Spending a week in Morocco once again confirms why I love the place for its quirkiness – but also why it can drive people absolutely crazy.
We came for a host of reasons, which involved driving practically the length and breadth of the country – visiting SPANA’s most northerly, and southerly clinics.
Now, anyone who has had any doings with Morocco’s roads, and the unusual style and driving skills of its drivers, will confirm that it is an interesting experience.
I mean, call me old fashioned if you will, but would you expect vehicles, including mule and donkey drawn carts to regularly approach you coming the wrong way down the motorway, passing our astonished stares with nothing more than a cheery waive?
Or to see sheep and cows grazing on the central reservation – after all you wouldn’t want to waste all that lovely grass.
And if you happen to live on the other side of the main (very busy) Casablanca/Rabat motorway , what could possibly be more normal than a mother dispatching her children to run across, dodging the juggernauts, to get to the school on the other side?
But then, you drive down the Casablanca Avenue in Marrakech – it’s mid May – and the Jacarandas lining each side of the street are in their full glory. They create a thick haze of cobalt blue stretching into the far distance.
As we pass a bloke is painting the walls of a house and spills half the paint across the pavement. He doesn’t even notice.
Going up into the mountains the Tamarisk trees are also in full flower, and just for once, after exceptional rains this year, cattle and sheep are lying contentedly it their dappled shade, chewing the cud.
Even the poor old broken-down horses, mules and donkeys waiting stoically in our hospital in Marrakech look a little bit better than normal. Their owners ask pathetically for our help, but sadly there is no miracle injection we can give to make these animals young again.
But we do what we can – especially to try and ease the pain of old wounds and injuries. In that respect, I feel a certain kinship with them. I know old wounds and injuries I thought long since healed, come back to haunt us as we age. At least I feel I can look the trudging, loaded donkeys in the eye now, after trudging myself round the Marathon. And I only had to do it once – and then had to spend a week nursing the blisters.
Still, it did make an impression on the people. They now know that the English are completely mad – shaking their heads in disbelief at the photos of the three of us in our donkey outfits.
But we raised over two thousand pounds at a fundraiser in Tangier, and at the AGM in Rabat last night, people stood to applaud the donors of SPANA in Britain for their generosity.
So, who cares about their unusual driving habits?
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 18 May 2009
Back to Morocco
Thursday, 11 December 2008
Rude Bishops and Morocco
It’s irritating, but whenever I tell people I’m going to Morocco, especially during the winter, they usually come up with “Oooh, you are lucky. All that lovely sunshine!”
If only they knew.
We just spent a few days visiting some of our more remote centres – Khenifra and Midelt stuck away in Morocco’s backwoods, in the Middle Atlas Mountains.
Absolutely blooming freezing.
It’s p****d down with rain solidly for the past six weeks (good for the farmers, it’s true), so the whole country is a muddy quagmire, (film-makers wanting to do the First World War trenches on the cheap, now’s your chance), floods everywhere, only now it’s December, it’s turned to snow, shutting roads, freezing pipes and bursting drains, generally adding to the jollity of life.
We spent a night in a jolly little ‘auberge’ in the hills near Midelt. No heating, no hot water, actually putting clothes ON to get into bed. People told me it was ‘characterful’. Frankly, I’d rather have a little less ‘character’ and a few more ‘mod cons’.
Strange though, I really love the area. One of the poorest regions in Morocco – 75% of all motive power still comes from mules and donkeys. Yet the people couldn’t be kinder or more hospitable, and with a sense of humour to help them cope. And my God, they need it.
Finally, on our way home – courtesy of Royal Air Maroc. The flight is both extremely full and extremely disorganised – the food came, but no water – and in taking away the trays they’ve just dropped a tin-tray of ‘Boeuf et riz’ all over my head.
Two blokes across the aisle, coming back from a Marrakech stag night have just been sick.
Sitting next to us is a Nigerian Bishop – in all his purple finery. And what an extremely unpleasant man he is.
Arrogance is mixed with a certain brutality, as he barks and grunts commands at the Moroccan stewards. ”TEA!”, “WATER!” he yells at them. I find I’m increasingly often having to remind my fellow passengers that we have a tradition in England of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to people who give us things or help us, or do things for us. Twice in the last two weeks I've done this...and now to a Bish. It’s true, they look at me rather strangely. But didn’t they have mothers or grandmothers to teach them such things?
Our friend the Bishop seems to think we will all be impressed by his huge status if he treats anyone beneath him like a slave. No doubt he’s very big on theology, but frankly, a little short on Christian humility and the ‘love thy neighbour bit’
Oh well, never mind. It’s nearly Christmas.
It would be nicer going home, if I didn’t have the dread/guilt of another blinking training run tomorrow. The London Marathon. At my age? I must be completely barking mad.
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 19 November 2007
Poppies in Tunisia
Yesterday we drove up into the north-west of the country, almost up to the border with Algeria – the tail end of the Atlas mountains. Cold and bleak at this time of the year, it was also drizzling with rain.
The hills themselves are either stripped bare by over-grazing and wood-cutting (who can blame them for trying to keep warm), but where given some kind of protection they are thickly forested with mostly cork-oak trees. Incidentally these are the only refuge for the Barbary Stag, the only species of deer in Africa and now very rare.
But one of the reasons SPANA is in the area is to help the mules that work in the woods, bringing down great loads of cork to the collecting points.Yesterday, however, we took the mobile clinic to the souk in Bousalem town itself. Held every Thursday, it reminded me of a British boot-sale only most of the stuff was not stolen goods. Farmers and traders bring in all their produce, and a sea of tents and shelters springs up, selling everything from vegetables to shoes, buckets to shovels, cereals to spices – a vast assault on the senses – noise, colour and smell.
And of course there are animals in their thousands. From chickens (in truth, not destined probably to have a very good day), rabbits (likewise), sheep, goats, cattle and hundreds of horses, mules and donkeys – many carrying the goods for sale, and the people to buy them. It must have been a bit like that in Medieval Britain – I bet Robin Hood would have felt quite at home. We park the Landrover in a corner, where people park their animals, and treat a steady stream of sore feet, cuts and scratches, a bit of a cough, a touch of mange, an infected eye – all the usual complaints.
But then after the crowds have started to drift away about mid-day, we pack up and head up into the hills – a different village each afternoon. We arrive in a cluster of shabby stone houses and yards – it looks as if everyone has emigrated - but suddenly, almost out of the rocks and ground itself, animals start to appear.
Amazingly, after a mere ten minutes, there are thirty or so owners and their animals standing round the mobile clinic getting wormed, or feet trimmed, even anti-biotics for an infection. And here there is time to talk to the owners and tell them what is going wrong, and how to look after their livestock better.
That’s another myth – most visitors only see the rich coastal strip of the country, with its hotels, shops and bars, and the money that comes from the tourists. But twenty miles inland, it’s quite another story - another world in fact – where poverty is still rife, and people and their animals struggle to wrest a living from a hard country.
By this time we are frozen stiff, and grateful to climb into the Landrover, say ‘Goodbye’ to the team, and start the long drive back to Tunis.
November is a particularly poignant time to drive along that road, as it was the same road that the First Army fought their way along in the winter and spring of 1942/43. All along the road there are the green signs of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, marking the cemeteries that plot their route to the capital. In one, at Medjez-al-bab, there are nearly fifteen hundred graves, mostly of men killed in late April 1943, just a fortnight before the Germans finally surrendered in Tunis.
I say men, but most of them, as can be seen from the ages on their gravestones, are just boys. In the failing light and November drizzle, I put last week’s poppy on the grave of an unknown soldier of the Black Watch.
Perhaps it’s just that we were cold and tired, and working with another very basic sort of existence, but walking out of that tragic, lonely garden was a very sobering and humbling experience.
Jeremy Hulme
Friday, 21 September 2007
Mt. Toubkal National Park, Morocco
SPANA has been working with the Department Des Eaux et Forets (a sort of wildlife and forestry Ministry) in Morocco for many years. I think it would be fair to say it has not always been an easy relationship. Something like that between Ken Livingstone and the Conservative Party would sum it up nicely.
Because we have built environmental education exhibitions in some of our refuges, as well as producing booklets and posters on endangered birds and mammals, we are seen by them to be the experts.
Sometimes I wish we weren’t.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, we eventually agreed to design and build an exhibition about the animals, people and natural environment of Toubkal National Park in the High Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco. This is to be in the currently empty building, titled ‘Eco Museum’, near Asni, a village on the hill road leading right into the heart of the mountains.
From there you can see mighty Mt Toubkal, 4,167 metres high, towering up into the piercing blue sky. The Berber hill people of the region call it Adrar N’dern, ‘Mountain of Mountains’ and retain a very healthy respect for the changeability and often violence of the weather - freezing snow-storms in winter, baking sun and desiccating winds in summer.
Anything living in the mountains has got to be tough; the plants, animals and of course the people. Which brings us to SPANA’s particular interest in the region. The villagers, depend absolutely on the toughness and resilience of that most wondrous creature – the mule.
Created by mating a donkey stallion to a horse mare, this remarkable creature has had more than its share of bad publicity, and a certain mythology has grown up around it. ‘Stubborn as a mule’, ’Mule headed’ – all denigrating a truly amazing animal.
Yet it was actually the mule that conquered the American West. It was mules, not horses, that pulled the prairie schooners. And it was mules that carried the forty-niners up into the Yukon and Alaska. The British Army had whole mountain brigades equipped with mules, complete with artillery specially designed to be packed on them. The Chindits in the Burmese jungle depended on them, and many a sick or wounded soldier owed their life to the hardiness and stamina of the good old army mule.
So SPANA has been only too pleased to provide veterinary care for the mules of the High Atlas – we’ve even built a little clinic in the village of Imlil (right at the foot of Mt. Toubkal) where every month the mobile vet team visit from Marrakech.
Every family depends on these mules for their very existence. Not only are they used in agriculture to plough and carry crops and water and firewood, many villagers are also mountain guides, and their mules carry supplies up to the mountain refuges, as well as tourists’ baggage, and more than occasionally, the odd tourist themselves.
So it seemed essential that mules should feature strongly in the exhibition, and last weekend we trekked into the heart of the mountains to get film and photos of the mules, their owners and the way of life in some of the remotest mountain villages.
It was absolutely stunning. Not only the spectacular landscapes – bleak, brown, barren summits soaring into the cobalt blue of the sky, with viridian valley bottoms crammed with fruit-trees and narrow terraces of maize and barley. The villages cling to the steep valley sides – any flat piece of earth is at a premium – so they seem a jumble of flat roofed layers, storey upon storey with little windows guarded by traditional wrought-iron grills.
The people who still struggle to wrest a living from this hard and hostile land are like their animals in many ways – tough and hardy, nimble and sure-footed, yet gentle and hospitable. It is a great joy and privilege to live amongst them for a little while, sharing their lives, their trials and tribulations, in fact stepping back into another, largely vanished world.
