Une mille étoiles

Last night we went to Mostapha’s mother-in-law’s house for dinner and sat on the roof looking at the stars. I have never seen so many! You can see whole galaxies that you would never know existed if you looked at the night sky of London, and lots of shooting stars!

So this week we have been settling into village life and meeting different groups of people: the women’s cooperative who produce argan oil, the women’s English class, the members of AIDECO (the main organisation we’re working with out here), Maggie the American Peace Corps volunteer and a girl called Rachida who speaks excellent English. Yesterday we gave a presentation to the villagers in the community centre where we told them about our lives in England and the work we’ll be doing here. We spoke mostly in French but had learnt a few phrases in Tashleheet which went down very well and afterwards we served cake and biscuits which we’d baked ourselves (previously my baking repertoire consisted of banana and choc chip cake and not much else so this is a new experience for me!)

At the end of the presentation we invited all the women of the village to a meeting next weekend to discuss the problems with the communal washing area. The men and women in the village, and generally in Moroccan society, do not mix so we have decided to make a conscious effort to work with the woman on problems that concern them, something which the members of AIDECO (consisting totally of men) are finding difficult to understand. Maggie told us that previously the association installed a pipe to the communal washing area limiting the flow of water and the women were livid because they could no longer wash their rugs, but they couldn’t tell the men because men and women don’t communicate! This is a real problem here and something which we’re hoping to assist with by being a medium between the women of the village and the men of AIDECO.

Today, we’re having a bit of a day off and are going to go climb a mountain later on and pop into Maggie’s English class in the community centre.