Tennessean in Morocco

The venture started with an itch to travel, but when Teacher James Hamlett's westbound airliner began bumping through rough air over Texas, the itch turned to queasiness. At Dallas, Hamlett phoned the State Department in dismay. He had quit a job as a French and Spanish teacher at Knoxville College to take a teaching job in Cambodia under the U.S.'s International Educational Exchange program. He still wanted to teach, he told Washington, but could something be done about the air currents? He hung up reassured; there was passage available on a ship, and it did not much matter that the ship was headed not for Cambodia but Morocco.

Hamlett's shift in direction mattered considerably to the drowsy Berber market town of Azrou, in the Middle Atlas Mountains. Last week, six months after his arrival, most of Azrou's 4,000 rug weavers, wood carvers and farmers were erudite enough to flavor their conversation with at least a few words of English--spoken with recognizable Tennessee drawls. And the strange rhythms of U.S. natives, as recorded in the waxings of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, are now familiar in a region where no American had ever lived until Hamlett came there six months ago.

Free-Style Debates. For all his foreign ways, 33-year-old Teacher Hamlett is accepted in the mountain town. He wears a black djellabah, and because he is a Negro is sometimes mistaken for a native. Said one Moroccan merchant: "He is completely at home here."

To the students of the Azrou lycee, Hamlett brought a startling kind of teaching. Assigned to teach English classes 15 hours a week, he volunteered to hold Spanish classes for another six hours, gets his points of grammar and sentence structure across during heated, free-style debates about the state of the world. An English class of 18-year-old boys last week began reading about poverty in 18th century England, then wandered off into an argument about present-day economic and social conditions in Red China and the U.S. To a U.S. partisan who overstated the material abundance of America, Hamlett said gently that "Yes, there are poor people in Los Angeles, too." Moroccans are much concerned with race prejudice in the U.S., listen intently to Hamlett's explanations that the widely reported outrages are only part of the story.

Another Year. Once a week Hamlett presides at an informal evening meeting that can eventually turn into either a jazz seance or a bull session. He has led his youngsters off on hamburger picnics, taught them U.S. dance steps, set them to collecting stamps and writing to pen pals in America. Now and then he rents a bus and carts the young Berbers off to fabled Fez, 50 miles to the North, to hear an American singer or lecturer who is passing through. Not long ago he ordered a shipment of hardball equipment, then gloomily canceled the order after watching spring practice. Said he: "It will be softball for another season at least."

Teacher Hamlett wall have at least another year to prepare his Sunday-morning softballers for the subtleties of hardball; the Moroccan government has invited him to stay in Azrou for another year. And last week the U.S. embassy at Rabat sent off a moviemaking team to film the djellabahed Tennesseean at work.

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