Taxis and Politics

A week ago, Tarabut Hussein traveled to the sizable town of Azilal and met up with other groups from our staj for a full day training on adult education techniques, behavior change mechanisms, and presentations/Q&A with some experienced currently serving volunteers. For our first break, volunteers scattered from the hotel entrance and found various snack stands and pastry stores before returning hands full to catch up with long lost friends from way back in Beni Mallal during our first week in country. The fare for that meal was most often nuts; either almonds, sugar-covered peanuts, or sometimes cashews, with the occasional sack of dates or raisins. Some people got coffee, and a few die-hards ran to the nearest establishment serving our new favorite reason to come to Azilal; the Avacado/Banana/Apple smoothy! This pale green, magical drink runs around 8-9 dirhams (about a dollar) and is served in a heavy glass mug which of course, you can take out of the store with you and return any time. That morning Amber and I skipped the smoothy and went with 5 dirham worth of sweet peanuts, which were weighed out and shoveled into a paper cone made out of 5th grade Arabic math homework. Literally, this cone was straight out of a workbook, complete with scribbled in answers and colored pencil drawings. I guess its good there giving away a little math lesson with each purchase. At lunch, we made our way to a cafe we were told would have turkey sandwiches. When we arrived and saw kafta (ground meat) in the display case with none other than a giant bottle of catsup and a small plastic toy hamburger, we promptly disregarded our turkey and ordered kafta sandwiches all around. As it turns out, what we received was not at all like the burgers that we had all been imagining. Instead, we got flat bread sandwiches with ground meat, onion, egg, tomato, sliced green olives, and melted American cheese. I ate the whole thing, but to this day I can’t decide if it was good or not. No bite was the same and only a few were delicious. Still I appreciated the experience and the ground meat. After another few hours of training, we headed over to the taxi stand which seemed different from usual. For some reason, all of the taxi drivers were way off on the side of the taxi lot in a group, while a large collection of confused passengers formed around the “kurtis” (these are the men that take the money and dole out passengers to the taxi drivers as seats fill up). The kurtis seemed stressed and tension among the passengers was growing rapidly. A trickle of taxis left the lot, but the further from Azilal your destination was, the less likely you were to get a ride. We watched in awe as one of the volunteers that has been in country for two years argued with kurtis and drivers over the ridiculous price tag for a seat to Marrakech. Despite her impressive language ability, she was still looking for a ride when we left for home. Luckily we didn’t have far to go and as it turned out, our driver just happened to live in our town so he was more than happy to take us there as his last ride of the night.
The next day, we found out that all the negative vibes at the taxi stand were due to a budding taxi strike in response to sweeping government mandates regarding taxi safety and regulations. Now this is based strictly on hearsay and snippets of French news, but it seems that some Moroccan government official (who may or may not have studied in the states) thought it appropriate to make significant changes to the codes and regulations that taxi drivers must abide by, including much harsher punishment for accidents and regulations banning taxis that are deemed too old. These regulations are probably in response to the lack of safety on Moroccan roads and may be very effective in saving lives and improving the development of Morocco, but needless to say, taxi drivers (most of whom own their own taxis which are often quite old) were not ready to augment their careers this drastically. In fact, the strike has been adopted by 19 transportation unions including buses and transits. Now, 9 days later, the country of Morocco has experienced the economic damage of vacant roads. Souqs and tahanuts across the country are deficient with no way of transporting produce and goods. The limited availability has increased prices and quality among produce in many places is dismal. This is especially tragic in a year which has seen one of the highest outputs of produce in Moroccan history. In response to the problems, unions and the officials today agreed on a 15 day hold on the strike to allow for negotiation. N’sha’ Allah, that will be enough time to settle on a compromise that saves lives and the economy too. Wish us luck!