Huff and puff and melt the house down

A month before our arrival in Merzouga, there was a storm unlike anything they had seen for almost half a century. It rained and hailed for 4hrs until a levee (yes, a levee in the desert) melted and unleashed a torrent towards the village*. Houses in the flood plane melted like chocolate in the third hour. Some 30 (three-oh) buildings disappeared as well as the aqueduct which fed the oasis, killing 4 people. The survivors were huddled into tent shelters waiting to see what support the government would give them to rebuild.
Now they, and we, were being sandblasted by the heavy winds. Our trek didn't start until the late afternoon so we walked around the desert town. The streets were empty in the high heat and low visibility of the sandstorm. We ducked into a guesthouse, which offered a home cooked lunch by the womens while the owner Ali helped pass the time by sitting down and chatting with us over tea and peanuts.
His family was nomadic and he was the first of 9 children to be born in a village. As with many nomads they found that the emergence of guards at the Algerian border due to heated political situations drastically limited the amount of grazing available to maintain their flocks of sheep. Over time families were forced to forego the nomadic lifestyle and started settling down fifty years ago. The families joined forced to build the aqueduct to the oasis and split time for access to the water. Each year more nomads are forced to make the same difficult transition as the grass is getting harder to find. Ali estimated that in two decades there would be no more nomads in the Moroccan Sahara. Sadly his uncle's two sons drifted into the 20km no man's zone between Morocco and Algieria for their sheep to graze. The Algerian troops caught them, confiscated the entire herd of 300 and imprisoned the two men for 2 yrs. Only recently released the other nomads will each give them a couple of animals from their own flocks to try to get the brothers started up again.

-Mary

* technical note: we weren't actually in Merzouga, but a small village next to it. But we don't remember the name of the village. We're told that Merzouga was actually only a slightly larger village, anyway.

oh, the picture has nothing to do with this town. Its actually from the Ait ben Haddou kasbah outside Ouarzazate. Just felt you deserved something for reading the story.