The Challenge
Helping the secondary school children that are learning English to get the confidence to use their language skills to interact with our Surf Instructor Course ‘gappies’!
The Solution
Every year we run two Surf Instructor Courses, these are designed to help people gain their level 1 surf qualification and help people get in to the surf industry. However, we have taken the view that it should mean a bit more than just that, we want our ‘gappies’ to help out in the community that they live in. You can call it responsible tourism, or you can call it simply doing the right thing, we are privileged, we are able to travel, these kids aren’t. We have options for our futures, they don’t!
With this in mind, we get the gappies into class with the school kids that are taking English at the higher levels and get them to take classes and sit with the kids. This informality means that more language is spoken and also the confidence of the children skyrockets. Once the gappies have done a few sessions we sometimes organise a day trip to a nearby town that some of the school children may never have visited. So in the past we have done Essaouira, Taroudant, Tafraoute. This is with a view that both the gappies and the school children are seeing some parts of Morocco they might not have had the chance to see. Also they are spending the day in each other’s company, just increasing the chance of the language barrier being broken down!