Rosana Zarza-Canova serves as a Peace Corps Youth Development volunteer in a town near Marrakesh. She grew up between the Berkshires, Massachusetts and Madrid, Spain. In her last months of service she is focusing on establishing a community library with the Director of the youth center and Library club at the youth center and work with girls, co-facilitating the Life skills program at the girl's dormitory with a counselor and helping start a girl's club at a youth vocational center. She also enjoys spending time with friends and neighbors and mastering traditional Moroccan foods!
| Reflection on Let Girls Learn in my community |
 |
Rosana,
pictured right, at a English certificate party at the youth center she works at
*I have changed the names of my friends
to protect their privacy.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to
Morocco and Marrakesh made me reflect deeply on the struggles of girls in my
community to achieve an education. When I look back upon my year’s work at the dar shabab (youth center), the majority
of those who have benefited from my classes, activities, and events are boys or
young men. This makes me wonder why there is not equal participation among boys
and girls. The program Let Girls Learn
renewed my interest and commitment to work with girls during my last couple of
months as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. In this post, I will describe
obstacles that girls in my town face and highlight them with a stories.
My community is a small, conservative
town of 5,000 near Marrakesh. There is one elementary school, one middle
school, and one high school. Around my site are 15 duars (farming villages), which only have elementary schools. There
are often one or two teachers for grades 1-6 in a one-room schoolhouse with
limited resources. If the girls in the duars
want to attend middle school or high school, they have to travel into town. It
is common for girls to drop out because their parents don’t want them to travel
in addition to not being as prepared in their schoolwork because of the
education they received in elementary school. The school provides
transportation or for a small fee they can apply to live at the dar taliba (girls’ dormitory) during the
school week.
When I say that my town is conservative
it is because gender roles are traditional. Most girls aspire to get married
and have children as early as 17 or 18 years old. Men are the breadwinners. In
comparison to my liberal upbringing, this is a conservative outlook.
Housework
The first obstacle that prevents girls
from staying in school is housework. Girls are expected to help around the
house. They have many responsibilities like cooking, cleaning, and taking care
of siblings, all which gives them less time to do their homework and study for
quizzes, semester tests, and final exams, or going to the dar shebab. When I asked my students if they wanted to continue
English classes during Ramadan, the boys said yes and the girls no. The girls
explained that they were needed to help prepare the evening meal to break the
fast. During the last Ramadan, I didn’t see any girls in the dar shebab for this reason.
Fatima Zahara’s story
Fatima Zahara is 15 years old and in the
9th grade. When her mother went away for a week to visit her sick
father, Fatima Zahara did all the housework. One day I stopped by her house
after work and found her kneeling in the kitchen, putting bread into the oven.
She had on a scarf to keep her hair out of her face and was in her pajamas; she
looked like any other housewife. We later devoured a delicious fish tagine she had made, and I complemented
her on her expert cooking.
I mentioned my surprise that she did all
the housework and explained that for me it was normal that my parents take
turns cooking. They laughed when I mentioned that my Papá takes pleasure in
cooking his famous seafood paella for me. Fatima Zahara and her family said
that in Morocco a girl is expected to learn how to cook and clean in
preparation for married life. There is word for a good housewife in Moroccan
colloquial, Darija: hedga. So a girl
must be hedga before she gets
married.
Around this time, Fatima Zahara dropped
out of school, but she hid it from me. However, I learned that it wasn’t
because she was busy with housework. Her parents, Nadia and Mohamed, cornered
me one day and pleaded with me to find out what happened so that Fatima Zahara
would return to school. They said they had tried everything- they had talked to
her teachers and the principal, talked to Fatima Zahara, even told her that she
needed to go to school, work, or get married (though they thought she was too
young to get married). They revealed that they had not finished primary school,
but they wanted Fatima Zahara to at least get a Baccalaureate degree (high
school diploma). Nadia told me about the literacy classes she had attended at
the mosque a few years ago, and taking out her cellphone, she proudly showed me
how she could use her Arabic it in.
After that, I tried to find a time to
talk with Fatima Zahara alone and find out what had occurred. I was concerned
that she thought I would disapprove of her decision to drop out, but with luck
she might open up to me. When we finally spoke, she confessed that she had had
a problem with a teacher. She had raised her hand to point out something wrong
in the lesson and this wasn’t received well by the teacher. He apparently
mentioned this to other teachers, and Fatima Zahara started feeling
uncomfortable at school. She spoke with the school principal, but she said it
didn’t help.
I thanked her for sharing this, and
advised her to apologize to the teacher and principal, forget about the past,
and do her best on her final exams. I placed the emphasis on the value of high
school to teach basic knowledge and skills for life and provide better
opportunities for her future. With a high school diploma, she could attend
vocational school or university, which would then qualify her for higher paying
jobs.
I also wondered what Fatima Zahara did
when she was not in school. She said she did “walo” (nothing), watched TV,
cooked and cleaned, and later she got a job packing vegetables in a nearby
factory. I asked her if she got bored doing walo
because her friends were in school or studying. Fatima Zahara replied she did
miss being with her friends, and (relief!) she planned to return to school in
September. She’ll have to repeat 9th grade but she didn’t mind. I
offered to help with schoolwork or to put her in contact with someone that
could provide tutoring.
Different expectations
I also find that parents don’t have high
expectations for their girls’ education. Perhaps they can’t imagine anything
beyond their own experience or maybe they are pessimistic about the general
economic situation. Even if their daughters attend high school, parents
consider that education for a housewife is not necessary. I challenge that
point of view because many of their daily tasks depend on being able to read,
write and do math. For example, when they go to the hanut (corner store) they need to read food labels or read
instructions on how to use household items. Medicines, too, require reading!
When they pay at the hanut or the
weekly souk (market), they need to know how to add and
subtract, especially if they are quoted the price in Riyals but are paying in
Dirhams. Housewives need to be able to calculate household expenses per day and
week based on the family income. Unfortunately, I’ve observed that the majority
of women don’t actually go to the hanut or
souk in my community; they depend on
their husbands or sons to shop.
Women’s space is comfortably in the home.
Some of the important tasks that women have in the home besides cooking and
cleaning are caring for children, being a role model, carrying out family
traditions and upholding the family’s status in the community.
Financial problems and Khadija’s story
Some young women face financial difficulties
and must help out their families instead of completing their education. Because
boys are expected to be the breadwinners, their education is prioritized over
the girls who are expected to be the housewives. Such is the case of Khadija.
She is 31 years old and works at the preschool in her duar and volunteers at the association for the girls’ dormitory in
town. She didn’t graduate high school and her studies at a vocational school
were interrupted when her father got sick. She started working at age 19 to
support her family of 7 (both of her sisters were married at a young age). She
wishes that she could have continued studying, but there really was no choice.
I find it admirable that she took on all that responsibility, placing her
family’s needs before her own.
As a working woman and unmarried at age
31, Khadija is an anomaly in my village. She is the breadwinner of her family.
She gives her father money to buy food at the weekly souk, her mother to buy household items or clothes, and she makes
the big financial decisions for the family, like buying a new TV or cupboard or
organizing an excursion into Marrakesh to visit family.
Khadija would love to get married and
have a family, but her responsibility to provide for her family weighs on her.
She claims that men don’t like working, independent women. Men believe that a
woman’s place is in the home. They might also be jealous of other men at their
wives’ work place, and husbands generally don’t want to see their women
interacting with men that are not in their family. If Khadija gets married, she
would have to continue supporting her family or her husband would need to take
on that responsibility. Khadija and other friends have asked me to set them up
with an American or Spanish friend because they believe Western men are more
open than Moroccan men. They say Western men would allow them to wear what they
want, come and go as they please, work, and allow some degree of independence.
There is also the notion that if a woman
works, she doesn’t have a good husband. She is called meskina (poor thing). The man is supposed to work and take care of
her. She can just relax at home.
Role
models of educated or working women are hard to find; a girl’s goal is to
settle down and start a household. Like teenage girls in any country, I often
find girls heads filled with boys and not about their studies or learning a new
skill, working, traveling, or starting a business. They talk about crushes and
boyfriends and ask when I plan on marrying and having children. I’m another
anomaly now as a young woman who has made the choice to focus on work, live far
away from my home, share responsibilities in my future marriage, and lead a
different lifestyle.
Miriem’s
story
19
year old Miriem is in her first year of studying economics at Cadi Ayyad
University. Once I went to her house, and she was having a panic attack before
her final exams. She had all her notes scattered around her room and was
moaning, “Rosana, I hate economics!” “I don’t understand French.” Many subjects
at the universities in Morocco, like biology or chemistry, are taught in
French, based on the education system inherited from French colonial rule.
Then,
Miriem confessed she was seriously considering a marriage proposal because she
was having a terrible time with her studies. She had received a marriage
proposal from a friend of her father’s with the one condition that she had to
wear the niqab (headscarf with face
covering). I encouraged her to continue on with her studies, to ask the
professors for help, attend office hours, seek out fellow students, anything to
work hard at completing her studies. We made a list of pros and cons for
getting married versus finishing university. Why not finish university and then
get married? Why not do both? Like the high school education for Fatima Zahara,
a university education for Miriem would provide more job opportunities at a
higher pay scale. Her English is pretty good, too, and that would be an asset
in any job. Alternately, she could change her major to English.
Thus,
girls in my community face many obstacles to finishing their education. I
realize that I have had a very different upbringing, which has made me embrace
different values. I grew up in a liberal, middle class college town. I had few
household chores like cleaning my room, emptying the dishwasher, and setting
the table. It was expected that I graduate high school with good grades and go
to university. I got a tutor when I struggled in Geometry and attended many
extracurricular activities. When my friends and I still hadn’t learned how to
drive, our parents would drop us off and pick us up from the movies if we
wanted to go. We would walk into town for lunch or dinner and meet up with
boys. When we learned how to drive, we would cruise around town at night. I had
many university educated, working, independent, strong female role models and
single and divorced mothers who were seen as equals and well respected in the
community. I saw men helping out around the house and cooking up delicious meals.
Relationships and marriage are different in the West. I will be able to date
and choose my husband. For all these reasons, I find traditional gender roles
in Morocco hard to understand and limiting. I do know that in the West there
are traditional roles, too, but they are changing, especially for my
generation. But, I have to admit that during my Political Science studies at
college, I didn’t find many female role models in politics.
I
believe I am, just by being here, a role model for girls and young women. I am
university educated, am working, and am unmarried, not even engaged! I live
alone and travel on my own in Morocco, and I’m independent. This difference is
accepted though it might not be a choice for them. I’ve shared my background
and life goals with them and in this exchange created friendships with a space
to think differently.
In
my work here I will continue to be a friend and a mentor to the girls, advising
them as best as I can when asked and emphasizing the importance of education. I
will continue to encourage them to develop their interests and gain experience
for their future. This recognition of their own potential will open up new
awareness and possibly new opportunities.
