1,001 Arabian Nights
When we first moved over here, my dad bought me a copy of Power, Faith, & Fantasy by Michael Oren. It’s basically the entire history of the relations between the United States and the Middle East region. A long book to be sure, but quite interesting. That’s where I learned that at one point the US had a camel cavalry!
One of the other things that I remember reading was about how a book titled One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (which is a compilation of many tales written arabic including “Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”) became wildly popular in the US and thus created a lot of interest in the Middle East and its culture.
For some reason or another I decided it would be fun to see if we “made it” to 1,001 nights here in our corner of Arabia. And we did! Or at least I have anyways. I actually reached it last Monday, but this Arabian life has taken its toll on me the past few weeks so I’ve been a bit behind in getting this post put together. Better late than never :)
As a quick update, our housing situation has once again become an issue. I feel like it’s hard to explain to people that have never lived here—housing is just such a big issue in this country and the renter is always as the mercy of the landlord. In our Bible Study all but 3 people (out of 11) have had significant housing issues over this past year. And it definitely doesn’t help that you have to pay your rent for the entire year up front… and it’s EXPENSIVE! Anyways, once we finally realized (why it took a realization, I don’t know) that it was all in God’s hands and we just needed to trust in Him and take prudent actions in the meantime, our situation has calmed a bit.
On 9 April, I received a call that we had to be moved out by 29 April. We were told there was only 1 person at the office that we could talk to about it and he was out of the office for the rest of the week but to com in on Saturday. Well long story short, we went in on Saturday and the guy walked right out the front door while we were waiting to talk to him, and he was not very nice about it when we confronted him! After 2 weeks of getting little-to-no information from “the-only-guy-that-has-the-information,” Paul finally got a hold of another one of their employees that gave us a little more background on the situation and made it sounds like we may not need to move out . We’re still not confident that we’re ok to keep living where we are until our lease is up (without having the power/water to our villa turned off), but we are confident that in the end God will work it out for the best.
And to end, I thought I would leave you with a photo of Paul in front of his weekly (or should I say daily?) Arabian lunch option of choice.
One of the other things that I remember reading was about how a book titled One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (which is a compilation of many tales written arabic including “Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”) became wildly popular in the US and thus created a lot of interest in the Middle East and its culture.
For some reason or another I decided it would be fun to see if we “made it” to 1,001 nights here in our corner of Arabia. And we did! Or at least I have anyways. I actually reached it last Monday, but this Arabian life has taken its toll on me the past few weeks so I’ve been a bit behind in getting this post put together. Better late than never :)
As a quick update, our housing situation has once again become an issue. I feel like it’s hard to explain to people that have never lived here—housing is just such a big issue in this country and the renter is always as the mercy of the landlord. In our Bible Study all but 3 people (out of 11) have had significant housing issues over this past year. And it definitely doesn’t help that you have to pay your rent for the entire year up front… and it’s EXPENSIVE! Anyways, once we finally realized (why it took a realization, I don’t know) that it was all in God’s hands and we just needed to trust in Him and take prudent actions in the meantime, our situation has calmed a bit.
On 9 April, I received a call that we had to be moved out by 29 April. We were told there was only 1 person at the office that we could talk to about it and he was out of the office for the rest of the week but to com in on Saturday. Well long story short, we went in on Saturday and the guy walked right out the front door while we were waiting to talk to him, and he was not very nice about it when we confronted him! After 2 weeks of getting little-to-no information from “the-only-guy-that-has-the-information,” Paul finally got a hold of another one of their employees that gave us a little more background on the situation and made it sounds like we may not need to move out . We’re still not confident that we’re ok to keep living where we are until our lease is up (without having the power/water to our villa turned off), but we are confident that in the end God will work it out for the best.
And to end, I thought I would leave you with a photo of Paul in front of his weekly (or should I say daily?) Arabian lunch option of choice.
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1 comments:
Perseverance and faith have been strengthened and refined in the sometimes odd world of the Middle East. :)
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