I taught my 1^st class at Dar Chabab (youth center) today and 33, eight to eleven year olds showed up. In a town where kids are leaking out of every doorway, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the mob of children pouring toward me with eager smiles, pens and soft cover Aladin notebooks in hand. However, I was so shocked to see them all there, at the previously deserted community center, waiting for me to TEACH them something…that I literally fell off the bottom step of the Dar Chabab entrance and promptly broke my sandal. The kids were so sweet, they were patient and listened to my Arabic phrases and limited vocabulary and participated in everything I tried to do with them. Their twisted and distorted attempts to pronounce all of the English greetings we were studying made all of the stress I have been harboring about my own Arabic studies and anxiety surrounding the location of my final placement melt away ( Well, at least for an hour or so J ) I have a hunch that however much English I try to teach, the biggest smiles are going to come when, like today I stood in front of the room, fist pumping the numbers from 1-10 and shaking my broken sandaled feet in the air while the kids shouted the numbers in a mixture of FrEnbia at the top of their lungs.

With our never ending, rigorous daily language studies, nights full of memorizing new vocab and now the added hours of afternoon teaching at the Dar Chabab I am finding myself tired (or an excessively overused darija word of mine, “anammdigadiga” translating to dying of exhaustion) just about every hour of every day. I ponder daily when my brain is going to just give way and explode from over use and the daily activities involved in the memorization of the numerous vocabulary coming at me from every direction.

I have had to consciously make cutthroat decisions about which words to memorize, and which to leave in the dust and not even attempt to remember. For instance, today I decided that the command form of “to listen” took priority over “mango”. However much I want to be able to buy mangos in the market, the necessity to quiet the screeching kids in my classroom took presidents today. I have recently been wondering if there will be a point of saturation where my brain just won’t be able to absorb anything else! It hasn’t happened yet but I am not sure how much can possibly soak in… So when you read my posts and have no idea what I am speaking about, forgive me. At the level of brain strain I am working with right now, correct English sentence structure is a true challenge…. Hahaha let alone trying to teach it to wide-eyed Moroccan children!!!!