Marché Maroc Marrakech

Marché Maroc Marrakech, one in a series of country-wide, PCV-organized and implemented craft fairs, was held at the Ensemble Artisanal April 14-18. The intent of the fair was to provide an opportunity for artisans working with PCVs across the country to attend a workshop on identifying sales opportunities, customer service, exhibit presentation, and matching products to the market, then put the information immediately into practice with a three day exhibition at a premier tourist stop in a major city.

I had signed on to the project as one of two members of the Artisan Committee, which involved communication with PCVs and their respective artisans to determine and confirm participants, providing travel and hotel logistics, translation of materials, keeping track of artisans, herding them to and from different locations, and being available for any artisan inquiries prior to or during the event.

The fair itself went smoothly. The artisans, forty in all, were mellow and patient throughout the duration, and all volunteers worked well with each other and the personnel of the Artisana. As I personally did not have artisans participating, (the potters here do not market their wares directly to tourists; they sell raw, undecorated items in bulk to middlemen for resale elsewhere) once the artisans were set up, familiar with things, and the tourists started rolling in, there wasn't a lot to do. I took on random errands to keep busy, at one point running through the back alley markets in search of a carpenter, at another, finding myself in a basement cyber cafe bargaining over the cost of color prints. All of us took turns on flier duty, awkwardly imposing ourselves in the paths of approaching tourists to hawk our cause, empathizing at last with the Moroccan merchants we've learned to snake past so aptly.

Hopefully the artisans were able to gain some new skills, establish new contacts, and learn from each other. I think each cooperative sold a decent amount. Each artisan was interviewed for feedback during the fair, and though I have yet to see a report of what was said, most of whom I spoke with and overheard seemed to regard the experience as positive. The next fair is in Rabat early next month. I won't be attending that one however, due to my being in ............................ America. That's right.

Bonus points if you spot the typo in the banner from the first pic.

Enrique Nights

 

We walk the loop around the neighborhood, the three of us, down the main street where people gather in fours and fives beneath the awnings of lighted storefronts and linger in barbershop doorways, sandals shuffling in the grit, their conversation muffled by the chainsaw buzz of motorbikes and a wake of pale exhaust.

One, in a black blazer and well-shined shoes that gleam under the streetlamps, recounts his day's university lesson-- early Celtic civilization-- speaking deliberately, almost angrily, as though doing so turns his words into proof. The other, reserved and musing, makes owl calls through cupped hands and offers bits of incidental poetry: Only the cricket can play his instrument.

Turning up a side street and into the alleyways between unfinished houses-- oppressive, hollow gray towers-- we rattle the iron window cages with our fingers as we pass like a playing card on bicycle spokes, mocking their efforts to protect; there is no one to keep out and nothing to hold in.

Who knows what all we talk about. We eat peanuts from paper cones, they bicker about everything, walking on either side of me, and brief quiet cricket interludes are quickly filled with misheard Latin pop lyrics that haunt me for days.

In the open expanse of a playing field at the end of the row, a breeze and the shadows of skulking dogs slip through the long grass. The air is warm and sweet with fragile traces of orange blossom. The lights of town hover above the basin beneath where the buildings rest invisible; mountains loom on the periphery with a presence darker than the obsidian curtain of sky.

We circle back around where the lights paint the street with the feeling of home and pressure cookers hiss from open windows, shaking hands and saying our "good evenings" at the corner near my door patterned over with the swaying shadows of fig leaves.