Winding Down

>Well, I have less than a week left here in Morocco, and I must say I won't miss the frigid temperatures, although melancholy is beginning to set in as I contemplate leaving Ali, family and friends here. I fly out of Morocco next Monday and after a week in Europe I will head home. Ali will join me in Berkeley for a few weeks, but he will return to Morocco for the spring semester at Al Akhawayn University of Ifrane (AUI). That means I get to come back for spring break! In January, Ismail, the youngest of the Khejjou clan, will start graduate work in international relations at AUI. Ali are I are very proud of him as being accepted at AUI is no small feat.>We spent a lovely Thanksgiving with American teachers from AUI last week. Ali and a colleague went out the night before to find a turkey for the event. He came home after three hours with three, rather lean turkeys. The turkeys were alive when he picked them out and they were still warm, although perfectly plucked, when he brought them home. They were undoubtedly the freshest turkeys I have ever eaten. They were well received at the Thanksgiving table and just like home, we ate and drank too much.They say it is about to snow in Ifrane and I believe it might. Ali and everyone else around here are thrilled at the prospect, but I am not moved. I have started to store water for him though as they say the pipes freeze up, which interrupts the flow of water into the house, sometimes for days and a time. Lovely. One friend said that it got so bad after three days of no plumbing that she and her husband had to leave town.

I have come down with a virus of some type so I have been passing the days huddled on the couch wrapped in my heating blanket and eating chicken soup. I will be fine as long as the plumbing doesn't freeze up.

The Fez Medina

Yesterday was my third visit to the Fez Medina and I still may go back. It's an amazing experience wandering the more than 500 streets and alleyways that make up this ancient city (Fez will celebrate it's 1300th year anniversary next year!). In fact, this Medina is thought to be the largest contiguous car-free urban area in the world. It houses more than 150 mosques, has the oldest university in Morocco, maybe the world, and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It has more than 13,000 historic buildings.

The only method of transportation in and out of the Medina are the donkeys who run the streets and alleys earnestly transporting goods in and out. Well, okay, there are carts that men push in, and bikes too, but it's the donkey that keeps that city of 150,000 (2002 figures) thriving and well stocked. And those donkeys carry a lot. There are something like 11,000 retail businesses inside the Medina walls. It's virtually impossible to navigate the Medina without a guide and guides are plentiful. I usually take off on my own for awhile, but then resort to hiring a guide after I have walked for a while in one direction only to find myself back where I started a half an hour earlier. My last guide was a charming 15-year old who knew all the nooks and crannies of the Medina and most of the history as well. We spent five hours walking around and taking photos which you can check out by clicking the Morocco link on the left sidebar.

Most of my time here during the week, I spend here at the Villa Inshallah, Ali's Ifrane home (homes here have names rather than numbers). This area is an old section, full of old stately villas previously owned by the French. Most of homes are remain shuttered, in this and most of Ifrane, because except for the university faculty and staff and service staff who work in the restaurants and markets, most of the homes here are vacation homes. It's said that this town of 15,000 swells to 150,000 during the winter and summer holidays. So, it's a nice quiet place to hang out in and it's easy to get work done because there is essentially nothing to do. Well, there are nice walks to take and people to visit in the evenings, but not a lot to lure you out of the house away from your projects. Ali and I have taken many driving trips to the surrounding towns villages, and forests in his fancy new car too. One would never know he hasn't driven in Morocco for 26 years. Of course, it helps to have a vehicle that intimidates everyone else on the road.

Reflections on volunteering

Volunteering in Tanzania was a rewarding, at times frustrating, yet totally inspirational. Here are the things that worked and didn’t work and what I would do differently the next time.

Volunteer Work: Like most volunteers, my expectations going into Tanzania were quite high, and as it turned out, fairly unrealistic. I imagined that by sharing my more than 25 years of expertise in teaching I would be able to positively impact teaching in Tanzania, at least at the school in which I was working and that I would also improve my own methodology by working with colleagues in Tanzania. I suspected that the language teaching methodology in Tanzania was out-dated, relying on rote memorization and language practice that was abstract and archaic, and I wanted to do what I could to raise awareness of more communicative teaching methodologies. As it turned out, there weren’t many opportunities to discuss teaching methodology with my Tanzanian colleagues primarily due to time restrictions and multiple interruptions in the teaching schedule. The time we did have together during our 20-minute morning breaks, we spent talking and arguing about issues outside of teaching and sharing ideas on broad and diverse topics. The one teaching issue that came up a lot centered around the question of disciplining students through corporal punishment. (While our colleagues politely listened to our reasoning against corporal punishment, I don’t think we influenced them at all on this issue).

My Canadian teaching colleague, Nick, and I essentially replaced faculty at the school, freeing them up to attend to extra-curricular matters. The irony is that Nick and I did a fair amount of team teaching together, which allowed the two of us to explore ideas and teaching techniques and learn from each other. But this did not happen with the Tanzanian teachers. So, if I were to do this again, I would strongly recommend that I team-teach with in-country teachers, on some sort of regular basis, to afford us the opportunity to learn from each other in planning and implementing techniques and strategies.

Living in Tanzania. In Tanzania, I lived in a house with, on average, 28 other volunteers, and 13 or so African staff who lived and worked at the “home base.” It was great to get to know so many sensitive, caring and committed individuals from Tanzania, Europe, Australia and the U.S. I learned a lot from them and developed friendships that I know will be long lasting. Two months, however, was a long time for me personally to live in such a communal setting (I was lucky that we were never more than three in my bedroom), and living in the very comfortable home base, both sheltered and isolated us from the realities of life of most Tanzanians. So, when I do this again, I will sign up with a volunteer organization, such as Cross-Cultural Solutions, for a shorter time, say two weeks, to get oriented to the country, area, culture, and volunteer opportunities and need. Then I will branch out on my own for the remainder of my time. In Moshi, for example, I saw ads for apartments and houses that looked comfortable and safe for around $250 a month. I could have rented one and either continued to work at my placement (assuming that would be possible) or approached other schools and NGOs in the area to do volunteer work on my own. There is plenty of need there.

While I feel I fell short of my goals with regard to teaching, most of my other expectations were surpassed. Living and working with Tanzanians was a richly rewarding cultural experience that will impact my life for years to come. I am also satisfied that my work there had a positive impact on my students at St. Theresia Secondary School. They certainly learned a lot about American and Canadian culture through our work with them as we dispelled myths and stereotypes about our cultures and explored the universalities of the human experience. I am sure that they benefited from the exposure they had to new ways of teaching and learning. I also hope that the pen pal project we initiated will continue to enrich their lives in the future.

Finally, I had hoped that I would find ways to continue to lend a hand in Tanzania after I left, and those opportunities are in certainly in abundance. I look forward to working with woman’s organizations and orphanages in Tanzania and Rwanda to assist them in developing projects that are sustainable and improve the lives of women and children there. And I look forward to returning to Tanzania in the future to following up on my work and preserve the unique friendships I made there.

Children in Rwanda

These children captivated my guide, David, and me on our last day in the north. We had driven up to an eco hotel with good views of the twin lakes and had found a bench to sit on that offered lovely panaramic views of the lakes and the mountains and farms surrounding it. We were a few hundred meters up the mountain and there were farms below us, down a very steep hill. David and I talked for a few minutes when sudenly two children appeared out of nowhere and began chatting us up. They had climbed up an incline that was at least 85 degrees, in barefeet. Within minutes and hand full of children appeared and more continued to come until we had a small crowd.


David began asking them about school and their dreams for the future and then he asked them if knew any songs, which of course they did, and so we were serenaded for a bit. Dancing followed and then it was time for us to leave.

David remembered he had brought some pencils for village children so we said we would go to the car and then return with a little surprise for them. When we returned five minutes later, the children were no where to be seen. But as we approached the bench there were shouts, it seemed from all over the valley below as the children informed david that they had been threatened with a beating if they came back up. Sure enough, two hotel guards appeared and said they children were a nuisance and they had told them to leave and not come back. After David explained that he had some pencils for them, the guards relunctantly agreed to let them come up, as long as they promised to stay away after that. When David told the children they could come back up, a few brave souls came half way up, but when they saw the guards they ran back down screaming. It took about fifteen minutes to conjole them all to come back up (when David asked the guard to throw their switches down, we started to make progress) Eventually, they all came up and David conducted an elaborate method of doling out the pencils and the kids, so appreciative, vowed to stay away form the hotel and study hard. Then the scampered down the steep hill.

You can see that they are dressed in rags, and some had clear signs of malnutrition. They all had professional careers in mind (doctors, lawers, engineers) for their futures. Their good cheer and hopefulness belied their dire living conditions

Home in Morocco

Well, I finally made it to Morocco and it is a joy to be here. It's wonderful to be reunited with Ali and see old friends, and I am blown away by how fast the computer connections are here!

Ali has a lovely little villa in the unitersity town of Ifrane high in the Atlas Mountains. It's cold here but there is fireplace and we have heating blankets and will be getting some area heaters this weekend, so it's all good, as they say. I have a number of projects that I am working on for folks in Tanzania, so I plan to just hang out at home and work most of the time while Ali is in class. It feels really good to have a home again!

Ali is enjoying his students at the university and is planning to stay the second semester. He will come home for winter break and then come back to Morocco in January and work until May. I will become an "Agreeing Widow" as they say in Holland. I guess one of us will have to travel over spring break this year.

Now that I have unlimited access to a computer, I have started to post photos of my journey in East Africa. I have put up some from Rwanda trip on the sidebar to your left. You can view these as a slide show, but should choose the "captions" option so you can read about what you are seeing. Tanzanian photos to follow!