Aftermath, Part 1

Perhaps you remember the flooding last fall? If only from reading my blog, you may have heard of it. We are still struggling with the aftermath of it here. I remember going to watch our little creek of a river turned into a raging torrent of coffee-with-cream colored water that roared like a giant rock polisher with the village. We would gather on cliffs overlooking the valley and watch the river pull cliffs down, over run fields, and rip full grown trees out by the roots. The men and women looked grim: sad, troubled, beaten, frustrated… even the ones whose fields were high enough to be safe from being bodily carried away. I didn’t understand why. I understood a little better when I was told that the irrigation system had been badly hurt by the flooding. I understood more when I went to go see it myself. Where the ditches weren’t filled or buried by rockslides, they had been sheered away by the water, leaving a crumbly wall of dirt and rock behind. And then I began to think about how many fields rely on that river water for irrigation… somewhere between 60% and 70% of them… and I really began to understand the worry. But the pessimism confused me. Surely there would be money forthcoming. I had read in newspapers about millions of dirhams that had been set aside specifically to repair flood-damaged infrastructure. Surely this qualified…! But time has slipped by, and the only repairs have been the emptying, by hand, of one of the three big ditches to take advantage of a seasonal spring that is currently flowing. I talked to one family that is planning to move out to our souk town this summer. They’ve had enough; they say this life is too hard. I talked to another man and his family. His words were, "there is no life here anymore. No fields, no work, nothing." So, we’ve begun looking for outside funding for repairs. Because one thing is clear: this village needs those irrigation ditches to survive. And it needs them all summer long, even when the seasonal springs stop flowing.