High Adventure in the High Atlas

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NOTE FROM RICH: "The following blog entry comes from an article I recently wrote for an upcoming issue of Peaceworks, a volunteer produced Peace Corps periodical. Enjoy!"

"High Atlas Training of Trainers Hike, September 2006" (or "Four City Volunteers Take on the Great Moroccan Outdoors")
By Rich Landrigan
YD Ouaouizerht, Morocco

Nestled up in the Azilal region of the High Atlas Mountains there’s a sleepy little valley named Ait Bououli. The hike from the top of the pass down to the dirt road that runs along the river bed boasts some of the most awe inspiring views in the Morocco. There are towering peaks of clay and sandstone, ancient Berber mud mansions that house entire extended families (called igrams), groves of olive, apple, and walnut trees, and trains of mules and donkeys carrying the loads of foreign trekkers and men and women headed for far-off souk towns. Cell phone reception is years away, the Internet is a distant dream, and you can forget about paved roads. They have a saying there: “The sheep go out, the sheep come back in. Nothing ever happens in Ait Bououli.”

This beautiful little corner of Morocco served as the first leg of a six day journey for four YD volunteers: Amanda Reid, John Kim, Cara Lane, and myself. More than just a reunion of the greatest CBT group of all time, our goal was to provide training and materials for associations in the region in the hopes that they would transfer their newfound knowledge and skills to their communities. The training was designed to cover information concerning the Moudawana (Morocco’s revised family law), SIDA (AIDS) awareness and prevention, and leadership/teamwork skills derived from the GGLOW (Girls & Guys Leading Our World) program. With the help of past and present Health and Environment volunteers from the surrounding areas we identified and made contact with these associations, set up appointments to meet with them, and planned the route that would take us from Azilal over the mountains to El-Qelaat M’gouna. Our intended stops along the way were to include douars in and around the towns of Ait Bououli, Ait Bougamez, Tabant, Ait Hamd, and Bou Tgrhar.

We gathered in Azilal on September 6th, made a final check of our packs and plans, filled our bellies with one of Amanda’s world famously creative dinners, and hit the ponges for a few hours of sleep. Early the next morning we met up with Khalid, who is the acting mudir of the Azilal Dar Chebab and a native of the Ait Bououli valley, and piled into the taxis that would take us up to the trailhead. As the mid-morning sun rose in the sky above us we headed down into the valley, stopping for pictures of the natural splendor around us, and the occasional pot of tea at, amazingly enough, little cafés set in among the trees around us. By late afternoon we were relaxing in the home of Khalid’s family, eagerly anticipating the coming tagines.

It’s remarkable that even after a year out here there are still things that can catch even the hardiest Peace Corps Volunteers off-balance. When we signed on I think we were all prepared to encounter the kind of culinary adventures usually reserved for National Geographic specials, but I can still say with absolute assurance that none of us expected to be served tagine with sheep testicles in it. Determined to participate fully in the cultural experience we dug in, and honestly, I have to say, not bad. Not what I’ll be making in my own kitchen this winter, but still, not bad 😊

Having conquered the trail and Xalid’s mom’s cooking, we moved onto our next challenge: actual work. The members of the Association of Ait Mzalt for Sustainable Development gathered in a small room on the ground level of the house where we presented ourselves, the goals of Peace Corps, and the information we had brought with us. The details of the presentation are available in our full report so I won’t go into them here, but essentially the training consisted of us providing information, engaging in games and activities with our trainees, and opening the floor to questions and answers. Although we were somewhat surprised by the small size of our audience and the lack of female representation we all felt afterwards that it had been a good start.

We ate a second dinner on the roof, under a blanket of some the brightest stars I have ever seen, with the Milky Way cutting its way across the night sky like a great belt of light. Looking out from the rooftop, at the valley below and the infinity above, I took a moment to reflect on how, for those of us used to living in the developed world, travel to the most remote regions of our planet is the only way to see the places closest to the Earth and those farthest from it in the same moment.

After a good night’s sleep, we woke early the next morning to a darkened scene. Clouds had moved in during the night and the only lamp in the sky was a brilliant moon that lit up the landscape in eerie radiance. The silver fields were silent except for the shadows of wild dogs moving through the grass and the river was no more than a sound of rushing water in the distance. At last, as the dawn announced itself with the first dim sunrays creeping over the heights, we said goodbye to the Ait Bououli valley and headed back up the trail.

Hours later we threw our packs down outside a jite (a small country hotel) in the Ait Bougamez valley and begged the owner to let us inside for some much needed rest. We were led into a beautiful interior room lined with ponges and decorated with numerous examples of Moroccan craftsmanship. Lanterns made of metal and colored glass illuminated sprawling hand-woven Berber carpets on the floor, traditional curved knives that were hung upon the walls, and a stone fireplace adorned with bellows shaped from copper and red-dyed leather. Surrounded by this simple finery we curled up in woolen blankets for the rest of the morning and eventually woke to hot tea, fresh bread, and no surprises.

That afternoon we met with the members of the Association Amis of Bougamez. To our delight we found that this association contained not only more members, but also a number of women. The people we were working with had a great interest in the work we were doing and, in sh'allah, our success there will lead to the further spreading of the information we brought to the community. Afterwards we all felt, without exception, that this training session had been a success.

Our last undertaking of the day was the trip to the small town of Tabant, our projected starting point for the next day’s journey. Arriving just as the daylight began to fade we began our search for a jite in which to spend the night. Sadly lightning did not strike twice. The jite we found was a lot more rundown than the one we’d spent that morning in, but our weary bones didn’t complain. We had more serious problems to think about, namely the ramifications of a bum knee, a twisted ankle, and a huge mountain pass to be climbed in the morning.

Fortunately Tabant, like many towns in the High Atlas, is used to having foreign visitors who get in over their heads. The owner of the jite pulled out maps to help us understand just what we were going to be attempting the next day and, finding that our plans were somewhat overambitious, he helped us secure a pack mule and driver to aid us in getting our wounded and our water bottles up the trail. Our hope was to make it to the town of Ameskar, spend the night there in a jite, and then continue on to the next training. As we would soon find out, however, the information we had been given about the distance and the difficulty of such an endeavor was slightly erroneous.

The next morning we rose with the sun, met our driver, loaded our mule, and headed for the pass. As we hiked across the fields and through a of couple villages I couldn’t help but smile as John pointed out kids wearing soccer jerseys given away by US Ambassador Thomas Riley on his recent visit to the region. It was comforting to know that, along with the associations we met, we weren’t the only ones trying to do something worthwhile out here in the mountains.

Finally we started going up. And up, and up, and up. It may have been the altitude, the endless jokes we told along the way, or simply the excitement of being back out among untamed nature, but as we climbed that trail I couldn’t help but feel a sense of complete contentment and peace, an opening of my senses to the world around me. Scenic beauty, the company of good friends, and the gratification that comes with doing something that matters have a way of lifting the spirit out of the ordinary cares and worries of everyday life. Our service here tests us in a lot of ways, and ultimate satisfaction rarely comes until each test has been passed, but there are those singular moments when the difficulty of the task at hand turns to a thrill, reminding us that we are alive and that we are living fully in that moment.

As we stood at the top of the mountain, looking back at the last stretch of switchbacks we had just overcome, and peering down at the mule trains coming up the other side, there was a communal feeling of literally being on top of the world. Although the pain in my knee was continuing to mount and the ache in my lungs was a constant reminder of the thinning air, I knew that it was all worth it, that I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I had dreamed of standing in this place since I was small: a lonely mountaintop on a far distant continent, with only a few friends and animals for company, and the stresses of civilization miles beyond sight. If any of you reading this have yet to experience such a moment then I highly encourage you to start rethinking that weekend getaway to Marrakech and go find a mountain or a beach or a forest or whatever it is that will open your heart and mind to the savage magnificence of our adopted home.

The trip down involved a mule traffic jam, a hearty lunch of bread, cheese, and fake sausage, up-close views of a breath-taking cliff carved out of the side of a hill, and a refreshing splash through a river-bed that led us to a small village of mud huts containing, mercifully, a jite. Despite the inspirational backdrop of a landscape and a culture untouched for generations, we found to our dismay that the prognostications of the jite owner in Tabant were right. Physical exhaustion and the fast setting sun would not allow us to reach Ameskar that day.

As we holed up in the jite that night we were faced with a decision that, by this point on the trip, had become all too familiar: tagine or cous cous? Settling on cous cous in the hopes that it would give us the energy to get the better of yet another high mountain pass the next day, we ate our fill and quietly drifted off to sleep to the sounds of children playing in the alleys outside and the muezzin calling the faithful to the evening prayer.

The following day’s trek somehow failed to inspire the spiritual illumination of the previous morning. The aches and pains of our bodies, the steepness of the climb, and the knowledge that we were now trying to make up for lost ground stifled our spirits and slowed our steps. Suddenly the test to which we were subjecting ourselves seemed more oppressive than liberating. When the individual moves from the city to the country (or vice versa) eventually the cares of the new environment catch up with and overcome the wonder of witnessing things previously unseen. The mind adapts to its new surroundings, grows accustomed to them, and then turns back inward to the problems of the moment. In this instant the real nature of the test reveals itself and the subject is forced to rely on experience, ingenuity, and sheer willpower to see it through.

Fortunately, we brought a mule.

I won’t say that there were no more happy moments on the trip. We had plenty of laughs and eventually we did pass the test. We climbed the last mountain and reached Ameskar where we took stock of our situation and went to work on our blisters. Our mule driver had to turn back because we’d only paid him to take us this far and, because of our growing number of ailments, we realized that the only way we would be getting out of Ameskar any time soon would be to hire transport. This turned out to be unavailable for over a day, and it wasn’t until after our second night in Ameskar that a man with a transit eventually showed up and we had ourselves a ride.

Regrettably time constraints forced us to scrap the last two trainings, but we did get in touch with those associations and they understood what had happened. Cara, who lives nearby, has plans to go back and make sure they receive the materials we had prepared for them and, despite this disappointing end we all feel that the successes of the trip outweighed the defeats. A project like this gets at the real heart of what Peace Corps is all about. Finding people that want to help their country and sharing our skills with them so that they can carry on the work when we are gone is the essence of sustainable development. It’s what’s going to make the time and energy we spend here in Morocco worthwhile. As a new project our report will help guide other volunteers who would like to attempt something similar in the future and it gives us more experience about what we ourselves are capable of doing. On a more personal level its gives us a better perception of the Morocco around us, the Morocco that many of the people in our sites come from. As YD volunteers we tend to live in more heavily populated areas but the people we live with are often natives from the surrounding countryside. Getting out to these areas gives us a better appreciation of where these people come from, their various cultural traditions, their hardships, and their history. Even if we didn’t achieve the goals we set out with I think we found something else that we’ll be able to bring back to our towns: understanding of ourselves, our HCN’s, and our service.

As we unloaded our transit in El-Qelaat M’gouna and followed Cara to the door of her apartment I looked back on the last week and thought about everything that we had seen and done. In those moments when the work is behind you and you’re settling down to a delicious dinner, it’s hard to not wonder if what you’re doing is really making a difference, especially when your results seem to fall short of your expectations. It’s impossible for individual volunteers, or even small groups of them, to making sweeping social changes on the magnitude many of us dreamed of when we first became of aware of the realities of poverty and social injustice. But we did manage to learn something, we did get to see another side of Morocco, and, most importantly, we did manage to complete at least those first two trainings. Maybe now something will start to happen in Ait Bououli.

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