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portraits BETWEEN RUSTAQ AND IBRI

written and photographed by PINAKI CHAKRAVARTY

“I hope they don’t develop this land,
because it is everything we have ever had”

SAMIYA
40 Q 0521953, 2593824

Hamdan bin Salim bin Rashid al Hathamy doesn’t know how old he is. “Perhaps 80 or 90,” he shouts, half deaf, seven kilometres into a dead-end wadi he has been living in for almost a half century. There is nothing here, not even water, just more goats and sheep than you can count, two concrete rooms, a few tents of discarded plastic sheets and a very old man and his family.

“We are from Jebel Shams,” he yells into the wind, and all the lambs prick their ears. “We were shawawi, and spent the summer up on the top of the jebel, when the weather was good. When it got too cold, we’d go down the slopes in winter. I have seen many sheikhs after we got here. The first was Nasser bin Rashid al Ghafari, and then came his son Mohammed, in turn succeeded by Khalid bin Saif bin Nasser al Ghafari.”

Hamdan pauses for breath, in the dull overcast light of a winter morning. A young woman peeks out from behind the netted window. Two ewes trot over the next stone-strewn mound, bleating, and are immediately mobbed by black and white lambs. Nothing has changed in this wadi for the past 50 years – even the four-wheel drive that is a later edition is of ancient origin.

Hamdan coughs into his dishdasha. “We never had any water here, we’d have to carry the goatskins back home, and return for more when they ran dry. We’d manage to live three days from just one skin – covering our drinking, washing before praying and animals.” You can still see the goatskin hanging from a tent beam, although they do have other more modern containers. The Hathamys have to drive to the mouth of the wadi where you will find a couple of houses, and farms, where wells were dug decades after Hamdan got here. “Even this track is a big problem – it washes away every time the rains come and the wadi floods. We want a road.

“I may not know how many years old I am, but I have experienced a lot in life. Our habits have changed – we were happy with little things in the past. I prefer the old days – they were so much simpler. The increase in population is a problem.” Hamdan isn’t above blame – he fathered three sons and three daughters. Partly because of the lack of possibility in the wadi, four of his offspring remain unmarried. One grandson was on the mats, doing sums as the goats nibbled nearby. Majid is around 20 and in Gulf College in Muscat, and smiles sheepishly as his grandfather launches into another paragraph of raised voice.

“I have no salary, and I have given everything I had to my sons when they got married. Now I have only these animals as my sole income. The goats used to be easy to keep in the old days, when there was good grazing. Now, I have to buy them fodder from Rustaq.” It seems a lot better at the mouth of Wadi Samiya, where the wells are dug and the people live close to the Rustaq-Ibri highway. You will find Walid bin Hamed bin Said al Hathami here, one of just 12 people who make their home in the wadi, spread over three houses and a well that they dug more than 30 years ago. Walid is in high school, and dreams of finishing university and getting a job with the government.

KHADA
40 Q 0527468, 2588515

Khada is the place everyone talks of in the surrounding villages – the wadi is so overflowing with water and trees that it is rumoured the government will spend millions on tourism projects here. That might be a long shot, but the place is certainly a hit with the locals.

But a few metres above the carefree splashing, Abdullah bin Khamis bin Salim al Haramali is digging in the mud, creating channels for the water flowing through the falaj beside. Abdullah is 70, much too old for this, for the RO20 he might scrape by selling his greens. “My sons are all married and far away,” he says, in between shovelling. “They don’t send me any money, so I support my wife through the land. I worked in the service for 21 years, but I don’t get a pension.”

So Abdullah has been forgotten by his children and might be much too old to dig, but you wouldn’t catch a hint of bitterness in the voice, not even as he squishes his toes through the mud, hitches up his loincloth and tells you what his life amounts too.

That isn’t much at all. He has a few patches of land, but these terraces are so fertile that they’ve been cut up and distributed among people from here to Khafdi and Rustaq. And no one has a single, large plot that might be in a better position than someone else’s. Instead, they’re all mixed up, so you might have a little sliver here, and another a few terraces down, so no one complains. Abdullah starts to dig on another terrace as we talk. “This one here isn’t even mine, but the owner lives in Rustaq and doesn’t have the time to tend it. So he lets me cultivate it for free, and I can keep the money I earn.” Anything that adds to the RO20 a month is a big help.

The setting is glorious, almost unbelievable, high on this terrace with green fields laid out, mountains straight ahead and rain clouds above. Anything seemed possible, even an old man in his tattered undershirt tilling the land.

“For 20 years we had no water here, and life was bad. I don’t know how it happened, but the water started flowing through this wadi after Gonu. And it hasn’t stopped since. I hope they don’t develop this land, because it is everything we have ever had.”

KHAFDI
40 Q 0529895, 2590413

Yasser bin Mohsin al Ghafari is 58 years old, now retired after many years spent with mines in the army. His heavily kohl-lined eyes flit over the part of Khafdi you don’t see from the highway: the old town at the back, sandwiched between new concrete and the wadi. This is the abandoned quarter of al Hajra, now just about 50 houses crumbling into each other. You will find other instances like this in your travels through the country, of towns being given a new name with a new lease of life, usually a well and similar infrastructure being introduced from the 1970s onwards.

Khafdi is barely more than a signpost as you make your way from Rustaq, on the brand-new road to Ibri, but turn off to the right and you will discover generations of history, survival and eventual prosperity. Everything stems from Wadi Bani Ghafer, from which the settlement draws an unimaginable amount of water that spurts out of many wells in the old town, almost overflowing the channels that criss-cross the plantations of lemon, mango, safarjal and date even as the new town is supplied by a government-piped supply.

The wadi is also home to the Ghafari tribe, who for centuries moved with their goats, following the water, between mountain and valley. They settled down when they dug wells, and you will find them in Rustaq and along the other little settlements towards Ibri.

“We haven’t destroyed the old town because it is a part of our history,” says Yasser. “We know it is special, and hope it can be preserved. In the past life was very difficult, but the new roads, like this one and the other from Ibri to Buraimi helped a lot. We used to trek to Rustaq to sell our produce, or make the 360km journey to the Batinah coast. Now, our wells are famous for their supply and what they have done for us. Today we are 600 strong, with six schools and a hospital with a staff of 30. Imagine that!” Yasser walks past the most imposing structure in Khafdi, the old sheikh’s house. It is done in sarooj, like the rest of the old town – the deep brown earthen mix that Omanis used before cement. The sheikh’s house looks massive, almost fortified, and encompasses its own well. This was the way it used to be in the old days, and the other villagers had access to public wells. Now, though, Sheikh Khalid bin Saif al Ghafari lives in Rustaq, which is the regional centre that all the little settlements along this road look towards.

SAI
40 Q 0527074, 2589180

There might only be five houses in Sai, but they all have electricity, water and even a GSM transmitter flung up on a nearby hill. Khalah bin Mattar al Wehi is 53 and has retired from the navy to his home of 50 years. “My family is originally from Musanna, 8km west of Rustaq. I was just a little boy when my father moved here.” Khalah is in a faded orange t-shirt and baggy blue shorts, and he wants two things. “Even with this GSM transmitter on the hill the signal is very weak,” he says, before pointing to the quarter kilometre of smooth earthen track that leads to the Rustaq-Ibri highway, shouting distance away. “And we want a concrete road. We’d been to the ministry a couple of months ago and they promised us one. The government owns the land here – we want them to give us a bit to build a mosque on.” Such demands might take a while to be fulfilled, because Sai is pretty well off compared to a lot of other anonymous settlements off the highway.

Marhoun Ali as Suleimani, 21, walks us five minutes into the wadi where a clear pool of water called al Habb is fed somewhere through the crack in the rocks. “This spring is very special – we believe that people can cure their skin ailments by bathing in it.” Marhoun is studying Arabic at Dubai College, has interned at Al Bayan newspaper in the Emirates and hopes to find work in the media there. “We put together RO2,000 for a pipe and generator, but now the government supplies us three times a week.”