At SOAS, where language students go on to work for MSF, MI5, and everything in between, it always seemed that the Development Studies students were the ones most often in existential crisis. One described the course: ‘in the first year, they teach you all the reasons why most aid projects are at best without sustainable impact, and at worst actively damaging. In the second year you are drowning/dancing away your sorrows in the East African clubs on the Seven Sisters Road, and in the third year it is suggested that maybe, just maybe, small projects, developed over years and led by the beneficiaries themselves might have some useful impact. I myself have seen the folly of misguided aid several times, most memorably in the Marshall Islands, where aid in one form or another makes up seventy percent of the country’s entire GDP (!). US ‘Aid’ had come in the form of white rice and coca cola, and given everyone diabetes. Jaded ex-pats would drink on hotel terraces and complain that the locals had used the expensive mosquito nets they had been given as fishing nets. Mormans, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses jostled for new recruits, and lots of ‘aid’ was predicated on the expectation that the recipient would eventually be baptised.
Lately have been of the opinion that I/we are only altruistic to meet our own needs, rather than anyone else’s, and if we are clear about that from the beginning then it avoids upset if things don’t play out as we hoped.
But I also believe that we are all fundamentally connected, and that I can't really feel fulfilled and free at the same time as perceiving that others do not. By some strong and regrettable conditioning, I can walk past a homeless person in London, maybe one that looks like my grandad, and have rationalised away the sadness and impotency i feel within five seconds. But being in a country - just for fun! - where many people are vastly less materially wealthy than myself and, importantly, where the cultural fallout of free market capitalism hasn't yet been fully felt, and people's souls are therefore closer to the surface, well that is a different story. My last experience of this was ten years ago. Then, Zimbabwe, with an mbira. Now, Morocco, with a marimba and a green 2003 MWB Mercedes Sprinter called Dame Judy Dench.
I have to talk a moment about Dame Judy. Her youth was spent in Aberdeen transporting fish, before a couple of years in Bolton, where she would move toys and general market stall bits and bobs from a wholesalers in Leicester to Bolton market. Me, her third and for sure proudest owner, took her to Kai’s carpentry workshop in Cornwall, where we spent a glorious 2017 summer turning her into a mobile home, complete with solar electric, ninety litres of water storage, a shoe cupboard, a snack cupboard, and a small library. I learnt how to use a drill and what a biscuit joint is. We chunks of 2018 in the midlands and north west, in countryside carparks and town industrial estates that I never knew existed, where I worked in schools and avoided occasional loneliness with butter'n'salt wraps and unhealthy amounts of Radio 4.
But this was merely splashing in the shallows for Judy, and her appetite for adventure was whetted when she took the BikeCoins collective to deliver clothes to Calais and bring back mostly legal racing bike frames from Ghent. In between fourth and fifth gear I heard her whisper a dream of stretching her ample axles at 120km an hour, in a place where she would not be criminalised for letting me sleep inside her, where the sun would keep her batteries topped up and she would host people with no common language, drinking tea and queuing up tunes on spotify.
So we went to Morocco.
Morocco is a good place to be in January 2019. It is hot. The beaches are wide and deserted and the waves huuuge. Vehicles of all kinds sit by the roadside packed with the sweetest tangerines i have ever tasted, 15p a kilo. Animals are shepherded, butchered and cooked in plain sight, and choosing to eat them feels good. With few exceptions, people are relaxed, greet warmly, and invite you to come back to their village to eat with their mum. Kids hitchhike home from school without fear. The stars are vivid over the sea, and overwhelming in the desert. Electricity pylons seem to be going up by the side of every road, tap water is drinkable, education is free till 15, and though I am in no position to comment on the experiences of women here, those I have spoken to express excitement about the changes that are taking place more often than frustration about how things have been until now.
My main aim was to find somewhere with odds on hot sun, where I could to park the van with direct access to the sea, and far enough away from others that i could play marimba all day without disturbing anyone. On a tip from Vandog Traveller, I took the road south from the village of Sidi Kaouki, parked the van on a rock above the tide line and set up the marimba facing the sea and setting sun. It was a sunday night, and I was soon joined by a couple of fishermen Abdul and Hafid, a goat herd named Hassan, and a couple of property developers from nearby Essaouira. The marimba is easy to play, and provides a focal point that softens social and cultural differences, and means you can talk when you want and play when you want.
Abdul, Hassan and Hafid lived in a shack at the edge of the beach, and over the next days I saw how they worked, setting the nets in the sand before the incoming tide, then hauling them in an hour or so after high tide, waist deep in the roaring ocean, bodies bent against the drift. With half a dozen or so big mullet, octopus or plaice in a bag they would walk or hitch a motorbike to a nearby village or town to sell the fish to restaurants or tourists. If there were no fish they would go out on the rocks as the tide went further out and pick mussels or clams. Hafid, meanwhile, would wander about on a donkey in the sand dune scrub behind the beach with fifty young goats and a ready smile, occasionally checking facebook on his phone.
Our transition from acquaintances to buddies came mid-scrub in a nearby hammam. Traditionally few homes would have plentiful water, so men, women and children would visit their local hammam - imagine a big multi-roomed sauna with a reservoir of hot water, underfloor heating and nice tilework - a few times a week for a deep clean. As with lots of things I have seen in Morocco, the whole business follows a strict process, part of which involves taking a glove shaped brush and scrubbing the fuck out of your neighbour, leaving behind little ribbons of dirty skin, then rinsing, soaping, and doing the whole thing all over again. And the scrubs were Comprehensive, the first time surprisingly so. I was cleaned, then I cleaned. Taking effort and care to exfoliate another felt like giving a gift, and another example of how words are rarely the best way of communicating the most important things, so by the time we left there was an unspoken but certainly acknowledged gratitude and trust.
Later I ate with Abdul’s family, fell in love with the three kids, made the mistake of starting to eat the meat at the bottom of the tagine dish before it had been divvied up onto bits of torn bread by the mother, and saw another process in action - making Argan oil. Argan trees were everywhere in that region, almost a mono-culture, squat and bristly with occasional goats munching in their branches. Life appears very subsistence, and aside from shepherding, making Argan oil seems like the only way that women have of making actual dollar. I was invited to buy some at a price that seemed expensive until I compared it with what they were selling it for in the ‘female cooperatives’ and on the internet, and realised that if I was in an episode of Bargain Hunt, I would have won without even showing up to the car boot. There are two kinds of Argan oil - the roasted kind, used for cooking, and the cold pressed kind, used as a skin and hair cosmetic and massage oil. In order to meet my own needs for fairness, cooperation, reciprocity and purpose, wouldn’t it be a great idea to see if a few of my friends wanted some and get together a little chunk of money for the family, trade not aid etc?
A couple of days and a facebook post later, I was able to go back to Abdul and say that we wanted fifteen litres of oil, 14 of which were the massage kind. He looked happy but also slight perturbed. We went to see the women of his family. I don’t speak Berber, but from the tone of his wife’s voice, the tickled expression on his mother’s face, and the way the words ‘litre’, ‘kilo’, and ‘un semaine’ kept coming up, I guessed that Abdul had over promised and under priced, and I was correct. It turned out that without a special machine, the cold pressed Argan took almost twice as long to make than the cooking stuff, almost a week to make a single litre. It was also more argan intensive, requiring 25kg of nuts to make 1l oil (an average tree will yield enough nut to make four litres of Argan a year). Why, they asked, had Abdul said that they could make multiple litres of it in just a week, and at that price? Was he mad? Had he been too blissed out after my exfoliation? I said that I understood it was beaucoup travaille, but that I had told the people the price he had set, and couldn’t very well change it now. Couldn’t he ask some of his neighbours to get involved? No, people wouldn’t work for that price. Throughout the conversation Sumeyah, their eight year old daughter, was using a big stone to crush the date-sized, ferrero rocher textured argan nutcases to reveal acorn shaped nuts that would then themselves be cracked open to get out the almondy kernel inside. She kept looking at me with the expression ‘look how good i am at this task that is very arduous yet that I make seem effortless!’ And i looked back ‘wow, yeah i am totally impressed by how you are doing that!’. It struck me a) she might be kept off school in order to make the amount of oil required b) Given that these village women looked way more wizened than women the same age in the UK, was i facilitating a transaction that literally made relatively poor girls age prematurely in order that relatively affluent women looked younger? Was this a textbook BA Development Studies case study? Would I soon be offering loans for infrastructure projects on the condition that they structurally adjusted their donkey?
In the end a sister in law dropped by and suggested a solution: do the machinable part of the processing* for a small fee at a nearby coop, thereby speeding up the process and making it worthwhile for other families to get involved.
_____
I picked up Beth and we went to the desert for a few days, returning to the village a week later. Everyone was in high spirits - they had managed to make the order with a couple of days to spare. In total eight families had been part of the process. We celebrated with a grand hammam trip to Essouaria and on the way back stopped at an electrics shop. His wife was super excited. The village had only had electricity for a year, and Abdul’s family had acquired two tellys but no satellite dish. They had to go to his mum’s if they wanted to watch, and my guess is that they didn’t always all want to watch the same thing. Today was the day of the satellite dish purchase! Forty euros (under a litre of Argan oil) for the dish, receiver and cables. Sumeyah’s enthusiastic Argan cracking came back to me - each nut cracked brought her one step closer to relaxing with Peppa Pig and friends, and this made the heavy stone a tool of the future. This image was followed by that of another 8 year old I know, who barely greets me when I visit his house because he is so absorbed by Fortnite. Enough said. But this isn’t an episode of the Moral Maze, nor a critical analysis the international Argan Oil trade through the lens of Non Violent Communication, so let’s just give thanks to the goats, observe that everyone (me too! Especially me) got some of their wants and needs met for a while, and keep our fingers crossed that I can get this precious cargo through customs.
*the ‘cold press’ part - the machine is basically a small electric millstone that turns the Argan seed into a peanut buttery gloop. This sets into a kind of oily soap that is is then hand-squeezed to get the oil)
Lately have been of the opinion that I/we are only altruistic to meet our own needs, rather than anyone else’s, and if we are clear about that from the beginning then it avoids upset if things don’t play out as we hoped.
But I also believe that we are all fundamentally connected, and that I can't really feel fulfilled and free at the same time as perceiving that others do not. By some strong and regrettable conditioning, I can walk past a homeless person in London, maybe one that looks like my grandad, and have rationalised away the sadness and impotency i feel within five seconds. But being in a country - just for fun! - where many people are vastly less materially wealthy than myself and, importantly, where the cultural fallout of free market capitalism hasn't yet been fully felt, and people's souls are therefore closer to the surface, well that is a different story. My last experience of this was ten years ago. Then, Zimbabwe, with an mbira. Now, Morocco, with a marimba and a green 2003 MWB Mercedes Sprinter called Dame Judy Dench.
I have to talk a moment about Dame Judy. Her youth was spent in Aberdeen transporting fish, before a couple of years in Bolton, where she would move toys and general market stall bits and bobs from a wholesalers in Leicester to Bolton market. Me, her third and for sure proudest owner, took her to Kai’s carpentry workshop in Cornwall, where we spent a glorious 2017 summer turning her into a mobile home, complete with solar electric, ninety litres of water storage, a shoe cupboard, a snack cupboard, and a small library. I learnt how to use a drill and what a biscuit joint is. We chunks of 2018 in the midlands and north west, in countryside carparks and town industrial estates that I never knew existed, where I worked in schools and avoided occasional loneliness with butter'n'salt wraps and unhealthy amounts of Radio 4.
But this was merely splashing in the shallows for Judy, and her appetite for adventure was whetted when she took the BikeCoins collective to deliver clothes to Calais and bring back mostly legal racing bike frames from Ghent. In between fourth and fifth gear I heard her whisper a dream of stretching her ample axles at 120km an hour, in a place where she would not be criminalised for letting me sleep inside her, where the sun would keep her batteries topped up and she would host people with no common language, drinking tea and queuing up tunes on spotify.
So we went to Morocco.
Morocco is a good place to be in January 2019. It is hot. The beaches are wide and deserted and the waves huuuge. Vehicles of all kinds sit by the roadside packed with the sweetest tangerines i have ever tasted, 15p a kilo. Animals are shepherded, butchered and cooked in plain sight, and choosing to eat them feels good. With few exceptions, people are relaxed, greet warmly, and invite you to come back to their village to eat with their mum. Kids hitchhike home from school without fear. The stars are vivid over the sea, and overwhelming in the desert. Electricity pylons seem to be going up by the side of every road, tap water is drinkable, education is free till 15, and though I am in no position to comment on the experiences of women here, those I have spoken to express excitement about the changes that are taking place more often than frustration about how things have been until now.
My main aim was to find somewhere with odds on hot sun, where I could to park the van with direct access to the sea, and far enough away from others that i could play marimba all day without disturbing anyone. On a tip from Vandog Traveller, I took the road south from the village of Sidi Kaouki, parked the van on a rock above the tide line and set up the marimba facing the sea and setting sun. It was a sunday night, and I was soon joined by a couple of fishermen Abdul and Hafid, a goat herd named Hassan, and a couple of property developers from nearby Essaouira. The marimba is easy to play, and provides a focal point that softens social and cultural differences, and means you can talk when you want and play when you want.
Abdul, Hassan and Hafid lived in a shack at the edge of the beach, and over the next days I saw how they worked, setting the nets in the sand before the incoming tide, then hauling them in an hour or so after high tide, waist deep in the roaring ocean, bodies bent against the drift. With half a dozen or so big mullet, octopus or plaice in a bag they would walk or hitch a motorbike to a nearby village or town to sell the fish to restaurants or tourists. If there were no fish they would go out on the rocks as the tide went further out and pick mussels or clams. Hafid, meanwhile, would wander about on a donkey in the sand dune scrub behind the beach with fifty young goats and a ready smile, occasionally checking facebook on his phone.
Our transition from acquaintances to buddies came mid-scrub in a nearby hammam. Traditionally few homes would have plentiful water, so men, women and children would visit their local hammam - imagine a big multi-roomed sauna with a reservoir of hot water, underfloor heating and nice tilework - a few times a week for a deep clean. As with lots of things I have seen in Morocco, the whole business follows a strict process, part of which involves taking a glove shaped brush and scrubbing the fuck out of your neighbour, leaving behind little ribbons of dirty skin, then rinsing, soaping, and doing the whole thing all over again. And the scrubs were Comprehensive, the first time surprisingly so. I was cleaned, then I cleaned. Taking effort and care to exfoliate another felt like giving a gift, and another example of how words are rarely the best way of communicating the most important things, so by the time we left there was an unspoken but certainly acknowledged gratitude and trust.
Later I ate with Abdul’s family, fell in love with the three kids, made the mistake of starting to eat the meat at the bottom of the tagine dish before it had been divvied up onto bits of torn bread by the mother, and saw another process in action - making Argan oil. Argan trees were everywhere in that region, almost a mono-culture, squat and bristly with occasional goats munching in their branches. Life appears very subsistence, and aside from shepherding, making Argan oil seems like the only way that women have of making actual dollar. I was invited to buy some at a price that seemed expensive until I compared it with what they were selling it for in the ‘female cooperatives’ and on the internet, and realised that if I was in an episode of Bargain Hunt, I would have won without even showing up to the car boot. There are two kinds of Argan oil - the roasted kind, used for cooking, and the cold pressed kind, used as a skin and hair cosmetic and massage oil. In order to meet my own needs for fairness, cooperation, reciprocity and purpose, wouldn’t it be a great idea to see if a few of my friends wanted some and get together a little chunk of money for the family, trade not aid etc?
A couple of days and a facebook post later, I was able to go back to Abdul and say that we wanted fifteen litres of oil, 14 of which were the massage kind. He looked happy but also slight perturbed. We went to see the women of his family. I don’t speak Berber, but from the tone of his wife’s voice, the tickled expression on his mother’s face, and the way the words ‘litre’, ‘kilo’, and ‘un semaine’ kept coming up, I guessed that Abdul had over promised and under priced, and I was correct. It turned out that without a special machine, the cold pressed Argan took almost twice as long to make than the cooking stuff, almost a week to make a single litre. It was also more argan intensive, requiring 25kg of nuts to make 1l oil (an average tree will yield enough nut to make four litres of Argan a year). Why, they asked, had Abdul said that they could make multiple litres of it in just a week, and at that price? Was he mad? Had he been too blissed out after my exfoliation? I said that I understood it was beaucoup travaille, but that I had told the people the price he had set, and couldn’t very well change it now. Couldn’t he ask some of his neighbours to get involved? No, people wouldn’t work for that price. Throughout the conversation Sumeyah, their eight year old daughter, was using a big stone to crush the date-sized, ferrero rocher textured argan nutcases to reveal acorn shaped nuts that would then themselves be cracked open to get out the almondy kernel inside. She kept looking at me with the expression ‘look how good i am at this task that is very arduous yet that I make seem effortless!’ And i looked back ‘wow, yeah i am totally impressed by how you are doing that!’. It struck me a) she might be kept off school in order to make the amount of oil required b) Given that these village women looked way more wizened than women the same age in the UK, was i facilitating a transaction that literally made relatively poor girls age prematurely in order that relatively affluent women looked younger? Was this a textbook BA Development Studies case study? Would I soon be offering loans for infrastructure projects on the condition that they structurally adjusted their donkey?
In the end a sister in law dropped by and suggested a solution: do the machinable part of the processing* for a small fee at a nearby coop, thereby speeding up the process and making it worthwhile for other families to get involved.
_____
I picked up Beth and we went to the desert for a few days, returning to the village a week later. Everyone was in high spirits - they had managed to make the order with a couple of days to spare. In total eight families had been part of the process. We celebrated with a grand hammam trip to Essouaria and on the way back stopped at an electrics shop. His wife was super excited. The village had only had electricity for a year, and Abdul’s family had acquired two tellys but no satellite dish. They had to go to his mum’s if they wanted to watch, and my guess is that they didn’t always all want to watch the same thing. Today was the day of the satellite dish purchase! Forty euros (under a litre of Argan oil) for the dish, receiver and cables. Sumeyah’s enthusiastic Argan cracking came back to me - each nut cracked brought her one step closer to relaxing with Peppa Pig and friends, and this made the heavy stone a tool of the future. This image was followed by that of another 8 year old I know, who barely greets me when I visit his house because he is so absorbed by Fortnite. Enough said. But this isn’t an episode of the Moral Maze, nor a critical analysis the international Argan Oil trade through the lens of Non Violent Communication, so let’s just give thanks to the goats, observe that everyone (me too! Especially me) got some of their wants and needs met for a while, and keep our fingers crossed that I can get this precious cargo through customs.
*the ‘cold press’ part - the machine is basically a small electric millstone that turns the Argan seed into a peanut buttery gloop. This sets into a kind of oily soap that is is then hand-squeezed to get the oil)
