the rahbis of majamma

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

October 2007

Many wadis come together here, and the Rahbi goatherd built his shack where they met, almost half a century ago. He called his home Al Majamma, the confluence of things. He would eke out a living with his goats and donkeys, scratching a life through the thorn and the rock. His house was scraps of branches, perhaps the shelter of the mountains. In summer, when the water dried up, he would move 12km up-wadi with his herd, to Wadi Slooh and its natural spring.

Life was simple: you had little choice except to follow the water table as it flowed down with the rains or dried up in the summer. The land was too harsh for farming and the sea too far away, so life was governed by what the goats could eat, where they could drink, and how much meat and milk they could provide. Generations for thousands of years had repeated the same cycle, only the names they gave places had changed.

But something must have stirred in this confluence of wadis, where the winds blow in and out of innumerable little tributaries, down the mountain slopes, across Slooh, in from what is now al Amerat, past Wadi Tayyin. The son of the original founder, himself a father in the 1970s, learnt of the existence of schools and the importance of education. And so he took his three sons and one nephew, installed them in a tent at Al Hajar, 18km away, the town with a school. The four boys would cook there, wash their clothes, and educate themselves over the next six years. The father would bring them provisions, and they’d return home every month or two by donkey.

And this is how Abdullah bin Salim bin Saif al Rahbi got his education. This got him into the government office where he asked for a job and has kept it ever since. “The old days were better,” he says now, sitting on a mat in his gravel courtyard. “We didn’t have the Internet or satellite television. We didn’t waste time. We came home and studied instead. Of course we’re comfortable today, but this isn’t good for studies. Now, our children disappear with books in their hands for school, but the principal later complains that he doesn’t see them for days on end.”

But Abdullah is only joking. His children are picked up in the school bus on a brand new road, driven to Madinat al Nahda, ten minutes away. Two years ago, before the present blacktop existed, it had taken us an hour of excruciating driving through wadis of loose gravel to get to this point. One felt like adventurers then – now even a tricycle can make it.

A couple of generations after the first Rahbis in Majamma followed the water to Slooh, that water is still central to the community, except it is now being delivered here by the government, on tanker every day. The Rahbis have grown into a family of almost 30, living in a few houses, and they have air conditioning. But even the freshly poured concrete and dusty cars parked outside do little to mask the desperation of a place that hangs by the thread of its dead end road.

That road, like Majamma itself, seems to be in limbo, stuck between the rock and a hard place. We had driven past the houses two years ago, making our way down the broad dirt road packed into submission. It had unravelled itself down the wadi and then up the mountain in a series of hairpin turns. 17km later we were down the slope, where the road ended with a blank wall of rock and an industrial road construction digger chiselling away. This road would lead to Wadi Tayyin, and there was another crew on the other end making their way towards us. Or so we were told.

Today, we find the diggers barely a few bends after we had seen them, with more blank wall in front. There are no villages along the way – just gloriously open wadi where you can run with as much abandon as an Al Rahbi in the rainy season. “This road is no good for us,” said Abdullah. “We don’t need it to go to Tayyin, and it only brings accidents to our doorstep. The work has been stalled since the last rains, when they washed away all progress. And there is a better way to get to Tayyin: via Wadi Kahzah, by foot or on donkey. They should have built the road through there.”

They didn’t, and even though this one seems stalled with a variety of problems, it still runs long enough into unexplored and uninhabited territory to make it an extremely attractive drive from Muscat. The road is easy, although you will need a 4WD. The tougher bits come later as you move up the mountain, but if you’ve ever stepped off the tarmac it’s child’s play. And the best part is the summit, where you can park your car on the culvert and walk up the rocks to the edge. It is here that you can look down through the cracks of the mountain and down the wadi, just as the Al Rahbis had done as they made their way here, from Bidbid and Wadi Tayyin. The temperature drops into the low 30s, the wind picks up and you have the wadi spread out all for yourself, with no one in sight. And the seven houses at the mouth of the wadi, beyond the furthest point you can see, will welcome you with water and food if you stop long enough. This is the promise of the Al Rahbis.

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