By Sandy Levinn, PCV
One fine, spring day, almost 3 weeks after I arrived in my sunny little corner of the desert, I found my mudir happily grinning down at me from the pile of rubble where our Dar Chebab had stood solidly the day before. “What happened?” I gasped, surprised and alarmed. “We are renovating the Dar Chebab,” quoth he, excited to the point of giggling. “It will be closed until August, or perhaps October. I’m thinking of taking a temporary job at the Commune; what will you do?”
And so, three weeks into my service and already out of work, I remembered a ToT that I had attended in Tinghir the week before. The topic was CPR and First Aid, and it was led, in English, by Nurin, a COS-ing health volunteer. The participants were 6 Moroccan students with good English, and the idea was to provide them with first aid skills, which they would then translate into Darija and teach in their communities. The first aid portion of the session was long and language intensive, but the group brightened as soon as we began teaching CPR. CPR is engaging, hands on, and highly demonstrable. Despite the serious application of the subject matter, everyone had fun practicing on each other and our makeshift dummies and – even better! – we were confident that everyone understood exactly what we were teaching. Recalling this trifecta of easy information transfer, important and applicable subject matter, and entertaining practical evaluation, I decided to go for it myself.
Once I made that decision, I very quickly booked myself a CPR tour of some local PCV sites, motivated by a combination of restlessness in my site (where I was assured at every turn that I would not have work until the fall) and simple convenience. If I was accompanying 50 youths from Alnif to participate in the 5k Rose Festival kick-off race in Kelaat Magouna anyway, why not stay an extra day or two and teach some CPR? If I was already going to be on the road, why not visit my friend and CBT-mate in Goulmima and commandeer his youth for a little life-saving lesson? If I was going to be out there anyway, why not extend the offer to my friends in Tinjdad and, just down the road, Nimro? I left most of the work to my hosts: they communicated with organizations in their sites, made arrangements for locations, found me my audience, and provided the requisite three 2-liter Coke bottles that would serve as our dummies. All I had to do was come up with a curriculum and teach it!
Once I had everything all set and translated (after an eleventh hour translation meeting with some of the original youth from Nurin’s ToT to check my work and a quick little broken taxi detour), I left my completely unfurnished house and began what ended up being both the most terrifying and most exciting week of my service to date. My first class was to be for a women’s association in a douar outside of Kelaat Magouna; what we did not know was that this was to be the first meeting of the association, beginning with some lengthy bureaucratic discussion and capping out at over 50 women in one tiny little room. When the time finally came for me to speak, it only took a few words to make it clear that I did not have a very good handle on the Darija, and nor did the women. Fortunately, we had an English teacher present, so I led my first class in English with Tamazight translation generously provided by the teacher. This doubled the length of the class, and after their long preliminary meeting, the women were anxious to get home. There were too many of them for
individual practice with the Santa-hat-clad teddy bear that was our infant dummy, nor was there enough space for them to practice the Heimlich on each other. Most of their questions were about nosebleeds, not CPR. My advice to call for help before beginning CPR (the most important step!) was met with laughing assurances that the ambulance would not arrive to their bumpy little douar for several hours, if at all. The Darija reference handout I had made was politely made available to the Tamazight-speaking, possibly illiterate women. It was a bit of a struggle to consider that first class a success, but it was a place to start.
After that, I revised my curriculum. Rather than read off a script, I focused on remembering key vocab words with the script as my security blanket off to the side. The Darija handout now has diagrams. I rearranged the content so that the Heimlich came first, and CPR was introduced as a solution in the event that choking led to unconsciousness (choking and drowning are the circumstances in which CPR is most likely to be successful without professional assistance and an AED). The next class, with about twenty older youth at the Dar Chebab, went much more smoothly, right up until the part when one of the students asked what they should say if their patient died and the police wanted to take them to jail. From this, I gained the painfully obvious insight that it is important to research the local laws before embarking on a project that may be illegal. Fortunately, when I arrived for my class in Goulmima (at this point seriously doubting whether I should continue teaching CPR at all), I was met by a member of the Red Crescent who thoroughly combed through my whole curriculum before allowing the class to begin. With my most sincere hamdullah to date, I gratefully confirmed that, as long as I was CPR certified and not actually certifying anyone else, there was no legal obstacle for me to continue with my tour. As we were leaving that class, my Red Crescent friend was discussing the possibility of forming a health club.
In Tinjdad, my first group was young enough that I felt uncomfortable teaching them CPR. Instead, Dan Wood taught an English lesson on body parts, and we followed that up with a simple demonstration of the Heimlich and a discussion about how to make an effective phone call to emergency services. The next day, I worked with an intimate group of just 6 beautiful women from a nearby sewing cooperative, and then with a larger group of women at the Dar Taqafa in the afternoon. I could not have asked for a better final day; the women were attentive and all showed a good understanding of the material through both verbal and practical demonstrations. I finally had the presentation down well enough that the Darija felt relatively natural, and the women helped each other understand my clumsy accent and stumbling tongue. No one suggested that anything I did or said might be illegal, and as I left I was approached by an association president who wanted a CPR class for his constituents as well. All told, we reached 158 women and youth (calculations brought to you by my trusty VRF!).
I returned to my site to find that my counterparts were jealous (in spite of their previous insistence that there was no space for me to work until October) and my CPR certification was about to expire. I contacted my Red Crescent friend from Goulmima about possible recertification, and was disappointed to hear that the Red Crescent will not certify Americans. They might give me an attestation that I had attended the class, he suggested, but it would not necessarily amount to the same thing. This meant not only that I could not teach CPR in my site, but also that no other volunteers without up to date CPR certification could use the (updated and completely legal!) curriculum I had developed to reach their communities. When I expressed my frustration to my parents, my chief-of-the-ambulance dad said simply, “I could certify them.”
This brings us to the present day. My parents are here! In Morocco! With me! Just two days after they stepping off the plane they are ready to lead an American Heart Association approved CPR certification course for 39 PCVs and a handful of LCFs using a very Peace Corps blend of mandated AHA materials and recycled soda bottle dummies. They are cheerfully donating vacation time and resources so that we can reach more people in more remote towns with skills that, ensha’allah, they will never have to use. If the need arises, however, they may well save someone’s life.
And so, three weeks into my service and already out of work, I remembered a ToT that I had attended in Tinghir the week before. The topic was CPR and First Aid, and it was led, in English, by Nurin, a COS-ing health volunteer. The participants were 6 Moroccan students with good English, and the idea was to provide them with first aid skills, which they would then translate into Darija and teach in their communities. The first aid portion of the session was long and language intensive, but the group brightened as soon as we began teaching CPR. CPR is engaging, hands on, and highly demonstrable. Despite the serious application of the subject matter, everyone had fun practicing on each other and our makeshift dummies and – even better! – we were confident that everyone understood exactly what we were teaching. Recalling this trifecta of easy information transfer, important and applicable subject matter, and entertaining practical evaluation, I decided to go for it myself. 
