The Sand Sea

One tenet of Habitat for Humanity’s assistance is that the family whose home is being built works alongside the volunteers.  It’s not a handout, it is help.  The reality is that not every member of every family works on the house.  Children go to school, and, at least in the overseas arm that I have worked with, many cultures have a taboo about women doing hard, physical labor, so typically, it is the fathers we see the most.  Last year, in Portugal, the father was the only member of the family I saw more than once in the week.  This year, in Tajikistan, we helped on four neighboring houses – all badly damaged in an earthquake several years ago – and the children did varying degrees of work depending on their age and ability, but all of the fathers worked from the moment we arrived until after we left.  All except one.  

His name was Kemal and he was very kindly, always nearby offering tea or preserved apricots he had grown and overseeing the work.  His boys – aged 8 to 14 – all worked efficiently and constantly, but he never lifted a hand to the mud.  In fact, one hand – his left – never moved from the pocket of his neat windjacket.  Our Habitat host, Farhod, who had never worked in this district before, was quick to question the man’s reasons, and was satisfied with the answer: Kemal had lost his hand and the use of that entire arm to one of the Soviet-era farming combines many years before. 

I could use any of the families as an example, but Kemal’s was the one we worked with the most.  Here is a family whose roof fell about their ears when the earth shook four years ago.  The children go to school when it is possible to do so, but since they grow most of what they eat, and get most of their water from a drainage pool outside of Dusti Settlement (appropriately named) where they live, there is rarely time for lessons.  We were there in Spring when local aquifers are full, but they are far from the mountains and the temperature easily reaches 50 Celsius (120 Farenheit) during the Summer so it is not always so easy.  In any case, the water is never safe to drink.  Habitat provides a Biosand filter, but it takes 25 days to purify water, and that water must be stored carefully.   Clearly, these people live a hard scrabble existence.  A father must have to raise a fist to extract a day’s labor from an eight year old boy, mustn’t he?  Since we were the first Habitat team in the region, and the only other westerners I saw were American soldiers and diplomats in an SUV entering Afghanistan the back way (we were 30 kilometers from the border), it would have been understandable if Kemal’s children were at least shy – even suspicious – around us.  To the contrary, however, they smiled easily and made friends with us fast.  They worked hard without so much as a scowl of complaint and the only thing they begged of us was knowledge.  They spoke no English but my boys traded with them the numbers up to ten and nouns for every item of clothing they wore.  Kemal’s two girls were not allowed to do physical labor, but they brought us tea, lunch, and company.  They adored Nancy, my co-leader and only female in our group, and at one point the three of them conducted an impromptu English course, writing in the dust on a splintered board with their fingers.  She taught them to count to ten and how to say “My name is __________”; they taught her a nursery rhyme that contained her Tajik name (Nisso – and wow I heard that little ditty easily a hundred times in the next few days from that sweet little girl).  All of that was new to them, but then, out of the blue, the elder girl draws (I won’t say “writes”) four letters in the dust: L-O-V-E.  Perfect.  A moment of grace.

I’m beginning this entry a little bass-ackward, though, because that was not our first impression of the country.  We flew into the capital city, Dushanbe, which was built on the old Soviet principle that aesthetics are bourgeois, and practicality is the only thing of value.  Big, square, concrete blocks.  Grey, brown, and drab green are the colors of choice.  We were warned to carry anything of value close to our bodies at all times.  My very first stop when we arrived in our village was to the local “chairman” who welcomed me unsmilingly and promised that he would look after our safety.  The translated words “your cooperation” came up.  Tajikistan gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 along with all the other Eastern block countries, but Russian remains the language of official business, and the place still swarms with police officers wearing epaulets and those huge, military-style caps. 

The chairman was really the only reminder of state-control in the village, but Dushanbe crawled with it, and the airport was the worst.  Our flight left at 5:30 AM, so I didn’t expect crowds, but of course I should have because there are only five flights out of Dushanbe every week: two to Istanbul, two to Moscow, and one to Kabul.  We gathered with a mob of travelers outside the building until they unchained the doors and everyone piled through.  Everyone had their bags scanned electronically twice, and many were questioned closely while their bags were manually searched; all this before we ever reached the ticket counter.  From the start, it was clear that our group was being targeted.  The only one of us who escaped a thorough bag search was Bader, who offered his officer a chocolate bar. 

Once we had our tickets, our passports were confiscated for copying and more careful checking.  An officer with three stars on his epaulets and a “friendly” smile assured us that we would have the passports back after five minutes (and five more and five more and five more).  He then checked our visas, which was a funny thing to do since we were leaving the country, then our registration (in Tajikistan you get both a visa and a registration stamp in your passport), and finally asked for our visa receipts. 

We got receipts for the visas when we first arrived, and I told the kids to keep track of them, because that’s the kind of thing you tell kids when you’re a teacher, but of course, I’d lost my own (it showed up yesterday when I unpacked at home).  Mr. 3-star looked very perplexed about that.  Why would I need a receipt for my visa when the visa stamp is right there in my passport?  3-star disappeared and I let the kids go through passport control ahead of me.  When I went through, sure enough, he asked for the receipt.  I gestured toward the plane to indicate that it was somewhere in my checked baggage but he gave me that blank look that passport controllers the world over share.  Fortunately, by pure chance, no doubt, 3-star happened to appear at that moment.  He motioned for a severe looking man in a black suit to join us and we all sat on a shadowy bench behind the controllers box.  He spoke seriously in Russian with the other man, for several minutes until I was uncomfortable, and then turned to me and sighed.  He shook his head.  He really didn’t know what to say.  “Problem,” was all, and then he shrugged helplessly. 

It has always troubled me: how do people know when to offer a bribe?  You don’t want to insult an honest man, especially not an honest police officer.  But as it turns out, the venal are very helpful – they shrug helplessly.  “What can I do?” they seem to ask.  They don’t need a common language; anyone can understand their helplessness in the face of your incompetence.  They want to help, but your foolishness has closed out all options.  That’s the signal, the helpless shrug.  Keep the money low, near the groin, out of sight.  Also, be prepared with the proper amount.  I was not prepared and had to accept the first bill that floated to hand – a 20 Euro note which was fine, but if I had pulled a 50, I would have offered it.

Despite the legacy of state control, however, I will return to Tajikistan someday.  I saw, but didn’t set foot in, the mountains and they are spectacular.  The villagers, and even the civilians of Dushanbe (like our humble host, Farhod), are sweetly natured.  Their lives are complex in simple ways.  The things that trouble them are things that matter, and the things that give them joy are as near as their brothers and mothers and sisters and fathers.

It’s been forever since I’ve written in this blog and it feels a little crazy to write in it at all  because surely no one is bothering to check it anymore, but I want to get this down so that I can say I saw it coming. 

Dubai is the best example of what I see happening so I’ll focus on it.  Many people have remarked on the Field of Dreams mentality in that city.  You remember the 1989 film of that name in which Kevin Costner’s character heard this mystical voice that promised “If you build it, he will come.”  In a nutshell, that’s Dubai’s economic vision of the future.  They build, and the city grows.  People do come; they shop, they lie on the beach, they eat in expensive restaurants, and above all, they invest.  Why do they invest? Because the city grows.  Why does it grow?  Because they invest. 

Forget about the oil, by the way.  People in the West take comfort in discounting Dubai’s fabulous wealth by saying it’s all because of the oil, but Dubai’s wealth really is self-made.  The oil was – and is – seed money, but it accounts for less than ten percent of the city’s wealth now, and that percentage shrinks annually.

So, what are these investors investing in?  Well, growth.  Some economists will say that’s sound.  They don’t just build buildings in Dubai, they build whole “cities,” or at least whole neighborhoods.  The famous Palm islands, for example, are really just glorified neighborhoods.  It takes a lot of people to build these neighborhoods, and those people need housing, so they build other neighborhoods to house them.  There is a housing shortage in Dubai, so, what do you think? They build more housing.  They need doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers and don’t for one minute forget the marketing experts to service all those investors.  Everyone is an investor in Dubai.  Apartments sell three, four, five times before they are ever finished, and every time they sell, the price leaps higher.  What does the eventual owner find when she finally moves in?  A very ordinary apartment in a very crowded city.  Why would she want to live there?  Because there is money to be made.  Investments!  Everyone’s making money, so it must be working!

The thing is, this economic model has been tried before.  Many times, actually.  Famously, there was a run on tulips in Holland in the 17^th century.  Everyone made money buying tulips – whole plantations of tulips.  Who bought those tulips?  Why, the investors.  But did any lovers buy the tulips for their loves?  Sure, a few.  The bubble burst. I had the good fortune to live in San Francisco during the “dot com” boom of the late 1990’s.  Everyone was getting rich building the internet.  They were getting rich building websites that helped you trade your old TVs for someone else’s old VCR.  They got rich building websites that helped you find a lawyer, or gave you advice on how to win a video game, or answered all your burning questions about burning CD’s.  Some websites even tried selling things!  They all got rich!  Why?  What did they make? … no one really could explain what they made.  It was a new world and it worked, didn’t it? Everyone got rich so it must work!  Where did all that money come from?  Investment.  Golly, investors have a lot of money.  And investors do their research, right?  They’re smart fellers from fancy colleges who spend their money wisely and understand complex economic models that elude the comprehension of us silly people who only understand that if I’ve got a widget and you’ve got a dollar, that’s a fair trade.  Where they invest must be wisely chosen, right?  Just talk to the guys who gave Bernard Madoff their billions.  They’re smart.  How do I know?  Cuz they got money.

And I was there when the bubble burst.  Everyone stood around blinking.  The dot coms left standing were the ones that actually produced or sold something that people really wanted.  Amazon sold books; Yahoo and Google sold only advertising, granted, but they drew the numbers by giving away a high quality service that people desired, and anyway, Yahoo may not last.

So, what does Dubai have that people want?  It’s got a lot of money, but that will only last as long as the investment does.  The investors will pull out, that’s a given.  It does have beaches, but trust me, Florida’s better, and Florida’s nothing to get excited about.  It does have shopping, but shoppers tell me that the shopping is better in the old standbys of London, Paris, NYC, etc.  It’s got traffic!  It’s got sweltering heat!  It has scant culture. 

I wish that I could come back to Dubai in one hundred years, because I think it will be a fascinating town then, but not for reasons that its visionary ruler, Sheikh Maktoum, has in mind.  Mark my words: in one hundred years, Dubai will be a metropolis with streets of sand.  There will be a thriving core near the creek where business is done and rich, cultured lives are lived.  I say this because there is a lot of creativity in the city, and the infrastructure is certainly there.  But further out, the great glass and steel towers that sprout in the desert where green sprouts have ever failed to find purchase, will stand empty.  And when entire neighborhoods and little cities have stood empty for decades, the desert will reclaim them.  The sand will blow in, making dunes in the streets, and you’ll be able to clamber up those dunes, clean the glass, and peer inside the empty skyscrapers.  What a great museum Dubai will become.  It will have history, at last.

So it’s been almost half a year since I’ve added anything to my blog, but not for lack of stimulus.  I don’t promise to restart the blog on a regular basis, but I do promise, in the next couple of weeks to provide some the perspective that a year’s stay in the Middle East has given me. 

Here’s a quick history of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.  The British, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, used this end of the Arabian Peninsula as a kind of staging/refueling area as they spread their influence to more prosperous regions like India and East Africa.  Abu Dhabi, in those years (and through most of the 20^th century) was no more than a handful of grass huts, maybe 100 full-time residents, and a pearl-diving industry that swelled the population to maybe 1000 during the season.  It would have been negligible to the British except that one of the most powerful sheiks profited from the pearl diving so used Abu Dhabi as a second home occasionally.

Dubai actually appears on western maps as early as 1725.  The area’s only creek flows into the gulf there, so naturally, it attracted full-time camel-grazing residents, and even some merchants from India and especially Iran who would trade there and use it as a jumping off point for better trading up the gulf.  Until 1971, the de facto currency on the peninsula was India’s rupee. 

Even beside the creek, however, there was next to no sustainable crop except for the miraculous date palm tree… and no one really survives on dates, do they?  Two miracles kept life going in the desert: the date and the camel.  The camel was both transportation and meat; it really was the measure of wealth.  Vegetation is sparse so to feed the camels, most of the population traveled around from oasis to oasis, letting their camels graze where they could.  They were not peaceful.  Camel theft was a mark of honor.  The Dubai tribes and the tribes across the area now known as Abu Dhabi warred over camels and territory much more often than they cooperated. It was an intensely primitive life that favored those with sharp eyes and heroic powers of endurance.  The strict discipline of Islam was perfectly suited to survival here. Only the tiniest fraction of people could read.  Most people could hold everything they owned in one hand.  It was like this until about 1960. 

Sometime around World War I, the British realized, from clues in the geography that had always been near the surface, that there must be oil under the sands.  By that time, they were understanding that distant colonies in volatile lands were more costly than they could afford so were already reducing their holdings around the world.  They didn’t want to manage Arabia, but they certainly wanted access to the oil and its profits.  They paid the sheiks for the rights to explore, and ultimately, to drill, but the oil itself always belonged to the Arabs.

The British had never been particularly helpful to the Arabs before, using them only so far as they were useful, and offering little in return.  There was precisely one doctor in all of the emirates, for example, and that was the one on the British military base in Sharjah.  If an Arab could drag himself to that one doctor, and the doctor was charitable, the Arab might be helped, but the Brits weren’t going out of their way.  They did nothing to modernize the area, nor even to mediate disputes – indeed, many Arabs thought (and think) that the British considered it in their best interests to let the Arabs kill each other in innumerable skirmishes across the region.  So when wealth began coming in from the exploration permits and the land leases, Sheik Shakhbut bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, the most powerful sheik in the land, horded the money.  He did not trust windfalls and he did not trust the British.  There were centuries old land disputes between his family and the Mahktoums of Dubai, the Saads, and the Sultan of Oman.  There were any number of catastrophes that a tribal leader like Shahkbut must be prepared for.  The oil money was for the inevitable bad times to come.

His younger brother, Zayed, had a much deeper grasp of not only the tremendous wealth at their feet, but also what it meant to lead.  He cared for his people and took it upon himself to usher them into the modern world.  In 1966, he took over leadership from his brother.  No one speaks or writes of how, exactly, he accomplished this.  It was entirely bloodless, but Shahkbut left Abu Dhabi for Bahrain (I think) and never returned. 

Immediately, Zayed began building roads, desalinization plants, hospitals, and schools.  He brought in experts and teachers from all over the world; he gave seed money to any local Arab who wanted to start a business.  Also, he strove to raise the profile of Abu Dhabi, both locally and abroad.  He gave money to struggling Arabs in places like Lebanon and Jordan that had no oil; and closer to home, he resolved land disputes with Saudi Arabia and Oman.  And perhaps most importantly, he forgave all old grudges with local sheiks and began negotiations to form a new nation among them.  In 1971, The United Arab Emirates was formed of seven emirates.  Zayed’s title became “supreme ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE.”  Sheik Rashed Maktoum became “supreme ruler of Dubai and vice president of the UAE.”

I spent this weekend in the Empty Quarter, or the Rub al Khali, the largest sand sea in the world which stretches across most of the UAE, deep into Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman.  The northern edge of it is marked by Liwa, a 120 kilometer string of oases.  We drove to Liwa and then set out across the sands until one of our 4-wheel drives bogged down.  We recovered the car after much digging, took shelter from the wind behind a nearby dune, and called that home for the night.

 
From camp, several of us hiked barefoot to the top of the tallest dune we could see.  By the map, we stood at the very edge of the sand sea, and yet even from that high place we could see nothing but dunes stretching to the horizon.  From there, we ran down the side of the dune – a drop of easily 500 feet – setting off the famous “singing of the sands.”  There is some dispute about precisely what occurs in this phenomenon, but somehow the movement of sands of a certain consistency and humidity achieves a harmonic effect that sounds like distant engines or a symphony of tubas.  We could feel the dune quaking around our ankles even when the person setting it off was fifty yards away. 

 
Once we landed in the sabkha, or salt flat, below, the sun was setting and we began the trudge back to camp.  I turned around now and then to check the sun for how much time we had, and every time I did, I was struck by how stark and bleached the desert looked beneath that glare.  It looked like nothing so much as a killer of men – a place to disappear, desiccate, and die.  But walking as we did away from the sun, the same desert was warmly tinted, all peach and terracotta.  It glowed the color of a child’s ear.  The desert loves the light and light loves the desert.  They caress each other and fondle each other like astonished new lovers.

Earlier this month, another teacher, Sena, and I took eight students to Portugal where we built a house (a week’s worth of house) through Habitat for Humanity.  Since developing a few carpentry skills years ago with Tod, I’ve always figured I’d do some work for that organization, and the opportunity fell into my lap here.  It was a no-brainer when Sena asked if I’d like to help out.

In Bend, the future owners of the houses we built often contributed to the construction of their own homes and it was such a pleasure to see how that emotional and physical investment connected them to this most basic of human needs – their own shelter.  Habitat does the same thing.  The father of the family whose house we helped build was on site, laying bricks, cutting stone, and mixing concrete every day.  The economy is slow in Portugal and like so many of his countrymen, he is currently out of work, so this was perfect for him.  His wife was there whenever she could get away from her work cleaning homes, and on the weekend, their daughter came to lay bricks.  A boy from the farm up the path came twice, for no other reason than that he liked the work and wanted to help his new neighbors. 

The kids we brought from Abu Dhabi worked hard (some harder than others, of course).  None of them really knows what it’s like when a parent fears the landlord, but most showed enough imagination to sympathize with this family and to feel that their work might serve as the foundation from which a family could step into a less desperate way of life.

As for me, it was wonderful to slop concrete on a mortar board again and spread it with a trowel.  I even loved the last day when we cleared the work site and I lugged heavy boards across ditches all day.  I know I get sick of that work eventually.  I know that waking up day after day in the rain or cold to break my back again against obdurate materials makes me depressed after a while.  But for one week, how satisfying it is!

And of course I loved being back in Europe.  The middle east fascinates, but somehow any old European town, with its cobblestone streets and hand-hewn rafters, feels both homey and exotic, simple and sophisticated.