Kudos to Moroccan Peace Corps Volunteers

More and more, as I talk to educated people here, it becomes clear that a lot of Moroccans' first expericences with meeting Americans come from meeting Peace Corps Volunteers. It's also remarkable that everyone who tells me about a Peace Corps Volunteer talks about 1) what a great person s/he was and 2) how gifted the person was in languages.

My landlady's husband: "Yes, they just send them into the mountains and they come back in three months speaking fluent Berber. It's amazing."

On a train from Fès: "My buddy (a Peace Corps volunteer) spoke Arabic like I do -- and it was Moroccan Arabic. Not Classical!"

Before I came to Morocco, I met with one of these former miracle workers, Kay Cassell who'd been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco some time ago. We're fortunate to have Kay as a lecturer at Rutgers, and she was a very giving and knowledgable resource person for me. Kay was familiar not only with life in Morocco from a Volunteer's perspective, but also from a librarian's. She was the first to tell me about the founding of ESI and to explain the involvement of UNESCO and of the American library school at Pratt.

It's good that I have knowledge about the founding of ESI, because references to Nasser Sharify, then Dean at Pratt and frequent visitor to Morocco, are not sparse around ESI. I hope to meet Mr. Sharify on one of his trips to Morocco before this year is out. I'd also love to run into some Peace Corps folks, but I don't know how likely that really is, since Agdal isn't one of the remote places where many of these folks seem to like to work.