Marrakech

We had the pleasure of traveling to Marrakech for in-service training. All the volunteers that we came to country with gathered there for about a week to be recharged with more language and technical training. It served as a good break for some of the volunteers who had been busy at site with camps and tutoring for their students to pass their baccalaureate. I believe another reason the Peace Corps office decided to hold the in-service training around this time was to counter the 6 month dip in spirits that might come as volunteers get over the initial excitement of coming to their final site. Culture shock has a funny way of not just bearing itself initially, but coming back to throw you off balance the minute you think you are adjusted.

Each morning we had language training in new learning groups based on our exit language proficiency interviews from our pre-service training. It was an opportunity for us to learn from different language and cultural facilitators with different people than we did during our community based training. Julie and I were placed in separate groups since she scored higher on her language interview. In fact, she was placed in the highest group, with the volunteers who studied Arabic before coming, or whose families were of Middle Eastern descent, and might have had Arabic spoken in the home occasionally.

I have been very proud of her and her language accomplishments. She has a great memory when it comes to learning new vocabulary. I have come to discover that Moroccans can be culturally more direct than Americans when it comes to pointing out the fact that I do not speak near as well as Julie. This initially caused me some concern, but has motivated me to want to be better. I am studying and using the language everyday, and feel like I am closing the language gap and catching up to her. It has been a blessing as well to have her know more than me since I can turn to her and ask her if she remembers certain vocabulary or how to say something and she usually has the answer.

After lunch each day we would then have large group, or break-out sessions for technical training. We received sessions on the youth development framework, monitoring and evaluation, safety and security, health and resiliency, grant writing, multimedia, behavior change planning, speaking about taboo topics, working with counterparts, content-based english teaching, job skills training, making logic models for our service, and many more. We also had a Q&A session with one of the supervisors from the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Julie also attended a special session that trained volunteers on how to facilitate content-based soccer clubs that focus on HIV/AIDS awareness. While she was learning how to do that, I was attending a special session on how to have fun in the pool and make everyone jealous who attended the extra sessions. Yes, I can't write about Marrakech without talking about that blessed/cursed pool.

The only reason I say cursed is because all our training sessions were mostly in rooms with broken AC units and perfect views of the junior olympic sized swimming pool. After almost everyday I would rush to my room to change into my swim trunks, and spend as much time in the pool as I could. One of our friends Stefan, organized a friendly aquatic competition amongst teams of volunteers that was quite entertaining and exhausting to compete in. Unfortunately, the lifeguard also clocked out about 6-30pm each day, about an hour after we got out of our sessions. Despite this little inconvenience we managed to get much use out of that blessed body of water. Occasionally, when Julie could convince me to get out of the water, we also made our way into the city.

Marrakech as a city is one you love and loathe. It embodies and at the same time doesn't embody the spirit of Morocco. It is a beautiful little desert oasis, full of incredibly rich cultural sites including mosques, and an old medina that you can get lost in, and some great little dives to get some amazing food. Its a city that has been developed in large measure because of the tourism industry. However, I feel it has also been ravaged, to some degree, by that same beast that gave it life. Maybe its because the tourists sites we have frequented are mostly visited by Moroccans, but everywhere I turned I not only saw foreign tourists, but herds of them. I fully recognize in the longer scheme of things we are tourists too. That is, we are only here for a relatively short amount of time (27 months), but having lived in other cities just as big in Morocco, the spirit of hypertourism pervasive in Marrakech leaves you with the aftertaste of eating too much Tanjia. It is manifest in the eyes of the monkeys in cages of Jemaa el-fnaa, the street performer who wont let you take a picture of anything in his turf without you paying him, or the Taxi driver that attempts to extort you for a jaunt to the train station. And to be fair, its not entirely their fault. Much of the accountability lies with the outsider, the tourist. In that respect, I realized that when I left my trainings and put on the tourist hat, I was contributing to the very thing I say I didn't like about Marrakech. Oh well, we'll always have the pool.

Will we go back? Yes. We enjoyed a lot of what we saw, and we also didn't have the time there to get the full picture. To the many volunteers living closer, we are definitely open to tips and suggestions.