Earth Day!

OK, I had the script *mostly* memorized. I brought it with me just in case, and yes, my eyes flickered down more than once, but it was a pretty smooth delivery. Except I still can’t pronounce “celebrate”, datHatafaln. I pronounce something, but who knows what it sounds like. :)

Our competitive trash pick-up went *really* well. :D We got about 20 l-qom (kids), ranging in age probably from 8ish to 14ish. Unfortunately, we only got boys. I don’t know how the message for the girls went astray, but, oh, well. L-qom were totally into it, collected a small mountain of trash (30-40 cubic feet, according to my back-of-the-notebook calculations), and had lots of fun. My mental image had been that we’d keep the banyos (the big basins), the kids would grab mikka bags and fill them with trash, and they’d bring the mikka bags to the basins. Instead, they all grabbed up their banyos and scampered off with them. They filled them, brought them back to us, dump them out on the ground, and repeated the process. Many times. We ended up with way more trash than we could pack up – it would have mostly filled the trunk of the grand taxi that brings us back and forth between our village and our PST town, and who knows what we’d have done with our luggage.

We’d already mostly abandoned the idea of packing out the trash, though, because H** told us this morning that both our nearby souk town and our bigger PST town almost certainly burn their trash. The “town dump” idea hasn’t made it to this part of Morocco yet, apparently. So if the trash is being burned anyway, we might as well burn it here. Pollutant? Yes. But on a small scale, and there’s plenty of wind to disperse the particulates. One thing I’m learning here is that there aren’t usually simple solutions, and there’s a lot of choosing the lesser of two evils. Anyway, anything seems better than leaving trash all over the ground.

So, after we’d assembled the mountain of trash, we had the kids we asked our gaggle’s leader, L**, where villagers burn their trash. We had l-qom, who were basically serving as an extension of our gaggle, help us transport it. Fortunately for us all, one of the kids had found a stash of slightly-busted flour sacks. (Villagers here don’t need to buy flour; they take their wheat to the local mill and carry the flour home again, using and reusing woven-plastic sacks.) These had holes too big to be useful in transporting flour, but were thoroughly adequate to carry large volumes of trash. We collectively heaved it over to the edge of the cliff, where I was rather relieved to find deep pits. I’d worried both that we’d be humping this stuff all the way down to the river and that it was a fairly windy day. (No surprise there. Even though The Sandstorm knocked my socks off, it’s only the most extreme example of the near-daily windstorms that rock my little village.) But these fire pits were at least six feet deep, so the wind wouldn’t be an issue. I love these moments of realizing that the ingenuity of my neighbors has solved a problem I’d barely been aware of. :) We tossed the flour sacks into the pits, and had A**, PCT and experienced fireman, light it up. We watched it burn for a while. I took lots of pictures, both of the fire and of the kids. I promise, one of these days I’ll learn how to load pictures onto a blog. :) Then we trooped back to the school, played ball with a few of the kids for a while, and dispersed.