CEO Today Africa Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 30 CEO Today Africa Awards 2018 MOROCCO MOHAMED BAGHDADI Executive Director of The Cultural Center for Language and Training ABOUT MOHAMED BAGHDADI I was born and raised in a small village in the Middle Atlas in Morocco. Ouaoumana, the name of that village, is in the south east of Morocco on the main road between Fez and Marrakech. The language spoken in the late sixties was predominately Tamazight, often called Berber. My mother tongue is Tamazight, and I still remember during my childhood when my friends would laugh at me for making mistakes when I spoke Moroccan Arabic. My childhood was to a large extent difficult. My father, who is of Arab origin, and my mother who is Berber, were very poor. They strived hard to feed their 4 children, 2 sons and 2 twin daughters, by getting daily work in the fields. There were times when there was no work available, and so they had to ask the neighbors to feed their kids. In the village, the inhabitants would own one or two cows so that they could have daily milk and butter for the family. My brother was chosen to be the shepherd of the village who would keep guard of the cows in uncultivated fields during the day and bring them back to the village in the late afternoon. He used the income from his job to improve our family’s life style and guarantee our daily necessities like bread, sugar and meat from time to time. My first official education was in a Koranic school. I was 5 years old when I had to learn the Koran by heart with no attention to meaning from early in the morning until late afternoon. Before going back home, the koranic students had to recite what they had learned during the day to the Koranic school teacher. Stumbling from time to time during recitation is punishable; the teacher with his long stick beat those who failed to learn by heart and kept them another hour or two until they reached fluency in their recitation. Learning through beating was not easy to bear every day. In order to avoid the teacher’s inevitable harsh punishment, I had to focus on my reading aloud and repetition of the verses until rote learning was achieved. I started my primary school at the age of 7. The new environment of the school was more appealing to me. The shift from sitting on a mattress, using a triangular piece of wood, a bamboo pen to write, to the use of a blackboard, a book, copy books, and a pen was fascinating. However, the way of punishment with the stick remained the same even in modern primary schools. I had to move to Khenifra; a small city 50 kilometers away from my village, to continue my junior high education. I had to stay with one of my family relatives in a big house with electricity, a salon, stairs to the first floor, and windows open on the street. I had to lead a new life in this city like sharing a room with a boy my age, speaking Moroccan Arabic all the time, and eating good meals every day. In Junior high we had 3 French, 1 Moroccan, and 1 American instructors. The first few days of learning English were difficult. However, I felt a bend towards this language and tried hard to get good grades. I had to move to the north east of Morocco with my family after my brother got a job as a miner in a company in the region of Nador in the Rif mountains. I had to adapt to a new culture and a new Berber dialect. The high school was 15 kilometers away from the village we moved to, and I had to commute everyday to school by taking a bus. After I finished high school and passed the Baccalaureate exam, I had to lead my own life far from the yoke of my family. In the mid 70s, there were only two public universities in Morocco: one in Rabat and another in Fez. The closest university to the north east of Morocco was in Fes, and that was how I joined the English department to study English language and literature. I graduated in 1980 and moved to Rabat for a one-year teacher training at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS). My work-life started in 1981 as a high school instructor of the English language in “Assisting students in their step by step intercultural growth is one of my main passions. Some of them succeed to move along the continuum of intercultural understanding to empathizing with the target culture.”