OCTOBER 1976 1
CHAPTER ONE: JANNA
The pretty redhead seemed to be everywhere in the classroom at once. At one moment she was standing near
the blackboard, at the next she was walking between the aisles of desks, the eyes of thirty-seven students
following her, their faces bright and smiling, full of eagerness to learn the English language.
Pointing to the hand-drawn sketch she held, Janna Gallagher asked: “Where’s the camel?”
Almost instantaneously she pointed to one of the dozen or so hands she could see raised.
“The camel is in the house.”
The classroom was filled with laughter, which Janna quickly quieted with a stern look. She was small in stature
but obviously in control, and it was clear that the students loved her and that this class was a time of recreation in a
day otherwise filled with physics, mathematics, literature, and geography courses.
“Good!” exclaimed Janna. “Where’s the monkey?
“The monkey is...,” several students started to answer at once, but stopped. With only a glance in their
direction, Janna had made them realize that they were out of turn. “One answer,” she insisted softly but firmly.
“Abdellah?” she asked, looking in the direction of the handsomely tanned, intelligent, but painfully shy Arab
teenager who always sat in the back corner of the room.
“The monkey is under the table,” answered Abdellah, slowly but confidently, his confidence gained after
several weeks with this teacher who was so unlike any others he or his fellow students had ever had.
To begin with, she was an American. There were only four of them in the small Moroccan town of Aïn El
Qamar, whereas there were over fifty French, the latest of the many invaders Morocco had known throughout its
long history. Even today, in 1976, seventeen years after independence, the French presence was still acutely felt in
the North African kingdom. For example, over half the teachers in this secondary school, Lycée Mohamed Cinq--
named after Morocco’s first post-independence king--were French. Some of them had never intended to teach,
but were taking advantage of an easy, well-paid two years abroad to fulfill their military service. The Americans
were different, and students like Abdellah could sense it, even though they didn’t know specifically that they were
paid less than their Moroccan counterparts and only half of what the French received because they had come to
Morocco as Peace Corps Volunteers. The students knew only that these teachers walked rather than drove
expensive cars. Their housing was more modest than that of the French. They could speak Arabic, the language of
the Moroccan family, and not just French, the language of the conquerors which had greatly permeated the
government, the media, and the schools. But most of all, the students recognized a difference in attitude. Teachers
like Ms. Gallagher really liked and respected their students. And the students returned this feeling.
Abdellah adored Ms. Gallagher--she said “Ms.” meant it was no one’s business whether or not she was
married. (She wasn’t.) He thought he would do anything for her. It angered Abdellah that a small group of
students had recently begun gossiping about her, spreading stories about a supposed romantic relationship
between her and one of her pupils from last year who was now a foreign exchange student in the United States.
Abdellah had heard the stories about private Arabic lessons which seemed to extend later and later into the
evenings. Someone even claimed to have seen Lahcen Cherqaoui, Ms. Gallagher’s student, leaving her house in
the early hours of the morning. Abdellah refused to believe this of Ms. Gallagher. True, he had seen the couple at
the post office together once, and teachers were not supposed to be seen fraternizing with students in public, but
Abdellah wanted to believe that Ms. Gallagher had done nothing wrong, and so that was what he believed.
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