When Bribery Becomes Dangerous

In the French-language Moroccan weekly that I read, they regularly use the term "pot-de-vin" for corruption here in Morocco. It's a bit ironic in a supposedly tee-totaling Muslim country since "pot-de-vin" means "pot of wine". It's even more ironic that the French regularly use the Arabic term "bakchich" back home in the Hexagon.

Although I have no personal experience with corruption here in Morocco, I hear about it all the time. Traffic tickets and drug charges disappear instantly with a little bit of cash. Apparently johns never get in trouble for prostitution because they pay their way out of it (the fact that they are male also seems to help the situation...) Friends have even told me that their parents have had to pay a potential employer in order to get a job.

So it came as no surprise to me that the restaurant across from my workplace had passed the mandated fire inspection even though there was no fire extinguisher on the premises.


A few days ago, I sat down at a cafe with Daniel to watch an African Cup game. He had been at the cafe, which is only a block from our work, longer than me, and he told me that a fire truck had just gone by.

"A guy got up and left the cafe to see what was going on. He came back a minute later," Daniel told me. "So I figured there wasn't anything worth seeing."

As I found out later, there wasn't anything worth seeing because two of my Moroccan co-workers put out the oil fire immediately with our fire extinguishers.

The restaurants' cooks and waiters had just left the building when the vat of cooking oil caught on fire. Despite the open butane tanks near the fire, they were mindlessly staring at the building with their heads stuck out and mouths open ( according to my co-worker who, admittedly, has a tendency to exaggerate things a tad). My coworkers (one a security guard, the other an administrator) noticed the fire immediately, grabbed the extinguishers, ran over and put everything out.

The last few days when I see both of them, I've addressed them both as "hero".