Terraced

We are climbing up a mountain, and the landscape looks like Mars. Alternately rocky and sandy, the trail requires steady feet, but our shoes slip and slide over the red dust that coats everything. Other than the odd cactus dotting the steep slopes, this is a wasteland.

Finally, after two hours of hard, sweaty trooping, we reach a crest and see a tiny village in the distance. Its muddy red buildings look abandoned and ghostly. We climbed all this way for this? Why would anyone want to live here? So far from the civilized world, accessible only by this treacherous mountain path, set in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason… Have the villagers come to their senses and left in search of a nicer place to live?

We are beyond thirsty. Our water bottles were empty long ago. As we approach the village, we can think of nothing but the sweet delight of filling our bottles and our bodies with liquid. We reach the communal water station and fill our bottles greedily. The water is clear and plentiful. Mountain water, we are told – cleaner than any water we’ll find in the “civilized” world. It is gold to us.

As our thirsty thoughts clear, we look around and discover that this village is not as barren as we had thought. The children are laughing as they chase the toys they’ve made with sticks and wheels. They run around like little mountain goats on the hillside. Their parents need not wonder where they are. They are healthy and happy in their mountain home. This whole world is their playground, and they could not be more safe.

The dusty red buildings seem at first quaint and primitive, but they are carefully numbered, and their inhabitants exhibit none of the misery apparent on so many of the faces lining the streets of Casablanca. They smile and greet us with a calm “bonjour,” and we know that, despite our comparative oddity, we are welcome here.

Most striking of all, however, is the dramatic change in the landscape surrounding these humble dwellings. Mars has disappeared; these people are nestled in a lush, green piece of paradise. The steep mountain slope has been terraced and irrigated, and abundant crops grow everywhere. The cows are sleek and healthy, and the goats and sheep wander amicably through the gardens and streets alike. Women harvest corn and other vegetables by hand and carry the heavy loads on their backs up the hill to the village. Children ride donkeys to neighbouring fields and villages, or down the mountain to the “civilized world” with goods to sell. As dusk approaches, the men and boys head to the soccer field to play, and the girls watch us with calm, but curious eyes. The mountains surround us on all sides, and hold us close. I have never seen such peaceful people, living quietly in such a peaceful place. And now that I am here, I wonder why anyone, upon arriving, would ever want to leave.

Freshly baked bread awaits us, along with locally made blackberry, fig, and cactus pear jams. We drink sweet thyme tea on the rooftop terrace, and envy the people who awaken to this spectacular view every day of their lives. Later, we sit around low tables enjoying barley soup, savoury tagine, and a sleepy verbena tea that sends us dozily off to bed.

Our accommodations are simple, by our standards, but more than adequate. We have electricity with which to charge our phones and light our rooms. We have water with which to brush our teeth and wash our hands and faces. The toilets, though not entirely fragrant, are functional. The floors are spread with rich carpets made by the local residents, and warm blankets await us in our padded beds. In the morning, we enjoy fresh bread and msemmen, and we are treated to rosehip jam and locally made butter. We are, in every way, satisfied.

How can this be, in a village so oddly situated at the top of nowhere, carved into a mountainside so otherwise devoid of life? These people are poor by our standards, but in many ways, this village is a picture of rural prosperity. Why?

Water.

These people have clean water to drink so their children don’t die of cholera as they once did.

They have a reservoir and an irrigation system that keeps their fields watered and allows them to grow food.

When water is scarce, they use lines they’ve drawn in the reservoir to determine which fields will get water on which days. Before they had a valve that could be opened and closed, they controlled the water flow with goatskin wrapped around a stick.

The drinking water is equally distributed as well. The houses are numbered, and each has its own water meter to ensure that every family gets what it needs.

There is food for everyone, and enough to spare to be brought down the mountain to be sold.

This began years ago. As the village prospered, a road was built, allowing trucks to come up the mountain with building supplies and cables for electricity. Schools were built for the younger children, and the older children were sponsored so that they could board at the school at the bottom of the mountain during the week instead of hiking up and down every day to attend classes. Some of these students are going on to post-secondary education, and coming back to help with the village’s growth. A hospital is about to be built, and doctors will be coming every day of the month to tend to the people’s health. This is a pilot village, an example for all of the other villages on the mountain, and its prosperity is spreading outwards and changing the whole region.

I stand on the terrace, looking out over the village as the sun sneaks away behind the mountain ridge, and I think about life here, and elsewhere, in this vast world of ours. I think about how easy it is for us in the west to consume our pure, beautiful water in so many wasteful and ignorant ways. We have no idea of the preciousness running between our fingers.

In Casablanca, I get a sense of that preciousness every time I descend the three flights of stairs to the bottom of my apartment building to refill my big water bottle using the school’s filtration system. I see it every day in the hundreds of thousands of empty water bottles littering the countryside, because people cannot fill their cups with water from their own taps.

As I stand out on the terrace, I think about the difference that water has made in this village, and I think about the villages without it. Not just a few villages, not just in this region or this country, but everywhere, around the world. In some places, children spend every day of their lives collecting water instead of going to school. The water is dirty and the people are sick. They are hungry, because their farmlands are parched.

If I stand and look out over this village, and subtract from it the water that has given it life, I see a place where I would never want to live. Subtract from that the food upon my plate, and the electricity that I rely on to power my many conveniences, and I am living as millions do around the world. And now subtract the peace of mind I feel, knowing that my family is safe. Imagine waking up each day knowing that war could take my home away in an instant. Imagine growing up in a place where hatred and fear are bred into me from the day I am born, because others threaten my way of life and claim the land I thought was mine. Imagine never knowing that life can be lived in any other way.

I stand on the terrace and feel so incredibly grateful – grateful that the people I love have the luxury of knowing nothing about that kind of life, and that the people of this village have found a way to rise above that fate. But I also feel sobered and a little overwhelmed. These people work so hard every day of their lives for so little; this village is only one of so very many with so much less – so many that I can’t begin to imagine the incredible need that exists beyond my sight.

I feel this same helplessness in the city when the destitute follow me through the streets, earnestly begging – really begging – because there are no social services in place to keep them alive. I feel it when I see a covered woman walking among the traffic, looking so sad and resigned, and my taxi driver speaks the only word that I can understand: Syria. I feel it worst of all when I see that I, in my wealth, can check into a fancy hotel for a long weekend and spend my days buying trinkets I don’t need – not because I wish to support these desperate shopkeepers, but because I want these trinkets to decorate my comfortable, well-equipped home.

I don’t know how to live with these extremes, and I don’t know how to live with myself, existing in such blatant comfort among the millions here and elsewhere who see my way of life and remain trapped in theirs. This weekend’s visit to the Berber village was a feel-good adventure of hope and inspiration. It was made possible by one tireless man’s vision. But I am not tireless. I am not a visionary. I am just a tired, pampered Canadian trying to muster the energy to walk three flights of stairs to fill my water bottle with clean water that someone else with a vision has worked to provide for me.

Standing on the mountaintop terrace, I wonder how the world would be different if all of us dropped everything, and just gave every human being on earth access to unlimited clean water. How would that change the economies and systems that keep the world in such a constant state of injustice? Would it transform people’s lives as it changed the lives of these villagers, or would it only scratch the surface of a need generated not by contaminated water, buy by corrupt, contaminated, quarrelous hearts?

I don’t know how to end this story. The poverty is unending and unavoidable, and I, in contrast, am nothing. Worse still, I knowingly use that feeling of inadequacy to justify my ongoing inaction. I am here in Morocco, educating Moroccans to go out and make a difference in their nation, but the fruits of that labour are abstract and distant, and the needy people are visible and immediate, on the other side of the campus wall. They are multiplied a millionfold beyond my sight, and even the most successful campaigns change only a few things, and only for so few. Sometimes our well-meaning aid programs only make the inequities more painful to those who do not receive.

How envious I am of those of you who have found a way to exist without this constant moral dissonance; and how thankful I am for those of you who do so by getting out there and doing the good that I feel I cannot do. You call me brave because I have left my home and crossed the world; but now I flounder. There are mountains before me I don’t know how to climb.

For more information about this village’s incredible story, and the man behind the vision, check out this website or visit the village association’s Facebook page.