Harvesting Fog in Morocco

Mist nets for harvesting water from fog have been around for a while and now the technology has come to Morocco. The results are impressive and have changed the lives of the inhabitants of five villages in the southwest of the country, who no longer have to travel several kilometres each day to fetch water.

At 1,225 meters above sea level, on the mountain overlooking Boutmezguida, five villages in the region of Sidi Ifni have installed forty huge nets to take advantage of fog. A fog fence or fog collector is an apparatus for collecting liquid water from fog, using a fine mesh or array of parallel wires. They trap the water droplets, which are then processed, mixed with well water and transported via pipelines to the villagers.

"In a region with semi-arid climate, having water by opening a simple tap is a revolution," says Aissa Derhem, president of the association Dar Si Hmad for Development, Education and Culture.

A Douar Id Achour, one of five communities served, women and children previously lost four hours a day on average to make round trips to retrieve well water.

"I filled two 20 litre four times in the day. But these 160 litres were sufficient not even us, because we have cattle! "says Massouda Boukhalfa, 47.

Mist nets in Chile

"Reaping the fog", has been used for more than twenty years in Chile, in the Andes. Developed by the NGO Fog Quest, which has already tested prototypes in several countries (Guatemala, Peru, Namibia, in particular), this is the first use in North Africa.

Symbolically, the water flow in Morocco began for the first time on March 21, World Water Day. Since then  92 homes and nearly 400 people have received running water to their homes.

"Morocco has a lot of fog due to three factors: the presence of an anticyclone, the Azores, a cold sea current and the obstacle represented by the mountain," says Derhem. "It's environmentally friendly and it helps preserve the water table in the region, which we were emptying."

The Dar If Hmad Association now wants to equip the surrounding villages and replace existing nets with new models capable of withstanding winds of 120 km /h.

The nets were built in Morocco with the help of a German foundation.

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Oulidia ~ More Than Just Great Oysters

Oulidia, on Morocco's Atlantic coastline, is famous for its oysters. It also has a reputation as one of the cleanest, most family friendly seaside towns in the country. The View From Fez investigates...

Prices of oysters vary widely - shop around

It is almost impossible to avoid oysters when visiting Oulidia. Not only are they on the menu of every restaurant, but cruise the waterfront and a dozen oyster salesmen will appear, shuck the oysters and pass them through the car window.

If you have rented an apartment, it is likely that a fishmonger on a scooter will appear each morning at your door with reasonably priced fish. They will also hunt out particular fish or prawns for you and deliver them the following day.

There are a number of good restaurants such as the Issa Blanca, and Ostrea II.  The Ostrea II is a well known stop for tourists and their oysters were delicious but expensive. However, their avocado and prawn salad was bland and based on frozen rather than fresh seafood.

For ambiance, price and an extensive menu you can't go past the L'initiale.  The Paella Royale for two is a real treat and packed with fresh seafood. Their oysters were also considerably cheaper than the Ostrea II and Issa Blanca.  L'initiale also serves a low priced and delicious breakfast.

L'initiale - friendly staff, and reasonably priced seafood.

Since The View From Fez first visited Oulidia around nine years ago, the town has undergone a face-lift and a great deal of development. Villas and apartments have sprung up, which now cover most of the hillside facing the lagoon.

Unlike other Moroccan seaside towns, there has been a conscious effort to keep new buildings low rise. Their style is in sympathy with the original Art Deco and Modernist beach houses, which line the streets adjacent to the beaches.

While the town is relatively quiet for much of the year, the holiday season following Ramadan sees the town packed with visitors. At this time, booking an apartment in advance is recommended. For those without a booking, locals waving sets of keys are happy to show you apartments for short term rent.

Oulidia is also home to a wide range of birds and ornithologists will find many different species in the wetlands and surrounding areas. Taking a boat ride around the lagoon is also a way of getting close up to the cormorants, falcons, herons and wading birds of the region.

Exploring the lagoon by boat is inexpensive and enjoyable

One of the most pleasing developments in Oulidia is the culture of civic pride in the cleanliness of the town and its beaches. Every morning sees teams of workers scouring the dunes and beaches collecting rubbish.  There are rubbish bins everywhere, which are regularly emptied. It is wonderful to see that, unlike at many Moroccan beaches, visitors actively collect their rubbish and deposit it in the bins.

Local boat operator, Hamid, complains that much of the plastic rubbish washed up on the Oulidia beaches comes from other places. "They all need to clean up like we do," he says.

Oulidia is one of 23 beaches in Morocco that have been awarded the "Blue Flag" environmental designation.

The beaches and dunes are remarkably free of rubbish

There are plenty of  amenities for beach lovers, ranging from small paddle boats through to dune buggies which, though noisy, are restricted to an outlying  area, away from the family beaches around the lagoon. Intrusive jet-skis are also thankfully prohibited at the main beaches.

For fishing enthusiasts, rock fishing is very popular, though caution needs to be taken as occasional large waves can be dangerous.

 Navigation tip: while all the local signs say "Oulidia", many GPS maps have the spelling "Loulidia".

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Twelve year old "miracle girl" found alive after floating for 24 hours

Twelve year old Ikram is being described as a miracle girl for surviving in the ocean for 24 hours after being swept out to sea in Oued Cherrat  The girl was found alive Monday after being spotted by Moroccan police searching the area for bodies of children who drowned on Sunday

Miraculously, Ikram floated on the surface of the water, says a media source, adding that the girl was immediately evacuated to Rabat Avicenne hospital to receive the necessary care.

On Wednesday, the body of a 15 year old was found on the beach in Skhirat  bringing the death toll to eight. The body of the driver, drowned after saving two children, was also found Wednesday.

Despite the fact that the children's coach, Mustapha Amrani, president of the sports association, has been detained, the victims' families refuse press for compensation. The man is esteemed by parents and children and involved personally in their education. He has always been very concerned about their future, says a source in Benslimane.

Amrani rescued several children from drowning. Today, the families of the victims said the responsibility lies with local authorities for not having placed  a sign to prevent access to the beach or having lifeguards to monitor swimmers.

The coach, who refuses to eat since his detention, was evacuated today to Temara hospital, where he is in intensive care. The man could be prosecuted for manslaughter.

The tragedy occurred early Sunday afternoon when the children from the town of Benslimane were on an unguarded beach at Oued Cherrat. (See original story here)

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Theatre Night in Fez ~ Eyes of the Universe

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Morocco's Daylight Saving Stops For Ramadan

As usual during Ramadan, Moroccans switch their watches and clocks back one hour to standard time (GMT) starting from next Sunday June 14.

According to a statement announced by the Ministry of Public Service and Modernisation, clocks revert by 60 minutes on Sunday, June 14, at 3:00 a.m. Daylight saving returns after Ramadan on Sunday 19 July at 2:00 a.m.

Incidentally all public administration offices will be open from 9:00 a.m till 3:00 p.m. during Ramadan


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Sufi Music for Syria Concert - Wednesday in Fez

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Tragedy at Bouznika Beach - 11 Children Drown

Eleven children were swept away today at the Bouznika beach.The Le360 website reports that five bodies were recovered and a search is ongoing to find the others

The victims, believed to be between 12 and 17 years of age, were swept away by a violent wave while they were trying to swim at the beach near Oued Cherrate not far from Rabat.

The children are believed to be part of a forty-six member Taekwondo club from Benslimane who had headed to the beach for relief from the very hot weather. Some children were rescued and admitted to hospital. According to some accounts, two helicopters were quickly on the scene to locate other missing children.

An investigation was opened into the incident under the supervision of the competent prosecutor and the Interior Minister went on site to oversee the search and rescue operations.

See update on "miracle girl" survival after 24 hours at sea.


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Fes Festival ~ Has the Magic Gone?

Peter Culshaw is a Fez Festival veteran and much respected music journalist. Peter Culshaw recorded his thoughts about the Fez festival of World Sacred Music on The Arts Desk - a highly regarded online arts site. With his permission, we repost his article. (A link to the original article is at the bottom of the story.)

theartsdesk in Fes: Has the magic gone?

The top world music festival reinvents itself with an Africa theme

Fatoumata Diawara: Under the Barbary Oak

More than anywhere else, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has been the place where I have gone annually for most of the last 20 years to retune my ears, to get inspiration, and to discover new international music. For fans, it was always more than a mere music festival; there was a visionary, idealistic element. The founder, Faouzi Skali, is a Sufi who started the festival as a response to the first Gulf war and invited musicians, thinkers and practitioners from all religious persuasions as a counterpoint to extremism and intolerance elsewhere. That mission’s importance grew post-9/11 and continues to expand with the madness of ISIS and their psychotic ilk.

Fes itself is in many ways the star of the show – the ancient medina with the winding car-free streets, the call of the muezzin, the circling swallows in the Bab Boujloud at sunset. Last year Skali and many of his associates were pushed out and so the big question for fans of the festival centred on how it was being remade, and would the idealistic elements remain? Skali, incidentally, still runs an impressive Sufi festival in Fes earlier in the year.

"No mention of Skali ... at best a faux pas, at worst rude and ungrateful"

The printed programme was a disappointment – no mention of what many people see as the heart of the festival: the Sufi nights where followers of the local Sufi brotherhoods perform outside, very late, in Dar Tazi; no mention of the Festival of the City, which are the free concerts in Bab Boujloud (the big concerts are very expensive for most ordinary locals); and no mention of Skali himself, which seemed at best a faux pas, at worst rude and ungrateful. Fortunately, the excellent local blog The View from Fez kept us up to speed with the programme.

One great thing about Fes is the characters you meet, which illustrates the sheer strangeness of the place

I arrived in a unseasonal, torrential rainstorm and that night's concert of the always feisty Oumou Sangare from Mali was cancelled. But the following day I saw three top-notch shows which assuaged fears that the musical level might have gone down. There was an extraordinary and moving ritual in the medina from Burkina Faso called Masks of the Moon, like some Peter Brook 1970s avant-garde production, but centuries old and compelling both visually and musically.

"Masks of the Moon, like some Peter Brook 1970s avant-garde production"

There was a performance of Cuban pianist Omar Sosa and a wonderful, expressive dancer called Tamango with percussionist Gustavo Ovalles. Sosa is a consummate pianist who has musicality oozing out of every pore and the result was both plugged into the past in its use of Santería sacred rhythms of Cuba and modern in its presentation, with impressive video projections under the famous massive barbary oak in Musée Batha.

There was a curious but satisfying collaboration between Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya and African kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, both of them doing music that originated in the 13th century on different continents. These were all in the Nights In the Medina strand, which was like a delicious tapas miscellany of musics.

The music director of the festival, Alain Weber, did mention that he felt “less constrained” under the new regime and it is likely that the above selection would have been impossible in earlier years – notably the mix of dance and video projection. I went off the main programme to get my musical kicks for much of the rest of the week. Instead of seeing what were billed as US soul legends The Temptations (actually, the splinter group The Temptations Review featuring Dennis Edwards, who joined the real line-up in 1968) I ended up seeing a fabulous group from the disputed territory of Western Sahara fronted by the charismatic figure of Saida Charaf, who dominated the stage in front of thousands of revellers in Bab Boujloud.

Saida Charaf

The theme of this year’s festival was Africa and Morocco’s relationship to it, but there wasn’t any gnaoua music, that most African of Moroccan of forms developed by slaves (a painful issue in itself not mentioned much at the morning discussion forum, I am told) who came over the Sahara, so I jumped at the chance of attending an all-night lila, or healing ceremony, in the medina. The close-up funk-spiritual rhythms at Casa Zohra were thrilling but I bailed out at 4am after a traditional harira soup. I’m not necessarily blaming the soup, but I was sick the next day and only recovered after two days, and this may have flavoured my perception of the rest of the festival.

One great thing about Fes is the characters you meet, which illustrates the sheer strangeness of the place. One local guy told me how he had had a nervous breakdown and the only way out was to invent his own religion based around birds. For three months he drank bottles of water with bird feathers in as a successful cure. One could do a whole book on such characters found in Fes and their stories.

Without Faouzi Skali and some of his friends and acolytes the festival normally attracts – the Sufi leaders, the social activists, the visionary academics – the audience seemed to consist more than previously of curious tourists. Some of the music, excellent enough, such as the collaboration between Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca and Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, was the type of thing you can see at the Barbican and WOMAD and perhaps it’s too early to tell with the new set-up, but there was a feeling that the festival might be morphing into a superior world music festival, with some of the old soul or magic missing. I imagine this is a familiar refrain from those who went to the early Glastonbury, Burning Man or Festivals in the Desert (“you should have been there in the early years”), even if most newcomers think they are still impressive events.

The last night was exceptional with the Hamdouchiya Sufis

Although not advertised fully, the Sufi nights at Dar Tazi were on. The highlights were the wonderful Said Guissi, who takes traditional Aissawa music – described by one visitor in the 1920s as “a tempest of oboes and drums” – into a new place. I think of him as a kind of Miles Davis of old-style Moroccan trance music. The last night, too, was exceptional with a Hamdouchiya group featuring, unusually, a female singer and a couple of European interlopers who performed wild, off-kilter trance music to great acclaim.

The last night went out with a bang and was easily the most popular, with waiters begging me to get them in to the Emirati singer Hussain Al Jassmi, who charmed the overcrowded Bab Makina, where the old Palace walls were decorated effectively this year with gorgeous light projections. With a 20-odd piece band, he won over the local upper-middle classes (the women mainly turning up in heels and skirts as opposed to headscarfs). His big hit seemed to be “Habibi Bashaloni” about a lover who supports Barcelona football team, who will be celebrating the result of the Champions League final, no doubt.

Peter is a music and arts broadcaster and has written for the Observer, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Songlines, among others in the UK and internationally. He has written a recently published book Clandestino: In Search Of Manu Chao published by Serpent's Tail and has produced and compiled numerous CDs. He was a founding Director of theartsdesk, and is co-editor of the New Music section.

See the original article here: Arts Desk

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Sunday Feature ~ The Power of Amazigh Women

Earlier this year El Houssaine Naaim wrote a fascinating article on women in Amazigh (Berber) society. Our Sunday Feature is an edited version of his piece. It first appeared on Morocco World News

Historically, women have been accorded varying levels of respect in different historical periods and different cultures and religions. In the pre-Islamic world, for example, women were considered second class human beings, symbols of shame and stigma, and female babies were often buried alive.

In the western world, women were considered to be witches - “Women are closer to the devil than to holy water.” In some Asian societies, women have been considered a symbol of bad luck. As one Korean saying goes, “If you don’t beat your woman for three days, she becomes a fox.”

In contrast to these societies and cultures,  Amazigh women have played outstanding leadership roles including as military leaders, spiritual mothers, and even more significantly as one of the Amazigh gods.

Amazigh Civilisation- A School on How to Treat Women

Women in the parts of North Africa originally inhabited by Amazigh people (Berbers) were called Tamghart  which is equivalent to the word “president” in English. The brother and sister concepts literally belong to the mother and not to the father. For example, Amazigh people say Ot-Mma (for Sister) or Og-Mma (for Brother) meaning she belongs to my mom or he belongs to my mom respectively.

Women were never accorded a low status in Amazigh society and throughout history were always responsible for the management of economic, social, cultural, or even religious matters.

Three examples of Amazigh women are illustrative of the status of women in Amazigh history: Tanit, Dihya, and Tin-Hinan.

In contrast to many societies in the world, women were venerated not just as ordinary human beings, but also as goddesses. Amazigh people in Carthage, now Tunisia, around 400 BC worshipped a woman, named Tanit. She was considered the goddess of prosperity, fertility, love, and the moon.

Historians note that the Amazigh military practiced certain rituals in her honour. They believe that the name of present day Tunisia and the Greek historic city Athens were named after her.

Tanit is evident in Amazigh culture and legends through antiques, statues, amulets, monuments, mosaics, as well as Amazigh ornaments.

The symbol of Tanit

The famous symbol that refers to Tanit is a triangle (sometimes trapezoid) topped with a circle separating the two forms with a horizontal line. The triangle depicted the goddess as a very simple woman.

Tin-Hinan or Tamnugalt as she is called by the native Amazigh in Azawad and surrounding regions (Mali, Nigeria, Libya and Algeria) means in Tamazight “she of the tents” and “president” She was considered the spiritual mother of the Touareg tribes. Thus, the name Tin-Hinan is interpreted as “mother of the tribe” or “queen of the camp.”

Tin-Hinan played a great role in protecting her tribes as she was always considered the symbol of social, political, and spiritual stability of Touareg tribes.

Tin-Hinan 

According to some historians Tin-Hinan was believed to have come from the Tafilalt oasis in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.  She was accompanied by a maidservant named Takamat. The pair were searching for an adequate place to settle down where there was water and safety.

The body of the queen Tin-Hinan is currently in the Bardo Museum in Algiers.

 Tin-Hinan legends have inspired art and jewellery 

Besides the goddess Tanit and the spiritual mother Tin-Hinan, Amazigh people were led by female military leaders in the 7th century in Numidia which is present day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

The military leader who marked the history of the Amazigh in North Africa was Dihiya, or Damya or Tihiya, different versions of the same name, all of which literally mean “beautiful.” She lived in 585 - 712 AD. She led several battles against the Romans and Arabs during the 7th century.

The historian Al Morakochi Ibn Idhari said about her that “All those who lived in the Africa of Romans (at that time) were afraid of her, as all Amazigh people were obedient to her.”

Dihya had defeated the invaders of North Africa on many occasions including the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Arabs. The last battle that she led occurred between her and the Arab leader Hassan ben Nouman who was first defeated and withdrew from the battle in 693 AD. She was called “Kahina” by Arabs as she was accused of sorcery.

Afterward, Dihya did not punish or kill the captives soldiers of  Hassan ben Nouman. Instead, she released them and in one case even adopted a prisoner who she thought kind with good manners which resembled the nature of the Amazigh people.

The historian Ibnu Al-hakam, in his book Kitab Futuh Misr wa Alamghreb, says that “Dihya treated her captives well, and released them, except for a man from Bani Abbas, named Khalid Benu Yazid, whom she adopted.

The Dihya legend has been retold in art and novels

Dihya defended her region by adopting the policy of "scorched earth" - burning anything of use to the Arabs.  Dihya said that “The Arabs want our country for gold, silver, and metal, but for us, farms and pastures are enough. We have no solution but destroying the land of Africa (North Africa), so that Arabs would despair and lose hope and leave forever.”

“Dihya, the Amazigh knight who marked history unlike any other woman, she rode horses and sought among the folk from the Aures to Tripoli, taking arms to defend her ancestral land.” – Ibn Khaldun

Dihya was buried in Khenchela, a city in modern Algeria.

Tanit, Tin-Hanan, and Dihya are just a few examples of Amazigh women who brought pride to Amazigh society and contributed to its civilisation, a fact unfortunately neglected by official institutions in North African countries.

Amazigh girl - with an eye on the future

Women have always been an important member in Amazigh families and societies at large. Thus, there are still tribes which pay tribute to Amazigh female saints called lella, a term used to venerate and honour people with a high reputation.

NOTE: The 11th Festival of Amazigh Culture ~ takes place in Fez between the 24th and 26th of July You can find out more and read the provisional programme here: Amazigh Festival 2015

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