Nshetah

This past week my fellow CBT (Community-Based Training for you who don’t speak Government Hyper-Acronymization, which is when we go to small villages, live with host families, learn Darija, and practice youth development) members and I began teaching English classes at the local Dar Shebab (youth center). Being very conscientious youth developers, we worked out a schedule of ability levels, planned lessons according to those ability levels, announced these levels in writing and speaking to the local Shebab (youth, as you may have guessed), and then proceeded to be overwhelmed by eager English-learners at all the classes, almost all of whom – regardless of which class they came to attend – were of beginner level or lower. This was a bit of a problem, so we turned to the youth developer in Morocco’s only alternative: Nshetah.

Nshetah, translated literally, means "activities" (I think), but functionally it’s more like "anti-class." This means that there are extremely different perceptions of nshetah between adults and youth. Youth see it as their only outlet for creative energy short of playing soccer (for those who are able to), wandering the streets aimlessly, and smoking hash. Adults often view nshetah as non-educational, and, therefore, wasted time.

Nshetah is, however, extremely needed by the shebab of Morocco. As alluded to above, there is really nothing for them (particularly the boys) to do after school. Unfortunately, no one has come to the "Dar Shebab" looking for nshetah. They all want "qraia" (class). This makes the class very difficult, particularly when it is supposed to be an advanced class and you begin with a quick review of the English tenses and a quarter of the class doesn’t know a word of English beyond "Hello." This also makes the nshetah very difficult because regardless if it was scheduled to be a theatre club or chess tournament, it turns into a pandemonium of shebab who came for English, but don’t want to go away when the opportunity to see Americans still exists and so they just run amok.

The trickiest part is really finding something that the shebab actually want and are committed to continuing without your control. Ideally, you’re really just showing up every now and then to give them a little guidance, but, of course, if your town is at that point, they wouldn’t have a Peace Corps volunteer, would they? So, you’re stuck between one of these two extremes, and you have to figure out what to do about it.

At least, that’s the theory. I don’t have my own site yet, so I can’t really tell you what it’s like, but it seems to be a constant struggle of attempting to motivate shebab to create things for themselves without telling them what to create. You’ll have to wait to hear how it goes.