In 1968–70, ten years before the Morocco Literacy Project (MLP) began, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Beni-Mellal, at the foot of the Middle Atlas Mountains in Morocco. My primary mission was to assist in the surveying and building of small irrigation canals, work that required travel into rural mountainous areas. It was exciting at times, and exasperating at others, for work was often held up by bureaucratic entanglements far beyond the reach and even comprehension of the naive outsider that I was. But the experience was an important one. Because of it, I decided to reorient my upcoming graduate studies from experimental toward cultural issues in psychology. Shortly after beginning graduate school in the U.S., I was fortunate to discover the field of cross-cultural research in psychology and education. A few course credits later, a Let's Learn Spanish paperback in my coat pocket, and ridiculous heavy boots on my feet in a land where sandals were de rigueur, I set off to join a team of researchers from Rockefeller University to conduct some preliminary work of my own, which included a study of schooling and memory development in a Mayan community in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

About a year later, with the help of a dissertation fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, I was off to Morocco for a 2-year stint of fieldwork on the effects of schooling on the development of memory and perception. Unlike my work in Mexico, where I was a true outsider, the Moroccan work benefited tremendously from the network of personal relationships that I had established during my earlier years in that country.