Opposite World
I need to write this post while I am freshly back home, because it wears off, you forget the sharpness of the differences . . .
You have to think about how you will manage your bags when you get here, because there will be no willing men with carts to do it for you.
Getting on the highway . . . people are so polite. People drive exactly at the speed limit, or maybe up to 4 miles over. If you put on your turn signal, they slow down and allow you to enter their lane. No one weaves back and forth, no one gets on your tail and insists you get out of their way. Traffic flows smoothly, predictably. People are wearing seat belts; their babies are in baby seats and their children are buckled in the back seat. It’s five lanes, and it’s all very tame. Our testosterone drivers in Kuwait would find it very very dull. I didn’t see a single accident, or single wrecked car all the way home, about twenty miles.
At the grocery stores, there are places for inviduals to put their grocery carts back – and they really do. There are also enough parking places. The cashiers also put the groceries in a bag for you, but there is no one who carries them out to your car.
The streets are immaculate – not because we have hoards of people to pick them up, but because people here have a horror of littering – and huge fines that discourage the rare few who would toss a kleenex out a window.
Service providers are more helpful, and less servile. There is a sense of interchangeable rolls – the guy behind the counter at Starbucks might also be a full time IT student at the local university, just piling up a few barista bucks to pay his way through school. (There is always a tip jar in every Starbucks – Have you ever noticed there are no tip jars at the Starbucks in Kuwait?) The gal behind the counter at the grocery store might live just up the street from you. The guy at the Half Price book store has kids at the same school where your child goes to school. It’s different when all the workers are part of the same community.
The health care worker living with my parents to take care of my father is treated like family. He’s from Ghana. I watch him watch us as we gather. I imagine some of it is very familiar to him – the way women communicate when family gathers, laughter, tears, family business, making plans and arrangements. And I imagine some of it is very . . . foreign. I would love to read HIS blog!
There are seasons here. You need to have socks with you to keep your feet warm, and closed-toed shoes. There are trees that were green two months ago, and are now a flaming red, or orange, or yellow. I need a sweater outside, over a shirt. It’s cool, but not yet really cold.
Part of the transportation system here is ferry boats. People take them to get to work. My home town is, like Kuwait City, on the beach, but the water is not jade green, but a deeper, colder blue.
We Make a Difference: Incremental Change
Here is what the experts have told us:
Germany and France can never live in peace with one another.
Northern and Southern Ireland can never live in peace.
Germany reunite? Unthinkable. They are too far apart.
Black and white will never be able to live together in South Africa.
The Serbians and the Moslem Croatians will never find a way to live in peace.
The European Union will never work.
The Soviet Union is impregnable.
Kuwaiti women will never get the vote.
There will never be peace in Lebanon.
These were not lies. The experts who told us these things were wise people, making their best guesses. When experts say things, we tend to believe them.
And here is what I saw – before the fall of the Soviet Union, things didn’t work. Toilet paper was rationed. There were no lightbulbs in the lamps. There were no hangers on hotel closets. In the market was only cabbage, sausage and tuna fish. The people were told that the West was failing, and that the supermarkets and stores were fakes, “Potemkin” villages, special effects to fool good Communists in a desperate attempt to make them think Democracy was working. But in every hotel room, when you checked in, the TV was already on – the chambermaids watched CNN, and then went home and told their families what was REALLY going on in the world.
And word of mouth, the truth spread.
There are some wonderful things happening in the world, technologies that could be used for good or for evil.
Cameras. Video cameras. Cell phones. Cell phones with cameras and videos. Google Earth. The Internet. It’s hard to cover up the truth when people can freely share information.
With these tools, we can hold ourselves, our leaders and our society accountable. Keep your cameras handy. Blog. Share your thoughts, your suspicions. Hold your leaders accountable for their actions. Read the news, and read the blogs from other countries. Refuse to believe there is no hope in appearantly hopeless situations, no matter what the “experts” tell us.
Here is what some experts are telling us today:
There is an imminent clash of cultures between East and West.
The Palestinians will never live in peace with the Israelis.
We can’t do anything about global warming / There is no global warming
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
There are small things we can do, right now, to make incremental changes. Pick up a piece of litter. Buckle your seat belt, and buckle up your children. Give an enemy the benefit of the doubt. Smile at your neighbor, and greet them. Stop and help that poor man broken down by the side of the road. Feed a stray cat. Donate clothing to the poor. Do one small thing, every day. Hold ourselves accountable in small ways, and the overall effect tilts the balance in larger ways.
Dharfur: We can No Longer Pretend We Don’t Know
Today, in his blog, Ogle Earth, which discusses new developments with Google Earth, Stefan Geens says the following about the new hi-res maps of the Sudan made public today in Google Earth:
Those circles aren’t animal pens. They’re burned-down gottias, circular mud huts that had straw roofs, and they’re what’s left of Dalia, a village in Sudan’s Darfur region, one of hundreds of villages that have been destroyed by the Janjaweed in a program of depopulation that has killed perhaps 400,000 civilians since 2003.
Today, Google added recent high resolution imagery of Darfur to Google Earth, taken by DigitalGlobe in January-March 2006. It serves as an unequivocal indictment of the Janjaweed, and of the Sudanese government whose implicit support it has enjoyed, because in these new images each and every burned-out gottia is visible. This is the kind of evidence that puts paid to the claims still coming out of Khartoum that the ethnic cleansing is not widespead, and that accusations of genocide are a mere pretext to wrest sovereignty away from Sudan with the deployment of UN peacekeepers.
Read the blog entry for yourself here.
He goes on to say “we can no longer pretend we don’t know.”
He’s right. It’s there, in high resolution, for all to see.
Props to the hard working young man at Google Earth who has been slaving to get all the detailed maps together. It’s a fine mission, ibn uckti, and we are all so proud of you and the hours you put in to make this possible.
Mining the Kuwait Times: 4 October 2006
Ya gotta love the Kuwait Times. I admire their spirit so much, I forgive their weak editing and poor grammar.
Six KAC Officials Quit
Six officials were transferred from their posts by the operations manager at Kuwait Airways, so they submitted their resignations, which were accepted without any investigation, so says the Kuwaiti Times (and also the Arab Times). Appearantly, they were transferred because they refused to recommend for promotion two unqualified candidates for captain, and were horrified to discover that these assistant pilots were promoted – verbally – to full airplane captain flying A310 aircraft in spite of most of the training officers having (previously) rejected this decision.
(This is actually a compilation from both Arab Times and Kuwaiti Times. They seem to be saying these six men resigned because unqualified pilots will be flying planes they are not qualified to fly, and the Director of Operations and his deputy know this and promoted them anyway. Arab Times adds that the director and his deputy are also jeopardizing KAC’s reputation in the international community when they refuse to investigate technical flaws found recently in some KAC aircraft. )
Think I’ll pass flying Kuwait Air for a while . . . .
Driving Sheepish
I actually speak English fairly well, and I don’t have a clue what “driving sheepish” is. The article states:
Policemen suspected a motorist driving sheepishly in Kabd. They ordered the Kuwaiti to stop his car and found a hunting rifle and a number of drug tablets inside. Police registered a case and referred the man to authorities.
Non-Halal Meat
“While residents of Kuwait are still reeling from shock, where cases of contaminated fish imported from Iran were allowed in by the municipality’s food imports division, a new scandal has just appeared on the horizon, reported Al-Seyassahl. A report indicates that one of the officials in the same department tried to cover up a crime he was involved in, by permitting some local foodstuff companies to import frozen meat without being slaughtered in accordance to the Islamic law. They presumed they could get away with the deceit, as, since no one was aware of the fact, could get away with murder.”
This is buried way down near the bottom of page 4. In most countries, it would be at the top of the first page, and heads would roll.
And last, but not least, to the tune of “La Vie en Rose” . . . French Smokers Fume as Public Ban Looms
My husband and I hate breathing second hand smoke so much that we will request another table in a restaurant if someone should be so gauche as to light up near us, disregarding the no-smoking signs in a restaurant, or pay our bill and go. It just isn’t worth it, not for our health, not for our state-of-mind. And all the same, it is very hard to imagine a France with a smoking ban in public places.
French cigarettes just smell different. French smoke reminds me of early mornings at the flea markets, picking up a cup of cafe au lait and a fresh buttery croissant, watching the early risers through a haze of smoke tossing back shots of Pernod to get their day started. I guess, because they are French, I can forgive them just about anything.
Building New Kuwait
I have a thing about safety. When living in Doha, we watched buildings go up with no discernible regards to building codes. I don’t even know that codes exist, or perhaps they are still being written. At least one construction worker per week “fell to his death”. Workers worked round the clock, trying to get the skyscrapers up before a deadline. People who scouted buildings for major corporations would shake their heads, and turn buildings down with serious foundation problems, girding problems, unbelievable structural faults.
Here in Kuwait, maybe things are minimally better. I had to stop shooting these workers when they started waving and only holding on with one hand. They are standing on a plate of glass being taken up to be installed.
I love these scaffolds. I hope you can see how this one curves in and out as it scales up the building.
The high tech joints close up:
DWP – Driving While Poor – to Be Outlawed in Kuwait
I’ve been watching the blogs, and I haven’t seen a mention of this, not a whisper. In yesterday’s Kuwait Times, front page, is an article about the proposal that all cars over ten years of age be taken off the road. The intention is to reduce congestion on the road.
I am guessing this will not apply to collectors of classic cars. I imagine this is aimed at the poorest of the poor, driving what they can afford, and holding their car together with prayer, shoestrings and chewing gum.
If Kuwait had a good public transportation system, this might be part of a solution. As it is – do you ever see a woman on a public bus? Taxis are available, but expensive. Domestic workers tell us that when they have any control over their transportation, they only go with a driver they know and trust.
I would guess that most of the cars 10 years and older on the road are owned by people who really need them, to get their children to school, to get to work, and to get groceries, etc. Legend has it that all these old cars on the road were brought in after the 1st Gulf War and sold – at great profit – to people who previously had been unable to own cars. For the working poor, cars give a smattering of dignity and luxury to a life full of scraping by and saving as much as you can. Yeh, the POS car puttering along in front of you is inconvenient, but have a heart – people need their cars, unless there is a good, reliable, decent and reasonably priced public transit system available to men and to women, which there is not.
I am also hearing friends telling me about the rules about driver’s licenses being enforced – you must be working, or you must have a college degree . . . but it is only applied to some, not to all. . .
We Need to Talk About Kevin
This morning on BBC, as part of the coverage on the horrorific murders in the peaceful Amish country of Pennsylvania, they interviewed Lionel Shriver, author of the award winning book “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
This is not a recommendation. Shriver’s book, which has won several awards for literary excellence, is not for the faint-hearted. It is a tough, muscular, bleak examination of a similar, fictional incident, written after the Columbine High School massacres.
My best friend and I read this book at the same time – it was a book club selection, paired with another book on a similar theme, “Early Leaving.” We ended up exchanging horrified e-mails every morning, discussing events in the book as if they were a part of our daily life, and speculating on where this was all going.
It is from a mother’s point of view, written to her husband, from whom she is separated after . . . .something . . . We don’t know what that something is. The book unfolds steadily and relentlessly. You want to stop. Truly you do, I am not exaggerating. The book rolls on, so dark, so ominous, you know it is leading up to something truly horrible. You don’t want to look. And you can’t stop reading.
“Why are we reading this???” we asked each other in agony. And we didn’t stop.
“Why did you want me to read this?” your friends will say, as you pass this book along, and then, shell shocked, they will come to you to discuss it. Most often, I didn’t even recommend the book, but friends would overhear other friends talking about it in hushed, horrified voices, and would insist.
The book is the scariest, most real book I have ever read. It hits at the heart of every mother’s secret fears – what if we have done something wrong while raising our child? What if our child turns into a monster? Do we ever really know anyone – our children? Our husbands? Ourselves? We are all so vulnerable in our mothering skills, so quick to blame ourselves for our children’s failings, and this book bravely explores that fear, that vulnerability, without taking the easy way out and giving easy answers.
If you read this book you will find yourselves talking about it months – even years – after you read it. It is a terrifying book.
And after you read it you will understand why my heart is breaking for everyone involved in this unthinkable killing in Pennsylvania. Were I some superstitious person, it would be so easy – it is clearly the devil’s work. I can’t imagine what this man could have been thinking, but he chose his victims – young, innocent girls – with purpose. My heart aches for his wife and children, who will bear this shame for the rest of their lives, and for his parents, who will wonder where they went wrong. My heart breaks especially for the peaceable Amish, revered throughout America for their simplicity and commitment in living their faith, who must try to find a way to forgive the man who took their innocent daughters’ lives.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and more
If you enjoyed the trip through Botswana and would like to read more about Botswana, if you think you might go there someday, or if you think you might never go there – you need to read a wonderful series of books by Alexander McCall Smith.
The first book is The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. You meet the main character, and heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, the founder and owner of the only women’s detective agency in Botswana, and her assistant, Mma Grace Makutsi (who can’t resist a handsome pair of shoes), and the love of her Mma Ramotswe’s life, Mr. J. L. B. Matekone. Mma Ramotswe describes herself as “a woman of traditional build” and drives a very old, small white truck. She has a way of looking at things differently – and she solves her mysteries in ways you or I wouldn’t think of.
The books are short, and deceptively simple. They are “feel good” books, giving you smiles and warming your heart as you read. At the same time, you find yourself thinking back to these books, some of the issues, some of the characters, some of the plots – long after you have finished the book. That’s a sign of a good read!
As different as the thinking and culture is, the books are so full of grace and good humor and tolerance and forgiveness that when the book finishes, you can hardly wait to start the next one. You feel like Precious is your sister, a very smart sister, not without her flaws, but a woman to be respected, a woman of good character and who can make tough decisions.
She also makes mistakes, and has to live with the consequences. You will find the books addictive. The entire series is:
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
Blue Shoes and Happiness
Jeffrey Deaver’s mysteries, on the other hand, are intricate and woven through with arcane information, but you always learn something. He has a series about a quadriplegic, Lincoln Rymes, a criminologist, who solves cases in a very Sherlock Holmes kind of way, by thinking about the evidence and the patterns that it presents. He has a girlfriend, Amelia, who is a policewoman, and works with him on many of the cases. The books that have these two characters are:
The Bone Collector
The Coffin Dancer
The Empty Chair
The Stone Monkey
The Vanished Man
The Twelfth Card
Last – and least, for The Devil Wears Prada crowd is Linda Fairstein, who almost always has a book on the New York Times best seller list. Her heroine is Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor (District Attorney) Alexandra Cooper, whose dad made a fortune on an artificial heart device, allowing her to work in the public service sector and still wear fabulous clothes, have weekly manicures and hair stylings at the best salons and eat at the coolest restaurants in town, and she tells you all about them.
They make great airplane reading for the trendy. The plots are formulaic – an astounding, mysterious crime is committed, Alexandra gets involved, along with her detective side-kicks, the criminal involved somehow focuses on Alexandra and she has to spend the night at her friends’ houses. You don’t read these mysteries for the astounding plots, you read them because they are funny and superficial and a quick read that doesn’t require much thinking.
Happy reading!
The Hemingway Safari: Moremi & Nxabexa (Part 8)
On the next morning’s game run, we see TWO cheetas, and oh my, are they lovely. They pose for us, get up and walk around for us. Well, not really for us, but as if we aren’t there, which is what we really like. We watch as long as we can, and then go watch the hippos.
For lunch, Sky has fixed vegetable crepes. Now is this living, or what? That afternoon, we go to the other side of that rickety bridge to game hunt. As we near the Gametrackers lodge, we see two little boys walking along. They stop Godfrey and ask “have you seen lions?” These guys DON’T want to see lions, they are afraid of the lions. Godfrey assures them we haven’t seen anything between them and the village. They are barefoot, and I hope they can run really fast if they see the lion.
When we return, we have a guest for dinner, Natalie, who is taking over the camp site with her crew on the next day, for another touring group. It is fun having a fresh face, and fresh stories to hear around the dinner table. Sky has fixed roast beef with fried rice, a green salad and pears poached in port!
Early the next morning, Godfrey hands us vouchers for our flights and for our stay at Nxebega Lodge. We drive over the rickety bridge one last time (I’m praying my way over this bridge every time we cross) and leave Moremi, heading toward an air strip. We get there a few minutes early, and watch our little plane arrive, with Collin, our pilot. First he shows us on a map where we will be flying, and goes over a few safety rules. We stow our bags and climb in – it is a Cessna 210 and only seats four comfortably, although two more could crowd into the very back.
Collin is one of the happiest people I have ever met – he has a sandwich and soda which Godfrey has offered him, and then we take off. This is the part of the trip I have dreaded, the flight in the small plane, but Collin McAlister is very confidence inspiring. He is small and lean, and one of those people we have met, one of many, who loves Africa and loves what he is doing. Mostly, his air service is like a taxi, taking eco-tourists from remote airstrip to remote airstrip. I’m not at all worried about his competence, but I DO find myself feeling a little claustrophobic once we get in the air. I shut my eyes, lean back, pray for a calm spirit, and within minutes, all is well.
I really love taking photos of the changing landscape. In a mere 45 minutes, we see Nxebexa spelled out in sandbags, and we land. Pick up our bags, say goodbye to Collin and meet Tsabo, who is waiting with the jeep to pick us up and take us to the lodge. At the lodge, we are met with hot washcloths, a refreshing big glass of guava juice, and a warm welcome.
Steve, the manager, takes us to our cabins, we drop our bags and come back for lunch, which, once again, has been held late for us. At this point, however, we understand how very gracious this is, as lunch is most often served at 11:30 and tea at 3 or 3:30, so when they hold lunch late for us, it puts the staff behind on setting up for tea.
Lunch includes pizza! It is breakfast food and lunch food, and there is both a buffet AND they are asking us what we would like from the kitchen. There is so much good stuff on the buffet, pizza, good vegetables, salads, etc, and we are just fine without special ordering anything.
Every now and then, you can look at life and see a pivotal moment. Our time at Nxebega was pivotal on our journey. Until now, we are just awed by the total experience. At Nxebega, we begin to understand more clearly that something unusual is happening in our lives. That “x” after the “n” in Nxebega is actually not an “x” as we say it in English, but a glottal stop. Most English speakers actually pronounce it Na’ah-beh-ha.
As AH and I sit down to eat our lunch, Anne comes by to chat with us, hospitably, as is the custom in these very small, intimate lodges. We ask her to join us, and have a 15 minute conversation. We learned a lot in that 15 minutes. Anne had a grant to study the impact of high end/eco tourism on the environment, and has been comparing that impact in Nepal, Antarctica and Botswana. You can see by her interactions with Steve, the manager, and the staff, that she has fallen totally in love with Botswana, and she has misgivings about eco-tourism.
Botswana’s focus on high end tourism, protecting the game to attract tourists and providing luxurious surroundings to cosset them as opposed to the Kenya model, going for the groups and high volume travel, is enlightened, but Anne has some reservations about the impact on the Botswanan people. For example, she says, none of the tourists take the time to learn even a few words in Setswana. They address all the help in English.
Just the night before, AH had asked Godfrey for a few words, and, thank God, wrote them down. He has even used them – saying hello and thank you in Setswana, but now I try really hard to learn them, too, and feel really really really bad that I haven’t. Other places we go, we speak the languages, or at least a few phrases. How could we have been so rude? Listening to Anne is fascinating.
Steve, the manager of the lodge joins us too (this is one of the amazing things about the hospitality in Botswana, this kind of personal time and attention) and we learn SO much that puts our experiences in perspective. One of the neatest things of all is that almost every time we ask the question “How did you get here?” we got an answer that knocked our socks off. When I asked Steve how he got there, he laughed and said “I fought and clawed my way to be here!” Later, when we had another opportunity to chat, we learned that he has worked in many places around the world, born in South Africa, but loves Botswana and wants to be a part of it’s future. And this is what we are beginning to learn, from Godfrey and his family, from Steve, and Ashleigh, and Anne, from the kitchen workers, from the game trackers, from the gate keepers and the soldiers – they love Botswana, and they believe in the future of Botswana, and will fight and work their bottoms off to be a part of what they believe, with all their hearts, will be Botswana’s future success.
What we didn’t know, until just minutes later, was that this was Anne’s last day. As we were exploring Nxebega, we heard singing, and when we found it, at the entrance to the lodge, we found Anne being seranaded by the Nxebega staff, singing they love her and will miss her. Anne was sitting on the jeep waiting to take her to the air strip, and sobbing. As we watched the very heartfelt farewells, we believed with all our hearts that Anne is another one of the true believers, who will be back to do her part to ensure that Botswana has a positive future.
Physically, let me tell you what Nxebega looks like. It is stunning. It looks a lot like the Florida Everglades, it is swampy and marshy and full of life. In the middle of a hot and arid country, a river flows great volumes until it just disappears. Most rivers run into the ocean; this river flows into a desert and evaporates.
We were visiting at the end of the rainy season, when it is all greatly green and watery, and it is nothing short of stunningly beautiful. Think palm trees and palmettos, think high grasses and lots and lots of wildlife. Herds of elephants, giraffe, baboons, leopards, cheetahs, lions, and oh, that is just the beginning. The area is really known for it’s beautiful birds!
We have a tent with a wooden floor, covered with coir carpeting. To get into the bath area, which is open to the out of doors, you have to unzip the two zippers of the inner flap and the two zippers of the outer flap. If you don’t keep these zipped, you have flies, or snakes or . . . baboons! You might have something else, thirsty or hungry! So you very conscientiously zip zip zip zip every time you need to go into the toilet/shower/sink/ dressing room area.
They have a generator, like at Savute, it is buried and soundproofed with sandbags, so that you can’t hear it. The generator comes on at 5 in the morning and goes off at 11:00 at night. Your bedside lights are run off batteries, so you CAN use them after 11, but you run down the batteries if you do. Besides, we are so exhausted every day that it is lights out for us by 9:30 or 10:00 every night. We have a terrace on our tent, looking out over the swamp. And a beautiful shower, Nxebega is SO clean. No insects in our tent, not a smudge. Lots of great magazines to read, and materials about Botswana, South Africa and Namibia. There is even a very good gift shop, with lots of fun things.
While we are picking up a few things, we talk more with Steve and Ashleigh about eco-tourism, about the politics in an emerging country, and about the difficulty of maintaining a resource intensive luxurious bush lodge way out in the middle of nowhere. All supplies have to be brought in from Maun, a safari jumping off place. Much of the produce is brought into Maun from South Africa. They never know for sure what they will get or not get, so their menu planning has to be flexible, and they have to be able to fix a lot of things themselves. The employees often come from far away, and they live right at the lodge, and go into Maun, or home only every now and then.
Keeping trained employees is a constant concern. One time, Steve, the manager, was going into Maun, 6 hours away, to pick up supplies and had a breakdown with his truck. As it was just a quick go-into-Maun, pick-things-up-and-come-back kind of trip, he didn’t even grab a water bottle on his way out, and ended up passing out from dehydration along the side of the road. Meanwhile, people in Maun had seen a truck a lot like his, and so everyone thought he really was in Maun. By the time someone passed him on the road and got him to a hospital, he was nearly dead. Now, he never goes anywhere without a water bottle! And a radio!
There is no electric fence around Nxebega to keep the animals out, and we are told that sometimes the game trackers go out looking and looking for leopard, and while they are out, a pair of leopards will walk right through the camp. One day recently, a family of monkeys were playing around the swimming pool and a baby monkey fell in. The monkeys were screeching and screaming and they can’t swim, so the baby was just drowning, and Steve fished it out with the skimmer.
Ashleigh, the assistant manager, says they have to keep the menus flexible. They have a two week revolving menu, but she likes to find new recipes to try so that the staff doesn’t get bored and stale. I have four of her recipes; the food at Nxebega was knock-your-socks off good! We went out for a game drive with our guide, Sami, who looked and sounded like a teacher, if teachers looked like Morgan Freeman (American actor).
We had a great time, At sundown, we stopped for drinks – and to watch the giraffes gracefully crossing the setting sun. Later our guard picks us up for dinner and we gather in the lounge, discussing the day, your game drives, etc. with the other guests.
There is a man from South Africa, with his three very lovely college-age daughters, and a South African couple, us, the Italians . . . and that’s it! Nine people. They make drinks or serve wine, and they have big servers full of hot mixed nuts. Then, dinner is served and all go into the dining room where one long table is set with candles. Dinner the first night was parsnip soup, beef sassouie (sort of stew) polenta, grilled peppers and for dessert, a walnut baklava with ginger ice cream. By the end of the ginger ice cream (total WOW) we just want to fall into our beds.
We are handed our wool covered hot water bottles on our way out. In the middle of the night, I wake up and I need to use the toilet, but I can’t find my flashlight. I’m not desperate, but I am a little scared, and I know that AH will wake up eventually, which he does, and when he goes into the bathroom (zip zip zip zip), I go too, but when he leaves he takes the light with him! I do NOT want to be alone in the bathroom with no light! It is very very dark, there is no ambient light in the sky. So I make him come back in, I finish and then zip zip zip zip, back to bed.
Kuwait Times: Today’s Hero Nameless
The Kuwait Times for today (Sunday 17 September 2006) reveals “the Interior Ministry has decided to recall one of it’s airplanes security men in Jeddah, to question him regarding a complaint by a Member of Parliament.
“A security source informed Al Rai Al Aam that an MP complained against one member of it’s airplane’s security because he ill-treated his brother while entering the plane in Jeddah and (emphasis mine) DID NOT CARE THAT HIS BROTHER IS AN MP.)”
At issue is whether or not a person is immune from having a bag searched if he/she is related to an MP.
The security source is quoted as saying that “even if the MP is exempt from checks due to immunity, it does not apply to his family and relatives. He added the security man’s request was justified, as doing his duty.”
Wooo Hoooo for people with the guts to do the job they were hired to do. Big WOOO HOOOO to the security man who insisted on inspecting, and his superior who backed him up; today’s Hero(es) of the Day. BOOOOOO to those who think they are too important to follow the rules that are in place to protect us all, not just in Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia, but wherever we are in the world.
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