Jaunting Along

After the Refurbishment All good ideas need others to propogate them; all groups need individuals to join them and all journeys begin with a few first, small steps. When the team that took on operation turn-around began the transformation of Baker House from the utilitarian, drab, unequipped and cold environment it was into the wonderfully warm, rich and embracing series of rooms you encounter today, full of professional equipment, we had relatively few members, little money and not a whole lot of commitment within the general member body, which was due to all kinds of external factors, but was primarily a result of the ageing of a demographic body brought in on the last oil boom. What we were facing, on the other hand, was the beginnings of what was to be an influx of a far more diverse and multi-cultural society from the next oil boom, complete with kids. 

Talk Given at 60th Anniversary of the Dhahran Women’s Group,  May 3rd, 2007, Saudi Aramco Learning to let our light shine out  Welcome.  In particular, to our honoured guest and speaker, Mr Mazen Snobar, Executive Director of Community Services and his wife, Naheel. We welcome too our other special guests, Mr Ahmed Zahid, CCSD Manager and Mr Richard Ksiazek, Administrator, Recreation Services Division, CCSD.  And of course, we welcome all our very special guests, members of the Dhahran Women’s Group, our Board and especially our wonderful volunteers and friends.  We come here from all over the world, a disparate bunch, derived from a variety of cultures, heralding from a multiplicity of lands and speaking a cacophany of tongues.  Like many an expatriate population, we are subject to both unique privileges and peculiar privations. The privileges are well-documented and often future-oriented – to do with establishing a nest egg, ensuring a better...

The Balcony at the Hotel Nomade, Istanbul Our Hotel Nomade  in Istanbul, recommended to us by one of the Turkish men with whom Fem works, has clearly marketed itself over the years as a place for single women and other travellers on their own, making it a generally friendly and convivial place to inhabit. 

Istanbul is such, that each age, with its own pre-eminent art form, parades before you, displaying now the mosaic and fresco work of the Roman era in the Aya Sofya, now the filigree stone-work and stained glass and architectural elegance of the Blue Mosque, and here the military echoes of numerous mercenary armies can be heard faintly above the crowds at the Topkapi Palace. 

We came back to South Africa to find a winter tracery of branches wearing their dust overalls, all a-popping with spring underneath, the buds on some trees set to jostle the little beans, hanging like sentinels, off from their perches. There were sunsets the orange of gold so hot you could pour it, the incandescence shot through with hot pink, such that the sky was filled with all the colours of a glowing peach. Throughout the managed veld, green shoots ran through and under the black soot of spring burning, the bare ground visible beneath. Arrays of African grass ranged along the roadside edges, gang-pressed regiments straggly and most disorderly in their ranks. We are back, home in South Africa after a year overseas in Arabia and just in time for our first wedding anniversary. We do indeed have something to celebrate at that, it's been a difficult first year of marriage and both we, and the marriage, have survived. There was the relocation, my dad’s death, our experience of a...

This was going to be about the desert. It still is. There are just are so many types of desert.  I walked in a desert.  And I cried,  "Ah, God, take me from this place!"  A voice said, "It is no desert."  I cried, "Well, but--  The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon."  A voice said, "It is no desert."  Stephen Crane Sunset at Shaybah As we drive out from Ad Dammām into the desert proper, it is mostly akin to Star Wars, except there are too many roads. Large, intersecting freeways undulate across the flatness. On one side, pipes, every shape and variety, litter the landscape in a series of triangular stacks. The start of the scrap yards - sorry, construction vehicle storage areas - begin as the road smoothes out. Alternately boiling and freezing under the great outdoors that unfortunately all too often doubles as the rubbish pit, the vehicles rust in mute testimony to a prior excess of construction, symp...