Summer Camp + Musings

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Just like in America, Moroccan kids get a nice long summer vacation. Also like in America, many Moroccan kids go away to summer camp for various activities such as sports, music, art, and language. Just like in the springtime, Peace Corps participates in these ministry sponsored camps by sending volunteers from the Youth Development sector to run language classes and clubs. The extra bonus attached to summer camp is that the ministry provides each volunteer with three scholarships to be handed out at our discretion, i.e. each volunteer picks three kids from their town that would otherwise be unable to pay to go to camp, and the ministry covers all the costs, including transportation! It’s a great chance for a lot of these kids, many of whom have never been more than a few dozen kilometers away from the place where they were born, to get out and see a totally new part of their own country, meet some kids from the city, and hang out with American Peace Corps volunteers for two weeks.

Camp this year was held in the small city of El Jadida, just down the coast from Casablanca. It’s a quiet little place, more modern than Essaouira, but with its own history and charm. Although it doesn’t boast a medina nearly as intricate as those found in other Moroccan cities, it does have an old Portuguese fort complete with cannons and a huge underground cistern that makes for great camper fieldtrips. Nearby is a small port where sailboats can be rented, giving kids a chance who have never seen the ocean to suddenly find themselves floating out in the wide open blue of the Atlantic.

Fortunately we had enough volunteers at camp that we could all choose between teaching classes in the morning or running clubs in the afternoon. I choose to run the GGLOW (Girls and Guys Leading Our World) club since the ideas behind it are closely related to the work I used to do in my summers at Camp Thoreau in Massachusetts and a year in the school program at Sargent Center in New Hampshire. The point of the program is to instill in kids the feeling that the fate of their world is in their hands, and that if they don’t do something to improve it then nobody else will. We try to teach them that you can’t expect the world to get better by just sitting around wishing. If people want to see change in the world they need to take charge and make it happen. Of course kids can’t always see this because they’re so used to their parents running the show so we try to give them puzzles and challenges to solve for themselves in the hopes that this practice will help them to see just how capable they are.

The challenges put a lot of emphasis on both teamwork and individual achievement. At first these ideas might seem contradictory but in fact they go together nicely. For example, there is one game where the group needs to move from one point to another, but they cannot step on the ground. They can only step on bandanas which can be picked up and moved, but if the bandanas are not in contact with a team member then they are lost. The only way for the entire group to move is if everyone takes individual responsibility for his/her bandana, and they all coordinate their movements as a group.

Originally this program was designed just for girls, since in traditional Moroccan society they are brought up just to be wives and mothers. The volunteers who designed the program wanted to give the girls they were working with the idea that they could achieve much more if they wanted to, and so the program was called Girls Leading our World. Eventually it was realized that to truly open society’s doors to women, it would take more than just convincing women of their equal status. The men would have to be convinced too, and so the extra “G” was added and boys were invited to participate in the program. Now, in addition to teamwork activities, GGLOW includes discussions of gender roles and stereotypes.

I must admit that at this point in the discussion I begin to have an internal conflict of interest and ideology, so if it’s alright with everyone, I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent for a moment.

On the one hand, as a Peace Corps volunteer my job is to do development work, and particularly as a Youth Development volunteer my job is to help raise a generation of intelligent Moroccans, ready to handle the ever changing landscape that is the emerging global community. By ignoring gender inequality and similar issues deeply embedded in the local culture, I risk leaving behind students ill-prepared to interact and integrate with their international neighbors, thus closing off potential avenues of business, friendship, and cross-cultural understanding. As an outsider, and an American at that, I’m in a particularly important position where the things I say and do can have an enormous impact on my students. Mine is a voice that they have rarely heard before. It is a voice that has different ideas, with different experiences and influences behind it. Without people like me these kids are at the risk of being left behind the rest of the world; undereducated, undervalued, and altogether forgotten. History, not to mention recent events, has taught us time and again what happens when masses of underprivileged people are denied their basic human rights. It would then seem to be in both their interest and in ours that we, the ones lucky enough to be born in the lands of opportunity, should do something to help even the playing field.

On the other hand, as a student of Anthropology, my inclination is to remain an independent observer of culture; a recorder of tradition and history, rather than a meddler and a “change agent”. Moroccan culture, particularly Berber culture, is centuries older than American culture so who are we to march in and demand an overhaul of traditional values and beliefs? History again teaches us that such hubris often lands us in the mess we are in already, with large numbers of disenfranchised people angered by a cultural invasion which they see as a corruptor of values and a destroyer of all things familiar. The reaction to this can be seen in the news every day, especially with the new All English Al Jazeera, which, by the way, I encourage all of you to watch if you want to see how “the other side” (yes I know this term is a gross over-simplification) views the current conflict. I mentioned in the last paragraph that gender inequality is deeply embedded in the local culture, but even that statement is only necessarily true when viewed through the lens of Western ideology. The fact is that many women, the very people we claim to be liberating with programs like GGLOW, are perfectly happy with the role that their traditional culture has set for them, and by teaching their children otherwise we are potentially undermining their entire way of life. Given the rampant depression, competitively induced stress, rising divorce and crime rates, corporate greed, cultural and economic imperialism, and other societal illnesses found in capitalist countries, can we really claim to be doing these people any favors by introducing our own value systems on them? Who is to say which of these values has led to the degradation of neighborly trust, a familial sense of duty, and other important traditional societal institutions in our own culture? (By the way, I like America a lot but recognizing your own faults is just as important as being proud of your accomplishments.)

Fortunately modern Anthropological thinking is not so naïve or idealistic as to suppose that there was once a “pure” form of any culture that has now been lost. Culture is organic, it is alive, and it is, in its essence, human. Humans have an incredible innate ability to adapt, which is why we can survive in such diverse and hostile environments as Siberia, the Amazon, or (God forbid) New York City. Similarly, culture incorporates new ideas based on changing environmental conditions, interactions with other cultures, and grass-roots based ideological change (re: the birth of any new political, religious, or philosophical movement in history). The important distinction in the case at hand is that the current cultural transformation in Morocco and the rest of the Muslim world is viewed as entirely foreign based, rather than the result of internal societal evolution. Historically speaking Morocco and other nations like it have been undergoing the effects of foreigner induced cultural change for centuries, so from this perspective sending Peace Corps volunteers to developing countries can appear to be nothing more than the stubbornly persistent continuation of a flawed mentality (i.e. “Staying the Course”). Unfortunately this mess is at least partially of our own making, so it seems only fair that we play a hand in trying to clean it up. It seems that sons truly do inherit the sins of their fathers, or, in a more global sense, generations inherit the sins of their ancestors.

The question is, how do we “clean it up” (yet another gross over-simplification of a problem with myriad angles to mull over)? NOTE: I’ve written a deal more about said myriad angles but have chosen not to include them here as this blog is quickly turning into an essay, which was not my original intention. If you’re at all interested on my further thoughts on the subject shoot me an email and we can have a nice discussion. Anyway, onto the big finish (almost)!

Ultimately I believe in education which means I believe in the free exchange of ideas and information. The best that I can do as an individual is to present my students with the knowledge that I have and hope that they can somehow reconcile the lessons they learn from me with the lessons they also learn from their other teachers and role models. In the grand scheme of things I really am only one person in their lives, so the point I made earlier about the importance of my impact on them is really only true to a point. As educators we need to encourage our students not just to listen to us and people with ideas similar to our own, but also to those whose ideas contradict us so that the students can see and understand the wide range of human experience and opinion. A person with a lot of information at their disposal has a much greater ability to synthesize all that information and make the best use of it possible. If we completely pull out of participation in the human community, if we allow ourselves to simply be observers and recorders, then the information we have accumulated will never find its way to the next generation, and all the wisdom of the past will be lost. We DO need reconciliation, we DO need understanding between cultures, and the only way to achieve this is by creating an open forum for discussion of all ideas. In other words, tell ‘em everything you know and let ‘em make up their own damn minds.

Incidentally, I already rationalized all this out for myself a long time ago, which is why I’m here doing what I’m doing, but I find that it can be interesting and instructive to occasionally revisit old arguments, especially to see if your original conclusions still ring true. I hope I haven’t skewed too academic for your tastes, and yes I know this blog entry was supposed to be about summer camp. I seem to have wandered widely off track and I think it’s gone on long enough so I’ll just leave you with one last story (which (sorry) is also fairly long) and let you decide if my efforts here are worth the trouble.

His name is Nourrdine. He’s about 18 years old and this was the first time that he had ever left his town out in the countryside. I don’t know who or what Nourrdine’s immediate influences are but when he came to camp he immediately let it be known how he felt about Islam and those that, in his eyes, strayed from the true path. He told girls who displayed their hair that they needed to wear the hijab (head scarf) before they could talk to him; he descried dancing as the pathway to hell; he even tried to recruit one of the girls who did veil to help him convince all the other campers about reforming their ways to follow a stricter interpretation of the Qu’ran.

Camp is supposed to be a place where the free and open exchange of ideas, attitudes, styles, etc., is encouraged so obviously Nourrdine’s actions couldn’t be tolerated. The camp director, Ayeshi, had actually made the decision to send Nourrdine home, but those of us who knew Nourrdine and felt that we hadn’t had enough time to work with him, intervened. Ayeshi, a good man, was clearly in a difficult position, but, after making it clear to Nourddine that any more of this behavior would get him sent home, he relented.

Nourrdine is a smart kid and, at heart, a good kid. His only real problem was lack of exposure which, of course, was not his fault. Recognizing these facts we made a concerted effort to show him the value of listening to other people’s ideas and taking the time to try to reconcile them with his own before offering his opinions. I remember one particular lunch that I had with him when we were talking about the problems he had been having and he asked for my advice. First I said that I thought it was great that he was so strong in his faith because it gives him a grounded sense of self. I told him that I thought he was intelligent, had a lot of energy, and had really good intentions, all of which adds up to a lot of potential.

“But,” I said, “potential is a tricky word. It means you have the ability to do the world a lot of good or a lot of harm. You have to be careful how you use your potential, whether you’re talking about faith, politics, or anything else. Even when you are trying to help people you might actually be hurting them, so each time you do something you have to ask yourself ‘Is this really good for the people I’m trying to help or is it just good for me?’ You have to look at what the people need, not just what you want them to have.”

I also gave him a metaphor that, I think, really helped him visualize what I was talking about. I said, “Imagine that your mind is a house. If you keep the door of the house closed then nobody can come to visit. You’ll never see your friends or your family, you won’t know what’s going in their lives, and you’ll never meet anybody new or hear anything different. But if you keep the door of the house open then everybody can come inside and you’ll meet lots of new people and hear lots of different ideas, and you’ll be able to go outside and see what the world is like for yourself.”

A lot of kids (and adults) might have listened to what I said and then gone right on doing whatever they had been doing before. Nourrdine is different though. He still believes that Islam is a religion that, at its core, is about love and peace. We caught him pretty early on and managed to help him see how other people can choose to live differently and why that’s okay. I don’t know what would’ve happened to Nourrdine if we’d never met him. I don’t know if he would’ve eventually figured these things out for himself, or if, becoming frustrated with a foreign culture that he saw encroaching on his own, he would’ve done something drastic. Maybe he would’ve turned out okay, but from where we stood we saw someone that frightened us. By the end of camp, though, he had apologized to everyone he had offended, made friends with some of the girls that didn’t wear the hijab, and left us as a new person. Two weeks isn’t a lot of time for someone to make that kind of dramatic turnaround but I think it is a testament to the quality of work being done by American Peace Corps Volunteers and to Nourrdine for keeping the door open.

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