Frustrations running high...

Apologies for a rather negative blog, but this week has been consumed by annoyances…

As seems to be always the case of our time so far in Morocco, this has been yet another week of highs and lows. There have been more than a few tantrums and tears on my part, with one childish moment of standing crying into a classroom wall. Thankfully when there were no students there to witness the madness.

The frustration has come from a few areas. With all the extra work we have been doing in school we keep trying to find ways to reduce the length of time we need to spend doing things. Those who have worked with me know that on a whole I am generally organised and efficient and if there is a way to do it quicker, I’m already doing it. The problem seems to be that here that everything takes much longer than it should. It’s not just the ordering of resources, programs or the processing of documents, it is also just the day to day jobs of printing, copying and using computers. Generally everything will take 2-3 times longer than it should. Last weekend instead of enjoying a relaxing Sunday at home, I spent 5 hours of computer crashing time trying to write and upload the blog. The following morning I went into school and it took me two computers and seven attempts to get a worksheet printed. Walk to the copier and you will generally find that it is out of paper and the ‘paper’ man is nowhere in sight. Result… Monday morning rage before you even see a single child.

We have a strange set-up here as a result of being connected to the university. Everything we want has to be ordered through them. Each order will need approval from one department before hopefully being passed to purchasing and awaiting approval there where at some point the order will generally be lost and the whole process needs to be started again. Take the paper situation, which has caused every teacher to lose it at some point already. The blank paper that we need for printing and copying is kept in a locked room. Only one person is able to unlock this room. This person has many maintenance duties within school and can be anywhere within the school at any point and is generally hidden in a small hole somewhere just when you have a free second and are in desperate need of paper to print. If you are lucky enough to find him he will come, unlock his room, and hand you one ream of paper. By which point there is often a build-up of jobs to print and copy and the single ream so begrudgingly given will disappear in five minutes. The more considerate of us will then have to go off in search of him again. Trying to avoid this situation we have requested that he keep a box of paper in the teachers’ room at all times. His response… ‘not possible, we only have 60 reams to last us until Christmas’. No amount of explaining that we don’t have any books and need to print and copy everything gets us anywhere. The suggestion of ordering more paper through the university is stonewalled. This man guards the paper like a precious metal.

If we were not connected to the university a lot of these problems would not occur. Although, to be fair we wouldn’t have any students either as the majority of them are deans’ and lecturers children. For a university that looks remarkably impressive, has a good sized international body of both lecturers and students, and has gone a long way towards increasing its enrolment figures, it is fairly lacking in forward thinking. At around the same time as they decided to increase the student enrolment, they decided to sell off half of the off-campus residences that are beside the school (about 50 apartments in all). Now they have managed to increase student numbers they have found that strangely they don’t have enough accommodation to house them all. These poor students are put into dorm style accommodation at the Best Western hotel down the road, 3 kilometres from the nearest shop or restaurant, 7 kilometres from the university and out in the middle of nowhere. To be fair, I’m not sure who I feel more sorry for, the students who are stuck out there, or the guests who pay to go on holiday and find themselves surrounded by hordes of uni students.

Having travelled and lived in many different places I know that we should be used to lack of planning and logical reasoning, and yet it seems that while some things are better here, many things are worse. For example, never before have I had to wait a month for an ATM card to be ordered and sent, an ATM card that you then need to take into the bank to activate. Then when trying to use said ATM card for the first time and failing, you check the balance and find that £2300 has vanished, you are told not to worry, sometimes the ATM machine takes a few days to update. A few days??? How about 3 weeks. 3 weeks when everybody else’s cards are working just fine. How can it be a simple case of it not updating when you’ve never made a withdrawal on the account? Where did the money go? Managing to stay calm enough to give their theory a go, we found all systems and balances had returned to normal a few days ago.

On a more positive note, we did finally this week manage to finish early enough to take the shuttle up to the university to go and use the swimming pool for the first time. The Olympic size indoor swimming pool is stunning, surrounded by cedar forest that is viewed through immense vaulted windows. We have been waiting nearly 3 months to get through the bureaucracy and get the swim pass and find the time to use it. Sadly, keeping with the theme of the week we only got to swim 2 lengths before we were told to get out as we had no swimming cap. C’est la vie.

The one absolute saving grace of the week, one which in itself nearly reduced me to tears… tears of relief, justice and joy, was the fixing of our shower. Since we have arrived we have had problems with the shower. It took up to 15 minutes running to get hot water through and often the pressure was so weak that I had to sit on the floor to rinse my hair. In comparison to Thailand where I often showered twice a day, here it was cut to 2-3 times a week interspersed with unpleasant bucket scrubs. When reporting the problem we were informed that this was all quite normal. After 9 weeks of weekly emails and an escalation to a higher power, they finally came and inspected it. I received an email this week to say that they had found one of the pipes to be nearly completely blocked with mineral build-up and ‘sorry for the inconvenience.’ Now we have a possibly one of the best showers we’ve ever had and just need to deal with the small matter of the shower head holder being positioned so high that the new hot and high pressured water jets right over our heads. Baby steps, but we’ll get things sorted.

My apologies for the negativity and lack of pictures. Note to self… must try harder next week at positive thinking.