On Development, Part I

Now that all of us new volunteers are getting our sites and starting to think about our development plans in a less abstract fashion, I think that it’s an appropriate time to talk about the effects of continuity and development. By “continuity” I mean the effects that a previous developer can have on the experience of his or her successor, as well as just the impact that all cultural ambassadors have on the image of their compatriots and the response they receive from the host country.

To illustrate this point, I’m going to tell you a story about my adventure hiking a mountain today. Today was actually the first day off that we’ve had here in Morocco. Every other day we’ve either had classes of some kind, self-directed language study, or been with our host families practicing our integration. However, today we’re in our seminar site (no host families), we had our massive language test yesterday, and it’s the staff’s day off, so some a handful of us decided to take a hike in the mountains. (As a quick side note, this part of Morocco, the Middle Atlas, is not at all like any of your preconceptions would lead you to believe. In fact, it’s cold and mountainous, and a lot like Western North Carolina.)

Fast-forwarding through most of the hike, we wandered around through some of the mountains going from peak to peak and pausing every so often to enjoy the view of the city. And when I say mountains, they are mountains, but the city is in the mountains as well, so the relative heights that we had to ascend were negligible. Anyway, we passed a bunch of Moroccans from time to time – Berber ladies doing laundry in the river, farmers coming and going between the city and the bled (countryside), families gathering branches for firewood, children playing jump rope up on the mountainside – and we would greet them casually and continue on our way. Usually they would start speaking to us in French (most Moroccans conceptualize all foreigners as being French because of their abundance here), and we usually surprised and impressed them by responding in Darija (Moroccan Arabic).

Anyway, after spending about an hour-and-a-half enjoying the bucolic splendor of central Morocco, and realizing that all of our conversations were turning to types of food we missed back in the states and the best of what we’ve had here so far, we decided it was time to head downtown to the café that sells hamburgers (which, ironically, are not worth writing home about). And so we left, but it turned to out to be earlier than I had expected, as I still had a loaf of bread (not as big as you think, they make them pretty “fun size” here) and a chocolate bar, so I scarfed the bread and began working on the chocolate as we walked. Before long we began passing some of the people we had seen on our way up, including a handful of boys who had been gathering firewood or something (most likely just horsing around), they saw the chocolate bar in my hand and immediately made a bee-line for us.

Now, an important element of development is sustainability (I believe we discussed this in a previous issue), which includes the way that you give to the host country. There really is no consensus on this particular point, but I and many of my colleagues would argue that just giving money or things to the host country runs contrary to the purpose of development, as it really only seems to develop a culture of asking foreigners to give things (or money), which means that development requires the presence of foreigners, their things, and their money, rather than requiring only the motivational energy (at best, ideally) of people like Peace Corps volunteers and the continued effort of the host community. This becomes even more important when you think about how if one developer just gives things and/or money, then they may condition their host community to expect the same from future developers – or foreigners in general – and can cause real problems for a successor trying to convince his or her host country to develop sustainably.

Needless to say, my convictions on this matter led me to say, “no, sorry” in response to the demands on my chocolate. The little ones were not so easily dissuaded in their pursuit of Maruja (this brand), and called in some reinforcements and began swarming us yelling, “Maruja! Maruja! Âtini [give me] Maruja!” We spoke with them a little more forcibly as we continued walking, but there was no changing their minds, so we mostly just kept walking – attempting to ignore them and continue our conversation about fencing (the sport, not the lawn decoration). And that would have been easy if it weren’t for the fact that one of them was definitely carrying a pretty nasty-looking meat cleaver (intended on the top of this mountain for a purpose that escaped me), and while he didn’t seem to be menacing us with it, it was definitely present in our negotiations. But we were clearly not interested in what they were selling us, and responded to them with, “Do you understand Darija?” “Hshuma âlikum [shame on you]!” And big lumberjack Tim asking them if there was going to be a problem.

We kept walking along the trail, but, unfortunately, this trail was pretty much only switchbacks, and the little chocolate monsters were just coming down the sides of the mountain calling at us from the trees and occasionally tossing rocks (fairly common in the aggregate amongst Moroccan boys), and doing a pretty good impression of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park – though keeping their distance for the most part. It’s hard to say how it would have ended if we’d had to really throw down because we soon saw a couple older men walking up the path towards us who seem to have dissuaded our pursuers.

Hopefully that was an entertaining story for you – there’s action, adventure, suspense, chocolate – and a little bit of reference to development, but I started this blog talking about continuity between developers, and I’m fairly sure that I haven’t talked about that yet. Here’s how it all ties together:

When we got back downtown and were headed on our way to the aforementioned hamburger café, we ran into a few more trainees sitting in a different café enjoying some lunch, and having just had this adventure, we quickly set about telling them what happened. But they stopped us pretty much immediately and said, “Wait, which mountain are you talking about? The big one with the building on top of it?” We said yes and they began to talk about how they had hiked the same earlier in the morning.

“We went up the side, and headed towards the peak,” they said. “After getting up there and having all the fun we needed, we started coming back down again and ran into these boys barring the path with a branch and demanding money. 100 dirhams. We said we weren’t going to give them anything except for the fact that one of them had a pretty nasty-looking meat cleaver seemingly intended specifically for menacing way-farers. They kind of chased us back up the hill and we had to climb down the rocks on the far side to escape. We had a little chocolate with us though, which we gave to them to get them away from us. It was horrible.”

And so there you have it. We had no idea why they were so fixated on the chocolate (we just figured who doesn’t like Maruja?), and they had no idea what – if any – impact their choices would make on the interactions between these host country nationals and future developers. And I certainly don’t intend to imply that what the others did was wrong; they were being more or less robbed at cleaver-point and made the right choice to preserve themselves (which leads to further discussion on the interplay between the needs of the developer and the developee, but we’ll have to save that for later). The point I’m trying to make with this story is that you never really know what’s going to happen in the future as a result of what you do or say now. We find ourselves often generalizing Moroccan behavior from a relatively small amount of interaction, and I hope it’s not too ridiculous of an assumption to imply that Moroccans do the same.

Take our site replacements, for example. The previous volunteer in my site is French-American and spoke in French for a good many of his meetings with counterparts, and I have a bit of difficulty convincing the same people to speak to me in Darija as they assume that all Americans speak French (an assumption that isn’t helped by the fact that I actually do speak French). That’s a very minor situation. Some of my friends, ladies, are replacing other lady volunteers that married or are marrying Moroccans, and have to spend all day explaining to their communities that they are there to do youth development, not to find husbands. Again, you can’t really say that it’s wrong for volunteers to fall in love and get married, but it goes to further illustrate the point that everything that we do works to establish precedents that we or our successors will have to deal with.

Something to think about.