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During this time I sent out the following on my email list:
"Thank Osama for that.
Normal service has been resumed. No wind, sun and clear blue skies. The
last 3 weeks have been a bit rubbish weather wise, today is the first day
for quite a while where that lovely sleepy calm feeling that most Southern
Moroccan towns are soaked... More on that later.
Picking up somewhat from last time but missing out a bit that will come
later.....
Morocco made it to the final of the African Nations Football Cup - a
cracking 4-0 win of Mali in the semi final lead to partying on the streets
afterwards in Sidi ifni where I watched it in a tea shop. The final was
against Tunisia, but unfortunately the whole tournament was based in
Tunisia, and the home advantage told in the final with Tunisia sneaking
home 2-1. A lot of glum faces on the streets of Ifni that afternoon. And
also quite a few closed tea shops. It seems spontaneous acts of happiness
are banned here. All of the tea shops that had people in them for the
semi-final that then took to the streets cheering and tooting their
motorcycle horns were closed by the police. All other tea shops had a
policeman inside of them. Good news for the Morocco anyway.
Then the bad news. A big (over 6 on the richter scale) earthquake hit
northern Morocco. I was over 1200km away down south so wasn't aware of it.
I was camping next to a beach about 10km away from Ifni (on top of a cliff
which made me think afterwards) so only heard a vague rumour that an
earthquake had struck, and the english couple who told me said they didn't
know where it was centred but had 'heard' that it had affected Spain and
France.
Oh, that is big if that's the case! So I popped into use the internet and
had a read. It was centred just off of the coast of Northern Morocco. I
guess the tremors had been recorded in Spain and France but they didn't
seem affected and Chinese whispers had played a part in what I was told
earlier. Certainly the Northern area of Morocco was affected though. Over
500 people dead and loads of destroyed buildings, houses and
infrastructure. Sadly the death tolls in places like Morocco, Algeria and
Turkey are always much higher than they should be because of the
incredibly poor quality of building materials. People are very poor and
many cannot afford the luxury of a house, let alone one made of solid
bricks and steel.
It dawned on me after a few hours that perhaps I could help in some way?
It said they needed help transporting injured people (despite being right
on the coast, much of the region is very hilly with unsealed roads) I had
a good think about it. It would take 3 days to drive there. I had a leaky
front wheel hub that should be fixed before I set off. What exactly would
I do when I got there and how would I talk to people? It would also take 1
day or so to sort out the landy when I got there and I would need
somewhere to dump all my stuff in the meantime.
Not quite sure if I had made up my mind if I was going or not, but very
much thinking I must do something, I popped into Ifni to sort out the
leaking hub seal on the landy.
I had all of the parts I needed (thanks to Ihana Tom and the good folks at
Dunsfold who had predicted what bits would need changing with alarming
accuracy) but needed a better jack and axle supports than my hi-lift. So
two hours to sort it out and then two and a half hours haggling over the
cost of hiring the jack and a helper monkey afterwards. The agreed price
beforehand magically disappeared when the seal was replaced, and so the
fun began.
Ifni is one of those quite nice but nothing really special sorts of
tourist places. In the last 2 years it has had a huge increase in
tourists, mainly because hoards of european pensioners in their massive
camping vans have 'discovered' Morocco and Ifni has a Camping area right
on the beach (though not all swimmers have figured out that raw sewage is
pumped straight out into the sea at night!). And as ever a few dopey
tourists have paid stupid prices for various things in the past and so
whenever you walk into a shop expectations of making a killing are raised
by the proprietor :-)
I held out for the previously agreed price ( I should point out, I have no
french, him no english, all done by using a calculator and talking in out
own language and wildly gesturing to various things - it's all a game of
bluff and sometimes I quite enjoy it ) and after an hour
when I was getting bored of negotiations, I reduced that price by 20%. If
he wasn't sticking to it, then never was I ;-)
In the end his wife forced the end of our game. It was time for lunch, she
was phoning him on his mobile phone to remind him every 5 minutes to come
home, and as mobile calls here are extremely expensive, it was obviously
eating into his profits. So he accepted, with much sulking, the original
agreed price. He then asked for a lift home as I had held him up. I quite
like that about the Moroccans. Business is business. Afterwards it's just
some dirhams changing hands and you get on with treating people as people.
No grudges, though lots of bluff and bluster beforehand.
I should point out that I was offering him a very generous price - 60
dirhams - about what a school teacher or policemen make each day - and
most likely what he would earn in a day as well. For 2 hours on his jack
(in the street outside) and a bit of help from one of the (10-20 dirham a
day) kids he has to help.
Certainly he jumped out of the landy with a smile on his face when I
dropped him off home and gave me a hearty wave. Perhaps he knew he was in
for a special treat when he told his wife ;-)
So another day down the drain regarding getting up north to help out. And
another withdrawal at the cash machine revealed I would soon need to be
living off of magic beans and locusts whilst running the landy off sand.
It dawned on me, though denial and self delusion are popular traits in my
family, I couldn't afford to go up north and then come back down to
finish my filming. Nor could I actually afford to finish my filming.
In the end I didn't go. All of the above reasons really plus a few more.
Before I got there a week would have passed and I wasn't sure if I would
make any real difference.....?"
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