Food Security Morocco Project #8799

Multicultural Partners Planting Trees in Africa

by High Atlas Foundation

Multicultural Partners Planting Trees in Africa

Project Report | Aug 11, 2021
Sustainable Development through Mother Tongue and Multilingualism

By Yossef Ben-Meir and Ellen Hernandez | President

When community meetings are held to determine priority development projects in villages, in neighborhoods, in schools, in agricultural fields—wherever they may take place—we want to speak the language that is spoken there, spoken every day. The idea of a person or a community of people exploring what they most want in their lives should be as real and as connected to their notion of “self” as possible.

One’s mother language is a language of the heart, and we can express ourselves in that language unlike any other because it is how our deepest contemplation takes place. It is the language of prayer, of mercy and of forgiveness. It is the language of friendship and love. It arises from the concept of the mother, the one who nurtures us as infants, being the one from whom we first hear language and try to articulate what we hear.

Expression in our mother tongue is associated with sustainable development. When we work with community groups through participatory dialogue, we focus on identifying what is most sought and what people want to dedicate themselves to. That kind of introspection should be completely honest, reflecting on our deepest selves in the language in which we are most comfortable. So, language is an essential part of achieving sustainability.

Participatory community planning is a hallmark of civil society organizations dedicated to sustainable development, but it can be challenging when there is the presence of multiple languages of expression. Civil society workers are often in situations where there is no choice but to use their many and varied languages—in Morocco, for example, this will include Arabic as well as Tamazight—to communicate effectively and try to make expression the most personal and closest to what is really felt. This requires movement in and out of languages, creating a climate of multilingualism.

The ideas of multilingualism are actually ancient. In the Hebrew tradition, for example, the highest court had 70 judges to reflect what were considered the world’s 70 root languages. The idea was that if you have each of these essential languages represented, those matters that came before the court would be approached from all different perspectives and points of view in order to come to a more truthful understanding of the subjects being examined.

We should learn as many languages as we can, not just as a skill but as a perception-creating opportunity. Through experiences such as travel, international work, immigration, and personal experience, we develop a multilingual, and thus a pluralistic, perspective. While this contradicts the philosophy that an engaged, connected citizenry benefits from a shared root language, the ability to “code switch” demonstrates a capacity to negotiate the personal as well as the public spheres of higher education, the workplace, commerce, and society. It also allows us to share our cultural and linguistic knowledge with our peers.

As language is alive and ever-evolving, and as thousands of languages are now endangered, there is also something in the nature of language that must be preserved. We understand that human beings have been on this planet for many tens of thousands of years. Imagine, then, the number of languages that have appeared and disappeared during that time? Today’s languages can be traced to some of them, but some have passed into oblivion. Even the thousands that exist today cannot be compared to the totality of all languages that ever were. Like plant and animal species, biodiversity of languages is becoming rarer and will continue in that trend as speakers of endangered languages pass on or assimilate into larger groups.

We are obliged, then, to make the effort to preserve languages through multilingualism. We need to document and archive them, as through the Endangered Languages Project, but we also must learn and utilize them in real situations through practice and experience. While there is a value to studying in a classroom, most of us learn best by immersing ourselves in the acquisition of new languages. People learn best how to nurture trees or how to deliver legal aid as clinicians and community servants in real situations, and we know that we integrate those skills and abilities and perceptions and absorb them better by actually applying them in the everyday world.

Heartfelt language expression allows for adapted and tailored design of initiatives to meet our human needs, creating the basis for their sustainability. Multilingualism gives us the range of views we need for more complete understanding, followed by decisions that are considerate of the range of factors that are behind (and surround) our lives’ conditions. Diving as well as we can into our home languages and those spoken around us preserves them on earth and avails us of the richness of symbols and knowledge that they carry.

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Jun 28, 2021
Updates on the Tadmamt and Akrich Fruit Tree Nurseries

By Said Bennani | HAF Project Manager

HAF Project Manager Said, Driver Abdelghani, and volunteer Youssef, all visited the Tadmamt and Akrich nurseries on June 3, 2021, to start off an insightful visit and viewing of the communities. The first stop was in Tadmamt, where they met assistant nursery caretaker Abdeltif, who walked them around the nursery and checked on the saplings and the seeds. They observed that since the last visit to the nursery, progress has been made, but there is still more to be done in choosing the best seeds and installing the irrigation system.

The challenge they examined at the nursery then is that the weeds grow very quickly since the saplings are frequently watered. The caretaking team, including nursery caretaker Si Omar, increased their work time in order to keep up with weeding while simultaneously preparing the almond and cherry saplings for grafting. In utilizing a teamwork approach, weeding should only take one week of dedicated work. Another two or more days are needed to prepare the grafting of the almond and cherry saplings. Hopefully, if the almond saplings grow efficiently enough, they will only take four weeks, and the cherry only two.

Additionally, the water storage system was full. Alhamdulillah, this year there is enough water for the nursery. Two more people will be hired to remove the dirt and plants that grow in the storage container so that the irrigation system will be filled with clean water and its space for water storage optimized. For the irrigation, more valves must be added at the main pipelines to control and distribute the pressure for each part of the nursery equally since work is being done on the terraces.

That same afternoon, the team also met with Akrich nursery caretaker Abderrahim to monitor the nursery together. Abderrahim is giving great attention to the carob saplings every day, and next year, 30,000 carob saplings may be distributed from this nursery. Abderrahim is very happy with the solar water pumping system at the nursery that was donated by FENELEC, and he informed us that the local communities of and around Akrich are learning the importance and the advantages of the solar system when they visit the Akrich nursery. Abderrahim enjoys explaining its function at the nursery. What is encouraging is that the local people are eager to learn more about how solar energy can help to pump their drinking water.

The Akrich nursery was the first of HAF’s “House of Life” interfaith nurseries, beginning as a pilot project in 2012 and built adjacent to the seven-hundred-year-old tomb of Rabbi Raphael Hacohen. Its success influenced the establishment of a second such nursery in Imerdal, near Ouarzazate, which overlooks the 1,000-year-old burial place of the Moroccan Jewish saint Rabbi David and was built at the direction of His Majesty King Mohammed VI of Morocco with funding from the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH).

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Jun 7, 2021
Review of "The Labor of Agrodiversity in a Moroccan Oasis"

By Megan Sprotte and Megan Williams | HAF-UVA Interns

In her recent essay, “The Labor of Agrodiversity in a Moroccan Oasis”, Karen Rignall examines the recent history of farming in the Mgoun valley in southern Morocco in order to explain how agrodiversity, labor, and tradition interact in current small-scale agrarian systems. Rignall emphasizes lines of thought that highlight the large extent that agricultural biodiversity is protected by small landholder farmers. She argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be a new product of recent transformations or rejections of agricultural traditions. She emphasizes that, to a large extent, agrodiversity is protected by these farming households because what may appear as traditional agriculture may in fact be a new method that has emerged in response to the changing commodity markets that in turn transform labor regimes.

Farming practices are not simply a persistence of tradition, but rather an intentional practice in response to changing social, economic, and agroecological conditions. Thus, as the times change, farmers are forced to experiment with the cultivation of a wider variety of plants, promoting agrodiversity. Additionally, Rignall points out that this increased agrodiversity represents a privileged position for certain households that are located in water and land-rich areas.

In her case study that consisted of twelve months of ethnographic research in rural Morocco, agrodiversity was promoted through a reconfiguration of labor regimes, however, many households lacked access to the necessary resources, capital and labor that facilitated this transformation. Many farmers' crop regimes were limited to corn and maize simply because they could not afford the labor required to include crops such as tomatoes and vegetables. This is illustrative not only of the strong barriers that prevent people from escaping poverty, but also how these transformed labor regimes can highlight and enhance the current inequalities that exist in communities.

The situation in the Mgoun region of Morocco is not unique to just this farming community, but is the reality for millions of Moroccan farmers trying to make a livelihood in rural locations throughout the country. The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) has recognized these intractable barriers the communities are facing and has taken steps to help them overcome these challenges. HAF aims to promote agrodiversity and aid in the transformation of farming communities towards new methods of agriculture through the creation of nurseries and the planting of dozens of varieties of fruit trees and medicinal plants. These plants are native to the region and the demand for these goods on the market makes them both a sustainable and reliable source of income.

Beyond providing supplies, HAF supports the formation of cooperatives that allow community members to work together so that they all may benefit from these new crops and methods of farming. The social, political, and economic spheres are rapidly transforming both within Morocco and around the world, and agriculture will continue to be heavily influenced by it. Through facilitating the process of transforming agricultural traditions for rural farmers, the High Atlas Foundation is both promoting agrodiversity and helping to empower all members of these communities.

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