We might be a little crazy but we decided to back to Azrou after our meeting with the public school teachers so we headed over there with Hassan and Mohammed (one of the teachers who spoke with us during our educator discussions).
Mohammed had an interesting story to tell about the school that he works at in a rural area in northern Morocco, which Hassan had to translate for us. Mohammed is a primary school teacher and teaches grades 1-6. However as a rural school there are only about thirty students in the whole school, and limited amount of materials for him to use in his lessons. This year he taught all 30 students by himself for the whole day despite having to teach to 6 different grade levels, because the other teacher at the school is pregnant. Talk about a challenging set up! Despite having more than a dozen educators in the room I think we came to the conclusion that there is no magical solution to perfect differentiation. The rural nature of Mohammed's school is such that the nearest city is 40 km away, and due to the lack of paved roads the last 7 km need to be traveled by mules or donkeys.
In Azrou, I finally tried my hand at haggling and it was a lot of fun as the good spirited people of Azrou were fair and kind to us. I ended up buying a book bag and a coin purse originally 110 dirham total, which I got down to 80 dirham total (about $10). I also bought this beautiful rug from Si Mohammed's shop, not the teacher, but a wise old man who is close friends with Hassan's father)
Fun facts learned over the last few days:
- Morocco has a very large fishing industry but it is being over fished by European fisherman.
- The major reason why the Western Sahara issue is not settled (this territory has been claimed by Morocco, and is considered my Moroccans to be part of Morocco) is because both sides cannot agree on who should be allowed to vote. Should Moroccans who moved to this territory be included? Should those living in Western Sahara at the time of the conflict, but currently living in exile in Algeria be included? It's now been well over 30 years and this has yet to be settled, despite the popular sovereignty mandate.
- Sharia (Islamic) Law is not as akin to Hammurabi's code as it may seem in Western media. In fact it is moral and civic reasoning is a major part of this legal system. For example, in the Qu'ran it says thieves are to have their hands cut off, however in the case of a famine, poor people were and should be excused from this punishment if they are stealing food because they had no choice. (I suddenly have the sounds of Les Miserables in my head)
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