Earth Day

We had a mini Earth Day celebration in our CBT village today. We haven't been able to get access to the school in town because the mudir (director) was being uncooperative. The first week we were in CBT, we went to the school with a letter from the Ministry of Education that sanctioned PC and allowed us access to the schools. The mudir told us that since it wasn't from his immediate boss, he could not allow us to enter the school, speak to any teachers, or otherwise do anything on school grounds. He really turned me off – it felt like he was on a power trip and relishing the fact that he could turn us down and we really couldn't do anything about it. Never mind the fact that the letter came from his boss' boss.

One of our projects for PC was to plan a small Earth Day project, ideally involving environmental education at the school. We didn't have the luxury of the school, so we organized an informal trash pick-up. We spread the word by telling the boys from the family where we held class and the kids in our host families. This morning at the designated time and place, we were pleased to find about 25 boys waiting for us.

Each of us had prepared a short presentation in Tamazight, but assumed Hoda would have to "translate" for us. I.e. repeat everything we just said with the correct inflection, intonation, etc. but we were pleasantly surprised when the boys not only listened, but for the most part understood what we were trying to say. Dan talked about PC and what we do generally, Liz talked about Earth Day, and Sarah talked about why trash is a problem. We had prepared a simple game – basically whoever gathered the most trash won. I explained the rules and before I could tell them that we had prizes, the boys were running in all directions.

They collected quite a bit of trash, which we had planned to haul back to Ouarzazate. Hoda talked us into burning it, with the simple argument that Ouarzazate also burns its trash. While not an ideal environmental solution, it did eliminate the trash we had gathered. The fire even fueled the boys to gather more trash from the area adjacent to where we burned the trash.
Overall, we were happy with the outcome. We were a bit disappointed that no girls showed up, but we kind of expected that. We had rarely seen girls outside their homes, except when accompanying their mothers or older sisters to the fields to work or walking to and from school. Had we been able to use the school, we could have had a broader audience, including the girls.
Trash is one of the few environmental problems we identified in our CBT village and it is a common problem throughout Morocco. Until relatively recently, almost all "trash" was recycled or reused in some way. For example, old sweaters and other knit clothes are unraveled and the yarn used to make rugs; food scraps are fed to the animals (I delightfully discovered that sheep eat just about anything!), containers are used again and again to hold a variety of things. Most families generated very little, if any, trash. The advent of plastic bags, individually wrapped food, and packaged medicine has contributed to the pile-up of trash around the country.

Unfortunately, most cities and villages lack the infrastructure to deal with trash.
Moroccans, generally, don't have the "don't litter" value that many Americans have. People simply throw things out the door or drop them as they walk. Walking through our village you'll see all sorts of random trash – shoes, clothes, broken dishes, empty bubble packages (like the ones used for cold medicine), candy wrappers, etc. The "reuse and recycle" value continues to thrive. Items that can be recycled and reused are. For example, my host sisters make decorative trees out of plastic bottles, rugs are still made of old sweaters and the animals still get the food scraps.

Our Earth Day trash pick up addressed only a small portion of this problem, but we hope that we got the kids thinking about trash and what they can do to prevent it.