Last week I took a short trip to Ramlat as Saba’tayn in Marib just southeast of Safir. See photos from my earlier post. The desert area is part of the Empty Quarter, but it is not as desolate as one might think. In addition to Bedouin settlements there are numerous oil and electricity facilities dotting the region. At night, their lights can be seen glowing over the sand dunes from miles away.
Although I didn’t see any violence during my trip, I sensed the tension just from the 30+ security checkpoints manned alternately by the military and tribesmen on the road to Marib. Several times soldiers boarded the bus to see if it had picked any armed men on the way, then just a few miles down the road, some tribesmen would get on the bus to see if there were any soldiers onboard. The paved road from Marib city to Safir, a major oil, gas, and electricity facility, is defended by the army with tanks and heavy artillery at almost every kilometer. Despite all this, the transmission line (not the facility itself) was attacked twice while I was in Marib causing Sana’a to lose power intermittently. An affiliated oil refinery has been sitting idle since the pipeline to Ras Isa was blown up in January, 2012.
This was my forth trip to the Empty Quarter and three years since I saw my buddy and driver Muhammad. Other than losing some weight and having more gray hair, he is still his old self, cheering and optimistic. While everyone else suffered during the political crisis over the past year, the enterprising Muhammad made a lot of money from buying cheap gasoline in Marib and selling it for an exorbitant price on the black market in Sana’a.
With each trip to the desert, I’ve noticed that he is more and more addicted to qat and getting lazier and lazier. After I took over the cooking and tea duty, he pretty much just drove the truck to destination and assumed his qat-chewing cigarette-smoking position all day in the shade of the truck. The only time he got up was to pee or to turn the truck for maximum shade.
Muhammad spends his days chewing qat and smoking cigarettes.
After three days in the dunes we ran out of fresh food and more importantly Muhammad ran out of qat. Time to hit some Bedouin settlements. He never cared about his appearance when we were out in nowhere, but the morning before we were to visit a Bedouin village, he put on a clean shirt. “I want to look my best so I can flirt with the pretty Bedouin girls.” said Muhammad as he combed his half-inch gray hair.
The good thing about Bedu is that it doesn’t matter if you know them or not, just show up and you’ll be treated like a guest. The temperature was rising fast, so we pulled into the first village we saw. Just our luck, someone slaughtered a sheep so we joined the feast. The meat tasted especially good after three days of dry bread and canned tuna. The Bedu here have settled into houses although they still don’t have electricity or running water. Their dialect is a mixture between pure Bedouin dialect and urban dialect which means that I can understand better and converse more freely. My previous trips were to the area further north where the Bedu still lived in tents and spoke pure Bedouin dialect which I found very difficult to understand.
After lunch I went with some young men and women to cut grass for the sheep and milk the shecamels, while Muhammad stayed to chew qat and look for opportunity to chat with girls. Bedouin women wear form-fitting dresses and are quite open to talking to strange men, so there was plenty for Muhammad to see and do.
While there was abundance of the same grass near the village, the naughty boys and girls chose to hop on a pickup truck and drive 30 minutes out of the way so they could mingle freely out of the sight of the village elders. The whole afternoon consisted of 10 minutes of work and three hours of flirting. At sunset, we went to the pen where the baby camels were kept and where the mama camels returned at night to feed their babies. The girls milked the camels before releasing the baby camels to their moms, and I drank the frothy camel milk to my heart’s content.
After dinner, Muhammad and I drove 45 minutes out of the village to sleep in the dunes. Muhammad slept in the back of the truck, and I dragged my blanket to crash behind a dune about 50 yards away. I was exhausted after a day of non-stop talking and slept until 8:30 the next morning when the sun was already high. Muhammad popped over the dune toting his AK-47 and handgun. “He is being awful active this early in the morning” I thought.
“Linda, did you hear anything this morning? A car came by.”
I was still waking up, but I could sense the urgency in his voice.
“No, I heard nothing. You??”
“I slept through as well. Didn’t hear anything.” said Muhammad.
“That’s because you spent too much energy thinking about girls yesterday.” I yelled over the sand dune.
I didn’t think it was a big deal until I came down the dune and saw fresh tire tracks just 10 yards away from our truck. The tracks then went up the dune, obviously to see the spot I was sleeping, then turned around and left. This is the area where Abida tribe and Bani Harith tribe have been fighting since the American drone killed a prominent figure from the Abida tribe two years ago. We both felt unease while playing out different scenarios in our heads. If they were the bad guys, they could’ve subdued Muhammad and kidnapped me. Muhammad wouldn’t be able to convince the police that he wasn’t in on this since the tire marks were so close. He felt embarrassed failing his duty as a bodyguard. We packed up and decided to follow the tire tracks which led us right back to the village. It turned out that someone from the village came out to make sure we were OK. Seeing that we were both sound asleep, they went back without saying hello.
Our little episode of carelessness became the entertainment of the day. The women joked how they could’ve married me off for a new car and some camels while Mohammad got teased to no end over at the men’s gathering place.
Since it was Friday, the women decided I should go take a shower and get cleaned up. (did I look that dirty??) Someone siphoned some water from a water barrel into a basin. While I cleaned myself, someone else washed my clothes. By the time I was done, my clothes were mostly dry under the desert sun. I felt refreshed and was ready to eat.
A month ago, some idiot from the village shot himself while carrying a machine gun. The bullet went in from his right chest and exited from his back. He spent a month in the hospital in Marib and just came back home a few days ago. The family slaughtered two sheep to celebrate his survival. It was bad that the idiot almost died, but good that we got to enjoy another feast. After a good meal and some sweet tea, the ladies were relaxed and started to joke around. The grandma, a widow in her 70’s, kept teasing me that I should just marry Muhammad because I’d get kidnapped one way or the other the way he slept through everything. I told her that I’d find her a husband in Sana’a. Others chimed in that the prospective groom should be about 100 years old with no teeth. The grandma felt a bit defensive so she pointed to her private area and made scissor movements with her index and middle finger toward me and other unmarried women in the room while winking mischievously. I thought female circumcision was only practiced in the South and Tihama area, but apparently it was practiced here at some point. I asked those who sat next to me and was told that it was no longer practiced.
The teenage girls pulled everything out of my bag and asked me item by item what they were for. I was glad I didn’t have any tampons, something I would not able to explain. They were mostly fascinated by the smartphone. In less than five minutes, they learned how to unlock the screen, navigate to the picture app, open the picture folders, swipe the screen to advance, and zoom in and out with two fingers. I was amazed how fast children learn when given the opportunity. There is a school in the village, but it doesn’t have any female teachers. Since families would not send their daughters to study with a man, the girls are still growing up illiterate in 2012. The girls asked me to stay and teach them the Quran. Ironically, I was considered the most educated female out here when it comes to Arabic and Islamic studies only because I can read and write. On my last day there, I was chatting with a couple of women and noticed that we all had our toe nails painted. They asked me if nail polish was forbidden in Islam. Apparently some guy from the village told them so. I have no credentials to give religious advice, but the guy could be correct since nail polish prevents water from reaching the nail surface during absolution. I asked them if the guy chewed qat, they said yes. I told them that there is a hadith that says:
طُوبَى لِمَن شَغَلَهُ عَيبُهُ عن عُيُوبِ النَّاسِ
Good tidings to the one who is more concerned about his own shortcoming than that of others.
Qat is considered a drug on par with alcohol by most Islamic scholars thus should be strictly forbidden in Islam. Chewing qat is a much bigger sin than wearing nail polish. Anyone who chews qat is in no position to tell others how they should practice Islam. In other words, he should mind his own business.
After sunset, the village fell in darkness but the lights from the nearby Safir electricity station could be seen glowing over the horizon. While Safir is churning out electricity for Sana’a and other cities, it has neglected small villages just a few miles away.
The next morning we drove back to Marib so I could get on the bus to Sana’a. Muhammad was stopping at every checkpoint to chat with his army buddies and handing out cigarettes through the passenger window. I kept my head down the whole time to avoid attention. He was also picking up people left and right until the back of the pickup was packed with armed men. I was getting pretty nervous until we got to Marib and all the hitchhikers jumped off the truck. Sticking to the strict code of conduct, no one asked Muhammad about me. They probably just assumed I was his sister or wife. I wanted to see Bilqis’ temple again but decided against it since it might attract unwanted attention given the total lack of tourists these days. The bus ride back to Sana’a was uneventful and I had a nice chat with a high school teacher about the sad state of education in Marib province and Yemen as a whole.
Sana’a was in darkness when I got back. Some disgruntled tribesmen in Marib have attacked the power line yet again!
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