Around the World in a Harvard Summer

It is a familiar cliche, of course, that the Third World is trapped between its own traditional cultures and encroaching modernity. Old men driving donkey carts past skyscrapers, turbaned young boys listening to rock 'n' roll songs, etc., etc. During my three weeks in Tunisia, though, I saw how facile that cliche can be, yet how very real it is for the people caught in this clash of cultures. I saw it turned upside down in a place which is literally upside down.

Matmata is a small village nestled in the rocky hills of southeastern Tunisia in north Africa. Over the centuries, the town's Berber settlers developed an ingeniously simple way of beating the withering summer sun and cold winter winds. They fashion a village of pit houses, huge craters disguising a complex array of caves used as houses, granaries, and "barns."

I was traveling with Paul, an Italian sailor who was taking photos for a travel journal, and through his camera eye I saw people making do with what they had. Out of each ornately carved home there were electrical wires. Above several, for instance, there stood television antennae and generators. The villagers took from the land and from technology what was necessary. And no more.

That evening in the small hotel bar, Paul and I talked with some local men about Tunisia and America, and about the recent bombing of neighboring Libya. They spoke of Khadafi with admiration and respect, as many southern Tunisians do, and as a man who stood his ground, almost as a Robin Hood figure. Even with my broken French I understood that they saw him as someone who did "the necessary thing."

There was no way I could begin to fathom the different world from which this point of view originated. Perhaps only from a landscape which, from the hills, seems to be nothing more than a village of craters.

Patrick J. Markee '87-'88, Lowell House