For Life Alone

There are snippets of conversations that cling to your memory insusceptible to the effacing effect of time. I will never forget one such a conversation I had with some American friends twenty years ago. We were having dinner and talking about Morocco when one of them asked: “are people in Morocco still living in caves?” I took umbrage at what I perceived as his supercilious and downright racist attitude. I snapped back explaining that we live in houses, wear clothes, drive cars, watch television, go to schools much like Americans do. My anger must have seeped through my face and vibrated through my voice; the subject was quickly dropped.

It’s only a few years ago that I discovered that indeed, twenty years ago, whole families in Morocco lived in caves; today, many more still do. It’s a reality most Moroccan city dwellers were unaware of. It is an aspect of our country our political leadership and officials never mentioned in their florid speeches and our news media never depicted in their self-serving articles and television programs.

Recently, grim images of poverty akin to the middle ages flashed on the screens of our national television and the pages of our written media. Such unusually unreserved veraciousness is induced not by the establishment’s belief the citizens have an indubitable right to the information; the investigative reporting of foreign news outlets combined with the government’s failed attempts to restrict satellite television and the internet – Morocco is a signatory of the Arab Satellite Broadcasting Charter – and the Moroccans’ voracious curiosity to learn about their country forced the release of information that was previously buttered in exclusivity.

In today’s dynamic geopolitical and global environment where poverty is considered a bearing ground for religious extremism, terrorism, prostitution, and drug trafficking, the government has discovered that the disclosure of Morocco’s “old poverty” generates unforeseen funds from wary Western intelligence agencies concerned that throngs of poverty-stricken Moroccans would march into their cities strapped in suicide vests. So far, Morocco has received over four billion dirhams in European subsidies. This year, additional European Union investments will aim at healthcare and education reform, water system purification, and transportation in rural areas. These projects will have extensive European oversight to ensure their successful achievement.

However, uncovering such realities outside of ordained channels throws government officials into a tizzy. The antiquated and backward looking political mentality of the Moroccan government sees such a pandemic reality as undermining to their “democratization and developmental” agenda. It castigates private citizens and Moroccan human right associations for criticizing its discrepant rhetoric, but it has no compunction justifying its profligate spending in ostentatious projects such as a twenty kilometers long tramway network in Rabat and a twenty-eight kilometers long one in Casablanca as necessary. This is while citizens outside Rabat and Casablanca, lacking the most basic services, are dying; services the government is obligated to provide, but fails to do so.

One has to wonder how such a cradle of civilization from which the Moors launched into Visigothic Hispania in 711 CE, thus introducing a Medieval Europe to science, medicine, philosophy, and literature, failed to retain some of that enlightenment and prosperity. One has to wonder why modernity – not civilization – founders once it transcends city limits.

While frolicking tourists sunbathe on beaches and dine in swanky resorts, while a few thousand elite Moroccans are living high on the hog, millions of malnourished, destitute, and sallow Moroccans in remote rural areas scratch the dirt for survival and take shelter in dwellings so sparsely furnished and poorly built that they look like caves. In this post-apocalyptic diorama, they sleep swallowed in whatever clothes and blankets they own to avoid freezing to death; they cook in tin cans; their women bleed to death giving birth; their children die of diseases the modern world thought eradicated; their men are despondent; weather permitting, they trek over xeric dirt roads and down jarring mountain slopes for countless hours and miles to reach a paved road. They share this country with us, but they live a different reality. The only sign of a government they see in their regions is a tattered flag whipped by the wind; the last time they saw a qaid must have been when the government was collecting “voluntary” donations for the eponymous Hassan II mosque.

The question is still ringing in my ears like a bad case of tinnitus. But at least now I have an answer.

Yes! Much like troglodytes, we are still living in caves.

But let us not succumb into hopelessness. All is not lost. The anti-poverty national Initiative for Human Development (INDH), a large-scale development project launched in May 18, 2005 and designed to provide the basic infrastructure to millions of Moroccans to alleviate poverty, marginalization, and social exclusion in response to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is already bearing fruit. The poverty rate is nose-diving like a famished Jaeger. People are getting richer by the minute. And by people I mean Prime Minister Abbas El Fassi, High Commissioner for Planning Ahmed Lahlimi Alami, Minister of Social Development Nouzha Skelli, and their ilk. If you haven’t seen anything from INDH yet, do not worry. They will soon send you an email with a claimant number for your jackpot, your ticket out of poverty. It might take a while for them to get to you; INDH is giving each and every Moroccan the individual attention they deserve no matter how far-flung your cave may be.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2009