A Simple Way to Help Girls Be Confident

As a Youth Development PCV here in Morocco, I do most of my volunteering in a dar chebab (Darija, or Moroccan Arabic, for "youth center"). Mostly I teach and tutor boys and girls in English there.

Since I want them to learn English well, I try to reinforce and otherwise complement the English lessons they have in school. Rather than overloading them with too much information to learn by introducing new vocabulary and grammatical rules in addition to the ones they're learning in school, I teach them about the same material they're studying in school.

Yesterday, I was teaching an English class with a small group of four girls. They asked me to teach them about the rooms of a house and what is often found in each room, since they're studying those words in school. In addition to reviewing relevant vocabulary with them, I was showing them how to use some of the words in sentences. So, I was writing sentences such as "He is making couscous" and "She was hungry, so she asked me to make couscous" on the board.

At one point, one of the girls asked me a question, but she was covering her mouth with her hand. Recently I was reading a Peace Corps publication about doing activities with girls. In it, I read about how a girl who is not confident at times will speak with a hand over her mouth. I also read in that book that by asking a girl to pose her question without her hand over her mouth, you're encouraging her to speak with more self-confidence. Before I'd read that part of that book, I would ask a girl who had posed a question with her hand over her mouth to repeat her question with her mouth uncovered so I could better hear and thus understand the question. However, having recently read this book, last night I asked this particular girl to restate her question while not covering her mouth, for the added purpose of trying to help her to speak with more confidence. Last night, I left the youth center once again reminded that we can encourage and support others in so many ways, some of which are so simple, that often we don't even think of them. However, if we try to be more conscious, alert and sensitive, we will see that in every interaction that we have, we have a chance to show how we believe we should treat others.