Abandoned children in Morocco get a new chance at life through an education programme that is the envy of all, writes Pierre Wolf
Aziz turned up in the village three years ago. Abandoned by his parents at the age of 12 months, Aziz was referred by the Moroccan social services to the SOS village in Ait Ourir.
It took all the patience, care and love that Malika, his foster mother, could summon up for his breathing to gradually return to normal and for him to open up to his surroundings. Today, this four-year-old runs around with the other children in the streets of the village near Marrakesh, one of three villages which Kinderdorf International, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), runs in Morocco. A total of 119 children, ranging from a few months to 16 years old, live in the village’s 14 houses. Each house is run by a foster mother who looks after eight or nine children.
In September last year the children started the new term. Until recently, Moroccan children did not have to go to school until they were six, but since the village opened 16 years ago, it has had its own kindergarten. On the wall as you go in is a picture of a camel with a bunch of kids sliding down its hump. From one room comes the sound of the older children, aged between four and five, counting together in French and then in Arabic. Teaching is systematically done in both languages.
Everyone in the village is very keen on education. “It’s their passport to getting a start in life,” says Larbi Belkouch, who runs the village. “Because the orphans don’t have any family, they have no connections to help them get a job. We can help them, of course, but like any parents we want them to stand on their own feet.” As part of its Children in Distress programme, Unesco funds a kindergarten in the new SOS village of Dar Bouazza as well as on-the-job teacher training in the other two Moroccan villages set up by the NGO.
The kindergarten also takes in other children for a small fee. There is plenty of demand for places and Belkouch often has to turn down parents who beg for their children to be admitted, even when they are well past the school’s age limit.
“We’ve had to learn from this failure. Six years ago, when the first children came to us from the state system, when they were about 16, the age for getting a job or continuing education, it was a disaster. I remember one boy who’d gone to secondary school in Marrakesh but who was failing all our courses. He couldn’t read or write, yet he had gone all the way through the compulsory state system.”
For the last two years, the children have gone for lessons in maths, biology, French and Arabic, as well as workshops in subjects ranging from cooking to computers. Belkouch and his team are planning to put up new buildings so they can provide 11 years of schooling. “These kids are better off here than in the state system,” says Jane Wright of the Unesco office in Rabat.” They deserve it because being an orphan in Morocco isn’t easy. Such children are looked down on as illegitimate. If they weren’t in these schools, they’d be abandoned and left to their own devices.”
– Unesco Sources
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, May 2001.