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KUWAIT
Beautiful Dancing Ladies
By
Jheri St. James
“I know I was sleeping with a knife, and I was waking up with the cold
sweats, because we were sleeping on the ninth floor, the top floor where we live,
and if that elevator comes up to the top, we know we’re not having company.”
“
And you can hear the elevator?”
“
All night long.”
This is the beginning of the story of the February 2005, Kuwait soil-collection— just
a guy picking up some dirt.
He describes Kuwait as he saw it. “There are skirmishes going on, bombings
in Kuwait. It’s exactly as it’s always been. They killed nine people
in the last ten days. It’s been on the BBC; it’s been on CNN once.
When it’s on CNN, that’s when I call my wife and let her know I’m
okay. Starting around January 15th, there seems to have been one cell that’s
causing a lot of trouble, and it’s continuing and escalating violence.
I imagine it’s only going to get worse because they’re letting four
Kuwaiti guys go from Guantanamo Bay right now. So they’re going to come
home and tell their stories, and now they have attitudes. You can’t be
locked up for three years and not have an attitude. So my feeling is it’s
going to get worse.”
“And if I remember right, didn’t we save Kuwait?” asks Gary
Simpson, creator of Common Ground 191.
“
That’s what’s so strange about it. Some guys I worked with were in
the service back in ’91, and at that time the hotel at the airport was
bombed, and the tower was bombed. But it was all rebuilt again. For some reason
they want to support the Jihad, and I don’t know why.”
“
Did that come from the levels of government or is it the insurgents?”
“
It’s definitely insurgents. Every time they arrest people, there are normally
one or two Saudis among them, so they’re coming from Saudi Arabia, absolutely.”
“
What is the government of Kuwait doing?”
“
Oh, they’re clamping down like you wouldn’t believe. Tapping telephones,
and when you pick up your phone you can hear the signals.”
“
Are they being assisted by U.S. troops?”
“
Not publicly, they’re not. The U.S. is saying, ‘we support what they’re
doing, and we back them and we have 100 percent confidence in them,’ but
at the same time soldiers aren’t allowed off the base in Kuwait City anymore.
So they’re not backing them very much.”
“
So they’re not supporting them as they are in Iraq? They’re not on
the streets?”
“
No, there are only two main bases.”
“
You were there for three weeks. What was your day like there?”
“
Depending on what kind of plane comes in, you drive to the airport, you work
the airplane, and you go home.”
“
You drive to the airport? Where are you staying?”
“
Oh, I live in a town called Salmiya, which is 35 miles away from the airport.
We’re the only Westerners in the town. We stick out like sore thumbs. I
saved an article from a newspaper, because they caught the head insurgent’s
wife in a building just a few buildings over from us.”
“
Aren’t you at risk there?”
“
Oh, absolutely!”
“
What does your boss say about that? Don’t they take any precautions?”
“
Change the Suburban two times a week. We get a new car, so they don’t recognize
us. They’re not doing much at all.”
“
If you had your way, what would be the prescription so you would be safer?”
“
I’m not going back. I’m done.”
“
Do you have the opportunity to be in an area where the military are, so you’re
safer? Kuwait City?”
“
Well, you could stay at a place called the Safar Hotel but that’s a dump
that sits right on the airport property.”
“
It may be a dump, but you’d still be alive more likely, wouldn’t
you?”
“
Well, yeah, I guess, but if I don’t go back I’ll still be alive,
and it will be just as good.”
* * *
The
State of Kuwait (Dawlat al Kuwayt) borders the Persian
Gulf, located between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, in a
country slightly smaller than the state of
New Jersey in the USA. It is a sandy desert—intensely
hot summers and short, cool winters—flat to slightly
undulating terrain. Its environmental challenges include
air/water pollution and desertification. Kuwait is a small,
rich, relatively
open economy with proven crude oil reserves of about 98 billion barrels—10%
of world reserves since 1946. As this small state depends almost wholly
on imported food, and about 75% of their water must be distilled or imported,
it has some
of the world’s largest and most sophisticated desalination facilities.
Kuwait is also the name of the capital city, which was founded in the
18th century by a tribal confederation of Arabic people, the Al-Sabah dynasty.
*
* *
“
Sometimes it’s a spoon in the dirt and into the bag it goes.”
“ Especially in the places where you were.”
“
Salmiya was a beach on the Gulf. It seems to be a marina for the people with
money—boats and things like that. The reason I took the soil from there
was because of these three women sitting in beach chairs, as we do here, but
they were fully masked, in black. I mean why bother sitting on the sand if you’re
going to be fully clothed? I just happened to be out one day, and I keep the
bag in my pocket. And you know, I saw some beach area, and I thought, ‘This
is as good a place as any.’”
“
When you say it’s a beach, I was thinking lake or sea, but there
are pools there as well?”
“
Right now it’s a little cold. The temperature is probably 20 C, which is
about 40-45 degrees. But I would be curious as to what the summer beach activities
are, because men and women can’t intermingle. They can’t go swimming
together because there’s a men’s pool and a women’s pool.”
“ Is it like a country club setting? Are there buildings?”
“
No, in a far stretch, it’s like Hawaii, where you have a road, maybe a
six-lane road going across and then there’s condominiums on the other side
and then there’s just beaches and restaurants. And places where you
can walk, places where you can sit out on the point and watch the water,
basketball
courts.”
“ Like Laguna Beach in a way?”
“
Exactly. But you’re 8,000 miles away.”
“ And the people are all covered up.”
“
The people who wear Arabic dress are. Some men wear three-piece suits, some men
wear jeans, some kids wear shorts and some wear Arabic dress with the headpiece.
So you have all different people. Because the largest hospital in Kuwait is for
plastic surgery, I’ve never seen more beautiful women in my life. But they
all sit with each other. And they sneak a peek now and then. And the guys all
hug each other. I was in Starbucks. There’s a Starbucks on every corner
because there’s no alcohol. There were two guys sitting here and two girls
sitting over here, and a computer one guy was typing on. Well a third guy came
in and one of the guys got up and he hugged him and he kissed him on both cheeks,
and then went to the other guy and did the same thing. And when he came to the
women, he just held his hand out. I almost jumped up and said, ‘Hey, what
are you doing? Shake the guys’ hands and kiss the woman!’ I
really had to hold myself back because it was starting to affect my brain.”
“
I’m sure it’s a very cosmopolitan city.”
“
What do they say about Lebanon—the Paris of the Middle East?
It’s
not quite that. There are definitely beautiful shopping centers and
all the most expensive watches and things they have. There’s
TGI Fridays, there’s
Chili’s—all the restaurants that are here are over there.
And there’s
a bar, but no alcohol is served, just virgin drinks.”
*
* *
The
women of Kuwait do a traditional dance called Khaleegi, the
Kuwaiti Gulf Dance, wearing very long caftans, which
they raise in their
hands up as they
shuffle to a 6/8 musical rhythm. The caftans are brilliantly
colored (blue, fuschia, yellow, green), sometimes sheer,
and extremely
ornately decorated
in a complex
tapestry of beads and sequins. The sleeves are also very long,
with very deep openings on the sides. To watch women
perform the Khaleegi
dance is
a gorgeous
study of movement and color. They swing their dresses, their
heads and long, glossy hair from side to side, in movements
that resemble
the opening
and closing
of a flower in a kaleidoscope. Sometimes they take the edge of
one sleeve and pull it overhead to form a hood, and continue
shuffling
as they slide
their
heads from side to side with a modest yet flirtatious air. Other
times they’ll
lift one hand up and shake it.
*
* *
“
Very rocky, almost like a jetty, just to avoid erosion, and then there’s
the beach and the little blue markers where they don’t want people to swim
past, so obviously it’s a swimming beach in warm weather. Everything there
is sand. But I’m almost positive if I took a sample at the beach
and I took a sample 40 miles away, it would be the same stuff. The whole
region
is
sand, unless they put concrete.
“
The route we go, we have to go through the coalition forces because I have a
military I.D., because we do a lot of military flights. You have to drive through—the
Kuwaitis have a road and we at the airport have nothing but dirt that’s
hard until it rains, and then it’s mud. The weird thing is that water pipes
aren’t underground. As you’re walking around on the streets, you’re
stepping over water pipes that bring water into the city. I don’t
know why that is, but they just leave them up on top.”
“ How big around are they?”
“
Whatever that is—like 10 inches across. You have to make an effort to get
over them. They’re on the ground, metal pipes . . . I’m sure I’ll
be back even though I said I wouldn’t go. I like the duckets they
put in my bank account every two weeks.”
“ Do they give you extra money because of the danger?”
“
No, no. They don’t consider it dangerous, because they don’t
go.”
“
You’re really quite the adventurer, though.”
“
I don’t know about that. Maybe I’m just blindly optimistic that nothing’s
going to happen to me.”
“ Right.”
“ How do the pilots feel about flying in and out of there? Those areas?”
“
All they do is complain. There’s no such thing as amnesty.
In the beginning there was hope. Flying into Kuwait when
the war was beginning? You would fly
in between the SCUDs. You could see a
G.I. sitting in a lawn chair next to a SCUD and you were
hoping that he was paying attention, because there would
be
one this way and then, in another few
feet, another one on the other side of the runway, pointed
straight up. So that was unnerving. They don’t like
it but they stay at a hotel downtown
right near the airport and the hotel has a 10-ft. barrier
around it, so they have some protection there. I guess it
will
take something to happen to someone before
they stop flying there. When we fly to Bahrain, we can see
all these planes that are well past their prime, and pilots
from New Zealand, America, England—they’re
from everywhere and they fly into Baghdad
every day. And it’s like, ‘what
have you guys done wrong?’ They
get paid for flights. We fly armor-coated
vehicles into Kuwait and then we give
them to a Russian airline and they have
to pay cash before they
take off. And then they take the cash
with them. Which to me doesn’t
make any sense, because if they blow
the flight up . . .”
*
* *
We
end our eavesdropping on this conversation with the question:
Does this sound
like a soil-collection project,
a sand-collecting
project?
No, it
sounds like
an action movie, a soldier of fortune
in a foreign land, observing the
native people
and
their customs,
the terrain,
ducking gunfire.
It certainly
doesn’t
sound like an art project in that most
peaceful of resorts, art villages,
Laguna Beach, California. But it is,
and that’s what makes Common
Ground 191 so endlessly fascinating—the
stories and the fusion of all these
soils and their stories into one huge
fresco, representing the possibilities
of peace
through art. And hopefully the beautiful
ladies of Kuwait will always continue
practicing
the art of Khaleegi.
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