I suppose that you Americans, as tax payers, are entitled to know what I am doing out here living in Morocco off government money. (a whole $250 a month!)
This blog will, hopefully, enlighten you to the fact that I am actually WORKING-- quite a lot too.
Well, I teach English about 15 hours a week. Only 9 of that is in class, the rest is private sessions that I schedule when requested. I teach at the Dar Chebab, which is the youth center. The kids who attend those classes are mostly boys, though some girls and at the high school-ish level. I teach there in the afternoon/early evening- after school. (hopefully more girls will come once the sun starts setting later and it's actually light outside when they get out of school.) They are generally between the ages of 15 and 30. When I first knew I would be doing "Youth Development" what I thought "youth" were is different from the Moroccan concept of youth. Here, youth are high school-aged people or young, unemployed, unmarried adults. They are referred to as "Chebbab." (pronounced Sheh-BAB with a flat "a" as in cat) I also teach at the Nedi Neswi, which is the women's center. Those women are just coming to get out of their house for a few hours and generally are not learning English for any practical purpose. Those women are their twenties and have kids at home and households to maintain, so I teach them when their kids are at school. It's not very serious and we mostly just have fun.
So WHY am I teaching English? This is not the main goal of Peace Corps, especially considering that I'm not in the education sector-- and this is a Francophone country. The point of it is to meet people and get integrated into my community. The idea is that from meeting people through teaching English I can get my hands in other local development work, partnering with local associations/clubs. One of the goals of Peace Corps is sustainability-- meaning, after a volunteer has left, the work s/he did will continue on with local people. So to do that, that means that we have to collaborate with other associations/clubs and work with local resources-- not just pumping money or outside resources in, like donations. The good news is that this technique is working! I actually have projects and activities coming up. This whole concept was intimidating at first because they send you off into the middle of nowhere and tell you to find projects when you don't know the language or the people. And what kept coming through my mind is "WHAT projects? HOW?" But lo and behold, they are coming full speed. So on Friday I'm actually doing a tree planting project at the lycee (which is the high school). This particular local association called, Al Manar, is a group of well-educated but mostly unemployed men who mainly do informal education classes. By informal, I mean, they hold evening classes for kids who have left school already. By law, you can't leave school until 15 but that rule tends to be ignored out here in L'Arobeya (the countryside). Nobody gets in trouble if your kid leaves school early to work, especially if you are nomadic tent people. So this association works with those kids. They collaborate with the high school too to encourage people to stay in school. So I think the tree planting thing on Friday is just a way to be visible in the community.
I also have been meeting with an environmental club. I haven't quite figured out what they want to do, but I've been attending their meetings and they seem to be pretty organized. They are about my age.
Another club I've been meeting with at the Dar Chebab is made up of younger kids (like, early high school age) and they have said they want to be a club of "environment, theater, and sports." WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? So what I've gathered is that most of the clubs (as opposed to the associations, which are documented and official) are really unfocused. And this serves as a microcosm to their lives. Like, they have dreams and ideas and goals, but they have zero skills in actualizing these goals. This club is an example because they want to do all these things and then, because it's so unfocused, they end up doing nothing. So I feel like my role in this is to encourage them and say "ok you want to do x activity? Great. What's the first step we need to take to make this happen?" While this may seem logical, apparently it is not. This will probably be my main influence in the community. Sure, it's not as tangible as installing a water tower or something like that, but it is surely important and surely "youth development." Which, inchAllah, will translate into "adult development."
The youth I'm working with are so idle. And it's not completely their fault. A beautiful thing about the Arab culture here is that family is So important. People put family before everything else and they are intensely close and protective. One consequence of this is that people are not generally willing to leave their home town to find work. They will take whatever they can find to be home with their families. Yes, many emigrate if given the opportunity, but this is a huge and painful sacrifice for the one who emigrates. So, when these young 20-somethings can't find work, they tend to wallow around and hang out in cafes complaining about it. Or they get grand ideas and become really excited about them....and then they sit in the cafes talking about it, because how does one even go about making one's dreams come true? Where are the examples that they can follow?
So this is the feel I've gotten from my city since arriving the first week of December. Over the remaining 1 year and 10 months, I will really push my effort into teaching, both formally and by example, how to have an idea, a goal, and follow through with it, step by step. Melanie, the volunteer I replaced, has already started paving the way for this. Right before she left she had a conference called "learning to serve: multiplying the power of volunteerism" that was basically a leadership conference for "youth" where they learned these leadership/goal actualizing skills I've been referring to. So, hopefully, as the new volunteer, I will be able to build off of what Melanie began and create some empowered young adults.
Good use of your tax dollars?
