The second night I was on the crew I went to sit at the tables outside the kitchen and pet the kitten. I met a guy named Nizar. We had a nice chat and he invited me to go smoke sheesha (hookah tobacco), so I did, and I went back every night from then on.
While I was there, the core sheesha crowd consisted of myself, Abdullah from Jordan (his family is from Palestine), Nizar from Tunisia, Numan from Yemen/Ethiopia, and Hamed, the hookah master, from Ibri, a city in northern Oman. We sat in plastic chairs on the edge of the camp, smooking hookah and cigaretts, and drinking tea and chatting. When the coals started to die Hamed would spin them around real fast using a contraption made from a tin can, and a wire hangar.
A lot of our conversations revolved around teaching me new Arabic words. Every night I brought my trusty "waraqa", a beat up sheet of paper with many nights of arabic words scrawled all over it.
We had some other conversations too.
Abdullah used to drive trucks from Amman to Baghdad during the Gulf war. Through some of the towns you had to drive very fast or else they'd hijack your vehicle and shoot you. His uncle got shot this way, and Abdullah had to carry his body back to Amman.
Newman immigrated to Yemen from ethiopia when he was 14, and then he returned to Ethiopia when he was 21. He described himself as "an animal let out of a cage". He partied like a mad man for about a month before he spent all his money and had to stop. In Ethiopia he met and fell in love with his wife. She insisted they move to Yemen where he couldn't party. That was 15 years ago, now they have five kids.
One night they told me all about how men sometimes marry four wives and have 20 some kids. But usually it ends up in trouble. Sometimes the wives will be jealous of eachother and fight, or sometimes they will be too good of friends and gang up against the husband! I think a lot of the point of this conversation was to see the shock on the American woman's face.
Abdullah's grandfather had a big farm in Palestine. He had four wives, and as a result Abdullah has 53 cousins.
I found out it is illegal to have any sort of beard in Tunisia.
In Yemen, if you are a young man over they age of 13, you are not cool unless you have your very own machine gun. Parents will save up for a long time to get one for their son for his birthday. It's a right of passage.
One night Abdullah asked me "Why do women from the US and Europe always want to have jobs?" and that made for a fun and interesting conversation.
Nizar asked me alot about the US one night. He had all these wonderful impressions of it. A place where there is lots of freedom and good jobs, easy to immigrate and fit in. Now don't worry, we also talked about some of the bad parts too, like our history with black people, and how difficult it is to get a good job without education. Nonetheless, it was nice to hear someone having good impressions of the US, and to appreciate some of those things I take for granted.
One night was a particularly busy one at "Mahaal" Neuman (Neuman's coffee shop). We decided then we should start our own United Nations. We had representation from the countries of France, Tunisia, Yemen, Oman, Ethiopia, Jordan, Egypt and the United States.
Working so far away from home, I tend to get very attached to people in short amounts of time. But you're always saying good-bye in this damn job. And there is always a good chance you'll never see the person you're saying goodbye to again. So, yes, I was very sad to say goodbye to my sheesha friends.
The night after I left the crew, I was sitting alone in my hotel room in Salalah, feeling kind of tired and lonely, and indulging in self pity when the phone rang. I heard a "Hi Saylii". "Helloooo??" I said slowly, stalling to give myself time to figure out who it was. It was Neuman. He said "Me and Nizar were just sitting here thinking its not the same without you." :)
