The Zaouia Ahansal Valley is located in the High Atlas Mountains, about four and a half hours from Marrakech. The Zaouia Ahansal Valley is composed of four villages, Amezray, Aguddim, Taghia, and Tighanimin. For a brief history on Zaouia, it was founded in the thirteenth century by a man named Sidi Said Ahansal. In this time there were two types of schools, Mosques and Zaouias, and the valley was named after Ahansal and his Zaouia. Ahansal was told to go out and build a village, and he should build it where his cat jumped off his donkey, which was somewhere along the valley, and there Zaouia Ahansal was founded. My rendition of the history of Zaouia Ahansal is brief and vague, but you get the idea.
For the duration of the week, the village sheikh (chief) opened his house up for us to stay. We slept in rooms with around four other people, had delicious traditional moroccan meals cooked by the family who lived there, and just an overall great amount of comfort in the sheikh's house in Aguddim. I was unfortunate to be sick in some way almost the entire duration of my trip, but the worst was in the middle of my stay in Zaouia. I hardly even left my bed the day that I was sick, I didn't think that anyone who lived there knew who I was, let alone that I was there all day sick, but I was surprised that when I was out and about the next day when some of the people in the house would ask me if I was feeling better. The people of Zaouia Ahansal are some of the nicest people that I have ever met, if we were walking between Aguddim and Amezray, the location of one of the community centers and our construction site, everyone would say 'salaam o aleikum' and smile, and among the house, everyone was so polite and friendly. Which was very different compared to the "keep your head down and ignore" lifestyle I am used to.
When we weren't eating or sleeping, we were doing our community service projects or hanging out around the guesthouse with our group and some of the children that lived in the house. I had a group of five other people and almost the entire trip we had a game of 'gumpsh' going almost the entire trip. Gumpsh is almost like a card matching game but you have a partner, and the goal is to have secret codes between you and your partner to get four of a kind and have your partner call it out before anyone else does, and figure out other group's codes and call them out. It sounds complicated and it can be, but it's fun. That game was a favorite among my group, and the kids that lived in the house always hung out next to us and watched when we played. We also made friendship bracelets, played with a soccer ball in the courtyard, and just hung out and had a good time.
The real excitement of the service week during my trip was the actual service. I had never done any kind of service before this summer. I was a camp counselor for a week a couple weeks before I went to Morocco, but besides that, this was the first time I had ever done any kind of community service. We had three main tasks, construction, gardening in the community center, and tutoring the local children. During the construction, we helped build the second floor of the community center in Amezray. Which was one of the biggest surprises to my entire trip. I thought that we would be the ones building the community center and that we would be using a lot of power tools and it would be similar to how we build buildings here in the US (not that I would know what that is like though...), but it wasn't. We used very traditional techniques that they've used for hundreds of years, instead we were more of helpers to the construction workers, on the first day I helped move a pile of rocks closer to where they were working, and on the second day I was upstairs scraping the dirt between the rocks in the wall so they could lay plaster over it later. I was honestly afraid to do the construction, I am a clumsy person and I thought I was going to mess something up, but it was very easy and to my surprise, we took lots of breaks, almost too many in my opinion. It seemed like we would work for 10 minutes take a 30 minute break, and then do another 10 minutes. After like four, 10 minute sessions, we'd be done, and I'm not complaining by any means, but I thought we would be doing more. I think these numbers might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but we did take a lot of breaks. The gardening was a lot of fun too, we weeded a few different patches, mostly the rhubarb, and we prepared and planted a zucchini patch, but after all of that was done, we helped with the crazy irrigation process. The gardens in Zaouia are set up so that there are lots of little sections of the crystal blue river that feed into smaller streams that feed into the gardens. When they need to water the gardens, they unblock some of the sections that form small streams into the gardens, and let the water flow into them. After they have all been watered, then they block it back up again and do it again next week. I couldn't believe that they do that each week, it makes you appreciate sprinkler systems a little bit differently, although, I will always have some serious respect for these gardening techniques. And finally, my favorite part of the community service projects was tutoring the local children. There are two ways the children learn in Zaouia, through the government schools for subjects like Arabic, Amazigh (berber), French, and Math, and in the community centers for what we would consider "the fun classes" in American school, they learn about art, music, photography, and English. The government schools are run like they are here, fall through early summer, but the community centers run year round. Every afternoon kids can come to the community centers to hang out with their friends, learn, and spend time with exchange students, like myself, when they are in town. Our group was split up into groups of two or three and we each had an activity we had to plan to do with the kids, and they rotated between us every 30 minutes. I was part of Photography the first day, where we taught them how to use little point and shoot cameras provided by the Atlas Cultural Foundation; painting the second, where we taught them colors in english and painted on rocks; I was sick the third day we were supposed to teach, and on the last day, I was supposed to teach geography, but our program leaders decided to take a break that afternoon. I absolutely loved being around these kids, they were some of the sweetest and most precious kids I had ever met. They didn't have very good english, we had very basic conversations with them during the activities (how old are you and how many brothers and sisters we have were common), but we honestly couldn't talk with them much, we had a translator with us for the activities and they helped us get the directions across. I, on the other hand used this as a good opportunity to practice my French. French is one of the main languages in Morocco, most classes are taught in French, and a lot of the professional settings of Morocco is in French. I was one of the only kids in my group that spoke French, so you bet I used it! I got to get to know the kids a little bit better, and I even got to give the activity directions in French, definitely one of my biggest achievements as a French speaker. It was cool too because the translator for my group was the French teacher in the village, so he helped me with it so the kids understood a little better.
On Monday (July 2) of our week in Zaouia, we got the chance to experience the weekly souq. I was on the "Souqs and Service" trip after all! (p.s. A souq is a market, you'll hear this word from me a lot). This souq was very different than the souqs we explored in Marrakech and Chefchaouen, which I will talk about in future posts. It was a place where the nomads and locals in Zaouia could get their daily necessities, such as spices, tea pots, shoes, clothes, food, and other basic needs. The nearest city to Aguddim and Amezray is Azilal, which is about a two hour drive away, and most people don't have cars, so they have the market every week. I got a good deal on two pairs of pants for 100dh, or about ten dollars USD, which would have costed me at least $30 USD each if I had bought them here. After we had done our shopping, we went and sat on a cafe terrace and watched the bustling market, and the hundreds of donkeys scream while drinking the incredible Moroccan Mint tea. It sounds weird, and honestly pretty crazy, but it was pretty funny. We legitimately thought someone was beating them, but they were just being donkeys.
My trip to Zaouia ended with a traditional party hosted by the village Sheikh. We got to put on traditional Amazigh dresses, we danced to the traditional music of Amazigh and North African culture, and we got to have one last good memory made in Zaouia. I honestly thought the dancing was way better than it is in the US to be quite honest. First of all, the music is live, there was a band of I think about six guys that came to the guesthouse with drums, they stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, and started singing and banging their drums, while stepping sideways in a big circle. We all joined in between them and on the sides of them, and we were dancing, and trying to figure out what they were singing so we could sing along. It was completely unlike anything I had ever done before. It was beautiful.
Overall I had a really amazing experience in Zaouia Ahansal. One of the biggest surprises I had for the entire trip was the impact I left on the people of Zaouia. I thought I was going to almost "save" them from a major crisis, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I thought we would be bringing all this western influence over and we would be almost saving their lives, but in reality, we weren't saving them, and we weren't really bringing much western influence over either. We were there to make their jobs easier. They could have easily done the things we were going there to do themselves, we were just making it faster and easier for them. In the US we are used to being able to hire gardeners, or contractors, or whatever it is to do things for us. They don't have the ability to do that there. So we left an impact on them by making their lives easier. And we did tings the way that the people there have done it for years.
I was able to have this experience in Zaouia from The Atlas Cultural Foundation. ACF's main goal is to help better the quality of life for the Berber people of the High Atlas Mountains, primarily in Zaouia Ahansal. They work with the village people to find out what it is they need and they get it to them. ACF has built community centers, gardens, bus stations, and so much more for the villages. But they also help preserve historical buildings and sites specific to the history of Zaouia. I am so happy to have worked alongside ACF during my stay here, the goals they achieve and the projects they are doing in Zaouia are truly incredible. You can read more about what ACF does, and more accurately read about the history, at https://atlasculturalfoundation.org/ I absolutely loved my experience in Zaouia with ACF and no doubt about it, but I will be returning to Zaouia sometime in the future. My experience there has left such a positive influence on me as an American, a student, and a traveler.
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