Avoiding Sainthood

Living in Rabat for two and a half months I feel that I have a good understanding of daily life in urban Morocco. Until recently, though, I lacked any knowledge about life in rural Morocco. All SIT programs emphasize a week long village stay to help students experience their host country's rural life. I was eager to learn about village life, but I was worried that our time in rural Morocco would become all about "the American saviors staging an intervention".

Recently, I've noticed a common trend in the facebook pictures of those studying abroad in developing countries. It seems to have become a right of passage to post pictures of oneself holding, or playing with, the rural children of underdeveloped communities. Students go to rural villages to help build houses or wells and they always end up with pictures of themselves with hundreds of children looking up at them as if they were staring at a saint. I am a big believer that communities cannot develop unless they take the initiative to change. The work that these student volunteers and NGO's do is admirable, but all too often communities become reliant and cannot sustain the changes made by external parties. Before we left for the village I brought up my concern that we would find ourselves in this situation. Mary felt the same way and reminded us that we should approach the experience journalistically, observing and informing our readers about something they could not experience firsthand, not interfering in the village's affairs. In fact, I think we even ended up doing a type of gonzo journalism; we became very well integrated into the village and practically felt like community members.

Mary assigned us each a story and asked me to write an introduction to the village. We decided to make these stories more like reporter's notebooks; we chose to write about what caught our attention the most and we took a personal angle. We wanted readers to understand and feel what we had experienced. We'll work with Mary to edit our stories and then we'll eventually post all of our stories on Round Earth Media's blog (http://www.roundearthmedia.org/category/blog/). For now, though, here are links to the unedited versions of my introduction to the village (http://soundcloud.com/veronica-jean-seltzer/sbaa-rouadi-intro) and my story, The Village Intellectual(http://soundcloud.com/veronica-jean-seltzer/the-village-intellectual).