Colin F
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GoodEgg wrote:
Off the meter, Colin. What great images and people. If I were to pick favorites, they would be #3 and #1.
You have their full attention and you have captured a bit of each personality.
Thanks! I must share the experience I had with the elderly woman in the last photo shown.
I was walking down this quiet lane in one particular town, and saw this old woman ahead of me. It was a lane in a residential part of town which abutted a large section of trees & jungle which ran through the region – a swath of greenery in an otherwise barren landscape. *You can Google “Boumalne Dades” on Google Maps (Satellite) to see what I mean.
This lady was quite old, and walked in a severely hunched manner, and at a snail’s pace. It was heart-wrenching to watch, but then as I got closer, I saw that she had now begun to walk down a fairly steep, narrow, gravelly trail off the side of the paved road into the aforementioned “green zone”.
With an old, short, worn stick in one hand, and a rolled-up piece of fabric in the other, she very slowly side-stepped down the steep, gravel trail, so hunched over that her face was only about a foot from the trail surface. The steepness of the trail, combined with her limited mobility caused me to be incredibly concerned for her safety. I could see that with one little slip or mis-step, she would have tumbled a considerable way down the trail, or even worse, over the edge, sending her even further down the bank.
I attempted to communicate with her, hoping that I could offer some assistance, but she did not speak any English, and seemed determined to carry on. It was painful and nerve-wracking to watch. I thought that there would be a very good chance that she was going to lose her footing on the trail, a trail that even I with my adroit abilities and modern hiking boots would have needed to be careful negotiating!
I looked around for someone else who I could communicate my concern to, but there was nobody. Then I saw a tall man rounding a corner so I waved him over to my location. He didn’t speak English either, but seemed to understand my concern, and indicated that everything was ok and that there was nothing to worry about. I was perplexed, but eventually carried on my way down the road. After coming to a dead end about 10 minutes later, I turned around and headed back. When I came to the trail, I looked down and saw the woman sitting in a patch of grass. I walked down the trail to where she was and saw that she had a very small scythe in her hand, and was cutting clumps of grass and piling it onto the laid-out piece of fabric.
Again, we couldn’t communicate because of the language barrier, but with gesturing with my camera, she allowed me to take her picture. She seemed to love the attention, and I couldn’t help but wonder who she was in her youth, and what her life was like.
Later that day, I explained all this to our Moroccan guide, and he said she would have had some sort of animal at home, like a goat, and was collecting the grass for it. He added that she would have been making this trek daily, likely for decades. I asked why there wouldn’t be some other younger family member to undertake this task, and he said that no, what I witnessed was all quite normal within their culture.
An experience I’ll never forget.
Edited on May 12, 2019 at 08:34 PM · View previous versions
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