We rose, breakfasted and walked up to join Matt & Tim. It was already very warm but the windless morning air was thick with pollution and we could scarcely see the hill beyond. I found it a labour to breathe; every breath constricted and tainted, like a homeopathic suffocation! After some time at Matt's we went to an Internet cafe and thence to Gabe and Teresas for a student's tea party in honour of Sally, a volunteer returning to England. We saw Gabe, Theresa and Matthew in their element with the students. Matthew had set them the task of writing poems about food memories. His own was a memory of eating scones with Great Granny and Uncle David at Sidmouth. The poetry was funny, poignant and moving; several recalling rainy childhood days in Baghdad (memorable for their rarity) with faces pressed against the window as the smell of cooking and the chatter of family life mingled in the background. I spoke for a long time with Gabe. They are a rare couple. At a stage of life when most are drawing pensions and joining golf clubs they are learning Arabic, running the Iraqi Student Project and actively joining their convictions to their actions.
After the tea party we went shopping for a spare pair of trousers for me (having forgotten to pack any!), had a juice in the park then walked up to the Friday Market with Gabe, Theresa and the newly arrived Monica. The Friday Market is the market where Syrians go rather than tourists so it was full of useful everyday things rather than carpets, hangings and trinkets. Tim stayed with Matt and the students but we met together for a pizza before Terry and I returned to our hotel.
As we waited outside the pizza shop I played around with long exposures of night time street scenes. A group of young men were standing nearby watching. One came up to me offering me a share of his crisps and asking if I would like him to take the photo of me. His English was good and he explained he was a scout so England was important to him as the birth place of Baden Powell. I wonder how many English people could say Syria was important to them as the birth place of medicine, dentistry, literacy and mathematics?Terry and I walked back a different way down narrow streets awash with cars and pavements used as parking lots. Drivers and pedestrians had a mutual disrespect with jaywalking as abundant as pavement parking. The bit neither of us enjoyed was crossing the main road, a kind ofdeath street consisting of three lines of traffic chaos where the accepted crossing technique is a suicidal saunter into the traffic streams. The slower you cross the safer it is said to be since they see you with enough time to take evasive action. It takes courage to put yourself entirely at the mercy of the vested self interests that would avoid a dented bonnet and thereby aim to miss. It took less courage, however, than the cyclist we saw riding in the dark with no lights the wrong way down a three lane one-way street packed full of evening traffic.
Terry and I were fairly tired when we got back so quickly fell asleep. I tossed and turned and dreamed of being stopped by the police for riding without lights. Waking, the room was airless and my lungs still felt violated. Breathing was a conscious act you had to be careful not to forget. I lay writing until the 4.30 am call for prayer rose and fell like a tide in the darkness and consciousness drifted at last on the outgoing ebb.
Images - Tim in his element at the tea party (top); long exposure image of traffic on 'death street' - hence the ghostly figure (bottom).
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