For three weeks in July and August, a team of students – dubbed Team
Tagut – from Worchester Polytechnic Institute (Massachusetts, USA) joined Dar
Si Hmad in Agadir and Sidi Ifni. The team’s goal was to design an electronic
game and textbook to teach students about the human elements of engineering for
developing communities featuring our fog harvesting project.
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| Eid Al-Fitr on the beach of Agadir with Team Tagut |
Faculty leader Rob Krueger explains: “The project we are working on here is an electronic
textbook based broadly on the themes of gender, development, and water. The
text book will have several components. First, it relates the story of a fog
water harvesting project in Southern Morocco that was a decade in the making
that involved villagers, men and women, an NGO, Dar Si Hmad, and many other
actors to pull off, including a world leading researcher in fog water
harvesting... This story is not a simple one involving fog nets, pipes, pumps,
and other forms of infrastructure, it involves people's ways of life and how
they could change as a result of the project. Second, it provides students the
opportunity to inhabit a character that was involved in the project in the
course of a role playing game. Our interviews, photos, and videos, are designed
to inform a student of the different perspectives different actors have in
these processes. Hopefully, it will teach compassion, too, especially between
the western and Muslim world. The textbook also provides learning opportunities
for simple programming (not my area!), computational methods, and reading data
sets. Finally, the textbook will be presented in a way that it could be adopted
to college students, high school students, and even grade school students who's
teachers use "STEAM" methods of teaching (science, technology,
engineering, ARTS, and Math). It's an ambitious project, to be sure.
By
bringing these components together I hope we can help educate more culturally
and socially literate engineers, bring more underrepresented groups to STEM
related fields, and teach students with a liberal arts orientation computational
literacy. It was Werner Heisenberg or Albert Einstein who said that,
"nature only responds to those questions we ask", well, if we have
more liberal arts students who are STEM-literate and more STEM students who are
culturally sensitive we might develop more human-environment centered outcomes
from our infrastructure projects than merely technologically elegant ones.”
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| WPI students share breakfast with Marouane and Najib |
After the first week, WPI student Clara Merino reflects: “The lack of roads and
education are still a real issue in the bled. The schools are often far or not
open due to the teacher not showing up. They are unreliable education systems.
One of the younger daughters suffers from a heart condition. This makes it dangerous
for her to attend the larger yet farther school. She has attempted to go to
school which resulted in her passing out. Her school mates have carried her
back to her house still unconscious. The other children in the family attend
school. The husband pushes their education by holding them responsible for
completing their homework. As he wishes his parents had pushed him to do. The
parents of this family have such a drive for education. That it may be one of
the top reasons why even the accessibility of water can not keep them in the
bled. The wife herself wants to continue her education and learn English and
French. But neither the wife nor the children will see their education flourish
in a school that only offers four years of schooling at best.
Where does this leave me? I ask myself, sitting down with interview questions in my hand. These parents want nothing more than to give their children a future. One that their parents could not give them and that their village CANNOT give them. It makes you want to flag down the UN or someone to do something about this. But that got me thinking, what would have I done? At my age, my mom got married and moved to a completely new country. Where she did not know neither the language nor had any family connections. With only one thing on her mind, her children’s future, she persevered. Around my age, the wife of the family in the bled met her future husband and within 15 DAYS, they married. Now almost 14 years later, they are still working together to secure their children’s future. What will I do to secure mine and my children’s future?
Isabella Schiavone explains: “Whenever you talk to someone who has worked on Dar Si Hmad’s fog
project, they tell you that there’s nothing more amazing than watching the fog
come up the mountain. Part of me always assumed that the magnificence came
because these people new the impact that the fog water system has. I thought
that the fog coming in was amazing because the fog project was amazing. The fog
meant that there would be water and that wasn’t just good. That was a miracle.
I didn’t expect to see any fog while we were
here, certainly not any up near Mt. Boutmezguida. During the summer months
there is rarely any fog that is able to get all the way up to the mountain
before it burns off or the hot eastern winds blow it away. Last Thursday night
it rained in Sidi Ifni and on Friday morning the city was covered in a thick
cloud of fog. As we drove up to Timtda we were still clouded in this thick,
heavy fog. It was cold, the fog clings to your skin and clothes and the wind
from the west chills you thoroughly. And it is amazing.
The Aït Baamrane region is undeniably a desert. The plants have thick,
waxy leaves to hold in the little water they get, the dirt is dusty and dry,
and sometimes it seems impossible that there is so much life in these
mountains. But standing there, cold and wet in the middle of the day in the
desert is almost inexplicably wonderful. The plants seem to reach out for the
fog’s nourishment. The animals perk up as if they can feel the water coming. And
yes, it is even more amazing when you know that the fog is going to become clean,
accessible water for people who need it. But there is something that is simply
magical about something that is nothing more than a meteorological happenstance
could sustain that much life.”
