My Last Trek - Manzanillo, DR

Manzanillo
  Manzanillo is a place which seems to know itself very well.  It is more content than complacent.  A person rarely hears a complaint or cynical response to the polite question: "Como estas?," but rather they hear a genuine: "tranquilo."  Other places have aquieced to operate at a basal level of dissatisfaction with the social and economic status quo.  Life is not perfect, but there is a sense of more good than bad.
  This is a town of about 5000 underemployed, but happy people.  They have a high standard of living and the town is decently covered by government services.  The streets are swept, (the streets are paved... for the most part), the power is on and the water flows sufficiently for most residents (for at least eight hours per day), the children finish high school and the local clinic treats what they can and sends the rest of the patients via the one working ambulance to Monte Christi whether they be Dominican or Haitian... and many are Haitian.
  Aside from working at the local shops or performing odd jobs many work part-time at an industrial port on the Atlantic beach.  The port hosts one or two cargo ships per week and the prostitutes host the sailors at the row of beach bars on the north side of town.
  Typically, people spend their ample free time sitting in front of small rows of cement houses with little fenced in yards and sip Presidente pilsners from small plastic cups and play dominoes.  Pick-up trucks armed with enormous speakers roll slowly through the streets selling vegetables or stumping for this or that political candidate.  The shops close at 1pm and reopen at 3pm.  In the evenings, the young and single (frequently leave their children at home) to step out to the especially loud beach bars to dance to the bachata, meringue and salsa music the DJs play.  A plastic cup of either anejo or blanco rum and 7Up goes for 50 pesos (about $1 US) and friends dance with generally the same crowd night in and night out.
  The sugar cane for the rum comes from plantations run by large companies not far from the center of town.  Bananas are also grown nearby but are nearly all for export and impossible to buy in Manzanillo.  Bananas, in previous years, led to the rise and fall of so many small Latin American governments under corporations like United Fruit, unlovingly referred to as 'la pulpa' (the octopus); are now produced a bit more democratically.  Still it is only plantains which are in the shops in Manzanillo.  The nearest banana stand may be two hours away in Santiago.
  That is the condition in which we found Manzanillo.  This was all due to the work of the town's local Peace Corps volunteer: Bronwen, a recent college grad and Idaho native, spoke nearly fluent Spanish before she arrived.  Campaigning by the hospital administrator led her to ask Trek Medics for a donated ambulance.  She sent us an email.
  She quickly realized that an ambulance may be the least cost-effective way to cover a town's emergency transport needs.  Our program would utilize volunteer drivers, and most importantly, they would be dispatched through a mobile phone network called Beacon, the cornerstone of the whole operation.  The best part was that Bronwen was able to convince the rest of the community that our way was better, even if not more impressive than a big new ambulance with lights and sirens.
  Our work was not easy.  So many moving parts had to come together for the idea to work properly.  First, was putting together a training session for about 25 curious volunteers at a former golf club built for Americans in the heyday of United Fruit.  The volunteer first responders who had been recruited by the city leaders Bronwen had been in contact with ranged from high school aged to middle aged with an even mix of men and women.  We had to bring all of the education and recruiting together crisply and that involved everything from learning the word for 'bleeding' in Spanish (which is 'hemmoragia') to ordering enough lunches for the whole group.  The two-day event was encouraging.  The volunteers were full of questions, eager and excited.  Most of them took to the skills quickly and several learned to properly answer the Beacon messages that take the place of our western radio communications.
  In the following smaller-scale training sessions at the fire station's waterside front yard we found that the mosquitoes are vicious and while Beacon is simple to use, it is also simple to make mistakes when answers must be formatted precisely enough to be recognized by a computer... no extra spaces, a capital letter O is not just as good as a zero.  Still, the corps of dependable volunteers grew to about 12 and the early stages felt successful.
  During one of our training sessions by the fire department's section of the beachfront swamp a call came in.  We were ready with our video cameras to record all the good work we were doing at the training sessions, but this was about to be better.  The ambulance refused to start.  We could not have planned a better showcase for the SMS-based text message 911 service that cut out the expensive and unreliable ambulances from the neighborhood emergency response loop.  Everybody lent a hand to get the ambulance to start and it was no use.  We got it all on tape.  We activated a Beacon call from our computer and rode along, cameras rolling, as a volunteer used his own car to respond to the call.  It was a public relations coup.
  Still, despite some notable successes, in the background, the problems were mounting.  Only one of our volunteer first responders had consistent access to a car, the rest arrived on scooters which serve as poor ambulances.  Nobody ever seemed to have credit on their phones in order to answer the calls.
  The original vision of Beacon involved taxi-drivers... a population expected to have four wheels and a charged phone; but that original vision was not properly communicated to the town leaders when they went looking for volunteers for our system.  Still, nothing was over yet.  We could just as well continue to recruit and we did, but solving the problem of the phone minutes was not easy.  We offered people rewards of phone credit for participating in our tests and training sessions, but having credit ready (beforehand) for an emergency... what could we do?  We were not there to fund the system ourselves.  The whole idea was to be sustainable.
  In the meantime, we had metrics to meet, which meant having the hospital summon the fire department ambulance with our system as well as the conventional phone call as a failsafe.  The hospital was not fond of the idea.  It would mean doctors had to send a text while in front of patients and apparently, doctors had recently been reprimanded for doing just that.  Furthermore, the hospital director took such exception to the idea that the ambulances were kept by the fire department, that I began to believe he thought we had some influence over the matter, which surely must have been an issue better handled the local Ministries of Health and Interior.
  Trek Medics' solution was more or less to bribe the hospital by offering them motorbike ambulances with sidecar beds.  The questions of who would drive them or who would fill them with gas were never answered before an online fundraising campaign sprouted up to fund the bikes.  And the hospital staff was excited about the idea of new toys.
  In Manzanillo, all of the moving parts were not coming together as anyone would have liked.  The volunteers could never answer the calls because they had no credit on their phones and even when they had, at times, the telecom network moved too slowly to complete the exchange.  The hospital was holding out for bribes and the idea of Trek Medics funding the town's emergency services indefinitely was both unfeasible and in opposition to the principle we had been operating under.
  We continued on, pressing forward as much as we could; but it started to become obvious that we were facing problems which had no solutions.  We  listened to the blaring music and ate our grilled chicken dinners at the small cafe in the center of town with regulars and the expats who passed through.  We shot pool at the bars down by the beach and swatted mosquitoes while marveling at the locals who showed so much talent playing with warped cues on shoddy tables.  We spent time with the friends we had made, but with a sense of disappointment that the Beacon program (at least in its present form) was not the answer to expanding emergency communication coverage.  It worked on some isolated days, with small numbers of players; but it was nowhere near being ready to be put in the role of a city or even a town's emergency communication.
  In the last days of our three-month stay, it became clear that Beacon needed more institutional support from the telecoms to be effective.  It needed free text messages for the users and access to faster connections; but some in Trek Medics' back office thought that no telecom would ever take that much of a risk.
  In the end, it was a strong idea which had to be tried.  It could be said that the perfect idea has not been invented yet.  Giving up on less-than-perfect ideas would cut off at the knees conceivable chance at progress.  This idea still needs a major overhaul, but the risk was worth taking.
  Failures have a way of being waypoints along the way to success and I know that one day I will be able to look back on our efforts and see them as something which helped create a better life for the people who made us their neighbors and friends.
   

Career Volunteer

Career Volunteer
This last Monday turned out pretty well, but started off with a real punch in the face.
Just for sake of setting the scene a bit… the previous Wednesday I had been in Marrakech (where they have good internet) to watch my sister’s wedding LIVE from Jamaica via webcam. I really wished I could’ve been there, a pretty little spot by the ocean; but ever the volunteer, I still had about six months left to go on my term in the Peace Corps. Wishing I’d been somewhere else that day began with the first of two shoving matches I had gotten into with punks on the street who felt the need to shoot their mouths off at my friends (one female, the other of Asian descent [plenty of people here think it’s acceptable to "talk trash" in the street and seem genuinely surprised that someone is going to do something about it.])
So coming back from ‘Kech to my provincial capital of Azilal, my EMT buddy and I stopped by the local Protection Civile station. Behind the high gate, the guys were playing soccer against a cement wall when we showed up unannounced. They saw the two aromi (Moroccan Arabic: Foreigner) and seemed to wonder what we wanted… "Nous voulons jouer!," I shouted. ("We want to play!")
Ice broken: I explained as best I could that we were EMTs in the States and wanted to have a sit-down kind of info swap with these obviously well-equipped, well-trained fire and medical responders. We all shook hands, exchanged greetings (in the very thorough local style). They told us we were very welcome, but just to come back the next Monday when the chief would be there. Great! Our little ambulance project was stepping up from the countryside to the main stage.
Later that night the rain and the snow began to fall seriously for the first time this season. The damp weather only made the cheap soup we ate for dinner that night so much the better. For the fact that Moroccan soups are really good and cheap, many of my meals are heavily soup-based.
The rain continued in Azilal and the snow in the mountains where I live through the weekend until the next Monday when the action of the story really begins.
As per usual, to get out of my village it’s necessary to be down the hill and at curbside by about 4am to catch the van as it goes by. It usually doesn’t rain very much up here; and up until that day I had never stood there in the rain (cold yes, but until then, I’d had the luck.) It wasn’t a heavy rain and I even wore my new coat… a present for a recent holiday (Eid-Kebir, where we sacrificed a live goat) from my host-family who are of limited means. It was a nice gesture, but I’m almost sure it’s a women’s coat.
As I stood there for over an hour in the dark and the rain it became more and more obvious that I was the only idiot who wanted to go to Azilal on that particular morning. I guessed that many in my village (and at Protection Civile too) would’ve just said ‘go another day;’ but that wouldn’t be stubbornly American of me. I said I’d be there.
The only other way to get out is to hike out two hours to the intersection of the road to the larger town on the other side of the valley. Peace Corps has two other volunteers there, both from my group. I set out, walking in the dark and the drizzle. After only a minute or so I stepped on a rock which I hadn’t seen, rolled my ankle and jammed my knee in the pavement. I caught myself on my palms before it was my chin too. I probably looked bad, but I jumped right up, as if to prove to all the people who weren’t there that I was OK. My only thought was about my camera (still safe, if not damp in my backpack) and whether or not I’d bleed through my long-johns and pants. It was unlikely, but I couldn’t tell in the dark. Limping for a few paces, I pushed on; but I began thinking about why I was A) in the Peace Corps, B) on a mountain in Morocco, C) walking in the dark and the rain when everybody knew Protection Civile wasn’t going anywhere and no one would be the worse off if we did this later in the week, and D) why do I keep volunteering for things? After all, since university I’ve been in a volunteer military, a volunteer EMT and now a volunteer in the Peace Corps.
If there is some higher calling and duty, then let it be a duty to honesty… If I’m really being honest with myself (and I think oneself is the easiest person to lie to) then I’d say I’m doing all this because I crave the adventure and the challenge. I like proving to myself (and to others, I guess) that I can; and it’s all fun for the most part. And I get to learn a lot about people, places, myself… I guess it works out. As long as I’m out looking for feats of strength to perform, I may as well make myself useful and do something for someone else.
Nothing profound there… you’re cynical philosophers will say that no one does anything for anyone else, but only the selfish satisfaction of having done it. Others have said that the satisfied feeling is the great reward for helping people. I guess, being a career volunteer, I’ve always kinda grappled with the two and wondered what I was really doing. The honesty feels good though. I know it’s a bit of both.
There are definitely days when we don’t really feel the gratitude we think we deserve or we see that we are more motivated than the people we think we’re helping; on those days it’s pretty obvious we’re out here for our own sense of accomplishment. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to help. There’s no way out of this circle, so I suppose that accepting it is the only way to ride in style. That’s all.
Oh, and I did make it to Protection Civile (and only about 5min late). The assistant chief (about late-twenties and in his sharp uniform looked a ton better than I did crawling in from the backwoods exhausted, drenched and freezing, however bundled I still was in my blue women’s coat and tattered pants… my now old, but formerly waterproof boots soaked from having to help push our van through a small river of mountain runoff water earlier that morning.
Our little info swap session at first went awkwardly. My friend and I brought another guy (a local from Azilal) to help translate, but even with that help; this young asst. chief still didn’t really understand what we wanted. I’m sure he first thought that these two Americans were there to rescue to the poor Moroccans. Still, he was polite and welcoming, but he had a look that seemed to say he didn’t ‘need’ our help. Finally, we got through the idea that we wanted to learn from them as well and even then he wasn’t sure what exactly to tell us.
I realized it was a hard question to ask… Tell me about some of those little tips and tricks you pick up along the way, I was saying. (By the way, tips and tricks really doesn’t translate well.) We had a few prepared which we passed on as we sat around a couch and small table in his office. He finally broke out his procedural manual; it was old and French, but it did the job. He flipped open to any page and basically started talking about anatomy and physiology basics; but all of that started real conversations. The three of us discussed techniques for giving oxygen to unconscious patients (with and without spinal injuries), what to do in cases involving pregnant women and we contributed a bit about monitoring brain function after head injuries. It was exactly what it should have been; and luckily almost all of these words come from Greek and Latin so English to French wasn’t a big deal.
We also saw their ambulance and fire trucks. They’ve got some hi-tech stuff. Their ambulance can carry three patients, two better than us. If you’re familiar, on the ‘bench’ side, they can essentially set up this sort of bunk bed operation that puts two patients above the bench. Pretty cool. We all learned something, we did our jobs and perhaps most importantly… I had my little adventure for the day.
Mission: Accomplished

Heil Apfelfuhrer

Heil Apfelfuhrer
Why am I subjected to such extremes around here?
In other times and places it often seemed that things naturally homogenized; here things seem to hold balance by remaining equally divided at the opposite ends of my mind.
If you’ve been patient enough to keep reading, thank you, and here is the answer to the first, obvious question… Apfelfuhrer was a short-lived anti-Nazi movement which sprang up in Germany a few years ago in response to an even shorter-lived Nazi revival. Rather than a black swastika in the center of their red flag, the group used an apple as their symbol. Why? I suppose it’s about as ridiculous a thing to salute as a swastika. The whole intent was to bring down the neo-Nazis by mocking them with farcical uniforms and flags. It worked. Way to be.
Now why bring it up? Because people around here constantly keep me on my toes by either being shockingly wonderful or bafflingly awful. And, I suppose, it’s only different from other places because, here people constantly feel the need to remind me how lovely and welcoming all the people are here… all the people are here. Sometimes, yeah…
(And maybe this is just a little down-time sour grapes… This scale I’ve described really doesn’t include the few honestly great friends I’ve made around here… people I will think about always; and I’m grateful for that. This scale is more for the nameless people in the background who, unlike in other places, just don’t seem to stay in the background and be nice and neutral. Everyone has to be on one side or the other, and that’s the odd thing.)
So without prices posted on most everything, the "tourists," whether speaking native-languages or not, pay more for things. Sometimes we put up a fight and I feel like Mike Huckabee (or whoever it is these days) arguing for a flat sales tax because "it’s fair" that everyone pay the same thing. Maybe I am better off, but it still feels slimy and racist to charge people more because of their appearance and estimated net worth (estimated by appearance). And, surprise, it recently happened… I paid some little kid (maybe 11 or 12) the normal five dirhams for a sandwich and he insisted on two more. One more, I might have believed, but still, I was about to let it slide and handed him another 5 asking for my change. When I saw the smirk on his face, after his big score, I pushed the sandwich back on the counter, threw the change on the floor and walked away. Petty, perhaps; but for the kid it was probably his lucky day…he got ten dirham and a sandwich, just for trying to get away with one on me.
I went over to a café to get a coffee, since it looked like I wouldn’t be eating lunch that day. As to not pay another tourist rate, I asked how much the coffee was beforehand. Another kid waiter didn’t understand my Berber, I tried in Arabic, I tried in French, I tried in Arabic again, I tried in Berber again and we were both about to give up when another man at the café stepped in to save me… and I was given the fair price of five dirhams. After the coffee arrived, our translator offered me some dates that he and his family were sharing. And again, I was overcome with this wonder about this question of everyone being so delightful or not. It was pretty nice of this guy to help me translate a bit and then share the dates with just some tourist and his giant backpack.
So then I got on the bus and knocked out soon enough. I woke up and saw the high school-aged kid across from me studying from a book he had drawn a big swastika on. My first reaction was to start yelling, perhaps ask him if he had anything to say or do… as long as I was "right here." I reeled it in though. My guess is that this guy didn’t really want me and my family dead. I seem to have gathered up enough evidence to support the theory that many people around here have next to no idea about what happened during the Nazi years and probably use it more as an anti-Israel (as opposed to anti-Jewish) than anything else… not that I love seeing it.
The other problem is, of course, that if I’m off "picking fights," not that carrying swastikas isn’t already asking for a fight, I’d sorta become exactly what they think I am: a Jewish stone-cold killin’ machine. (Take that Woody Allen stereotype!) So, I just went back to sleep wondering why this guy is so welcoming and what he actually meant by his swastika.
So then it was break-time on the bus. We stopped by some roadside fruit stands in a roadside town. I stepped out for some fresh air and saw one of the fruit vendors from one of my last trips home from Marrakech. He got up and offered me the crate he was sitting on. We spoke for a second in Arabic and as I was about to run out of words he asked that we switch to French so he could practice. That slightly improves my vocabulary.
I told him about the work I’d been doing in ‘Kech and he asked about New York, etc. After a few seconds he offered me an apple or two (for free obviously), we ate, he excitedly introduced me to another worker there as a guy who speaks Berber. They were both excited; it’s a common scene.
The bus honked its horn, break-time was over, I said goodbye to my new friends and sat back down on the bus across from the Nazi. And that’s when I thought of the apfelfuhrer thing.
Is that a good conclusion for the story? I wish I could say that things all worked out in the end. I guess they did in the sense that life just goes on. I don’t think anyone learned a valuable lesson. I think everyone involved is exactly the same.
So since none of us are any bit the better off, I’ll just say a danke scheone to the apfelfuhrer crowd. There’re some people who I can say were going out of their way to do it right. Heil Apfelfuhrer!
　

It's All About ME!

I guess I should explain the long hiatus...
Despite what people say and all those heart-warming movies which tell us that anything is possible as long as you can dream it, I guess I'm (again) putting the journalism dream on the back shelf... and I had been for a while, at least as a career option.
I'm gonna be a doctor now. That's the new idea. It seems like it still may afford me the opportunity to do some good, get out on some more adventures and possible even write about it all someday, plus I really loved my EMS days. So, I've got a long road ahead, but I do know that: one must do something. As much as I love journalism, I don't think it's wi$e at this point to keep pressing the issue as a career choice... not enough money there to keep me off of people's couches. Oh well. So for that reason, I guess I felt like the blog (which at one point was intended as some kind of clip portfolio) was too much trouble to maintain, especially given how infrequently I get to a good internet connection. Then add on top of that the cracking of the screen of my pretty pink laptop which I bought and later discovered... was pink. That's true, ask anybody.

The New Plan

So instead of writing sample articles employing all of the fine journalistic principles and techniques which I have learned, I will succumb to the 'new school' of any idiot can say whatever he/she wants whenever he/she wants and what's more crazy is that other people sometimes even read it. In this case I really only expect family and close friends to 'read it,' so I guess that's not so crazy.
And one more thought on the death of journalism... It seems to me that as long as we're all going to be 'journalists' now. Reporting via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, phone-cams, etc., why not teach more journalism in school, right? Are they already doing this? I live in Morocco, I don't know... Teach kids how to blog. Make them responsible journalists early on, then even if there's still no money in journalism, perhaps some more quality material will rise up from the gutters of the internet.

The Lost Nav

So I wasn't really lost after all... I was just changing directions. Now I'll just carry on like every other clown writing about what he saw or did that day.

Guess what everybody! I just taught my first two ambulance driver training sessions with my buddy Andy out here in the Peace Corps! Woo! [Really Big Smiley Face!] [Winking Smiley Face!]

The program is developing as we see what these drivers really know and don't know, but they, as well as some of the docs and nurses at these rural clinics seem to dig our scene. [Winking Smiley Face]

We gave them some backboards and collars and set them up with some equipment they should be carrying like, gloves, tape, blankets and jazz like that. [Smiley Face with half-note in background as a play on my use of the word 'jazz' to mean: stuff Face]

This project had been in the works for about a year and a half which sounds like a long time, but is really only about a week or two in "Peace Corps condensed time." So it's not that bad. Those few days or months, depending on which calendar you use, were spent convincing my supervisors this was a good idea, confirming the interest on the part of these drivers spread throughout my province (Azilal), finding a supply company for the equipment, writing a grant, getting grant approved by Rabat, by Washington, waiting for the money to arrive, paying the Casablanca supply company for the backboards and collars, waiting on the delivery of the backboards and collars, distributing materials, and finally scheduling and executing these training sessions. [Smiley Face with Sweat Flying Off It's Face, Face]

Also, I'd like to mention that in early September I helped teach a little journalism clinic in the city of Ouarzazate. I met a really good group of kids who are actually show some enthusiasm for journalism and using it to improve their lives and their communities... Imagine that. I'm also a little jealous, I gotta say, that they come from a place where journalism may not quite be dead yet. Go crack heads!, I say to them.

And for me it gave me a little motivation to get back writing again... even if it is in this new, modern, everyone's-a-reporter now way.

So I will sign off here:

"This has been the Lost Nav blog, from Morocco, Lost Nav reporting."

courtesy of Travel Mag

http://travelmag.co.uk/?p=2887

Take the Ramadan Challenge - Azilal Province, Morocco, Sept. 3, 2010

Log margin notes:

Moroccans Take the Challenge

Ramadan is the Muslim holy month best-known for the obligation of the faithful to fast during daylight hours.

In fact, beyond eating, smoking, swearing and fighting are all prohibited and generally best-behavior is required throughout. The month itself appears consistently on the Islamic calendar, but slides 16 days earlier each year against the Christian calendar.

The holiday also presents two great challenges for a non-Muslim visitor to a Muslim land, particularly one who is here to interact and not simply observe or even sight-see.

The first problem is simply of logistics.

The first meal of the day is served at sundown and is heralded from the minerets by the muezzin in every locality. Traditionally, the fast is broken in the same fashion as the prophet Mohammed was said to, with dates. After the dates, the traditional Moroccan break-fast is followed with hard-boiled eggs, bread and olive oil, juice (often more of a milkshake), coffee (often more of a cafe au lait), shebekia (fried sugar cookies) and soup.

It is not uncommon in some households for people to push back from the table and nap on the floor in the dining salon just a few inches from where they sat and ate break-fast.

Whether nap or no, the next meal is served a few hours later and is quite often a tajine. A tajine is both the name of the dish and the dish in which the meal is served. A conical clay lid is removed from the plate below revealing a stew typically consisting of root vegetables, meat and vegetable oil. The tajine is placed in the center of the table and for each guest to reach into with a piece of bread to scoop a small chunk of vegetable or meat (and almost always in that order.)

Fruit is a typical dessert which is followed by a few precious hours of sleep before the household is again awake under dark skies for one last meal before the muezzin again sounds the call for another day's fast to begin. The final nightly meal may closely resemble a normal late-morning or afternoon tea served during the rest of the year. There is, of course, tea (an imported greent tea, heavily flavored with mint and sugar), bread, olive oil, honey, jam and butter.

Once the sun comes up on another day, many wearied and thirsty people go to work, but many, by way of preparing for another day's fast, are sleeping in. The provincial capital of Azilal (by no means a large city) is almost entirely shuddered at daybreak. The small city is home to a disproportionately large amount of cafes which all remain closed until just before nightfall. Most shops and businesses do operate during the holy month, but frequently on irregular holiday schedules.

Americans Take the Challenge

"Is tazumt?" is how it is pronounced in the Berber dialect of Tashelheit spoken in the Central Atlas region. That is, "are you fasting?" in English.

The Lost Nav was not. As someone who fasts annually on the primary Jewish fast-day of Yom Kippur (and has also dabbled in other Jewish fast-days), I don't object to the concept. Different interpretations offer that it allows people a greater kinship with those who are unable to provide for themselves. It is a lesson in self-discipline. Some people even think it's healthy.

For me, it seems like fasting is the ultimate test of how Moroccan each volunteer is willing to be. How much will we give up our American identities for a Moroccan one?

We are told we must integrate into the communities we are posted to, in order to learn about them and win the trust of the people there; but I feel it is worthwhile to caution against over integration.

We have three goals here, in short they are: to help people, teach them about US and have US learn about them... in that order.

If an American becomes so thoroughly Moroccan, that may be a great way to learn about the native culture, but it undercuts the first two stated goals.

By creating a first impression as solely a student of culture, language and life in the host country, we are thought of as solely students. Some go as far as participating in some of the activities we are trying to correct... drinking from a communal water cup, for example. Therefore, when it is time for the student to become the teacher, from where does the authority come? After learning for so long, what does an American have to teach the Moroccan?

And by yielding so greatly the American identity, are not opportunities lost to teach about the very American culture noted in the second goal?

Let the debate rage in training sessions and cafes among the two camps of volunteers... the Moroccan side and the American side. Both have merits, but for myself and the greater good of Morocco; I will be, as ever:

American.

The Pen Racket: Addicted to Aid at a Young Age - Azilal Province, Morocco, Aug. 7, 2010

Travel log:
They come from the West. Westerners ride into Morocco to enjoy the scenery, the culture and history. Still, what they see on their way to and from the kasbahs and the natural wonders is the evidence of many of the problems their predecessors helped create; and they want to help and the want to give.
So the question is: what are they giving and what are they taking away?
The professionally charitable (or developmentally charitable) say that purely giving chokes true development and does a disservice to the recipient of such well-intentioned and misguided generosity.
The Lost Nav is true to form and quite lost over what may be a solution. Armed with minimal skills in both French and the Berber dialect of Tashelheit, he wanders one hour each way to his local health clinic dreaming up ways to help, or rather develop.
During the hike, brains racked in the service of new community and country, the neighborhood punks demonstrate the early symptoms of their addiction to foreign aid. They also show the symptoms of boredom and the unavailability of more useful activities as they harass yet another 'aromi' or foreigner in their midst.
"Fiyi stilo," they yell and demand in their French-tinged Tashelheit or plainly "donne-moi stilo" in French... "Give me pen!" They carry on further with "bonjour" and "ca va?" in the most exaggerated and snotty French accents they can muster.
Many tourists are duped by this feigned desire for school supplies. Some are likely to give in just to get rid of the little beggars, but the locals tell a different ending to the story.
The pens are traded at the local convenience shops (called 'hanuts') for candy... candy and the sense that foreigners come and are happy to give.