Azan Insult
This is from last week’s Arab Times, one of those things I clip because they are interesting and then sometimes I forget. My Kuwait readers will wonder why I am even bothering, maybe this isn’t so interesting, but to me, it is one of those things that illustrate a difference in how we think.
Man Insulted in Azan Row:
Director of an unidentified department of the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs has filed a complaint with the Andalus Police Station accusing a Kuwaiti man of humiliating him and threatening to cause him harm, reports Al-Rai daily.
A knowledgeable sourse said the man works as a muezzin at a mosque in Sulaibikhyat and the suspect accused him of calling the faithful for prayers earlier than the time assigned by the ministry.
The source added residents of the area had sent letters of complaints to the ministry stressing the muezzin should abide by prayer timings issued by the ministry.
A source added the man is a political activist and has a file at State Security.
The source also said the man visited the director and humiliated him in a very negative manner. The man reportedly called the official on the phone and called him a donkey and threatened to cause him harm.
Here’s what I love – in Kuwait, the muezzins are LIVE! In every other Islamic country in which I have lived, it has been recordings, but here, they are LIVE! One woman told me that their muezzin was fired because at the end of the call to prayer, music started playing, and everyone knew he had left a recording.
Each muezzin starts the call to prayer at a slightly different time, so you hear a chorus of individual voices raising their voices to say “God is great” and to call the people to prayer, a sound as beautiful as the church bells of western countries, which fulfill a similar function. You can hear the sound of the call to prayer here:
And in how many countries would exact time be an issue when calling people to prayer? Life is sweet, living in a country where time to pray is an important issue.
And here is what I find intriguing – in the west, when we call someone a donkey, it is a very mild insult. I have heard that here, being called a donkey is like one of the very worst things you can call a person. Please, local friends, can you tell me why donkey would be such a bad insult?
Qatari Cat Plays With Adventure Man
When we got the Qatteri Cat, he was about 8 months old, a gangly adolescent. I had been looking at another cat, but the vet showed me this one and said “he looks like you.” It made me laugh, and I took the cat.
He had been adopted by a family where the man in the house really liked him, but his wife and her mother did NOT like him. The Qateri Cat cringed every time I came near, he would hunker down on the floor, his ears would flatten and he would growl.
The minute Adventure Man walked in the door, the Qatari Cat fell in love. He followed AM around the house, rubbing on his legs, looking at him adoringly. As he calmed down and I would pet him, he would allow me 30 seconds and then he would bite me – hard, hard enough to draw blood.
We ran into his former owners at an art exhibit. “Is he still such a naughty boy?” the M-I-L asked us. “Oh no!” we lied, “He is NEVER naughty.”
Qatari Cat would occasionally get out of the house, and I would have to try to find him. All I had to do was to wait a few hours, and then I would hear his plaintive wailing from behind somebody’s wall, and I would have to go knock on the door and ask if I could get my cat. I learned to take his cat cage with me, after being seriously scratched a couple times because he was tired and scared and his natural instincts came into play. I still have scars to prove it.
Slowly, slowly, he came to trust me. Even when he bit and scratched, I never hit him, never kicked him, I would just pick him up and put him in a bathroom for ten minutes or so – or until I got over being angry with him. His little brain couldn’t remember three minutes later why he was in “Time out”, but sometimes I had to keep him there for his own protection!
He still bites when he is scared. He was born on the street, and those instincts will always be with him. I keep him away from little children and people who would move too fast in his direction. For the most part, he is tamed. He hasn’t bitten me for months, and even then, even as he was biting me, hard, he remembered, and let me go without a fight. He even had the decency to look a little ashamed.
Why am I telling you all this? With Adventure Man, he is a totally different cat. He has NEVER bitten Adventure Man. Adventure Man comes home from work and the QC is waiting in the hallway for him. He slings QC over his shoulder and takes him on a walk around our home, then he slings him down on the carpet and give him a big rub on his tummy. The QC never bites, never scratches, just goes belly up and lets his “dad” rough him up. As soon as AM lets go, he does this amazing flip to get back on his feet and he runs away just a little, looking back and saying “C’mon, aren’t you gonna chase me?” and I hear the two of them roaring off down the hallway.
I think the QC thinks AM is another cat, a really fun cat. And I think he thinks I am his mom. Definitely he thinks I am his feeder, waterer and warm spot. But I will never hold the same place in his adoring little heart that Adventure Man holds:
PS Adventure Man didn’t like the photo I posted last week called DementoCat. He said it made the QC look dead, and it hurt his heart to see it. I am sorry, Advenure Man. 🙂
I Will Never Understand You
When I came online this morning, I got a big shock. Yesterday, I had the highest reader count ever in the history of the blog. I can usually count on Saturdays being a very low day for readership, and Sundays are usually a little better, so I am totally at a loss as to why yesterday would have attracted so many readers.
I posted book reviews. You never read my book reviews! I do it for the few readers out there like me, addicted to really good books, really good authors, and then we talk about books BEHIND YOUR BACK! You never even see the really good book discussions, or us getting together and furtively exchanging our books!
The last time I had so many readers was back in December, when I posted Mom’s Fruit Cake and the Divinity Candy recipes. Overall, that Divinity Candy keeps going and going. Go figure! I had only been blogging 3 months at the time, and oh, what a thrill it was to see that spike for December, but it left me desolate as your attentions shifted elsewhere and I couldn’t figure out how to get you back.
But Go Figure is my constant refrain. You are a fickle audience. I can’t help but be intrigued. I will never know what you are thinking; maybe 1% of my daily visitors comment. The rest of you drop in and snorkel around a little, and then leave, a swirl trailing behind you but no tangible evidence of your visit, other than the little tick in the stats that show you were here.
All I can deduce is that the best bet for blogging is to be content to start small and build slowly. Don’t worry about statistics. (And don’t worry if you ARE worried about statistics, as you can tell from the content of this post, we all are aware of our statistics, that was a purely hypocritical word of advice on my part.)
Honestly, I have come to the conclusion that my very safest bet is to blog for myself, and that is what I do. I blog about what catches my eye, what strikes my funny bone, what grabs my intellect, what inflames my heart, and I blog about the trivialities of my daily life. I love your visits, and I love hearing your point of view, even if it doesn’t agree with my own. I ask only that you watch your language, as my Mother reads this blog, and that while you are passionate, you steer clear of hate language toward any race, gender or nationality. Bureaucracy is fair game.
I am happy you came by, sorry if I was sleeping!
Donna Leon: Death in a Strange Country
Recently I discovered, to my disgust, that I have purchased two Donna Leon books I have already read. I bought them from England, and now they have been published in the US under different titles. Aaaarrrgh! I hate it when that happens.
I have a good friend I want to pass these books along to, an amazing woman who has no idea how amazing she is. When she talks about her early years as a private detective, she refers to herself, with a perfectly straight face, as a “Dickless Dick.”
After I read this book, I passed it along to Adventure Man, who loved it. He aloud to me from it late at night, and we both laughed. Here is the the excerpt he liked, he could identify with it:
In their bedroom, he saw that she had placed a long red dress across the bed. He didn’t remember the dress, but he seldom did remember them and he thought it best not to mention it. If it turned out to be a new dress and he remarked on it, he would sound like he thought she was buying too many clothes, and if it was something she had worn before, he would sound like he paid no attention to her and hadn’t bothered to notice it before. He sighed at the eternal inequality of marriage, opened the closed, and decided that the grey suit would be better.
He, of course, is Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon’s chief investigator, consumately Venetian, very married, and fighting a lonely battle against the louche corruption of the Italian bureaucracy.
And this book is about the death of an American military man in Venice, except that of course, it turns out to be about something much much bigger. Leon has several axes grinding in this one, but the biggest is illegal dumping, and the arrogance of countries who dump their toxic wastes on smaller countries, eyes wide open, knowing full well that horrorific consequences may result – and not caring.
My favorite part is when Commissario Brunetti visits the American base outside of Venice for the first time:
He left the place and went to stand outside, content to get a sense of the post while waiting for his driver to return. He sat on a bench in front of the shops and watched the people walking past.
A few glanced at him as he sat there, dressed in suit and tie and clearly out of place among them. Many of the people who walked past him, men and women alike, wore uniform. Most of the others wore shorts and tennis shoes, and many of the women, too often those who shouldn’t have, wore halter tops. They appeared to be dressed either for war or for the beach. Many of the men were fit and powerful; many of the women were enormously, terrifyingly fat.
Cars drove by slowly, their drivers searching for parking spaces: big cars, Japanese cars, cars with that same AFI number plate. Most had the windows raised, while from the air-conditioned interiors blared rock music in varying degrees of loudness.
They strolled by, amiable and friendly, greeting one another and exchanging pleasant words, thoroughly at home in their little American village here in Italy.
Donna Leon has a sharp eye for detail, doesn’t she? Don’t you feel like you were sitting there on the bench with Commissario Brunetti, seeing through his eyes?
Reading Donna Leon transports you to another world, Venice, and the joy of reading has less to do with solving the crime than being able, for a short time, to stop and drink coffee while tracking down a criminal, eating a meal or two with Brunetti and his family, experiencing the frustrations of the Venetian bureaucracy in all its radiant corruption, walking along the canals so early in the morning that the delivery men haven’t even begun yet making their deliveries . . .
And yet the problems addressed in the Leon books are part of a greater world picture, and Leon has an enormous capability to draw blurry lines with increasing clarity as we watch how international corruption works hand in hand blindly taking profits while dribble by dribble degrading the world for future inhabitants.
Ramadan Supplies
Oh! It’s a perfect day to be out shopping. Stores are putting out all the special Ramadan things – and now is the time you can find all the things that have been missing all summer. It’s a lush, wealthy time, anticipating the joys of the coming month of Ramadan.
And look what I found! Straight from the Street of Lanterns?
No! Made in China!
Kuwait For Kuwaitis
Today, two Indian gentlemen passed me on the Gulf Road and ended up in front of me at the next stoplight. They gave me a good laugh:
Rape in Kuwait (2)
There seem to be some misconceptions running around about rape in Kuwait. One misconception is that Kuwaitis commit a lot of rape. If you read the newspapers, however, you will discover that a lot of the rapes committed are nationality on nationality, for example, one senior Phillipina lady will befriend an unhappy domestic worker, will “help” her get away, and the domestic finds herself abducted, gang raped and in sexual slavery. That’s one common story.
Domestics of all nationalities are abducted off the streets, taken to apartments or villas, raped repeatedly by two or more men, and then dropped off on the street (or dropped off a balcony). People don’t seem to be very concerned about domestic servants being people here, having the right NOT to be raped, it sort of seems like business as usual, no matter who is raped or doing the raping. I have yet to read of one single case being prosecuted or sentenced in the Kuwait newspapers, but maybe I missed a day or two.
Another common story is Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani on Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani, and that can be men abducting/raping men, or men abducting/raping women. Some of these women are also recruited into prostitution, and are found when the police raid the dens of iniquity, catching the men and men or men and women in “uncompromising” positions, or, even better – RED HANDED!
There is a whole catagory of abductions – Kuwaiti, Bedoun or other Gulf or Arab nationality where a man or woman, or men or women, is/are abducted and taken to camps in the desert and raped multiple times. Sometimes they are left naked by the side of the road. Sometimes their dead bodies are found, and occasionally enough clues to guess at the identity of the abductors/rapists.
Then there are the men that rape children. It can be within a family. It can be within a building. It can be within a neighborhood. Many times the child knows the rapist, and is told that if they say anything, the rapist will kill or harm the child’s parents. There was an epidemic of child rape in Hawali, and although the man arrested cries “I didn’t do it!” the fact is that the epidemic of rape in Hawali has stopped. That doesn’t mean that children aren’t being raped, it just means that the Hawali Monster seems to be off the streets of Hawali.
Objectively, if there can be said to be a “good” thing about rape in Kuwait, it is that so few of them are fatal.
What can, accurately, be said about Kuwait is that there seems to be a lot of rape. If you think I exaggerate, I challenge you to read the Kuwait papers every day for a month.
When there is a lot of rape, it means there is a social, legal and political climate that tolerates rape. It means that rape cases are not handled with a lot of attention to gathering evidence. It means that men and women are not encouraged to persue rape charges. It means that the police are not very interested in investigating accusations of rape. It means that the legal system is not very interested in prosecuting rape. It means that the rape victims are not valued highly enough to deserve not to be raped.
Rape happens everywhere. Rape happens in wars, rape happens on the streets. In most places, we are taught, rape isn’t about sex as much as it is about power. Here, in Kuwait, I am inclined to think it may be a little bit of both.
I’ve worked with rape victims in several different locations. Working with the victims gives you so much admiration for women, what they endure, what they survive, and their deeply ingrained sense of priorities and self. You’d think the experience would be devastating, but the women who have experienced rape and overcome it have been anything but devastated – many of them become truly awesome individuals, literally, awe-inspiring. They refuse to be victims. They carry on with their lives. They accomplish. They let their anger fuel and energize them to become incredibly accomplished individuals. It isn’t surprising – wealth and accomplishment also give you additional protection against it ever happening again.
There is another tragedy in Kuwait – male rapes. When men rape another men, like in prison, it is very much a power thing. Me big – you little. Me do what I want with you. Most of the victims I have met, or heard about are young teens. Being raped by a bigger, older male really skews their lives. They begin to question what it was about themself that got them raped, they question whether maybe they are gay and don’t know it, they ask, over and over – Why ME? Young men who were good at school start getting bad grades, they can’t concentrate, they often turn to drugs.
Being forced to have sex, whether you are man, woman, or child, is wrong. And doing nothing to stop this epidemic is also wrong. To look the other way is wrong. To say it isn’t happening is wrong. To become so used to it that your heart becomes calloused is just plain wrong.
I know most of the time my blog is a nice place to visit, and these entries make you uncomfortable. I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable. I myself am so uncomfortable that, as Martin Luther said (only he said it in German) “I cannot other. God help me.”
One Year Today
(Photo above from a very cool website called Coolest Birthday Cakes.Com. Oops, no, it is not the 50th anniversary of this blog, only the 1st, but I love the cake!)
One year ago today, I gathered up every fragment of courage I could find and joined the blogging world. You can’t imagine how nervous I was. I had a lot to learn about WordPress to start, it was a steep learning curve.
I had done my homework. When moving to Kuwait, I discovered the information-rich world of blogs, and while trying to figure out what life in Kuwait might be like, also discovered several women bloggers I really liked: The Queen of Kuwaiti Bloggers Jewaira, a highly literate and often cleverly funny Alflaila / Zin / 1001 Nights, and a bravly funny MiYaFuSHi. Ladies, what I liked the very best about your blogs was that when I would go to the comments sections, I would learn all kinds of things, things I didn’t even know I didn’t know!
And the men – Don Veto(he has a sharp eye for inconsistencies), Hilaliya a Third Culture Kid with an entertainment/political/social issues blog, Skunk who talks about money and culture with irreverance and wit and enormous insight, and of course Purg whom I found scarily intimidating until I found out he was a sweetie-pie. There was also Gastronomica / the Equalizer who used to write lyrical and beautiful posts, but who opened his own restaurant and doesn’t seem to blog anymore.
Thank you all – you inspired me and helped me have the courage to jump in.
Zin, you most of all. I remember a post where you asked if you should even continue, that you knew there were a lot of viewers, but few responses, and boom! you got all kinds of responses! When you blog, you kind of put yourself out there, and that can be a little scary. You were an inspiration to me.
Thank you all, old friends and new, for making me so welcome. One year later, I feel like I have a whole new world of virtual friends. 🙂
When I started blogging, my niece, Little Diamond, was a frequent visitor, and just one short month later, she also started blogging. Then my nephew Earthling blogged for a while on the Google campus and the food there. My sister, Sparkle also blogs sporadically. And, just so you know, my Mom reads the blog, so I am very careful about language!
I hope you are having as much fun with Here, There and Everywhere as I am. I love the times you jump in and give me the information I need to answer those useless questions that buzz around in my head, like with the Yemeni Star. Now I know something new! I love it!
The only bad surprises I have had were the occasional nasty comment and the garbage bins full of spam. I have to go through the spam, and I try to do it quickly, to make sure good comments don’t get lost, but oh, what horrid stuff there is out there, and I am offended they would want to put it on MY blog. It makes my skin crawl!
As for the occasional nasty or aggressive comment – mostly, I let them stand. I figure it tells you more about the mentality of the commenter than anything about my blog. Some people just carry a lot of baggage, more to be pitied than condemned.
Thank you. My time here in Kuwait is so much richer for knowing you through your blogs, and for the good and bad times we share.
Yemeni Star
I give up.
I am throwing myself on your mercy.
A week ago, Adventure Man heard a morning radio show on 99.7, “Superstation”, in which a meteorologist at the Kuwait Airport mentioned a particular star, which when it appears above the horizon in Kuwait, the ancient inhabitants would know that cooler temperatures were on the way.
Adventure Man is sure he called it The Yemeni Star, because it appeared over the horizon in the general direction of Yemen.
I’ve google’d it to death and can’t find anything. I called in the superstar Googler, Little Diamond and even she had to admit defeat.
Kuwaiti friends and bloggers – please, ask your elders if they know of the Yemeni Star. I think the weatherman said it was the nomadic peoples who would watch for it. I am guessing that in Kuwait, there are few nomads left, but a great number of descendants of nomadic peoples. Or, if you have an astronomer, or weather person in your family, could you ask them?
I don’t know why it matters to me, but it does.
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