Many Hands Make Light Work
We started our third day of the trip with another amazing breakfast on the terrace. We’re beginning to see why this is such a staple in Morocco because it’s an amazing way to start your day. Similar to yesterday’s breakfast, it had an amazing diversity of delicious foods to choose from.
Following breakfast, we were led in our first Darija lesson, a language lesson of the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. This lesson was focused around a number of words and phrases focused on morning greetings. We began with learning more simple words, and doing some spoken repetition, learning the meaning and a proper way to use them. We then applied those words to a typical back and forth for meeting and greeting someone in the morning. Each taking turns, practicing and testing one another on our recent learnings, soon to put this lesson into real action as we would soon be joining members of the community to support them in their recent project.
As Tizi-Noucheg is a small village of about 600 people, nestled in the High Atlas Mountains, it receives a lot of rain and snow outside of the summer season. This precipitation makes it very challenging for community members to navigate the village as the paths and roads become muddy and slippery. The community association has several projects on the go, however, the one we have the opportunity to support them with is helping to create pathways and roads using concrete to make the village easier to navigate.
After getting on our gloves, hats, masks, sunscreen and filling up our water bottles, we met the group of community members who would be leading us in the project today. They spent time explaining the process and letting us know what we would be doing. We started by levelling the ground where the concrete would be poured for the future road. We then mixed a pile of gravel, concrete and sand together, while adding in water to create the mixture for what would soon become the future road.
Next was to transport the mixture from where we mixed it, to where it would be spread. This is where the true power of teamwork and the phrase, many hands make light work came into practice. We lined up, next to one another, passing bucket after bucket of the liquid concrete to the end of our line. We would then pass it off to a project member who would pour it onto the ground. An amazing mid-morning treat took place when a collection of other community members brought us what we came to learn was ‘second breakfast’, a typical mid-morning snack shared with friends and neighbours. This second breakfast included madhoune, a honey bread which we all absolutely loved. We continued with the project until lunch and then came back again in the afternoon to finish our goal for the day.
In the afternoon, we became more efficient, finishing faster than expected and winning ourselves some free time before the soccer game we had with the locals. It was amazing to see how we may not be from the same place or speak the same language, but we connect over our love of sports, soccer being at the top of many of our lists. We mixed with the locals, forming teams of equal size. The game was so much fun! With lots of action, goals scored and of course, some friendly banter. Following the game, we thanked each other as you typically do, said our goodbyes, and headed back to our guest house for dinner. Tired from a full day, we’re headed off to bed, excited for what tomorrow will bring.
