Spring Trip

4-15-2007 A LETTER FROM GEORGE WASHINGTON?

After camp, I took a few days off to do some traveling. I had a conversation at camp with another volunteer about how unbelievably lucky we are to have ended up in Morocco, a country with such varied beauty and culture that we could never hope to take in everything even in the two years we’re stationed here. With deserts in the south, beaches in the west, snow capped peaks in the middle, winding hills and Spanish villages up north, not to mention the mixing of Arab, Berber, French, and Spanish culture running together like watercolor everywhere you go, the country offers ceaseless opportunity. The other day, I met this absolute hippy-stereotype who had been in Morocco for a month with his wife and daughter, and he had the audacity to coolly tell me that he was “already getting bored,” and that he’d “spent a few days in each of these cities and didn’t find anything new.” All I could do was just smile, nod, and think “You jaded, ignorant, travel-moron. You’re a walking cliché of the types that zip around a country, checking off names of cities they’ve ‘been to’ after they’ve hit the bus station and main street. Then they leave, going to look for ‘uncharted territory,’ some new unattainable authenticity they think they can get cus they played guitar and laughed with some Berber guys in a tent, but left not having learned a single thing about their real lives.” But this guy was a lot bigger than me and had scary tattoos, so I kept my mouth shut and was comforted realizing that he would live a miserable, unsatisfied, “too cool” life in which he missed anything of beauty or importance the world was begging to offer him.

Off the tangent but and back to my vacation... I traveled to Chefchauen, “the prettiest little town in Morocco,” nestled into the hills, known for its ubiquitous light blue painted buildings. Though it’s built around tourism now, it was once a “forbidden city.” Chefchauen, apparently not having received the memo on Moroccan hospitality, had only been seen by 3 foreigners before the Spanish came in 1937—one had been poisoned, the other chased out, and the other made it in and out cus he apparently disguised himself as a Rabbi and that worked out for him. Fortunately, I did not get poisoned or chased out and had a great time, but UNfortunately, it would have been fun if I would have had to dress as a Rabbi to get out alive.

After that, I headed to the international port city of Tangir where apparently you can sit on the beach and see Spain on a clear day, of which I unfortunately did not have a single one. But it’s an absolutely entrancing city, especially when you get into the literary gossip and visit the places where many great writers of the early 20^th century lived, wrote, and occasionally worked as spies during WWII. I even got to see the cafe where Tennessee Williams wrote his first draft of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” even though it’s been turned into a sort of beach-disco club these days. It would, however, be interesting to have seen how the play would have been different had the cafe been a dance-club while Williams was writing. But “A Disco Musical Named Desire” may not have been as meaningful a production, and I don’t know if Marlon Brando can sing...

The other intriguing part of the city was my visit to “The American Legation,” which is the only American historical site that exists outside of the US. The building was a gift from the Moroccan Sultan and was the first American ambassadorial building. Morocco was the first country to officially recognize the US as an independent nation, and inside the Legation, there is a letter of correspondence between George Washington and Sultan Moulay Ben Abdallah. In the letter, Washington very cordially invites the Sultan to recognize and trade with the fledgling nation, even though, as he stated, the US had no gold or silver mines and agriculture had been limited by the recent war, so they had nothing to offer but hoped that the US could someday be somehow useful to its friends. Oh how times change! It was so intriguing to read into the tone of the letter as the leader of a rebellion essentially begged a powerful monarch to side with his impoverished rouge nation that had nothing to offer but hope and good will. The world’s come a long way.

Also housed in the Legation was a copy of a hilarious correspondence from one of the Ambassadors housed there in its early years attempting to explain that, even though he was strictly ordered to receive no gifts, a parade from the Sultan had showed up at his door with a magnificent lion and lioness as a gift to the government and people of America. In the letter, the ambassador explained how he did absolutely everything in his power to refuse the gift, but the people were impossibly insistent and would not leave. At the time the letter was written, the lions were being housed inside a room at the Legation and the ambassador was hoping for a swift reply from the US indicating how he should deal with them. It was good to see that Moroccan gift giving to foreigners has not changed in the last few hundred years, not in the scope of its generosity or in the absolute futility of a polite refusal to receive it!

Pics From Spring Trip

1. Me in Chefchauen
2. Church in Tangir (that's the lords prayer in Arabic bordering the alter area)
3. Reviving some Roman ruins outside of Fez
4. Letter from George Washington to Sultan of Morocco
5. Beach time at Asilah

Spring Camp

4-6-2007 CAMP

I’ve spent the last week working at an “English Immersion Camp” in Al Hociema, a city up north on the Mediterranean 3 trains, 2 busses, and 3 cabs away from my site. The camp is organized each year between the Peace Corps and the Moroccan Ministry of Youth for kids ages 13-17. For a week, three other volunteers and I worked with some amazingly motivated Moroccan staff members to entertain, control, and from time to time educate fifty eager Moroccan middle schoolers.

I was in charge of teaching the intermediate English class, and also running a “music club” which mostly involved me playing songs from the greats of western music that I decided were essential to the students’ development—The Beatles, Elvis, Bob Dylan... Justin Timberlake—it was great fun! However, the biggest ended up being “Bingo” which I would use to warm them up. Yes, I’m talking about the “B-I-N-G-O” song and the tricky “instead of a letter, you CLAP” trick. I can’t explain how strange it is to be unwinding in your room when you hear six too-cool teenage guys pass in the hall rocking out and chanting “There was a farmer, had a dog...”

Otherwise, it was just like any other summer camp I’d seen in the US—lots of singing, camp games, skits, counselors playing tricks on each other, yelling at kids to go to bed and then doing the same thing to wake them up in the morning. The kids were great, almost TOO well behaved. I mean, they did kid stuff, but even the “bad kids” were nothing compared to what I’ve seen elsewhere. A lot of them were first timers, as these sorts of camps are fairly new in the country, and I think the kids recognize it as more of a privilege then just “Summer camp, of COURSE I get to do this every summer.”

Probably the biggest surprise came at the end of the camp when all of the students were saying goodbye. Older volunteers had warned us about what was to come, but we still didn’t really believe it: Apparently, without fail, at the end of every camp, all of the students start weeping and holding each other, not wanting to leave their new found friends and the joys of camp. I was skeptical. Most of the participants were teenage guys, and teenage guys are WAY too cool to cry in front of each other. And besides, these kids had been together for like six days. How much of a bond could they have?

But when the day came, an experience I’m now familiar with in morocco... I was wrong. Once the kids got their bags outside of the center, they all (the cool guys even MORE than the girls) started openly weeping and hugged every single camp member and counselor. A few of the heaviest weeping dudes somehow ended up on my shoulder and I had no clue what to do, mostly because I hadn’t realized how culturally-conditioned I am to feel that public expression of male emotion is inherently awkward, but also because the only Arabic consolation phrase I know is what you’re supposed to say when someone had died, and I figured that would only make things worse. So I just held onto them and let them cry. It was so touching to see these guys, on the verge of adulthood, openly expressing emotion and how much the camp meant to them. I think a lot of it was that, unlike in the US, weeping over the departure of your guy friends is actually a masculine thing to do, as if it indicates that you were part of the club, and that you had such a close experience with this brotherhood. But I think it also was an indicator of what these kids were going home to. Not that I have any knowledge of their particular situations, but I just know that this week of games, songs, and field trips wasn’t just “entertain me” time for them. Though I’m not sure they learned a ton of English, and they’ll probably forget Bob Dylan (and go home singing “Bingo”), something about this time of free interaction with kids their age in a supportive atmosphere touched them enough to merit tears—tears that no one criticized, because they all understood and felt the same way.