LRCC

Hi all

During our Morocco trip of 2011, we stopped with Moroccan friends of John Horne's. They were fantastic hosts and opened their houses to us. They feed us and offered the hand of friendship.

This was despite all their fruit trees having been washed away by flooding (climate change is having a massive impact on Morocco) and one of the brothers loosing his wife to cancer. There is no free health care in Morocco and the family spent every penny they could afford, to no avail.

Being men of faith, the brothers believe that this is the 'will of Allah', but being a man of science, I know this is not so.

I work as a Agricultural Consultant and in my last job went around farms in the UK, trying to get farmers to farm more environmental responsibly and to improve the wildlife habitats on the farm. I also have a great interesting in farming systems across the globe and how they can be improved. Walking around their farm, I could see instantly what could be done to put things right again. The only problem was we would need about £7500 to buy two ram pumps and a truck to move them to Morocco.

The farm has plenty of water. There is a river running through the farm and the land at the side is highly fertile, but the weather in Morocco has dramatically changed over the last couple of years and it would be a waste of time to replant this area with fruit trees. The brothers have plenty of desert land on higher round, but it would cost too much money to pump irrigation water using electric or diesel pumps. Due to the volume of water in the river, the farm is idea for ram pump irrigation. These pumps are Victorian technology and only use the force of flowing water to pump a small percentage of the water up a pipe. One ram pump can pump up to 3500 gallons a day.

As said above, these Victorian pumps are normally cast iron, weight over a ton and cost about £3500 each. This was a bit of a non starter to buy one and ship it to Morocco, But whilst searching You tube for home made ram pumps (popular in the remote areas of the USA) I found a video from Papa Pumps. This is a UK company who at the time were making small ram pumps for use in the Third world. I gave them a call and it turns out all the original pumps that went to Africa were stolen and weighed in, as they were made of Stainless and brass. They were in the process of developing a plastic pump and I am glad to say it is now available. These new pumps are only £550+vat and weighs only 2Kgs!

My proposal to all is that to repay the brothers generosity, we start to raise money to buy a couple of pumps and the pipe they will need to use them?

Have a look here http://www.papapump.com/

Would the LRCC be prepared to assist raising the money and then organising a trip to go fit them?

Cheers Mick

Count me in Mick.
Tony

Hey Mick,

Certainly count me in, though we need to involve John to make sure this is what they would actually want and use

I got the feeling when we were there that although they were devastated at the time, as you say they regard it as the will of Allah and have come to accept the situation, relying on what little the flowers etc. bring in now.

I hope I'm wrong and that we can help them, and I'm certainly up for raising the money and even helping to deliver & install them, as long as the families want to irrigate the land and will make use of them.

Let me know what you're thinking about re. raising funds. I'm quite happy to have an 'appeal board' at the shows etc.

Cheers,
Robin.

Hi Robin

Forgot to say that I spoke with John when he called in here on Friday. He would love to take a pump for the brothers as he feels he owe them for a lifetime of friendship and hospitality.

I think putting a board up at the shows is a good idea and hopefully fellow enthusiast will give generously. Maybe one of the magazines may pick up the story and help us hit our target?

Cheers Mick

.

hi mick

any way i can help (collecting donations and delivery)let
me know

regards
phillip

This a great idea Mick and as you say I do 'owe' these guys although they would probably deny it. I will put the idea to them and see what their response is. It will have to be done by snail-mail so may take some time but this should not deter us from starting to raise cash as there are other ways to help them too - grain seed, fertiliser, farm implement refurbishment etc. My main concern is to raise their hopes and then not be able to deliver.

Somewhere I have photos of the days before the orchard was washed away when the Hanif family were relatively well off. I will try and dig them out.

Before the floods, they had 700 apple trees and a sole buyer for the whole harvest. In addition they grew peaches, apricots and pomegranates. As you mentioned I first encountered the two brothers in 1970 when they were in their mid- teens. I was driving south in an ex-Military Bedford RL with 24 pax on board and looking for a wild camping spot. I turned off at Foum Tillicht, a defile in the Atlas ridge just north of Rich, and found a beautiful spot, well hidden from the road on the banks of one of the main tributaries of the Oued Ziz. Two young boys approached, squatted on their haunches and observed us from a respectable distance without saying a word. That year I returned 5 or 6 times and a great friendship developed. It was notable that the two boys who turned out to be brothers, Abdulnajjer and Aziz, never asked for anything - on the contrary they brought bags full of apples for my pax. Soon they were running their own guided tours of the farm exclusively for my groups, identifying the trees in the orchard and the herbs growing wild on their terrain. They demonstrated how their water mill worked and how its variable speed determined the coarseness of the maize they were grinding. They showed us the technique for baking fresh bread and served it hot, dipped in olive oil and washed down with the obligatory 3 glasses of sweet mint tea. Over the years as they tired of my efforts at translating their commentary from a mixture of French and Arabic, they perfected it in English. The question of payment was never raised, it was clear to me that this was not appropriate. They would accept cigarettes and I once gave them a ghetto blaster, that was about it. In the early 80's I started to work in Asia, so that I could play in Africa. Visits were less frequent, 2 or 3 times a year but the friendship remained strong and although it's an overworked phrase, at each visit they always reminded me that 'chez nous, c'est chez toi'.....to be continued

Ma'a salama

John H

aka Lawrence of Leeds - a legend in his own lunchtime.

How are things progressing with this project? The Swiss charity I work with, (Aide en Raide) is planning a trip to ‘La Haute Atlas’ in July. Last year they installed a solar-powered water pump, and this year we are going to set up a medical centre. I mentioned the Water Pump Appeal, and the charity would be interested in helping. More details from Overlander and Jabbawocky would be helpful.

Best wishes,
Tony

My brother has a business round pumps (PFS Helston) so might be able to get something at cost?

He also used (?) to deal with Papa Pumps and also has installed the first solar powered borehole pumps with reservoir tank for use in remote areas for feeding stock.

Let me know what the spec is or the make and model. There must be something about vat if it is going for export as well

Alex

Hi Alex. Many thanks for the response. One of my colleagues in ‘Aide en Raide’ is from Neuchatel, and was involved in the recent Solar World Navigation Record. Switzerland is acknowledged as the world leader in solar technology.

However, as Jabberwocky has explained, ram pumps seem to be the best solution to the problems outlined here. My charity may be prepared to finance the purchase of Papa pumps – if the price could be reduced through your contacts, this would be marvellous.

Hi Tony

Can you let me know what details you need and I will do my best to find them out for you.

Basically, the farm has a river with plenty of water. They have an irrigation gully which supplied water to the flood plain land where the fruit trees used to be. This flood plain area is only a couple of acres at most, but used to provide a good income. The farm has a vast area of desert, but this is about 3 - 5 metres above the irrigation gully and 8m above the river.

The plan would be to get water to the desert area and replant this area with fruit trees, leaving the existing cropped area in production to provide some income whilst the fruit trees mature.

Options are to water from a higher position in the river or use the existing gully to power two ram pumps. Without doing a survey, I'm not sure how far away we would have to go to get the water to flow into an irrigation system. From our visit, I do know that the existing gully could be simply modified to power the ram pumps.

The ram pumps run 24/7 and would fill a tank, which in turn would water the trees every night through piped trickle irrigation system.

In an idea world, I would like to go out and do a proper survey, but at present would struggle to fund trip to Skipton.

Cheers Mick