Who did I meet at St. Mary's this evening but Kuya Roy. I hadn't seen him since I left this place in 1994. He left in 2003, the year before my return. Kuya Roy was wearing a bright red basketball jersey with a long sleeved shirt under it for church. He was more tanned and his face more weather-beaten than last but he had an air of confidence that he'd accrued from being in Yemen. He said he knew how to use an RPG, which my wife had to get a translation of. He was proud. He's working for an Emiratee Sheikh's (Al Ameri) water drilling company and consulting for the World Bank in the badlands of Southern Yemen. He said he went to Osama Ben Laden's place, by which he meant his people, who live in a wadi and are goat herds. You have to tote a Kalishnikov in the market he said. (His eyes were agog with happiness. Alas! where are the days of the Wild West in the U.S.?) They may have no water for six months and you may drop a well 1000 meters down and hit no water! They in fact are running out of water in Yemen.

People in Southern Yemen are more cooperative than those in the north, whose government is corrupt, according to Roy.

He's in Al Ain to make sure his salary is in the bank. He said that he was only in Al Ain for a week to get supplies, also. He said that, since he left, those who work under him had to take a vacation, too. I told him he must be indispensable. He couldn't remember me at first since I've gotten thinner and I have no moustache and I'm 'calvo'. I couldn't forget Kuya Roy though, one of the most intelligent guys I've ever met. Who wouldn't be intelligent if he were living in Yemen and happy to be toting a Kalishnikov!

Kuya Roy heard the word 'sistema' and had to laugh, "the Arabic way, no system. Imshee, mafee mushkalah, kalee-wuhlee." I had to laugh, too. You gotta have a sense of humor to survive "these places".

And so I praise Kuya Roy.

Bereavement of my common sensical notions
Every day I seem to think of something that goes against my sense of the common, what I've taken for granted in the past. For instance, passing on the right. It is done all the time here on the roads where it is not uncommon for people to drive as fast as they do in the west of the US, in the wide open spaces where, as Dorn says, "speed overcomes space until it just turns into it". I usually go just under the speed limit on the road to either Abu Dhabi or Dubai, 120 klits per hour. I hate the annoying beep, beep, beep of the built-in beeper that goes on automatically after the needle reaches 120 on the speedometer. For them speed becomes space that shrinks it in time to make the normal hour and a half to Abu Dhabi, probably just 45 minutes. You really have to keep an eye in the rearview mirror because if you pass a slow driver in the middle lane one seems to come up on you out of nowhere had you not looked in anticipation and then you get flashed, they (if you remain in the middle, slow lane, you may be treated to the sandwich from a car simultaneously passing you on the right) will not slow down, coming right on your tail. I find it quite annoying so never put myself in such a position. If one has tendencies to agression as male drivers are want to do, then I can only say restrain yourself, do not engage in this dangerous play. There are enough horripilating accidents reported in the local press. On the notorious Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, there was recently a man stalled in the narrow margin of the inside lane who was lopped in two by a driver who got impatient and was speeding down the margin.

Even in town speed is the norm. Even at roundabouts. One does not slow to a halt on approaching a roundabout, one speeds up or comes to a quick halt, some drivers, especially of lorries, still coasting in the outer lane until you've passed by them as you shoot out of the roundabout and the lorry driver shoots in, making for a kind of pas de deux, just avoiding colliding into each other as each goes in the opposite direction, a kind of aborted game of tag where one does not tag the opponent at the last moment.

Recently, at the the gazelle roundabout in town at night I had the fool notion to cut into the traffic with a fellow fool on the right of me reacting as well to the raspy voiced imp of the perverse talking in our ears at the same time. I could not do a beeline because the car was doing a circle around in the inside lane, so I veered slightly to the right. Fortunately the driver on my right veered to his right too. Of course, the car looked like an old Toyota Cressida or Corolla, so I thought he didn't have enough steam to be going too fast around the roundabout. I was lucky. People usually speed up when they are in the roundabout, even when they are going around it in the inside lane. Taxi drivers like to come at a roundabout on a tangent, thus counteracting centripetal force.

I must admit, since I've learned negotiating roundabouts only here, that I probably am not doing it the right way. But then, what is the right way? Especially here where one wouldn't know the difference. The driver's ed. cars here are so slow that they seem to be going at a snail's pace. Driver's ed. is a thriving business. I heard of a Filipino for whom it took nine road exams before he passed it, and he had to pay for each one. My neighbor passed it after the second try when during the first exam he didn't stop at a stop sign on a side road inside the neighborhood. I don't usually come to a full stop at a stop sign unless it is absolutely necessary. So you may be thinking, what goes? They are painstaking about the exam, but it is every man for himself on the roads. They don't have enforcement beyond radars. The police are worthless.