The Amazir Folk Tales: first draft

The first issue of the Amazir Folk Tales has been printed: 

The final version will be available after some revisions.

 Contact us for information about this project.

Amazir Folk Tales

As you may know from the many previous posts, we enjoyed three years with Peace Corps as Youth Development volunteers in Morocco. During this time, we had the pleasure of meeting Said N'Ait Hda, a university student of linguistics and a member of our English Language workshop. Said's family is Amazir (an ethnic group that occupies much of North Africa), and he reads and writes Tifinagh, the written form of the ancient Amazir language. Because we expressed an interest in his ancestral language and its curious alphabet, he presented us with several traditional folk tales told by his grandmother, written in Tifinagh and English.

While all Amazir speak various dialects of their language, few can read and write it, so Said thought it might be useful to preserve these oral stories, written in Tifinagh, Arabic and English, and illustrate them to be more accessible for children. Below you will see some preliminary layouts from two different stories with and without captions) to give you an idea of what we plan to publish in the coming year.

Mountains

Last weekend we went to visit the family of our Amazir counterpart. We knew they lived in the mountains, and had pictured a rather barren landscape (and in fact, the steeper slopes don't support much vegetation), but we encountered green valleys, clear streams fed by melting snow, terraced fields of ripening wheat and fruit trees, and wide pastures with rambling herds of goat and sheep! 

When one thinks of Morocco, one may be inclined to think of deserts, camels, and labyrinthine marketplaces; but by travelling to the mountains, one finds vistas that are more like New Mexico! It was a perfect spring day, and the family had arranged a lunch which started with their own walnuts, moved on to goat (tajine and skewers) and ended with the apples they had grown. It was an unforgettable experience of true Moroccan hospitality and a spectacular landscape. 

A colorful collection of blankets for the cold winter months

Griffin

The holiday of Ramadan is quickly approaching! The last class of the semester featured a bit of fantasy as the participants created a Griffin: one of the Mythical Animals (Hayawanat Khorafiya, in Darija) which had been part of a lesson earlier in the year. By sheer coincidence, there might be a connection between today's Griffin project and the previous week's Triceratops assemblage. Some historians speculate that the myth of the Griffin was created in ancient times when miners looking for gold found the bones of a Triceratops-type dinosaur in their excavations.     

Triceratops

The recent classes were a combination of animal imagery and construction (using discarded cardboard boxes). Last year the children made pandas and tigers in this manner, and this time they created a triceratops. While introducing the activity, we mentioned that some paleontologists speculate dinosaurs might have been very colorful, and this appears to have encouraged the children to use their imagination in coloring the triceratops before assembly. 

Shapes and Colors

A few weeks ago, we took a break from the animal image curriculum, and had a session which dealt with the vocabulary of geometric shapes and colors. Handing out a page of shape outlines, we asked the children to fill them in with any color, then name the shape and its color in English. All Moroccans are familiar with the hexagon and pentagon, as they are the basis for traditional Moroccan patterns seen every day in decorative mosaics used on buildings around town. The one word every child knew was "star", as the starfish had been one of the sea creatures featured in a previous activity.

Stay tuned!

Recently our trusty MacBook has been having some problems, so we have been unable to upload photos. Hopefully we'll be able to figure out how to upload pics from our other devices. In the meantime, we will describe another activity which we have tried with the advanced English students. Showing them a narrative painting (like a Winslow Homer, N.C. Wyeth, Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth) we ask them to write a paragraph about what they imagine is happening. It's a great activity to practice written English, but it's also a good exercise in creative writing! 

 N.C. Wyeth ''Old Pew''

 Edward Hopper ''Nighthawks''

Andrew Wyeth ''Christina's World''