Foum ZguidThe Nomadic school in the Desert of Lake Iriki
The nomadic school in the desert of Lake Iriki was created in early 2015, by a nongovernmental association called Imagine, this school gave a lot to the nomads and the nomadic, life. The teacher who is from Mahamid Elghizlane, tries his best to educate the children of the nomads here. The subjects reached are Islamic education, mathematics, Standard Arabic, and French, the students of different ages have the same level all the time. Unfortunately, they couldn’t continue to the public sector if they wanted to continue in the middle school but rather they could be in the primary school. But it is still a great achievement that at least the students here know how to write, read, and calculate. Which allows them somehow to adapt in a way to the development of the world. Each year is the same student, around 12 students, sometimes less because they need to help their parents with the goats and dromedaries.
But there are still unfortunately a lot of student nomads who are far from this school hidden in the mountains. We at cooperative Ben Mahmoud that we created to help the nomads by offering chances to work at our company to guarantee the continuity of nomads in the Sahara, especially in this hard time of lack of rainwater for years and years, the nomads’ source of life here is the goats and animals, but when there is no Raining water means there is no grass which means there are no animals. The nomads find themselves obliged to sell some of the goats and the dromedaries to bring food for the rest of the herds, but unfortunately one day he found that no animals left because of the long period of dryness. When the nomads are left with no animation he will find that it doesn’t make more sense for them to stay in the Sahara, and this is what causes us the problem of immigration from the Sahara to the nearest city. The problem is more than that, we see that if it continues in this way one day we will have nobody left in the Sahara.
This is why we think that the field of tourism could be the best solution to keep this beautiful way of life ( nomadism) alive. We don’t want they to change from nomadism to tourism but we encourage them to continue as nomads by offering chances to work for one individual for each family, Which will give the individual another source of life to help his family and bring good to the goats and dromedaries rather than selling some to buy food for the rest. What is more important for us also is the education of this individual in the field because we want to spread the idea and this individual we want him after a few years to be independent and make his own business
