Improve Rural Moroccan Schools: Sami's Project

I keep coming back to the public restrooms. That sounds like a strange thing to keep coming back to, but it was a moment something shifted for me, the moment I stopped being passive to my expectations of walking in and using the bathroom without thinking of what goes into maintaining them. I was forced to confront the attendant and the small bowl of coins in front of them labeled “3 dirham”. I paid, confused, used the restroom, and walked back to the bus thinking it was just that one stop. I didn't think much more about it beyond a gas station and convenience store stop. It wasn’t until the third stop when I realized the stops weren't random. They had a rhythm. The guide knew everyone. 

The guide had arrangements. The toilet stop, the argan cooperative, the roadside shops with the water, snacks and postcards. These were not spontaneous additions to the itinerary. They were the itinerary, at least for some of the people whose livelihoods depended on the travelers of the road we were driving. And once I understood that, I couldn't see it as a small thing anymore.

I came into this experience holding questions around development and sustainability, what it actually looks like when communities are supposed to be partners in, not just recipients of, the economic activity moving through their spaces. What I didn't expect was to watch it being improvised in real time from the window of a tour bus. Because that's what I think I was seeing. Not a program, not an initiative, just people who had figured out how to intercept a little bit of what was flowing through their landscape before it disappeared entirely into systems they had no access to.

That realization came with complications, and I want to be honest about that. I don't know how the money moved once we left the shops. I don't know if the cooperative’s proceeds reached the women who ran it, or whether the arrangements benefited the guide more than anyone else. I didn't ask, and that matters. The questions I didn't ask are part of the record too. What I do know is that geographic location matters and does something to communities that is easy to miss when you're only passing through. It's not just about distance. It's about who gets to participate in decisions that affect their own lives, and who doesn't. Who captures value from the resources and landscapes that define their home, and who watches it leave on a bus headed somewhere else.

I think about the women at the cooperative, not the stop I'm describing here, but one earlier in the trip, where we sat with women who were weaving and had been for years. There is a kind of self-sufficiency in those spaces that I find genuinely moving and also genuinely complicated. Moving because it is real, because these are communities building something durable out of very little. Complicated because self-sufficiency can also be a polite way of describing abandonment, communities that have learned to rely on themselves because larger systems were never designed to reach them. The three-dirham toilet stop sits somewhere in that tension for me. It is resourceful. It is also what resourcefulness looks like when the alternative is nothing.

I came into this experience thinking I understood what I would find, and I didn't. I thought I would observe. Instead, I found myself implicated as a tourist, as someone generating economic activity I can't fully trace, as someone whose presence on that bus was both the reason the stops existed and also the reason they were never quite enough. What I know is that the landscape I was moving through is not a backdrop. It belongs to people who have been sustaining it through arrangement and ingenuity and small coins in a bowl for a very long time, and the least I can do is complain less about how many stops were made and more about the economic value that those stops brought to the shop owners.