West Wing Comparisons

To anyone who has spent a lot of time with me knows that one of my favorite TV shows ever is The West Wing. I am pretty lucky that a lot of the trainees feel the same way. My Ouarzazate roommates and I watch a different West Wing and/or Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (Aaron Sorkin is a god) episode the nights we are in the hotel.

Anyway, in the 2nd to last episode of the series, Allison Janney’s character, CJ Craig, mentions that 9 out of 10 African aid projects fail because of poor road infrastructure. I have no way of knowing if this is actually a true statistic but based on the 2 months I have spent in my CBT village, I have no trouble imagining that this could true. Here is why:

My little village received about an inch of rain in steady drizzle that last 12 hours. Well, who would have thought that this would have turned life upside down. Certainly not the Americans. The roads here are all dirt so everything turned into mud. The river, which supports the village’s agriculture and livelihood, rose a few inches thanks an early snow melt in the High Atlas mountains. Well the river is what separates my village from the bigger town that has the supermarche and most important (to me) the internet. The only way to cross the river is by walking across (let’s face it, it is more a creek):



Or by using the bridge which is basically a pile of rocks built up so that vans with 4-wheel drive can across. Well, when the river rose, it looked like this:



And made it impossible to forge. Well, we were scheduled to ‘go into town’ to buy food and use the internet and damn it, we were Americans; a little rain was not big deal us and food and internet are the two things we can’t live without. Still not completely understanding the situation, we made the decision to just walk over the ‘bridge’ and grab a taxi to town. Our LCF (teacher and for the moment, boss) told us this wasn’t possible so naturally, we considered mutiny.

Well, to shorten the story, the river receded a little and we begged in our best Tamazight the van transport driver to take us to town and he consented. It was during the bridge crossing that the severity of situation hit us. The water was moving very swiftly and if it had rained just a few more inches, the villagers would have been trapped in their homes for days, possibly weeks. Contemplating this, the words of The West Wing popped into my head and I thought “wow, that statistic could actually be true”.