A Doctor's Diary (eBook)

The Village … A Distinctive Life

Masliyah Village:

Masliyah is a village in the Baish Governorate affiliated to Jazan, a southern region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. By the will and decree of Allāh, I was born into this world at dawn on the 28th of February 1962 AD, to a modest middle-income family. That morning for me was the start of a life full of everything, imaginable or unimaginable. I lived a life full of events and changes; a life of someone whom Allāh willed that lives and witnesses so many things and learns from lecture halls and eventful life chapters, moment by moment.

This life that I’m talking about started in a very small village where all the residents knew each other without exception. All and sundry lived under very modest economic and social conditions that were completely different in the sixties and seventies of the last century than in the twenty-first century.

I was the fifth child among twelve brothers and sisters. Two of them passed away, while ten stayed alive and are blessed, praise be to Allāh, with health and well-being.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Jazan region was completely dependent on agriculture, where all the land, from north to south, was covered in the green of corn plantations, and its healthy soil gave off the scent of green grass and fruitful trees.

The top priority for our family was, and still is to this day, knowledge and education. Our family was one of the families that Allāh graced with agricultural land, which yielded much and provided ample luxury for its owners during that beautiful time. Rather, it was an important factor in providing the financial ability that ensured a decent life for the family, including appropriate education for its members. The annual yield of small seed corn in its red and white varieties was very large, and it was considered currency that people used when buying and selling by barter. At that time, we used to go to the grocery store with a little amount of corn to buy all the needs of the house, like sugar, tea, salt, and oil.

Corn is the main farming crop in Jazan. It used to be stored in large containers called ‘Ejār (plural of ‘Ajrah), and one ‘Ajrah is large enough to hold about nine large hollow sacks of rice and sugar of fifty kilograms each, and sometimes corn was stored directly in these sacks. The ‘Ejār were made locally from the fronds of the Doum palms in very beautiful artistic patterns. These corn-filled ‘Ejār were kept on the baulks of large Doum palms that were placed flat on the ground, thus the ‘Ejār were not touching the ground to prevent them from getting wet or eaten by termites. ‘Ejār and sacks filled with corn were brought from the farms at the end of the agricultural seasons, carried on camelback, and later on Toyota trucks. They were placed on top of each other in the manner previously explained in what is called stacking (Raṣṣ).

In the years when the harvest was bountiful, the stacking of ‘Ejār and sacks filled with corn in our house amounted to more than fifty ‘Ejār and two hundred sacks, stacked about five meters high and ten meters long. That precious stock was like a bank account or a safe in a house, meaning that the more corn available and stored in a house, the richer and of higher income its residents were.

My father, may Allāh have mercy upon him, had a lot of livestock, including sheep, cows, and camels. He also had many workers (the Shuqāh); men and women who were responsible for doing the housework and cultivating the land, and all of them were good people of the village.

The duties of the workers included fetching water from the wells, carried in clay vessels on donkeys. In each trip, the donkey would carry two jars of about twenty liters each, placed inside a net made of Doum palm fronds (Shibāk) resting on the donkey’s flanks and across the saddle where the rider sits. In return for a little corn, the water was filled by the person who worked at the well, called the Barrāḥ. At that time, there was only one well for all the villagers and their cattle to drink from. Sometimes, when the workers were busy with their private chores, as it was impossible for them to be available all week, we, the sons of the family, would fetch the necessary household supplies, and that was usually on the weekends, which fell on Thursdays and Fridays.

Things then developed to some extent, and people’s need for water increased. The water carried in clay pots was no longer sufficient, so there emerged the cart carrying a barrel on two wheels and pulled by a donkey. This was the case until the Toyota Hilux made an appearance in the late seventies, which greatly revolutionized the way things were done. After that came the stage of doing away with donkeys, and they started to gradually disappear. Many of them were carried in trucks without mercy to their final resting place far from the village, where many of them starved to death while the rest were run over on the international highway. Donkeys and their importance in transportation and carrying baggage vanished, and the usual place in Baish market for auctioning, buying, and selling them disappeared.

Everything about the village life was beautiful in terms of calmness, purity, and complete safety. I’m not just referring to the calmness and purity of the atmosphere and the cleanliness of the roads, but also to the calmness and purity of the souls and the cleanliness of the hearts. People loved each other and felt like brothers and sisters, without any formalities in their daily interactions. The houses were all built of straw and called ‘Ishash (shacks); sing. ‘Ish-shah, and the external fences were built of Samar and Markh trees and called Zurub (palisades); sing. Zarb. As for the internal partitions that were used as separators between the shacks and as curtains for them, they were called Mashārajāt; sing. Mashārij. There were no closed gates nor security guards. This setup might have been part of the immigrant heritage that was brought to the south of the Arabian Peninsula by immigrants across the maritime borders from neighboring countries in the fifties and sixties of that century. Naturally, the immigrant heritage was economically and socially compatible with the lifestyle of people then, especially since the Jazan region has a lot in common in its climate, topography, and agricultural products with the neighboring East African countries on the opposite side of the Red Sea. However, much of this heritage started to gradually fade away in the early eighties. The shacks were replaced by rooms built of unreinforced cement bricks covered with timber roofs. The palisades were also replaced by walls built of cement bricks.

The new rooms were built in a manner quite similar to that of shacks. Each room had two doors and two windows for ventilation and for cooling in the hot summer weather. These rooms were a place for receiving guests, gathering family members, and sleeping as well. They were internally decorated in a unique style, characterized by shelves that carried pots filled with sand for stability, and walls adorned with plates of different sizes and colors.

Unfortunately in the 1980s, as people’s financial situation improved, all this heritage disappeared very quickly, those rooms were replaced with villas, reinforced concrete houses, and public housing (all of a foreign character imported from abroad).

The newly constructed reinforced concrete housing in the Jazan region is not compatible with the environment and the nature of the hot humid weather throughout the year. The need for air conditioning, constant air cooling, and high electricity consumption has become a must for all classes of society. It costs a lot of money and makes it hard for people to live without. It is strongly recommended that architects implement designs compatible with the hot weather, that would be of high ceilings, special thermal insulators, wide windows, and dust barriers, while preserving the architectural heritage of the region.

Interior design of traditional houses in Jazan (١٩٦٠-١٩٨٥ AD)

In the recent past, the streets of the village were sandy (not paved), and how beautiful those streets paved with clean white sand were! And how filled those narrow alleys that connected those streets were with the scents of glorious history! It was a beautiful setting and spacious fields where we would come and go and play and have fun. They were beautiful days in every sense, and how I wished that the past would make a return, but it is impossible for it to return.

My father, may Allāh have mercy upon him, had a donkey that had a distinctive white color and a unique braying sound. That donkey was like a luxury car at that time. We would know that my father was almost home from work each afternoon by the distinctive braying of his donkey. That white donkey was my father’s daily means of transportation back and forth, from the village of Masliyah, where he lived, to his work in the Baish court, which was about eight kilometers away; and this was the case for several years.

Later on, my father’s financial circumstances improved a bit and he, may Allāh have mercy upon him, could afford to buy a Toyota “Jeep” with a soft-top. It was the second car in the village, as...