3/19/08 - Tagrut of Terror

When we’re out in our villages, doing our Community-Based Training, we alternate our days between language lessons, led by our beloved Language and Cultural Facilitator, and technical training activities, which we conducted as a group. Some of our tasks involved learning what our community already knew about their natural resources. For one, we were supposed to ask local children to collect insects, tell us their names in Tamazight, and ask what they knew about them. (Are they harmful or helpful? What is their life cycle? Etc.) Finding local children wasn’t hard; every time we set foot outside, we were surrounded by a group of young boys that we referred to as our “gaggle”. This gaggle of boys ranged in age from about 5 to about 13, and had a core of three boys, at least two of whom are related to our LCF’s landlord.

When we set out to learn what the children of [River Village] know about insects, we turned to Lahcen and Mohammed, two core members of the gaggle of boys who accompany us everywhere. H**, our LCF, explained to them in Tamazight that we wanted them to find insects and bring them back to us. We then went in to meet with a farmer and his wife, to talk with them about the crops and herbs they grew. After a very fruitful discussion with them (pun intended), we went back outside to find our gaggle. They appeared within minutes, clutching a wiggling mikka (plastic) bag. They handed it to H**, who flinched, blanched, and thrust her arm outwards, shouting something indistinct.

For the record, I have never—before or since—seen H** be anything but poised, gracious, and articulate. So this was a bit of a shock. She held the bag in her outstretched arm. Arik moved to take it from her. She said something like, “But it’s got a tagrut!” When Arik just shrugged, she shoved it into his hand. We looked inside. Apparently, the gaggle had interpreted “insects” as “small slimy things”. We had a larvae, a tree snail, an ant, and the tagrut: a frog. A cute frog, as frogs go. (It would be an agro if male, tagrut if female. Have you ever tried to sex an amphibian? Yeah, me neither. The gaggle called it a tagrut, it’s a tagrut.) We took her out to get a better look at her. Once freed from the bag, the tagrut made a break for freedom, in the form of a huge jump…which flung her out into space, then crashing down onto the ground. We picked her back up, checked her out, and asked the kids our questions.

I looked around for H**, so she could translate for us, and discovered that she’d moved about ten feet away. Every time the tagrut had made another lurch for freedom, she’d moved further. She translated from a distance. The boys didn’t know anything about her life cycle or her role in the ecosystem – what she ate or what ate her – but they did know that she lived in the targua, the canal, since that’s where they’d found her. We took her back there, and, with the gaggle’s help, returned all the animals to their homes. (Except the ant, who crawled away while we were walking down to the fields. We didn’t mention that to H** – no need for her to know that Arik wasn’t holding the bag that tightly closed.)

H** admitted later that if Arik hadn’t taken the mikka bag, she would have flung the whole assemblage of critturs as far away as she could. Turns out our unflappable LCF has an Achilles heel, in the form of a reptile phobia. I asked her if she’d explicitly requested invertebrates, or had avoided the technical term when talking to the gaggle, and just asked for little creatures. With a shudder, she replied, “I asked them for insects, and they brought me a tagrut!”