When Anarchy Works

Today we went to a barbeque at the home of two new acquaintances, Mark and Birgit, an English-German couple. Their villa is located in the Palmerie, a posh neighborhood about 7 kilometers from the medina. Real grass, a big outdoor swimming pool and hamburgers on the grill. A bit of heaven. We sat on carpets laid out on the grass, propped up with brocade pillows beneath an enormous karob tree, which, although we have much disdain for its choco-substitute nuts, provides an elegant and abundant shade. Birgit and Mark like to entertain eclectic groups on lazy Sunday afternoons. Today, we are just seven, including two Moroccan brothers and their sister. The sister has lived in Munich for the past 14 years and is a friend of one of Birgit’s Bavarian cousins.

Since it’s our first visit to the Palmerie, Birgit gives us the name of a trusted cab driver who knows the route from the medina to their house. His nickname is Mohammed-Vite, a reputation born of his tendency to treat the narrow routes of Marrakech like the Autobahn. His dashboard is strewn with silk peonies, a curious complement to his manic driving.

During the course of the brunch chatter, conversation turns to the dramatic philosophical differences between Germany and Morocco, basically a case of extreme order versus anarchy. We recount our frustration at the line-cutting tendencies here and our delight in the phrase “Asha dir? Ana lewel!” or “What are you doing? I was here first!” which we use to the amusement of shopkeepers and line-cutters alike. Queues are sacrosanct in Germany, Birgit explains; no one cuts and all accept the rules of the queue without question. The Munich-based Moroccan tells us how disconcerting and dangerous it is when she comes home to Morocco and follows traffic signals by the book. The other day she started across the street as the walk signal flashed green and was almost flattened by a car and two scooters as they careened though the red light.

The thing is, the rule breaking and general creative anarchy that rule here in Morocco seem to actually work better on many levels than the regimented practices of places like Europe. Birgit even sites a study that found that places with rule-bending drivers experience fewer accidents than their law-abiding counterparts. Our first-hand experience seems to support this claim. We’ve seen very few scrapes – even on streets where cars, taxis and buses share space with bicycles, scooters, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. And we’ve not seen a single ambulance; the only sirens we’ve heard were from police vehicles escorting some political convoy.

Here in Morocco, drivers are more aware of everything around them. They aren’t just focused on the taillights in front of them (by the way, only vehicles that exceed 20 miles/hour are required to use lights at night), traffic signals and the official rules of the road. Instead they are hyper aware, eyes darting constantly left and right, watching for oncoming vehicles. When the one rule is that there are no rules, drivers are imbued with real personal responsibility and decision-making. Eyes are wide open. Reflexes are fast. Probably the only true threat comes from the foreign drivers that clog the roads during the summer months.

If anarchy works better than order on the streets of Marrakech, we wonder if this principle would hold true in other aspects of life.

Not to harp too tirelessly on the house, the jury is still out on whether creative anarchy is the best philosophy for home renovations. Although work progresses at an admirably speedy pace at Dar Noury – it’s amazing how quickly walls and stairways can be demolished! – we’ve run into our first case of ‘measure twice, cut once” gone awry. Given that we’re complete novices about medina house renovation, the one thing we’ve been stressing is “make it strong”. We don’t want walls caving in or tubs falling through ceilings. Since the house is 150+ years old, we’ve asked the crews to rip up the floors to inspect the beams to make sure the woods in good condition before proceeding. Hamoud’s taken our structural cautions to heart and has promised to reinforce all of the floors with rebar and cement. Anyway, we arrived at the house the other day to find that the workers had already installed two built-ins – a bed and a bench – before ripping up, inspecting and reinforcing the floors beneath them.

To us, this seemed like a huge waste of time, but Hamoud merely shrugged and said, “We’ll just rip them out when it’s time to do the floors.” Cue Samuel turning beet red, pacing wildly and searching for French words to explain idiocy of said “plan”, only to sputter incomprehensibly.

“That’s the way it goes here,” says Mark with a laugh as we recount the episode. He’s right, of course, and we have to concede that we’ve been on the winning side of the city’s penchant for fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants construction methods. After all, on the same day we acquired two built-ins that aren’t long for the world, our clever and zippy crew designed and built a fireplace in our living room and solved the geometry quandary posed by our stairway leading to the terrace, which had been dogging us for weeks. Two points team anarchy, one point team planning. Who’s your money on?