4/23/10 Mural Painting 101

A How-To Guide for Mural Painting

Step One: Prepare the wall

1. Decide which patch of wall you want to paint.
2. Decide how big the final mural will be.
3. Wash the wall.
4. If you're scaling up from an existing image, figure out the dimensions, do the math, and calculate the precise size of the mural.
5. With a tape measure and Sharpie marker (and ideally either a bubble level or a third partner who has a good eye for level), designate the boundaries of the mural.
6. With a chalkline, ensure the boundaries are perfectly straight.
   
   

Step 2: Prime the Wall

1. Decide what color the background of the mural will be. (For world maps, it makes sense to prime the wall in light blue. That way, the oceans are done, without having to be hyper-careful around continent boundaries. You can just roller them on!)
2. Mix your paint.
   
   
3. Roller in the bulk of the paint. (Is roller a verb? What else do you call applying paint with a paint roller?)
   
4. With a small brush, cut in the edges. Most Moroccan walls are thinly plastered and then whitewashed, so taping the edges isn't an option - you'll rip off half the wall. Hopefully you'll have someone as attentive to detail as we did.
   
   
5. If you're gridding your mural - ie, scaling it up, bit by bit, from a small image, using a grid system - you'll want to snap chalklines at even intervals, so you have a visible grid above your primed surface. To make a precise replica, you'll need to figure out the scale factor between the image in your hand and the mural on the wall. It's math you probably haven't thought about since 7th grade, but sit down with a ruler, tape measure, pencil, and calculator and you'll work it out. :)

Part 3: Draw the Picture

1. Either freehanded or using a pre-existing image (with or without a grid), draw your picture onto the primed surface. Use a pencil. You can't really erase unless you have an art gum eraser, but you can smudge it pretty easily, so at least you'll know later that you didn't mean that particular line. Besides, you'll be painting over it all, right? :)
   
   
2. If necessary, go back over your penciled lines with a Sharpie. In bright, direct sunlight, our pencil lines were nearly invisible. We shaded them with our arms and redrew them in Sharpie, so they'd be easy to see later, when we had paint brushes in-hand.
3. Color your own copy of the picture. (This step can be skipped if you have access to a color printer.) We used colored pencils and the black-and-white printouts of the map, and I got to regress to kindergarten. :) Also, we thought that a few of the colors on their map were too similar (like an orange and a peach that we had to squint hard at), so we changed them.
   
   
4. Choose your paint colors. If they match the colors from (3), your life will be a lot simpler. Then mix your paint colors. Our art guru did this for us, with gorgeous success.
   
   
5. Color-swatch your picture. (Especially if your image is complex, like a world map.) That is, daub paint in each little section, so that your mural becomes more or less paint-by-number. This prevents you frantically referencing the printout in your hand (that you hopefully remembered to bring!), trying to figure out if that little corner of Madagascar should be dark green or light green, while swarmed by eager children. Also, this allows children to paint all the sections of their color, without having to check back with you. (Yes, this does make your map look like it has technicolor smallpox, but that won't last long.)
   

Step 4: Paint the Mural!

Step 5: Bask in your accomplishment

Here are the 21 kids, some teachers, and the PCVs.
(L) Half of the world biome map (R) Half of the Water Cycle mural

Part Six (Optional): Touch Up the Mural

Go back the next day and clean up the edges, make sure there isn't any primed surface still showing through (a big problem on textured walls like these), fix any mistakes... The kids accidentally painted across the Red Sea, making the Sahara contiguous with the Arabian Peninsula. Little things like that.

Water Cycle Mural, End of Day 1 Water Cycle Mural, End of Day 2

The obvious differences are the appearance of the water cycle arrows (whose label words will be filled in soon), and the more obvious nature of the three-dimensional diagram. Also, a cloud shrunk. If you look more carefully, the snowflakes and raindrops were redone, and patchy paint was filled in to present a smooth surface.

World Biome Map, End of Day 1 World Biome Map, End of Day 2

The kids had done a good job, so the only obvious differences are the reappearance of the Red Sea, the biome key (which the Arabic teacher promised to fill in), and that the Kamchatka islands are now islands, and not a big streak of brown. There are also subtle changes, like the thickness of the paint (which shows up best in Antarctica, now white instead of whitish-blue) and the sharpness of the contacts between colors.

Heart-Healthy Foods Mural, End of Day 1 Heart-Healthy Foods Mural, End of Day 2

The fruit and heart got outlined, the frame completed.

Touching-up is optional, and depends on the skill level of your students. And how particular you are about the final product. :)

Step 7: Celebrate!

We went home and had delicious food. I highly recommend this. :)

So there you have it, friends: the seven-step guide to a fabulous mural day. Our Earth Day was a huge success, in my opinion. The kids had a great time, they learned good things, and now their school has trees and murals to embed the memories permanents.

And there was great rejoicing. :D

4/22/10 Earth Day 2010

Happy Earth Day!

This year, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Morocco's capital city of Rabat was one of 6 cities worldwide that the Earth Day powers-that-be selected for ... I'm still not quite sure what, but something cool. So Morocco has gone *all*out* for Earth Day this year.

Every tree in every public nursery for hundreds of kilometers has been claimed for tree plantings. 400 were planted in SouqTown. 500 in Berberville. Some friends of mine, organizing an Earth Day celebration for their village, located in the heart of the Eastern High Atlas National Park, requested 50 trees and ended up with 12. Which we planted! Along with another 10 olive trees that they purchased from a private nursery.

Earth Day! So many happy memories and fond associations...

In my friends' village, they celebrated Earth Day at their local madrasa (elementary school) with a tree planting, mural painting, and an environmental presentation (originally to be given by our Water and Forestry partner, but when he had to cancel, a friend from SouqTown's English Club stepped in). They asked me to come, since I've helped paint my share of murals. They also invited up an art guru, a PCV who has years of experience as an artist and art teacher, and one of the newbies, here for site visit. (My newbie stayed in Berberville - his choice.)

In the morning, we planted trees with 75 kids - 33 girls and 42 boys.

After lunch, the 21 students from the two oldest classes came back to help us paint the murals.

Pictures and details to come! :D

3/29/10 Nature Walkin'

At the Spring Camp in Emerald City, Zifi and I led an Environment Club. Over three days, we took the three groups of students on a walk through the neighborhood park adjoining the camp.

We'd prepared index cards with various activities, which we placed at strategic points throughout the park:

• Look up. How many different colors of green do you see?

We placed this one just a few minutes into the park, to introduce to the students the idea of careful observation. Most kids responded with 3 or 4, until we pointed out that even the same leaf could have multiple shades of green, in the dappled light.

• Look at the litter. How long do you think it takes these items to decompose?

Decompose was a new word for the kids, in English at least, but most of them were familiar with the concept. We put this card near a huge pile of trash - close to the size of a football field - and pointed out various pieces of garbage while giving the kids these decomposition statistics: disposable diaper 10-20 years, orange or banana peel 3-5 weeks, cigarette butts 2-5 years, plastic six pack holder 450 years, piece of paper 2-4 weeks, plastic bag 10-20 years, Aluminum can 250-350 years, wool sock 2-4 years, Styrofoam never, glass never.

We asked them if they planned to bring their kids to this park someday - we didn't bother asking if they planned to have kids, since that's a given in this culture - and pointed out that, unless somebody stepped up with a massive cleanup effort, most of this trashpile would be waiting for their children.

The amount of litter in the otherwise lovely park depressed me. In fact, litter is the wrong word. It implies left behind detritus. This trash looked to have been deliberately dumped. In fact, the park was full of narrow mounds, mostly grown over with grass, that looked for all the world like a garbage truck had backed up, dropped a full load of trash, and driven off. Does Emerald City not have a town dump? Or is it cheaper to drop trash in the park than to pay some sort of town-dump-fee? Zifi and I speculated, and even asked the kids, but never got an answer.

• Stop. Can you feel the warmth of the sun?

This one sat in an open area in the mostly-shaded park, and gave us a chance to bask in the sunlight (since it was chilly most of the week) and to talk about photosynthesis. Virtually none of the kids knew the word "photosynthesis" in English before we gave it to them, but most had learned about la photosynthèse in Science class (which is usually conducted in French, as are half the classes by junior high and high school). They were relieved to find it a cognate (as are oxygen and carbon dioxide, for that matter. Let's hear it for the universality of science!).

• Hug a tree.

The kids found this one goofy, but did it anyway. We talked about photosynthesis and the role trees play in giving us oxygen, as well as absorbing our carbon dioxide exhalations, let alone providing wood, paper, kindling, etc.

• Make a rubbing of bark.

The word bark was new, as was the concept of doing a rubbing. After the first group mostly just drew on their papers while holding them against a tree, we were careful to emphasize with the second and third groups to only use the side of their crayon. The trees in question had a really gnarly bark, so the rubbings came out well. :)

• Using only your senses of touch, smell, or taste, become familiar with one tree. You should be able to identify your tree later on.

This was a fun one. We'd blindfold a few volunteers, assign them buddies (since the ground was uneven at best, and liberally sprinkled with thorn bushes), and then have each buddy walk each blindfolded volunteer to a tree. The blinded kid would grope around at the tree, exploring the texture of the bark, feeling for low branches, sniffing it, licking it, and generally memorizing "their" tree. Then the buddy led the still-blindfolded camper back to the group, at which point we'd spin the poor blind thing in circles till they were dizzy, and then remove the blindfold and ask them to find their tree again.

We did this with about 15 of the 50 kids in camp, and every single one of them correctly identified their tree. Undoubtedly, a few were assisted by unscrupulous (or just overly-helpful) buddies, but most had simply learned so many characteristics of their tree - a knot just at knee height, or a branch at shoulder height, or a gap in the bark just there if you reached around - that no imitation, substitution, or alteration would do. We couldn't fool 'em.

• Look down. How many different colors of green do you see?

Usually, by the time we'd gotten here, the kids were observing more carefully, and we got much higher numbers than the first time.

• Look closely. How many living things do you see? Make a list in your notebook.

This card we placed in a relatively open spot, with a view of a stream that usually hosted a few egrets, as well as near some bushes that played home to snails. Most of the students learned the English words for ant and grass and insect here. (This is an English-language immersion camp, after all, they're supposed to be learning new words.) Some kids got really into it, and found all sorts of beetles and spiders and other creepy-crawlies.

That reminds me - once, a student asked me to translate le ver. Thinking she'd said le vert, the grass/greenery, I gave them grass. But as I heard them passing the word to each other, I realized they meant worm, and suddenly remembered the tongue-twister from French class, Le ver vert travers la vert vers la verre vert. The green worm crosses the the grass towards the green glass. And all the words are homonyms (or nearly, for travers). OK, sorry, end tangent.

• Close your eyes. Listen. What do you hear? Make a list in your notebook.

Most of the students discerned the nearby flowing stream, the wind through the eucalyptus leaves, crickets, frogs, and a few birds. A few snarky kids pointed out that they could hear their not-so-silent friends, too.

• Imagine - what did this park look like 100 years ago? Draw in your notebook.

We placed this card in one of the most picturesque sections of the park, far from the dump sites and the toxic sludge growing in the pond. By this point in the walk, we were usually running late, so sometimes we had the kids draw, and other times, we just talked about what we saw. Most of the kids knew that the eucalyptus trees in this area were all non-native, introduced from Australia fairly recently. The Water and Forestry Department loves planting eucalyptus trees. Kalaytus, as they're known here, grow ridiculously quickly, so tree-planting projects look successful within a matter of years. Unfortunately, they also poison the soil, so there's never much (if any) undergrowth.

• Make a rubbing of a leaf.

By the time we got here, we never had any time, so we skipped this activity all three days. Sorry, leaves. You'll get love another time.

• Imagine – what will this park look like in 100 years?
  

We placed this card on top of a garbage pile that someone had dumped right smack in the middle of the road. They hadn't even pulled into the trees, like the rest of the trash dumpers. We gave the kids the chance to speculate whether the park would be cleaned up or would turn into a multi-acre trash heap. Most kids went with a middle ground, anticipating that it would be a housing development. Given how rapidly this Casablanca suburb is growing, they're probably right.

At this point, we walked the kids back to camp, thanked them for joining us on a nature walk, and sent them off to their afternoon activity.

PS: Of the three groups we took out, we never once had a kid wander off (helped by having either Zifi or me walk sweep), but we did occasionally have extra kids join in. I'm not sure where they wandered in from, but as long as everyone who we'd left with, came back, I figured we'd done our jobs.

11/10 School Check-In

Today I walked down to the local middle school/high school campus with a Fulbright scholar who is researching girls' education in bled Morocco. She had a series of questions to ask the administrators; she's been in Berberville for two months now, but has had trouble getting the requisite paperwork to have admittance to the schools. I've had the paperwork for over a year, plus I've spent a year and a half building relationships with the teachers and administrators, so I accompanied her in hopes of smoothing her way.

It worked.

We had a very successful conversation with the principal, and he even gave her a copy of the school's enrollment records, complete with details about annual retention, failing students (or "redoubling", as they're called here), IB passage rates, and more, broken down by gender.

I don't know why the principal has been a stickler for the paperwork until now - he didn't ask to see mine until May, and I worked in the school from October onwards - but I was very grateful that he answered her questions fully and thoughtfully today.

I was less grateful - in fact, I was downright upset - to discover that the huge murals that we poured so much time, attention, labor, and money into last year...

...I don't even want to say it...

...have been plastered over. The king is scheduled to come to Berberville next week - and I say "scheduled to" because this is the *eighth* time that he has been expected in the past 20 months, and we haven't yet seen him - so everyone is running around, beautifying the city.

And for reasons that I cannot comprehend, the school administration decided that the buildings would look better with freshly plastered and repainted walls than with the gorgeous, professional-looking murals that the EE club students generated last year.

Honestly, it felt like a gut punch.

I didn't even notice it immediately - it's hard to see what's *not* there - but about 5 minutes into our visit, I suddenly noticed that I was looking at textured beige where a huge world ecosystem map should be. I hastily ran around to check all the other walls...all freshly plastered and painted.

It hurt.

When I asked the principal what had happened to all our work, he just shrugged and said, "You can redo them if you want."

That hurt, too.

And then we began discussing girls' education, and my spirits rallied somewhat, and I even proposed a few new mural ideas before we left...but my heart wasn't in it.

I did run into a few of the teachers we worked with last year, and talked about restarting the club for this year. We'll see how that goes...

8/13/09 Big Men On Campus

My PA and I stepped through the gate to the college. It hung open invitingly, but only because unknown agents ripped out the lock a while ago, so now it can't close.

I walked her around the grounds, showing her the murals we painted and the hundreds of trees we planted. I'd hoped to introduce her to some (any) administrator, but the place seemed deserted.

As we wound up our perambulations around the campus, we heard voices drifting through a window to the dormitory. I looked in and saw five men sitting around a table, laughing at each others' stories as they finished their lunch. Since I didn't recognize any of them, I assumed they were day laborers, here to continue the ongoing construction/maintenance of the large campus. I mentioned this to my PA, who asked, "So where's the construction?" Looking around, I realized that for the first time in months, I saw no ladders, power tools, steel rods, or half-finished buildings. I suggested that maybe they'd put a new coat of paint on a surprisingly sharp-looking building, but wondered.

We finished our walkabout and turned to head back to the car (bliss-inducing side-effect of site visit: getting to take the 2-km trip from downtown to the campus in an air-conditioned, fully sprung, cushion-seated car instead of walking in the blistering heat of a cloudless summer afternoon). Two figures appeared at the door of the dormitory and called to us. We walked back to say hi.

Long story short(er) - they're members of an association based in Springfield, here for 15 days to prepare the campus for the new school year and provide activities for the students who have mountains of empty time on their hands during the summer hiatus.

They spoke with my PA in rapid Darija, so I followed almost none of the conversation. I therefore don't know who first proposed having the kids put rings of white stones around all of our fledgling saplings...but I know that my PA was thrilled, and eagerly volunteered us to help out. When they explained their materiel shortages, I volunteered white paint and brushes.

We hadn't yet visited the gendarmes or the caid, so we agreed to come back in a few hours. The students wouldn't show up for another half hour anyway - we'd gone to the campus during siesta - so we said we'd bring the materials right away and then return to help out after running our other errands.

We returned to my house for the leftover muraling supplies. My PA looked at the cans of white paint and explained that jiH, which the guys wanted to use to paint the rocks with, is ... something else. Made from dust and rocks. I offered plaster, but she shook her head. A trip to my ever-dependable buHanoot got us connected with the local version of Home Depot (which is apparently across the street from my house! I knew it was an industrial space, but never knew what was in there!) and we were soon the proud owners of a 30kg bag of ... white dust and rocks.

We dropped that, along with brushes and sponges, at the college, then returned to our daily rounds.

When we returned, an hour or two later, everyone was asleep. Apparently, siesta runs really long on hot summer days. (I mean, seriously, it was almost 5pm by this point.)

But when one of the association guys met us at the dormitory door - after repeated knocking - he showed us three nearly-overflowing buckets of ... white stuff.

The rest of the team soon roused, and together we carried the sloshy buckets out to the field.

The first order of business, I discovered, was gathering rocks with which to encircle the tiny saplings. I'd imagined that we'd paint a bunch of rocks first, then arrange them around the trees...don't know why I thought it'd be a good idea to carry rocks dripping with wet paint...

One by one, and then clump by clump, kids emerged from their siestas to join in the effort. We pillaged all the decent-sized rocks from the gravelly soil, then went further afield, to the piles next to the newly-constructed buildings, in order to find enough stones to create half-meter-diameter circles around a hundred or so trees.

Why only ~100 when there are 250 on campus? Because the main goal of this is to help would-be tree-waterers to find the trees. Most of the fragile saplings run along the front wall of the campus, in front of buildings, or lining the edges of the exercise courtyard, but we scattered a batch of 100 or so just north of the soccer field, and since they reach only about 6 inches tall, they're awfully hard to spot. Lhumdullah, Berberville has gotten a rainy summer, so the trees have mostly fended for themselves, but a few good-hearted folks have watered them during the dry weeks. At least, they've watered all the trees they've found. 5 overlooked trees have completely vanished, and another 5 or so are dead, leaving behind only brown stalks. There are another 10-15 that are, in the immortal words of The Princess Bride, "Mostly dead." With enough water and TLC, they'll pull through, but not if their would-be caretakers keep missing them.

So we created rock rings, and then painted/sponged them with what I finally identified as whitewash. I've never actually seen it before. In fact, I only know it from Tom Sawyer and its modern, metaphorical usage, referring to glossing over unpleasant truths. And from the stories about how the White House got its name. But it's a real substance, and apparently still in active use, at least here in the developing world.

So while small boys and the association guys whitewashed the rings of stones, I kept wandering the field, looking for little lost saplings. Every time I found one, I started its rock ring, then called over a kid (or three) to finish it up while I kept walking. The further afield I went, the more dead or dying saplings I found, underlining the importance of our work. If the trees were fully dead, I didn't bother memorializing them with stones or whitewash, but the mostly-dead ones were my favorite finds, because I knew that these were the most likely to be saved by our efforts.

After a few hours, my PA and I had to cut out, for our last errand, but first we ran down to my buHanoot and picked up sodas and snack cakes for the kids. Delivering them brought out the worst in our little helpers - when I saw the fights that broke out between kids trying to steal the food before we could give it away, I understood how greed earned a spot on the list of 7 deadly sins - but eventually, everyone was happily slurping and munching, plus I got to give a mini-lesson on the evils of littering (as the kids dropped their bottlecaps and snack wrappers where they stood).

Looking over the future forest, planted by children and teens and parents and a handful of PCVs just five months ago, every tree now highlighted by a bright white bulls-eye of stone, I felt again the glow I'd felt when we first planted the field. Though the tiny saplings barely hint at their future majesty, the dozens of trees scattered across an acre of scrubground point to a greener, shadier, healthier, ecologically exciting future.

Am I naive to hope so much? Or just willing to believe that change can come?

5/6/09 Mapping the Northern Hemisphere

I recently got access to my friend Jamila's pictures, so I may be sprinkling blogs with old pictures for a while. :)

This one shows four of us working on the Northern Hemisphere of our biome mural map, about two months ago. (March 5th, I believe.) The mural itself is two meters tall, plus we had to start about a meter off the ground because of a small fountain (that's the grey thing at the bottom of the image), so to finish up, we had to be well off the ground.

From left to right:
Me, on a ladder, dotting in Alaska's islands; one of our partner-teachers on a chair, filling in Canada's Atlantic coast; Lahcen on a chair, finishing the chapparal around the Mediterranean Sea; and Fatima, on a ladder, working on the forests of central Asia.

One advantage of the chair-ladder requirement was that it limited the number of paintbrushes we could have on the map at any given time. The day before, I'd felt like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus: we had a swarm of kids all trying to fill in the southern hemisphere at the same time.

Oh, and did you notice that, in the picture, my hair is in a lopsided ponytail and I'm wearing two shirts with over-large sweatpants, with bulky things in the pockets, so it looks like I weigh about 200 pounds? Yeah, that's not accidental. On days when I know I'll be surrounded by hordes of teenagers - mostly boys - I do my best to dress as UNattractively as humanly possible. (The heavy rubber boots had more to do with the inches-deep mud than any fashion choice.)

5/7/09 Dressing the Wall (and Myself!) for Mural #4

Today a massive batch of Volunteers - me, Fatima, Brahim, Jamila, and newly sworn-in PCVs Mina, Hayat, and Jamal - assembled in Berberville to take care of some paperwork for the mountain's newest residents...and Fatima and I naturally put the gang to work on our newest (and potentially final) mural. It'll be our biggest one yet, reaching five meters across and three meters up. :D It'll (inshallah) show the impact of pollution on a river system.

We scrubbed the wall and primed the massive space, with "help" (read: active staring) from a crowd of students. Like our previous murals, this one will reside on the campus of Berberville's college and lycee. Tomorrow, inshallah, we'll grid, draw, and begin painting the mural, hopefully with more active help from the students. We hope to finish up by Saturday - Sunday morning at the latest - and will then have our final club meeting on Sunday afternoon.

I keep forgetting how much stuff muraling requires. Buckets (without holes!), water, paint, brushes, rollers, rags, sponges, stirring sticks (though a littered length of hose met that need today), chalk lines, pencils and/or Sharpie markers, meter sticks, right-angles, and, of course, the right outfit.

I'm no Sarah Jessica Parker; I think purses are a waste of time and money and accessorizing doesn't deserve to be a verb. But sometimes I do put serious thought into my wardrobe...and today was one of those days.

It paid off. I think I've found the perfect painting outfit. My problem in the past has been that most of my long-sleeved shorts don't have tails long enough to be able to reach, bend over, stretch, or all-of-the-above, without flashing an inch or so of lower back. Or at least worrying that I'm flashing some lower back. My jackets are all plenty long, so in cold weather, I could just take care of it that way, but our gorgeous spring weather includes some mighty warm sunny afternoons that preclude parka-wearing. But today, I layered a lightweight long-sleeved T-shirt under a huge long T-shirt (that I used as a nightshirt in the US), and voila! No matter how I twisted, leaned, or reached, I stayed fully modest and cool in the mid-afternoon sun.

So when it comes to picking a painting outfit...I'm covered. (Pun intended.)

4/20 Soccer Tourney Day 2.5

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...a really high header.

Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, I watched the 3rd and 4th guys' elimination games. Somewhat against my will, I'm actually becoming a soccer fan.

Like yesterday, we had a student step up to ref the games. Also like yesterday's ref, today's was skilled and fair, and all-around impressive.

In Game 3, the Tall Ones faced off against ... a team whose name nobody could remember. Fortunately for our tournament chart, the Tall Ones dominated the game, ending with 2-1, so they'll advance to the semi-finals to play the winners of Game 4.


All the teams played well today, helped by the clouds which minimized the sun's glare, but hindered by the incredibly dry ground which kicked up dust with every step. You can actually see the dust in some of the photos, it's so thick.

The final game of the day was also the most exciting, in part because of a last-minute bending of the rules: only 3 players showed up to play for the Sons of the Lions, so we let them fill in their ranks with ringers from previously-defeated teams (including Saturday afternoon's ref).


In the first half, the Gazelles*, their opponents, dominated the field, scoring one goal right away and a second in the middle of the period. Coming up on halftime, it looked like a blowout. But the Sons of the Lions (who I keep wanting to call the Cubs) shot in a bullet kick from midfield, right before the buzzer, that pulled it up to 2-1. After the half, the Cubs - ooh, sorry, the Sons of the Lions - nailed another goal, and suddenly the game was a lot more interesting. With about 15 minutes left to play, they bombed in a third goal, and suddenly the crowd was on its feet. The Gazelles couldn't pull it together to tie it back up before the final bell, so the Sons of the Lions, complete with 4 previously-defeated players, advances to next weekend's semi-finals.

* I found this a weird team name, because "gazelle" is the single most common thing shouted at girls walking through big cities. More accurately, it's the thing I hear most when walking through cities. It's meant to be flattery, as gazelles are universally perceived to be beautiful and graceful creatures. It comes across as harassment, though, since I don't actually *like* having "compliments" shouted at me by strangers. When I asked one of the teachers why the guys would choose such an effeminate team name, he pointed out that gazelles are also fast, strong, and deft. Which they certainly are, but still...

4/19/09 Soccer Tourney Day 2: Hope Springs Eternal

Today, we have one match in the morning (girls) and two matches in the afternoon (boys). Then the tourney will pause for a week and recommence next Saturday, with the boys' semifinal rounds. Sunday will be the championship games for both the girls and the boys.

The match was set to start at 10, so I got there at 9:45, and by 10:15, we were rolling. That's pretty extraordinarily prompt given that one of the teams didn't actually show up. I don't know where the miscommunication occurred, but we ended up a team short. Fortunately Hope, the losers of yesterday's girls' match, appeared (in uniform, which makes me think some of this was pre-arranged) to fill the void.

Sunday mornings, the students get to sleep in. It's the only day of the week without any classes at all. I therefore expected minimal attendance, as students chose their snug beds over the windy, dusty soccer field.

As the game began, there were indeed only a handful of onlookers. As the sun rose higher, though, more and more brave souls emerged from the dorms, and by halftime we had 35 guys and 20 girls watching the game. The second half, cheerleading erupted spontaneously, and we had rival factions shouting the names of the two teams (Hope and Sisterhood). More and more students trickled into the stands (by which I mean the dirt hump next to the field.) At the final buzzer, the score was tied 2-2, so the crowd of now 80 guys and 21 girls held their breath for the sudden death overtime. Three or four minutes later, Hope executed a slick triple-pass that slid the ball all the way around the goal and then slipped it just inside the goalpost. Looks like their defeat yesterday wasn't the end of the story after all; they'll face Jasmine again for the championship, next week.

More to come, including a bunch more pictures, but it's time to head back for the boys' matches...

4/18/09 "But Girls Don't Play Soccer"

I realize that it's counter-intuitive to start a blog about girls and soccer with a picture of *boys* and soccer, but, well, I really like that picture. And I promise, we'll have pictures of girls really soon.

Today's story actually began several months ago, in October of 2008, when Peace Corps informed us that the People Of America had donated hundreds (possibly thousands) of soccer jerseys to the People Of Morocco. Exactly how the POA did this, I'm not sure. But we had hundreds (thousands?) of jerseys available to us, to be distributed as appropriate.

So we requested some - we being the PCVs working with Berberville's college and lycee teachers to organize a club for 3rd-year students [the equivalent of 9th graders]. We've been planning to hold a "soccer tournament" for the final few weekends of the schoolyear, and that time is upon us!

From the begining, we said that we wanted this tournament to be for boys AND girls. Which is when the teachers said, "But girls don't play soccer." We tabled the conversation at the time, saying only that after all, one of our long-term goals for the club is to develop leadership skills in the students, so we'll let the students--the male AND female students who come to every club meeting--organize the tournament. Over the many Saturdays we've spent on campus, with the club (holding meetings, painting murals, planting trees, etc), we've noticed girls on the soccer field. We brought this up with teachers, who shook their heads and calmly reiterated, "Girls don't play soccer."

It's really quite frustrating to have someone calmly and blandly say things you know to be untrue. But again, we didn't want to make a big thing of it, so we went back to our trump card: the kids would organize everything, anyway.

This past week, the students created the teams for the tournament: 8 teams of boys (7-10 players per team) and FOUR TEAMS OF GIRLS.

Fatima and I jumped up and down a lot when we got the rosters. :)

The students had originally planned to keep the tournament limited to the 3rd-year students, which would have meant a total of 12 girls. (Some other time I'll rant about the extraordinary drop-out rates among female students. For now, suffice to say, of the 3rd-year students - the equivalent to American high school freshmen - only 10% are female. Yeeeeah.) In their planning sessions, though, they must have changed that rule in favor of having an actual elimination-style tournament for both boys *and* girls, which meant that they opened the soccer tourney to every girl in the school, and netted FORTY eager players.

"Girls don't play soccer"?


The first two teams to compete selected the team names "Hope" and "Jasmine". And this afternoon, they battled it out for the chance to go to next weekend's championships. These girls knew their stuff. I saw headers, chesting, high kicks, straight kicks, tight passing, fancy footwork, and hustle, hustle, hustle. The teachers had originally suggested two twenty-minute periods, but after 20 minutes, the girls protested pausing for halftime. "We're not even winded yet!" they insisted. So the referreeing teacher agreed on the spot to extend the periods to 30 minutes each - the same length as the boys.

Oh, and to address the question that the boys wouldn't be interested in watching the girls play? Picture a crowd of one hundred and forty-nine boys and thirty-five girls, peering through shuttered eyelashes against the blinding midday sun, buffeted by frigid winds, blinking away the dust clouds being kicked up by the ... girls playing soccer. In slick-looking jerseys and headscarves. (Of the 20 girls on the field, only 3 have uncovered heads.) That's 184 students who are here to watch the girls' match. :D

After the final whistle, Jasmine had defeated Hope 2-0. The girls headed back to the dorms to shower and change, and the boys took the field for the battle of the Berber Lions vs the High School Lions. (Did I mention that the kids picked their own team names?)

The crowd whittled down slightly. 19 of the female spectators went down to the practice field to prep for their own game, tomorrow morning. A few more guys showed up. At the half, I counted 154 boys and 16 girls, for a total of 170 students watching the lions compete.

My favorite thing about the above shot is the contrast between the high-powered players on the field and the indolent spectators on the hillside above. :)

Final score: Berber Lions 2, High School Lions 1.

The third game should have started at 4pm, but things were running late, and it was 4:45 before the Lions finished up. The shadows were long, the team facing west had a blinding low-angle sun staring at them, and the chill in the air was making me shiver under my four layers.

But the students wouldn't hear of putting their game off till tomorrow, so at 4:50, the whistle blew for the match between the Berber Brotherhood and the Stars. Oh, and who was blowing that whistle? Not the teacher who had been refereeing the previous two matches. One of the most skilled players from the defeated HS Lions asked if he could ref the third game, and in the spirit of encouraging student leadership, we enthusiastically approved his request. I wondered if he'd show favoritism to his friends or exhibit any other shortcomings that would make me regret my decision...but he was phenomenal. Quick, responsive, alert, and brutally fair, he made the final match of the day feel professional. Final score: Berber Brotherhood 2, Stars 0. Next weekend's semifinals will feature the Berber face-off: Berber Lions vs. Berber Brotherhood.

Tomorrow, we have three more elimination matches - one for girls, two for boys - so stay tuned, sportsfans!

4/17/09 To-ing and Fro-ing

Today was a nice, full day, and I thought I'd share it with y'all.

7:00 Wake up. Go back to sleep.

8:00 Wake up. Stay up.

8:01 Remember that my butagaz ran out yesterday, and thanks to the strike, there were no full buta tanks to be had, and that I therefore won't have hot water for cocoa, laundry, dishwashing, etc.

8:02 Discover that my toilet, which has been slooooow ever since a mouse drowned in it (and I just flushed it down, rather than extract its bloated little mousy corpse and think of another way to dispose of it) is now completely blocked.

8:03 Do laundry. Heat up water with electric hot pot (which blows the circuit breaker every 5-15 seconds, which is why this is not a good system) and then say forget it, I'm using the rubber gloves anyway.

9:00 Hang laundry on the roof.

9:15 Count soccer jerseys and sort into bundles of 10.

9:30 Go to "Fatima's" house. Feed her cat. Look for toilet plunger. (Unsuccessful.)

9:45 Buy toilet plunger in souq for 14 dh. Probably a ripoff, but I'm not in the mood to haggle.

10:00 Meet with the Middle School English teacher to discuss tomorrow's soccer tournament. And life in Morocco. And employment opportunities in America and Morocco. And racism in America, France, and Morocco.

12:00 Go home. Plunge toilet. It now flows free as the Father of Waters (anyone get that? please?), lhumdullah. Encouraged by success, plunge shower drain (which hasn't worked in the year I've lived here - one reason I rarely shower. The lack of hot water is a bigger reason). It works! I now have TWO functioning drains in my bathroom! This is very exciting.

12:30 Pick up miskota (coffee cake) and bring it to my host family's house, where I partake of couscous lunch, my favorite Friday tradition. :)

2:00 Go home. Pick up full butagaz tank en route, but don't bother installing it. Clean frantically, because Ama is coming over soon. There's a chance we'll just meet up at my doorway and then head to the sbitar (medical clinic), but she'll probably come up...

2:30 I hear a knock at the door just as I finish sweeping the front hall. I hastily shovel the mountain of tracked-in dirt into the dustpan, flick the broom over the remnants to scatter any visible dirt into the anonymity of my mudbrick floor, and run down to welcome Ama.

2:32 Give Ama tour of my house. She raves over most of it, especially the pictures of my family (thanks, Dad!), and makes a few adjustments to the decor. Notably, she thinks the top of my TV looks naked, so she puts a flag* in my favorite mug** and sets it next to the satellite box.

3:00 Ama and I visit the sbitar. She's in the 7th month of her pregnancy, so she had some bloodwork done in SouqTown a week or two ago. The results were sent up to her on yesterday's tranzit (the first tranzit to run in a week, because of the transportation strike), so now she's taking them to the doctor for interpretation. She asked me to look them over while we were waiting for lunch; they're in French, so legible to me, but even though I know what the words *are* in English, I don't know what 90% of it *means*. What's a hemoglobin, anyway? At the sbitar, Ama was very disappointed to discover that the doctor was in. Counter-intuitive, no? Being a traditional Berber woman, Ama infinitely prefers to visit with the female nurse-midwife. Fortunately, the nurse came in halfway through our visit, and Ama happily followed her back to the OB/GYN ward for her examination. All is well, but the doctor prescribed some routine pregnancy supplements.

3:45 I go to the pharmacy to pick up the supplements for Ama. The pharmacy is right in the heart of downtown, so Ama never goes there. Most Berberville women avoid downtown, for that matter. Of course, I live half a block from downtown, but fortunately, there are back-znqt (alley) paths that sneak past the city center to allow Ama and my other female friends to slip up to my door. The pharmacist is still at lunch/siesta. I walk back to where Ama is waiting for me, by the preschool, and tell her that I'll try the pharmacy again later, and then bring her the prescription.

4:00 Back home. :) Set up the butagaz tank, cook the zucchini bread whose dough has been sitting in the oven for 36 hours (which involves re-lighting the oven every three minutes for the first half-hour, at which point it settles down obediently), heat water, wash dishes, make a pot of cocoa, check email, check zucchini bread, check email, check zucchini bread, check email, try first batch of zucchini bread - big success!

5:00 Wrap up second batch of zucchini bread. Head to pharmacy. Hand pharmacist prescription. He asks (in Tam), "Are these for you?" I say no, they're for my host mom. He clarifies which, of the 58 women in town who share her name, she actually is, and then fills the prescription.

5:15 Deliver bread, meds, and April rent to Ama. She asks me to verify how often she's supposed to take the meds, so I pore over the French fine print. I burst out laughing. Ama wants to know what's so funny. "This medicine is for women who are pregnant," I explain. "The pharmacist asked if it was for me. He thought I was pregnant! Hshuma! I'm not married!" We both chuckle. Then, after a beat: "You did explain that it was for me, right?" Ama asks, sounding a bit worried. "I did, lhumdullah," I reassure her.

5:30 The kids get home from school, accompanied by Baba. We all share the zucchini bread. Ama asks for the recipe, and is shocked to discover that you can put xodart (vegetables) into Helawa (sweets). It took a while to find the word she for zucchini, though, since the one I learned - kurjet - she doesn't recognize. I try to sketch them out with my hands, explain that it's a green vegatable (which there aren't many of, here - I live in a land without broccoli or spinach), and she finally says, "Taghsayat?" Squash? "Yes!" I agree. I hadn't realized that the word was so flexible. There's orange taghsayat, which is pumpkin, the yellow taghsayat, which I'd call squash, and now a green taghsayat, zucchini. "Yeah, I saw some of those in your kitchen," she said, pleased with her deductive skills.

6:00 I head home, tired but happy. :)

* My latest package from home featured 3 small American flags. Not knowing what to do with them, I displayed them prominently on my tea-shelf (the eye-level rack on the north wall of my kitchen).

** The mug features a cow in bas-relief, complete with an emerging head which serves as the handle. I bought it to give to my cow-loving sister, but figured I'd use it for the many months till I see her. Then I cat-sat, and the visiting kitty knocked it to the ground. It now has several hairline fractures, so I'm scared to pour boiling water into it, lest it shatter...but I still love it, so I had it perched on top of my tea supplies, in the kitchen. It's purely decorative now (sigh), so Ama's use of it to enhance my TV aesthetics is entirely appropriate.

3/27/08 Muralled maps (final)

A few weeks ago, I told you about the world map ecosystem mural we (PCVs, teachers, and students) painted for the school we've been working with. But I don't think I ever showed you the final map, so here it is.

Note that we used a non-Mercator projection, so Greenland is visibly *smaller* than South America. Also note the Key on the left, where we describe the biomes we mapped (in English and Arabic), the title (between Africa and Antarctica), the compass rose (upper right) and the Moroccan flag (lower right).

A week or two later, we painted a biome map of Morocco. In the map above, it's all averaged out as "Chaparal", but when you zoom in, you can begin to see some of Morocco's extraordinary biodiversity:

Instead of a text key, we have an illustrated one.

Hopefully, the teachers will continue to use these as learning aids in talking about ecosystems, biodiversity, geography, and countless other topics. Plus, they make the school look gorgeous. :)

4/11/09 Moroccan Man-Touch (and Implications for Gay Travelers)

One of the first cultural differences noticed by Americans in Morocco is the practice that my friends and I refer to as "The Moroccan Man-Touch".

In America, especially among white Americans, there's a strong cultural taboo against physical contact between men. Handshakes are fine, back-slaps are permissible, but that's about it. Some men will hug each other, but many (maybe most) won't.

Morocco is different.

Here, men touch each other all the time. They hug, they lean, they hold hands, they walk arm-in-arm, they kiss cheeks, they cuddle. In public. It's the Moroccan Man-Touch.

I vividly remember one afternoon, when I'd been here for a week or two, I headed out of our hotel (in a fairly large southern city, popular with tourists) and passed by two snappily-dressed, coiffed guys holding hands and strolling the street. My knee-jerk reaction was, "Oh, look, a cute European gay couple!" (Which I thought to myself, but did not say out loud, lhumdullah.) A split-second later, I realized that nope, this is just a perfectly ordinary pair of straight Moroccan men.

Every time I travel, I think about it again. In my site and souqtown, I tend to avoid looking at men, for a variety of reasons. When I'm 8 feet in the air, though, looking through a bus window, I feel much freer to people-watch and even stare. So I see the man with his right arm wrapped around his friend's shoulders and his left arm rubbing his friend's belly. I see the guy standing behind his friend, arms clasped around his buddy's chest. I see the two men approaching the bus station, one with his arms hanging straight down, the other wrapped around his friend's arm, one hand clasping the elbow and the other the hand. I see the long, lingering goodbye hugs, with repeated kisses on each cheek.

It looks like a scene out of Provincetown, but these are all straight men. (Or so they'd call themselves, anyway, but that's an entirely separate can of worms.)

At the Language Camp, two of my male PCV buddies had a running contest going: They fully participated in the Moroccan Man-Touch with the male counselors/instructors, and competed to see which of them could touch a Moroccan man enough to make him uncomfortable. Neither won. They did both end up with a bunch of new friends. :)

Today we had a SIDA (AIDS) lesson with the students at the nearby middle school. Afterwards, we discussed the next lesson with some of the teachers, and showed them images we're planning to use. The images all relate to SIDA, some more obviously than others. The exercise is a creative one, asking the students to create explanations connecting the photos to SIDA. Sometimes the connection is pretty tenuous, as in, "These corrugated iron shanties represent a community in poverty, where the triple cocktail isn't available and therefore HIV is more likely to turn into AIDS."

One picture showed two men, smiling into the camera, one with his arm draped over the other's shoulder. In America, it would clearly be an image of gay men, and students' possible connections could be that AIDS first appeared in the gay community, or that AIDS continues to be rampant among gay men, or something in that vein. Here, though, everyone assumes that they're just two buddies, and the students say things like, "Even if you have SIDA, your friends won't abandon you," or "You can't transmit SIDA by hugging, so this is safe behavior."

Actually, that last sentence was the one I thought of. It wasn't until "Lahcen," my PCV friend who had brought the pictures, explained that it showed two gay men, that I realized that it hadn't even occurred to me. I've become so inured to the Moroccan Man-Touch that it hadn't even crossed my mind that these two men with their arms around each other might be attracted to one another.

And that's where the "Implications for Gay Travelers" comes in.

In America, gay couples often hesitate to show affection in public, for fear of attracting attention and/or harassment. Straight couples can engage in public displays of affection without a second thought (unless they're approaching public decency laws), but for gay couples, public affection is a nearly political act that requires no small measure of courage. Here in Morocco, it's the reverse. It's Hshuma (inappropriate, shameful) for men and women to touch in public (though, like in the US, handshakes are nearly always acceptable), but same-sex couples can be free to hold hands, link arms, put their arms around each others' waists, etc.

It may seem odd to promote gay tourism in a country where homosexuality is a crime, complete with a 5-year potential jail sentence...but as long as you limit your PDAs to the behaviors described here (as in, keep kissing and the rest for your locked hotel room!), you'll actually find a more tolerant populace than in most American cities.

Oh, and yes, women do engage in Moroccan Woman-Touch, but (1) It doesn't alliterate as well, so it's not as fun to say, and (2) It looks less startling to American eyes, because every junior high in America has girls clinging to each other all day long. Also, women are much less frequently hanging around outside - if they're out-of-doors, they're probably going directly from one place to another, not loitering for the fun of it, as the men do for hours at a time - so you just don't see it as much.

But here are some examples of the Woman-Touch: (1) Last time I was in a grand taxi for a few hours, the matronly woman next to me first put her arm around me, then pulled my shoulders down so that I was snuggled against her bosom. She'd noticed me dozing off, and wanted me to rest more comfortably. (2) Another time, a group of us were crowded side-by-side in a big room, for a meeting. The woman next to me leaned over to hear something better, and (completely unconsciously) balanced herself by holding my thigh with both hands. (3) During Language Camp, there were always more students than available chairs or sofas in the big room, so the girls routinely sat on each other for an hour or more at a time. (4) Whenever I'm seated next to a woman, I can count on her using my leg as an armrest. (5) In every medina in the country, you'll see women shopping together, bodies intertwined to some degree.

This utter unselfconsciousness about expressing friendly physical affection is actually one of my favorite aspects of Moroccan culture. I've always been a hugger by nature, and while it makes me sad that I can't hug my male PCV buddies in public, I can't help but smile when a Moroccan friend tucks her arm through mine while we walk through town. :)

3/30/09 Welcome to Spring Camp, aka Mini-Rant on Heterogeneous Groupings

I went to the English Language Immersion Camp, aka Spring Camp, with four other PCVs from my region. We're a pretty tight-knit group, thanks to sharing a souqtown and collaborating on most of our projects. (I'm a firm believer that when you have a dense cluster of Volunteers, you end up with *more* than the sum of our parts. We support each other, both emotionally and in our work.)

The five of us from the Berberville Region traveled north on Friday, then east on Saturday. We met up with our Fearless Leader Saturday afternoon, then our final two PCV teammates on Sunday morning.

We spent Sunday getting everything together, and were ready for the kids to arrive today, Monday.

As they arrived, we had a quick, one-on-one chat with them, in English, to determine their English language proficiency. It's a quiz disguised as a conversation. Here's a typical example:

"Hi! Welcome to Spring Camp!"
"Hi."
"I'm Kauthar. What's your name?" [basic statements of fact]
"Mohammad al-Bijanibi."
"Nice to meet you, Mohammed." [basic greeting phrases]
"Nice to meet you."
"Where are you from?" [advanced statements of fact]
{blank stare}
"What is the name of your city?" [simpler words - can they understand "to be"]
{blank stare}
"Your. City?" [simpler words]
"[Some nearby town]"
"Can you tell me about your family?" [can they understand or conjugate the present tense]
{blank stare}
"Do you have any brothers?" [simpler words - can they understand "to have"]
"Yes."
{looking expectantly} [can they conjugate it]
"Two brothers."
"Do you have any sisters?" [checking additional vocabulary]
"No."
"Are you happy to be here?" [can they understand basic emotional vocab]
"Yes!"
"Why?" [can they conjugate "to be"?]
"Because. Friend. Happy."
"What did you do last summer?" [can they understand or conjugate past tense]
{blank stare}
"What do you want to do this summer?" [can they understand or conjugate future tense]
{blank stare}

At this point, I'd cut off the conversation with a big smile and a reiterated welcome. Kids whose English was still up to the challenge got some more questions, continuing this pattern of taking one big step, then dialing it down until they could respond, taking another big step, finding their level of comprehension and creation, etc, etc.

I'd then assign an English Language Level to the student, based on which questions they'd been successful with. It was complicated by the fact that, because of Moroccan educational methodology, nearly all the students had comprehension levels enormously above their ability to speak or use language. They memorize long lists of vocabulary words and conjugation charts, but never construct sentences, let alone paragraphs. But I'd assign them something, giving it my best guess based on our broken conversation, and then wait for the next arrival.

We kept our records of the students' scores, and our Fearless Leader used them to divvy the students up into four homogenous groupings: Beginner Low (no or virtually no English), Beginner High/Intermediate Low, Intermediate Mid, and Intermediate High/Advanced Low. For simplicity's sake, we referred to them as English 1, English 2, English 3, and English 4.

Our Fearless Leader compiled the lists and typed them up, then posted them this morning.

So where's the mini-rant promised in the title?

Thanks for asking.

Turns out somebody had made other plans, and had grouped the kids randomly. Which educators refer to as "Heterogenous Groupings". ("Homogenous Groupings" are those where students are grouped by ability level - ie, exactly what we'd tried to do - what we'd done! - the day before.) Educational theorists will argue the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two styles. In heterogenous groups, theoretically the stronger students will help the weaker students, thereby enriching their own understanding while supporting others. That's the theory. It works in concept-based disciplines, like social sciences and physical sciences, but tends to be less successful in disciplines that are more dependent on linear progression, like math and foreign language acquisition.

Which is a complicated way of saying that OUR GROUPS WERE BETTER. After we'd realized what had been done, we pointedly asked, "So then why did we test them all yesterday?" and got wide-eyed stares. Grrr.

When you're trying to teach a foreign language (like English is, to Moroccans) to a MIXED group of students, you're guaranteed to never meet all of the kids' needs, all of the time. Even when the kids are at roughly the same level, it's really hard to teach them all the same thing at the same time. But by scrambling our groups, they just ensured that our classes would be useless for at least half of the kids, most of the time. Sigh. I hate feeling like an ineffective teacher.

3/22/09 Tree Planting!

Friday was the Spring (Vernal) Equinox, and Saturday was the "International Day of Trees". Here in Berberville, it's been a tree-riffic weekend. :)

I've spent most of the past week preparing for this weekend's tree planting. My sitemate "Fatima" and I have met with (and requested participation from) nearly every official and influential citizen in our village: the caid, the khalifa, the moqaddim, the president of the commune (the local legislature), the principal of the junior high and high school, the principal of the three local elementary schools, the president of the parent-teacher association, the president and treasurer of Berberville's biggest NGO, the local representative of the province's biggest NGO, the police chief, and teachers from each of the five schools in the region. We've been working for months with my counterpart, the engineer and director of the nearby national park, to supply and transport the trees from their nursery, about 6 hours to the northeast, into our village. And it worked! This weekend, we planted 500 trees and hosted a "Tree Summit" attended by 16 men (including the caid, khalifa, and most of the other men previously listed), 3 women (all teachers), 131 boys, and 66 girls. That's 200 people out of a village of 1500 or so. :D


Here it is: That was the indoor part of the tree-planting. It was scheduled for Saturday at 2:00, and I'd anticipated it would run 30-45 minutes. For a variety of reasons, it ended up starting at 3:00, and lasting about two hours. At 5, we headed out to Plant Some Trees. Fortunately, we'd done the legwork in advance...





The work started on Sunday, when we went to the junior high/high school campus (the two schools share a campus). We measured the dimensions of the school, decided where we'd put the trees, and figured how many we could place there. Then, on Tuesday, we took spray paint and marked the locations.

Monday and Tuesday, we met with the Caid, the Khalifa, the president of the PTA, and the president of the Commune. It took two meetings apiece, but we ended up getting tools - ten picks and ten shovels - donated by the Commune. I wasn't sure what the picks would be needed for, but I soon learned. Turns out that if you break up the soil with a pick, shoveling it out of the way is eeeeeasy. If you try to dig a hole in this abused, eroded, snow-buried, sun-baked soil with just a shovel, it's frustrating and very nearly impossible.

Armed with picks and shovels, we returned to the campus on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to dig the holes. We attracted quite a crowd, most of whom were happy to help out. :) (In the background, you can see the edge of a mural that we painted with our club students a few weekends ago.)

This shows "Fatima" and the principal of the junior high/high school, breaking up soil and preparing tree-holes. SouqTown's Chief Engineer for the High Commissariat on Water and Forestry and the Fight against Desertification - the official title of my counterpart - had advised that we wanted holes to be about a 50 cm across and about 50 cm deep. So we dug in. (Pun intended.)

Here I am, posing with two of our helpers, students from the junior high. There was a constantly changing flow of students, some of whom helped for a few minutes, some for hours. Due to the never-ending flux, I don't have a good headcount for how many students helped. I do know that we had girls, boys, young men, and young women. I counted as many as 20 at one time, and think it's fair to say that, between Wednesday and Saturday, at least 100, and probably as many as half of the 500 students on campus, swung a pick or hefted a shovel at least once. :D

Water and Forestry staffers drove the trees up on Thursday. They left half at the campus, and put the other half in Fatima's front hall. Saturday morning, we brought Berberville's elementary school their trees. We'd offered them as many as 100, but they had places for 64. Above, you can see three of the dozens of children and parents who showed up to dig the holes and plant the trees. The tree in question is tiny - barely a sprout - but we're hoping that the students will provide the TLC to encourage its growth into a big, strong Aleppo Pine tree.

Here are a high school teacher, a PCV ("Lahcen"), the principal of the elementary school, my 9-year-old host brother, and another elementary student, all collaborating to plant a tiny Cypress.

Here's a tiny cypress already showing signs of love. Without prompting, students watered it and made a protective ring of stones to ensure that it's not accidentally stepped on. :)

We planted about 300 trees on Saturday, all at local schools. On Sunday, the other 200 were planted, at other schools and here, at the caidat (aka the Caid's administrative compound). The big cypress trees were there already; the brown circles with nearly-invisible green sprigs at their center are the newly planted trees.

All in all, I'm completely thrilled with how well this went. We had help from six Peace Corps Volunteers, dozens of teachers, parents, and other Berberville citizens, and hundreds of kids. Over 200 people showed up for Water & Forestry presentations on the virtues of environmentalism in general and trees in particular, and many, many more helped to implant hundreds of trees in Berberville.

The continuing concern, of course, is caring for these tiny trees. My hope is that they will be a tangible contribution to Berberville's ongoing formal and informal environmental education. I love the idea of students protecting and watering these fledgling saplings, ultimately creating a forest of their very own. :D