The Sandstorm and the Qaid/Quyd/Kaid

Note: I have no idea how to spell this guy’s title, in English or Arabic. My guess would be Quyd, but everyone around (I’m typing this while hanging out in the common space) is saying Qaid. Enh, forget it. I like quyd better. Regardless, he’s the representative of the government in the region. He’s below the governor but above the sheikh and the moqaddim. The executive branch of Moroccan government looks like this, more or less:

King

Governor

Quyd

Sheikh

Moqaddim

We’ve met our village’s Moqaddim twice now. He oversees three villages, of which ours is the largest. Once he came to our little school; the other time, we went to his house to meet with him. We met the Quyd because he requested (required?) our presence. We presented our papers to him, explained what we were doing in his region, and asked him a few questions about the government. My impression is that, like most politicians, his job is 90% knowing what to say, and 10% doing it. He said that he is most proud of the roads that he has put in during his tenure, and that most of his goals revolve around building more. (Paved roads -->Trucks carrying equipment --> Cell phone towers --> Community development!) I wonder how well distributed the roads are; do they cluster, or does my village get an equal share?

When I write it that way, our visit to the Quyd sounds nice and normal.

Now add a sandstorm.

The biggest sandstorm that I’ve ever seen.

And the taxi that drove us to the Quyd’s town didn’t drive into our village, but met us on the paved road. (Because no, the Quyd hasn’t yet brought pavement from the main road into my village.) So we had to hike out the half-kilometer, through the sandstorm. How bad was the sandstorm? When we came back, I discovered that the road to the village is curved. I’d hiked half a K on a road with two switchbacks, and I hadn’t noticed that the path was turning. My field of view was limited to the friend at my right hand and about two steps ahead on the path. I held my notebook in my right hand and used it to shield my face.

I was wearing a cowl-necked shirt (the one dressy shirt I brought to Morocco – if meeting the local poobah doesn’t justify dressing nicely, what does?), and I pulled the cowl all the way up to the bottom of my sunglasses and breathed through it. When I washed the shirt, it made the water turn brown.

After our sand-blasted trek, we made it to the taxi. The ride into the town was short, but the wind was as harsh to the car—a Mercedes Benz with seven people in it—as it had been to us. We were pushed all over the road.

When we got to the Quyd’s palace, the wind still hadn’t let up. Inside the palace itself we experienced a lull, but when we went into his office, we were reminded of the storm: the awning outside his window was pulled loose from its moorings, and it began to furl and unfurl, slamming against the window every few seconds. The Quyd and H** both did a masterful job of carrying on their conversation and pretending nothing was going on. It added an element of the surreal. If this had been a movie, the howling winds and whipping awning would have created an environment of foreboding and portent. Since it was reality, it was just distracting.

But it got better.

The Quyd used his unsubtle foot-pedal-summoning-device to call in an adjutant, who he instructed to take care of the awning. This unlucky soul headed out into the storm. He squinted against the driving sands, but couldn’t shield his face because he was trying to hold down the flailing cloth. It didn’t take long to realize that he couldn’t just tuck the corners in, so he went back for reinforcements. He came back with a friend and a length of wire that they used to tie the awning to the bars around the window. It kept slipping away from him or from his friend, and they’d start over. The whole process, performed against the howling winds, and requiring the best efforts of two of Morocco’s finest, took about 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes of my looking back and forth from the Charlie Chaplin-esque comedy outside the window to the serious discussion taking place inside, between H** and the Quyd. I’ve had *dreams* that made more sense than this afternoon. Dreams with ukulele-playing, French-speaking Japanese tourists that seemed more plausible than the disconnect I witnessed from my seat in the Quyd’s office.

An unexpected effect of today: I’ve reopened the question of chopping off my hair. After three days without a shower and an hour when the wind whipped it and drove sand and dust into it, it’s unthinkably grimy and snarled. I might even have a start on dreadlocks.