Jessica Watkins in Spanish Speaking Morocco - 1998
I returned two weeks ago from my stay as a gap year volunteer in
Morocco, and I cannot thank you enough for the £250 which
you sponsored me because I feel as if I've had the most amazing
six months of my life. David Denison, St. David's Trust Director,
put me in touch with Lady Bute during her stay in Taroudant in March,
but I have waited until the end to give you an overall view of my
experience.
In terms of work, my time was split between a 3 month placement
at a school for physically and mentally handicapped and deaf and
dumb children in the North, in Tetouan, and a two month placement
in an orphanage in Taroudant in the South where the Trust is based.
I shall give a rough outline of what I was doing at both.
L'Association Hanane in Tetouan was founded 29 years ago by the
father of a girl called Hanane who was handicapped in all three
ways. A couple of the teachers have been working here since the
beginning and a lot of the staff know both father and daughter.
I'm sure the fact that many of the staff are themselves former pupils
has a great bearing on the atmosphere within the school.
 There are now about 250 pupils, 60 of whom are boarders, and since
I was living next to the dormitory, albeit in a separate room shared
with one of the teachers, I got to know them pretty well. The boarders
have very little to distract them so I really did feel that I made
a difference above all as a source of entertainment. Only some of
the older, mobile ones were able to leave the centre and go into
town, the others had to wait until holidays. But there was a television
room, the playground was marked out for basketball and football,
and lots of the girls spent spare time knitting or doing crochet
and embroidery since they are taught to a very high standard to
provide a possible future source of income.
During school hours I was working with the classes for the mentally
handicapped. The ages of the children in a single class ranged between
6 and 16 and they all had different learning difficulties; some
had Downe Syndrome, others were autistic and with a lot of them
I admit that I didn't know exactly what their disability was, and
neither did the teachers. Some of the children only responded to
certain stimuli so I think the school should try to pinpoint the
nature of each child's disability. Mostly I was teaching the children
numbers, colours and animals using pictures I'd drawn as well as
Arabic that I myself had only learned weeks before. I did a lot
of drawing for them to colour in, and a series of posters for the
walls. One thing that was almost guaranteed to get them going was
music, so we had a couple of mini-discos in the classroom, and I
also found that my gymnastics was a great source of entertainment,
so many break-times we spent either giving displays or playing "tig"
(me versus 50 children!) in the playground.
Although some had terrible disabilities, the kids at Tetouan were
really the lucky ones in that virtually all of them had very caring
families to go home to.
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