Almost over

yes Ramadan is almost over..... and I am dreaming of my breakfast cup of coffee and no more Harira!

We have now finished pouring the concrete for the basement ceiling and the ground floor. Mohamed worked all night on Tuesday night to get it finished. He says it was really something seeing dawn coming up over the mountains.

I haven't been up to see it yet - but since it will still be full of the wooden scaffolding I think I might wait a few days. Then we can get the electricity in and install a toilet and move in! We are going to live in the basement while we build upstairs... mainly while we save up to get it finished as it has cost a lot more than we estimated to get the basement built - but then our estimates didn't include having a basement with 3 rooms and a garage and buying an extra bit of garden ground. Anyway it will be nice to be finally living in our own place ... even in an unsettled way.

Everyone is well - hope you all are too

Life goes on

I can't believe how the last week, (month... year) has flown by. Ramadan is just entering the final week... I am getting heartily sick of making and eating harira, but found my earplugs so at least I am now managing to get a proper nights sleep (not being woken before dawn by Mohamed and his mother making and eating food!).

Progress on the house is slow... but now the concrete base is down for about 3/4 of the house and they are getting ready to pour the ceiling of the basement. Once that is done we are going to concentrate on getting electricity in, a toilet put in and a water supply (via a tank) put in - then we will probably move in while the building goes on above.

The workers decided to do the concreting by night and I was tasked with making a huge turkey stew for them to keep them going. I don't know if I am going to have to do it again this week when they pour the ceiling.

My niece Josephine has left home... off to university in Edinburgh, and Rosie has left Glasgow to start her PhD in London. I have been thinking about when I left home - how strange it felt and how alone I was.... but not for long. What is strange now is that it was almost 25 - no 35 years ago!

Wikaren

And this is a view of the village - well the eastern end of the village. We are living in the big square pink house above and to the right of the mosque.

Elvis

Here is Elvis in our inside patio - with the rose tree

Water, water everywhere.....

On Sunday we took a trip up the valley behind our new house to a fresh water spring to collect some "drinking" water. We went in our faithful Kangoo though everyone else takes their donkey.

I wish I had a donkey.

It is pretty little place, surrounded by olive trees, a fig tree and even some palm trees. The spring water comes via a pipe into a series of 3 tanks - one for humans, one for donkeys to drink from, and a reservoir for keeping the olive trees watered. While we were there one of the men from the village came and let the water out of the reservoir to trickle into an arrangement of irrigation channels. He then went around blocking and unblocking the different channels (with an assortment of stones and rags) to make sure all the trees in the grove got a drink.

The road to the well has only just been made passable for cars, and soon the villages up the valley will be connected to the electric grid, though I suspect it will be a while before they have piped water!

Back in the village I have been working out what to do with household rubbish. There is no collection service here. I put all old bread and vegetable peelings outside the gate and in the evening donkeys come and eat it up. They really enjoyed some watermelon the other day. I think I am going to have burn other food waste and paper and then I will just have plastic (excluding the bottles we use to collect water from the valley) and tins to worry about. I have been sneaking bin bags full of rubbish in to Agadir and leaving it in the eurobins in the street where we used to live in Dhakla.... But I suddenly realised the other day that the heavily loaded horse and carts that I see wending their way up the hill as I am driving down into Agadir are full of rubbish and are heading off to dump it somewhere in the countryside.....

Plastic waste is a real problem here and Moroccans are really bad at just dropping litter. I am sure I have talked before about how the countryside is strewn with old carrier bags - usually black plastic which scurry along the bottom of the hedges and hang in bushes. If you just catch the movement out of the corner of your eye you think there is a big black hen rooting in the ditch or a blackbird in the bushes (depending on the size of the bin bag)... actually that reminds me of the time I came across a plastic wrapped silage bale that had rolled onto our road at Slaggan Croft. It was early in the morning in winter so quite dark and I thought at first it was a dead cow on the road!

Well I had better get back to work... this week mostly tidying up my movie script and setting up a new website or two.....