Jeddah Update

Lily is seven years old and flying across the atlantic for the thirteenth time in her life. From Logan in Boston to Charles DuGall in Paris to the airport in Riyadh, the plane travels over miles of sand, rocks, and srub bushes. Vainly, she keeps her eyes peeled for cacti and camels, saying in in an awed voice again and again, “This is where I'm going to live!” Lily's mother sighs in vain and doesn't even try correcting her after the fifth time. The small girl ignores the women in black who surround her and her mother, their oddness vanishing after the first diplomatic faux paux that the seven year old has preformed.

The plane lands at last in Riyadh, where Lily's mother grasps her hand tightly. She manuevers with many years of practice and locates Lily's two older brothers. The oldest, Ben, is put in charge of Nathan, because Lily is the baby of the family. Each of the four members of this family carry a backpack and the three children carry in theirs each, two changes of clothing but four pairs of underwear, a toothbrush, and whatever books, toys, or games got stuffed into the backpacks before departing New Hampshire. The mother carries everybody's passports, travelers checks, and American money.

The airport in Riyadh is dark, closed in despite the high ceilings. At some point during the journey night had fallen. Lily needs to use the bathroom, but the only one her mother can find has not been cleaned, and there is shit on the floor among used toilet paper. The smell is overwhelming. Mom whisks Lily out the door, back into the large terminal conjunctions.

“Can you hold it?” She inquires.

After the smell, the green fluorescent lighting that filters onto the stained tiles, Lily can hold it. It is only an hour until the plane leaves for Jeddah. Lily and her mother go back to the terminal they left Lily's brothers in, and find them quickly.

Bored, and tired of sitting after long hours on various planes, Lily points to the balcony edge, a large circle of open air looking down on the airport level below the terminal conjuctions, surround by a plain, modern railing.

“Stay where I can see you,” her mother admonishes, and off Lily goes, to observe in secret the going ons of the people one level down.

Eagerly, the young girl crouches next to a decorative vase, and presses her face through the wooden bars. She stays very still for almost three minutes, a vast accomplishment at her young age. Then, she begins to contemplate what would happen if she spat. Just as Lily is measuring how much trouble she could get into, a she feels a hand run its fingers through her hair. She whirls, nearly tripping over her own feet, at this invasion of her personal space. She stands there, arms rigid, mouth slightly gaping. Her eyes are wide, shocked, staring at the three women cloaked in black who stroke her hair, one who touches her hands to her lips before pressing it to Lily's forehead. Lily waits, tensed, for them to walk away.

She runs, then, to her mother who is resting with one eye on her children and another on their bags. Lily runs into her mother's arms, and says “they touched me.”

Her mother turns abruptly, “What?”

“On my hair,” Lily nearly wails. “They, they pet me!”

Mom soothes Lily, running her fingrs through Lily's almost shoulder length hair. At seven, Lily's hair is still blond, and though darker now than it used to be, any light still catches the gold highlights that will fade in three years.

Her mother explains, not worried now, “Some of these women have never seen hair like yours, they're only admiring it.”

Lily nods, watching her brothers as they huddle over a gameboy.

***

Hot, humid. Dusty, yellow, tan. Five times a day there’s a musical language pouring out of minarets, five times a day the bustle of the city pauses, five times a day it is painfully obvious you don’t belong. But the cars still move because even Wahhabi Islam lets you continue to travel during the call to prayer. The fountains continue to run, beautiful cascades of fresh water over blue tile, or shooting ten, twenty, fifty feet into the cloudless sky; a tribute to Jeddah’s desalination facilities. Jeddah is the greenest, most lush city of Saudi Arabia. Of all of the King’s cities, palaces, and resorts, he prefers Jeddah—the botanical gem in a country where the sun bakes greenery dry, where the wind scours plants from the sand, and where anything left in the sand is consumed by the goats, sheep and camels.

Rain. For the first time in the year and a half she’s lived in Jeddah, there’s rain. Her face is pressed to the glass, watching, entranced by the water pouring down, rivulets streaming and pooling on the windowpane. Her breath fogs the glass, and she draws a happy face, wishing she could go outside. Downstairs her mother is laboring over the stove top, carefully measuring ingredients into a pot. The woman is making chocolate pudding, and she’s taken the day off from work—the rain making terrible drivers even worse. The real motive for her day off, however, is to keep her three children from going outside and playing in the downpour.

“It isn’t clean, it will make you sick.”

And she’s right. It doesn’t rain in Jeddah. The city hasn’t seen a downpour like this in the past hundred years. Every so often, perhaps during the winter months, where the temperature of the city might drop down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit and the children wear windbreakers to school, there might be a short shower, lasting perhaps five, maybe ten minutes. It doesn’t even get your hair wet, this shower, and children lay on the asphalt of the playground to make rain angels. All the greenery of Jeddah is provided by the ever vigilant gardeners, the extravagant sprinkler system set up in private gardens, the public workers watering the median strips were the palm trees grow. Jeddah’s sewer system isn’t equipped to handle rain. The sewer system was never meant to handle this much water.