Meeting with the Water Association II

Tonight, we stayed late at school to meet with the Water Association. (That’s what everyone calls them. We learned tonight that their official name is “The [River Village] Association for Drinkable Water.”) Last week, in [Mountain City], we talked with three Volunteers who have been working for the past year. They had lots of useful information for us – as all the PCVs we’ve met do – but they focused their energies on talking about NGOs, both the big international ones we’ll be hitting up for cash and the teeny associations we’ll be working with in our villages. They warned us that many associations are viewed as dishonest by their villages, and that we should be wary. Our Water Association, though, is universally regarded as du nishan*, an idiom like English’s “straight arrow,” so we had no worries on that front.

We’d been working on details of our tree-planting plan since our meeting with Mohammed I**, aka el presidente, the association’s president. We were therefore more than a little disconcerted when the idea was shot down within the first five minutes of the meeting. It more or less went, “We’re not sure where people could plant trees. All the arable land is in use already. Do you have any other ideas?”

Our little CBT group had settled on tree planting after exhausting all the other ideas we could think of – notably growing plants from seeds, holding a festival at the school, doing a community-wide trash pickup (which we’ll do on Earth Day instead), and a few others I can’t think of right now – so we were (or at least I was) thrown by the idea that we needed to come up with another plan on the spot.

We took a second to regroup, and then D**, the group member who has natural leadership oozing out of every pore, said, “Why don’t we take a few minutes to talk about other options we could pursue, but if we can’t come up with a better one, we can come back to this.” We PCTs talked amongst ourselves, as did the members of the association: Mohammed I, Mohammed II, Mohammed III, Mohammed IV, and S**. (I’m not making this up. OK, I made up the numbering scheme, but it’s literally true that four of the five members of the water association are named Mohammed.) Mohammed III seemed to be pushing hard for something. H** told us that it was bee-keeping. That sounded good for a second – the Ministry of Agriculture will send an expert to hold a workshop and provide equipment if any community has 10 interested parties – but then H** said that the Ministry official in question will be out of town when we’d need him. So there went that idea.

After a few minutes, the Mohammeds concluded that they couldn’t come up with anything better than tree planting, so the plan that we’d spent several hours putting together was suddenly back on the table. Whew. We spent an hour or so working out the details, over tea and kaw-kaws (peanuts), and called it a night. It looks like all systems are go for a very successful project that will yield tangible, sustainable good for this village that has been so good to us. Humdullah!

*Nishan means straight, and “du nishan” is used literally when giving directions – it means “walk straight ahead”. Nishan is also used to refer to time, as in “10 nishan”, aka 10:00 on the dot, or to people, as in “Wow, your teacher is totally nishan – you can’t get away with anything in his class!”

**Yes, I’m making an exception to the proper noun rule, because, as this story makes clear, every third Moroccan you meet is named Mohammed. At least.