The personal and professional website of Douglas Van Bossuyt
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Last week I wrote a little term paper for my Compex Systems Engineering class. I am still trying to find a good LaTeX to html converter so in the meantime I am posting it in PDF format.
Complex Systems Design Across Cultures
It’s a rather rough paper but it will give you an idea of one avenue I’m investigating for my PhD work. This might turn into a conference paper in a few weeks.
Tags: Complex Systems, Complex Systems Design Across Cultures, LaTeX, Research Paper, School, writing
Once again, I’ve let too much time go by since my last update.
Today is a national holiday in Tunisia. Yesterday was Eid Kabir, the feast of the sacrifice. We actually got Wednesday off as well. In total, I get five days off this week. The festivities revolve around the ritual slaughtering of a ram of more than one year of age. The family that I’m staying with had me help with the slaughter. Next time I get a fast enough connection to upload photos, I’ll post a few. It was a rather interesting experience. A man walks around through the streets calling out something to the effect of “Slaughterer for hire!” When someone wants his services, they go out on the street and wave him down. He comes into the area where the ram is being held, orients the ram in the correct direction, slashes the neck up to the spine, and allows the sheep to bleed to death. It took a surprisingly long time for our ram to finally expire. After that, he was strung up by his hind legs, the butcher pelted him, gutted him, and got him ready for the family to slice and dice the meat. The butcher, aside from being paid, also got a part of the liver and a part of the pancreas of the sheep. It’s traditional for the slaughterer to receive these bits of the sheep.
After the butcher left, we moved the ram from where we had slaughtered it into the laundry/garden/pool shed. We hung it from the rafters in there and started cleaning out the stomach and intestines. These pieces of the sheep are made into a delicacy resembling haggis but, I’m informed, tastier. In a couple of days I should be sampling this dish. To fortify ourselves for the day, we barbequed some mutton that was purchased the day before and allowed to chill overnight in the fridge. Meat is best here after a few days of curing in the fridge or in another cold place. At around noon, I helped out in taking the rear right leg of the sheep off. We fried it for a couple of hours in olive oil and vegetables. The result was very good. I believe that today there may be more mutton eating as we still have half of a sheep hanging next to the washing machine. The other hind leg will go to charity, as the Koran dictates, but that still leaves a whole lot of meat. Here, every part of the sheep is used. I’m informed that even the head turns into an especially yummy dish and that the muscles in the face of the sheep are the best pieces on the entire animal. We shall see!
Since I last updated, aside from Eid Kabir taking place, I’ve been up to many other things. Ramadan ended somewhere around November 15. It so happened that I missed the Eid (feast) at the end of Ramadan. Rather than being in Tunisia for the festivities, I flew to Los Angeles to compete in the ASME International Student Design Contest. My team ended up placing 5th out of 13 teams. The best teams from around the world that won their divisions were allowed to compete at this contest. We could have placed maybe one or two higher had we managed to get two perfect runs, but the other teams there had some good machines. We won the unofficial awards of most engineering and shiniest robot though. I was only in Los Angeles for a total of three nights and two days. In that time, I ate as much Mexican food as possible. Tunisia only has one Mexican restaurant and it’s not very good. I don’t know how the Mexican embassy staff survives here!
Being in Los Angeles really gave me some reverse culture shock. Everything was so big and people were so distant from one another. There were so many cars and the cars were so big. I wonder what it will feel like when I come back in the summer after nine months in Tunisia.
I was gone a total of five days, including two and a half days of traveling. Going to Los Angeles, I carried two suitcases completely stuffed full of carpets and pots and a multitude of other purchases made by some of my fellow students. I played courier for them so that they wouldn’t be overweight returning to the USA. My fellow teammates and friends that were in Los Angeles with me hauled all the stuff back to Oregon in their car. I also picked up a bunch of stuff to bring back over. In addition to some odds and ends that I wanted, such as duct tape and plastic ziplocs, I also brought over about 50 or so pounds of gifts for one of the girls. That included a crystal vase which I hand carried in my backpack. It was quite the ordeal. Back in Tunisia, I took a flight from Tunis to the island of Djerba. The program was on an extended fieldtrip of the south. I only missed the first day of the trip and successfully met them at the hotel in Homut Souik in Djerba. Unfortunately, not everyone had been having as good of a time as I over the Eid holiday. Four out of the nine of the students were very sick with intestinal and stomach problems. Three of them must have had some bad harrisa, the other had something else, on the night I left for Los Angeles, which did her in.
They eventually all got better, but not before Jeff had to get a large penicillin injection in the glut muscles in Gabes. He said it wasn’t his best memory of Tunisia!
We traveled all around the south of Tunisia for a total of about six days. Starting in Tunis, the group drove south, stopping off in El Jem, the site of the second largest coliseum in the world, second only to Rome. It quite often doubles as its more famous brother in Rome in movies and documentaries. I wasn’t with the group on this part of the trip as I was still flying back from Los Angeles. Next stop for the group, after dinner in Gabes, was Djerba, where I met up with them.
Our transportation throughout the south was rather interesting. We had a typical 20 or 30 passenger bus with large roof rack and the like. They are very common in Tunisia to be used for schools and for tour groups. The twist was that our bus on the outside had a long proclamation of who gave the bus to the university (the glorious president Ben Ali, etc etc). It also said what the bus was being given for – mentally and physically disabled students. We were asked once or twice if we were mentally retarded. We always answered “yes!” We got lots of funny looks due to the writing on the side of the bus.
On the island of Djerba there is an interesting old synagogue which is said to be the oldest in the world. The site has been continuously occupied by a synagogue since 586 BCE. The current building though was constructed early in the 20th century. The site’s true claim to fame is a recent terrorist attack by Al Qaeda back in 2002 when a truck bomb exploded next to a bus full of German tourists. 19 total died in the attack. Since then, security has been tightened. There were enough armed guards around that rather than dieing of a terrorist bomb, I was more concerned about accidentally getting shot by a guard!
On from Djerba, we went down to the town of Tataouine, the namesake of the misspelled planet in the StarWars movies. There isn’t that much interesting to see within the town itself but the surrounding hills and mountains are heavily laden with interesting historic and ancient villages. This is the land of the Ksour. Ksour (ksar for singular) are fortified granaries, usually built in hard to reach places. They are basically bank vaults full of grain only to be broken open in time of need. Only a few ksour are still in use today. Most lie in ruin with even the villages that supported them being all but abandoned. With opportunities aplenty in Tataouine or Gabes or Tunis, there is very little to keep people farming and living on such marginal land. The worst of the consequences of the exodus from the mountain farms to the cities can be seen in the neglect of the many check dams built to capture the precious rain and topsoil. These dams were built hundreds if not thousands of years ago. They vary in size anywhere from a meter across and half a meter high to ten or twenty meters high and a fourth of a kilometer across. There simply aren’t enough people left in the mountains to continue maintaining the dams. Aside from providing the only fertile agricultural ground in the region, these dams are also very important to keep areas downstream from flooding. Without them, flash floods are becoming more common.
On our fieldtrip we visited the ksar and village of Chenini. It’s firmly planted on the major tourist routes which has made it a rather sad place. Most of the people left in the old village are only there to soak up the few tourist dinar that they can grab from the package tour groups and the land rover convoys that frequently come through. We arrived at the village just at sunset. It was a very pretty place. The old village and ksar are built up the sides of a very steep mesa. The ksar is built on the upper most reaches, circling all the way around the mesa. This isn’t actually a true mesa as the top is a knife edge with only a few feet of actual flat ground. All of the old grain storerooms were in tatters and varying states of collapse. The only thing in the entire village that was being kept up was the whitewashed mosque sitting in the saddle of two sections of the mesa.
Onward from Chenini, we went to Matmata, home of the underground troglodyte dwellings that were made famous in StarWars. We made it there long after dark due to the distance and the complete lack of a modern highway system. Outside of one or two roads, the entire country is a conglomeration of two lane and single lane roads. At least almost all of them are paved now. We slept in a hotel built in a troglodyte house complex. In fact, that hotel also contained the set for Luke Skywalker’s Aunt and Uncle’s house from episode IV. We ate breakfast in the set.
From Matmata, we swung north and west back to Gabes to visit the oasis of Chenini, not to be confused with the ksar of Chenini. This is where one of our professors, Karim was born. We had a feast at his brothers patch of oasis which consisted of an entire roasted lamb and many side dishes. After lunch, we walked across the oasis for a couple of minutes to the cave where my professor was born. He lived there until he was about 7 or 8 and they got housing above ground in Chenini Nouvelle.
We stayed the night in Gabes. The next morning we got in the bus and headed out to Kebilli and Douz. Douz is the gateway to the Sahara in Tunisia. We rode camels at sunset in the sand dunes just outside Douz. It was fun but the ride was a little painful. We were more or less sitting on a few blankets piled up on the back of the camel. We almost had an incident though with some of the horsemen trying to sell horseback rides on their Arabian horses. These riders were pretty nuts, barreling across the desert at speeds that I didn’t know horses could travel at. They also have a tendency to get too friendly with female tourists. The secret police had to come out and shoo them off after Karim and the horsemen got into an argument. We found out later that a few of them had actually been arrested earlier in the day for groping some female tourists. The camel drivers were much nicer than the horsemen though. They have a syndicate which regulates prices, times, and who’s turn it is to take tourists out. If any of them were to step out of line, all the others would let that person know he did something wrong!
After a brief foray into the souk at Douz, we continued on to cross the Chott. Chotts are basically huge flat expanses of salt pan which periodically get a few inches of water in them when large rainstorms occur. The road between Kebilli and Touzer, our destination, runs straight across the largest Chott in Tunisia for about 90 kilometers. We stopped in the exact middle of the crossing at a wide spot in the road where an enterprising Tunisian had built a roadside stand to sell desert rose and other such geologic doodads from the desert. The moon was nearly full, the Chott was full of water, and we couldn’t see a single light anywhere. It would be a very romantic place to pass the night.
Supposedly, the Chotts of Tunisia are actually below sea level. Possibly up to 20 or 30 meters below sea level. Back in the 1800′s, the French attempted to build a canal into the Chotts to flood them and give a place for the French fleet to hide so they could attack the British fleet and rule the Mediterranean. Fortunately for Tunisia’s Digla Date production, this never happened. The chief engineer on the project died before they had even begun digging. The plan was later revisited in the 1960′s, this time by American interests under the guise of the Ploughshare Program, a front setup by the American Atomic Energy Commission. They proposed to build the canal by means of controlled nuclear explosion. Basically, they wanted to detonate a bunch of atomic bombs across Tunisia to create a canal. Needless to say, it never happened. It is interesting, however, that the Tunisians never speak about the elevation of the Chott. I think that many people are afraid that someone will once again try to build a canal into the Chott and once again flood them with ocean water Evidence of the wreck of a Roman galleon on the north shore of the Chott has long been held up to show that yes, indeed, these were once connected to the sea. Today though they only produce mirages.
We continued around Southern Tunisia for several more days stopping in at the mountain oases near the Algerian frontier, the ruins of ancient Sbeitla, and visiting the grand mosque in Kariouan which we had skipped the last time we were there. All in all it was a good fieldtrip but it extended my traveling from just five days up to eight or nine days total. I slept quite well after all of that.
Back in school, and without a Ramadan schedule, we finished out the term in the first week of December. Other students started leaving the same night that the program finished. The last one to leave, Kellen, took off just before Christmas. I’m the only one left from the original group still in Tunisia.
A few days after the program ended, my parents flew over and joined me in Tunisia. We toured around the country for a little over two weeks, hitting up many of the same sites that I had been to with the group before. We also managed to get to a few new places including more of the Ksour. In particular, we went to the village of Douriet. The ksar there is very fascinating and looks exactly like the famous renascence painting of the Tower of Babble. When I get another chance to post pictures, there will be many of that place. It hasn’t gotten on the main tourist routes yet so the place is still pretty pristine but I think in the next few years, it will finally be discovered by the 4×4 convoys and the tour busses.
Another highlight was coming within 50 meters of the Algerian border in the oasis of Mides. The entire oasis was filled with secret police trying to act natural by farming or selling things in stalls. What gave them away though was the presence of a multitude of walkie talkies.
We had originally planned to go to Libya for two weeks but after our visa applications were rejected (we only had a group of three and to go to Libya, they require a group of at least four), we went to Malta for five days instead. The island nation of Malta is quite a fascinating place. About 500,000 people live on a small cluster of four islands in the middle of the Mediterranean. The maximum speed limit on the islands is something like 60 or 80 kph which can almost never be reached as the place is so small! We visited all the major sites on the island including the Knights of St. George cities and fortifications which nearly completely engulfs the islands and the ancient temple complexes on the islands of Malta and Gozo. They are the oldest freestanding structures in the world, even predating the pyramids. Going to Malta was a nice break from Tunisian reality for me. It used to be part of the British Empire and only gained its independence in the middle of the last century. They still hold many British traditions dear such as high tea and red telephone booths. The language there is also fascinating. It has an Arabic grammar structure and many Arabic words but also lots of Italian, French, English, Greek, and a few other things mixed in. It uses a more or less Greek character set as well. It’s a very strange and mixed up language but it was fun being able to understand some of it. The counting system, for instance, is borrowed, in its entirety, from Arabic.
My parents left Tunisia just after the New Year. They went back to Oregon and to a diet nearly devoid of tuna and harrisa. I stayed in Tunisia. I now am officially in Tunisia on a Global IE3 Internship program coordinated through the Oregon University System. I am interning at the Tunis-Carthage Marble Factory a 20 minute metro ride from downtown Tunis. In the mornings I go to school at Bourguiba School in the Lafayette neighborhood of Tunis. Bourguiba School is the top place in all of Tunisia to learn a foreign language. People from all over the world come to it to learn Arabic among a host of other languages. I’m taking modern standard Arabic. The classes are challenging as they are taught almost entirely in Arabic. The professors speak a little English but do all of their explanations in French. Some of the other students in the class translate for me. On my first day of school I met a guy from Sweden. He’s in a higher level Arabic class, having studied Arabic for three years in college and studied in Syria for a number of months. He’s in Tunisia now to refresh his Arabic and hopefully get a job as a translator in Sweden. I helped him move into an apartment with a couple of my friends, one from Algeria and the other from Morocco. I’ve also met people from many other parts of the world. There is one girl in my class from Tokyo, Japan. Her grandparents live in Kyoto which is not too far away from Wadayama where I went on a sister school program back in middle school. Another girl in the class is from Amsterdam and is married to a Tunisian football player. She is anything but a typical Tunisian wife, often wearing European outfits with a good dose of pink and going out on her own around town. In fact, her husband lives in Djerba while she goes to school and lives in Tunis! There are also people from Spain, Germany, Brazil, France, Italy, and a whole host of other countries at the school. It’s a very amazing place were lots of cultures mix together.
In another twist, I’m also moonlighting at CEMAT, the American research center for the Magrib in Tunisia. I’m helping them with their computers and website. In exchange, I get a small stipend which helps with my living expenses. Maybe in the coming months I’ll also get to tag along with the director of CEMAT when he goes to other Arabic speaking countries. There is some talk of him hiring me fulltime for part of the summer to help with a few programs he has cooking. Time will tell though. I am definitely in Tunisia until June, but beyond that, I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing or where I’ll be.
Well that’s all there is for now. As always, email me if you want to hear more details on Tunisia, and be sure to email me if you’re thinking of visiting Tunisia. -Douglas
Tags: Letter Home, Tunisia, writing
Yes, I know I’ve been a bad boy. This is my first real letter home since arriving in Tunisia over a month ago. I can’t believe it’s only been a month. It feels like a year has already passed by!
The flight over was uneventful aside from my wristwatch dyeing. Three years of flawless performance and then battery death! Since landing in Tunisia, I haven’t had a clock. I haven’t needed a clock. Things here run on their own time. If you tell someone you’ll meet them at 2 o’clock in a cafe, that means you could show up anywhere between 1 and 3pm. Saying “Insha Allah” after agreeing to do something is basically the same as saying “I’ll do it, but in fact, no, I won’t do it”. It’s used as an easy escape, invoking the name of Allah absolves you of any blame or problems down the road for not performing the task.
The first few weeks of my time in Tunisia were filled to the gills with field trips around the north and west of Tunisia. We went to such sites as the ancient Roman and Phoenician cities of Dougga, Carthage, and Utica. One day we drove for about 20 kilometers along the old Roman aqueduct running to Tunis from a spring more than 40 kilometers from town. It’s a truly impressive structure rivaling any other roman monument I’ve seen to date.
On one of our field trips, we stopped off at an old Berber hilltop fortified settlement. It bore a striking resemblance to the Hopi dwellings on the mesas of the desert southwest of America. The construction, the colors, and the people all were the same. The only difference was the language.
The last couple of weeks have fallen in the Islamic month of Ramadan. We’re near the half-way point of the lunar month. Every night I have a big dinner, starting exactly at sunset, with either the family who I rent a room from, or one of the many Tunisian students I’ve met. It’s very interesting to observe who fasts and who doesn’t in Tunisia. I would have expected most of the population to fast as they do in most other Islamic countries. Instead maybe only 50% fast, and of those, most don’t strictly fast. Up until maybe ten or fifteen years ago, the government banned fasting to increase productivity and keep the country strong. Since the overthrow of the old president, Habib Bourgiba, in 1987 by his one-time prime minister, Ben Ali, Tunisia has become more Islamic. It’s still a far cry from even Egypt or Morocco though.
Classes have been going well. I’m taking a women’s study class, an environmental case study class, a Mediterranean cultures class, and an Arabic language class. I’m registered for a total of 17 credits. Between class, Ramadan, and other responsibilities, I’m kept very busy! Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent trying to get from point A to point B and back again.
Transportation in Tunis is actually very easy but it takes a long time to get anywhere. To go from my apartment to school, we get a ride with the family in the back of their little delivery van to where they work. That takes anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on traffic. Rather than stick to the big highways which are always bumper to bumper and most of the time complete gridlock, we drive through neighborhoods at reckless speeds. Traffic here isn’t as bad as in Egypt or Morocco, but it’s quite different than Oregon! Lanes are disregarded as well as most stop signs and stop lights. Instead, whoever is the boldest goes first. Sometimes, two way roads are turned into one way streets when enough traffic decides to go down the wrong lane. Pedestrians are completely disregarded unless there’s a real danger of hitting one. No one wants to get a dent in their car, especially from a pedestrian. When there is traffic control, it’s provided by the many police officers. Instead of having a welfare system like the USA has, Tunisia hires unemployed people into the police force. As you can imagine, almost every street corner has two or three uniformed officers. Watching some of these people try to direct traffic is really funny. A perfectly fine intersection can be changed into a traffic nightmare within minutes of a police officer arriving on the scene. People joke that since there’s no crime to speak of in Tunisia, the police have to create traffic jams just so they have something to do. The police also make a habit of pulling over cars at random for searches and, at times, arrests. Whenever I’ve been pulled over in a car, as soon as they see that I’m a “tourist”, they wave us on our way. Otherwise, we could expect a 20 or 30 minute search of all of our possessions and the possible forfeiture of our documents.
Anyway, once we get dropped off, it’s anywhere between a 20 minute and 40 minute walk. The majority of our time seems to be spent trying to cross one very large and busy intersection. A major highway to the north and another major highway to the west intersect in a stoplight. We have to cross from one corner to the exact opposite corner. Sometimes we end up stuck in between two lanes with cars whizzing by going opposite directions. It’s a real adrenaline rush in the morning.
Our school is in a neighborhood called Hayatt Al Khader (The Green Town). The neighborhood, in fact, is anything but green. It’s a typical dusty borough. Most of the houses and buildings are finished, but many are in various stages of construction. The joke among Tunisians is that the entire country is in a perpetual state of construction. Since independence from France in 1956, Tunisia has had a sustained building boom, trying to catch up for the previous 100 years when Tunisians weren’t allowed to build anything for themselves. I wonder how much longer this housing boom can be sustained. Government statistics say that something like 19 out of 20 people own their own home or flat in Tunisia. I expect that the good times will run out soon. Most likely, the government will try to prop up the housing market for a while before they let it collapse or change its focus to civic projects.
The school itself consists of a couple of different blocks of buildings roughly in a C shape. In the middle of the C, there’s a large chunk of ground taken up by an elementary school. Our school is part of the University of the 7th of November at Carthage system. In the rapid expansion of Tunis, the different departments and colleges of the University were flung far and wide around the city. Our branch is only for languages such as French, English, German, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and others. Other schools are only for engineering or the humanities or whatever. The buildings are all whitewashed and are multi story. The building that we have all of our classes in is three stories tall with a central open section housing the only staircase between the floors. It’s also the building that everyone is forced to enter through. There are security guards at the only unlocked entrance to the school to make sure rabble rousers aren’t allowed into the school grounds. On several occasions we’ve seen them take potential troublemakers outside. Most likely the kids are just kicked to the curb, but if they’re known radicals, they’ll be arrested and beat up. That said, some protests are allowed. I’ve seen several protests for school reform on the bottom of the staircase. Usually it consists of one or two students yelling for smaller class sizes and more options. Maybe twenty or forty students will stand around in a semi circle listening.
Sometimes I feel like a rock star and other times I feel like the new playtoy of the school. Everyone wants to talk with us and try out their English. It’s hard to get them to talk to us in Arabic or French. Also, it’s hard to speak Arabic so I suppose English is the best answer. Usually, I go directly to the classroom to avoid the many students, mostly women, who try to talk to me and say hello and whatnot. It almost feels like a reality television show! Outside of school, most people try to talk to me in French. They’re shocked when I talk to them in Arabic. My Arabic is still really basic though so communicating is challenging at times. One nice thing for communicating but bad for learning Arabic is that almost everyone in Tunis speaks at least three languages, one of which is English. The problem with this trilingual city is that there isn’t a real distinction between French or English or Arabic. All three are blended together in this funny fusion of languages. Farther south or west in cities such as Bizerte or Kairouan, the people speak Arabic and a little French. The Arabic outside of Tunis is much easier to understand as less dialect has managed to creep into the day-to-day language.
In the next few weeks, I’ll have a five day vacation to celebrate the “change” on November 7, 1987, when the original president since independence, Habib Bourgiba, was “retired” by the current president, Ben Ali. Originally, several of us had planned to go to Libya but that fell through this last weekend when it became apparent we wouldn’t get the visas in time. It takes about 30 days to secure the appropriate papers to travel to Libya. I think once the program ends in December, I’ll head to Libya with my parents for a few days. Since Libya is out, now we’re looking at Malta or Sicily or one of the other nearby islands in the Mediterranean. I think by Thursday we’ll know where we’re going.
Mid November will see me back in the USA for two days to attend a design contest in Anaheim California. I will be gone from Tunisia a total of four days, two of which will be spent in airplanes. It will be very tiring but I hope that it’s rewarding too. Hopefully when I go back to the USA, I’ll be able to give someone a few CD’s worth of pictures that they’ll post online for me. I’ve been getting a bunch of good shots but I don’t have the ability to upload them from Tunisia.
That brings me to a good topic. The internet in Tunisia is painfully slow. Internet Cafes run off of a single shared 56k modem connection. Anywhere between five and 15 computers will be sharing one dialup modem! It’s painful. To check my email it usually takes me two hours and about three dollars. That might not sound like much, but in a country where everything takes a long time, those two hours are a lot! Also, checking the internet every day or two would quickly add up into a large bill. I usually find myself checking my email once or twice a week. Hopefully once I’m on my own starting in December, I’ll be able to get a place with its own phone line and get DSL. I hear DSL is something like 250 dollars a month but it’d be so worth it. You have no idea the pain involved in checking my email!
Well that’s it for now. Email me if you have any specific questions or want to hear more about something and I’ll see about including it in the next update. Maybe next time I’ll send one sooner.
Tags: Letter Home, Tunisia, writing
Phosphates. Ask ten people on the streets of any major American city what phosphates are used in and nine of those people won’t be able to name one product. Ask them where phosphates come from and most would only be able to answer “the ground” if anything at all. So what, exactly, are phosphates, why are they important, and how are they produced?
Phosphates appear in a broad range of products and are present in trace amounts almost everywhere in the world. The chemical formula for phosphate is P2O5.1 Some common uses for phosphates are for fertilizers, especially in acidic soil, cosmetics, explosives, and other such products. Without phosphates, many of the marginal agricultural lands of the earth could not be farmed. Also, industrial agriculture would not be possible as phosphate is used to recharge the soil faster and without the need to change crops or leave fields fallow.
To get phosphate, one must extract it from rock. Approximately 90% of the world’s reserves of phosphates are contained in sedimentary rock. The other 10% is found in igneous rock.2 Tunisia’s deposits are exclusively sedimentary. Also, Tunisia’s deposits are very rich in the carbonate-fluorapatite form of phosphate, otherwise known as francolite. Francolites with high carbonate for phosphate substitution are the most highly reactive and are the most suitable for direct application as fertilizers. This means that Tunisia’s phosphate reserves are very profitable. In fact, they are some of the best in the world, being in the top 8% of profitable reserves. 3 The extraction process for francolite rich sedimentary rock such as in Tunisia compared to igneous rock found in places such as Canada or South Africa is much easier, less expensive, and cheaper. To turn igneous rock into fertilizer takes much more energy and many more chemicals.4 Tunisia’s rock, after some refining, can be applied directly to the fields of the world.
The extraction process for the phosphate deposits in Tunisia works something like this: Large swaths of overburden, or the top layer of soil, are cleared in strip mine operations to reveal the thick beds of phosphate rich rock beneath. This rock is separated from the earth by various means, most of which involve explosives or large machines that make loud noises, it is then loaded into railway cars and hauled to the refining plants. Tunisia’s primary phosphate reserves are in the Gafsa region in the central Tell. Refining centers are located on the central coast clustered between Gabes and Sfax. Railway cars full of ore roll toward the coast day and night to supply the refining operations around the Gulf of Gabes.5
At the refineries, the rock is washed, dried, tumbled, crushed, run through reactors, and in general poked and prodded, until the phosphates separate out from the other constituents of the ore. Sulfur is extensively used in the processing which leads to very smelly refineries and the need to import large quantities of sulfur into Tunisia. Tunisia has no significant deposits of sulfur. The waste is mainly comprised of phosphogypsum which can either take the form of a solid pile, a liquid solution involving either fresh or salt water, or as dust blown by the wind.6
Tunisia mainly exports raw phosphate to countries such as France, Russia, and Italy. Domestically, phosphates are refined into explosives for the mining industry, some cosmetics, and fertilizer. Homegrown infrastructure to produce cosmetics or fertilizer on an exportable scale hasn’t materialized as of yet. Maybe in another few years, Tunisia will be exporting finished goods produced with its own locally mined phosphates.
Current Issues
By far, the biggest issue facing Tunisia’s phosphate industry today is pollution. The Gulf of Gabes between Sfax, Gabes, and the Kerkennah Islands is one of the most polluted places in all of the Mediterranean Sea. This is a result of several factors including not treating the liquid effluent streams of the refineries, and the massive accumulation of phosphogypsum piles which are unprotected from the elements.7
Recently, the European Union gave Tunisia a series of loans and grants to expedite the cleanup process of the Gulf of Gabes. These loans total more than 45 million Euros in aid to solve the phosphogypsum problem, treat the liquid effluent from the plants, and help clean up the Gulf.8 Were it not for the particular situation of the phosphate plants and the flow of the tides and currents, contamination from the phosphate industry would have spread far beyond the Gulf of Gabes and into the Mediterranean as a whole. Due to the tidal patterns of the Gulf, most of the pollution is kept very close to the shore between Sfax and Gabes. Even so, communities in Europe and other countries which have beach-front property are nervous about the possibility of more general contamination. Unlike in some places, such as America, the Europeans look a little wider when they search for pollution problems.
Phosphogypsum is a rather nasty substance. In the United States, phosphogypsum is specifically covered under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: 40 CFR Part 61 National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants; National Emission Standard for Radon Emissions From Phosphogypsum Stacks.9 Aside from piling up in significant quantities wherever phosphate is processed, phosphogypsum also effuses radon gas which is radioactive. This means that phosphogypsum is inherently radioactive at some level. Exposure to high enough quantities, such as working for many years in a dust filled environment or through drinking water, could introduce enough radiation into the body to have the same effects as uranium refining tailings. In fact, many groups within America are calling for standards dealing with the treatment of phosphogypsum to be raised to the uranium tailing standards. Specifically,
“Firstly, the uranium tailings standards require a double composite liner with two geomembranes and an underlying layer of 3 feet of compacted soil with minimum hydraulic conductivity of 1×10-7 cm/sec. The gypsum standards require only one geomembrane and 2 feet of compacted gypsum with minimum hydraulic conductivity of 1×10-4 cm/sec (or an underlying 18-inch layer of compacted soil with maximum hydraulic conductivity of 1×10-7 cm/sec, which has not been used in any of the four cases analyzed in Section 4).
Second, the uranium tailings standards require a leachate collection system that is also used as detection system. If the measured volume of liquids recovered exceeds a pre-determined action leakage rate, a response action plan is set in motion to mitigate or stop any leaks. In the gypsum case, leakage through the liner is expected and it is actually calculated in the technical reports presented in the permitting process.”10
In Tunisia, phosphogypsum is currently contained by dumping it in large warehouses. When it rains or when the wind blows, phosphogypsum gets spread around the general vicinity of these warehouses. Long hot and dry summers in Tunisia mean that there are many phosphogypsum particulates floating around in the atmosphere.
Future Possibilities and Problems
To deal with the phosphogypsum, Tunisia has decided to burry it somewhere in the interior of the country where it will have minimal environmental impact. It will be moved by rail from the coast to big pits. A top layer of clay will be used to cap the phosphogypsum, effectively entombing it underground.11 However, the chances for radon leaching from the ground in areas where phosphogypsum has been buried will be quite high. Also, ground water intrusion into phosphogypsum dumps will slowly pollute the surrounding aquifers. This is, however, better than Spain’s approach. Up until the last ten years, all of the phosphogypsum from the plant in Huelva, Spain dumped directly into the salt marsh system. A dam was completed recently to allow for some settling of the phosphogypsum, but a large portion still flows freely into the salt marshes.12
Aside from the pollution problems afflicting Tunisia’s phosphate industry, Tunisia is also in danger of running out of phosphate rich rock. Some sources predict that in the nest 25 to 50 years, Tunisia will have depleted its commercially viable phosphate deposits. Tunisia is estimated to have between 100 000 000 and 600 000 000 tons of phosphate reserves. Tunisia produces 8 000 000 tons of phosphate rock per year. Conservative estimates give Tunisia twelve years before the reserves are exhausted. More liberal estimates, accounting for evolution in phosphate extraction technology, suggest that Tunisia has about 70 years before depletion.13 Of course, as the reserves decline, the easiest phosphate will be gone, leaving harder to mine reserves, which will result in a gradual slowing of production, much like the oil industry in Tunisia is currently experiencing as its primary oil fields are nearing depletion.
Despite all of the challenges and uncertainties facing the Tunisian phosphate industry, it is still a key part of the Tunisian economy, accounting for one third of all exports from the port of Sfax alone.14 Whole regions of the country such as Gafsa rely on the income that phosphate production provides. When the good times run out, Gafsa, Sfax, Gabes, and the railways will be faced with a severe overabundance of labor and deficit money. As Tunisia doesn’t have significant natural resource reserves beyond phosphate, Tunisia will be forced to become more dependant on renewable and sustainable methods for production of employment and revenue. Tunisia already employs tourism and agriculture in this respect but other areas will need to be found.
For the next 75 years, phosphates will continue to play a large roll in Tunisia, but one day, not too far in the future, phosphate production will no longer be a significant part of the Tunisian economy. Even after the mines have closed and the refineries shut, the environmental legacy of phosphate production will be felt for many years to come. Even transitory industries leave a permanent mark on the land.
Notes
1. ____________. World Phosphate Deposits. http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5053e/y5053e07.htm (11/26/2004)
2. ____________. World Phosphate Deposits. http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5053e/y5053e07.htm (11/26/2004) 3. Michalski1, Bernedette. THE MINERAL INDUSTRY OF TUNISIA. http://www.fluoridealert.org/phosphate/overview.htm (11/26/2004)
4. ____________. World Phosphate Deposits. http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5053e/y5053e07.htm (11/26/2004)
5. ____________. Economy. http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/en/laenderinfos/laender/laender_ausgabe_html?type_id=12&land_id=175 (11/26/2004)
6. ___________. Management of Phosphate Tailings. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ptail.html (11/26/2004)
7. EIB.Transboundary Cases of Industrial Pollution: European Involvement in Tunisian Phosphogypsum Cleanup. http://www.eib.org/news/press/press.asp?press=2830 (11/27/2004)
8. EIB.Transboundary Cases of Industrial Pollution: European Involvement in Tunisian Phosphogypsum Cleanup. http://www.eib.org/news/press/press.asp?press=2830 (11/27/2004)
9. ___________. Management of Phosphate Tailings. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ptail.html (11/26/2004)
10. ___________. Management of Phosphate Tailings. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ptail.html (11/26/2004)
11. EIB.Transboundary Cases of Industrial Pollution: European Involvement in Tunisian Phosphogypsum Cleanup. http://www.eib.org/news/press/press.asp?press=2830 (11/27/2004)
12. ___________. Management of Phosphate Tailings. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ptail.html (11/26/2004)
13. ____________. World Phosphate Deposits. http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5053e/y5053e07.htm (11/26/2004)
14. ____________. Tunisia. http://www.polpred.com/en/er/tunisia.htm (11/26/2004)
Bibliography
EIB.Transboundary Cases of Industrial Pollution: European Involvement in Tunisian Phosphogypsum Cleanup. http://www.eib.org/news/press/press.asp?press=2830 (11/27/2004)
Michalski1, Bernedette. THE MINERAL INDUSTRY OF TUNISIA. http://www.fluoridealert.org/phosphate/overview.htm (11/26/2004)
Overview of the mineral industry including recent moves to privatize certain sectors.
____________. Economy. http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/en/laenderinfos/laender/laender_ausgabe_html?type_id=12&land_id=175 (11/26/2004)
An overview of the Tunisian economy from the German perspective. Sections pertain to the phosphate industry.
___________. Management of Phosphate Tailings. http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ptail.html (11/26/2004)
A series of abstracts and excerpts of articles and papers on phosphate tailings. Many multiple authors contained within. If access to this journal was available, these sources would provide a real wealth of information.
____________. Tunisia. http://www.polpred.com/en/er/tunisia.htm (11/26/2004)
An overview of the Tunisian economy as presented from the Russian perspective. Contains sections specifically on the phosphate industry.
____________. World Phosphate Deposits. http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5053e/y5053e07.htm (11/26/2004)
Gives data on tonnage of phosphate production, phosphate reserves, types of phosphate reserves, methods for extraction, etc.
Additional Resources
CITET. Air Quality. (7/1/2004)
Lists legislation and regulations for air quality in Tunisia. Includes the decree setting up the ACTV (Vehicle Technical Monitoring Unit) which CITET runs to monitor industries in Tunisia.
CITET. Cleaner Industry. (7/1/2004)
Lists legislation in Tunisia covering industrial pollution in Tunisia. Includes legislation on sewage and waste water treatment, legislation on solid waste, and general legislation including a law which regulates environmental impact studies.
CITET. Marine Environment. (7/1/2004)
List of legislation regarding the marine environment passed by Tunisia. Includes laws on fishing, public maritime domain, national land-use and town-planning codes, national emergency intervention plans to deal with marine pollution, monitoring, managing, and disposing of wastes in the sea, etc.
CITET. Water and Waste Water Management. (7/1/2004)
List of Tunisian legislation dealing with water and waste water management. Includes laws and decrees dealing specifically with regulations governing discharges into the environment, into the public sewage system, use of waste water for cropland irrigation, etc.
Hamdy, Karim. Islamic Perspectives on Natural Resources Management and Sustainability. Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2000.
Outlines the Islamic perspective on resource management and sustainability as outlined in religious writings such as the Koran.
Harris, Frances. Global Environmental Issues. Chippenham: Antony Rowe, 2004.
Course textbook covering global environmental issues. Includes case studies of specific environmental challenges.
Plan Bleu. Issues and Concerns: Costal Regions in the Mediterranean. (7/1/2004)
Discusses the costal regions of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. Highlights dangers of increased population in costal areas to the sea, biodiversity, and historical sites.
Plan Bleu. Issues and Concerns: Free trade and the environment in Euro-Mediterranean context. (7/1/2004)
Reviews issues involved with international free trade and the environment. Lists additional resources and documents on the topic of free trade and the environment.
Plan Bleu. Issues and Concerns: Water in the Mediterranean Region. (7/1/2004)
Outlines water resource issues focusing on the use and overuse of aquifers in the Mediterranean basin including countries such as Libya and Palestine where more than 100% of the renewable water resources are being used.
Tunisia Online. Environment. (7/1/2004)
Gives general background information on Tunisia’s environmental policy. Includes list of agencies, offices, and ministries which are governmental stakeholders in the environmental debate in Tunisia.
Tags: Phosphates, Tunisia, writing
Tunisia’s wealth lies not in its phosphates or its olives but instead in the great salt pans of the interior. Once, long ago, these salt flats were shallow seas supporting a diverse variety of plant and animal life. They were even deep enough to support a roman galleon, at least supposedly. The archeological work on the find was a bit sketchy as the excavator was one of the primary supporters of connecting Chott Jerid to the sea. There is, however, a good chance that such vessels did in fact ply many of the now dried up inland seas of Tunisia.
Declining rainfall caused, no doubt, by the same climate change that dried up the Sahara, changed these seas of water into seas of salt. Now days, when crossing the Chotts, one is more likely to see a mirage and blowing salt than real water and seagulls. Of course, there is an exception to every rule, such as when our group crossed the Chott late at night in the middle of November. We found a Chott full of water. As far as we could see, the water glistened in the moonlight. Times like these are important in the Chott as these moisture events provide the catalyst to create new and bizarre salt and gypsum formations. After all, what would the man who owns a shop square in the middle of the Chott sell to tourists if it weren’t for these desert roses and salt sculptures?
A Chott full of water or even recently full of water is a dangerous place. Walk off of the causeway or a known safe path and you take your life in your own hands. Beneath a seemingly safe salt crust might lay quicksand or deep black mud waiting to swallow up unsuspecting people and camels. Stories of such things abound around the oasis jump-off points on either side of Chott Jerid. One story says that 1000 camels and their drivers were swallowed in the Chott when they went off the beaten path.
Back in the heyday of the camel caravan, it used to be a few days journey to make it across the Chott. The main route between Douz and Kebili was clearly marked with the trunks of palm trees stuck upright in the salt flats. There was a raised island of salt in the middle of the Chott where camels and humans could spend the night or the day, depending on the season, before continuing on their way to the other side. Now, that raised bit of land is where the Chott gift shop is setup.
Several times over the last 150 years, people have gotten the idea in their heads that the Chotts of Tunisia should be converted back into lakes. Once, right after the completion of the Suez Canal, the French looked into digging a canal all the way into Chott Jerid to flood it with sea water. If this had been completed and it had worked, it would have destroyed all of the desert oases of Tunisia where the highest quality dates are produced, not to mention completely obliterate the oasis complex around Gabes where the canal would have cut through. Luckily, it was found that, in fact, the Chotts were at least 10 meters above sea level, and after the death of the main proponent of the canal project, the whole idea dried up for many years.
Again, the idea of flooding the Chotts surfaced in the mid 60′s when the Plowshares, an atomic energy group in America, decided that creating a trench to the interior of Tunisia was a good idea and the best way to do it was with atom bombs. The idea was to blast a trench from the sea all the way to the interior of the country – possibly as far as Algeria! The only side effects would have been some “localized radiation fallout that will be inconsequential and not adversely affect the greater environment”. Had such a crazy scheme been carried out, the entire south and middle of Tunisia would be one big radioactive wasteland.
For now, it appears that Tunisia is happy with leaving the Chotts alone. Aside from an airstrip or two and a couple of causeways, the Chotts remain untouched. Gone are the camel caravans of old, now replaced with long haul trucks and tour busses. The idea remains the same though. Cross the Chott as soon as possible and don’t get lured in by the mirages. Maybe one day in the future, once the climate shifts to being wetter and cooler in this part of the world, the Chotts once more will be great inland seas, but until that time, I think that Tunisia will just have to be content with salt pans and the occasional salt sea. Anyway, if they ever did try to fill the Chotts with water, be it fresh or salt, it would do little good for agriculture as the whole area is permeated with salt to such a degree that nothing will grow there, even when there is moisture. It will require a massive climate shift and many tens if not hundreds of years of a high water flow through the Chotts and out to the sea before the area is ready to support edible plants and animals. Until then, we can observe the beauty of the Chotts at night under a full moon.
The far south of Tunisia hasn’t always been a sandy wasteland. Once it was a savanna stretching from present day Morocco to the Nile River. Today, it’s a combination of sand and dry land. Somewhere along the way, several thousand years ago, the land underwent a radical change from productive grasslands to sands devoid of life. Whether it be purely as a result of climate change or maybe as a result of over grazing by wild animals or even domesticated livestock or perhaps a more systematic abuse of resources no one at the moment can say. It is clear though, that this process is ongoing and without human intervention, will continue to claim more land every year.
Fighting against desertification is nothing new. People have been battling the sands of the desert for thousands of years. In the desert oases of Tunisia, palm frond fences have been employed since the founding of the first palmeraie to check the advancing sand. With time and persistence, humans have fought and won battles against the desert in hundreds of oases, pushing the cultivated land farther and farther from the water source. A key portion of this effort has been controlling the sand.
In recent years, this effort to control the sands of the desert has been broadened beyond the oasis to the rest of the south of Tunisia. Along most of the major and secondary roads, sand fences have been installed, with good success, to check the advancing sands. In some places, the sand drifts caught by these fences are over 30 meters high and still growing. To keep these artificial sand dunes in place, it requires constant vigilance on the part of the local authorities. Every time one of the fences gets buried under the sand, another fence must be installed at the top of the dune. There may be ten fences below the visible fence!
Efforts to control desertification don’t stop with sand fences. In Libya, for many years, hundreds of thousands of hearty trees have been planted in the desert, pushing back the unusable land and opening vast swaths of country to the possibility of cultivation in the future. In Tunisia, traditional check dams designed to capture scare water during the infrequent but violent rainstorms have been beefed up and improved to keep more land wetter longer. In Morocco, at the edge of the great sand sea, I watched as front end loaders and dump trucks were used to dig out part of a village from the steady advance of the sand dunes. Each country and each region fights wars against the sands in different ways.
Looking out over vast expanses of sand dunes and finding a place where the sand parts and a little bit of the dead earth beneath is revealed makes me wonder just what might lie out underneath the sands of the Sahara. Walking between the dunes in Morocco revealed artifacts dating back several thousand years including such exotic finds as seashells and bits of coral from the red sea. I have a feeling that one day, if the sands can be pushed back far enough, whole lost civilizations will emerge out of the dunes. Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself and the sands and desertification are held at bay. Otherwise, one day, all of North Africa will be one big sand sea.
Tags: Great Sand Sea, Tunisia, writing
Motoring through the southern half of Tunisia I got a chance to see firsthand the arid conditions of agriculture. Aside from the common oasis of greenery in a sea of brown and tan, Tunisia doesn’t have much in the way of water resources. Unlike in the arid climate regions of America where deep bore wells are used to draw water to the surface for industrialized agriculture, Tunisia employs a more environmentally friendly approach of dry land farming. Throughout the southern deserts, every single dip, ditch, creek, ravine, or low spot on any sort of a slope is blocked by stone and earthen check dams. Behind these dams, hundreds of years of patience have created level patches of soil. Within this soil, the crops of the south are grown.
Some crops are planted at a specific point during the year and allowed to lie dormant until proper moisture rains down in a brief and highly infrequent deluge from above. Other crops are planted and come up on their own accord in spite of the dryness. These check dams actually hold water back underneath the soil where hearty plants can tap into the moisture during dry months. The other category of plants is planted only after it has rained and the earth is humming with water. Palms and other trees grow in these small beds of plenty tapping into the deep underground water supply year round.
These patches of cultivation in an otherwise sea of brown are the soul result of human intervention in an otherwise eroding landscape. Across the south of Tunisia, the ground is hard and parched. When rain does come, it comes in such copious amounts that the earth isn’t able to absorb the moisture. Instead, it runs off in huge torrents, cutting deep ravines and channels across the landscape. To harness the water and erosional soil, dams of all sizes, from tiny to immense, have been built over the centuries. Only through the continued tending of humans have these dams remained in place. In several locations, where maintenance of the dams has fallen by the wayside due to people moving on to bigger cities or to more profitable things, I saw breached dams with deep water cut trenches burrowing through the once productive soil behind the dams.
Not only do these dams provide agricultural land, but they also control the torrential downpours which periodically strike the southlands of Tunisia. Without such places for the water to be slowed down, huge torrents would rush down the dry riverbeds, washing out roads, houses, communication lines, everything. Recognizing the value of the dams, the Tunisian government has a program to revitalize and expand the dam system to help control the flood waters and encourage agriculture on the marginal lands of the desert.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen such dams in use. On the east side of the high atlas mountains in Morocco, I also saw such a system in place and still actively used by the Berber tribes who reside in the mountains. Conditions there were so extreme as to warrant planting individual dwarf wheat plants about ten inches apart to make the most of limited amounts of rainfall. When I visited one such agricultural operation outside the small village of Amassen, the wheat plants were already ready to harvest in the beginning of July and only stood about five inches tall. I haven’t seen such extreme agriculture in Tunisia, but no doubt, in some areas, it once existed. Since independence, such subsistence agriculture has, it appears, fallen by the wayside in favor of more profitable and leisure inducing enterprises.
As more and more high production agricultural land in Tunisia is taken up by tourism and industry, Tunisian farmers will be forced onto more and more marginal land until even the driest of locations are being farmed. Maybe moisture farming, like Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt practiced, isn’t too far off in the future.
Tags: desert agriculture, Oasis, Tunisia, writing
Throughout the four oasis complexes we visited on our trip to the south, the level of sophistication of irrigation and irrigation control impressed me. In all of the oases, a complex system of water management has been in use for several thousand years. This is evident especially in the larger Gabes oasis complex where the bus got up close and personal with a roman aqueduct which passes water over the road and another roman aqueduct which passes water under the road. These two aqueducts have effectively limited the size of vehicles which can use that particular road through the oasis for some two thousand years. They have also provided irrigation for large swaths of greenery.
In the oasis of Chebika utilizes a dam to retain water in a narrow gorge in the mountains above the alluvial fan of greenery. This dam appears to be a recent construction, but similar methods of storing water for lean times no doubt have been used in the mountain oases for quite a while – if not by a dam that retains water in the liquid form, then by earthen berms designed to capture water runoff from the particularly strong and rather infrequent rain storms which, from time to time, hit the deserts of Tunisia.
The oasis of Tamerza employs a series of canals and pipes to carry water throughout its palmeraie. Little has changed here, aside from the plastic pipes now being used, since the oasis was carved out of the desert landscape. Probably before the water was so heavily exploited, the natural swimming hole at the bottom of the cascade in Tamerza was a bit deeper and a bit cooler, but having the choice between an entire oasis that can support several thousand people and a cool refreshing swimming hole, it seems that the local populace decided on the less invigorating of the two.
Tozeur’s oasis has been operating at its current state since the 1200′s when Ibn Chabbat, Tunisia’s famous engineer, designed the irrigation system. The same channels, canals, and dams which he devised to supply the ten square kilometer oasis with all of its water are still in use. Some of them have been upgraded from the original stone and wood linings to concrete and metal, but otherwise, the whole system has been running with minimal maintenance for about 800 years.
Recent years have seen the amount of water available to oasis agriculture decrease substantially. In Gabes, the various non-agricultural uses of water have increased greatly. Phosphate processing uses water. So does the new city. So does the zone touristique. Everyone is water hungry. Unfortunately, as is the case in many places, the traditional agricultural practices loose out. From what I gather, each section of the oasis used to get two or three days of water per week – now they get water every 45 days or so. To adapt to this, beds that used to be 20 meters long have been divided into 10 or even 5 meter sections. Originally, the watering practices consisted solely of flood irrigation. Now, people use a combination of flood irrigation, made more efficient by smaller beds, drip irrigation, and direct injection of water to the root level via pipes stuck in the ground next to the root balls of trees during planting. The oasis at Gabes has managed to cling to is precarious existence in this manner, but continued growth of industry, tourism, and the city are increasing the threat to the oasis.
An interesting bit of wisdom imparted on Lucas and I by our host dad, Ahmed, struck both of us as very true and very interesting. The only reason such large and complex oases exist is that humans decided to use the water from a spring to build oases out of the desert. It’s a daily battle with sand, heat, and drought to keep the palmeraies alive. Even a few days interruption in vigilance against the sands of the more sandy deserts and the entire palmeraie could be lost. Take humans out of the equation, and every oasis in Tunisia would shrink to but a few palm trees and some small bushes clustered around a little spring surrounded by desert. The peoples of the oases of Tunisia not only are the benefactors of the greenery but are also the architects and caretakers. Humans and the oases they live in are bonded together. Take one away, and the other will succumb to the sands of the desert.
Tags: Chebika, Gabes, Ibn Chabbat, Oasis, Tamerza, Tozeur, Tunisia, writing
I’d like to tell you the name of the person which gave us the presentation in class today, but unfortunately, Heather, Lucas, and I were delayed downtown trying to acquire some food. We had a second session of Arabic class that lasted until 4pm and we had decided to go find something quick and easy so we wouldn’t be dead come 4pm. It was just our luck that the place we chose was very slow! So as a result, we arrived 45 minutes late to class.
The part of the presentation that I did see was very interesting. The presenter was showing us the ongoing effort to utilize Tunisia’s water resources which include surface water such as Tunisia’s sole river, the seasonal wadis, and several lakes, ground water, and waste water. Currently, it looks like Tunisia won’t run out of water until after 2030. Through careful management and a large distribution network, the resources of the northwest are spread across the entire country. Something like 80% of the available water is in the northwest which is only 20% of the country. Even the water which Tunisia does get doesn’t actually originate here. Instead, it comes from Algeria through the river.
It was interesting seeing their efforts to keep Tunisia flowing along. She talked about the aquifer recharging schemes that they’re implementing around the country. Basically, they put little rock dams maybe a couple of feet high across wadis to slow the flow of the water, drop some sediment, and allow the water a chance to soak into the ground. They had tried the pumping method to pump water into the ground during wet years, but it didn’t work very well in Tunisia. They also looked at trying to treat waste water that way, but it wasn’t economical or efficient. She said Israel does it effectively which I found rather interesting. Israel is a really dry place!
Knowing that Tunisia’s 20 golf courses are irrigated using treated wastewater, I wonder what they smell like. I know that many courses in the USA are also watered in this way and some of them really stink, especially when the treatment plants up stream break down! I imagine since these are all tourist golf courses, they probably don’t smell bad at all.
She wrapped up her presentation talking about the extensive monitoring network in the northwest river drainage system. There are many weather observation stations, rain gauge stations, river sampling stations, and points where they manually take water samples. Every six months they do a comprehensive sampling of the water all across the northwest. She said that when they sample the water, they wake up at 4am, drive all the way out there, get the samples, and are back in Tunis at 10pm to drop them off at CITET for analysis. If the samples sit for more than 48 hours, they aren’t any good as the oxygen levels won’t be accurate anymore.
All in all, it was an interesting presentation. I wish I had been there for the entire thing!
Lazreg really goes to town on arguing that “global feminism’ is a horrid problem which is solely the fault of the west and the puppets that are paraded around on the international lecture circuit. She pontificates at great length her distain for the treatment of the “Other woman” as someone who lives in a bad society and needs freeing and, prior to that, careful documentation for consumption by western audiences. She argues that all western work on the study of the “Other woman” is garbage and only serves to sensationalize and perpetuate lies and half truths about women from societies other than those of the west.
It seems to me that Lazreg must have been passed up once too many times to be a guest lecturer or was turned down by one too many publishers and now she’s become a very bitter and jaded academic. I dare say that she lost her academic marbles. This short piece seems only designed to lash out at the rest of the academic community in a very blind and indiscriminant manner. She harshly criticizes everyone from her own students through other academics through the “Other women” lecturers and authors. Never once did I see any real suggestion for improvement on the current system. Regardless of whether or not what Lazreg says is true, it’s entirely unconstructive to spew such academic bile in the faces of her peers without offering up some possible solution. In engineering, that would be like saying a dam will fail and kill a million people but not suggesting any methods to stop the event from occurring.
I agree with her that many people do trivialize the “Other woman” and make all of her efforts and endeavors into a fight against the system in which she lives. In fact, I’m sure that I’m even guilty of such things. In today’s gogo western world of 10 second sound bytes and instant information 24/7/365, if the topic isn’t sensationalized a bit, no one from the general population is going to bother looking at it. For that matter, most undergraduates wouldn’t take a women’s studies class if they didn’t expect to read some exotic tales of far off places and far out women. Some might even be so lucky as to see national geographic style photographs of women in “traditional” dress scratching out a meager existence in sub Saharan Africa. What the students aren’t told is that an anthropologist paid the women either in cash or in food or some other valuable commodity to pose in outdated clothes doing things which they wouldn’t usually do. I’ve known enough anthropologists over the years to know that this is the modus operandi for a good chunk of the anthropological community.
But I digress. Agreeing with Lazreg is one thing. Agreeing with her method of delivering the message and the “academacized” nature of her writing (lots and lots of unnecessary big words and tons of verboseness) served more to hurt her argument rather than help it in my eyes.
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