Small Deeds

More thoughts on hot air ballooning, which made an impression on us. Our trip to the balloon base camp began well before dawn. As we walked the streets before 5AM we passed dozens of men walking toward the mosque next door. As we kept our bleary eyes on the cobblestones in front of us, we were surprised to hear someone call out, “Bonjour, Caitlin et Samuel!” We looked up to see Mustapha, our plumber, on his way to pray. We exchanged greetings and walked on in search or a taxi. As we waited for a cab, we couldn’t help but notice that we hadn’t seen a single woman making the trek to the mosque at 5AM, and made a mental note to inquire why.



We pull to a stop in front of a flattened building and learn that this pile of brick and wood was the village schoolhouse until mid-July when a freak summer tornado raised it. Situated in the middle of nowhere between the three small villages that shared the facility, the pile of rubble is rather startling. Off to the side, a stone structure is intact, minus a roof, and we suspect that shoddy construction was partly responsible for the tornadoes damage. For a fundraiser for a literacy charity, it seems quite an unlikely coincidence that we’re to take flight a few meters from the school’s rubble.


While Room to Read is an impressively organized charity based in San Francisco and run by a former Microsoft bigshot, we learned (while waiting to see if the winds will allow us to take off) that Room to Read doesn’t actually exist yet in Morocco. [Of course, as we learned this we felt we were living inside that Seinfeld episode about George’s bogus charity: “The people in accounting looked into it, and it turns out there’s no such thing as the Human Fund.” “But there could be.” But there’s not.”] Without actual charity status, board, meetings or other formal trappings, it’s the ambition of several expats we’ve met to bring the literacy program to Morocco. A series of small events, with all proceeds going to the charity, have been organized over the past year, and the year ahead will show if the group is able to attract the parent organization it’s been courting, or if it sets its sights on a series of worthwhile but modest projects which are identified through the experiences of individual group members.


The ballooners present all see the destroyed schoolhouse as a perfect project for the local Room to Read. Certainly, three villages worth of children who are currently without a school would agree. We hope that the good intentions of those involved (ourselves included) can translate into action.

As the black scorpion we saw (as we pause to refill the balloons gas tanks after the trip) shows, the obstacles are many and varied.