The Ever-Important Counterpart

Elizabeth “Lou” Jay is a fourth year volunteer serving in a small community located the mountains south of Marrakech. Before she came to Morocco she was a professor at the University of Indianapolis, teaching “Intro to Sociology” and “Social Problems” courses. Much of her academic background focused on women and society cross-culturally. This greatly influenced her decision to join Peace Corps and work with disadvantaged populations within the community, namely girls and women. Most of her time in Morocco has been dedicated towards empowering her community through art, exercise, hikes into the mountains, and constructing a park. To find out more about her service, you can read her blog at Lou Around the World.

The Ever-Important Counterpart

By Elizabeth Jay, Badr Allouche & Bochra Laghssais

As Peace Corps Volunteers, the most important key to our success is our counterparts. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to have the same impact in our communities. They open doors we didn’t even know existed, they support our every attempt, they celebrate our victories, and they help us overcome our challenges. They are the reason we do what we do. They are the very definition of sustainability we hope to achieve by the end of our two years. They often go beyond helping us start a class or see a project get off the ground; they take our humble beginnings and mold them into their own classes or develop our projects into subsequent phases of design and implementation.

Peace Corps teaches us from day one that the best way to gain the trust of the community is to integrate, and the best way to ensure our work is successful is to ensure we utilize counterparts. This is particularly crucial when doing gender and development work, which can often tiptoe into the blurry zone between culturally appropriate and culturally unacceptable. Our counterparts help us navigate through obstacles of language, 7chuma (shameful) themes, cultural differences, and age-appropriate content. While I may feel perfectly comfortable teaching my preschoolers the days of the week, I would rather leave it in the hands of my counterpart to help me talk to a room full of adolescent males about how to be an advocate for women against sexual harassment. There’s just more legitimacy to a male, closer in age to the audience, speaking in the local dialect about the need to stand up for woman on the street, than an American woman who tends to butcher the language when talking about sensitive topics.

One of the best parts of Peace Corps Morocco is that we can really shape the work we do based on the things we enjoy doing and the things we’d like to develop in our communities. Gender and development (GAD) work is fairly ubiquitous across Morocco. There are many avenues, venues, audiences, and themes throughout the Moroccan GAD landscape that allow for gratifying work. The work we do is not only enjoyable for us. You know you’ve connected with the right counterpart if he or she finds as much joy in the work and see the same need for it in the community. Take for instance one of our GAD counterparts, Badr Allouche:

Badr worked with RPCV Alice Carter
(2015-2016) to lead a group of young men
and women to summit Mount Toubkal.

My name is Badr Allouche. I am a 28 year old Moroccan. I am a second year English major at Ibn Tofail University. I also work as Language and Cross Culture Facilitator with Peace Corps as a part time job, and most of all I am a gender advocate.

I remember back in 2012 when I was helping Lauren (RPCV Morocco 2012 – 2014) start an aerobics class at the youth center. Living in male-dominated site, it was sure that starting these classes would not be easy. It was mostly getting men’s approval to let women come to the youth center.  So as a gender advocate I started with my surroundings. I invited my mom, my aunt, and some of my female friends to join the classes.  Lauren had a good number of women to start with, after couple of session the class started to grow to reach 40 women. My reward? When my mom came home wearing her tracksuit for the first time, she had a smile of victory on her face. Well, she also stopped complaining about her hurting joints, hamdoulah. After one month, Lauren led a mini marathon for the aerobics women that ended up being a huge event in Tiflet. At that moment, men and everyone else became very encouraged that Tiflet is a place for both genders.

Badr helped facilitate a two-month Lifekills course
in his community, empowering many young women

Working with PCVS in gender empowerment has been seen in my activities in my community. Last year we started an American football club, that included girls and guys training together for the passion of the game, we had about 12 girls versus 18 guys, a number which we believed it was a great success for the sport and for Tiflet.  I also worked with Kika Kaui, the PCV in Tiflet, this past year, helping her with her women and health workshop which I could not be prouder to be part of.

Tiflet's team won Best Team in Morocco
at the Arabic Model United Nations Morocco 2016.

I am so glad and fortunate to be a GAD counterpart. I have had the opportunity to witness the great work woman can do; working alongside female PCVs opened my eyes on gender issues  that were not obvious to me, the little things that turned out to be important on the way to a better community. GAD gave words to the mentality I have always had for the work that I have always believed in. I have always had that perspective that we are all the same; we all deserve equal opportunities in life. GAD put those ideas into a reality. GAD has impacted my life in a way that I have never imagined. How? Well I am a man who would never shout at his female partner to go to the kitchen. I am a man who feels proud when a girl makes a perfect pass in American football. I have become the man who is not ashamed to put the apron on and stand in the kitchen or change my child's diaper someday. I have a better understanding of my female counterpart. And now I am more appreciative of what I have become.

What’s interesting about the PCV-Counterpart relationship is how often we don’t realize the impact we are having on our counterparts. We are so grateful to them for being our Darija-to-Darija translators and helping us steer an awkward conversation back to the land of comfortable, but they are just as grateful for us. Often our counterparts take away so much from the sessions they help us facilitate. Peace Corps relationships and opportunities can help them mold their lives and shape the direction of their futures. Another GAD counterpart who has worked with many Peace Corps Volunteers, Bochra Laghssais, is a great example:

My name is Bochra Laghssais. I am 21 years old. I studied English literature and American society at Cadi Ayyad University. Currently I am a student at the University of West Bohemia in Czech Republic, studying International Development studies with a focus on gender.  I worked for Project Soar Morocco as a field coordinator and empowerment facilitator. I am a writer at AfricanFeminism.com where most of my articles focus on women and advocacy. Being a Peace Corps counterpart started way back when I was a student in my town Tazarine. I started as regular student studying English at the dar chabab (youth center). I loved English so much and the dar chabab was a great way to practice and meet people who shared the same interest.

The volunteers in my town were really active and included youth in their activities. It was very interesting to me, so I attended some of them. For example, I completed the “Life Skills‘’ series taught by RPCV Kyla Vanderhart. At the beginning of this program, I was really shy and could not express myself because of being a woman and living in a conservative community. With the help of the volunteer, I become more open-minded and able to speak and discuss topics with other people.

Later on I moved to Marrakech for university and I got to meet other volunteers and work with them. I have worked on Life skills with the RPCV Kira Charlesworth; this time not as a student, but as facilitator. I got the chance to teach students in Tahnaoute, 35 KM away from Marrakech, some skills like self-confidence, self-advocacy, leadership, and conflict resolution. I also had a chance to attend the Project Design and Management training held by Peace Corps with PCV Julie Feng, in which we are developing a blog for non-native Darija learners to read stories in Darija and pick up as much vocabulary as they can through reading and listening to the stories at the same time.

Bochra with actress Meryl Streep at the
Let Girls Learn celebration hosted by
First Lady Michelle Obama

As time passed, I was able to attend more events by Peace Corps and get involved in other programs. I have also been able to do much GAD-related work. For instance, I helped RPCV Rachelle Wilson in Sidi Rahal facilitate some workshops in a GLOW (Girls Leading our World) club about self-confidence, self-worth, and advocacy, as well as goal setting. With all that, I had special invitation to meet the first lady Michelle Obama during her visit to Morocco to promote her Let Girls Learn initiave, and that was the great honor of my life. She is a very powerful woman. That she and her husband started from humble beginnings and to become the first African American family in the White House is really inspiring.

Bochra empowered many
young women at Project Soar
just outside Marrakech

Through my connections with Peace Corps and my GAD work, I started working with Project Soar. While I was in Project Soar, my manager was PCV Olivia DiNucci.  I was surrounded by powerful girls with great energy and passion that actually inspired me every single day to do more and fight for girl’s education and serve and lead by example. My work with Project Soar began immediately after coming from the White House in October 2016, which was another wonderful inspiring week of my life where I met girls that share the same interests as myself. When I came back to Morocco, I knew that working for Project Soar would be continuing on the First Lady’s path and letting girls go to school.  Despite the fact that I had to attend full-time university courses and work as a storyteller, I was determined to devote some of my time for the Project Soar girls. When I saw them every Sunday, they reminded me of myself when I was their ages and my hopes and dreams while living in small villages with a lack of resources. I feel like I belong. I share these girls’ lives and stories. Like I did, I made it to the university; deep in my heart, I know and believe in these girls that they will do the same thing or even better.

The work we do really comes full circle. The student becomes the teacher. And in my humble opinion, it’s the work we do with our counterparts, the relationships that we build with them that’s really the most important work we do. It’s so easy to get caught up in the mentality that we’re here to impact each of our communities as a whole, or get caught up in the “Mother Teresa effect” as I call it, but that’s just not realistic. What we can do, however, is empower the handful of people that become our counterparts, transmit our knowledge, encourage their passions, and help them become the greater catalysts for change in the community. At the end of the day, they are the ones who will be able to influence the larger population.

Working with a counterpart on a sensitive issue such as domestic abuse or girl’s empowerment assumes that you start from a foundation of trust, openness, and mutual understanding. Taking the time to really develop these relationships and broaden the spectrum of work you do together can do nothing but nurture these aspects of your relationship and increase the effectiveness of your projects. Peace Corps may emphasize to us over and over again the importance of a counterpart, but what they often fail to mention is how these people become so intertwined into our lives; “counterpart” seems so clinical and sterile a term. What really forms is a mutually-beneficial relationship, a deeper understanding, and a long-lasting friendship.

1. Bochra and Lou at the open ceremonies for the 2016 Global Summit for Peacebuilding and Social Development;
2. Badr and Bochra helped lead a group of youth from various PCV communities to the summit of Mount Toubkal;
3. Lou and Badr at the swearing-in ceremony for the 2016 staj of Peace Corps Volunteers.

 

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Posted by Katie Bercegeay