morocco | Journeys Without a Map

Embodied Energy

Okay, for the third time I’ve been criticized for my ‘environmentally toxic’ choice of vehicle. “How can you call yourself a ‘permaculturalist’ and justify driving a vehicle that wouldn’t be allowed into London because of its high emissions?” The first antagonist asked, waving his hand dismissively at my latest vehicle, a 1982 Bavarian fire engine.

That’s the gist of all three accusations: that I should be driving the latest and cleanest. Before buying this monster I had already given the subject some thought, of course. For a start, it’s a thirsty beast – 18mpg or 15L/100km – and I’m not the wealthiest. Plus, the engine is a 1960s design, so it does indeed cough out quite a bit more particulate matter and CO2 than most things around these days. But the fact is, I didn’t buy it for its efficiency. I bought it because (1) it could have been tailor-made for my family’s needs, (2) it was ridiculously cheap, (3) it’s old so I can fix it myself, and (4) it’s ferkin’ cool. It ticked four out of five boxes. But none of that really answered the accusation.

Our 1982 Mercedes 608 fire engine approaching The Serai for the first time.

“Erm….,” I stammered, caught off guard, “It’s a working truck and I’m only going to do 10,000km a year in it. Anyway, it’s a recycling effort.”

I didn’t lose the argument but nor was I very convincing. So later I did some research into car and truck emissions, fuel consumption and the crux of the matter: embodied energy.

Embodied energy isn’t very often considered these days. It should be. Everything that we buy, from carrots to cars has, in its production, burned fossil fuels and caused a CO2 emission. That’s embodied energy. The car that first accuser had turned up in was a new Landrover Discovery. My discovery about his Discovery was that approximately 30 tonnes of CO2 had been emitted in its manufacture. Then, comparing his vehicle and mine, taking into account the extra grams of CO2 per km that my fire engine emits, I found that I could drive to Capetown and back six times before I’m even in the same ballpark. In other words, if I cover my usual 10,000kms a year it will take 12 years before my fire engine has even started to catch up with the shiny new Disco.

But, in fact, I never will never come close to matching his motoring emissions. As my truck just keeps on going while he replaces his car every 3-4 years because the ashtray is full or whatever, he will continue to fall so, so far behind me in Eco-credibility that I would have to slash and burn a chunk of the Amazon and there plant soy beans for him to have any hope at all of catching up. And none of this even takes into account his embodied energy emissions before now. I’ve never bought a new car in my life.

There, take that! Anyone else want to ‘dis’ my ride?

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There’s no real need for me to put a barrel vault roof over our main reception room. It’s in the original plan however and I think it’ll add WOW factor to the finished building. It’s also fun to have a go at building a vault, so why not?

I wouldn’t be allowed to do this in Europe. Some beige little man in a beige suit from a local authority would come and tell me it didn’t conform to some farcical regulations invented merely to give beige men positions of authority. Yes, yes, yes, and to save lives as well, I suppose. Whatever the case, I would need to employ a structural engineer to tell me how to conform to these regulations, he would tell me my walls shouldn’t be made of rocks and mud and suddenly the cost of it all would become untenable. Here, in fact, if a little beige man turned up with the same deal his interference would have far more justification; Agadir was completely leveled by an earthquake in the 1960s and it’s only 200kms to the south. I should take that seriously, but beige men can’t get their low-slung cars to within 3kms of this place so I choose take my chances instead. These two little steel bars should do the trick!

There’s another reason I wouldn’t be able to do this in Europe. My fisherman neighbour, Hafed, patiently handing me bricks as I mess it up again and again, or mixing up more lime for me to waste, would be on the same rate per hour in Europe as I pay him here for a day. It’s outrageous really, the daily wage here, and we pay 20% more than anyone else I know of for the same work! He even enjoys it; it’s good money and from the rooftop he can see what all his friends are up to. I pay the same to his younger brother, Abdullah, who has shown some flair for this kind of caper and has built two domes on his own. He’s learnt skills that are surprisingly rare here and frequently I catch him admiring his own work with unrestrained delight. In Europe I’d probably have a sullen youth perpetually reaching for his iPhone and at the end of each week a third of the total cost of this roof would go into his pocket for having done little but irritate me.

So, I get to play around a little here and it started way back when I asked a friend to design this building. I don’t remember stipulating vaults, domes, towers, spiral staircases, cloisters and a stage but that’s what she came back with. Perhaps I did.

I fell in love with her design immediately and we have stuck fairly closely to it even though the job earmarked to pay for it all disappeared shortly afterwards, to be replaced only by a hand to mouth existence of seasonal frolics. A few changes have been made along the way, the most dramatic of which followed our discovery that the design didn’t actually fit within the perimeters of the land. No doubt this was my oversight, not the architect’s. In haste, for the stone masons were about to arrive, we lopped a metre off every side of every room. And thank God we did. It’s big enough as it is and from some viewpoints looks so vast against the surrounding farmhouses that I shudder with embarrassment and hurry home, hoping not to have to talk to anyone with it rearing up monstrously behind me like Disneyland.

The other major change has been in the time I envisaged for it’s completion…enough said on that.

It’s never been easy to think of it merely as a house; we don’t need a house as big as this. It’s always been an Eco-lodge, a ‘centre’, for art, drama, permaculture, music; creativity in all its guises. I’m looking forward to building the stage for them all. With no beige men in sight it will be spectacular and won’t cost me so much I have to charge future visitors a fortune. The intention is to have interesting, colourful people staying here, not just wealthy. Interesting and wealthy will be ideal, obviously. And that’s another reason to build a such a vault. Nobody is going to even imagine that I was fool enough to build this thing myself. They’ll say “Wow!”, obediently, and then ponder the cost of such a marvel, imagining a figure so reassuringly great that they’ll feel sufficiently privileged to stay here, despite the frogs’ spawn in the ‘swimming pool’.

How to structure, position, scale and market this non-profit thing I’m creating has been occupying every waking moment. The route ahead and a strategy become slowly clearer but the volume of information still to read and understand grows ever larger. Initially it seemed that getting 29 Moroccan farmers on board was going to be the hard part but, of course and as always, delivering on the words is where the real effort lies.

At first, months ago, I thought it should be a Community Interest Company (CIC), end of story. After far too little research it seemed to be the legal entity best suited to our needs, all things considered. But therein lay an issue I wasn’t seeing clearly enough: our needs? I wasn’t using ‘our’ correctly. Regarding many aspects of what I am planning for this little corner of Morocco there is no ‘our’. There’s ‘them’, the communities of Azrou Issa and Al Faida, and there’s ‘us’, Ayelen and I. I will never truly be one of them and nor will Ayelen. It matters not how well we learn to speak Arabic, or how long we live amongst them for we will always be outsiders and foreigners to be excluded from certain things or titbits of information. The cultural gap is vast and to be brutally blunt we have not the slightest desire to cross to the other side. It’s not now, nor ever was why we are here among them. Let’s face it, we’re here because eight years ago I wanted to buy an interesting piece of land somewhere and this piece was affordable.

So I came to my senses and stopped thinking about us all as a single group with the same aims. Yes, for this project to succeed we must all have ‘skin in the game’ but we’re only going to be playing on the same pitch for the next five or so years. Do I want to be going through all this head scratching again then? Not particularly; whatever vehicle I build for myself now must be able to last until I have forgotten what it is and nodded off. Whatever vehicle they want to build must last a lot longer. How can a CIC, registered with Companies House in London and requiring annual accounts to be submitted there possibly serve their longterm needs?

A cooperative is what it must be. There are plenty of these in Morocco and a national support network, presumably – though probably not – to help it all happen and thrive. They will have heard of cooperatives and will have trust in the format. And indeed it proves so. When I ask them to start one they are immediately in favour. But on returning to Spain, wrapped up in the idea of this single project, I am still not thinking straight. I’m still not seeing past this project to the next and the one after that. It’s only when I sit down and try to work out how we’re going to get the money for extensive earthworks and the planting of three hundred thousand trees that my imagination begins to see through their fattening trunks to the proverbial wood beyond.

I have been thinking too small. This project, I begin to see, need not be just a vehicle towards finding my expertise, it could be the start of something much bigger and more important, which could also realise many more of my dreams. Every generation has it’s issues but it does seem that we who are alive today exist in a time when it’s more important than ever before that we strive, whether individually or together, to affect a real change. It certainly features large among my ambitions, firstly because I know how good it feels to believe that you have helped in something worthy, and secondly because I have waited until my forties to become an angry young man. Nobody is advertising for ‘revolutionaries wanted’ though. I need to work it out myself and then get on with it. One member of a permaculture forum I visit ends his posts with the quote, ‘If you have a job, get your affairs in order and leave it, for there is important work to be done.’ When not humorous I suspect self-aggrandisement as being the principle motive behind most end of message quotes but this one sets the steeple bells ringing.

Thus the Azrou Issa Permaculture Cooperative loses it’s slot as ‘The Project’ and is demoted to Project No 1; that’s theirs. Mine’s a charitable incorporated organisation, UK-registered, a foundation which will instigate, assist, oversee and encourage this project and others to come. Some of the trustees are already recruited and it’s going through its third and, hopefully, final name change. Raising money for this is going to be tough and the name is important; it’s hard to settle on one. It needs to be just right but I’m not the first to be starting a green charity or movement and many of the great ones are of course gone, or are too close to some existing organisation. Undeservedly, permaculture for many still carries hippy connotations but we are not here to knit yoghurt or sing Kumbaya to the stars. We are a vanguard of a revolution and our banner must avoid being, as my brother put it, too ‘sandaly’.

Meanwhile in Morocco, we have arrived back, our van creaking and bursting apart over the horrendous 3km track under it’s prison-beckoningly heavy load of wood and other assorted stuff that we’ve either found in skips or been given over the summer. Hassan, the main man here, has not been to see me yet so I know that he has made no progress in starting the cooperative. Ayelen has bet me a hour’s massage – our standard wager – that, in fact, despite all the excitement of September, he won’t even have been to see the man in town whom I arranged to assist him. I shook on it knowing she was right; this one’s a gift.

I have to admit to a small crisis of confidence when I arrived at the Serai last week. After a particularly hot summer and now with a howling wind tearing at the plastic bags, les fleurs de Maroc, fluttering from almost every tree, the place was looking at its worst. The water pump had packed up in April and all our carefully planted trees and shrubs appeared shrivelled, abandoned and barely alive. There was a fan of rubbish sprayed out from our neighbour, Hafed’s wall as if he had just tossed it all up into the wind. Opening the house I found everything thick with dust and gecko shit and for half an hour or so I felt paralysed and quite unable to start making it habitable. It’s the first time since 2008 I’ve been here at this time of year, near the end of the dry season, and the scale and possible lunacy of the project I am planning was suddenly thrown into very sharp relief. I sat on the doorstep and stared out to the ocean across the parched land and thought I must be mad.

A couple of hours later, waiting for the vacuum cleaner to cool down again, I went outside to fetch in some furniture and found a chameleon sitting on my office chair. It was the first time I’d ever seen one in the garden but it was the symbolism of the chair that struck me most. I have been a little chameleon-like myself in some ways and that this extraordinary little creature had so incongruously positioned itself seemed to be telling me that this indeed was my place, at that desk, making it all work.

I’m not overly susceptible to ‘signs’ but this place has been unusually thick with them over the years. In the first place, it was a string of coincidences that persuaded me to take an enormous leap of faith in buying the land without ever having set foot on Moroccan soil. These were followed by the revelation that Ayelen, and this is the most bizarre of all, quite independently and before we were a couple, had chosen the exact same little patch of coastline to be interested in, in terms of buying land. There have been others too and it’s always felt solidly right that we are here.

I carried my little visitor deep into the forest and we eyeballed one another quizzically en route. She, or he, was very calm, two little mitten-like hands gripping my forefinger. When I returned to the house I was in an entirely different frame of mind. This project was the right thing to do, for a multitude of reasons, and the people would go for it.

For weeks now I’ve been going over in my head what I wanted to say to them. How was I going to portray my plan so that they were persuaded to try it without thinking that a free meal ticket was on its way? How was I going to turn generations of thinking on its head? My grasp of Arabic is still feeble so, for a start, I would need a good interpreter with me, and one whose own enthusiasm I could inspire before we even went in. I’ve worked with many interpreters in the past and it’s been a mixed experience. One or two have almost got me killed. Others have made up for my own failings in understanding a cultural nuance or three. Watching closely for the changes of expression in my audience has generally been the surefire way of knowing the value of the man at my side, but working with a new interpreter can be nerve wracking. What’s the point of rehearsing the persuasive subtelties of what I might say when it’s another who’s going to say it, and when I’m going to have little clue as to how he’s conveyed it? But a way around this, of course, is to keep everything very simple and have as many visual aids as possible. To this end I scour the internet for days.

There’s a lot of permaculture stuff on the net but the vast majority shows people playing around in temperate and sub-tropical climates, with fat cattle browsing amidst lush, broad-leafed vegetation. If I showed even a few seconds of that they’d think I was a deluded idiot. In the end there’s only really some before and after photographs I can use, some cartoon graphics, and parts of a well-known Youtube film series entitled ‘Greening the Desert‘. Part 1 appears to have been made as an afterthought. It’s not a film at all, but a slideshow with voiceover. It has a powerful message, however, and the fact that it documents a salted landscape with less than half the rainfall we get here, no decent catchment, and much higher summer temperatures, is gold dust. I fill in any gaps with my own badly drawn renditions of what we might do to harvest rainfall and a selection of permaculture oddities, such as a ‘chicken tractor’. You’ll have to look it up.

Six hours before my presentation I go into town to meet my team. I don’t know them from Adam but they all come highly recommended and none of those I initially had in mind are available. Rachid (left) will interpret and has worked for friends in setting up a local charity. Two friends of his: Kim (not pictured), from Germany and Fouad (right) have volunteered to film the event. They are all young, well informed, tech savvy and speak perfect English. I have a friend drop us off in the forest at the top of the escarpment and we walk down towards the ocean together. By the time we arrive at the Serai I know they are all going to be great. The only concern left is how many of the locals will turn up?

For several days now, two lads, Abdullah and Khalid, have been going around the two communities encouraging everyone to come, but I know it’ll take time for people to gather. Inside Hassan’s windowless house the atmosphere is stifling and for an hour there’s nobody but him and a younger man called Hussein. Many are down at the beach harvesting seaweed that will end up as the agar in laboratory petri-dishes and it actually gives me a useful hour of quiet discussion. I want to understand what it is they really want. What does Hassan dream of for his grandchildren? What would they do for more money if only there was more water?

They talk openly of abandoning the land. They have heard on the news that the Government plans to allocate this part of the coast to a new system of marine reserves and they think that this will prevent them from collecting the seaweed. If so, it’s yet another income stream that’s denuded or closed off altogether. Many here have hardly any land and make their living almost entirely from the beach. They have nowhere to keep a boat so they go out to sea in old truck inner tubes lashed to broken surf boards, through the crashing waves to lay nets beyond. Or, when the ocean swell is less, as it is at this time of year, they collect the weed from above and below the low water mark. The fishing isn’t good anymore. These days there are just too many boats coming out of Essaouira to comb the waters just beyond their nets, and over the horizon are the larger international fleets. For those without livestock the writing is on the wall. Already many families have left for the town. The diminishing rainfall and poor soil supports only wheat, peas, onions and potatoes and hardly enough of those to pay for the next batch of fertiliser. My timing could not be more fortuitous.

The room fills slowly and with too many children. There are no women, of course. I did venture the possibility that some of the older ones, the matriarchs, might attend but even this was met with derision. Khadija (left), whose house this is, only gestures from the doorway, at one point, that someone must pour the tea if we are to drink it. It’s frustrating that half the room must be taken up with disinterested boys while the one group that I could really rely upon to push this idea along are denied entry. I’m still missing some of the key men too, however all but a few of the families are represented, so off we go.

Very slowly and methodically I take them through a potted history and the basics of permaculture and holistically managed grazing. Even watching the film clips is a halting process, as almost every scene requires explanation as well as translation. Fouad and Kim film the reactions, which vary from Hassan’s growing excitement to the unshakeable boredom of the boys lined up along one wall. I couldn’t care less about the latter but Hassan’s enthusiasm is vital; he is the unofficial spokesman of the two communities.

The room only really comes alive when I detail my plan and reveal a sketch of how we might harness the rain falling on the hillside above. They cannot deny the sense of this. Like me, they’ve all watched, in a flash flood event, millions of litres of water laden with countless tons of quality soil rush past the land on its way to the beach. My drawing shows it slowed against gabions, kept as high as possible for as long as possible, forced to drop its load, backed up and then diverted in swales along the contours, and finally into cisterns. I was deliberately mean with my green crayon but have nonetheless painted a very different scene to the reality outside this hot little room. They know I’m no expert. They’ve watched and no doubt laughed at Ayelen’s and my gardening efforts. But we too have known no better, planting fruit trees without support species, leaving the ground uncovered. What I’m talking about now is getting an expert down here and making a careful and detailed plan of terra-forming and planting.

The reaction is better than I’d ever hoped for. To my surprise, nobody gives a damn about tearing down their drystone walls and carving great ditches everywhere. I have a whole page of annotated counter arguments to use, starting with the fact that their ancestors terra-formed this place when they arrived here but that things have changed since then and more needs doing now. None are necessary. They want to stay here and suddenly there’s a little more hope. I spend a lot of time pressing the point that I might fail to raise any money at all to help pay for such landscaping and what’s far more important is that they come together and work as a team. They must form a cooperative and become a taskforce with a clear economic goal or this is all just fantasy.

To finish, I outline one more, relatively new agricultural technique: aqua-ponics. I envisage the women in control of this, harvesting all their vegetable needs, and fish too, from a few greenhouses situated on the least productive land. All of this is possible; it just requires will and determination. I can see it in some faces (Hassan, 2nd from left below). Others give little away.

Once, shortly before working in Bosnia for the UN at the height of that war, I was taught a technique for reading a man’s mind. By observing closely the flutter of his eyes as his brain processed the question just put to him and then what he might say in reply, one was supposed to be able to discern a lie from the truth. You had first to establish whether he was left or right handed, so cigarettes and things to sign were always up one’s sleeve. Then, while trying not to stare, you had to watch for the downward flick – processing the question – and then the upward – constructing the answer. Top right might indicate he was thinking up a lie, top left that you were getting the truth. Straight up, as in rolling heavenward with accompanying sigh, most likely indicated that he was bored and genuinely had no idea, but was going to bullshit you anyway. After a few days there it was fairly clear, from all sorts of other indications, that everyone was spinning us well thought out misinformation in any case, so I rather lost interest in mind reading.

Nor would it serve me well here. Only time is going to tell me how hard these men will be prepared to fight to stay on this land. For now, all I need is majority consent, and for them to start the cooperative. Hassan tells me he’ll get around all those not present and give me the definitive answer in two days. This he does and all are in favour. He asks me to be the cooperative chairman. I explain there won’t be a chairman, they’ll be leading themselves democratically, but in reality I know I will indeed be the driving force, and for quite some time.

So, I have a new job. To start with, I’m a fund-raiser and then I have a blank canvas – 100 hectares of arable, 200 of forest – on which to experiment and trial the findings of the world’s leading perma-culturalists, agro-ecologists, holistic managers and anyone else with a good idea. It’s going to be a fascinating journey and it might even be the best job I’ve ever had.

The day after my presentation, Abdullah, one of the brighter young men in the community, went to town and enrolled in an English language course. So it begins.

I’m good at quite a lot of things. I can fix your car, sail your boat, make all manner of things in wood, steel, stone, thatch and brick, stitch up your wound, shoot the balls off a gnat at 300 yards, knit a hat and even darn your socks. I’m a paraglider, kite surfer, rock climber, scuba diver, skier, ~~dancer~~, yacht master, soldier, film maker, public speaker, TV Presenter, and writer. I can even J-turn a car.

What irks me is that I’m expert at nothing.

If there exists one single aspect of my life that I’ve harnessed and ridden all the way it’s the resolve to have as much fun and variety as possible. This is not a philosophy that looks to the future very much, nor one that has made me a lot of money. No matter, I’ve always thought, for I would at least be immune to such future ailments as the mid-life crisis. But growing older doesn’t miss anybody out. Just as the electronic music emerging these days starts to sound to me like taking off ones ear defenders in a car plant, I am beginning to see all sorts of things through older eyes. At 46 I’m on the downhill run and it gets faster and faster. I don’t regret a single thing and I’m proud of how I’ve spent my time but there is a gap in my experience that now yawns quite wide. I realise suddenly that it’s time for me to find the thing I’m going to be expert at.

I’m ready – and this takes some saying – for a career.

There, it’s said. It’s out in the open. So what’s it going to be, this last minute career? What’s going to provide for us and take me into my dotage?

Ayelen wants me to write and to get back into TV. Well, it’d be great to make a living at writing, but having published one book and made less than a grand from it I hold onto no literary fantasies. With the advent of e-books it’s easier than ever before to publish but for the same reason there are many more pigs to compete with in the pen. What will I write about? I have not the imagination for fiction, nor am I a salesman able to write convincingly on any old subject. I am only interested in writing about something I am genuinely passionate about.

It would be great to get back into TV too, for in many ways it was the perfect job; it took me to amazing places to meet phenomenal people and do crazy things with them. But I want something I’m more in control of, something less fickle, less crap, and most importantly, more pertinent to the state of things today. A lot of the programming I helped to make I am not proud of at all. Magical experiences with forest dwelling peoples around the world were slashed and burned down to ‘wow-factor’ energy hits, injected like a stimulant between adverts for toxic ‘must-haves’. I had no power over the edit, but when it bred controversy I was held accountable nonetheless. In any case, since that time I have indeed pitched occasional ideas to TV. All have had an environmental angle, because there lies my interest, and all have been refused, because the viewing public don’t want to hear about the environment. No, TV is not my path. I’ve never owned one, for a start.

So I’m sitting, lying, staring at the ceiling, thinking, worrying a little, wondering where my role is in this spiralling world, where the money’s going to come from this winter, worrying some more, when suddenly it comes to me. It’s an idea I’ve been talking about for years but somehow I’ve kept filing it away for the future, a project to be started only when we have finished building The Serai in Morocco. Now, I realise with a start, is the time for it. And it has everything I’m looking for: challenge, global relevance, longevity and satisfaction.

So what is it?

Our neighbours in Morocco, whom we live amongst only when we have a little money for building, are salt of the earth types. They lead simple lives, scratching a partial subsistence from poor soil in an environment that, whether through geo-engineering or CO2 emissions or whatever, grows drier and drier, year upon year. When they need cash, they sell a goat or try to catch whatever fish have escaped the foreign trawlers criss-crossing the Atlantic horizon. Their fields do not feed them all year round. For generations, and despite appearances to the contrary, they have followed the mono-culturalist ways of modernising agriculture. They plant one crop per field and every spring, after the harvest, they turn their goats onto the land to strip it bare. The sun then beats down on it for uninterrupted months, desiccating it for the incessant wind to blow away. Every autumn, after the first light shower, with donkey and cattle plough teams they inject the dead earth with fertilisers to give the next crop something to feed on.

And so it might go on. But electricity arrived two years ago and now everyone has a satellite TV. The young men and women, like Abdullah here, now in his twenties and one of the first generation to be educated, watch Egyptian soap operas displaying exaggerated lifestyles. Nobody wants to herd goats anymore and even if they did, the forest that provides grazing through the summer heat is now degrading fast. Driven by drought and higher expectations, Abdullah and his contemporaries will soon enough join the worldwide exodus from countryside to city and the older generation is powerless to prevent it.

Enter permaculture, agro-ecology, holistic management and us. I’m no expert in these things, not yet, but I’ve done a course and I have spent hundreds of hours researching, on the internet, everything from soil types to dam-building to starting a cooperative. Such is the power at our fingertips these days. The founders of permaculture and their proteges have achieved amazing things in climates even more ferocious than this.

I know enough to believe firmly that we – the communities of Azrou Issa and Al Faida – can turn this strip of coastline around and create a sustainable future for the young, and also for the house that we’ve been labouring over. It’s the perfect place for such an experiment: a borderline-arid landscape with too much wind and ever decreasing rain. But there are very positive features too, such as the huge water catchment potential contained in the hillside behind. The Serai can become the research centre, a place of accommodation and learning for incoming volunteers and students from near and far. We’ll use the land as the classroom blackboard for region-specific study and we’ll experiment. Ultimately I hope that our younger neighbours, both men and women, will be qualified teachers in their own right, to go out and spread the word.

If we can make it work here we can take the lessons learnt to other sites around Morocco, and then to other semi-arid lands, empowering people at grass roots level and sucking carbon from the atmosphere as we go. Great God, I am almost feverish with excitement!!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I must recruit all my neighbours into this madcap scheme before anything else happens. And it’s not going to be easy. They are a conservative bunch, to say the least, and who am I but a ‘gowrie’, a foreigner, and a non-religeous one at that. Every one of our European friends in Morocco has an armful of stories to illustrate how cultural differences disrupt practice and how, in the end, whatever has been initially embraced falters and dies when it becomes clear that some personal input might be required. The Straits of Gibraltar can seem like an unbreachable chasm at times, across which European logic and Moroccan logic frown at one another uncomprehendingly.

But in many ways I have been preparing for this moment for the last seven years. I have a relationship with our neighbours and for whatever it’s worth, it’s a good one. It’s been forged. It’s not something I could have bought or even have acquired in any less time. Ayelen has been crucial to it’s development. They know we are honest and fair in our dealings with them but also that we are not to be taken for a ride. We know that they too are honest and generous but that they are always looking for the ‘easy angle’. We laugh a lot together and get our hands dirty together. They have built the Serai and they know we have put every spare penny earned over four years into their pockets. Few outsiders have been employed and everything is extremely squint as a result. The women adore Ayelen and her idiosyncrasies. The men are impressed with my range of skills and my tenacity in learning new ones. We are impressed by their humour, stoicism, humility and their ability for hard work when the occasion demands it.

I really think we can work this idea together but I’m under no illusions that it’s going to be easy. It’s going to be a long and very hard journey, but they say the first steps are the toughest. And this is one of the first steps: publicising the intent.

The second step is tomorrow, when I hit the people with my idea. At the end of it I’ll either have a new job or I’ll be back to staring at the ceiling, worrying.

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Embodied Energy