Mobile phone recharge

Every time I get a new mobile phone sim card it comes with a different recharge process and codes. When we arrived in Morocco, I picked up a new Maroc Telecom card with just a few dirham’s worth of time on it. I had forgotten that Maroc Telecom does not provide coverage in the ground floor rooms of Dar Borj Dahab.

When the time on the card ran out I purchased a Meditel sim card because Meditel provides better coverage throughout the house. The card came with 30 dirham of time. I’m set!

I put the chip in and tried to call. It did not work! I listened to the message which was in Darija (Moroccan Arabic). I understood two things: first, from the message, I assumed that I could press 1 for an option, but no idea what the option was;  and second, that I would not be using the phone until someone helped me change the language from Darija to French.

When our house manager Mouanis came over, it took him about ten minutes and two calls from another phone to get the sim card working, but finally I had a working phone.

After making a few brief calls I checked the credit remaining. With just 10 Dirham left, it was time to recharge, so I purchased a 20 Dirham recharge card at the corner store.

The Meditel recharge card is the red sliver pictured below a credit card. The instructions were in a font that was so small neither Anita nor I could read it. I tried to send a text message with the recharge code as I would have done with a Maroc Telecom recharge. That did not work.  Ok we need help on this too.

Our plasterer Abdelkader was about to leave after work, so I asked if he could help. Abdelkader, who speaks Darija, Spanish and a little French, said “Ok”. He looked at the instructions on the recharge card and dialed the access code 555. He realized my phone was set to French so he dialed 555 on his Meditel phone and then pushed the numbers on my phone to match what he was hearing in Darija on his phone.

It worked.