Saturday is not a day off

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“You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.” -Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson)

Today was a wonderful day for many reasons, one of them being that Mom sent me an email saying that a Calvin & Hobbes book is on the way from Boise to Kelaa. For the life of my I cannot understand how I could have left home without any Calvin. It is very unlike me.
Another reason today was a wonderful day is that I am a Peace Corps Volunteer living in Morocco and it is cloudy but not cold. (Like Dad and I used to bring rain whenever we went camping, I seem to have brought a very wet and mild winter to Morocco. The farmers are happy.) It is good to be here and now, so I thought I’d share a bit about my daily routine that thankfully is not likely to become mundane.
I got up around 8am and went across the street to the corner store for a half liter of milk. It comes in a little plastic bag marked “Le Bon Lait Marrakech” It is pasteurized and whole and tastes like cream to me since I have been drinking nonfat milk for years. The past week or so I have gotten in the habit of boiling some sort of cracked wheat in the milk and calling it breakfast. My little teapot makes three glasses and I usually have a pot of tea made Moroccan style, but with less sugar.
After breakfast I cleaned up a bit then walked to the Dar Chebab to plan my lesson for this afternoon. On the way I ran into the mudira (director) of the Neddi Neswi and we chatted in the street for a bit. At the DC I talked with Malika who works for the Sports part of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. She helps out a lot with sports clubs at the DC and also ends up doing a lot of management stuff. She was the only one at work when I got there, though her young daughter showed up shortly and they left me in charge of the place while I tried to figure out what to teach tonight. Také showed up shortly and went out back to play volleyball with a group of guys. The mudir arrived and left again, saying he’d be right back. I was still trying to figure out the rules for different kinds of conditional phrases. The problem with teaching grammar is that I have to learn it first. After I got my lesson in good enough shape that I thought I could wing the rest, I set out to count the books that had been donated to my Dar Chebab.
The mudir is set on building a library in one of our rooms, which I am very excited about. Happily, the Peace Corps worked with the American School in Rabat who has a partnership with the Sabre Foundation and they sent me a box of books. Even better is that once I saw how great the books were when I requested more they actually sent more. I now have everything from high school English text books to English dictionaries to kids picture books to novels by Jane Austin - and the jewel: a beautiful set of the Lord of the Rings series. Whoever the Sabre Foundation, is I love them. They sent paperwork with the books, so I counted how many books we received and wrote a bit about how they were going to be used and by whom.
At noon Také and I closed up the DC and I went home to make lunch and do some laundry. I was very uncreative in my cooking today and boiled the garbonzo beans that I set to soak last night with potato and curry powder. I wasn’t sure what to do with it then so I added one of each of the veggies I had on hand: a carrot, a zucchini and a tomato. I grated the tomato Moroccan style. They have tomato paste concentrate, but it’s not that good and if you want tomato sauce the only way to get it is to grate a tomato. I thought it was the strangest thing ever when I first saw somebody do it, but have found myself grating tomatoes quite often since I started cooking here. The garbonzo-veggie stew turned out pretty good, though I admit it sounds bland. Enough curry and garlic, or Tabasco, can cure most of my bland concoctions. I have lots of ideas of other things to cook, but still don’t have the supplies to make them. I do my cooking all out of the same pot, which I wash three to four times a day. Most of the ingredients I want cannot be bought at my corner store and I need to make the time to venture out into the rest of Kelaa to explore what else is available.
After lunch I did some laundry, washing and rinsing with my line of buckets in the sun on the roof. Then I had just enough time to rush to the cyber (hole in the wall with computers that I cannot call an internet café) to send a few emails and try to plow through my overcrowded inbox. Half an hour later I was back at the Dar Chebab trying to get organized for my lessons and simultaneously entertain the students who had shown up early.
I started my classes tonight by reading one of the shorter picture books donated by the Sabre Foundation to the class. I try to do some sort of warm up activity in the beginning to let the latecomers straggle in and circulate the attendance sheet. I think it also gets them thinking some in English. Tonight’s lesson was on public speaking, using the conditional. Most of my students have studied the conditional in school already, but that doesn’t mean they understand it as well as they could. After a through review and some work with the conditional I launched into the public speaking part. Lots of the students have to give oral presentations in school and I thought some practice would help. I also told them if they want a job they probably have to interview for the position. We had fun with them getting up in front of the class and saying everything from “If I were an elephant, I would live in Thailand” to “If I were king I would help poor people” to “If you quit smoking you might be healthy.” They are wonderful students.
I teach two classes the same lesson on Saturdays because I found that the Saturday class was so big that it was unmanageable. I teach the same lesson because if I don’t many students will stay for both classes and I will end up with the same overcrowding problem I started with. One class today really got into the public speaking and we ended up almost having a debate about a certain current issue.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer I need to be apolitical and carefully neutral about current events while still being sensitive to Moroccan culture. This is a delicate balance and not always easy. Lots of the students had been using the Muslim boycott of Danish goods as a subject for their conditional sentences and several asked my opinion of the issue. As with all off topic interruptions, I responded that we could discuss it after class. But they wouldn’t let it rest, so I dropped the conditional and told them we would work on public speaking, but that I wanted to hear their opinions about the issue with Denmark. Asking them only to speak clearly and loudly, so everybody could understand, and to stick to English, I opened the floor. Many students stood up in front of the class to say that they were very upset by the cartoons that a Danish paper had printed which were disrespectful to the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), Islam and Muslim culture. I have not seen any of these caricatures myself, but most of the students have. I was surprised by how emotional some of them were and how strongly they felt that the cartoons were not only disrespectful and discriminatory, but hurtful to them personally. Some students talked about freedom of speech laws in other countries, but most spoke of respect and the need for intercultural understanding. I was careful to maintain neutrality and closed the discussion by thanking everybody for sharing their views. I said that I think what we need is for such dialogue go to worldwide in order to prevent such hurtful things from happening, adding that in my opinion if people of other cultures understood Muslim culture better they would be more respectful and sensitive.
My last class ended at 8pm and I walked home to cook dinner and write this blog.

ps. As I am posting this blog there is a new guy working at the cyber, playing music in Spanish and talking to me in Spanish - fluently. This far south very few people speak Spanish, especially in Kelaa where if people know a European language beyond French it's usually Italian. I wasn't kidding about Morocco being a linguist's paradise.

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Photos

My closest mosque
I am within eatshot of two mosques. The closest one is almost always a bit slower than the other, so I hear the calls to prayer in delayed stereo. I took this looking down from my roof, to the east.

The neighborhood "drogerie"
A drogerie is a hardware shop and I am lucky to have one across the street. On the opposite corner is the closest grocery/everything shop. Tractors, horses and other alternative modes of transportation are very common here.

Comments

[huff]

feedback
Wow, sounds like your are having a very interesting experience. Couldn't help but react to your discussing the cartoon thing with your class. Info from this end is that most of my peers can't understand what the outrage is about. After all, cartoons about "our religion" are very common and even when people get upset about something they don't burn things down and kill people. Outrage is one thing, murder is another.... I wonder if some of the chasm between western and other pt. of view is the fact that freedom of speech is not so common in much of the world. anyway... huffer

[huff]

class
I was wondering if any students in my class are sending you any replies.?? I have put a link to your blog on the class weg site. huffer