Last month, I was visiting some people I know in the Ifrane area, and through a series off (ultimately very fortunate!) circumstances, I met a couple studying at the Ifrane university. We were crashing at the same people's house as I. They happened to mention that they had been entrusted with some money donated from the US for relief after the big earthquake in Casablanca in the last few years... and I spoke up. Mentioned that there had been major infrastructure damage and that we could definitely use the monetary help. Time passed... there were texts, phone calls, and more of the same, until I got the great news!! The director of the relief money would be very happy to see the money used in my little village!!
Followed a trip to pick up the money... it's truly terrifying to be entrusted with large amounts of cash... I know now I will never be a banker! Not that there was any doubt before... and measuring mission...
To be continued...
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
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.
The Idarab
After I made my way back from Figuig, I got stuck in site for almost a week. No, there wasn’t a late snowstorm, although I did, ironically, loose power. It begins to seem that if I am stuck site, I will also loose power. :) That was the result of a little windstorm, though. The reason I got stuck in site is the same reason we still haven’t had the Women’s Wellness Workshop, even though it was scheduled to occur last Monday. The greater part of Morocco has been more or less immobilized for the past week due to the striking of all road bound public transport. People say "they are doing an Idarab." The deal is, they want to change one of the accident laws, and there’s a big meeting of all the transportation big wigs soon, and they wanted to get their attention. Well, they got a lot of peoples attention, alright! The only functioning public transport was the train, expensive bus lines and those local transport you could convince to risk running the gauntlet of the striking transport folk. The most reliable form of transportation in the bled (backcountry) was to try to catch a ride with someone. People were either thumbing it or pulling strings to get around. I just hunkered down in site and decided to ride it out, after much frustration trying to get to the W.W.Workshop.
I and my two chosen women attempted to leave for the workshop, but got no further than my souk town… we were informed by text that the workshop had to be postponed because most of the women couldn’t make it due to the strike. We rescheduled for 3 days later. But had to delay again, because the strike still wasn’t over yet. And then we had to push it back again… by this time, we decided to push it back by 10 days to be sure the strike would be well and truly over! The interesting thing is that even the people who would normally carry vegetables to market aren’t going, and so there’s a temporary food shortage in many places. I myself got caught out and had to borrow some little carrots, a zuccini and one old, small, but delicious tomato from my best friend in site. To give you an idea of the scope of the strike, the Safety and Security Coordinator for all of Peace Corps Morocco was sending out texts telling us the status of the strike and what the travel policies were concerning it. So, this morning, I finally received the text telling me that the strike was OVER, lHamdulillah!! All prayers that it will not commence, and that the Workshop will go smoothly and wonderfully, and that both of my women will be able to go!
I and my two chosen women attempted to leave for the workshop, but got no further than my souk town… we were informed by text that the workshop had to be postponed because most of the women couldn’t make it due to the strike. We rescheduled for 3 days later. But had to delay again, because the strike still wasn’t over yet. And then we had to push it back again… by this time, we decided to push it back by 10 days to be sure the strike would be well and truly over! The interesting thing is that even the people who would normally carry vegetables to market aren’t going, and so there’s a temporary food shortage in many places. I myself got caught out and had to borrow some little carrots, a zuccini and one old, small, but delicious tomato from my best friend in site. To give you an idea of the scope of the strike, the Safety and Security Coordinator for all of Peace Corps Morocco was sending out texts telling us the status of the strike and what the travel policies were concerning it. So, this morning, I finally received the text telling me that the strike was OVER, lHamdulillah!! All prayers that it will not commence, and that the Workshop will go smoothly and wonderfully, and that both of my women will be able to go!
Spiderman, Spiderman...
…does whatever a spider can… how many of you all remember the little jingle at the beginning of the original Spiderman comics? Well, now there are a couple of Berbers in the Middle Atlas Mountains that do. I sang it for them. J It’s amazing what little scraps of pop-culture seep into life here. Sometimes completely unappreciated, sometimes known and loved… or at least appreciated… like the Dora the Explorer backpack my little neighbor girl wears to school every day. I asked her if she knew the name of the girl on her backpack… she said no, but then I told her. But I couldn’t find a way to explain Dora the Explorer and hold her 5-year-old attention span. More universal is the appeal of hip-hop to teenagers. The love it for the same reason American teenagers do: it’s hot, it’s danceable, and their parents don’t like it. But back to Spiderman.
There was a little gum wrapper lying on the table at the house where I ate kaskarot, the late afternoon meal, today. The little boy picked it up and waved it at me, and from the depths of my memory emerged this little jingle… Spiderman, Spiderman… I couldn’t help myself, I was suddenly singing it to them. They liked it, and asked me, what does it say? So, here I was, explaining Spiderman to them, and reviewing my thievery vocabulary at the same time. This led into a conversation about which spiders in the region are poisonous to humans and which are not. **Note to self, the big ones that crawl around on the floor are the ismn (bad) ones… which means the family that used to reside in my bathroom are better off gone… I used to call them Big Scary, Little Scary, and Mama Scary. For obvious reasons. I digress… So, they asked me to sing it again, and again, and now… despite listening to Radiohead and Led Zepplin, there’s this little jingle floating around in my head…
"Spiderman, Spiderman.
Does whatever a spider can.
Spins a web, through the skies
Catches crooks, just like flies.
Look out, here comes the Spiderman…"
There was a little gum wrapper lying on the table at the house where I ate kaskarot, the late afternoon meal, today. The little boy picked it up and waved it at me, and from the depths of my memory emerged this little jingle… Spiderman, Spiderman… I couldn’t help myself, I was suddenly singing it to them. They liked it, and asked me, what does it say? So, here I was, explaining Spiderman to them, and reviewing my thievery vocabulary at the same time. This led into a conversation about which spiders in the region are poisonous to humans and which are not. **Note to self, the big ones that crawl around on the floor are the ismn (bad) ones… which means the family that used to reside in my bathroom are better off gone… I used to call them Big Scary, Little Scary, and Mama Scary. For obvious reasons. I digress… So, they asked me to sing it again, and again, and now… despite listening to Radiohead and Led Zepplin, there’s this little jingle floating around in my head…
"Spiderman, Spiderman.
Does whatever a spider can.
Spins a web, through the skies
Catches crooks, just like flies.
Look out, here comes the Spiderman…"
Thursday, April 9, 2009
spring camp
there is a small city, hemmed in by mountains, at the end of the Moroccan map. Figuig, city of palms, cut off from its Berber brothers in algeria, walled city. thats where i went to help out with spring camp. the only people i knew there were antonio and dunia (to use their moroccan names), but it turns out we had a really great crew! all good workers, cheerful, even in the face of adversity. i had so much fun getting to know them and having fun bringing the american to english language immersion spring camp!
figuig is a very long way from just about anywhere. it took me two days to get to Bouarfa, where we were stuck for a night because of the torrential rains. Figuig is in the desert. just across the border there are proper Saharan ergs (dunefields). but the drive down looked more like... the Serengeti. it's a high plateau, flat mostly, some slow-rolling hills, and the occasional small, rocky, morocco style mountain massif thrusting through. but it was all covered with... grass... and flowers... great streaks of purple, yellow, green, reaching to the horizon! sosososo beautiful. i miss green!!! the bus ride down from oujda takes a few hours. and it was allllll greeennnnn.... sigh of contentment...
camp was fun. the kids enjoyed it, when they weren't busy being too cool for school (some things never change). we had a raining inside incident involving all of the girls lugging their mattresses to the guys room to sleep without being dripped on from above. we had a door become unopenable, and the lock had to be knocked off with a sledgehammer. we had the 'pink vest boy', desire of the heart of every moroccan teenage girl. we had leapfrog, charades, dancing, halloween, and lots of english classes. we had a traditional wedding drum song, and one of the girls was 'taken by the music' and did the crazy hair dance. the environment club (me, antonio, nate and 15 kids) planted a medicinal plants garden (so much fun!! getting my hands in the dirt felt great!). we went for a hike to a fish-farm/irrigation pool.
we had the 'walled city' effect. people who have been subject to raiders for centuries (and still have the walls to prove it), who are separated from their trading routes by rather arbitrary borders that are now indefinitely closed, who are proudly berber in the very Arab eastern region, are walled people. they dont trust us or each other very well. and it made it hard to do silly team building activities that americans like to do at camp. you could literally see the tension between kids from different towns at times. there was a fight. did we make any headway? maybe. its hard to tell. but we tried!!! team-building, emphasis on togetherness, not joining in the between town teasing.
we had a theft, and a huge convention, and a semi-miraculous return of the stolen item, after tears, lectures, threats, tears, police, worries about honor and reputation, promises that a thing stolen from a moroccan would have had the same reaction, and finally... we got it back. thank God!
and then the kids left. and some of them cried to leave. whether they were sad to leave us, or their new girlfriend, or something else... at least they had a good time! i pray they learned something too.
figuig is a very long way from just about anywhere. it took me two days to get to Bouarfa, where we were stuck for a night because of the torrential rains. Figuig is in the desert. just across the border there are proper Saharan ergs (dunefields). but the drive down looked more like... the Serengeti. it's a high plateau, flat mostly, some slow-rolling hills, and the occasional small, rocky, morocco style mountain massif thrusting through. but it was all covered with... grass... and flowers... great streaks of purple, yellow, green, reaching to the horizon! sosososo beautiful. i miss green!!! the bus ride down from oujda takes a few hours. and it was allllll greeennnnn.... sigh of contentment...
camp was fun. the kids enjoyed it, when they weren't busy being too cool for school (some things never change). we had a raining inside incident involving all of the girls lugging their mattresses to the guys room to sleep without being dripped on from above. we had a door become unopenable, and the lock had to be knocked off with a sledgehammer. we had the 'pink vest boy', desire of the heart of every moroccan teenage girl. we had leapfrog, charades, dancing, halloween, and lots of english classes. we had a traditional wedding drum song, and one of the girls was 'taken by the music' and did the crazy hair dance. the environment club (me, antonio, nate and 15 kids) planted a medicinal plants garden (so much fun!! getting my hands in the dirt felt great!). we went for a hike to a fish-farm/irrigation pool.
we had the 'walled city' effect. people who have been subject to raiders for centuries (and still have the walls to prove it), who are separated from their trading routes by rather arbitrary borders that are now indefinitely closed, who are proudly berber in the very Arab eastern region, are walled people. they dont trust us or each other very well. and it made it hard to do silly team building activities that americans like to do at camp. you could literally see the tension between kids from different towns at times. there was a fight. did we make any headway? maybe. its hard to tell. but we tried!!! team-building, emphasis on togetherness, not joining in the between town teasing.
we had a theft, and a huge convention, and a semi-miraculous return of the stolen item, after tears, lectures, threats, tears, police, worries about honor and reputation, promises that a thing stolen from a moroccan would have had the same reaction, and finally... we got it back. thank God!
and then the kids left. and some of them cried to leave. whether they were sad to leave us, or their new girlfriend, or something else... at least they had a good time! i pray they learned something too.
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