The fields here are watered year round by snow melt that passes though seven main targas, or canals, and many hundreds of minor causeways and ditches, all of which, it seems, have their own names. These are operated in rotation by the six main families of the village. The women cut fodder for the cows down in the river bed, or up in the forests, and haul it along the steep paths in huge bundles. The girls sing as they fetch water, collect wood, wash clothes, milk cows and lug babies around in slings on their backs. Men and boys work the irrigation system, plow, harvest and plant, and care for the sheep and goats.
Younger boys seem mostly to throw rocks at each other.
The sheep and goats, for their part, spend their summers in the high pastures, near 10,000 feet along the Ouanoukrim massif in the new Jebel Toubkal National Park. The shepherds bring them down to their winter grazing area near the village in October, before the heavy snows. That is, these people make more human bodies out of less land than almost anyone. This productivity gives the place a Shangri-La feel. It s a dense thicket of green jammed into the crevasses of impossibly rugged mountains.