17th century village comes back to life

Another long driving day, but with interesting stops along the way, as we’ve come to expect from Mohamed.

We visited an irrigation tunnel built sometime between the 12th & 14th centuries to show us how communities managed to get water to their villages and date palm groves in the desert before mechanization. The underground canal was probably five miles long, all hand-dug, from the water source in the High Atlas Mountains to its destination. The lengthy canal had a series of deep holes dug from the surface to allow maintenance of the canal if it got plugged up at any point along the line. A guy had to be lowered down into the canal to clear the mud wile another stayed on the surface to raise the baskets of mud and eventually raise the unfortunate person underground once the work was completed. Nowadays, the water is all dried up and it’s a bit of a tourist attraction to go down into the tunnel (large enough to stand up in).

We passed by a village in the middle of nowhere with large fancy homes that are mostly vacant. At the end of WWII, the French recruited Moroccan men to help rebuild France, since sadly, there weren’t as many men left in France at the time. The workers thought they would go over and work for a couple of years, then come back to the nice homes they had recently built. But they ended up staying (for the money, we suppose), and bringing their wives over, and having children. Three generations later, the families of those original workers feel that France is their home, and they only come back to these nice homes for a month or a few weeks each year.

Next up was a 17th century ‘ksar,’ the fortified village of El Khorbat. The village had died out, but a foundation was established to restore the ksar and create a reason for people to come back to live there. They built a preschool and kindergarten, a museum of Berber culture and a restaurant. We were able to visit the 3- and 4-year-olds’ classroom, which was a very special experience! We were asked not to photograph the children, but I wish you could have seen and heard them. They are native Berber speakers, but since primary school and up is taught in Arabic, this school is preparing the kids for a future of education. In Mohamed’s (Berber) generation, many kids did not complete school beyond 6th grade or earlier because of the language gap. He said Arabic and Berber are as different as Spanish and Chinese, including having different alphabets. The kids sang songs to us in French and in Arabic, and we sang “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” to them!Læs mere