Blogs from Rabat, Rabat-Salé-Zemmour-Zaer, Morocco, Africa - page 10

Here are pictures from the first field trip we took. They are from Tuesday, May 26. Everything was impressive and interesting but I kept finding myself thinking of the learning process involved in a field trip. Middle school graduation marks the end of the field trip's golden years and I don't think I think this might have been my first field trip since high school. For the most part the pictures do the trip justice. Minus the explanation of what you are looking at, an album of pictures is roughly the same thing. So what is the vale of a field trip? I think the value of an educational field trip on the college level goes beyond simply viewing and asking questions. In my mind the real benefit of travel is learning to enjoy something foreign ... read more

I have arrived in Rabat. I flew out of JFK last night at 8:30 and got into Casablanca sometime around 6:00 am local. The flight itself was only six hours but you can take up subsequent grammatical errors with jet lag from one hour of sleep. Just had orientation at Amideast, the school where we will be studying, and am about to meet my host family. The city looks like an awesome place and I am starting to struggle through the language transistion. I hope that in a week I will be comfortable. For now, Barak Allah Feek (may God bless you).... read more

"We think you are insulting us," said Akmed, the blind Moroccan, "when you say that time is no problem in Morocco". As the Technical Coordinator for the Peace Corps Orientation and Mobility program (Stage, '93) I was hosting a seminar for the administrators of the blind schools from all over Morocco. I had been given two days notice to coordinate it. My first response: a PANEL! I figured if I got a panel of people together to discuss blindness issues, spoke real slowly, and used complex American jargon that would take the translator thrice as long to find an Arabic equivalent, I'd be able to make it through the day and use my allotted time fully, if not completely productively. Time... Yes, I had perhaps been a bit insensitive on occasion to the cultural differences between ... read more

Why Time Is No Problem in Morocco (Part 1) In the 1990s I was hired by the Peace Corps to be the Technical Coordinator in the Orientation and Mobility/Visually Impaired program. The school was located on a campus in Rabat, the capitol, in the northwest tip of Africa. In Arabia, language not only is used to describe dreams and reality: language IS dreams and reality. Experience is a poor relative. The river that divides Europeanized Rabat from its mystical, gleaming whitewashed citadel of magic, Sale (pronounced "Sah'LAY") is named the Bou Regreg: "The River of the Father of Reflections". Compared, physically, to the great rivers of the world, the Bou Regreg is a stream. A rivulet. A tinkle. Yet its name has mystical, cosmic implications. It is the father of reflections: our lives are apparitions in ... read more

dear all, you will have to excuse the wait, i arrived back from marrakesh on wednesday evening, and had a rubbish day yesterday with only 2 students in the morning class and one in the evening one, but today i made sure i had a really well planned lesson etc., and the two hours flew by! now have the weekend off again to plan more lessons, but i don't like staying in rabat, as you may have gathered, so i think this may be done en route to the place with lots of flamingoes that i will be seeing with dassy... we had an incredible five days. we arrived in marrakesh on the friday evening to grey skies and rain, which was pushing it a bit, considering the weather we had been having up here, and ... read more