Sunday, November 18, 2007



I know halloween is long over, but I had to give a shout out to my brilliantly witty group members and their skills with a pumpkin. Just look at it until you get it...

MY SITE

11-2-2007 MY NEW EDITOR POSITION

I just got elected to be the Youth Development 2007 representative editor for “Peaceworks,” a publication sent out to all of the volunteers in Morocco featuring stories, poems, and random anecdotes from PCV’s in our country! This means I’ll get to travel to Rabat every so often to edit, and help put together the magazine. I’m excited about the position, and I’d like to think I got elected because of my writing skills and experiences with playwriting and thesis work, but I think I really got in because I told everybody about “Bachelor’s Corner,” a column I made with some friends in our 8th grade newspaper for lonely single guys. Who knew THAT would ever get me somewhere in life?

11-6-2007 MY SITE

Well, after months of training with no idea where I’m actually going to end up in this country, I finally have a site! Imagine, a little chunk of Morocco to call my own. My site is BEN GUERIR—a pretty large city by Peace Corps standards (about 70,000) just an hour north of magical Marrakech on the train line. The town thrives on a military base and phosphate mining—both nearby. It’s flat, mostly devoid of greenery, and basically surrounded by desert, which doesn’t make it much to look at, but the city is bursting with energy, social associations, and active youth.
This allows me to begin answer the question, “What will I ACTUALLY be doing here?” I’m actually following a lineage of volunteers who have worked in this site. The city is well familiar with Peace Corps and is eager to have a new volunteer. The volunteer I’m replacing at the Youth Center here did some amazing work setting up a “Youth and English Club.” Right now, a committee of youth leaders sets up meetings, plans events, and runs a small library out of the Youth Center. They frequently plan youth outings, talent shows, and have even done AIDS awareness campaigns in the past. My job will be to help the group expand, facilitate more activities, connect the youth group with other local organizations for awareness campaigns, and of course, do some English teaching. I also hope to work with a budding theatre group in the Youth Center that does clown shows for children, but is interested in expanding into older audiences.
It’s odd. Before I came here, I had the vision that I would basically be an English teacher, that is, in a more conventional sense. And English teaching is actually what we get the most training in, and what most PCV’s end up doing in their time here. However, we’re trying to get more into the realm of youth development and empowerment in addition to English teaching.
In reality, from what I’ve seen, Morocco has a pretty spectacular language program here in the schools. First of all, the students here are generally amazing: They usually speak Darija (Moroccan Arabic) at home, and they learn to read and write Standard Arabic (quite a bit different) in school. They start learning French in 3rd grade, and then tack English or Spanish onto that around the time they hit middle school. Many students even speak a completely different Berber dialect in the home, so they put yet another language on top of those. Students here are quite shocked to learn that we usually only learn one language in America (Well, first of all, they’re shocked that I’m a white person who doesn’t speak French, to the extent that they usually just don’t believe me and speak to me in French anyway). I have a difficult time trying to rationalize with them as to why we don’t. Aka:

Me: Well, you don’t really NEED French or German in America.

STUDENT: Don’t Americans ever go anywhere?

ME: Well, not really, and if they do, they usually just expect other people to speak English.

STUDENT: Ah, Americans.

ME: Yeah, but we do make really good food, like Pizza.

STUDENT: Isn’t that Italian?

ME: Probably.

STUDENT: So you learn other peoples’ food, but not their languages.

ME: Don’t you have some English homework you need help with?

On top of that, the curriculum designers use English as a medium to teach lessons that are actually important. Gone are the days of “The dog is under the house,” which is my experience with language learning. Nope, kids here have units like Stereotypes, Tolerance, Women in the Workplace, Environment, and Immigration Causing Brain Drain in Morocco. It’s so encouraging to walk into a Youth Center in a small Moroccan village and have kids run up to you and say, “Do you have any stereotypes? You should not have stereotypes. They are wrong. Do you want to know why?” and then they proceed to pull out the essay they wrote on tolerance of differences.
So, in sum, the students here, by and large, have wonderful English programs. What they do not have is time in school for extracurricular activities like music, theatre, sports, and AIDS awareness (Well can you blame them? It’s not like they’re learning 3 languages at once or anything). That’s where the Youth Center comes in. Traditionally, it’s a place where students can go for extra tutoring and rousing games of ping pong. But the Peace Corps—along with the Moroccan ministry of Youth—wants to incorporate more extracurricular activities to empower youth. So THAT’s what the heck I’m supposed to be doing here.

SO WHAT’S THE PEACE CORPS UP TO THESE DAYS?

My vision of The Peace Corps has changed quite a bit since I signed up. There’s this romantic vision of what the Peace Corps is—rough, idealistic young Americans being parachuted into remote jungles where desperate locals eagerly await their arrival. The rugged American youth then proceed to dig wells or build dams, hand in hand with local leaders, knee deep in mud, drenched with the sweet sweat of community action. Then those Americans, soiled from working with the land, go home to take a bucket shower in their mud hut and write poetry with too many floofy adjectives by the light of an oil lamp.
Then there’s this vision that volunteers are basically dropped in the middle of no where with no real direction or anyone to report to. Then they just pine away 2 years hand washing their clothes and coming up with more elaborate adjectives for the floofly poetry they hope to publish when they get back to the states.
I can’t speak for other programs, or even other sectors of Peace Corps Morocco, but it’s certainly not like that here. We’re actually under the jurisdiction of the Moroccan Ministry of Youth and Sport. We have educational professionals come from the US to design project plans and objectives for our work with youth.We write monthly reports to our sector administrators, and come together for mid-service conferences to network ideas. Our staff, our communities, and certainly our volunteers take our work quite seriously, and I’ve been thoroughly impressed this whole time by the organization and support the Peace Corps has provided us.
Not to mention that I get to work with youth all day! Plus, the simple presence of Americans doing good work, and being readily accepted into tear-jearkingly hospitable Muslim families in an Arab nation this day in age speaks volumes about the reality that people are just people no matter where you go. Put all of that together, and I feel like I have one of the most important—and the coolest—jobs in the world right now.

~CB