Since my first week in the village, the school director has been talking about the urgent need for toilets for the school. The government I guess is in the habit of building classrooms in villages, but not building bathrooms, so the students have to either hold it all day or use the fields around the back of the school. School bathroom building is a pretty common peace corps project in Morocco, and my site mate Jed is a health sector volunteer who was interested in taking this on, so everything seemed pretty straight forward. We held a series of meeting with the parents starting in April, telling them we would supply all the materials if they agreed to each contribute one day of labor for free. We asked around and found a guy who knew how to build stuff and hired him as our foreman. Jed filed all the paperwork, we involved the association, and received the money from USAID in June. Once we had the money, we arranged with the foreman a day at the beginning of July to go together to Midelt and buy everything we needed and bring it back to the village in one trip. Everything was going great and we had plenty of time to finish building these simple bathrooms before Ramadan started. I was busy getting excited about the blog post I was going to write when it was all finished ("my most concrete project yet").
