sai: 40 Q 0527074, 2589180

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

There might only be five houses in Sai, but they all have electricity, water and even a GSM transmitter flung up on a nearby hill. Khalah bin Mattar al Wehi is 53 and has retired from the navy to his home of 50 years. “My family is originally from Musanna, 8km west of Rustaq. I was just a little boy when my father moved here.” Khalah is in a faded orange t-shirt and baggy blue shorts, and he wants two things. “Even with this GSM transmitter on the hill the signal is very weak,” he says, before pointing to the quarter kilometre of smooth earthen track that leads to the Rustaq-Ibri highway, shouting distance away. “And we want a concrete road. We’d been to the ministry a couple of months ago and they promised us one. The government owns the land here – we want them to give us a bit to build a mosque on.”

Such demands might take a while to be fulfilled, because Sai is pretty well off compared to a lot of other anonymous settlements that you would normally never ever stop at unless your car broke down on the highway.

Marhoun Ali as Suleimani, 21, walks us five minutes into the wadi where a clear pool of water called al Habb is fed somewhere through the crack in the rocks. “This spring is very special – we believe that people can cure their skin ailments by bathing in it.” Marhoun is studying Arabic at Dubai College, has interned at al Bayan newspaper in the Emirates and hopes to find work in the media there. “We put together RO2,000 for a pipe and generator, but now the government supplies us three times a week.”

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