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nseigner les adultes The class was not that well attended that day, due to Eid- normally she and Hoodha (Rachid’s wife) teach sixty women between them. Karima had complained that they were hard to teach as they tended to chatter, but when she tapped meaningfully on the board, they were immediately silent. Quite an achievement with twenty or so women, all older than thirty five, who are illiterate. Well, they were illiterate, now they can read the letter "t". They were all veiled, mostly swathed in the huge cloths that the older women wear, great coloured sheets that serve as over clothes and veils. They were all delighted to have us at the back of class, shyly turning around and smiling, and laughing with us when they got it wrong. Its terrible that they should have to learn to read so late in
life, and it is something that still occurs- there is no obligation
to go to school, one of Ishraf's friends has been taken out of school
by her parents, she is 12! The illiteracy rate runs at about 50%
of the population, of which 75% are women. Many Mosques and Islamicist
organisations are taking part in what is a large government drive
for literacy. Yet another of the many examples of how, Islam is
definitely a force for change and reform. Giving to the poor: Selka is continuously giving money to people in the street, something that I have started to do, slightly despite myself, but often because it is simply polite to give a dirham to a poor old woman “the women in blue”, with whom I have had conversations in basic Arabic outside the cake shop. There is a woman who often comes to the door for money, and also a neighbour, maybe my age with a two-year old son to whom Selka gives money, and purposely left over meals every now and again. There seems to be no shame in receiving or guilt for being in the position of being able to give to others; more a privilege for both. weddings Selka and Mohamed’s wedding -Saharan style-, from the video they showed me. Day 1 Feast for 120 male guests, roast sheep, a small one per table of ten. Huge mounds of couscous, then fruit then tea. All taking place in august in a tent in the Sahara in Selka's family garden. Yes they look very very hot, and no one is moving very much. Music but not much dancing in the evening. Day 2 evening. Selka wears a white draped dress, and two lines of pearls looped on either side of her head, brown dots painted around her eyes on her face. A tray is brought in, and they proceed to feed each other first
milk, then dates, and then exchange rings. It is quick, embarrassing,
(accompanied by much laughter as we watch it) and it might be the
camera angle but not many people seem to notice its going on. day 3 evening Selka wears a draped dress and has white flowers in her hair( cant
be real in the Saharan august) Making couscous balls is hard, especially as loads of people are watching you -I speak from experience Mohammed and his uncle do the same, but it becomes a hilarious competition as to who can make the other person eat the largest amount of couscous. The party begins again, more dancing and the uncle makes a complete fool of himself, dancing in is white jallabah, looking like a ghost and leaving us along with the wedding party, in hysterics. Painting school walls- the moral dilemma So we've completed the first big cliché. I could try and explain it away, how even though it is a cliché it was an amazing experience and how the children will really benefit. But I won’t, and I would like to think that they will, but I doubt it. At the school the people from GMH put on a bit of entertainment for the children who had come along, maybe 40 of them. The usual songs and clapping but this time they did a clown act which was very funny, even though we didn’t understand much. But once again, we, the so called volunteers were moderately useless. At least we could paint the walls of the school! It was fun, and satisfying, but I wondered, couldn’t the children do this, don’t they want to do this, surely they should be doing this? Even if it is us who draws out the designs. But they had mostly gone home, and the few who stayed refused to join in when I proffered a brush or sponge. Partly because they were shy, but maybe partly because they just haven’t done that kind of thing before. Even more reason to do so now. But will they benefit? The school was much brighter, and for a week they'll admire the pictures, and whenever someone important visits they'll be told, "Oh the volunteers from GMH painted those walls". But it won't brighten up the dark dirty classrooms, it wont hide the fact that the benches are all broken, that the toilets aren’t cleaned, and that the teachers are expected to teach every subject without training, or without having any speciality in that subject. Or, worst of all, that some children don't even start school, and that many don't finish it. Things ARE improving, many of the adults who are illiterate are being taught to read and write, and attendance is higher. However, Morocco only signed up to the rights of children in 2001 so it has a long way to go. And where do we English volunteers stand in this? I honestly don’t know. I only hope that this will be the first and last cliché to be fulfilled. The Orphanage Oh, the babies will, in the words of Karima, "break your heart", it made me angry, very angry. those babies (twenty of them with to five carers) that had been left because they were born outside of marriage, some only a few months old, some much older ( they can stay till 18) the babies were really very disturbed at being without a mother, kept in a crèche all together so not much opportunity for sleep. The orphanage was very well equipped; many businesses and charities had donated money to build individual houses each for 6 children and two carers, who all seemed to genuinely be interested in the children and especially in their school work. But the babies! And by association, the mothers, who must be traumatised by not only the social shame of their pregnancy, but by the loss of their children. Do they give them up willingly? Or is there pressure? There must be. It seems ridiculous, surely the dishonour is already done in becoming pregnant, and the giving away of the child seems to make it worse, not better. Even more upsetting was the home for six disabled orphans. They seem to be severely mentally disturbed -head banging and self harming- they have two carers who spend twelve hours a day with them alternating days. There is another woman who does nine to five work and then two women who alternately work nights. Simply to prevent them from harming themselves and each other is too much for two people, let alone cooking and cleaning. So the opportunity for any playing, learning or affection is nonexistent. We will all work at the orphanage next week as there are school
holidays, and at least there I need not worry that we will not be
needed, they seem to be desperate for help in several areas. Work Christina and I will be with the disabled children, and Nicky and Grace will be with the babies for the first week. The following week until the end, Grace will be with the disabled children and Christina with the babies at the Lala Amina orphanage. Nicky will be at the Wifaq school teaching IT for half a day and assisting a teacher in a class of disabled children for whom there is no room in any of the special classes as yet. Mostly doing activities such as music, art or dancing. I will be working at another school, Mansour Debit, doing a similar thing but assisting a class of deaf and speechless children, which has been run by a teacher for four years now. She needs me to teach some of the children whilst she teaches the others, as they are all of different ages and abilities. I am excited but nervous. Lala Amina When you arrive in the morning, some of the children are usually up, most often Bouchra who is on her potty! Then its time to get all of them showered, dressed and their beds changed before breakfast, which is quite a fight. Some of the children are keen to shower, eagerly removing their clothes well before their turn, others less so, therefore there is lots of screaming and some dragging. Almost all of them wet or soil their beds, which means trying to get the filthy clothes of them(as far as I’m aware, pyjamas haven’t become fashionable here yet), and cleaning them, which, considering that the bathroom is small and usually filled with half naked children eager for their shower, and that there is little hot water (one morning we ended up boiling the kettle and pans) is exhausting. They cannot really dress themselves, apart from Abdullah, and although some of them are compliant, others, like Bouchra, run round screaming to make the process more exciting. Add the fact that its very cold so they all wear many layers of ill fitting clothes, and you have half an hour of fun! Then there is Fadua, who is the only one of the children who is
physically disabled as well as mentally, so she has to be undressed
and lifted, screaming to the shower, she is painfully thin and does
not weigh much. She has sores on her body from wearing wads of cloth
nappies, and seems to find the whole experience traumatic, but this
may simply be due to the way she is carried so roughly. When the beds are made, the children are sometimes allowed outside, where we played with them, though to start with the women were quite disapproving of us doing this. Then its time for lunch, ridiculously early, as their day is mostly punctuated by meals. By this point the clothes of at least two of the children have already been changed as they have wetted or soiled them; the laundry seems to be on permanently. After lunch break - they also have a siesta, its time to fold and organise all of the clothes and laundry into the cupboards, usually fending off the children, Aziz likes to put his hand on your back and follow you around, which would be ok if he weren’t about 6ft tall and strong! Also Abdullah, who is about fifteen will either be in a good mood and drawing, or in a bad mood and throwing the toys (which few ones there are) out the windows. Khalid is put in a kind of straight jacket to stop him from trying to rip his ears off- large scabs are a testament to his determination to do so! He is often put in the room on his own to just sit and rock. When I have persuaded him to play, he tends to resort quickly to violence, snatching my wrists and dragging me, or hitting his head in frustration if I ignore him. The TV is on permanently, but the children aren’t very aware of it, or of each other. Aziz is occasionally aware of others though, but that generally takes the form of banging the window in Fadua’s room to make her cry. She is the calmest of them all, mostly because she can’t really move, and often resorts to banging her head in frustration. However, if you hold her hand and say 'ka' to her she will cheer up, and giggle but she also has tried to bite me, maybe because my hand was in the way of her biting herself. In her case, it is significant to her development that she is an orphan, as the other children are so attention demanding that she gets left on her own. She would respond very well to more love and attention, but she is maybe 16 so I don’t know what will happen to her. In the afternoon it is Cassecroute (tea), more bread and milk, to supplement the unripe oranges that the children escape to steal off the trees. After a day of simply running around, keeping them in clean clothes and making sure that they don’t harm themselves or each other, we were exhausted, so any playing or teaching is a miraculous bonus. That is where we volunteers come in, in theory lightening the load of the vital work, and spending more time playing with and trying to teach the children. What they really need is interaction. The fact that this has been neglected in the past is evident in the way that they strive to get your full attention. As of today (in theory) I start my permanent job, but I will try to go back and visit them, whilst Grace will be working there every day, and Christina popping in from looking after the babies. Ashara This afternoon before work I sat to watch the Shia Muslims in Iraq on the TV, self flagellating teenagers beating themselves with brooms whilst moving to a slow rhythm. There were men shouting encouragement to them and in the background, a couple of soldiers in what Fisk (just finished the tome) would call "kitty-litter yellow" of unknown provenance, but its Iraq, so they're probably American And in Morocco? Couscous with the salted and hung in the sun bits of meat and stomach left over (yes STILL LEFT OVER despite eating nothing else for a month) from Eid al-Kabir's sheep! I have already had my first lot chez a neighbour having come back tired and hungry yes, but not hungry enough for couscous when I know that there will be more later. It means music- in a square near to us, beside the smelly samak/ huut (fish) stalls, they have set up a stage. Tewfiq promised that there will be TATAT TAT RATATAT TA TAT tonight i.e. loud traditional drumming. But for the moment it’s Arabic pop to collide with the Muezzin, and the growl of the sermon, from the mosque that is the same distance in the other direction from our house, about 25metres! It means fighting- no, I know you think that that tradition was reserved only for hot late afternoons in food stores during Ramadan. It must be connected to the self-flagellation, and to the violence surrounding the death of Ali in 661 AD, killed in a battle in Mesopotamia. It’s supposed to involve throwing eggs etc, but since there has apparently been real violence involving acid in past years, it has been strictly banned. This hasn’t stopped Ishraf and the neighbourhood children from raiding the fridge and having to wash their hair several times a day. I thought egg was good for your hair? This egg thieving also provided the latest opportunity for the children to laugh at me. As Ishraf pretended to squash an egg on her unsuspecting mum’s head, I shouted “LAA”. No, in Moroccan Arabic, with a strong emphasis that makes it effective with children. They found it hysterical, I presume either because of my accent, or of my strange reaction to shout in Arabic. My favourite TV observation is the very amusing self-censoring that goes on with the remote, the minute even the most innocent of kisses appears in the program. The result of this is that the children can see horrendous violence, murder, explosions, car crashes, mangled bodies, but a husband and wife kissing? Oh no, my eyes! Never mind that you might lose track of the story halfway through, because no one really pays attention to that any way. What was funny for self-censoring was watching them watch a trailer for the film Brokeback Mountain on French news, because it was shown as the story is, a friendship between two guys who fall in love, so it was all fine and macho, there was some discussion in a French about homosexual undertones in western movies in general, and then, all of a sudden, the men are rolling around in the grass, ahhhhhhhhh change the channel quick. It was like a channel changing speed exercise! AHHH I'm a nasty teacher now! I am teaching IT to year 6 children for half the day (aged 12 to 15 and classes of 10, two classes a day). Spending quite a lot of time planning for the first lesson, with Soussi and Nicky and Rachid’s cat, definitely paid off. The children are very keen, but also children, so they like to chatter, and are desperate to just play games etc. In a blessing in disguise only one computer was working to start with, which meant that I was mostly teaching boring things like names of the main components, and when I taught them about clicking and double clicking, they could only go one at a time on the computer in front of the class. Therefore when a boy thought he would be clever and double click on a program, to open it before we'd learnt it, I could shout at him in front of the whole class. That didn’t happen again! However, by the time I got to teach the second round of lessons, I let them onto the computers in groups, to do a typing game, it was madness to start with. Some of the children are really keen to please so were fine, others were determined to go and do other stuff, despite having been told not to do so by me at the beginning of the class. I had to do a "get off the computers now and sit down at the desks in silence" to one group, having told them off, and spent 10mins revising other stuff with them, they got the message not to do anything that i hadn’t taught them. The strange thing is, that even though they are typical children during the lesson, at the end they often come up to shake your hand or kiss you at the end of the class, to thank you. Its really nice, Nicky said that the same happens to her, and I reckon it shows that they realise that a person can be a teacher, and a person, or, the cynical side of me would say that its just to take the mickey a bit. As for the deaf and speechless class, that’s going really well. There are nine pupils aged between seven and fourteen, and the teacher is very good with them. The lessons have been well thought out and everything is geared towards getting them to communicate. So we did things like getting them to distinguish sounds, to do some maths, such as counting and adding, to do some writing, as they are slowly learning the Arabic alphabet and sign language. They are all very expressive, despite the fact that only one or two are able to form words. They all love drawing, so keeping them out of the drawing books is a challenge. They do have some behavioural problems, such as one boy who is very violent towards the others. They do not focus very well on the tasks, but the teacher takes the attitude that they simply need to be able to communicate, and she encourages them to do anything that they are interested in. Some of the children are very bright, such as one little boy, (though he is obviously spoilt) who, when we went on the computers as only two pupils turned up (it was raining), learned how to open and close programs, and completely learnt how to use paint in half an hour, despite having never been on a computer before, and from simply watching what I showed him. Birthday and Work We started in the downstairs sitting room with some really nice presents and biscuits, whilst Selka proceeded to take me in and out of the room to dress me up in different dresses, which did make me feel a little bit embarrassed, to say the least. My favourite is definitely the pink Saharan one, with the hair head-dress that goes with it (which Tewfiq put on yesterday with a cap and which made him look like a Rasta-man! He and Selka then danced manically around the house, not quite the look it was intended for!) We went to the nice upstairs sitting room, where the huge cake was waiting for me, along with three different juices, strawberry, orange and banana-apple, home-made tarts which are delicious, and sparklers, which was a bit bizarre and quite terrifying, visions of burning down houses! Having admired, cut and eaten the cake, whilst some crazy happy birthday in 5 different languages music was played, and the balloons that had such things as, 'I love you' and 'Bonne Annee' written on them. Have been working quite hard, am really beginning to enjoy the Deaf and Speechless classes, the children are mostly bright and eager to learn, as long as it doesn’t involve maths or writing. The program for them is really good, it includes sport which is really fun and they learn a lot from it- waiting to have their turn for the ball, and to try to work with others. Its very difficult in the classroom though as they are very easily distracted, and often resort to violence due to frustration. They seem to enjoy drawing most of all, and they like the distinguishing sounds exercises. However, they can be quite horrible to each other, often just for the sake of it! I have also been taking them on the computers, about which they are now all obsessed, to the point where that’s all they ask me about! They were very quick to learn about it though, and loved Paint most of all. Rachid, one boy who has also had a hearing aid fitted, enjoyed listening to the music samples. The teacher takes the attitude that anything they learn will be useful, so encourages them with whatever they like. She also wants to help them get some training for later in life, possibly as cordonniers, as two of the older boys have already done leather work. IT classes are also better, as I know what the children are like more now, so I know how much freedom to give them, they learn very quickly, almost too quickly, but that is also good as I want to give them some projects to do, such as posters etc. Taroudannt is the same as ever, though more sunny this week, and also many more tourists, mostly middle aged and staying in camper vans which I cycle past on the way to work twice a day (home at lunch for tagine). May have got the hang of the souq, as when buying Henna for Christina's birthday (which we celebrated with drinks at a posh hotel) I managed to carry out most of the conversation in Arabic, got given free henna tattoo stickers, and a nice piece of cake that the shop owner gave me. It was so nice to be able to practice my Arabic, though now I am trying to do more at home as well, saying how my day was and what I’m doing tomorrow. Jbl (mountains) Next time I will try to write a bit about what the town is like, all the strange shops, and the people who stand around, especially in our area. Ferk L'Hbab The mosque also backs onto the kind of square formed by the road junctions, and there are always stalls selling khobs (bread) against the ochre walls. Along with the students and children who walk or cycle of motorbike past, there are always women, draped in a large cloth, only eyes showing, of women in Jallabas, who go past with a handful of small children. The narrow alley where Mohammed and Selka's house is very narrow, but people still manage to motorbike up it. It is also very long, and winding, going deep into the jumbled houses. The house where I live is one of the first, but by the number of people who come past, there are many more. There is some kind of building work going on in one of the houses, so every morning we hear the mule backing up the alley, its hooves echoing and the "giddy-up" waking everyone up. There is also a man who sells oil and a man who sells gas bottles, and they both hoot their horns as they cycle up the alley. The children play football in the street, and the smaller children work their way from house to house for kisses and bits of cake. They squawk and scream most of the day. When I have been into neighbours houses, they always involve very steep stairs, to go up to the sitting room, and they are mostly as dark as ours. The women who live in the houses closest to us are always gossiping loudly out in the street, sometimes in their dressing gowns, or in jallabas, or in the draped cloths. They most often seem to gossip about the hammam that backs onto Selka's house, and which pollutes most of the neighbourhood by burning rubbish. I love to stand at the upstairs window to look down in the alleyway or out into the road, and watch all the people go by. Work is going well, though I have realised that there are only 4 more weeks of work left, which seems very little time, especially with the deaf and speechless children. They make good progress, but it is quite slow, so more time is really needed. However, this does at least mean that I am trying to carry out as many ideas as possible, tomorrow we are making pasta necklaces with them, which means that I must go and get some more paint and materials. Hopefully I will be able to do some of the drawing exercises with Mustafa and the older children. They also loved doing graffiti on the photos that I had taken of them, in Paint on the computer, will try to get them to work from those as well. The Best Meal and The Worst Meal School: with the IT classes am still doing PowerPoint presentations with them, which is going surprisingly well, and hopefully next week I will do some mathematical or visual games programs with them With the deaf and speechless children, we did leaf printing yesterday, which turned first into printing with whatever you can find, then into hand printing, and then into screaming and getting the paint everywhere. They did do some really nice stuff though, and they have been making animal masks too which are really good. Am also trying to push them on the maths front (I would do reading and writing too, but am not really up to standard enough). They hate being pushed to keep on going till they get it right, but it really seems to work, Rachid, an older boy was delighted first when he got all the subtractions right, and then even more delighted when I showed him how to do it without writing down lines for every number. what we do in the class with the deaf & speechless
children- me assisting Reading/ Writing: not as big a part of the lessons as I would have hoped, but teaching them Arabic letters, and vowels and then words that begin with those letters. Generally Habiba ( the teacher) writes it on the board, then gets them to say the sounds and write them down on their mini blackboards. This takes quite some effort, as they do not have good concentration and often resort to simply drawing on the boards. They also learn the sign for the letter at the same time Maths: also not as often as would like, varies from getting small children to count small disks and right down the number, to me trying to get the older boys to do more complex addition and subtraction sums. They are good at maths but once again lack concentration, and really need one on one help Listening exercises, these vary from distinguishing different instruments such as maracas or triangle, to saying whether the whistle came from the left or right hand side of the room. The thing is that they can all hear, to a greater or lesser extent, and that they are simple used to ignoring these sounds. Thus by firstly distinguishing instruments, the idea is that they will eventually be able to distinguish their voice and the voices of others Sport/ balance etc: some of them walk quite badly, as they cannot balance well so we do sport with them, football, or simply running around, or skipping/ hopping etc. this is also good as it tires them out, not so good as it is hard to get them to do any kind of team sport as they tend not to pass to others as they cannot al for the ball. Art/making a mess: try to do some creative things with them, some of the children such as Mustafa, do this anyway at home, but others are only just learning how to draw. I must explain to then the principles of mixing colours, because they tend to put black in everything. They have done some nice leaf printing, and made paper flowers and paper chains, which involved ripping up a lot of paper for no reason at all. Some funny things they do: every day Hafida, one of the girls tells me that i should wear the veil because god told me to! She explains in signs and it’s very funny because she is so insistent. They always show everyone all the food they brought for break time, which seems a bit foolish considering how much thieving goes on. They do not realise that I cannot speak Arabic, or that I don’t come from Taroudannt, which means that Rachid, who should really go to a normal school now, as he is ready for it, gets very annoyed with me when I cannot write or understand what he is saying. The funniest is when someone farts, because they all get up and run out the room, and because we also run out to get them, they now think that it is normal to run out the room. They also re-arrange the tables obsessively, so they can be nearer to the person they want to hit. The Bled(countryside) I haven’t written for ages, maybe because I've been busy, or maybe because I am finally settled in so that things no longer seem so remarkable that I feel the urge to write about them. Yesterday I went to the Bled(countryside) with Habiba, the teacher who I work with. We set off in a Renault 4, all six of us, Habiba, me, her son and niece in the back, and her sister and her sister's husband in the back. It was a sunny/cloudy day and the farm where we stopped had a large bare mountain behind it. Inside the cool courtyard was your dream Moroccan garden; sweet smelling orange and lemon trees, and not much else. All around were blue painted walls, and a room in which we sat on the floor for lunch, "kouli l'hem Hannah" (eat the meat Hannah!) was the order of the day. After the meal we wandered in the fields picking poppies with the children, and then they showed us the dirty cows, and the olive oil groves and press. The whole village was a collective, in which they were all give equal amounts of land, and they sold the wheat, milk and olive oil to make profit and to pay back the cost of the land. It sounds idyllic, and it was, but it seemed to me that they were
mostly women working there, and the work must be very hard, as though
they did have a tractor, a lot of it is done by hand. Work is, well, good actually, it’s very tiring with the deaf and speechless children, but they are still funny and good humoured. Rachid and Younis now cycle home with me, which is a bit worrying as Younis can't hear car horns. He also ate couscous outside our house last Friday with four other boys. Hafida was delighted because I wore a headscarf one day. I tried to explain to her that it was because my hair was dirty, but she was even more delighted because she thought that I was ashamed to show my hair generally. Anis, a new boy from the orphanage has decided that I am his mother, which is quite strange because he hits me and kicks me, screaming "khreib" (nasty). Nadia has progressed from stealing money to stealing bicycles. Le Fin du Travail On my last day the long-awaited maths breakthrough took place. After weeks of practically picking up the children and taking then to the blackboard to do sums, or having long battles with them to persuade them that no, one sum is not that exhausting, on the last day I had a breakthrough. The older boys got the hand of adding and subtracting with carrying over figures. They were so pleased with themselves that they kept asking me for harder and harder sums, and kept getting them right. All of a sudden I was surrounded by the whole class begging me to give them sums and so even Nadia and Mustafa had sudden picked up how to do two plus four. As usual it ended in a general melee, but I was so happy, they had learnt something. When I visited briefly after the trip to the Sahara, Mustafa said to me( in signs as usual), “We haven’t done any sums like last week since you were here” and seemed to be asking me to stay and give him sums at that very moment. Christina will be taking over from assisting Habiba after the school holidays and she’s primed to teach them a tonne of maths. Goodbye party from IT classes. They had warned me, but in my last afternoon my pupils had decided to give me a party, and I wasn’t really prepared for the mayhem that was to follow. About forty kids turned up, about half of whom I had never even seen before. The problem was I didn’t really know what the plan was so I couldn’t really tell them to shut up, or organise them. Fortunately one of the lady teachers came to my rescue with her orange plastic piping stick. Thus the kids fed me with fizzy drinks and cakes, fed themselves and got generally very stressed with each other. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so hot in my classroom and if it hadn’t been so bizarre. The pupils who I had never taught were the most friendly, and the classic Moroccan way of entertaining - stuff your guest and leave them to their own devices - never fails to bemuse me. Eventually the cheerful teacher who was responsible (well, in theory) for my classes turned up. We went outside where they gave me presents (Anglo-Saxon present-receiving embarrassment kicked in at this point), cake, did sketches in Arabic and a quiet girl who was supposed to be translating the plays for me said when I was given a pink headscarf, “Muslim women wear headscarves you know”. I looked at her bare head to disprove her point. Though the whole event was moderately ridiculous, I was very touched, they really didn’t need to go to such an effort, and I felt worried that I could have taught them better. However, the problem is that IT is not on the curriculum, so no regular teacher would be paid to teach it and therefore my teaching it was as seems to be the norm, making the best out of what wasn’t an ideal situation. Sahara The desert started suddenly, there was sand and there were camels. The guest house was a little further along, built of mud but very grand for a mud house. We sat sweating in the Saharan tent whilst we were poured strong tea. That evening we ate couscous and began one of many in depth conversations, the ruder meanings of the word “Tina” and “twenty”. Hajj listening in with much concern. I woke early and sat on the roof in the cool and drew before wandering along the track, trying not to be conspicuous as first donkeys and then three very large camels were led past me. Breakfast was sizable and at about eleven, as it was heating up we set off for a walk. The Kasbah in the village was filled with sand and with friendly children who we chattered away to, if we had been on our own then we would maybe have felt differently but Moroccan men all seem to have this ease and friendliness with children. The narrow passageways were dark and cool and occasional streams of light gave a strange colour. We burst into the sun. The desert was there, stretched out but more threatening that I imagined it. We walked on for a while getting thirstier and thirstier. In the small village I poured a bottle of water down my gullet and Fouad dragged us shopping. Two of the boys, Christina and I drank tea on the sofa in the carpet shop whilst the others browsed. Fouad emerged in full Saharan regalia and insisted on being repeatedly photographed. Having walked back along the hot main road we had lunch before heading to MHamid in the minibus. Mhamid is an empty town on the very edge of the true Sahara, and was pretty much deserted. In many of conversations in Morocan between Fouad and the others, I picked up on the word Polisario every minute or so. We weren’t in Polisario country, and their real stronghold was several hundred miles away in Tata. The conversation took more of the form of muted fear at any potential disturbance than eager Saharan or Moroccan nationalism. However, the following weekend the King was scheduled to make a speech announcing measures for partial Saharan independence. As we waited to get on our camels my grandparents phoned for a chat, however having never been on a camel before the prospect of talking on a mobile phone at the same time was a bit daunting. I tried to introduce myself to my camel at which he made a good attempt at biting my arm! After the forward and backward lurch we were all up and along our way, firstly through the village and then out into the rocky desert. The movement was disconcerting but the view sufficiently distracting to make me forget it. As the village disappeared behind us the dunes began, soft and rolling, the evening sun cast gentle shadow on the beautiful colours. We eventually clambered up a small steep dune and the tent came into view. As the camel owners put the tea on Nicky and I clambered to the top of one of the high dunes surrounding the tent. The sun was setting, and below us the camels munched on a tree. We buried Nicky in the hot sand and then slid back down for more strong Saharan tea. Supper was a stew eaten in the half-dark before we gathered around the fire to chatter and join in the rhythmical clapping and beating on the watertub. The fire lessened and we lay gazing at the stars and competing to see shooting stars. In the night Fouad, Nicky and Grace were conquered by the cold and retreated to the tent to apparently see a large white camel ambling around next to where the rest of us were sleeping. I woke early again and sat on a dune in the morning breeze. Breakfast was miraculously large, Moroccans don’t seem to do minimalist camping; jam jars, cheese, coffee pots as well as orange juice and the obligatory tea. I was the first to clamber onto my camel, a challenge as it was loaded up with two metre-wide baskets. As I got one leg over it descided to stand up very quickly, miraculously I had the presence of mind to leap off, and didn’t provide everyone with the sight of me hanging off a very tall camel. The rest of the day was spent driving back to Zagora, stopping off to see a pottery cooperative where they sat in tiny huts in the dark kicking the wheel. More tagine was consumed. The next days were spent visiting Ourzazate before we returned to the orange-blossom scented Souss valley Donations et Mssalama(bye) It is unfortunate that we did encounter problems whilst organising the distribution of our donations. Due to a series of misunderstandings, members of the GMH bureau did not have the same understanding as to the purpose of the donations as us volunteers. It must be said that this is something which I also encountered at my work placement. As a result of our concerns, which we voiced to AfricaTrust, the transfer of the donations to Morocco was delayed. At the time of writing, monies have just been transferred into the account of the new volunteer Sam rather than into a GMH account so that the purchase of the large items can now go ahead. As Christina and Grace had brought their donations out with them, we were able to purchase many of the smaller items in the last weeks. Donations bought or to be bought with monies raised by all four volunteers: Lala Amina orphanage, the unit for disabled children Pre-School Class at L’Ecole Wifaq La Maison Du Bienfaisance L’Ecole Wifaq L’Ecole Mansour Debit
My last few days in Taroundant were filled with goodbyes, Henna and endless visits to the Souq. Returning from one such visit Selka and I stopped off outside the butchers’ to get meat for the next few days’ tagines. The butchers is a tiled counter with hunks of meat displayed on it a the usual half cow hanging in the street. It was busy and a crowd of men, dirty and tired from work had gathered around. From about two metres away Selka asked for the pre-ordered chunk. It was wrapped in a plastic bag for us and passed across the crowd. From this distance the smell of warm meat wafted: it had been a particularly hot day and the flesh was sweating and growing stale in the hot air. The butcher picked up a large chopping knife and a large piece of meat, placed it on the tree truck that acts as a board: As he brought down the knife the debris of blood and drops of meat were splattered on the already dirty tiled wall. His white apron was used to wipe his hands and then the next customer placed their order. Its things like this that I’ll miss. Whilst trying to gather together items for our donations from various shops, we played the worthy cause card in our hard bargaining, trying to stretch the money as far as possible. Thus I encountered two types of devout Muslim; the silent type and the chatty type. The silent type sold us 30 bath towels at a cut down price, but refused to speak directly to us women, instead relying on the many assistants who counted piles of multicoloured towels and repeated that he was giving us a good deal because he was a good Muslim and it was a good cause. That was certainly true but he looked a sight. He was quite young wearing white jallaba and trousers and his bare feet were propped up on the desk whilst he flapped pieces of paper around him and watched our fight with the assistants with bemusement. The man agreed to make fourteen fitted sheets for yet another cut down price, and when I popped in to check that he was getting down to the work, he caught me in a strange theological argument. “Are you a Muslim?” That evening he’d done all the work but despite the long day was happy to share some of his sesame seeds with us (just like two little girls in a Cairo mosque so long ago). The last night Karima and her family did a lovely meal for us outside their house the three of us volunteers (Christina, who is staying for three more months was making the most of her brief holidays) , the families and the new volunteer Sam, and people who been involved in our stay were all there. It was a sad moment at the end, but in typical GMH style we were all expected to say our bit, and some of the members of the bureau were typically restrained in their enthusiasm for the project. At the end I felt very positive about the work that we did, but felt even more than before that the project is a continuous one which will only work if volunteers keep on coming. On Saturday morning I hugged and kissed goodbye the family, got an especially large tearful bear-hug from Selka, with whom I have become very close over the last three months, and climbed into Hajj’s mini-bus, only slightly weighed down by my own extra kilos as well as the couscous, jallabah and million and one other things I had squeezed into my bags. We rushed through the countryside to Marrakesh, getting there in such a short time to make our first trek across the mountains seem ridiculous. Jemal Fna hadn’t lost but gained its magic in the previous months, except now I could understand much of the stall-holder’s banter, and demand that our brochettes were hot. Fouad and Abdesssamad were with us and helped to translate the barmy fortune that a hilarious old woman gave me and Nicky. Twenty four hours, a much delayed plane and long car journey later (broken by a yummy meal at Nicky’s Gran’s), Rutland seemed very pedestrian. |
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