Tunisia – Page 34 – Not Your Average Engineer

November 28, 2004November 15, 2021

Water Resources

I’d like to tell you the name of the person which gave us the presentation in class today, but unfortunately, Heather, Lucas, and I were delayed downtown trying to acquire some food. We had a second session of Arabic class that lasted until 4pm and we had decided to go find something quick and easy so we wouldn’t be dead come 4pm. It was just our luck that the place we chose was very slow! So as a result, we arrived 45 minutes late to class.

The part of the presentation that I did see was very interesting. The presenter was showing us the ongoing effort to utilize Tunisia’s water resources which include surface water such as Tunisia’s sole river, the seasonal wadis, and several lakes, ground water, and waste water. Currently, it looks like Tunisia won’t run out of water until after 2030. Through careful management and a large distribution network, the resources of the northwest are spread across the entire country. Something like 80% of the available water is in the northwest which is only 20% of the country. Even the water which Tunisia does get doesn’t actually originate here. Instead, it comes from Algeria through the river.

It was interesting seeing their efforts to keep Tunisia flowing along. She talked about the aquifer recharging schemes that they’re implementing around the country. Basically, they put little rock dams maybe a couple of feet high across wadis to slow the flow of the water, drop some sediment, and allow the water a chance to soak into the ground. They had tried the pumping method to pump water into the ground during wet years, but it didn’t work very well in Tunisia. They also looked at trying to treat waste water that way, but it wasn’t economical or efficient. She said Israel does it effectively which I found rather interesting. Israel is a really dry place!

Knowing that Tunisia’s 20 golf courses are irrigated using treated wastewater, I wonder what they smell like. I know that many courses in the USA are also watered in this way and some of them really stink, especially when the treatment plants up stream break down! I imagine since these are all tourist golf courses, they probably don’t smell bad at all.

She wrapped up her presentation talking about the extensive monitoring network in the northwest river drainage system. There are many weather observation stations, rain gauge stations, river sampling stations, and points where they manually take water samples. Every six months they do a comprehensive sampling of the water all across the northwest. She said that when they sample the water, they wake up at 4am, drive all the way out there, get the samples, and are back in Tunis at 10pm to drop them off at CITET for analysis. If the samples sit for more than 48 hours, they aren’t any good as the oxygen levels won’t be accurate anymore.

All in all, it was an interesting presentation. I wish I had been there for the entire thing!

November 28, 2004November 15, 2021

Bitter Academic

Lazreg really goes to town on arguing that “global feminism’ is a horrid problem which is solely the fault of the west and the puppets that are paraded around on the international lecture circuit. She pontificates at great length her distain for the treatment of the “Other woman” as someone who lives in a bad society and needs freeing and, prior to that, careful documentation for consumption by western audiences. She argues that all western work on the study of the “Other woman” is garbage and only serves to sensationalize and perpetuate lies and half truths about women from societies other than those of the west.

It seems to me that Lazreg must have been passed up once too many times to be a guest lecturer or was turned down by one too many publishers and now she’s become a very bitter and jaded academic. I dare say that she lost her academic marbles. This short piece seems only designed to lash out at the rest of the academic community in a very blind and indiscriminant manner. She harshly criticizes everyone from her own students through other academics through the “Other women” lecturers and authors. Never once did I see any real suggestion for improvement on the current system. Regardless of whether or not what Lazreg says is true, it’s entirely unconstructive to spew such academic bile in the faces of her peers without offering up some possible solution. In engineering, that would be like saying a dam will fail and kill a million people but not suggesting any methods to stop the event from occurring.

I agree with her that many people do trivialize the “Other woman” and make all of her efforts and endeavors into a fight against the system in which she lives. In fact, I’m sure that I’m even guilty of such things. In today’s gogo western world of 10 second sound bytes and instant information 24/7/365, if the topic isn’t sensationalized a bit, no one from the general population is going to bother looking at it. For that matter, most undergraduates wouldn’t take a women’s studies class if they didn’t expect to read some exotic tales of far off places and far out women. Some might even be so lucky as to see national geographic style photographs of women in “traditional” dress scratching out a meager existence in sub Saharan Africa. What the students aren’t told is that an anthropologist paid the women either in cash or in food or some other valuable commodity to pose in outdated clothes doing things which they wouldn’t usually do. I’ve known enough anthropologists over the years to know that this is the modus operandi for a good chunk of the anthropological community.

But I digress. Agreeing with Lazreg is one thing. Agreeing with her method of delivering the message and the “academacized” nature of her writing (lots and lots of unnecessary big words and tons of verboseness) served more to hurt her argument rather than help it in my eyes.

November 27, 2004November 15, 2021

Waiting for Death

This story tells of the tragedy of independence for the traditional Moroccan woman. Initially, Zahra fought for independence only to find the fruits of her labor died on the vine at independence. To add insult to injury, she only could find work as a cleaning woman for a French cultural center. Now the colonizers who she fought against are her only means of support.

Once again, it appears that the women of Morocco were duped into trusting the men would give them their fair share. Once again, the men betrayed them.

Certain passages such as the following bear striking resemblances to portions of the book Animal Farm.

“He ate with a fork and I with my fingers. The sound of his fork hitting the plate,” (pg 54) and “He packs the kif carefully into a small pipe which looks like a thimble, lights it and sucks in, making the kif burn like a live coal. Smoke seems on the verge of coming out of his ears as well when Roukia, mirroring my own thoughts, says, ‘You’d better stop doing that stuff or they’ll drag your name through the mud.’ ‘Soon he’ll be smoking European pipes and cigars,’ I add, ‘Independence has played tricks with their heads.” (pg 63).

Just as the pigs in Animal Farm turned into men, the resistance fighters of Morocco have turned into the French. It seems that wherever a colonizing power leaves, the locals become even more colonial than the original colonizers! The Moroccans became more French than the French, the Egyptians more British than the British and the Mexicans more Spanish than the Spaniards. Regardless of when or where the colonization and revolution took place, it seems that the result is the same.

The only real twist in North Africa and the Middle East comes with women’s rights. Regardless of all their fighting for the resistance, once it was over, they were even worse off than when they started. Women that stuck with tradition were often cast by the wayside in favor of women who wore French clothes and cut their hair short, such as Zahra. She was thrown out in favor of a 20something “secretary” who dressed like a French woman and maybe would bear children for Zahra’s husband. Having received no formal education beyond the literacy classes she took during the resistance, Zahra was forced to in turn try to spin wool, which she found unprofitable, look for a job in olive oil factories, and then finally found stable and secure employment at a French cultural center. Zahra got her papers and whatever the law provides for. She didn’t have any parents or grandparents to move back in with and she wasn’t about to set up shop with her sister or other relations after having tasted independence and freedom. It all ended up in a horrid bind for her.

The only thing that seems to keep Zahra going is her faith. Now she’s just in a holding pattern until she dies and moves on to the next life where her Sheik promises a better life. Let’s hope that Zahra finds an oasis devoid of bastards like her ex-husband. Zahra now only waits for death.