women, Mostly Men, Both Common. In the first round I asked the students to put the different cards in the category with which they most closely corresponded.

I was working with an extremely helpful environment volunteer and both of us were surprised to see the results. Most of the students in the class were from Rabat. There were just a few from the bled (countryside.) But we still didn’t expect the students to say…Both mom and dad: cook, clean, become teachers, gendarmes and wash laundry. We both said, REALLY? REALLY?

This is interesting because we both live in the countryside and…we’ve never seen a female gendarme, a female doctor, our host dads don’t cook and clean…that is for sure. The Rabatis kind of shrugged it off and re-enforced the, YES GUYS, BOTH MEN AND WOMEN DO THESE THINGS. It was certainly news to me. And I’m pretty sure it was news to the students from the countryside that got extremely quiet at about this time.

The next step of the game, after discussing why certain jobs are more female specific and other jobs are more male specific, was to switch up the categories. The new categories were, Only Women Can (physiologically,) Only Men Can (physiologically,) Both Can (physiologically.) Of course when we did it this way, we found that both men and women are capable of doing just about every job. There were exceptions, Only women give birth and breast feed and only men get prostate cancer and determine the sex of a fetus upon conception but… the majority of all other jobs can be done by either males or females. A small discussion followed about why jobs are gender specific when both males and females are capable of doing them. It was a great class despite the fact that some of the language was a little over the students heads. They seemed receptive and hopefully it made them think at least a little bit.

Spring Camp Overview

I just completed my first Spring Camp! Spring Camp is an English emersion camp for students around the country. There were 22 camps held this year, with collaboration between PCVs and Moroccan staff, to reach approximately 1700 youth.

A typical day started at 7:30-wake up, Moroccan National Anthem, Songs to help everyone wake up. Breakfast at 8:15. English class from 9:00-11:00. Sports/Activities 11:15-1:00. Lunch 1:30. Clubs 3:30-5:15. Break 5:15-5:30. “Activities” 5:30-7:00. Dinner 7:30. Games, Music, fun, talent shows, movies etc 9:00-11:00pm.

This was the general schedule however everything always seemed to be running an hour or two behind. Most of the kids showed up a day late. That meant testing their language levels and getting them into classes instead of actually teaching English the first day.

They had a DJ playing music as the students arrived. Close to a third of them came from Rabat on a bus. As they came into the dining hall where the music was playing, and where we were waiting for new arrivals our jaws dropped one by one, as did the students from the area that had arrived on time. Some girls had short spunky haircuts, almost no one had their hair covered, and girls were wearing short-sleeved shirts, skirts, and heels. And, Man, did they know how to dance… This was like nothing I have ever seen here…and something I would expect to see at a bar at home. I’m pretty sure all of the kids from the bled(countryside) felt the same way. They were literally drooling as these girls took to the dance floor. The boys from Rabat came in with their baggy shorts, hats, popped collars and drama. What were we in for?

Harassment Panel

I was recently asked to be on the harassment panel for the new trainees. As a representative from the harassment working group I have had time to talk to a variety of PCVs about the different kinds of harassment they face and their coping mechanisms.

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this kind of thing before so I wont go into too much detail but to say that it was great for me to sit in front a big group, to help facilitate discussions and to hopefully ease the minds of trainees a little.

I am, by no means, in a site with an excessive amount of harassment. I joked because it was still kind of early on my way to catch a taxi to the training site and no women were out. I felt like I was doing a walk of shame or something as I watched one man after another undress me with his eyes. Then I got to the training site and thought, well, harassment isn’t that bad in RoseValley. It is something you get used to. You don’t have a whole lot of choice. You either get used to it or go home. It is rarely threatening in my neck of the woods, if ever. It is just really annoying. On good days harassment doesn’t faze me one bit. On bad days I’d really like to sock someone. Of course I know better then that, they wouldn’t be afraid to hit back.

I felt like the training itself went really well. I worked with three other volunteers and we presented different scenarios to small groups of trainees. We then discussed, how these situations could have been avoided entirely, if they couldn’t have been avoided, how could you lessen the impact? How could you respond to them? Where could you find sources of support if you can’t deal with it on your own? These are very important topics because Harassment is something that volunteers face every single day and it can completely destroy a volunteer’s service if it is not handled in a certain way. That of course is hard because there is not one specific kind of harassment, way of dealing with, or way of avoiding it. And harassment is entirely subjective. What you may see as harassment, I may not. What I may see as harassment, the man doing it may not. The important this is that if you perceive it as harassment towards you, then it is.

The PCTs seemed receptive to the discussion. Hopefully they are prepared for what lies ahead of them during their service. In the mean time it gave me a chance to look back at my last 5 months in RoseValley and focus on the techniques I used to keep a positive attitude on the hard days. The worst thing you could do is become resentful and hateful towards a specific group of people. It hinders you service, makes it difficult to collaborate with people and makes it impossible to appreciate all of the amazing people that do exist and are present everyday in your community.

VSN (Volunteer Support Network) Training- and Lessons in Squatting

I took the opportunity to go to training by the Volunteer Support Network a few weeks ago. The training mostly addressed how to be an active listener. This means listening attentively, not making people’s problems about you, and not giving too much advice. Essentially how do you, “Just Listen?”

We talked about different kinds of stress prevalent in Peace Corps Morocco. There is a wide range but some examples: trying to find work, integrating, negotiating cultural norms, trying to balance personal and work relationships, harassment, isolation, travel, feeling like you aren’t getting anything done, language using the Turkish toilet… the list is endless.

We talked about the different times during service in which certain stresses are most prevalent, coping mechanisms and other sources of support.

Some of the things I found most beneficial were getting to know certain members of my staj better, noticing the amount of diversity possible between 5 different PCVs even if they all appear rather similar on the outside, and most importantly that I may or may not have been using the squat toilet the wrong way for the last 7 months.

The latter topic is up for debate. Sometimes I wonder how I still manage to splash my pant legs every once in a while after living here for this long. Is it really possible that I still don’t know how to use a Turk? We were all sitting around and a second year Volunteer said, “Hey guys, you’ll never guess what I learned this weekend! Which way to you guys squat when you use the Turk!?”

If you have to go “number 2” it is obvious which way to face. There would be a lot of cleaning up to do if you faced the wrong way. Peeing on the other hand is a whole different story. Apparently it is best to face the hole of the Turkish toilet as opposed to the door of the bathroom. Splashing is significantly reduced this way. One volunteer made the point however that you have to be pretty darn sure all you have to do is pee if you are going to maneuver a backwards-facing squat. You also have to be comfortable with your back to the door, which is a rather unnatural feeling.

It’s funny; the Turk isn’t that hard to get used to (weather you are using it the right way or the wrong way…whatever that means.) It is however always one of the most common topics of conversation at the beginning of a PCVs service and it often requires support.

I ran into some of the new trainees the other day and they were bragging to me about how they still hadn’t taken a dump in a squat toilet as of yet. I asked how it was possible that they had been in country for a month and still not faced the Turk. They told me (basically as a collective group) that they all just put off business until getting to the classroom everyday, where they conveniently have a western toilet. All I could think was “Ah, Man! You better start practicing! You are going to have to face it at some point. Better now while there are still people to pull you out if you fall in!”

I remember during my training there were plenty of times when we cheered for each other’s success in getting off of the D-train (Diarrhea,) relieving ourselves after weeklong bouts of constipation or commiserating with one another when someone else hopped on the D-train. There is no support like moral support and knowing that your dear CBT buddy is just a shart (Shit/Fart) away from being a True Peace Corps Volunteer too! And on that note, I recommend avoiding the “active listening,” when providing squatters support, for your sake and theirs.

International Women’s Day: Activity Two. “Number One”

I did a second activity related to International Women’s day about a week later. We had an outdoor movie night at the Dar Chebab where we projected the film on to the Dar Chebab for the community. The movie I chose is called “Number One.” It is a Moroccan, feature length film in Darija. The theme of the movie is the Mudawana (the family code.) It addresses women’s rights in a humorous and enjoyable way, appropriate for the whole family.

In the film there is a hard, cynical man, who disrespects the women who work in his sweatshop, his wife and the people around him. His wife, exhausted by his behavior casts a spell on her husband. He becomes unable to speak disrespectfully to women even if he wants to. He tells his wife to cut her hair, wear what she wants, gets her a bank card, and he even starts helping out in the home (which really got a laugh out of the community.) At a certain point no one knows quite how he or she is supposed to behave which causes all sorts of confusion. Eventually the husband and wife reach a balance in how to sustain their relationship in a respectful way.

I was very pleased because there was a descent turn out. There were not only boys and girls but also men and women present at the film. One of my boys from the Dar Chebab said that this was the first time he had seen women outside, late in the evening, participating in a community event.

There was a discussion that followed the film, lead by my host father. I honestly can’t say I understood a whole lot of it but it seemed good and lots of children were participating.

International Women’s Days (IWD) March 8, 2010

March 8 was International Women’s Day. It was the perfect excuse to bring up gender roles and gender issues in my Dar Chebab. I went to class with the intentions of making mother’s day cards with my 13-year-old girls. The idea behind this was to give the girls the opportunity to think about all of the things their moms do for them and all of the work women do in general. This would hopefully give them the chance to really appreciate their mothers.

I brought stickers, colored paper, pens, markers, scissors etc. It was going to be an extravaganza. Class was supposed to start at 6 but 6:30 rolled around and no one had showed up. I was standing there stewing and relatively disappointed because I was really excited about the project.

In the meantime there were two 17-year-old boys hanging out in the room. As I paced back and forth they stopped me and said, “Miss Fauve, what is it you were going to do with the girls?”

I lethargically dragged over the supplies and began to explain the point of making cards for one’s mother. The boys picked up the paper and started drawing and writing messages to the important women in their lives. As they began their art projects more and more boys began to show up. With complete disregard to the fact that all of the stickers I brought were intended for girls (hearts, stars, flowers, humming birds, rainbows) the boys decorated their cards (and cell phones) with stickers and colorful designs. Most messages said something along the lines of , “I LOVE YOU MOM!” One card was particularly moving. It said, “Thank you mom for everything you do. I remember when I was little and you slept next to me when I was sick. I love you.” I was practically in tears, be it from the messages the boys were writing or the fact that the boys just ran with the project and didn’t feel too cool for it.

The real thing this showed me was all of the preconceived ideas I have about gender and gender roles myself. I brought stickers for girls and thought of card making as a girl’s activity. The fact that the boys would just as readily participate, use the supplies provided to them no matter what colors and images they were, was inconceivable to me, despite the fact that it is just as important, if not more, for the boys to think about the appreciation they have for the important women in their lives.