This week brings cooler weather and fall winds. Unfortunately all that moving air stirs up the sand until it looks like our island is covered in a blanket of fog — until I walk outside and have to brush the dust off of my iPhone screen every 5 seconds and wear sunglasses well after dark.
Right now I am walking the track at the boys’ football practice, pushing my way though the haze. It’s only 5:30 but it’s been nighttime-dark since 5:00 because we live on Saudi time. Really. According to our place in the world, we should be an hour ahead like Oman and UAE. When we traveled to Crete we flew
4 hours and were still in the same time zone. We were eating dinner at 7:30 because it was staying light until then. Our sun sets here at 4:30pm.
In October. It’s pretty funny to think that we sit in the dark so the Saudis don’t have to change their clocks when they come across the bridge to play. On the flip side the sun comes up at crazy early O’clock in the morning, but that doesn’t help me. Thank God for blackout shades.
As I walk I can hear four or five different calls to prayer all overlapping each other in an a cappella chorus. It’s something I’ll miss when we leave the Middle East. The singing is haunting, reverent, and beautiful all at the same time. I’ve become so used to it as a background sound in daily life that I might only notice it once or twice out of the five times a day. It’s a special call tonight because we are in the period of Ashura, a time when the majority of Bahrainis mourn and remember their martyr, Hussain.
Now there is sand in my lipgloss and I feel the grit as I purse my lips together, but it’s a small price to pay to be standing where I am. I still wonder at the life I lead and how I got here. At the pieces that fell into place to point us toward Egypt and the revolution that changed the course of our history along with the rest of the Arab world. As I walk I wonder where we’ll go next? Josh is in Abu Dhabi this week living the dream, working with the Emirati military. It’s near the top of places he would like to live in the world. Maybe we could do a trifecta in the Gulf: Oman, Bahrain, and finish it off in UAE?
Inshallah. God knows I couldn’t have planned it up until now. I can’t even imagine what is coming next.