Old men rebuilding an old foggara (underground aqueduct) near Akabli village.
The foggara have supplied villages like this for a thousand years with fresh reliable water, but now are falling into disuse as young people are not interested in the difficult and dangerous work of going underground to clean and fix them. The foggara tap into near surface water some six km from the village and transport it with natural gravity flow through a canal dug through hard rock eight meters below the surface. The water emerges in surface canals in the village where it is used by homes and then divided according to inherited ownership to private family gardens. The foggara are accessed by climbing barefoot down a meter wide shaft with toe and finger holes in opposing sides of the descent. Here a foggara worker is waiting for a bucket of debris and accreted minerals to be hauled 12 meters to the surface by rope and pulley.
