Anecdotal February

            As I’ve said before, this has not been a month for long-form narrative, though it has been a great one for shorter stories.  That trend has continued, so I’ll continue with my short form blogging.

            Last Sunday I took a walk up into the surrounding hills, and was shocked to discover how many people know me in the outlying villages.  In some cases I teach their kids, who live with relatives in town during the week for school and return home on weekends, in other cases they see me weekly at souk, in still others they’ve just heard about the local American.  I know I should be used to this by now, but it never fails to take me by surprise.  Now that I’ve started to learn some verbs and conjugations in Tamazight I can actually speak a little with people outside too.  Interestingly, now that I’m starting to learn Tamazight I even understand their Arabic better since I’ve got a better grasp on the local accent, and I think Tamazight is finally starting to kill my (bad) Fassi accent and replace it with something easier for locals to understand.

            After my morning romp I had just an hour or so to relax before meeting up with the hiking club I’ve been writing about.  This week we planned our hike for next week and had a discussion on interdependency and on ways that corporations and other people using the environment can and should protect it both for the sake of the environment and, counter intuitively, so as to maximize profits (Jared Diamond’s book Collapse was invaluable for getting examples of this).  As always the students were active in the discussion and had tons of ideas, but like environmentally passionate high school students the world over while they rightly see big corporations as such a major threat to the environment that they could not imagine situations where companies improve profits—or at least protect against losses—through stewardship. 

We taught a global example, but also had a local one.  Globally it behooves oil companies to ship oil in double hulled ships because the greater cost of those ships is offset by the reduced likelihood of a terrible accident which a.) means they’ll have to pay for cleanup, and b.) will lose sales for months or even years while the public purchases gas from competitors who haven’t recently caused huge catastrophes.  Locally, a company building a water pipe recently accepted bribes from some farmers to not dig near their lands, possibly causing parts of their fields to be unusable this year.  Instead the company dug in less good places near the farmers who hadn’t bribed them.  In the rainstorms these places, as predicted by a company environmental advisor, flooded while the places where the pipes would have been better placed did not.  This ended up destroying the dirt road, the nearby fields (both of bribers and not), and the company’s profits.  It is now bankrupt and the farmers must rebuild the road at their own expense so they can sell their produce, all because no one listened to the company’s environmental advisor, who had told them they would have flooding.

After the meeting my counterparts and I went to get some tea, and in the process picked up a new Nasuredin (my local Joha) story.  He came out with our pot of oregano tea—yes, I now it sounds weird, but it’s a Tamazight tradition and a delicious one at that—and as he gave it to us I said a quick “Thanks to God,” as you do in Morocco when you’re quite thirsty and the tea comes.  Nasuredin asked if I was saying it, or the teapot.  Not to be outdone I quickly replied, “both.”  He than berated me as a teacher who can’t count, since if two of us are saying “Thanks to God” I should use the plural expression!

On Tuesday night I had to cancel my evening classes to accommodate a presentation by local first responders in commemoration of a national day of remembrance for automobile accidents.  While that is the purpose of the day, the first responders actually gave a class on basic first aid and response techniques, (the Heimlich, CPR, and other like things).  An important class, but not particularly well done, it went on much too long, and bored the students, who ranged in age from 6 to 20.  Apparently, unlike at least my high school experience, this is not taught in schools ever here, a local friend told me later that he’d only learned this while attending a vocational school for agriculture that thought these are important techniques to know!  That was after he was partway through university.  At the obligatory talk back at the end of the event some students spent some time berating the government for not providing local responders with the necessary gear to speed up response times—I’m noticing a constant theme in these talk backs—but I couldn’t help but think that the bigger mistake was not making sure these important first response techniques aren’t taught in a more conducive setting for learning, as a required health class like it was for me.

That’s a bit of a downer, so I’ll end with a lighthearted Joha story:

Joha was in the market one day when he noticed a man with a cage in his hand.  There was a parrot in the cage, and the man was selling his parrot, shouting out to the market goers, “100 gold ducas!”  As Joha watched, someone bought the parrot.

Joha suddenly saw a chance to make some money, so he rushed home and got a turkey from his backyard.  He returned to the market and began shouting, “200 gold ducas for this beautiful turkey!” but nobody showed any interest.

Finally a friend came up to Joha and said to him, “Joha, are you crazy?  You can’t sell a turkey for that price!”

Joha said, “Why not?  My turkey is as beautiful as a parrot that was sold for 100 ducas this morning, and my turkey is bigger.”

“But Joha,” the friend said, “that parrot is valuable because it talks like a man.”

“Is that so?” said Joha.  “Well, my turkey thinks like a man.”