June 2006
I have decided, this time at least, to take a slightly different approach to communicating with such a large group. Seeing as my blogs have become increasingly impersonal as of late, I think I may just write an email or two that explains what actually happens directly to me like a normal person. No waxing philosophic this time around, just a bit of info on the daily routines and a more concrete description of my job here. I do work here, after all. Theoretically.
I am not too sure exactly where to start, but I think that the spring would be a good place to start, since the last email only discussed the 1.3 billion “Muslims” (I place the term in brackets, since all this really means is that one is born in Muslim society, but not necessarily practicing or observing the attendant religious duties) out there, of which I am certainly not a member. So what does Mr. Tar the agnostic do out here?
Last week I was reading a magazine that I picked up in Rabat, Jeune Afrique, when I saw a very interesting and pertinent quotation by the late author, Madeleine de Puisieux. “Do you want to know how one must give? Put yourself in the place of the one that receives.” This philosophy, above all others, is the one that Peace Corps has exemplified and mastered in the past four and a half decades and has wooed almost 180,000 volunteers to undertake the journey. It sets Peace Corps apart from the majority of the world’s development organizations while it inspires, overwhelms and challenges its volunteers. Even after one year spent in the Atlas Mountains, living in the same mud-walled homes and walking the same dusty roads as my fellow villagers, I feel I have only glimpsed that idealized insider’s perspective. In truth, I have largely given up on trying to see the world through their eyes. What I do know intimately, however, is the place of the one who asks.
In the past six months I have been working closely with a local rural development association called l’Association Tachoguachte pour le développement et préservation de l’environnement du Ksar Tabouârbite. They are not all that unlike the countless other community organizations which are ubiquitous throughout the countryside and towns of Morocco and as you may remember, fit the naming scheme that I described in my January email perfectly. The unit is quite new (existing only 18 months at present), is guided by an extremely vague mission statement – the name says it all, in fact – and the president, who I have never met, lives approximately 600 kilometers away in the Mediterranean city, Al-Hoceima. To boot, the member that I principally work with neither works nor lives in the village. His name is Moha Bagarrou, a relatively educated, middle-class Moroccan who runs a half-baked electronics store in my market town, Rich. The store itself is somewhat of a disaster, with countless wires hanging from ancient shelves and a myriad of random boxes filled with an assortment of couplers and gadgets, all with a musty, incomprehensible sense of organization to it. The store could have served as an indicator of things to come. The remaining members of the association are either partially-literate or joined the association only to embezzle funds from whatever funds they might be awarded. Consequently, he is the only participating and trustworthy member of the only organization in the area that was interested in working with me. Nonetheless, our work (and managers) necessitates a local presence to facilitate programs, organize inhabitants, provide valuable local knowledge, translate conversations with community elders (who are excruciatingly difficult to understand) and ideally, carry on programs after we leave.
My first conversation or two with Association Tachoguachte was performed with my language tutor, Khadija, but it soon became clear that this was an unsustainable practice considering her two toddlers at home. Those initial conversations were invaluable. At that point, I was still uncomfortable with speaking about details and technical subjects in a foreign language. With a firm understanding of their current projects and the expression of their aspirations, I decided to go it alone. At first, my assistance to them was minimal, shooting them some ideas on ongoing projects. After our In-Service Training (at the 6-month point of service), though, when I gave Tachoguachte a list of funding sources available in Morocco, the real interaction began.
The association’s secretary, Moha, gave me a phone call one day, saying he needed help with a grant proposal for the Canadian Embassy’s funding agency. It was an excellent idea: requesting money for an elite breed of sheep to be managed, in terms of labor and revenue, by the women of the village. The only problem - the Canadian Embassy accepts grants written in French only, which neither Moha nor I wrote very well. In the next week, we sat in front of my laptop for hours, conversing in pidgin-French and tapping out grammatically incorrect elaborations of our project plans, budget, and community description. Several more sessions of touching up, my Larousse Dictionnaire de Poche close at hand and placing a lot of faith in Microsoft Word’s grammar and spell check, and we were ready for a second opinion. I gave a draft to Eaux et Forêts, our Moroccan sponsoring agency, and had them report their corrections to the association. But when I called Moha to get the most up-to-date version to send to my program manager, I was told, ever-disappointingly, “Mais, je l’ai déjà envoyé! (But, I already sent it!)” – so much for communicating fine details.
Ultimately, we were unsuccessful with the Canadian Embassy, but not with any great surprise: they typically fund only 7-8% of the proposals received. That does not spell surrender for that idea quite yet. Even before receiving the rejection letter, we arranged plans for a different funding agency and a different strategy. Another association, Association Taghia, procured funds for a very similar project gave us advice on how to write a successful proposal and this time I am taking more of a backseat with the actual writing – an integral step in weaning them off of my help and acting independently. Providing an articulate, thorough request for funding in a second language has proved incredibly challenging. It was never a situation I had encountered before; not before I put myself in the place of the one who asks. Well, we still have a long way to go. My friend from Association Taghia had applied to and received funding from the Belgian Embassy. He encouraged us to apply there, as they focus on the southern regions and have a clearly demonstrated interest in women’s agricultural assistance and social equality projects. Hoping for inspiration and guidance, I asked him for a copy of their proposal in January.
I got it two weeks ago, which is diligent in Moroccan terms, and gave a copy to Moha, telling him, “Read this carefully and note down the strengths that we can add to our proposal.” When I returned two weeks later, I was surprised to see that he was working on it very hard, and the new version ran a good 7 pages long. I was short on time and copied it onto my USB stick to read and work on at home; just the first glance at his shop revealed a number of spelling and punctuation problems. When I got home, it was abundantly clear why. He had copied the other association’s proposal word for word, exerting the effort only to change the name of the village, association and the number of women in the town. Most brazenly, he also plagiarized their budget, despite a vastly different population. I was both bemused and disgusted. It would be one thing to carbon-copy a proposal, but to send it to the exact same funding source? Of the 10 projects they fund annually, did he really think they would not recognize a spitting image of last year’s grantees?
Derision in Arab society takes a completely different shape than it does in ours. Never before have I seen such a vocal and irritable culture. At least in cities, one often sees crowds of men, yelling, screaming, and picking up rocks that are never thrown in a rather hollow threat – like a boy brandishing a toy gun in a fight. But what is usually being expressed is general rage; personal attacks and ridicule are relatively off-limits. Even in civilized, person-to-person arguments, to cut someone down is to burn a bridge. Consequently, Moha, who I respect and is the only reliable and somewhat effective person to work with from my village, had to be dealt with in a very indirect way. I arranged a meeting with him and the other association that week to discuss organization and planning, a meeting he almost skipped intentionally, presumably since he was afraid to face the man he plagiarized from. But my patience was running out. When he was running 90 minutes late, I sent him the curt message, “Are you coming are not?” and resolved to myself, “If he does not show, I am done with these clowns”. He did eventually. The copied proposal was never broached and will never be again; that alone should signify that what he did was unacceptable. Afterwards, I wrote out a list of items that I thought could strengthen our proposal and we will proceed from there; it is all I can really do.
There is still more asking to come; the town is eager for trees, which unlike some of their previous demands, is actually a tenable project idea. It is certainly better than the irrigation canal project. The village already has one which operates on a rather ingenious and ancient strategy of diverting river water upstream of the town into a vast network of shallow channels. Farmers flood their fields on rotations of 10-20 days depending on the crop and climate. The mud and dirt walls of these canals are bound to erode and fall apart with time, however, and a good assortment of communities tend to request funding to cement them. Knowing that it would be an expensive project I warned Moha that Peace Corps-specific funding is limited to $2,500; in other words, a pittance. One day I received a text message from him, saying, “I got the estimate for the irrigation canals from the Department of Agriculture: $100,000. Come by my shop”. I don’t know who throws down $100,000 on one little village’s water canals, but it certainly was not going to be miserly Peace Corps coffers. I got my laughs out and then stopped by his shop two days later. “Moha,” I exclaimed, “I told you that we don’t have that kind of money!” He became stern and quiet, contemplating. After a few moments he shot, “Okay. You get one half, and I’ll get the other half.” We never talked about the irrigation canals again.
Projects that run smoothly can be extremely enjoyable. Some of the educational programs that we have organized have been a lot of fun: AIDS education, summer camps, etc. Along more environmental lines, however, my largest program, in theory, would be a national program of bird surveys, corresponding wildlife education and birding-related eco-tourism workshops with the residents and service providers of national parks. It is right now in the grant stage, a proposal I wrote with two other volunteers who are bird fanatics. I am merely a neophyte and collaborator. We did a preliminary bird survey in Imilchil, a village on the western flanks of my national park, situated 90 kilometers away, where there are two of the few natural lakes in all of North Africa. Owing to the sparse alpine lakes, reservoirs and coastal wetlands, combined with a strategic location – the junction of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Africa and Europe – Morocco harbors and is visited by a good 450+ species of birds.
Developing this program entailed finding a capable Moroccan organization to partner with. We believe we found one in the Association of Earth and Life Science Teachers (AESVT) partners, and so far we have had a planning meeting and spotty correspondence to establish each partner’s role. I sense they may be getting annoyed with us, due to the glacial pace of finding funding and a little mishap in a little mountain village in Demnate. I have not confirmed this story yet, but it goes like this: AESVT requested a volunteer to come to the Atlas mountain village of Demnate, just two hours southeast of Marrakesh. It is a relatively large town, bordering a nationally protected forest, brimming with teachers to collaborate with on environmental education projects. One woman was assigned there in May; in the final weeks of training, each volunteer is given a village/town/city assignment, and visits it. The site selection process itself is rather cursory. Peace Corps is given a list of potential sites by government ministries or receives a request from an NGO directly – in this case, AESVT. Peace Corps then goes to the town, glad-hands public officials who invariably whitewash the state of affairs and then finds a family willing to host the new volunteer for $5 per day (a pretty good deal, in fact) for two months. I talked to the woman after visiting it. She was very excited about the physical location but a little intimated by the number of qualified professionals already working there; what role would she play there? Nonetheless, I heard through the grapevine, two weeks later that her site had been changed. The only explanation I have heard is that some staff members were reading the newspaper (yes, the newspaper no less) after her site visit when they read that Demnate had been used recently as a training site by terrorists. Oops! It could all be hearsay. Nonetheless, AESVT has not been returning my emails recently.
I am not too sure exactly where to start, but I think that the spring would be a good place to start, since the last email only discussed the 1.3 billion “Muslims” (I place the term in brackets, since all this really means is that one is born in Muslim society, but not necessarily practicing or observing the attendant religious duties) out there, of which I am certainly not a member. So what does Mr. Tar the agnostic do out here?
Last week I was reading a magazine that I picked up in Rabat, Jeune Afrique, when I saw a very interesting and pertinent quotation by the late author, Madeleine de Puisieux. “Do you want to know how one must give? Put yourself in the place of the one that receives.” This philosophy, above all others, is the one that Peace Corps has exemplified and mastered in the past four and a half decades and has wooed almost 180,000 volunteers to undertake the journey. It sets Peace Corps apart from the majority of the world’s development organizations while it inspires, overwhelms and challenges its volunteers. Even after one year spent in the Atlas Mountains, living in the same mud-walled homes and walking the same dusty roads as my fellow villagers, I feel I have only glimpsed that idealized insider’s perspective. In truth, I have largely given up on trying to see the world through their eyes. What I do know intimately, however, is the place of the one who asks.
In the past six months I have been working closely with a local rural development association called l’Association Tachoguachte pour le développement et préservation de l’environnement du Ksar Tabouârbite. They are not all that unlike the countless other community organizations which are ubiquitous throughout the countryside and towns of Morocco and as you may remember, fit the naming scheme that I described in my January email perfectly. The unit is quite new (existing only 18 months at present), is guided by an extremely vague mission statement – the name says it all, in fact – and the president, who I have never met, lives approximately 600 kilometers away in the Mediterranean city, Al-Hoceima. To boot, the member that I principally work with neither works nor lives in the village. His name is Moha Bagarrou, a relatively educated, middle-class Moroccan who runs a half-baked electronics store in my market town, Rich. The store itself is somewhat of a disaster, with countless wires hanging from ancient shelves and a myriad of random boxes filled with an assortment of couplers and gadgets, all with a musty, incomprehensible sense of organization to it. The store could have served as an indicator of things to come. The remaining members of the association are either partially-literate or joined the association only to embezzle funds from whatever funds they might be awarded. Consequently, he is the only participating and trustworthy member of the only organization in the area that was interested in working with me. Nonetheless, our work (and managers) necessitates a local presence to facilitate programs, organize inhabitants, provide valuable local knowledge, translate conversations with community elders (who are excruciatingly difficult to understand) and ideally, carry on programs after we leave.
My first conversation or two with Association Tachoguachte was performed with my language tutor, Khadija, but it soon became clear that this was an unsustainable practice considering her two toddlers at home. Those initial conversations were invaluable. At that point, I was still uncomfortable with speaking about details and technical subjects in a foreign language. With a firm understanding of their current projects and the expression of their aspirations, I decided to go it alone. At first, my assistance to them was minimal, shooting them some ideas on ongoing projects. After our In-Service Training (at the 6-month point of service), though, when I gave Tachoguachte a list of funding sources available in Morocco, the real interaction began.
The association’s secretary, Moha, gave me a phone call one day, saying he needed help with a grant proposal for the Canadian Embassy’s funding agency. It was an excellent idea: requesting money for an elite breed of sheep to be managed, in terms of labor and revenue, by the women of the village. The only problem - the Canadian Embassy accepts grants written in French only, which neither Moha nor I wrote very well. In the next week, we sat in front of my laptop for hours, conversing in pidgin-French and tapping out grammatically incorrect elaborations of our project plans, budget, and community description. Several more sessions of touching up, my Larousse Dictionnaire de Poche close at hand and placing a lot of faith in Microsoft Word’s grammar and spell check, and we were ready for a second opinion. I gave a draft to Eaux et Forêts, our Moroccan sponsoring agency, and had them report their corrections to the association. But when I called Moha to get the most up-to-date version to send to my program manager, I was told, ever-disappointingly, “Mais, je l’ai déjà envoyé! (But, I already sent it!)” – so much for communicating fine details.
Ultimately, we were unsuccessful with the Canadian Embassy, but not with any great surprise: they typically fund only 7-8% of the proposals received. That does not spell surrender for that idea quite yet. Even before receiving the rejection letter, we arranged plans for a different funding agency and a different strategy. Another association, Association Taghia, procured funds for a very similar project gave us advice on how to write a successful proposal and this time I am taking more of a backseat with the actual writing – an integral step in weaning them off of my help and acting independently. Providing an articulate, thorough request for funding in a second language has proved incredibly challenging. It was never a situation I had encountered before; not before I put myself in the place of the one who asks. Well, we still have a long way to go. My friend from Association Taghia had applied to and received funding from the Belgian Embassy. He encouraged us to apply there, as they focus on the southern regions and have a clearly demonstrated interest in women’s agricultural assistance and social equality projects. Hoping for inspiration and guidance, I asked him for a copy of their proposal in January.
I got it two weeks ago, which is diligent in Moroccan terms, and gave a copy to Moha, telling him, “Read this carefully and note down the strengths that we can add to our proposal.” When I returned two weeks later, I was surprised to see that he was working on it very hard, and the new version ran a good 7 pages long. I was short on time and copied it onto my USB stick to read and work on at home; just the first glance at his shop revealed a number of spelling and punctuation problems. When I got home, it was abundantly clear why. He had copied the other association’s proposal word for word, exerting the effort only to change the name of the village, association and the number of women in the town. Most brazenly, he also plagiarized their budget, despite a vastly different population. I was both bemused and disgusted. It would be one thing to carbon-copy a proposal, but to send it to the exact same funding source? Of the 10 projects they fund annually, did he really think they would not recognize a spitting image of last year’s grantees?
Derision in Arab society takes a completely different shape than it does in ours. Never before have I seen such a vocal and irritable culture. At least in cities, one often sees crowds of men, yelling, screaming, and picking up rocks that are never thrown in a rather hollow threat – like a boy brandishing a toy gun in a fight. But what is usually being expressed is general rage; personal attacks and ridicule are relatively off-limits. Even in civilized, person-to-person arguments, to cut someone down is to burn a bridge. Consequently, Moha, who I respect and is the only reliable and somewhat effective person to work with from my village, had to be dealt with in a very indirect way. I arranged a meeting with him and the other association that week to discuss organization and planning, a meeting he almost skipped intentionally, presumably since he was afraid to face the man he plagiarized from. But my patience was running out. When he was running 90 minutes late, I sent him the curt message, “Are you coming are not?” and resolved to myself, “If he does not show, I am done with these clowns”. He did eventually. The copied proposal was never broached and will never be again; that alone should signify that what he did was unacceptable. Afterwards, I wrote out a list of items that I thought could strengthen our proposal and we will proceed from there; it is all I can really do.
There is still more asking to come; the town is eager for trees, which unlike some of their previous demands, is actually a tenable project idea. It is certainly better than the irrigation canal project. The village already has one which operates on a rather ingenious and ancient strategy of diverting river water upstream of the town into a vast network of shallow channels. Farmers flood their fields on rotations of 10-20 days depending on the crop and climate. The mud and dirt walls of these canals are bound to erode and fall apart with time, however, and a good assortment of communities tend to request funding to cement them. Knowing that it would be an expensive project I warned Moha that Peace Corps-specific funding is limited to $2,500; in other words, a pittance. One day I received a text message from him, saying, “I got the estimate for the irrigation canals from the Department of Agriculture: $100,000. Come by my shop”. I don’t know who throws down $100,000 on one little village’s water canals, but it certainly was not going to be miserly Peace Corps coffers. I got my laughs out and then stopped by his shop two days later. “Moha,” I exclaimed, “I told you that we don’t have that kind of money!” He became stern and quiet, contemplating. After a few moments he shot, “Okay. You get one half, and I’ll get the other half.” We never talked about the irrigation canals again.
Projects that run smoothly can be extremely enjoyable. Some of the educational programs that we have organized have been a lot of fun: AIDS education, summer camps, etc. Along more environmental lines, however, my largest program, in theory, would be a national program of bird surveys, corresponding wildlife education and birding-related eco-tourism workshops with the residents and service providers of national parks. It is right now in the grant stage, a proposal I wrote with two other volunteers who are bird fanatics. I am merely a neophyte and collaborator. We did a preliminary bird survey in Imilchil, a village on the western flanks of my national park, situated 90 kilometers away, where there are two of the few natural lakes in all of North Africa. Owing to the sparse alpine lakes, reservoirs and coastal wetlands, combined with a strategic location – the junction of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Africa and Europe – Morocco harbors and is visited by a good 450+ species of birds.
Developing this program entailed finding a capable Moroccan organization to partner with. We believe we found one in the Association of Earth and Life Science Teachers (AESVT) partners, and so far we have had a planning meeting and spotty correspondence to establish each partner’s role. I sense they may be getting annoyed with us, due to the glacial pace of finding funding and a little mishap in a little mountain village in Demnate. I have not confirmed this story yet, but it goes like this: AESVT requested a volunteer to come to the Atlas mountain village of Demnate, just two hours southeast of Marrakesh. It is a relatively large town, bordering a nationally protected forest, brimming with teachers to collaborate with on environmental education projects. One woman was assigned there in May; in the final weeks of training, each volunteer is given a village/town/city assignment, and visits it. The site selection process itself is rather cursory. Peace Corps is given a list of potential sites by government ministries or receives a request from an NGO directly – in this case, AESVT. Peace Corps then goes to the town, glad-hands public officials who invariably whitewash the state of affairs and then finds a family willing to host the new volunteer for $5 per day (a pretty good deal, in fact) for two months. I talked to the woman after visiting it. She was very excited about the physical location but a little intimated by the number of qualified professionals already working there; what role would she play there? Nonetheless, I heard through the grapevine, two weeks later that her site had been changed. The only explanation I have heard is that some staff members were reading the newspaper (yes, the newspaper no less) after her site visit when they read that Demnate had been used recently as a training site by terrorists. Oops! It could all be hearsay. Nonetheless, AESVT has not been returning my emails recently.
1 comment:
You write very well.
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