I was standing on a dusty dirt road strewn with stones, waiting for my tour group to finish in the little local museum with our lecturer and guide. It was toward the end of a beautiful sunny day and almost at the end of our 17-day tour of Yemen, Arabia Felix.
A little boy, about four or five, maybe a little older, was hanging around me. That wasn’t unusual. For some reason I cannot explain, all over the world I traveled, children were drawn to me, especially little boys and some older. Maybe they hadn’t seen a woman with red hair before. I traveled mostly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In China, sometimes, even adults wanted to touch my curly red hair.
I was tired, it had been one of the most challenging, exhausting, stressful, amazing, difficult tours I’ve ever managed — and yet, remains to this day one of my favorites.
It was February of 1998, the U.S. was threatening to bomb Iraq, unless Kofi Annan was able to broker a deal. He was. Some of the Yemeni tribes were taking foreign tour groups hostage as bargaining chips. They used to treat the hostages more like guests while they negotiated with the government until they realized it was too expensive. Now they were trying to capture just one or two tourists, so it was becoming more dangerous. And on our all day drive across the Arabian desert, we had armed Bedouin escorts to protect us from carjackings. I was the Tour Manager.
Yemen was one of the most exotic places I’ve been. Geographically, culturally, historically cut off from the rest of the world by Saudi Arabia and the Arabian desert, it was like going back in time.
Suddenly the little boy bent down and picked up a stone.
He gave it to me. It had delicate fossils etched in it on both sides, hard to believe it was natural. I was surprised and delighted.
My experience all over the world was if a kid gave me something, it was usually followed by ‘bonbon’? ‘stylo’? ‘dinar’?; they wanted something in return. Not this one.
There was a little ice cream cart nearby so I offered him an ice cream. No, he didn’t want it.
He wanted nothing but to give me that precious gift.
“Shukran!” I thanked him, one of the few words I knew in Arabic.
I treasure that little chunk of rock with the beautiful fossils and the memory of that little boy. I wish I had taken a picture of him, but he is embedded in my memory.
I wonder how he is now, almost 25 years later. Is he alive? Does he remember the red-headed foreign woman? Is he surviving the civil war and bombs of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in his beautiful, savage country? A country where there were more guns than people and men wear the djambia, the curved dagger, at their waist.
Alice L
3/28/22
500 words