Surrounded by olive and palm trees in a Moroccan mountain village, a centuries-old collective granary preserves the ancient practices of the Amazigh culture.

“The traditions are vanishing, but not here,” said proud village elder Hossine Oubrahim, in Ait Kine in the Anti-Atlas mountains.

High in the rugged hills some 460 kilometres (280 miles) south of the capital Rabat, Ait Kine is home to one of country’s few remaining collective granaries called agadir in Amazigh, Morocco’s Berber language.

The imposing, fully functional structure, likely built in the 18th century and restored in 2012, is still used by local residents to store and protect their produce.

“We were raised on the tradition of storing our grains, dried fruit, oil and valuables there,” recalled Oubrahim, in his 70s and wearing an indigo-coloured tunic.

“And we continue to respect it.”

The village’s granary is a “monument” that “represents our community spirit”, said Abdelghani Charai, a 60-year-old merchant who returned to his ancestral home in Ait Kine after years away.

Grains, fruit, family archives

The granary, built using a practice known as rammed earth, sits in the village centre, protected by a fortified wall with a stone watchtower.

In the past, during times of unrest and rebellion against the government, it offered a safe place for storage, Charai explained.

“The granary guaranteed security,” he said.

Inside, 76 cubicles are arranged in three levels around an open courtyard with a water cistern.

The agadir has stocks of barley, dates and almonds, but it is also used to safeguard documents like marriage and birth certificates, religious texts and contracts, and recipes for traditional medicine inscribed on palm stems.

Lahcen Boutirane, the guardian of the collective storeroom, said the village’s 63 remaining families use it.

“Others have left, but they keep their archives here,” he told AFP.

Unwritten laws have kept these granaries sacred and inviolable spaces, not only storing crops to use in drought but also protecting them from attacks, said archaeologist Naima Keddane.

Boutirane stressed the importance of preserving Ait Kine’s agadir, which “bears witness to our ancestors’ ingenuity”.

‘Solidarity’

Collective granaries can be found elsewhere in North Africa — in Algeria’s Aures mountains, Tunisia’s south and Libya’s Nafusa mountains — but they are most common in Morocco, though many are no longer in use.

The kingdom has more than 550 ancient igoudar — the plural of agadir — according to the culture ministry, which is preparing a UNESCO World Heritage nomination.

They are located primarily across central and southern Morocco, in caves or on cliff sides, on hilltops and in valleys.

“The challenge is to save Morocco’s collective granaries, which have almost disappeared in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya,” said architect and anthropologist Salima Naji.

Passionate about these “institutions of solidarity”, she had helped restore Ait Kine’s agadir, now an attraction for both researchers and tourists.

A group of Italian visitors appreciated the carved wooden door, adorned with forged iron.

“We are doing a tour of granaries,” said guide Emanuele Maspoli, describing them as “extraordinary places that attest to the historical wealth of Morocco’s oases”.

“It’s a magical place,” said tourist Antonella Dalla.

Pointing to the murky waters of the Tonle Sap, Si Vorn fights back tears as she recalls her four-year-old daughter dying from diarrhoea after playing in the polluted lake.

Her family of 12 is among 100,000 people living in floating houses on Cambodia’s vast inland waterway, and while their village has 70 houses and a primary school, it has no sanitation system.

Now a local social enterprise, Wetlands Work (WW), is trying to tackle the problem by rolling out “floating toilets” to filter waste, but the high cost of installation means for now they are available to only a lucky few.

For generations, villagers whose livelihood depends on fishing have defecated directly into the water that they use for cooking, washing and bathing — risking diarrhoea and even more severe water-borne diseases such as cholera.

“We use this water, we drink this water, and we defecate into this water. Everything!” Si Vorn, 52, told AFP, saying her family fell ill all the time.

“Every day, I worry about my health. Look at the water, there is no sanitation. I’m so worried but I don’t know what to do.”

More than a million people live on or around Tonle Sap, the world’s largest inland fishery, but there is no system in place for managing human waste from the 20,000 floating houses around the lake.

Cambodia, ravaged by war and the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia.

Around a third of the population does not have access to proper toilets, according to the WaterAid charity, and diarrhoea is a leading killer of children under five.

Wetlands Work hopes its HandyPods, as the floating toilets are properly known, can help Si Vorn’s village and others like it in other countries.

HandyPods use three small tanks to filter and clean the sewage.

Human waste passes from the toilet into the first tank, then the second and third. Inside, trillions of microbes in a “biofilm” — a slimy matrix of microorganisms — remove pathogens and the treated water is discharged into the lake.

“We’re addressing sanitation in floating villages that have never experienced sanitation before,” Taber Hand, the founder of Wetlands Work, told AFP.

The resulting “grey water” may not be clean enough to drink, but it is safe to use for washing and cooking.

The company has installed 19 floating toilets in Chong Prolay, Si Vorn’s village, and they have proved popular with the few that have them.

“We use this water because a bottle of clean water is 4,000 riel ($1), so we can’t afford to buy clean water for using, cooking and bathing,” fisherman Roeun Nov, who won a free HandyPod through a lucky draw two months ago, told AFP.

“We buy clean water for just drinking.”

WW has installed more than 100 HandyPods in 20 villages on the lake through two separate projects funded by European Union, and aims to roll out 200 more by 2025.

The hope is that the more villagers see the toilets in action, the more they will want proper sanitation.

Outside Cambodia, WW has also installed the system in 12 villages in Myanmar, but cost is a major obstacle to widespread adoption.

The floating toilets cost around $175 each — a huge sum of money for Tonle Sap fishing communities, where on a good day a villager might make $5.

Hand said his team was considering subsidies in the longer term, so that families would only pay $35 to $40 for a treatment system.

Chan Sopheary, a WW field officer, said lake people were beginning to change their behaviour around sanitation and hygiene, but they were not willing to pay for the toilet yet given their poor livelihoods.

“We cannot afford one because we just make enough money for daily spending,” Si Vorn’s husband Yoeun Sal told AFP after bathing in water by his house during a hot afternoon.

“If no one helps us, we will keep using the lake (as a toilet),” he added.

Countless shelves line the walls of a basement at Denmark’s University of Odense, holding what is thought to be the world’s largest collection of brains.

There are 9,479 of the organs, all removed from the corpses of mental health patients over the course of four decades until the 1980s.

Preserved in formalin in large white buckets labelled with numbers, the collection was the life’s work of prominent Danish psychiatrist Erik Stromgren.

Begun in 1945, it was a “kind of experimental research,” Jesper Vaczy Kragh, an expert in the history of psychiatry, explained to AFP.

Stromgren and his colleagues believed “maybe they could find out something about where mental illnesses were localised, or they thought they might find the answers in those brains”.

The brains were collected after autopsies had been conducted on the bodies of people committed to psychiatric institutes across Denmark.

Neither the deceased nor their families were ever asked permission.

“These were state mental hospitals and there were no people from the outside who were asking questions about what went on in these state institutions,” he said.

At the time, patients’ rights were not a primary concern.

On the contrary, society believed it needed to be protected from these people, the researcher from the University of Copenhagen said.

Between 1929 and 1967, the law required people committed to mental institutions to be sterilised.

Up until 1989, they had to get a special exemption in order to be allowed to marry.

Denmark considered “mentally ill” people, as they were called at the time, “a burden to society (and believed that) if we let them have children, if we let them loose… they will cause all kinds of trouble,” Vaczy Kragh said.

Back then, every Dane who died was autopsied, said pathologist Martin Wirenfeldt Nielsen, the director of the collection.

“It was just part of the culture back then, an autopsy was just another hospital procedure,” Nielsen said.

The evolution of post-mortem procedures and growing awareness of patients’ rights heralded the end of new additions to the collection in 1982.

A long and heated debate then ensued on what to do with it.

Denmark’s state ethics council ultimately ruled it should be preserved and used for scientific research.

Unlocking hidden secrets

The collection, long housed in Aarhus in western Denmark, was moved to Odense in 2018.

Research on the collection has over the years covered a wide range of illnesses, including dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

“The debate has basically settled down, and (now people) say ‘okay, this is very impressive and useful scientific research if you want to know more about mental disease’,” the collection’s director said.

Some of the brains belonged to people who suffered from both mental health issues and brain illnesses.

“Because many of these patients were admitted for maybe half their life, or even their entire life, they would also have had other brain diseases, such as a stroke, epilepsy or brain tumours,” he added.

Four research projects are currently using the collection.

“If it’s not used, it does no good,” says the former head of the country’s mental health association, Knud Kristensen.

“Now we have it, we should actually use it,” he said, complaining about a lack of resources to fund research.

Neurobiologist Susana Aznar, a Parkinson’s expert working at a Copenhagen research hospital, is using the collection as part of her team’s research project.

She said the brains were unique in that they enable scientists to see the effects of modern treatments.

“They were not treated with the treatments that we have now,” she said.

The brains of patients nowadays may have been altered by the treatments they have received.

When Aznar’s team compares these with the brains from the collection, “we can see whether these changes could be associated with the treatments,” she said.