Herding Nomads

The trouble with working with semi-nomadic herders is that they are, well, semi-nomadic. Families often keep a house here, and a tent or a stone house in the mountains as a base for the herders to come back to each night. The family is divided between the two places, and the family members switch back and forth and back and forth. Usually a pattern emerges, though.
For example, the president of the herders’ association here has his family divided up as follows. Like his father, he keeps the main family house here. His oldest daughter keeps house, with his youngest son who is still going to school here. His wife runs the mountain base camp, a tent in the summer and a rock house in the winter. Except when the winter is so hard that the rock house is covered in snow. Then they take the tent down to the foothills. His second oldest daughter is married and lives in Sefrou. His two youngest daughters are attending middle school/high school in Haj City, our market town. They are staying with family members. The president is slowly building a house in Haj City. When it is finished, he will move his oldest daughter and youngest son there, and his youngest daughters will move in until they are married or go elsewhere. The old family home will be abandoned, I guess. His wife will, I suppose, run the tent until she is too old to do so anymore. At which point he will also be old, and perhaps he will sell his 350 odd sheep and goats and live out as good a life as he can in Haj City. I wonder if his grandchildren will learn the language he learned first at all. Many children of Imazighen heritage are completely ignorant of the language and stories of their fathers. Why bother when Arabic is so much more universal anyway? His is not an unusual story: many families are planning their escape this way. The life of the nomadic herder, semi- or no, is a hard one.
Back to the original comment… in trying to help people improve their life, one has to hold many meetings. Meetings are hard to hold if half of the people who need to be there are always gone, and which half is missing is continually changing. Any meeting or work that needs doing takes careful planning, and good luck as well. The worst is when the herds are moving between summer and winter pastures. Everyone is in constant motion, because moving the herds means moving the tents, with all of the furnishings and accessories. Vans, trucks, and endless mule and donkey trains can be seen moving up and down roads and mountains paths for weeks. I give up organizing until those weeks pass.
The nice part about working with semi-nomadic herders is that you get to go hang out in the tents with them in the summer. High altitude grazing grounds are always cool and breezy. The mountains are beautiful, and stark. They are almost entirely bereft of trees, but lightly covered with tough bunch grasses, herbs, bushes and the occasional blades of new grasses making a break for some sunlight between the rocks. Thus, the colors of the rocks show through, with a soft haze of yellow green overlaying them. Except for the patches of forest, deep green and sparse. Those forest bits are small and shrinking, like patches of hair on a balding man’s head. They hang down in lower altitudes, too, much like said male pattern balding. I use them to teach about erosion. “See those trees? See those huge gullies cut into the mountains by the rains last year? See how they are hardly ever in the same place? That’s why trees are important!” Unfortunately, I only get to tell so many people because I work closely with only a few. They are the ones who really organize. They use their superior networking powers to contact and bring in the semi-nomadic herders. It works pretty well for the meetings, but not for the informal education.