Through the grapevine

ESI students are great. On Tuesday, several indicated in their FaceBook status that they were pleased with the choice of new director for the school.

It's official: Mr Lemallem will be the new director. The announcement came the day of the week when I'm not on campus, so I'm pleased that the students were so actively mentioning it in the social sphere. It's still difficult for me to understand when news breaks at the school -- my Derija isn't exactly improving and folks here are so bi- and tri-lingual that they forget that not all can understand.

Unlike American university searches for Presidents and Heads, nothing about this process was transparent for me, as a teacher from the outside. Suffice it to say, I'm very much hoping to meet the new director at some point before the end of the year. I tend not to be notified about faculty meetings, so this might be more difficult than it would seem.

On a related front, we'll be receiving two days of vacation for the Prophet's birthday next week. Other Muslim countries will celebrate on Monday and Tuesday, but Morocco started the month a day later, and will have the holiday on Tuesday (with our second day off on Wednesday). Students want to make a long weekend of it and not come in on Monday, and no one can really blame them. Instructors are in a very undesirable position, though, of trying to guess whether it's worth having class, or better to reschedule ahead of time. In one of my Monday classes, my students and I opted to reschedule. In the other class, it's still unclear whether we'll have class on Monday, five days from now.

I must say that one of the draws of coming to Morocco was the knowledge that I would be forced to (re-)learn to "go with the flow". It's just not worth developing high blood pressure over what are, to me, last-minute changes, and ones that are not communicated to the instrutors. Returning to the North American way of things, in a few months, is going to require a good deal of reverse culture-shock training, I think. As of right now, though, I'm trying desperately to hang in there and take Moroccan life as it comes. New director, unplanned days off, and all.