In the eye of the Tunisian dirham .. Huts are strewn with poverty and frost

Badruddin Al-Wahaibi-Ain Draham (Tunisia)

On the burning wood stove, the aunt moved with her cold hands, the rest of the fires that began to fade, not the sting of the fire, nor the suffocating smoke of the hut. Here in the eye of the Tunisian dirham, where the beauty of nature charming and extreme poverty and deadly frost.

Dharam of Jendouba province (northwestern Tunisia), or the wheat market, as the barbarians called it for its rich plains, was the country's lung through a unique forest wealth in North Africa, hot water and dams, and archaeological sites.

It is one of the Tunisian cities where the French did not spare their military arsenal to control it during the colonial era because of its natural wealth. However, since independence, the wheel of development has refused to turn around and often stumble upon the absence of a decent life for a large group of its people.

Shanty cottages
Inside a shabby hut amidst the jungle, a donkey, a dog, a chicken and a cat, with a seven-member family, a mud-roofed roof and firewood under the rain, all of them together, share the animal and animal vocabulary; the goal is to survive.

On the inside of the cottage is a pile of burning wood, surrounded by tree trunks that have been taken to sit, and in the corner equipment stacked on a shelf that suggests something like a kitchen where nothing is cooked for a few hands. The animals escape from the frost outside to share the warmth of the fireplace.

Al-Jazeera Net has seen what the bride of the north - as it is called locally - is hiding under its beautiful mountains, surrounded by unique mountains and forests, where the dirham is proud of the people of Ain al-Dirham and its source during the French colonization.

A harsh winter
As a guest duty, the aunt did not find a good gift other than bread, saying that the rains isolate the area and cut off the only road leading to and from the village of "al-Ruwayi", so she lacks food supplies and manages her order according to the circumstances.

The road leading to the village, which lies a stone's throw from the Tunisian-Algerian border and extends to the village of Hammam Bourguiba, mostly unpaved or paved, is cut by torrential rainfall from the mountains to be a dangerous seasonal religion at more than one point.

As the road is cut, this old woman talks about cutting off her and her family, where she lives on her fears of cold and hunger. She fears that the clouds and rain will sag on the exhausting roof of the hut, and she fears that the donkey will not be able to carry one of them.

She can not even describe her pain. She says that she has suffered to see her grandchildren with these worn clothes, seeing them trembling from the cold, competing to share the morsel and cover at night, and also racing to a corner where the rain does not seep out to sleep.

"They come close to the fireplace," she says. "Despite the harsh circumstances, they are distinguished in the study, and their results are a source of pride.

The school is about four kilometers from the cottage and the area, she says. The village children walk back and forth, and when the rain and snow are heavy, the huts and houses are forced, like their grandchildren today, because their natural bodies can not face nature.

Lack of resources
In order to cope with the cold and rain, the woman relies on two indispensable sources: collecting firewood from the forest for heating and cooking, and the state-run ransom of her husband, estimated at $ 50 a month, which is too small to feed her family and meet the needs of children.

As for the cottage, her husband always undertakes to maintain it in the summer in anticipation of the rain and snow season, he says - to renew the horizontal pillars, by mixing mud with straw to make it cohesive and then stacked above the cottage to be a ceiling, and this year was able to add a plastic roll to alleviate the Rainwater leakage.

Drinking water is also a day-to-day struggle. The well is about two kilometers away, and the village women rely on donkeys to bring their needs for relatively good drinking and cooking water, a dangerous journey sometimes in the winter due to the bad condition of the roads.

"This family is a replica of hundreds of similar villages in many villages, but despite the lack of resources, the seasons of rain and snow have moved the hearts of compassionate people to extend a helping hand to this poor group of people," said the finance official of the Association of Good.

For more than 60 years since the independence of Tunisia and the huts in the forests of Ain Dharham, their place has been replaced by a difficult equation that could not be solved by successive power.

Despite the wealth of wealth that nature has enjoyed in this region, Sala and her grandchildren are waiting for decisive and quick decisions from the authorities, from the darkness of the shacks to the light of human homes.