I cannot load a new picture of Alex & me, but I have a very old one. He has changed a bit (me too).
Three times a year they open the gate and parole us inmates for regional rest breaks. The State Department is very generous. They drop you in Kuwait of Amman and you can go anywhere you want with the caveats that you pay for your own trip and come back a week later.
For my first break, I am going to Egypt to meet Alex and together visit the treasures of the Nile. Alex likes history and it is fun to travel with him to these sorts of places. I still recall with great fondness the trip we made to Rome together when he was thirteen. But the road to Egypt runs through Kuwait.
They have an enormous tent city at Ali Al Salem base and I got a nice bed, with a real mattress and blankets in a tent barracks. I arrived aboard my C-130 just in time to miss evening chow and too early to wait for mid-rats, so I went to McDonald’s. This is the first time I have paid for food in more than three months. The Big Mac Meal was filling, but I did not feel that I had missed much by not having it these past months.
AAS base is around 45 minutes from the civilian airport in Kuwait. You go by bus and the bus terminal at the base is remarkably like bus terminals everywhere, with the exception that it lacks the little distractions like coffee shops, restaurants and newsstands. In return, however, you get the gift of time, time for introspection, time for reading, time for just being. Time like this is an anachronism in our scheduled and connected world.
I have the gift of time, with no deeds to do, no promises to keep. Some might complain of boredom, but I am just “feeling groovy” and remembering a little Coleridge.
Time, Real & Imaginary
ON the wide level of a mountain’s head (I knew not where, but ’twas some faery place), Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! This far outstripp’d the other; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind: For he, alas! is blind! O’er rough and smooth with even step he pass’d,
Egyptians have been very friendly. Some are just the trying to sell something, but others seemed genuine. We are staying at the Marriott, where I stay whenever I can all around the world. The Cairo Marriot is more opulent than most. It sits in a beautiful garden area on an island in the Nile in a palace built by the Egyptian Khedive to host Euro-Royalty during the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Among the guests were Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Eugene, wife of Napoleon III. I suppose they had really nice rooms. Today the rooms are typical Marriott. I like that. I feel at home.
Outside the Egyptian Museum
Alex & I walked to the Egyptian Museum, which is just across the river not far from the hotel. It is full of artifacts, perhaps over full. The place has a little bit the feel of a warehouse, with artifacts stacked in rows. After you have seen one mummy, you have pretty much seen them all, kinda dry and depressing. But I enjoyed seeing all those things I have seen pictured in history books. We saw the King Tut stuff, for example.
The desert preserves things that would have long ago turned into dust or compost in any other environment. I especially like the little wooden figures showing ordinary life and people working in brewing, baking and textiles. I prefer these kinds of things to the death obsessed culture of the tombs. How they lived in more interesting than how they died. The gold and art from the tombs is spectacular, but it was a waste of for the people of the time to literally slave away their lives to fill monuments to the dead. I don’t much like the jackal-headed gods either.
Old & new
We tend to think of Egypt only in relation to those who built the pyramids but there is a lot more. Roman and Greek history was always my specialty and I am more interested in Egypt under the Greek Ptolemy and the Romans. This period lasted more than 1000 years, but we often telescope history and move from the pharaohs to the caliphs, with only a brief glace at Anthony & Cleopatra, usually even forgetting that Cleo was a nice Greek girl descendents from one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Cairo was built on a Roman city called Babylon. It is a little ironic that I had to travel FROM the country of the original Babylon to see one. The Christian Copts, descended from the original inhabitants, still live on the site.
This is one of the narrowest buildings I have seen.
Parts of Cairo are pleasant, but it is never peaceful and walking around is not much fun. Drivers pay no attention to crosswalks or signals. You have to run for you life to cross busy streets and there are lots of busy streets. As Alex and I waited to run across one busy street, some guys on the other side actually mocked us for being timid. The funniest thing I saw was a bus turn a corner too sharply and three guys literally fell out. They landed on their feet and just chased the bus to get back on. Cacophony is the word to describe roads. Everybody feels it necessary to beep his horn just like a bored dog has to bark at everybody who passes. We did a lot of walking nevertheless. It seems like everybody wants to talk and invite you back to their shop for free tea. Of course, it is not really free. If you stop more than a few seconds, taxis pull up and ask if you need a ride I have to admire their energy, but I would prefer to have a little more peace.
I am traveling in Egypt. I have my camera and I plan to take lots of pictures, but I forgot to bring the cable to load them onto the computer, so I will not immediately be able to post them. I will still post texts and will amend them with pictures when I get back to Al Asad.
I also have some old pictures I can use AND the Internet is so fast here compared with Al Asad that I might take advantage to post some old odd things.
I was surprised at the calm in the isolated Nukhayb region. Maybe there just are not enough people to form hostile groups. Sunni and Shiite live together in harmony. They intermarry and even share the same Mosques. Another explanation is good management. The area is guided by Sheik Lawrence, named for the famous T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. (Local pronunciation eliminates the initial “L” sound and his name is usually transliterated as Lorans).
We spoke to Sheik Lawrence at length during a gathering of local leaders at the Nukhayb “Government Center”. The 17 city council members present were all Arab Bedouin men in traditional Arab garb, several of the men are Sheiks of some level.
Lawrence is a man obviously in control, to whom the others clearly deferred. He stands out from his fellows who were dressed in the traditional flowing robes, since he wore a western style blazer and slacks. He also clearly understands English and showed that he understood before the translator spoke. He is well connected in Iraq and internationally. He is kin to the Saudi royal family and has connections all over the Gulf, a member of the provincial council of Anbar and can get appointments with anyone he wants in Baghdad. As a result of all this, Nukhayb gets its share of money from the central authorities.
In our foot patrol through the town, we saw a reasonably well maintained and prosperous place, with smiles and waves from most everyone we encountered. Area children were well clothed, healthy and happy. For a small community in the middle of nowhere, this town doing very well. What were the problems?
In one word: rain, or lack thereof. No rivers run through the region. The six wells in the region supply only drinking water. Agriculture depends almost entirely on rainfall. By this time of the year, the wadis are usually green with new shoots and the shepherds can take their flocks there for food. This year has been bone dry. When the vegetation doesn’t get water to grow, the goats and sheep, which make up the bulk of the local economy, suffer.
Never much rain; this year none at all.
I could not get an estimate of the numbers of sheep and goats that I thought was really reliable, but the number of 150,000 came up as consensus figure herded by around 200 nomadic shepherds in a fifty kilometer radius around Nukhayb. Raising sheep and goats is always a precarious business. In the roughly one in five “good” years, there is sufficient grass for the animals. 2003-4 was like that. Other years present varying degrees of hardship. One of the old men in the meeting told us that currently it costs around $150 to raise a sheep until it is ready for sale, but sheep fetch only around $100 on the market. Without access to free range, sheepherding is distinctly unprofitable.
During the bad years, the Iraqi government used to subsidize or provide grain. According to the old men at the meeting, during the time of Saddam Hussein, the government supplied two kilos of grain per head per month. With this guarantee against failure, my guess is that shepherds expanded their herds, which made them ever more dependent on government subsidies and had the additional pernicious effect of overtaxing the carrying capacity of the land. We have a classic tragedy of the commons situation, since the land is not held privately, exacerbated by the moral hazard of government ensuring against failure. Sustainable sheepherding would probably require a significant reduction in the numbers of sheep. This is not the solution the local people embraced, however. They requested that our ePRT either provide the subsided grain or pressure Iraqi authorities to do so.
I am afraid that we have neither the resources nor the inclination to go into the subsidizing of environmental degradation business. We told them that we check into offering some emergency help, which will consist of advice and medical and vitamins, which will help ensure that the sheep that do survive are healthier. The viscous circle of drought, weakness and disease is in play. As the animals get weaker, they are prey to more and varied types of worms and parasites. We can help reduce these maladies.
In the longer run, Sheik Lawrence thought digging wells for irrigation would help mitigate this recurring cycle of crisis. He mentioned that he had seen developed well-based systems in Jordan and Saudi. Ground water in the Nukhayb region is ONLY 220 meters below the surface he claimed. Farther to the west, it is deeper under the surface. He mentioned that they had plans for central pivot irrigation systems, but lacked the experience and expertise to make them work.
Fortunately, our ePRT agricultural expert, has both. Dennis also thinks that some of the local soils could be extremely productive if the proper irrigation techniques were used. We offered to let Dennis help, should it be appropriate. Preliminary steps would be identifying soils that will make irrigation worthwhile and actually digging the wells. Lawrence said that during the time of Saddam Hussein, there was lots of talk about digging wells, but not much action. How have things changed?
This morning I heard something weird. The sound on the roof was rain. Maybe it is not too late for some of those sheep ranchers. We didn’t get much … so far, but it doesn’t take too much out here. It already had the good effect of washing some of the dust off some the date palms and eucalyptus trees. They are now a more actually green instead of that dusty greenish color. I would like to see the greening of the wadis.
Another unexpected thing you find in the deserts are proto-watermelons. You can see them in the picture above. Those little green balls are the ancestors of the big ones we know and love every summer. They are yellow, not red, inside but otherwise look like mini-watermelons, which is more or less what they are.
They grow wild in the middle of the desert. I would have thought something like a mini-watermelon would grow near water, and it seems profligate to produce a water filled globe in this desiccated landscape, but the roots evidently go down deeply enough to tap what water is available.
Speaking of the unexpected, I just wanted to post this picture from the traffic circle in Nukhayb. That’s right. It is a bunch of teapots around and eagle. I don’t know what it means either, but somebody went through a lot of trouble to make it.
My home… this is. Above is the VIP tent at Mudaysis.
Sleeping on a cot in a tent is never comfortable. A modern cot is made out of synthetic fabric that has the peculiar capacity to draw away and dissipate body heat. This would make cots great hot weather equipment, but the fabric evidently can accomplish its mission only on cold days. You wouldn’t believe how cold it gets in Iraq. I was equipped with my thin sleeping bag. Even wearing everything I had with me, I was freezing. The first night was the worst. We experienced one of those rare days when it was overcast all day. Usually, you can count on the warmth of the sun to clear the cold from your bones, but for the record on New Years day 2008, the sun shined weakly or not at all in Mudaysis. Temperatures hovered in the 40s at midday. At night the clouds cleared permitting a drop into the 20s. I have never been so cold for so long. Coming from a Wisconsin native, who went to school in Minnesota and served tours in Poland and Norway, this might sound strange. I certainly have been more intensely cold, but not for two days solid. In the cold climates, really cold places, we heat our dwellings, wear warm clothes and hunker down inside warm buildings when it gets really cold outside.
Necessity is the mother of invention. On the way to chow the next morning, I noticed lots of discarded cardboard boxes. I took a couple back to the tent and made the thermo-mat you see in the pictures. The boxes were ironically labeled – KEEP FROZEN. Cardboard, as every bum & drifter knows, is a good insulator. It really made my second day in the cold tent a lot less unpleasant.
We traveled to this God forsaken high desert in the SW corner of Iraq along the border with Saudi Arabia to meet with the local sheik to talk about problems the drought is creating for local agriculture. There is usually not a Marine camp here. The Marines are stationed temporarily at Mudaysis to protect pilgrims going on the Hajj. They arrived just before the Hajj began a few weeks ago. We take it for granted because we see it so often, but it remains truly remarkable how the U.S. can project power anywhere on the globe. Even here in the middle of what could pass as a science for a movie about Mars, we can set up and supply a camp, complete with hot meals, its own fire department and fully functioning command operation out in the desert. Heated tents for visitors, however, is evidently beyond our powers.
Below are my friends Reid & Dennis at the chow hall.
