It's always a joy to sit down with cuya Roy when he visits from Yemen to give me the news. He's here for a month to wait things out, for things to cool down. He works for a company that digs water wells and lives in Aden where now the US army wants to ban guns from the city. It's like the Wild West there, cowboys and Indians, isn't it, cuya Roy, I said? His face is more the dark brown leather of a shoe than last time he blew into Al Ain from Yemen. He and I go way back to the early days in Al Ain at St. Mary's, in the early 1990s, which recently got a new Catholic church. He speaks with the stiff upper lip of Bogart but not at all the one of a top drawer Brit. He patted his belly and said he'd put on some more weight and then sat down in the kitchen of my flat after 7 o'clock New Year's Mass. My wife and I invited him home for a meal. He entered the flat and put down his bag and joked that he had no gun in it. We reminisced about the early St Mary's, especially Frs. Francis and Antonioni's time, the latter who I didn't remember much about, as he was only briefly pastor though long enough to be complained about in a letter to the Bishop in Abu Dhabi, the headquarters of the Arabian vicariate. The Indians on the parish council calumniated him for his popularity with the Filipino community and alleged Filipinos were sleeping in his bedroom. Roy said Antonioni was teaching them adult catechism in his house, the priest's house attached to the small church, which was torn down recently to make way for the new church. Francis was popular too and did not give in to the prejudices rife between the communities, either Filipino or Indian. I can imagine what the Indians thought when I often visited Francis, an Oxford educated Englishman and convert, when I was a bachelor and watched videos with him (I remember watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with him.) Even among the Indians there are rivalries depending on whether you are a Goan or a Keralite, according to Roy, and now that I'm on the parish counsel I see the aggressiveness of the Indians and the difficulty the two Filipinos on the parish counsel have, the Indians being in the majority and the current pastor an Indian. (I would imagine even the minority of Tamil Nadu Catholics, who are not represented on the counsel as far as I know, suffer from the prejudices as well.) Roy didn't know that Fr. Matthew, the pastor after Fr. Antonioni, was not a Capuchin, and so he, despite being Indian, suffered prejudice as the Capuchins are in the majority, as far as I know, among the priests in this diocese. Matthew was pastor for fourteen years and had a very austere regime to say the least those fourteen years, not maintaining the church and letting it get run down. I remember his sermon about his pet rat. But I liked him because he was genuine in his transparency and honesty. He disbanded, in fact--this from Roy tonight--the parish counsel because he didn't want to meet the same fate as Fr. Antonioni, who the Bishop got rid of. Matthew would briefly meet with parishoners in the office attached to the sacristy and then recede into the darkness of the house. He counted the collection all by himself and sent most of the money for the Catholic missions to Rome, not bothering at all to improve St Mary's.

What was more interesting was his recounting of the present situation in Yemen with the recent influx of American troops to Yemen against the third front of Al Qaeda, as Roy put it. What about Somalia, I asked? There's no oil there, so the US doesn't care about Al Qaeda there. Just Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Yemen. He sees the poorest of the poor, the goat herders who Al Qaeda appeals to because they have nothing to lose but water. They use a stick with a hook on the end to reach the leaves in the tall plants to pull the limbs down so the goats can eat them. But, also, the fruit are knocked down and the goats eat those too. Apparently, qat cultivation was encouraged by the Americans when poppies were grown before, cocaine, as Roy called it. Qat needs a lot of water and instead of sprinkler irrigation they flood the land after sowing the qat. A lot of the water simply evaporates up in the air. The aquifers are plummetiing further down so that the water table gets deeper and deeper as they aren't being replenished. Roy would know as his business is well digging. More and more of the poor are moving to Sana'a (population 6 million), which is up in the mountains, 3,000 meters, and so it is very difficult to pump desalinated water from desalination plants on the coast. The Badu goat herders in Saudi are apparently more prosperous as they can find pasturage in the mountains in Saudi whereas the lowlands in Yemen are parched. Roy described it as seeing the mountainside turn black in the distance as the goat herds moved into the mountains of Saudi. The Houthi tribesmen are Shi'ite and so Iran has been supplying them with arms to stoke the fires of rebellion. The Houthis are on the border with Saudi and hence the Saudi bombarding their villages. Then there is the history of the formerly Communist South Yemen and North Yemen and their grievances. Apparently, the former president of (South?) Yemen is in Oman. But, I got lost there, as I don't know the history of the region and have not been following the news on CNN, as Roy has been. Even the Jews there are being persecuted, and are leaving with the help of the US. Roy said that you can see the Jews, the men with their side curls, at Western Union in Aden getting the money wired to them from the US.

Since it was getting late, I drove cuya Roy to the company accomodations, where he is staying with Filipino friends, on the outskirts of Al Ain near the Oman border, two roundabouts from the huge, new Bawadi mall. On the way he told me that he easily got his driving license through the help of the president's son, who at first wanted to give him a horse, but Roy said he wanted to drive, as he'd have to feed the horse, and the company gives him a transportation allowance! He said the president's son has a lot of blood on his hands, exterminating a whole village, not letting the media in to report, especially Al Jezeerah, and then bulldozing it and scraping the land where the village was flat so no trace is left.