Three Garden Shovels and a Squeegee

Katrina with her drift-finding friends on what could possibly be Ifrane's very first snow turtle

Fourteen inches of snow lie on the ground and more is pouring out of the sky. It's a good thing my dad (who would have been 79 today) taught me to love bad weather!

Thanks to the wind, we've been watching drifts grow by the hour in front of our apartment all day. This afternoon, Katrina and her little friends trudged home from school wearily battling the wind. Almost home, they caught sight of the 3-ft snowdrift a few feet away. Miraculously, they forgot all their exhaustion and bolted straight for the deepest part. It is as if snow drifts have a strong magnetic pull on 7-year-olds. They cannot resist them. Before they know what has happened, they are diving in.

It was not much later that we saw the snow-clearing crew. The university does have a bobcat which they drive around the parking lot now and then, clearing the road but rather unhelpfully blocking us in - this time, only a few minutes after Gerald cleared away the snow behind our car with a tray. But the bulk of their clearing is done with four men carrying - you guessed it - three garden shovels and a squeegee. It all seems quite hopeless as we watch them picking at the mounds of snow.

A while ago we had the brilliant idea to buy a few snow shovels for the university and their tired groundsmen - until we heard this story:

Apparently, an American professor in the 90s thought the very same thing. He bought 100 snow shovels and donated them to AUI. But the workers did not like them. They were odd - strange - and not familiar. And now no one seems to know where those 100 snow shovels are. They seem to have disappeared with the melting snow of that season.

What a picture that gives me of development work in general. We westerners march in, fix things and stand back to admire our work. But the people don't get it. They don't buy it. They don't like it.

What a challenge - if a simple paradigm shift from a garden shovel to a snow shovel is so hard - what about much larger issues?