samiya: 40 Q 0521953, 2593824

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

Hamdan bin Salim bin Rashid al Hathamy doesn’t know how old he is. “Perhaps 80 or 90,” he shouts, half deaf, seven kilometres into a dead-end wadi he has been living in for almost a half century. There is nothing here, not even water, just more goats and sheep than you can count, two concrete rooms, a few tents of discarded plastic sheets and a very old man and his family.

“We are from Jebel Shams,” he yells into the wind, and all the lambs prick their ears. “We were shawawi, and spent the summer up on the top of the jebel, when the weather was good. When it got too cold, we’d go down the slopes in winter. I have seen many sheikhs after we got here. The first was Nasser bin Rashid al Ghafari, and then came his son Mohammed, in turn succeeded by Khalid bin Saif bin Nasser al Ghafari.”

Hamdan pauses for breath, in the dull overcast light of a winter morning. A young woman peeks out from behind the netted window. Two ewes trot over the next stone-strewn mound, bleating, and are immediately mobbed by black and white lambs. Nothing has changed in this wadi for the past 50 years – even the four-wheel drive that is a later edition is of ancient origin.

Hamdan coughs into his dishdasha. “We never had any water here, we’d have to carry the goatskins back home, and return for more when they ran dry. We’d manage to live three days from just one skin – covering our drinking, washing before praying and animals.” You can still see the goatskin hanging from a tent beam, although they do have other more modern containers. The Hathamys have to drive to the mouth of the wadi where you will find a couple of houses, and farms, where wells were dug decades after Hamdan got here. “Even this track is a big problem – it washes away every time the rains come and the wadi floods. We want a road.”

“I may not know how many years old I am, but I have experienced a lot in life. Our habits have changed – we were happy with little things in the past. I prefer the old days – they were so much simpler. The increase in population is a problem.” Hamdan isn’t above blame – he fathered three sons and three daughters. Partly because of the lack of possibility in the wadi, four offspring remain unmarried. One grandson was on the mats, doing sums as the goats nibbled nearby. Majid is around 20 and in Gulf College in Muscat, and smiles sheepishly as his grandfather launches into another paragraph of raised voice.”

“I have no salary, and I have given everything I had to my sons when they got married. Now I have only these animals as my sole income. The goats used to be easy to keep in the old days, when there was good grazing. Now, I have to buy them fodder from Rustaq.”

It seems a lot better at the mouth of Wadi Samiya, where the wells are dug and the people live close to the Rustaq-Ibri highway. You will find Walid bin Hamed bin Said al Hathami here, one of just 12 people who make their home here, spread over three houses and a well that they dug more than 30 years ago. Walid is in high school, and dreams of finishing university and getting a job with the government.

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