The coffee sits next to me on the living room table and the steam curls up and floats playfully through the sunlight pouring in the window just over my shoulder. It is good to be in the home of a Peace Corps Volunteer and the following paradoxes are so common among volunteers that they are almost cliché. I am in a Moroccan apartment where the only working toilet is a Turkish squat hole at the bottom of the stairs next to the front door, yet I am typing on a lap top computer, listening to the latest internet downloaded music. The coffee is sweet, sweet Starbucks but it is from the last volunteer who lived here (about 3 months ago) and it has long gone beyond “fresh”. The best part was the brewing process! I had to get creative without having any sort of coffe aperatus. So, I started by placing a filter in a plastic bag, tearing a hole in that bag and then pouring boiling water over the grounds, through the filter and plastic bag where it was collected in a pitcher. It worked remarkably well, actually! Ah, Peace Corps to the rescue again!
Beyond giving us access to a computer for blogging and an intelligence test on how to turn old coffee grounds into the sweet elixir of life that I crave, Chris Blackwood was our connection to the community of Tinejdad!
Not only did he enable our first official round-table/cultural exchange meeting of Supercross08, he also led us on a tour of the city. We were followed by 20 enthusiastic kids all around the age of 10. They entertained us, and us them, for well over an hour! They were equally amazed by our whiteness as well as our lack of ability in French, not to mention their unsatiable desire to be photographed!
Then, last night we met at the DAR CHEBAB (local youth center) and led a discussion about stereotypes. Chris did the leg work to arrange this meeting and because of his hard work, we had 20 Moroccan young people show up from the ages of 15 to 25! We were blown away by how open minded and intelligent they were. They were receptive to everything we were interested in discussing and we were able to touch on subjects like gender equality, politics, and even religion.
We started the meeting by creating a definition for stereotypes so that we were all on the same page and then we broke one down together, “All women are good cooks”. The kids caught on right away, and we were immediately debating how this stereotype might make women feel or force them into a role they don’t desire, both very tender issues in a Muslim country. Undaunted by such heavy subjects, these intelligent young people were eager to continue the dialogue we were creating. Our second activity was to let the kids brainstorm stereotypes they wanted to discuss and then split them into small groups to focus on a specific issue. The stereotypes they picked were, “All Americans are good teachers”, “All Americans are rich and have nice lives”, “Americans look down on others”, and “Islam = terrorism”. These themes were exciting to me because the students chose them and because these are the exact sort ideas Supercross08 was created to take on!
The students were very gracious and polite in their discussion on these issues. There were many great comments made about how stereotypes lead to racism and violence and how we all need to increase communication so that we can avoid the unnecessary hate that is growing between Muslim and Western countries. The theme that I came away with is that open, honest dialogue may not make disagreements disappear, but it makes them less scary and puts a human face on the other side of the argument, therefore, making it that much harder for hate to spring up! Thanks to Chris and to all our New Moroccan friends that took part in this first presentation! You guys ROCK!
Beyond giving us access to a computer for blogging and an intelligence test on how to turn old coffee grounds into the sweet elixir of life that I crave, Chris Blackwood was our connection to the community of Tinejdad!
Not only did he enable our first official round-table/cultural exchange meeting of Supercross08, he also led us on a tour of the city. We were followed by 20 enthusiastic kids all around the age of 10. They entertained us, and us them, for well over an hour! They were equally amazed by our whiteness as well as our lack of ability in French, not to mention their unsatiable desire to be photographed!
Then, last night we met at the DAR CHEBAB (local youth center) and led a discussion about stereotypes. Chris did the leg work to arrange this meeting and because of his hard work, we had 20 Moroccan young people show up from the ages of 15 to 25! We were blown away by how open minded and intelligent they were. They were receptive to everything we were interested in discussing and we were able to touch on subjects like gender equality, politics, and even religion.We started the meeting by creating a definition for stereotypes so that we were all on the same page and then we broke one down together, “All women are good cooks”. The kids caught on right away, and we were immediately debating how this stereotype might make women feel or force them into a role they don’t desire, both very tender issues in a Muslim country. Undaunted by such heavy subjects, these intelligent young people were eager to continue the dialogue we were creating. Our second activity was to let the kids brainstorm stereotypes they wanted to discuss and then split them into small groups to focus on a specific issue. The stereotypes they picked were, “All Americans are good teachers”, “All Americans are rich and have nice lives”, “Americans look down on others”, and “Islam = terrorism”. These themes were exciting to me because the students chose them and because these are the exact sort ideas Supercross08 was created to take on!
The students were very gracious and polite in their discussion on these issues. There were many great comments made about how stereotypes lead to racism and violence and how we all need to increase communication so that we can avoid the unnecessary hate that is growing between Muslim and Western countries. The theme that I came away with is that open, honest dialogue may not make disagreements disappear, but it makes them less scary and puts a human face on the other side of the argument, therefore, making it that much harder for hate to spring up! Thanks to Chris and to all our New Moroccan friends that took part in this first presentation! You guys ROCK!
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