Sabotage

Yes, it’s an ugly word, made all the fouler when it involves a drainage pipe that has run amok inside the walls of a just-painted house. Owning to circumstances that are still not clear to us, one of our workers stuffed a plastic water bottle (oh, how we’re bemoaning our earlier post extolling the many uses of said bottles!) into the drain pipe that runs from our terrace through the walls of the guest bathroom and dining room to its eventual exit in the city sewer beyond the mosque’s walls. Not only did the offending creep hide the bottle in our drainpipe, he then added a 40-centimeter layer of cement and other rubble that contributed to a colossal blockage and the resulting backup and overflow. You see, each night before heading home, our workers shower on the terrace (and doing other things that involve a drain, though we hate to even think of them as we consider our mucked up walls), so you can imagine the grimy water that filled the pipe. Having no where to go but up, once the “dust” as Hamoud so poetically calls the stuff that goes down drains (toilet, sink and otherwise), it overflowed and stained our freshly tadelakted and painted walls with vile brown rivulets.





Once the sabotage had been discovered, the Marrakech equivalent of RotoRooter arrived to clean out the drain and then the team set to work repairing the not inconsequential damage. “Look at this,” said Hamoud in disbelief, fishing his hand in the murky water and pulling out bits of debris that had comprised the blockage. Now, our new tadelakt must be stripped and reapplied (a two-day process), the dining room ceiling must be replastered and the walls repainted, and so on. Mustapha, our plumber/electrician, has remerged and set about cracking walls to ensure that the pipe has not suffered long-term damage and that we won’t sustain further leakage. Welcome back, Mustapha!

While we are upset by the setback, the sting of the betrayal by one of our own team is even worse. All those times we pinched ourselves for the good luck we've enjoyed with our able crew, especially as we listened to others complain about their worksite woes, is coming back to haunt us.

We were quite pleased, however, with how Hamoud and Mohamed handled things. Once they’d discovered the identity of the pipe plunderer, they swiftly fired him and rallied to right the problem caused by his sabotage. To be honest, the remaining crew seems even more cohesive and dedicated to getting our renovation back on track. When we located a photo of the saboteur on our computer (curiously, a lanky smiling boy who’d been one of our favorites), the team gathered around and shook their heads in disbelief at the traitor that had infiltrated their ranks. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. In Marrakech, though, one has to wonder if a sheep’s attire is the safest costume to don.