So it begins (for real)

It is October 13th, over 200 days since I first landed in Morocco and classes have just begun. I so far have 14.5 hours of teaching or co-teaching (only English classes) per week. As with all things, the demographics of the first classes are not quite what I expected.

I am here for 'youth development'. In the US, you may be a youth if you're mid-teens or younger. Here, the term means unmarried and reasonably young, say, under 30 or so.  I think at a certain age you pass into spinsterhood but I'm not sure what the cutoff is exactly. Anyway, there are a number of students who do not exactly meet the main 'youth' criteria. That is to say, Krista and I have multiple male students in their mid-to-late 40s. Yup. Youth development.

Now you would think that our boss, the head of the Dar Chebab would have informed them that we are working in youth development. And you would also have assumed that the name of our workplace, the 'Dar Chebab', i.e. 'house of youths' might have alerted these late bloomers that they were in the wrong building. Of course, you don't want to turn anybody away and so we'll continue to teach them as long as they acquiesce to singing songs and playing with finger paints.


In other news, we recently went to Rabat. again. In the course of one week, we went from Rabat to here, then here to Rabat, then Rabat to here. We leave home, walk 20-30 minutes, take a grand taxi for an hour, and then a train for 9-10 hours, and then a small taxi to wherever it is we want to go. Sometimes, there's air conditioning on the trains, and usually you can find a seat somewhere. On one of these trips our train car managed to get hit by stones on two separate occasions. The first time a window cracked and the second time the entire window shattered but fortunately none of the glass fell out- I guess car windshields are designed to break like that during impacts. I guess kids like to throw rocks.  They're no doubt starved for entertainment because all the classes at youth houses are full of aging men.

Anyway, it's good to be busy. I'll probably regret that statement within the week.