Last time, we were talking about the difficulties of integrating into the community and finding a groove with development work. To date, this is still a constant effort, and I’m starting to get the feeling that it may be that way for the remaining year and a half I have left of service. Speaking of which, I have now been in site for a touch over six months, and in Morocco for just about nine, which is the longest I have ever been out of the States in my life. Granted, that was true about five months ago, but who’s counting?
And so, what is life like for a volunteer nine months on? Well, it’s slow, but it’s a lot more grooved than it used to be. I still mainly only teach classes, but it’s not exclusive anymore. And this is mostly due to something called PACA.
PACA, or Participatory Analysis for Community Action, is the Peace Corps’ series of surveys designed to help new volunteers assess their sites’ strengths, weaknesses, and potential for development, while simultaneously assisting in their integration. In theory, anyway. Really, it’s mostly just a handful of questions that most community members don’t really understand the point of, leading most to simply ask you, the volunteer, to give them computers. It does get people thinking about their town, though, which is crucial to any sort of sustainable development. The trick is, you have to get them to look at their homes and see not only the problems but also the solutions, and not only the solutions but also the practical solutions that are within their power. In my experience, it’s not majority response, but it only takes a handful. I don’t know what I’d do if I had everyone coming to me with project ideas; I’m busy enough as it is.
Which leads us to what’s going on here. Ever since my PACA work at the Dar Shebab, I’ve gotten little to nothing from the guys there. Unfortunately, I’ve learned in the past few months that although there are many associations working out of the center, there are just about zero of them that like to work with anyone else. This has led us to a lot of slowdown in terms of activities here. Ever since my PACA at the Nedi Neswi (the women’s association – I haven’t mentioned them much, but I also teach English there) I’ve started three clubs with the girls, so I’ll with that as I work my down the list of work.
My first day at the Nedi I tried to explain to the mudira (feminine form of “mudir,” the director) what a Peace Corps volunteer does, and she, like so many others, understood this to mean that I could get them computers. Consequently, after doing my PACA work with the girls in my English class, we settled on three clubs: Health Club, Sports Club, and Informatique Club. Each has a president, vice-president, and secretary. So far, the Health Club has held a meeting on women’s health (with Salma), the Sports Club has starting running once a week in the morning, and the Informatique Club has decided that it wants to hold computer literacy courses. The main problem is that they are looking for me to run them, while I’m trying to force them to do it, but that’s not really a surprise with Peace Corps work.
Another volunteer said quite precisely: “You get the feeling that you want development more than they do.” I had a great idea, inspired by the fact that so many people come up to me asking for me to tutor them privately and for a fee. Volunteers are not allowed to work for money, nor do they have nearly the time to devote to one person at a time like that. I proposed a peer tutoring program. Peer tutors don’t really seem to happen around here, and I still don’t know how to say that in Darija, but I was convinced it would work. So, I more or less told one of my English students that he was going to be in charge of the tutoring program at the junior high school, and started meeting with the principal and some teachers to get permission and tutor volunteers. We ended up holding about four trainings for tutors to which no one came before we revised the idea, my student brought in three of his friends to be trained to tutor math, and they went back to school as tutors. I hear that they even did a few sessions. This taught me some pretty valuable lessons, like starting a lot smaller than you want to get to, and that you need to get the idea from the local. Now we’re looking into how to continue it next year, and how to expand the Dar Shebab classes into much more than just English, an idea that came from someone outside of the tutoring project.
We also have the kind that originates with locals but doesn’t get carried through. A handful of elementary school principals told me that they wanted me to come do something English-related at their schools because most of the kids couldn’t come to the Dar Shebab so late at night. So we planned a “cultural presentation” and I actually got one of the principals to put me on the schedule. The plan was to do a little bit of English, a little bit of American culture, and maybe even sing something. What happened was that I showed up for our first meeting and the principal had forgotten. The second time, he wasn’t even there. Nor was he there the third time, either, but a group of kids told me that I was supposed to teach them. They proceeded to spend the next 25 minutes acting horribly until I couldn’t take any more and left. The fourth time, we actually had class (I didn’t see any sign of the principal, though, again), although I had to eject a good four or five students. The fifth time, I resolved to speak to the principal about how poorly his kids were behaving and how I was not going to just be a free English teacher for him; he needed to either do a better job of selecting the students, or send someone else to our sessions to keep them under control. Before I could say anything, however, he told me that with the upcoming exams, it would be best to postpone everything until next year. What happened here was a good idea that came from the community but the community didn’t invest anything in it, and it failed. We’ll hopefully do better next time.
Finally, we have projects that are initiated by the people we work with who are invested in them, and yet they still don’t quite work out. A local association – an association of associations, actually – wanted to build a playground at their facility. They had worked with the previous volunteer to do a Peace Corps funded projects to build an information resource center, and now wanted to expand on that with something to draw families and life-long users. There are actually no playgrounds of any kind in Freedonia, and children tend to have the option only of playing in the street or not playing at all. Unfortunately, however, the king has decided to develop our town into a city (note: this is actually fantastic, although in this particular instance it’s causing a problem for me). You see, the center used by my association friends is connected to a long-abandoned public pool, but the current plan would include repairing and reopening it, and, thus, we can no longer build a playground there. We’re considering moving the plan elsewhere.
I have, however, started working on some summer sports programs, and have in the last week gotten my Dar Shebab students pretty keen on ultimate frisbee, and have a tentative plan to play baseball this coming week. We also want to try some more academic projects of the popsicle stick bridge / egg drop contest variety. And, of course, there's summer camp that will be a big part of the summer, but that's a story for another time. Suffice it to say, development is still a constantly frustrating struggle, but, with time, it starts to make itself a little clearer.
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