4/23/10 Mural Painting 101

A How-To Guide for Mural Painting

Step One: Prepare the wall

1. Decide which patch of wall you want to paint.
2. Decide how big the final mural will be.
3. Wash the wall.
4. If you're scaling up from an existing image, figure out the dimensions, do the math, and calculate the precise size of the mural.
5. With a tape measure and Sharpie marker (and ideally either a bubble level or a third partner who has a good eye for level), designate the boundaries of the mural.
6. With a chalkline, ensure the boundaries are perfectly straight.
   
   

Step 2: Prime the Wall

1. Decide what color the background of the mural will be. (For world maps, it makes sense to prime the wall in light blue. That way, the oceans are done, without having to be hyper-careful around continent boundaries. You can just roller them on!)
2. Mix your paint.
   
   
3. Roller in the bulk of the paint. (Is roller a verb? What else do you call applying paint with a paint roller?)
   
4. With a small brush, cut in the edges. Most Moroccan walls are thinly plastered and then whitewashed, so taping the edges isn't an option - you'll rip off half the wall. Hopefully you'll have someone as attentive to detail as we did.
   
   
5. If you're gridding your mural - ie, scaling it up, bit by bit, from a small image, using a grid system - you'll want to snap chalklines at even intervals, so you have a visible grid above your primed surface. To make a precise replica, you'll need to figure out the scale factor between the image in your hand and the mural on the wall. It's math you probably haven't thought about since 7th grade, but sit down with a ruler, tape measure, pencil, and calculator and you'll work it out. :)

Part 3: Draw the Picture

1. Either freehanded or using a pre-existing image (with or without a grid), draw your picture onto the primed surface. Use a pencil. You can't really erase unless you have an art gum eraser, but you can smudge it pretty easily, so at least you'll know later that you didn't mean that particular line. Besides, you'll be painting over it all, right? :)
   
   
2. If necessary, go back over your penciled lines with a Sharpie. In bright, direct sunlight, our pencil lines were nearly invisible. We shaded them with our arms and redrew them in Sharpie, so they'd be easy to see later, when we had paint brushes in-hand.
3. Color your own copy of the picture. (This step can be skipped if you have access to a color printer.) We used colored pencils and the black-and-white printouts of the map, and I got to regress to kindergarten. :) Also, we thought that a few of the colors on their map were too similar (like an orange and a peach that we had to squint hard at), so we changed them.
   
   
4. Choose your paint colors. If they match the colors from (3), your life will be a lot simpler. Then mix your paint colors. Our art guru did this for us, with gorgeous success.
   
   
5. Color-swatch your picture. (Especially if your image is complex, like a world map.) That is, daub paint in each little section, so that your mural becomes more or less paint-by-number. This prevents you frantically referencing the printout in your hand (that you hopefully remembered to bring!), trying to figure out if that little corner of Madagascar should be dark green or light green, while swarmed by eager children. Also, this allows children to paint all the sections of their color, without having to check back with you. (Yes, this does make your map look like it has technicolor smallpox, but that won't last long.)
   

Step 4: Paint the Mural!

Step 5: Bask in your accomplishment

Here are the 21 kids, some teachers, and the PCVs.
(L) Half of the world biome map (R) Half of the Water Cycle mural

Part Six (Optional): Touch Up the Mural

Go back the next day and clean up the edges, make sure there isn't any primed surface still showing through (a big problem on textured walls like these), fix any mistakes... The kids accidentally painted across the Red Sea, making the Sahara contiguous with the Arabian Peninsula. Little things like that.

Water Cycle Mural, End of Day 1 Water Cycle Mural, End of Day 2

The obvious differences are the appearance of the water cycle arrows (whose label words will be filled in soon), and the more obvious nature of the three-dimensional diagram. Also, a cloud shrunk. If you look more carefully, the snowflakes and raindrops were redone, and patchy paint was filled in to present a smooth surface.

World Biome Map, End of Day 1 World Biome Map, End of Day 2

The kids had done a good job, so the only obvious differences are the reappearance of the Red Sea, the biome key (which the Arabic teacher promised to fill in), and that the Kamchatka islands are now islands, and not a big streak of brown. There are also subtle changes, like the thickness of the paint (which shows up best in Antarctica, now white instead of whitish-blue) and the sharpness of the contacts between colors.

Heart-Healthy Foods Mural, End of Day 1 Heart-Healthy Foods Mural, End of Day 2

The fruit and heart got outlined, the frame completed.

Touching-up is optional, and depends on the skill level of your students. And how particular you are about the final product. :)

Step 7: Celebrate!

We went home and had delicious food. I highly recommend this. :)

So there you have it, friends: the seven-step guide to a fabulous mural day. Our Earth Day was a huge success, in my opinion. The kids had a great time, they learned good things, and now their school has trees and murals to embed the memories permanents.

And there was great rejoicing. :D

4/22/10 Earth Day 2010

Happy Earth Day!

This year, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Morocco's capital city of Rabat was one of 6 cities worldwide that the Earth Day powers-that-be selected for ... I'm still not quite sure what, but something cool. So Morocco has gone *all*out* for Earth Day this year.

Every tree in every public nursery for hundreds of kilometers has been claimed for tree plantings. 400 were planted in SouqTown. 500 in Berberville. Some friends of mine, organizing an Earth Day celebration for their village, located in the heart of the Eastern High Atlas National Park, requested 50 trees and ended up with 12. Which we planted! Along with another 10 olive trees that they purchased from a private nursery.

Earth Day! So many happy memories and fond associations...

In my friends' village, they celebrated Earth Day at their local madrasa (elementary school) with a tree planting, mural painting, and an environmental presentation (originally to be given by our Water and Forestry partner, but when he had to cancel, a friend from SouqTown's English Club stepped in). They asked me to come, since I've helped paint my share of murals. They also invited up an art guru, a PCV who has years of experience as an artist and art teacher, and one of the newbies, here for site visit. (My newbie stayed in Berberville - his choice.)

In the morning, we planted trees with 75 kids - 33 girls and 42 boys.

After lunch, the 21 students from the two oldest classes came back to help us paint the murals.

Pictures and details to come! :D

4/17/10 Sprinks' Camp in Photos

I know, I know, I promised you pix from Spring Camp - aka Sprinks' Camp - a month ago. But this is the first time I've pulled the photocard out of my camera in well over a month, so now you get to see them. Enjoy!

As I mentioned, we spent some time locked *into* our room. Sprinks, our fearless leader (left), climbed out the window, around the column she's leaning next to, and over to the landing at the top of the stairs. She went for folks with tools, who began the process of breaking into our room. While they worked, we took a moment to bask in the coastal sun...

Once we got our housing squared away, we turned out attention to work. I was responsible for an English class - I got the Advanced section - and I worked with Zifi to organize an Environment Club.

For our club, Zifi and I arranged a nature walk, with environmental mini-lessons on cards placed throughout a nearby park. Here's one:

Placed near a half-acre of dumped trash, it talks about decomposition rates and asks the kids to think about the future of this mostly-lovely park.

A little farther on, we talked about photosynthesis and the ways by which trees help us. Shortly afterwards, a card asked the students to take a bark rubbing and hug a tree. They did both:

Here, in a non-littered space, you can see just how lovely the park could be, if it were left trash-free. Zifi is talking to the students about observing shades of green. How many different shades do you see?

So that was the club. For English class, each day's lesson was organized around the theme of the day. For Environment Day, my students created posters with concept maps linking environmental ideas:

On our last day of classes, we arranged an English Olympiad, with a series of word games so the students could show off their newly acquired language skills. For one, we had the students create thematic acrostic poems around certain key words from the week. This one was my favorite, so I took a picture of it:

So that's the work side of Spring Camp.

But let's not forget about the play side of Spring Camp.... (To be continued)

3/30/10 The Huffer Environmentalist (Rated PG-13)

Zifi and I put the cards for our Nature Walk out on Monday morning, then led groups of campers on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoons. Each day, we had fewer cards than the day before, as they were lost to wind, curiosity, or vandals. (At least one was deliberately moved, and another torn to pieces.)

On one walk, we found that the Make a leaf rubbing card had fallen from the tree we'd tried to tape it to. Moreover, it had landed in a puddle of motor oil, so it was saturated and greasy. Someone had dropped a not-yet-empty bottle of oil, uncapped, so it had poured out. Whether the same person dropped our card into their mess or whether the wind took care of that, we'll never know.

After we retrieved the card, and greasily attempted to re-affix it to the tree, I noticed that one of the kids had picked up the plastic bottle. I was touched that he'd internalized the lesson of decomposition, and that he remembered that plastic bottles take hundreds or thousands of years to break down completely. I leaned over to Zifi and pointed out our little tree hugger.

A few minutes further up the path, I looked back and saw the kid with his nose in the bottle. Either he was checking to see if that noxious odor was really coming from the bottle, or he was huffing. Odds are, it's the latter. I remain hopeful that it's the former.

When we got back to the camp, a few minutes later, I was relieved to see the kid drop the bottle in a trash can. Either he really was trying to clean up the park, a little at a time, or he'd discovered that motor oil may smell awful, and in fact be awful, but it won't get you high.

Either way, he'd learned a valuable lesson, right? :)

3/29/10 Nature Walkin'

At the Spring Camp in Emerald City, Zifi and I led an Environment Club. Over three days, we took the three groups of students on a walk through the neighborhood park adjoining the camp.

We'd prepared index cards with various activities, which we placed at strategic points throughout the park:

• Look up. How many different colors of green do you see?

We placed this one just a few minutes into the park, to introduce to the students the idea of careful observation. Most kids responded with 3 or 4, until we pointed out that even the same leaf could have multiple shades of green, in the dappled light.

• Look at the litter. How long do you think it takes these items to decompose?

Decompose was a new word for the kids, in English at least, but most of them were familiar with the concept. We put this card near a huge pile of trash - close to the size of a football field - and pointed out various pieces of garbage while giving the kids these decomposition statistics: disposable diaper 10-20 years, orange or banana peel 3-5 weeks, cigarette butts 2-5 years, plastic six pack holder 450 years, piece of paper 2-4 weeks, plastic bag 10-20 years, Aluminum can 250-350 years, wool sock 2-4 years, Styrofoam never, glass never.

We asked them if they planned to bring their kids to this park someday - we didn't bother asking if they planned to have kids, since that's a given in this culture - and pointed out that, unless somebody stepped up with a massive cleanup effort, most of this trashpile would be waiting for their children.

The amount of litter in the otherwise lovely park depressed me. In fact, litter is the wrong word. It implies left behind detritus. This trash looked to have been deliberately dumped. In fact, the park was full of narrow mounds, mostly grown over with grass, that looked for all the world like a garbage truck had backed up, dropped a full load of trash, and driven off. Does Emerald City not have a town dump? Or is it cheaper to drop trash in the park than to pay some sort of town-dump-fee? Zifi and I speculated, and even asked the kids, but never got an answer.

• Stop. Can you feel the warmth of the sun?

This one sat in an open area in the mostly-shaded park, and gave us a chance to bask in the sunlight (since it was chilly most of the week) and to talk about photosynthesis. Virtually none of the kids knew the word "photosynthesis" in English before we gave it to them, but most had learned about la photosynthèse in Science class (which is usually conducted in French, as are half the classes by junior high and high school). They were relieved to find it a cognate (as are oxygen and carbon dioxide, for that matter. Let's hear it for the universality of science!).

• Hug a tree.

The kids found this one goofy, but did it anyway. We talked about photosynthesis and the role trees play in giving us oxygen, as well as absorbing our carbon dioxide exhalations, let alone providing wood, paper, kindling, etc.

• Make a rubbing of bark.

The word bark was new, as was the concept of doing a rubbing. After the first group mostly just drew on their papers while holding them against a tree, we were careful to emphasize with the second and third groups to only use the side of their crayon. The trees in question had a really gnarly bark, so the rubbings came out well. :)

• Using only your senses of touch, smell, or taste, become familiar with one tree. You should be able to identify your tree later on.

This was a fun one. We'd blindfold a few volunteers, assign them buddies (since the ground was uneven at best, and liberally sprinkled with thorn bushes), and then have each buddy walk each blindfolded volunteer to a tree. The blinded kid would grope around at the tree, exploring the texture of the bark, feeling for low branches, sniffing it, licking it, and generally memorizing "their" tree. Then the buddy led the still-blindfolded camper back to the group, at which point we'd spin the poor blind thing in circles till they were dizzy, and then remove the blindfold and ask them to find their tree again.

We did this with about 15 of the 50 kids in camp, and every single one of them correctly identified their tree. Undoubtedly, a few were assisted by unscrupulous (or just overly-helpful) buddies, but most had simply learned so many characteristics of their tree - a knot just at knee height, or a branch at shoulder height, or a gap in the bark just there if you reached around - that no imitation, substitution, or alteration would do. We couldn't fool 'em.

• Look down. How many different colors of green do you see?

Usually, by the time we'd gotten here, the kids were observing more carefully, and we got much higher numbers than the first time.

• Look closely. How many living things do you see? Make a list in your notebook.

This card we placed in a relatively open spot, with a view of a stream that usually hosted a few egrets, as well as near some bushes that played home to snails. Most of the students learned the English words for ant and grass and insect here. (This is an English-language immersion camp, after all, they're supposed to be learning new words.) Some kids got really into it, and found all sorts of beetles and spiders and other creepy-crawlies.

That reminds me - once, a student asked me to translate le ver. Thinking she'd said le vert, the grass/greenery, I gave them grass. But as I heard them passing the word to each other, I realized they meant worm, and suddenly remembered the tongue-twister from French class, Le ver vert travers la vert vers la verre vert. The green worm crosses the the grass towards the green glass. And all the words are homonyms (or nearly, for travers). OK, sorry, end tangent.

• Close your eyes. Listen. What do you hear? Make a list in your notebook.

Most of the students discerned the nearby flowing stream, the wind through the eucalyptus leaves, crickets, frogs, and a few birds. A few snarky kids pointed out that they could hear their not-so-silent friends, too.

• Imagine - what did this park look like 100 years ago? Draw in your notebook.

We placed this card in one of the most picturesque sections of the park, far from the dump sites and the toxic sludge growing in the pond. By this point in the walk, we were usually running late, so sometimes we had the kids draw, and other times, we just talked about what we saw. Most of the kids knew that the eucalyptus trees in this area were all non-native, introduced from Australia fairly recently. The Water and Forestry Department loves planting eucalyptus trees. Kalaytus, as they're known here, grow ridiculously quickly, so tree-planting projects look successful within a matter of years. Unfortunately, they also poison the soil, so there's never much (if any) undergrowth.

• Make a rubbing of a leaf.

By the time we got here, we never had any time, so we skipped this activity all three days. Sorry, leaves. You'll get love another time.

• Imagine – what will this park look like in 100 years?
  

We placed this card on top of a garbage pile that someone had dumped right smack in the middle of the road. They hadn't even pulled into the trees, like the rest of the trash dumpers. We gave the kids the chance to speculate whether the park would be cleaned up or would turn into a multi-acre trash heap. Most kids went with a middle ground, anticipating that it would be a housing development. Given how rapidly this Casablanca suburb is growing, they're probably right.

At this point, we walked the kids back to camp, thanked them for joining us on a nature walk, and sent them off to their afternoon activity.

PS: Of the three groups we took out, we never once had a kid wander off (helped by having either Zifi or me walk sweep), but we did occasionally have extra kids join in. I'm not sure where they wandered in from, but as long as everyone who we'd left with, came back, I figured we'd done our jobs.

3/23/10 Environmental Art Contest

Sunday afternoon, kids gathered at SouqTown's Youth Center for an environmental art contest and an environmental presentation on the value of trees (appropriate for Tree Day, no?). My camera battery died before the presentation began, and my backup battery was home charging, since I'd drained it the day before, but I managed to get pictures of the young artists.

They used egg crates to keep their paints separate - an old kindergarten teacher's trick that I'd totally forgotten about till now. :)

This girl is painting leaves on a tree. By the way, this is the third or fourth environmental art contest I've seen/organized/etc, and by far the most successful at getting thematically appropriate art. Every painting I saw - and I spent a good hour walking around, looking at every piece, repeatedly - clearly and vividly demonstrated the kids' appreciation for trees and the environment.

This young lady's painting shows a tree growing out of the Earth:

...while the boy next to her paints an angry face on his Earth - the words he added later make it clear that Earth is fed up with all the pollution we're choking it with.

Artists posing with their creations:

And my favorite of the day: (The text says, "Trees are the lungs of the earth." And see how the tree roots form bronchial tubes? What a clever idea!)

3/20/10 National Park Presentation

On Saturday, March 20th, on the eve of the International Day of Trees, SouqTown hosted a workshop for community leaders from 100km around (as well as anyone else who wanted to show up), to draw attention to our little-known and under-served National Park. The local youth center hosted the workshop - they have the best auditorium in town - so an unusually large percentage of the attendees were young people.

The workshop was well-attended; according to my headcount, we had 45 boys and young men, 42 girls and young women, 39 men, and four women, for a total of 130 folks.

The third presentation came from the director of our national park, aka my counterpart. He spoke about the history of our park, its role in environmental and ecosystem preservation, the endangered and threatened species that live in the park, etc.

Here he is, next to a map of our park:

The park director was one of two speakers who had prepared a PowerPoint presentation. Here's a slide of his that caught my eye:

It shows the relative prevalence of various species of tree, as well as the total forested ground-cover, by region. The national average is 12.6%, it says (though that seems high to me), unevenly distributed across the country.

After the various presentations, the floor was opened for questions and comments from the audience. I was struck by the openness of the forum. Whereas a comparable American workshop might leave a few minutes for questions and comments (with an emphasis on questions, so that the bulk of the remarks come from the invited speaker(s)), this workshop - and others I've attended - allow anyone to speak for as long as they wish. The invited presenters spoke for about an hour and a half, but the audience comments lasted almost 3 hours.

Here, a professor visiting from "Springfield" is posing pointed questions about the lack of public trash cans in SouqTown and the practice of licensed guides encouraging poaching within the National Park boundaries. (I know this because he was the only person, in the five hours of talking, who spoke in a language I know - French. Everyone else spoke in Arabic. Though 90% of the people in the room are Amazigh, no one spoke Tam. I could rant about the cultural and linguistic causes and implications of this phenomenon, but for now I'll simply leave it at ::sigh::) The man next to him spoke about an hour later. By the time I left, about 8:45, the audience had whittled down to 25 die-hards, virtually all of whom were simply waiting to speak.

Quick note about GAD (Gender And Development): The planners scheduled the workshop for 5pm (ie after business hours, because Saturday is a work day for teachers and many others). It started an hour late, as nearly everything does, so twilight was already descending as the first speakers began their remarks. By 7pm, when the four scheduled speakers had concluded their remarks, only 6.5 females were left in the room out of the original 46 - one adult woman, 5 high school juniors and seniors, and one little girl who was there with her daddy and big brother. (She's the 0.5, and you can see her in the picture above. Cute kid!) The other girls and women had left in drips and clumps over the past hour (10 left in a group, then 2 a few minutes later, then 3 a few minutes after that...), as none wanted to be out after dark. By the time I left, only one young woman (plus the little girl) remained. I mentally grumbled against the poor planning - all by men, of course - that had failed to plan for the cultural requirement that women and girls not be out after dark. I also began planning a Take Back The Night march.

In all, the presentations met their goals of increasing the profile of SouqTown and its National Park, educating locals about the role and history of the park, and encouraging people to think environmentally. Plus, the cookies were *delicious*. :)

3/18/10 Atelier de Sculpteur

Note: Revised slightly on 3/23 to correct a few details I'd misunderstood.

Over the river and through the woods from my village - OK, literally, along a river valley and through half a dozen mountain passes from me - is the small village of Agouti. Their nearest biggish town is Ait Bougamez, known to ecotourists as the jumping-off point for Jbel M'Goun, the second tallest peak in Morocco.

Their community faced challenges similar to mine: viciously cold winters, shortage of wood, protected (National Park) land filled with easy-to-poach wood low incomes that made buying wood impossible or nearly so... The local Water and Forestry Department (WFD) representatives were getting increasingly frustrated by the locals' habit of sneaking into the protected areas and poaching (chopping and stealing) the protected trees. On the other side, the mostly-illiterate villagers couldn't understand why they were suddenly being fined and punished for gathering fuelwood to survive the winter, as they've done for thousands of years.

Enter the Atelier de Sculpteur. The "Sculptor's Studio" or "Carver's Workshop" (both translations are equally valid, in Moroccan French) was formed by men who carved tools - spoons, bowls, forks, cups - as they and their fathers and forefathers had done for countless generations. When their road was paved a handful of years ago, bringing in tourists and hikers, they found a new market for their craft.

Recently, some of the Atelier de Sculpteur artisans, with help from a Peace Corps Volunteer, brokered a fairly ingenious solution to their wood-poaching problem. In exchange for official permission to pick up fallen deadwood from these protected and endangered trees, the craftsmen promised to plant more trees and protect the living specimens in their forest from wood poaching by their neighbors. They can carve the chunks of deadwood into gorgeous woodcrafts that they sell to ecotourists and, increasingly, to visitors to their beautifully designed website (which you can check out here, or read about the creation of here - second story down).

Gorgeous!

In 2006, some of the members of the Atelier de Sculpteur formed an NGO named Association Ighrem, to help solve some of the challenges that rapid development and exponentially growing ecotourism had brought to the village. (Ighrem is the Tamazight word for the ancient Amazigh fortresses whose ruins perch above many of our mountain villages.)

Association Ighrem made a further pledge: for every woodcraft purchased from the Atelier de Sculpteur, it would plant a tree of whatever species* the item had been carved from. Buy a boxwood spoon and they'll plant a boxwood tree. Buy a walnut bowl and a walnut tree will soon blossom in the protected forests.

* Unfortunately, this hasn't worked out yet, for logistical reasons. They're hoping to start it next year, but this year, they're planting apple trees - one of the best cash crops in mountainous areas like ours. And just to make the contribution even more powerful, they donated the trees to the poorer families in the village (a disabled man, and a widowed woman with 5 children in school) to help with their financial circumstances. The carvers were so happy with this idea that they may ultimately find a balance between these two solutions in coming years. As of January 29th, Association Ighrem had expected to plant 26 trees in March (March being the optimal planting season for most trees). Thanks to the success of their website and Facebook page, though, they made dozens more sales in the past month and a half, resulting in a planting of 80 trees yesterday, March 17th.

Moreover, 33% of the profits from every sale flow directly into the Association Ighrem coffers, for use in various development projects. They recently held an eye clinic, where 400 villagers received free vision screenings and eye care; they're planting vetiver, a non-invasive erosion-fighting grass that purifies groundwater and strengthens hillsides; they partnered with a student group to provide wheelchairs to residents of Agouti as well as to the Ait Bougamez health clinic; they organized and hosted a grant-writing workshop for their community; the list goes on and on.

But there's only so much deadwood - what happens when they run out?

While wood is a highly renewable resource - especially if new trees are being planted regularly! - the artisans currently craft their products from the deadwood that has accumulated over decades and centuries, and yes, they're using it up faster than the remaining trees are dying. Knowing this, they've deliberately set high pricepoints on their products. In other words, they know they can't do this forever, so they're going to maximize the returns it brings their community. (For reference: I find the prices similar to those of comparable handcrafted items you might find in Ten Thousand Villages, and cheaper than similar items at The Bombay Company, but that does make them expensive by Moroccan standards, with our delightfully low cost of living.) With a degree of foresight rare in third-world villages, Agouti's craftsmen are investing their current windfall into building infrastructure supports and meeting vital community needs.

2/08/10 On Marrakesh

Here's a photo of Marrakesh that I snapped last spring.

Note the contrast between the palm trees and the snowy mountains. (I actually shot pictures of cacti in front of the snowy mountains, but they were out the window of a moving bus, so came out hopelessly blurred.)

But note, too, the grassy foreground, behind the brick and iron barricade.

This is one of Marrakesh's fancier hotels. (Not this one, but sadly, Marrakesh has several.) Where rich tourists spend several thousand dirhams per night (ie, several hundred Euros) to be pampered and coddled and to feel at home.

But you're not at home, silly tourists. You're in Morocco. A desert country, where the vast majority of the precipitation falls as snow in the Atlas mountains or else in disastrous, flash-flood inducing fall downpours. Morocco needs all the water it gets. In order to maintain these lovely grassy fields, sprinklers run for hours each morning. Thousands upon thousands of gallons of water are wasted every day, so tourists can forget that they're visiting a desert land, and imagine that they're sipping their morning coffee in their own backyards.

This waste is simply one of the dozens of reasons I don't like going to Marrakesh - the overcharging, sexual harassment, touristy schtick, and dishonest cab drivers are on the list, too - but it's one of the most readily visible.

It's beautiful, no question.

But at what cost?

11/27/09 3id Preparations

I went over to lunch at my host family's house today, as I do most Fridays.

Baba is out of town, showing the mountain nomads to a tourist, so Ama has been rattling around the house alone for a few days. (Well, she still has two pre-adolescent boys, a 2nd grade girl, and an infant, but she hasn't had any *adult* company in a while.) So she was eager to talk.

I learned all kinds of interesting things.

For one, the gigantic mountain of ifsi I'd noticed in the courtyard had been brought down by her cousin, who lives in her home village, a bumpy dirt-road trek about 20km off the main drag. He'd brought it in his transport-the-tourists oversized-Jeep-like-truck, which is why the mountain of ifsi reached up to the top of the (one-story) house. I estimated that it would have taken four or five donkeyloads to transport that much ifsi without the truck.

I also noticed just how *big* the shrubs were. I'm used to seeing ifsi used as a whisk broom, because it's the right size, plus it's the only use for the prickly bush during warm weather. (In cold weather, of course, it's used to supplement the expensive firewood purchased from wood poachers who in turn steal it from distant National Parks. They bribe the forest guardians to allow them to poach the wood; the higher the bribes, the more expensive the wood to my friends and neighbors. This is reason #13 as to Why Kauthar Doesn't Have A Wood Stove, But Endures The Smelly Butagaz Stove Instead.)

So from whisk-broom-sized ifsi to shrubs a solid meter in diameter...I wondered if it was actually the same species.

It is.

Up in Ama's village, there are few people and lots of mountainside, where the ifsi grows.

Here in Berberville, there are *lots* of people and the ifsi only grows out by the lake and in the cemetery, so every year, the women gather pretty much every last twig. During the spring and summer, it regrows from its stubborn roots, but gets only a foot or less in diameter before fall returns and the women come back with their scythes.

Think about the difference in volume between a one-foot sphere (not that the bushes are perfectly spherical, but it's close enough for the thought experiment) and a meter-diameter sphere. Volume goes up with the *cube* of the radius, so these remote-village-ifsi are *enormously* larger than the little bitty ones I'm used to.

Tonight, when we're all sitting around the stove, waiting for the henna to dry on our hands, I'll talk to Ama and my siblings about the implications of this. The relationship between the over-harvested ifsi and its ever-shrinking size, plus what that means for soil quality and erosion. Of course, words like "erosion" and "resource management" only exist in Arabic and French, not Tamazight, so I'm going to have to think about how to phrase it in ways that will make sense to my illiterate-but-highly-intelligent host mother.

Other highlights from lunch:
* The king is coming! The king is coming! Sometime after l-3id. [[This makes the *ninth* time people have told me this in the past 20 months. I'll believe it when I see his motorcade roll into town, and not before.]]

* My little brother interrogated the entire neighborhood to find out who had picked up my cell phone after it fell out of my pocket. ("It belongs to our tarumit!") Only after he offered a cash reward did the finder speak up, and even then he wanted to keep it. Apparently, my brother and the other kid got into a fight over it, with the result that when I returned from my recent trip to Rabat, the other kid came up to me on the street and said, "Hey, I found your phone! Come over to my house and drink tea and I'll give it to you!" I thanked him profusely, but didn't offer cash, which is why Ama was now explaining to me that I'd need to make my little bro's promise good. Which I'll do tomorrow, when I stop into that household on my round of 3id visits.

* She asked after my entire extended family, knowing that in my travels, I'd've had the chance to reach out to them on Skype. She has a phenomenal memory - I suppose you'd *have* to, if you have no way to record information for later recall - and often asks follow-up questions to anecdotes I've told her weeks or months before.

* Ama knows just how quickly the next six months will pass, and how soon I'll be gone. She grew up with four sisters, but they've all scattered; she doesn't have any family of "her own" in Berberville, she said, except me, so she'll be very sad when I leave. The silver lining that she keeps reminding herself of: Someday, I'll return with my husband and cute children - one boy, one girl. I always answer inshallah or msh irra arrbi (as God wills or if God wants it) , but I know how much it would mean to her. And I do certainly plan to come back to Berberville someday. Spouse and kids? Yeeeeah, we'll see about that.

* She's been under the weather for the past few days, so hasn't been able to make the holiday cookies that she's known for (and that are expected fare, come the morning of the 3id). So when I presented her with a box of fancy cookies from Souqtown, she was tremendously relieved. When I told her that I planned to spend the afternoon baking more, she got even happier.

* She offered to let me take a shower in their guesthouse. (The main house doesn't have running water at all, let alone a shower room.) I countered with spending the night - if that was OK. I'd been waiting for her to invite me, but I guess I was too emphatic at the last 3id, and made her think I didn't want to. When I asked if I could stay over, she lit up.

So we parted with me promising to return around sunset, cookies and shower stuff and fancy-clothes-for-tomorrow in hand.

Which means I'd better start packing...

11/10 School Check-In

Today I walked down to the local middle school/high school campus with a Fulbright scholar who is researching girls' education in bled Morocco. She had a series of questions to ask the administrators; she's been in Berberville for two months now, but has had trouble getting the requisite paperwork to have admittance to the schools. I've had the paperwork for over a year, plus I've spent a year and a half building relationships with the teachers and administrators, so I accompanied her in hopes of smoothing her way.

It worked.

We had a very successful conversation with the principal, and he even gave her a copy of the school's enrollment records, complete with details about annual retention, failing students (or "redoubling", as they're called here), IB passage rates, and more, broken down by gender.

I don't know why the principal has been a stickler for the paperwork until now - he didn't ask to see mine until May, and I worked in the school from October onwards - but I was very grateful that he answered her questions fully and thoughtfully today.

I was less grateful - in fact, I was downright upset - to discover that the huge murals that we poured so much time, attention, labor, and money into last year...

...I don't even want to say it...

...have been plastered over. The king is scheduled to come to Berberville next week - and I say "scheduled to" because this is the *eighth* time that he has been expected in the past 20 months, and we haven't yet seen him - so everyone is running around, beautifying the city.

And for reasons that I cannot comprehend, the school administration decided that the buildings would look better with freshly plastered and repainted walls than with the gorgeous, professional-looking murals that the EE club students generated last year.

Honestly, it felt like a gut punch.

I didn't even notice it immediately - it's hard to see what's *not* there - but about 5 minutes into our visit, I suddenly noticed that I was looking at textured beige where a huge world ecosystem map should be. I hastily ran around to check all the other walls...all freshly plastered and painted.

It hurt.

When I asked the principal what had happened to all our work, he just shrugged and said, "You can redo them if you want."

That hurt, too.

And then we began discussing girls' education, and my spirits rallied somewhat, and I even proposed a few new mural ideas before we left...but my heart wasn't in it.

I did run into a few of the teachers we worked with last year, and talked about restarting the club for this year. We'll see how that goes...

10/27 The Day The Water Returned

As I've mentioned here before, Berberville gets water only a few hours a day.

The fact that we have running water at all has already changed lives.

Three years ago, plumbing was installed. For the first time in the thousands of years that Berberville has been here, women didn't have to gather water either from the flowing surface water or from the freshwater spring.

Explanatory tangent: On maps, Berberville sits at the intersection of two rivers; that's undoubtedly why this became an "urban center" (if such a thing can be said of a community with only a couple hundred households) back in the dark mists of time. But these "rivers", though they're so called on maps, look like the things we call "creeks" back home. (In fairness, I grew up on the Mississippi, so maybe I have a skewed perspective on what a "river" should look like.)

All the land adjoining these waterways gets farmed. It's Irrigation 101: the shorter a distance you have to transport the water, the more food you can grow. The side effect is that the houses sit on hillsides/mountainsides above the fields. So the women have to carry water into the houses to do their work.

It's easiest to use water from the creeks/rivers, but that water is used for everything from watering livestock to washing clothes to bathing, so there's a predictably large volume of ... waste ... polluting it. People still drink out of it, to be sure, but it makes them sick.

The nearest spring - the place where groundwater emerges onto the land, ie a source of much, much cleaner water - is 4 km outside of town. Uphill. (Note for puzzled geologists and hydrologists: marly limes --> perched aquifers.)

So the arrival of pipes and plumbing, three years ago, was a Really Big Deal.

At that time, the commune - the local legislature, j-jm3a3 - discussed a dilemma: Should villagers get access to 24-hour water flow, and pay for their (metered) water use? Or should the government provide water for free - but since the commune has limited funds, the water usage would have to be limited, too...only two hours a day of free flowing H2O.

You already know the punchline: I get water from 9ish till noonish every day.

I'm not sure if I've before mentioned the deciding factor, that swayed the minds of enough commune members to determine the vote: Someone pointed out that Berberville's economy is rapidly shifting from an agrarian system to a cash-based system, fueled by tourism. Tourism funds the mountain guides (like my host dad), the hotels, the cafes, the trinket shops... And those tourists, this person argued, want to see an Authentic Berber Village. They want to see pristine Amazigh culture. Pristine Amazigh culture doesn't include running water. If everyone has plumbing, he concluded, tourists will stop coming and our town's development will tank. (Pun intended.)

I'm not here to argue the merits of the case, just report that the argument was made.

...But this is all old news. Three years old.

I've lived here for 17 months; I've adapted. I do dishes, laundry, etc, only in the mornings. This morning, I took a bath. I usually cook more in the mornings than evenings; if I do make an elaborate dinner, I stow the dishes in the sink and wait for the morning to wash them. Etc.

But today...

Today was different.

Water shut off a little before noon, as is normal.

But...

A couple hours later, as I was making another batch of Kauthar's Pumpkin Spice Muffins, I cracked the eggs and then reached for the tap to rinse off my hands. Even as I twisted the knob, I realized that it was useless - that the water was long gone. But in the split second before I could twist the knob back and turn to use bottled (stored) water - WATER POURED OUT OF THE TAP!

I stood there, blinking at it (and yes, rinsing my hands). I turned it off...and then back on again, just to see if I could.

It worked.

We had afternoon water!!!

I hastily washed all the dishes I'd dirtied since the morning, refilled the kettles I'd emptied with my bath, and just **marveled** at the wonders of running water.

So there you have it, friends, a pre-Thanksgiving reminder of something you probably never thought to give gratitude for: 24-hour access to running water.

9/11/09 Where There's Smoke...

The American cliche says, "Where there's smoke, there's fire."

8 years ago today, smoke indicated something else entirely.

Last night, trudging through darkened streets after an epic journey, I smelled burning cedar wood, and knew three things: (1) I really love the smell of woodsmoke; (2) Winter has already come to my mountains; and (3) My work as an environmental educator has barely begun. Cedars are protected species, and grow only in forest reserves in Moroccan national parks. The fact that my neighbors are burning it for fuelwood means that the woodpoaching has already begun for the year.

Tonight, I smelled the distinctive scent of burning plastic. Either someone was disposing of their trash or impoverished Berbervillians were burning the only fuel they could find to stay warm on this chilly night.

Because, at least in this snow-scented village, where there's smoke, there's usually...winter.

8/13/09 Big Men On Campus

My PA and I stepped through the gate to the college. It hung open invitingly, but only because unknown agents ripped out the lock a while ago, so now it can't close.

I walked her around the grounds, showing her the murals we painted and the hundreds of trees we planted. I'd hoped to introduce her to some (any) administrator, but the place seemed deserted.

As we wound up our perambulations around the campus, we heard voices drifting through a window to the dormitory. I looked in and saw five men sitting around a table, laughing at each others' stories as they finished their lunch. Since I didn't recognize any of them, I assumed they were day laborers, here to continue the ongoing construction/maintenance of the large campus. I mentioned this to my PA, who asked, "So where's the construction?" Looking around, I realized that for the first time in months, I saw no ladders, power tools, steel rods, or half-finished buildings. I suggested that maybe they'd put a new coat of paint on a surprisingly sharp-looking building, but wondered.

We finished our walkabout and turned to head back to the car (bliss-inducing side-effect of site visit: getting to take the 2-km trip from downtown to the campus in an air-conditioned, fully sprung, cushion-seated car instead of walking in the blistering heat of a cloudless summer afternoon). Two figures appeared at the door of the dormitory and called to us. We walked back to say hi.

Long story short(er) - they're members of an association based in Springfield, here for 15 days to prepare the campus for the new school year and provide activities for the students who have mountains of empty time on their hands during the summer hiatus.

They spoke with my PA in rapid Darija, so I followed almost none of the conversation. I therefore don't know who first proposed having the kids put rings of white stones around all of our fledgling saplings...but I know that my PA was thrilled, and eagerly volunteered us to help out. When they explained their materiel shortages, I volunteered white paint and brushes.

We hadn't yet visited the gendarmes or the caid, so we agreed to come back in a few hours. The students wouldn't show up for another half hour anyway - we'd gone to the campus during siesta - so we said we'd bring the materials right away and then return to help out after running our other errands.

We returned to my house for the leftover muraling supplies. My PA looked at the cans of white paint and explained that jiH, which the guys wanted to use to paint the rocks with, is ... something else. Made from dust and rocks. I offered plaster, but she shook her head. A trip to my ever-dependable buHanoot got us connected with the local version of Home Depot (which is apparently across the street from my house! I knew it was an industrial space, but never knew what was in there!) and we were soon the proud owners of a 30kg bag of ... white dust and rocks.

We dropped that, along with brushes and sponges, at the college, then returned to our daily rounds.

When we returned, an hour or two later, everyone was asleep. Apparently, siesta runs really long on hot summer days. (I mean, seriously, it was almost 5pm by this point.)

But when one of the association guys met us at the dormitory door - after repeated knocking - he showed us three nearly-overflowing buckets of ... white stuff.

The rest of the team soon roused, and together we carried the sloshy buckets out to the field.

The first order of business, I discovered, was gathering rocks with which to encircle the tiny saplings. I'd imagined that we'd paint a bunch of rocks first, then arrange them around the trees...don't know why I thought it'd be a good idea to carry rocks dripping with wet paint...

One by one, and then clump by clump, kids emerged from their siestas to join in the effort. We pillaged all the decent-sized rocks from the gravelly soil, then went further afield, to the piles next to the newly-constructed buildings, in order to find enough stones to create half-meter-diameter circles around a hundred or so trees.

Why only ~100 when there are 250 on campus? Because the main goal of this is to help would-be tree-waterers to find the trees. Most of the fragile saplings run along the front wall of the campus, in front of buildings, or lining the edges of the exercise courtyard, but we scattered a batch of 100 or so just north of the soccer field, and since they reach only about 6 inches tall, they're awfully hard to spot. Lhumdullah, Berberville has gotten a rainy summer, so the trees have mostly fended for themselves, but a few good-hearted folks have watered them during the dry weeks. At least, they've watered all the trees they've found. 5 overlooked trees have completely vanished, and another 5 or so are dead, leaving behind only brown stalks. There are another 10-15 that are, in the immortal words of The Princess Bride, "Mostly dead." With enough water and TLC, they'll pull through, but not if their would-be caretakers keep missing them.

So we created rock rings, and then painted/sponged them with what I finally identified as whitewash. I've never actually seen it before. In fact, I only know it from Tom Sawyer and its modern, metaphorical usage, referring to glossing over unpleasant truths. And from the stories about how the White House got its name. But it's a real substance, and apparently still in active use, at least here in the developing world.

So while small boys and the association guys whitewashed the rings of stones, I kept wandering the field, looking for little lost saplings. Every time I found one, I started its rock ring, then called over a kid (or three) to finish it up while I kept walking. The further afield I went, the more dead or dying saplings I found, underlining the importance of our work. If the trees were fully dead, I didn't bother memorializing them with stones or whitewash, but the mostly-dead ones were my favorite finds, because I knew that these were the most likely to be saved by our efforts.

After a few hours, my PA and I had to cut out, for our last errand, but first we ran down to my buHanoot and picked up sodas and snack cakes for the kids. Delivering them brought out the worst in our little helpers - when I saw the fights that broke out between kids trying to steal the food before we could give it away, I understood how greed earned a spot on the list of 7 deadly sins - but eventually, everyone was happily slurping and munching, plus I got to give a mini-lesson on the evils of littering (as the kids dropped their bottlecaps and snack wrappers where they stood).

Looking over the future forest, planted by children and teens and parents and a handful of PCVs just five months ago, every tree now highlighted by a bright white bulls-eye of stone, I felt again the glow I'd felt when we first planted the field. Though the tiny saplings barely hint at their future majesty, the dozens of trees scattered across an acre of scrubground point to a greener, shadier, healthier, ecologically exciting future.

Am I naive to hope so much? Or just willing to believe that change can come?

8/12/09 Site Visit Ventures

Yesterday was my site visit from my Program Assistant.

In non-Peace-Corps-Speak, that translates to "Yesterday, the second-in-command of Team Environment paid a visit to my little Berberville in order to meet folks, chat up the Powers That Be, and give me ideas as to next steps on my work."

We paid the requisite visits to the gendarmes, the caid, and the host family, plus popped out to my beautiful lake, my mdrasa, and my college.

Everywhere we went, something unexpected happened. The college is the best story, which is why I'm saving it for tomorrow. :)

But here are some of the others.

At the gendarmes, I discovered that the itinerary I'd given to them for the month of August, spelling out my travels in a hastily sketched-out note on a ripped-out-sheet of notebook paper, had been typed up and faxed to ... somebody further up the food chain. Since I sort of imagined that these itineraries I give them whenever I leave Berberville just get ignored and then lost, this came as a bit of a shock.

At the caid, my well-intentioned and well-spoken governor-type reiterated, in a blend of French and Arabic that I mostly followed, just how much he supports the work that PCVs do. My PA and I left the meeting in smiles, and she spent the next few hours coming up with ways that he could be helpful in my future work. 'Cause he's just that cool.

At the host family, we drank tea and ate bread and jam. I made the tea, since Ama was having a rough time with the baby, and was reminded once again just how useless I feel in a Moroccan kitchen. (I put in too much tea for the small pot, so it came out bitter. Sigh.) Ama felt the need to point out to my PA and to my 3tti (who dropped by) that I'd made the tea, which might have been her attempt to say Look, she makes tea! but felt more like Don't blame me for this nasty stuff. Double sigh. But Ama and my PA had a great conversation about energy usage (read: burning fuelwood) and capacity building (read: creating a grassroots organization to help) that left me wondering about future plans here in my village. My mental teapot is now bubbling away...let's hope more successfully than the physical one I poured from this evening.

At the lake, my PA gazed rapturously at the Carribean-green waters...while I winced inwardly. Maybe Carribean seas flourish when green, but my little lake is showing the effects of Tide in the rivers, contributing to algal blooms and ultimately eutrophication - a five-syllable word for death by choking, at least when it comes to lakes. We also observed that the water, which was over the road back on the 4th of July, is now even higher. It's over a meter higher than the usual shoreline. Lake-margin trees are now submerged up to their middles. How long can trees survive this before their trunks decay and roots rot?? We couldn't even see the road leading deeper into the park; the trees that line it waved their upper branches at us, while the road itself hid under a meter or more of standing water.

At the mdrasa, I discovered that about a third of the trees we planted there in March have been uprooted by construction (grr), but that the construction guys lavish water and care on the other 2/3, at the direct request of the caid. So as sad as I felt to see the waste of two dozen saplings, I had to be grateful for the caid's ongoing commitment to our project.

At the college... As promised, this story takes the cake. So you'll get to hear it ... next time I visit blogspot. Tomorrow, inshallah. :)

8/5/09 The Newbies

Last year, when I was a newbie Environment Volunteer, I waited six months after my 11-week Pre-Service Training (PST) to see my buddies again, at our week-long IST (In-Service Training).

Thanks to the rearranging of the training schedule, this year’s newbies only got 8 weeks - not 11 - of training when they first arrived, then three months of living with their host families and working on language and integration, and now they have two weeks of “Post-PST” training. Yes, that means Post-Pre-Service Training training. Sometimes government bureaucracy just makes me smile. :)

I’m assured that they’ll end up with the same amount of training we got – either because they’ll get a 2-week IST or because I miscounted the number of weeks of PST – but the big difference is that instead of getting their “technical sessions” mixed in with their language and cultural sessions during one massive training haul, they had 8 weeks of language/culture and now, once they’re settled in-site and integrated into their communities, they’re getting all of the technical sessions in one huge batch.

As my loyal readers may remember, during PST, I shuttled regularly between my Training City and my small riverbank village. Three days in the City followed by a week in the village. A week in the City followed by two weeks in the village. Etc. We spent three months packing and repacking almost daily…but it also meant that we got to take breathers. Too many hours on learning a language that shares no roots with English? Take a week to train on how to set up EE clubs and conduct SIDA lessons. Too many PowerPoint presentations? Time to chill with your host family and bounce a baby on your knee.

I’m not sure which training model is more effective, though I do know that the newbies’ language skills are amazing. 8 solid weeks of living with their host families while getting 8 hours every day of direct instruction on language gave them a fluency and vocabulary range that I’m still working on after a year.

So why am I bringing this up now?

Because I’ve come to the newbies’ Training City to conduct some of those infamous PowerPoint presentations. I’m talking to them twice, actually. Today, I get to discuss the club that Fatima and I have run over the past year, and show them pictures of the murals, soccer tournament, tree planting, SIDA lessons, and other games and activities we all did together. Tomorrow I’ll co-lead a session on Monitoring & Evaluation. (A few months ago, a newbie & I went up to Peace Corps headquarters for a workshop on M&E, and now we get to pass along what we learned.)

I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with the newbies. For all that I call them by that slightly condescending term – newbies – I have nothing but respect for the new crop of Volunteers, a fresh group of wide-eyed innocents who have left their families, friends, and homeland for two years in hopes of bringing the world closer to peace.

When I was a wide-eyed Peace Corps Trainee, I *loved* getting visits from 2nd year Volunteers. They all seemed so confident, so blasé, so assured of things that I still found bewildering and shocking. I peppered each visitor with questions, trying to define the undefinable Peace Corps Experience. These newbies aren’t in quite the same position I was – they’ve had 3 months in their sites to knock the edges off their shiny newness, so they’re not as mystified by The World Outside of Training as I was – so I haven’t gotten as many What’s It Like?? questions. Instead, I’ve gotten to hang out with them. We’ve eaten meals, walked around town, chilled out on the hotel roof…we’ve gotten to know each other. And I’m reminded all over again what an honor it is to be a PCV.

Spending time with a room full of Volunteers…just isn’t quite like anything else. You have the full range of personality types, from fresh-out-of-undergrad-fratboy-type to retiree-calmer-and-wiser-type and everything inbetween. But young, old, goofy, serious, partier, workerbee, funny, chill…they’re all Peace Corps Volunteers. They all chose to surrender two years of their lives to live and learn and love a new country.

I can’t figure out how to say this without sounding like I’m self-aggrandizing, but please just trust that I don’t mean to be: PCVs are amazing human beings.

For most of my life, when I entered social situations full of strangers, I'd hang back, looking for the one or two folks in the room who I could connect to on a meaningful level. I’m capable of small talk, but I dislike it and prefer a friendly silence to stilted chatter. I'd nearly always find someone I'd enjoy talking with, and then spend the rest of my time with that individual.

It’s different here. When I walked into this hotel full of strange PCVs, I remembered something I’d forgotten since the beginning of stage: a group of PCVs isn’t like any other group I’ve ever met. I’m already connected to them all, on a profound level. These aren’t strangers at all; they’re members of my Peace Corps family, unknown to me but bonded nonetheless. It’s like going to your ancestral homelands and meeting your distant cousins. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never seen each other before or that your accents are different; you’re still family. You’ll figure out what else you have in common soon enough, but it hardly matters, because you’ve already flown across the first social hurdle. They’re already an us, not a them.

PCVs, despite the thousands of ways that we 8000 people are so different from each other, share similarities on a level that I just haven’t found anywhere else. And of course you find exceptions. A handful joined Peace Corps because they wanted an in to graduate school, or because they were bored and confused and didn’t know what to do with themselves. But those are the exception…and they don’t usually last very long, either because they go home early or because Peace Corps Service works its magic on them, and they find themselves serving the world as PCVs, even to their own surprise.

So I’m grateful to be here, not only to get to “pay forward” the generosity of the 2nd-year Volunteers who helped my Training, but because I’ve gotten to meet 26 new friends. 26 new amazing, selfless, generous-hearted brothers and sisters.

[[Little brothers and sisters, of course, regardless of their age in calendar years, because I’ve been here a year longer and am therefore clearly entitled to play the big sister card. ;) ]]

7/12/09 Azrou

Azrou is one of my favorite places in Morocco. It's big enough to have all the amenities I miss in my village (restaurants serving western food, shops that sell *everything*, trees) plus it's in a lovely part of the country, in the forests of Ifrane National Park, in the Middle Atlas mountains. It's close to Fes and Meknes and Ifrane (a swiss-chalet style town that rich Moroccans retreat to in the summer - it's like the Martha's Vinyard of Morocco) while being remote enough to feel cozy and intimate and just friendly.

We stayed in Azrou for several nights while visiting Ifrane National Park. There are some inns deeper in the park, but they're priced for tourists. In the Park, you can find Barbary Apes - sad, tourist-spoiled little monkeys* that will flock to you if you toss them bread - as well as gorgeous ceder forests (mostly secondary growth, but reforestation is succeeding well) and some lovely lakes. The lakes are year-round homes for several unusual species of waterfowl, and are key nesting habitat for a few endangered species, so bring your binoculars and prepare to be impressed. I think 90% of the life-birds that my Dad, an avid birder, added to his "life list" in Morocco were spotted here in Ifrane.

Lakes Aoua, Hichlat, and Ifrah are well known and mentioned in every tour book, but I want to mention Lac d’Afennourir, a RAMSAR site that doesn't get nearly as much ecotourist attention as it deserves. Like the other three, it hosts many species of waterfowl, amphibian, fish, etc, plus it's tucked farther away from agricultural and population centers, and is therefore much healthier as an ecosystem. All of the lakes are difficult (if not impossible) to access by public transportation. This is one outing where it's worth hiring a guide and/or renting a car to get around.

I want to give a quick shoutout to our Inn, the Auberge du Dernier Lion d'Atlas (The Inn of the Last Atlas Lion), for its extraordinary hospitality. The rooms are airy and clean, the food (breakfast and dinner are both available) is plentiful and yummy, and the host/owner, Aziz, is a prince. He adores Peace Corps, which would give him a special place in my heart anyway, but he's just a kind, thoughtful, genuinely helpful man. His inn is about 2km away from the Azrou bus/taxi station, but it's an easy walk or else a cheap petit taxi ride (I think 4 or 5 dh). You can find his place online at www.dernierlionatlas.ma or call them at 0535561868.

* Yes, I realize, Barbary Apes are technically *not* monkeys - they don't have tails - but everybody calls them that, and it's hard to refer to such little creatures as apes. That word calls to mind gorillas and orangutans, both of which are about 10 times more massive than these little simians.

June 25, 2009 Birding in Morocco

Morocco gets plenty of visitors from Europe and the US, but not enough birdwatchers. This means that there’s pitifully little information available to birders in Morocco. One of the best resources is Bird Guide: The Most Complete Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, published by Harper Collins. It has a pro-Britain bias, so includes statements like “This bird is only a summer visitor here, but winters in Spain and Africa,” but even so, its maps – available for *every* bird in the book – include the entire Mediterranean rim, including all of North Africa.

That one pairs well with Birding in Morocco, which is not meant to be a field guide. It cuts Morocco into a few dozen regions and tells you what to look for in each region. There are a handful of maps to the more remote sites, but is mostly useful for the lists of birds you can expect to see in each area. Partnered with the Bird Guide mentioned above, you can actually figure out what you’re seeing.

That said, neither book is 100% accurate. It’s not really their fault; Morocco is a big country – the size of California – and has dozens or hundreds of different microclimates and micro-ecosystems. This means that we have birds that haven’t yet been noticed by the nice folks writing the books. So if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has webbed feet, don’t worry if the map says that it’s never found south of France. :)

My dad is a devoted birder who has several hundred birds on his “life list”. I’m a tagalong birder; when I’m with him, I’ll do the field guide thing and have a fair eye for diagnostic details, but when I’m on my own, I tend not to pay too much attention to our flapping feathered friends.

But in just a few days with the family, I saw dozens of species of birds that I’ve either never seen before or just never noticed before.

Even the most bird-blind visitor to Morocco can’t help but notice the enormous storks (some say “cranes”) atop nearly every mosque in the country. These gigantic birds nest on the highest thing around and ride thermals on sunny afternoons, meaning that they’re nearly always visible, and always striking in their glossy black and radiantly white plumage.

But it turns out that they’re not the only black-and-white birds in my skies. There’s also a tuxedo-colored bird of prey, known in French as a beuze (spelled phonetically) or busard according to my French-English dictionary. Then there are the Eurasian Coots, which are all black except for a streak of white down their faces, and Black-winged Stilts, which look like skinny penguins teetering on stilts, just to name two more.

And colored birds? Ooooh, boy. There’s the blindingly yellow Golden Oriole, the radiant turquoise-and-rust Roller, the rust-bellied Moussier’s Redstart, and the multi-hued Eurasian Chaffinch (North African race) - not to be confused with the Blue Chaffinch, which is, yes, mostly blue.

In a day spent in the Ifrane National Park, visiting four lakes – Dayet Aoua, Dayet Hichlef, Dayet Ifrah, and Agoulmem Afenourir – we saw countless birds. Hundreds for sure. Probably thousands. The other species we’ve so far identified include…

(Eurasian) Common Kestrel

Lesser Kestrel (I spotted this one!)

Cattle Egret (these fill trees in Azrou, near the bus station, and are found *everywhere* up here)

Great Crested Grebe (a truly gorgeous duck-like creature)

Turtle Dove

Ruddy Shellduck (striking black and white wings while flying, but the wings vanish when it sits on a lake; then, you just notice the rusty neck)

Eagle (probably the Booted Eagle, but we’re not sure)

Alpine Swift

Coal Tit

Mistle Thrush

Willow Warbler

Black Kite

Red Kite

Little Grebe

Eurasian Coot

Red-knobbed Coot (incredibly rare – nests only in these lakes!!)

Black-eared Wheatear

Black-billed Magpie

Barbary Partridge

We saw more, but couldn’t ID them in the field. Dad snapped pictures, though, so we may work them out later. Stay tuned…