I am Myriam and I spent 6 weeks in Rabat as a volunteer. I’m from a Moroccan family, so I grew up visiting Morocco, but always as a family guest during summer holidays. Volunteering for six weeks with Go Experience Morocco – as part of the last year of my university studies in Applied Foreign Languages – was something entirely different. For the first time, I was not in Morocco as a niece or a cousin. I was there to teach and to actually discover a side of the country my family never showed me : its associative world, and the people who keep it alive.
Two Neighborhoods, Two Very Different Realities
I starts my day with teaching English to a group of women in a local NGO in the Hassan’s neighborhood of Rabat. Some sessions turn naturally into conversations about our daily lives, our families, what we each love to do after the center. We talk as much as we learn and those precious moments of sharing and connection are what I still remember most clearly today.
In the afternoon, I cross the river separating the two sister cities of Rabat and Salé in order to join the second community center dedicated to children. Working with kids is completely different from working with adults as it requires having a couple of skills such as inspirational leadership, adaptability and positive interaction enabling to connect and build a healthy environment for the child’s learning progress. So the moments I am most proud of, are when a child who had been stuck on the same exercise for days, finaly gets it right, and comes back to me with eyes full of stars. Seeing that kind of joy on their face, again and again, was a true source of motivation for me.
Teaching in two different associations gave me a much clearer picture of the Moroccan associative world. In the morning’s center, my students were mainly women, some of whom had never had the chance to study a foreign language before. Progress was slow, and I learned to measure it differently not by grammar scores, but by who felt confident enough to speak that day. Wheras the women’s class was calm, the children’s class was loud, and full of life.
More than anything, both centers taught me to really listen before acting, and to adapt to each context instead of showing up with a fixed idea of what “teaching” should look like.
Why I Would Tell Anyone to Try This — Moroccan or Not
If you are of a Moroccan origin, like me, I would really encourage you to volunteer here at least onc as it’s a completely different way of knowing the country. Instead of visiting the country as a guest, you will be someone with a task, a schedule, and people counting on you. This experience has greatly helped me to reconnect to a part of my cultural heritage that I would never experience in my usual family holidays.
You don’t need to have any root connections to the country or to speak Darija, the local dialect in order to be useful or to be genuinely welcomed by local families who open their homes to you. This volunteering experience also gave me the time to truly discover Rabat, rather than just passing through. I got to chance to fully immerse myself in its daily vibes and lifestyle. Rabat has a beautiful heritage and Morocco is far more diverse than most people think, changing completely from one region to the other. Six weeks isn’t very long, but when you spend it helping out the local community in two different centers by showing up every day, it was enough to grow more than I expected not because I gave something valuable to the people I met, but because they gave just as much back to me.