No Good Deed

No good deed goes unpunished, nor perhaps a mere good intention.

Cut to the second “meeting” we’ve attended on behalf of the children’s prostitution charity mentioned in an earlier post. We received a call last night from one of the coordinators instructing us to be at a fancy new sports facility that’s been constructed at Bab El Khemis – not far from the flea market – at 10 a.m., presumably to get our marching orders for the upcoming summer activities project with the program’s child-victims. Great, we thought, we’ll go early and have a peak around the market and then spend an hour or so hatching plans with our fellow volunteers.

Well, it turns out helping out might be more challenging than we thought. We arrive at the spiffy sports facility – all groomed lawns, giant tiled pool, theater and computer outbuildings, encouraging tri-lingual signs pointing towards tennis and handball courts, the indoor gym and infirmary. It’s all so, well, not third world. The center looks like it could be right out of Orange County, the philanthropic project of some retired tennis star.

Our gang is hanging out outside one of the admin buildings, awkwardly making introductions; clearly none of us exactly sure what’s going on and what we’re meant to be doing. Finally, after standing about for 15 minutes in the blazing sun, we’re ushered into the building where rows of 50 folding chairs are neatly lined up in a bare, very former Protectorate-looking conference room where someone’s fiddling with audio-video equipment. The meeting is starting to look very official, we think, and are quickly proven right as in walk a group of government guys in weekend wear – pleated slacks, golf shirts, polished lace-ups with cigarettes dangling from their mustachioed lips. For the next hour and a half, we’re treated to a full-on Power Point presentation (oh, haven’t we come all this way in some part just to avoid Power Point?) about the new facility, its aspirations (both for Marrakech’s youth and for the country’s tourism), program schedule, and on and on. No mention of the children’s prostitution charity, whose only tie to the center is that the summer activities program will be housed here, it seems, no words from the charity’s director, no info about what we’re doing here. Not to mention, the presentation is in heavily-accented French and Arabic, of which we’re able to get about every 4th word. We do like the amiable face and dramatic gesticulations (think Parisian street mime), of the center’s director, a middle-aged man who’d won us over earlier by complimenting our floppy straw hats (“chicest and cheapest”). At one point in the presentation, though, he points a puffy finger at me and suggests that perhaps I could teach tennis lessons. What??

Every now and again, between bouts of feeling like we might pass out from the heat and from the struggle to concentrate on a foreign and unintelligible tongue, we jab one another and smile at the hilarity of the predicament.

When the session comes to an abrupt halt and the crowd files out into the sun-drenched courtyard again, we approach Nico, hoping for some explanation. “I’m afraid we missed a lot of what was going on in there,” we say. “Go talk to Emanuel,” she responds, waving us off. “He speaks English.” Emanuel, who works for the center, not her charity, is surrounded by a big group of people. We wait for a while, but when it’s clear he’s going to be engaged for some time, we throw in the towel and wander back to the gate to find some water and a cab.

A charity’s success is not just a product of a do-gooder and his or her worthy vision; to be successful, a charity needs a leader who can marshal and inspire volunteers, making efficient use of able, willing hands. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case with this very deserving organization. We’re still eager to help out, but it makes us wonder what the statute is on wasted time and a fuzzy game plan.