April 2008; If you take a risk...don’t be surprised if it goes wrong!

Now Finn, there are times when you have to take risks. It’s best if these are in some ways calculated, i.e. that if it all goes wrong, it won’t be too bad for you. At times, well you’ve just got to hope that it luck is on your side. And then there are times when it’s a case of “suck it and see”...What’s the phrase...? ”God helps those that do!” You hope!

Anyway, despite our return from temporary expulsion, we all had to leave Moroc. I had a training with the Red Cross as part of their “Emergency Response Team”, which means that i keep my finger in the Humanitarian world, whilst we also do this out here. It’s always good to have a back up plan.

BRC Course Learning to provide Mass Sanitation for 10,000 people in an emergency.

At the chantier (worksite) we’d got to a point where, either we would need to stop work because we were going to be away, or we would need to leave the team to work by themselves, though with all materials already bought.

I’d been trying to get Abdurahim to give me a price for his work after the gratting for a couple of weeks now, and yet still he hadn’t. He’d also, it seemed to me, been stiring things up with the team in the way that i was calculating their work rate.

Having done some gratting, I had an idea of how long it took to do. But the team were working far too slowly...that’s waht happens if you pay by the day. Thus I tried to get him to give me a job rate.

This proved a nightmare. His initial quote of 90 days, had me asking him to go away and return when he was feeling sensible. He did and we eventually managed to get quotes for each of the rooms, which I wrote on the walls in spray paint.

But the main issue was that because we were leaving Fez for Uk, we had to decide if we closed the chantier, or if we allowed the guys to carry on with us away. It was only grattage but still common opinion amongst those here was that we close.

We chose to take a risk and let the team continue, buy all necesary materials and come back, with the work advanced...ish allah!

Beccie has her concerns.

We also asked a freind Kleo to keep an eye on the site and left an emergency float with her..just in case. I said that I’d be in e mail contact with her daily and if there were any problems we’d close the chantier....and off we went, of course finding that one of the workers was stealing materials from us with just an hour to go before the flight, requiring immediate suspension and clear explanation to the rest as to what was expected in our absence!!
What a joke!

Within days Kleo was contacting me to say that the decapeur needed more materials. Of course his was the only work that I hadn’t audited before leaving, but I was sure that he had all he needed. Ok give him more materials.

Then a day later, Abdurahim went to Kleos to say he needed more materials and I knew that something was wrong. Thus I advised Kleo to inform the team that i was closing the chantier until I returned.

Poor Kleo. As she described to me, this resulted in her having the whole team shouting at her outside her house. I’ve since learnt that finishing a team is a horrible business, but poor her. I can only appologise.

I may have learning about mass sanitation but I think I left Kleo in the shit. Sorry Kleo!

We returned to find that the team had indeed played silly buggers in our absence. Their work was shoddy. Abderahim had proved to be far from the mualim he had professed to be and had made a complete botch of several walls, all of which needed to be redone and thus I sacked the whole team.

It's not like we were trying to anything difficult, like this wonderful wood and plaster work at the wood museum in Fez.

We tried and failed. But at least we tried. There is so much to learn here and in doing this. It’s so very different from working with a large organisation and there’s something about working in Morocco which is very different from other places. It feels as if you are never sure if what people say, is true or not, about anything.

So we had to start again. Start again to find a team. Start again to test them out. Start again to plan our work with them, and all, again when I was off back to the second part of the BRC course, leaving much to Beccie to organise on her own.

I went off to the course feeling guilty but excited by the potential of the course. Unfortunately it was slightly disappointing and I returned to find Beccie pulling her hair out.

But at least she had you young man!

We’d employed two new Mualem, only to find, again that they were cowboys and their work shite...arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I think I can safely say that at this point we were at the least, down hearted. Simply trying to find the workers was proving to be a nightmare, let alone managing the actual build.

Thus we decided to try out several “entrepreneurs” who would manage the build for us. Unfortunately all of those we tried either proved exhorbitant in their costings (generally being at about double of what we thought we could pay ourselves, notably for materials) or simply not good enough.

Miserable, we found ourselves forlornly pounding the streets of Zkak El Maa (the street of water) only to bump in to a guy called Alamy, whom we had known since first looking for houses here. Ironically we had seen him working for several people eher, and whilst we didn’t necessarilly like his finishing, he had been regularly praised by others and definately got the job done. We explained our situation to him and he said he would help. Alhumdoolillahh! At last some luck.

Unfortunately his father had literally just died when we met him and as such apart from his obvious distress, he was busy organising the funeral. Secondly, as he said, he was busy managing the build of a massive riad for “The Russian” and wouldn’t be free for several weeks.

However at the very least he provided us with a new set of workers, stating that he would come in every now and then to check their work, and if we/he didn’t like it, he’d change them for others.

And thus we finally managed to get our new team together, alhumdoobloodylillah, perhaps the gods really does help those that do...we’ll see.

Fortunately it wasn't all pounding the streets, here's Beccie trying to learn Deriga with our teacher who only wanted to speak English!