Community involvement

We've now been living in our house, on our street, near our glorious neighbors for four months, and we're really happy with it. Our house is still great and our neighbors are awesome. However, our street is a mess. When we first moved in, it was compacted dirt/gravel, but really easy to walk on. Three days later, we woke up to the sounds of the whole thing being torn up, and it was replaced with a bunch of rocks. 

It's terrible. Since most of the street is on a hill, it's very rare that we have an outing where one of us doesn't slide at least a few feet. 

There are also a few bits that are still cement, but have become more troublesome than they are convenient. 

To make matters worse, cars go up and down pretty frequently, so the road condition is actually deteriorating each day. 

We haven't even had to deal with the rain yet, which will probably just make everything gross and slippery. 

However, when we were coming home on Friday, we found a group of about 40 people out on the street with signs and taking a ton of pictures. They were about to march through town to the local government building a protest for a new street. What organizers! When they asked us to join, we were more than happy to!

Forehead for scale?

This is the local government building here in Taounate. We marched here (about 10 minutes from our house) and stayed for about 45 minutes. The leaders had different chants worked out and a few speakers to lead the event. 

Right as we arrived, so did local law enforcement. Don't worry! They were just there to watch and no one even had to interact with them other than to say why everyone was there. 

Local police. 

The Gendarmes (more like state troopers back in America). 

It turns out, the people on our street were promised a new, paved road back in 2012 and still have nothing, so they're understandable angry. It looks like they started and gave up, actually...

But now we have been invited by one of the lead organizers to join them on Monday morning to do the same thing again. It would seem that they intend on making this a regular occurrence until a new street is down, and, as active members of our neighborhood, we'll be there!