khada: 40 Q 0527468, 2588515

Give me reasons not to be/ oblivion, irony./ Like something in Wisconsin,/ I am all the dirt I know./ Having come to in someone/ else’s boredom, I’m alive—/ and it’s an all-new boredom,/ a boredom of cathedral/ proportion. Empty as folk,/ I just make up, make over/ everything. Lately, I don’t/ even want a piece of me.
Graham Foust, Retarded Artifact

December 2007

Khada is the place everyone talks of in the surrounding villages – the wadi so overflowing with water and trees that it is rumoured the government will spend millions on tourism projects here. That might be a long shot, but the place is certainly a hit with the locals.

But a few metres above the carefree splashing, Abdullah bin Khamis bin Salim al Haramali is digging in the mud, creating channels for the water flowing through the falaj beside. Abdullah is 70, much too old for this, for the RO20 he might scrape by selling his greens. “My sons are all married and far away,” he says, in between shovelling. “They don’t send me any money, so I support my wife through the land. I worked in the Balushi Firqa of the army for 21 years under Sultan Taimur bin Said, but I don’t get a pension.”

So Abdullah has been forgotten by his children and might be much too old to dig, but you wouldn’t catch a hint of bitterness in the voice, not even as he squishes his toes through the mud, hitches up his loincloth and tells you what his life amounts too.

That isn’t much at all. He has a few patches of land, but these terraces are so fertile that they’ve been cut up and distributed among people from here to Khafdi and Rustaq. And no one has a single, large plot that might be in a better position than someone else’s. Instead, they’re all mixed up, so you might have a little sliver here, and another a few terraces down, so no one complains. Abdullah starts to dig on another terrace as we talk. “This one here isn’t even mine, but the owner lives in Rustaq and doesn’t have the time to tend it. So he lets me cultivate it for free, and I can keep the money I earn.” Anything that adds to the RO20 a month is a big help.

The setting is glorious, almost unbelievable, high on this terrace, with green field laid out, mountains straight ahead and rain clouds above. Anything seemed possible, even an old man in his tattered undershirt tilling the land.

“For 20 years, we had no water here, and life was bad. I don’t know how it happened, but the water started flowing through this wadi after Cyclone Gonu. And it hasn’t stopped since. I hope they don’t develop this land, because it is everything we have.”

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