The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  I was really struggling, in every way.

  I’d go to gatherings with old mates from school or uni days and try to keep a stiff upper lip. But all the while I couldn’t escape the terrible knowledge that I was in the deepest financial trouble of anyone in the room. These were the times when I would question all the major decisions I had taken in my life and my compulsion to keep moving in search of bigger and better adventures, to follow my wild dreams. If I hadn’t said ‘yes’ to Heath Harris’s offer all those years ago, might I now have been better off? I had come to live by the maxim that he who dies with the most good stories wins and, sure, I had accumulated a great trove of experiences, but what use were they to me now?

  My mates had run a steady race. They’d stayed in one place; they’d been married for twenty-five years; they had their houses in St Ives, worth a small fortune; and by and large they had happy families, with kids from stable homes ready to set off to university and start the cycle all over again. And what had I done? I’d been to Mongolia, to Ladakh and to Rajasthan. And now here I was with a big fat nothing. It was a terrible feeling, and I did everything I could to hide it from my mates.

  Mostly my friends didn’t realise how bad things had become, or they didn’t want to ask. But one of my dearest friends, Frank, sensed something was wrong and called to ask if I was all right. I replied that, yes, everything was fine, no worries. However, a couple of days later I rang him back. I swallowed my pride and asked him if he could lend me a couple of thousand dollars, to get me through a particularly tough patch. Later, when the wheel turned, I was able to give Frank a beautiful Kashan carpet from Iran, which I am glad to say more than repaid my debt to him.

  For a year or so I lived a hand-to-mouth existence. It was pretty ordinary. I remember very clearly when the lowest point came.

  I had nothing in the bank. I had no credit left, except on one card which was always maxed out. For the first time I understood the full meaning of the credit card trap and got a sense of why so many others only just managed to survive. Walking past a café in the main street in Wangaratta, I put my hand in my pocket and realised that all I had was $1.75. I couldn’t even afford a coffee. I was at zero—and I feared it was going to get worse.

  But, no matter how broke I was, I refused to sell my antiques. Camels and antiques were my great obsessions and they were intrinsically linked, given the camel’s role in trade across the Middle East. I had slowly gathered a great collection: swords, guns, cabinets, Syrian furniture, Portuguese pieces out of Oman, chests, boxes, carved doors, carpets and silver goods. I always feel that the objects we gather around ourselves reflect who we are, more so than our houses. Most of these things represent key points in our lives, both the highs and the lows. When I’m happy, I spend money. And when I’m pissed off, I spend money. I appreciate the concept of collecting and I like the idea of buying quality stuff, which can be passed down from generation to generation. This was more important to me than cashing them in to get by.

  I realised the only chance I had of coming back from the brink was to return to Al Ain. But I also knew I couldn’t make the first call.

  Thankfully, the wheels of destiny were about to turn again.

  When you want something badly enough and you finally get it, you will always remember the exact moment when it arrives. I was getting out of my car outside my brother’s vet clinic when my mobile rang. It was my old manager at the Hilli research centre calling. It seemed that since I left there had been zero high-tech breeding or research—everything had come to a halt. He called to relay the news from Sheikh Sultan that the embryo program needed to start up again.

  Not for the first time, the camels had come calling. The difference this time was that I knew one hundred per cent what that meant. And I was hanging out for it.

  Not that I let on.

  Twenty-two

  City boy to desert nomad

  When I returned to Al Ain I realised immediately how much it had become part of me, and me of it. You might say it was my destiny.

  I even managed to find the sign that my old friend Yafour had knocked up for me almost fifteen years before as I had put the finishing touches on the Tinson family home. There it was, discarded in some building rubbish out the back: ‘WARNING! Reduce speed. Children and camels around.’ The family was no longer in the house, but here was a sign, surely, that I was back where I belonged. I dusted off Yafour’s handiwork to reveal the familiar white lettering on red-for-urgent background and leant it up against a wall at the entrance to the driveway.

  In my absence the house had been occupied by Sheikh Sultan’s son, who had decked it out in hues of red, black and gold and shipped in huge luminescent blue lounges and ornate ivory-coloured bedheads. Some might call this garish; I loved it all. But the young sheikh had removed the various aquariums I once used to house my collection of snakes and lizards. I would have to reinstate a new collection, just to feel completely at home.

  Returning to Australia had been a transformative moment: I discovered that I didn’t belong there anymore. I felt safe back in Al Ain and not just in a financial sense, as important as that was. It defies the stereotype so many outsiders hold of the Arab world, but I actually felt physically safer. When people see conflict in the Middle East, they assume you could be killed any minute by a gun-toting, wild-eyed extremist. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, especially in the UAE where internal security is uncompromising. With my network of old Emirati friends I also felt I had a safety net of protection if anything should go wrong, financially or in any other way.

  And maybe, above all, I felt safe because I was doing what I was designed to do.

  I took myself off to catch up with the trainers out at the various camel camps and renew my acquaintance with them. Over the years the camps had been my office, the place where I plied my trade. I guess I had regarded them in very practical terms—as functional places for animals. I had become familiar with them to the point of being blasé about how truly exotic they were. But now coming back to them, just for a moment I was able to see them with the eyes of a newcomer.

  In one corner of the enclosure camels sat as a group on the sand, their legs tucked neatly under their bodies, all dressed in their patterned blue cotton covers, secured with rope under their bellies. On their muzzles were red, coarse-knitted covers resembling a tea-cosy to stop them from ingesting stones or sand should they attempt to graze between feeding times.

  If anyone approached, one would let out a long, low, guttural grunt, a sign to the rest that a stranger was around. Others in the herd would slowly crane their necks to take in the intruder before returning to their business. In another part of the enclosure the camel boys stood by their charges, holding onto them with rope tethers as the camels bent their necks low to scoop up feed.

  Across the way groups of camels in their threes and fours stuck close together, were mooching slowly across the red sands behind the lead camel, with a camel handler sitting cross-legged atop. As the sun descended, the handlers and their camels turned into silhouettes, shrinking smaller and smaller until they flickered out of sight.

  Heath Harris had always said the UAE was like a giant film set, and so it was. No other setting can conjure images like this. I understood then that I was a city boy who’d become a desert nomad.

  Being the one westerner amongst the Bedouin was something I had always cherished. It was like this out in the desert, where we might have set up a camel camp or just be sitting together around a fire. I could have a decent conversation about most things in Bedouin Arabic, which made me feel that I had a rare connection. At the same time, it made me aware that I was different.

  If I think about it, I’ve always gravitated to being alone in the middle of nature, whether it be in the bush, the desert or even the ocean. But the desert has a special sort of emptiness. In the golden sand and brilliant blue sky there’s a feeling of tranquillity and a sense of quiet power. The silence is complete and enveloping. The landscape is
stark, and beautifully so. In its vastness you feel small. Its tranquillity overwhelms the agitation of your thoughts. The desert is a time as much as it is a place.

  The camel looks regal in these surroundings. It belongs there. And so do I.

  There had been a convulsive change during my absence. The President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed, had passed away. For thirty-three years he had ruled the UAE and guided its development through extreme change; the majority of Emiratis had known no other leader. They had a relationship with him that is unknowable in a western democracy, where prime ministers and presidents come and go.

  One major consequence was that my ultimate boss, the Crown Prince, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, had been elevated to the office of president. I would therefore be responsible to the most powerful man in the country. Ultimately this would have implications for the scientific research.

  The change posed big questions. What direction would the country take now? Would a younger generation of leaders care less for the old ways? In short, the UAE was at a crossroads.

  Sheikh Zayed’s death had brought a time of reckoning for the country. Sheikh Zayed was the symbol of old Arabia, and seen perhaps as its custodian. It is almost impossible for an outsider to understand the reverence and affection that the Emiratis had and continue to have for Sheikh Zayed.

  I was given a glimpse of this at the first races I attended in the days after I arrived all those years ago, when dozens of men had surrounded the sheikh to show their respect and adoration. It was a scene I saw repeated many times over. When his death was announced on Abu Dhabi television, the newsreader broke down in tears and was unable to complete the report.

  When Sheikh Zayed was born in 1918, there was no such thing as the United Arab Emirates, just a collection of tribes clustered around various powerful families who controlled swathes of the desert. For much of his life the locals were dirt poor, living in huts made of palm fronds and washing themselves by rubbing sand across their bodies. They survived extreme heat and severe winds without relief. Those on the coast made a living out of diving for pearls, but this was dangerous work and for little reward. It was a time of no electricity and therefore no air-conditioning against the fifty-degree-plus heat, so in the summer families living on the coast would make the trip inland to Al Ain across the desert by camel, to escape the unbearable humidity. It was a journey of more than a week and it was not uncommon for some of the old and the very young to die on the way.

  In the time before oil transformed the UAE, Sheikh Zayed would travel by camel around the Abu Dhabi emirate. The discovery of oil, of course, changed everything. Suddenly a man born and raised in the desert needed to negotiate deals with American and British oil companies.

  When it came to uniting the seven sheikhdoms in the early 1970s, Sheikh Zayed didn’t have access to phones, faxes and email to communicate and make a deal with the disparate groups. He had to meet face to face with the leaders of tribes and families and come to arrangements that would work for all of them.

  He also had to argue for a vision that would dramatically change the Emiratis’ way of life forever. He wanted to use the wealth of oil to open up a land that had been closed for centuries, to make it a modern, internationalised state. Sheikh Zayed had convinced sceptical tribal leaders that it was in the national interest to have development on a scale and at a speed that was perhaps unprecedented.

  Ultimately he achieved this through sheer force of personality. But thirty-three years on from the founding of the UAE, change had brought its own price.

  One point often lost is that the Emiratis are a minority in their own land. At the time of Sheikh Zayed’s death, Emiratis numbered only some 500,000 out of a population of about four million. As a consequence, the locals risked seeing their culture and their identity overrun by the glitzy influences of the west. Alcohol. Fast food. Television. The values of a permissive and godless society were suddenly on the Emiratis’ very doorstep.

  In historical terms, all of this massive change had happened pretty well overnight. So there was a deep concern about the loss of cultural identity and heritage that comes from moving away from traditional roots.

  One of my head trainers, Rashid, is a good example of the impact of modernisation on Emirati families and the pressure it has brought to bear inside families. Rashid was born in Al Ain and grew up as a real camel man. In the 1950s and 1960s he was a camel jockey, and as a kid he would ride a camel in wedding celebrations, festivals and so on as well as at the races. It’s extraordinary to think that when I was at school watching man first walk on the moon, Rashid was riding camels around the oasis.

  In the space of one generation, Rashid’s family went in dramatically different directions. His oldest son attended university and worked in medicine; his life has taken him away from his traditional camel roots. Rashid’s second son, on the other hand, finished high school and decided to work with camels. Financially this was a good choice, because the really good camel trainers who train for the sheikhs can make a small fortune.

  The pull of modernity has created tensions like this in many Emirati families. Sons have moved away from rural areas to cities like Abu Dhabi and Dubai to pursue work, others will travel to universities in the UK, the USA or Australia and become exposed to completely new cultures and ways of thinking. It’s become a huge challenge for the society. Since the beginning, family and tribe have been the centre of life. Now they are both under stress.

  It was entirely possible that, with the death of Sheikh Zayed, the camels might have taken a big nosedive. But they didn’t. If anything, they became more and more important as a means of preserving Emirati identity. The camel had been central to the survival of the desert people. You would carry your family and all your possessions on a camel. You would sleep next to your camel. You were defined by the number of camels you possessed. Historically, without your camel, you were nothing. Now it was time to repay the debt.

  There was much to do to rekindle the work of the research centre. When it was closed down, all the staff went with it, as did a good deal of the lab equipment. Now there was a new manager, a young Emirati called Mansour bin Saad. Coincidentally, Mansour’s father was one of my bosses when I had first arrived in Al Ain. Mansour knew instinctively how important camels were to his society and was committed to preserving this identity. He was more progressive and more aggressive than previous managers I’d had.

  I decided that I would return to camel research for just seven months of the year to give me time to continue with the HEF Foundation work as well as other camel pursuits. But that arrangement wouldn’t last long. In a couple of years the work became too intense to take any break at all.

  Twenty-three

  A secret surprise

  It was not just me who felt most at home at Al Ain. My daughter Katya, too, knew that her heart and home were in the United Arab Emirates.

  Katya came to visit soon after I’d moved back and it wasn’t long before she ‘bumped into’ Khaled. And thus a great love story that had started when the two were teenagers took a new and decisive turn.

  Despite the concerns and warnings of both families, it was obvious that there was no keeping these two apart. Katya and Khaled had decided they needed to be together, and Katya let me know this was serious. And besides, she was no longer a child.

  Now, at age twenty-seven, my eldest daughter faced a real dilemma. She loved Khaled, but could she take the next step? Could she marry a man from a different culture and in some ways a different universe, and contemplate the rest of her life in an adopted country where she might not be accepted? And how would Khaled’s family react? Being in love was the easy part; being together in marriage appeared devilishly complicated. Katya and Khaled had to confront tremendous barriers, both official and unofficial.

  Khaled was happy to eliminate one potentially major issue. He made no demand that Katya convert to Islam. Khaled’s view was that Katya was a westerner and there was no need. But whatever pri
vate concessions Katya and Khaled might make in order to ease the way, none of this was going to be easy. It is highly unusual—in fact, it almost never happens—for an Emirati man to marry a western woman. And the opposite—an Emirati woman marrying a western man—is even rarer.

  The coming together of two families through marriage is a major event in the life of any Emirati family. It occasionally has to do with love, but most marriages have a much more practical function. Normally they represent tribal alliances, and traditionally marriage was a means of uniting different families into a power grouping. By tradition, too, the maintenance of the tribe was the paramount consideration and, in order to survive the randomness of life in the desert, families did not permit the infiltration of outsiders. And you couldn’t get much more of an outsider than Katya.

  There has been more and more pressure on the traditional ways as modernity crept into the Emirates. In the face of that, the institution of marriage has remained a bastion of tradition. Family is the cornerstone of life, much more so than in the individualistic west, where the traditional concept of family is pretty well shattered. The pressure of being such a minority in one’s own country also makes the institution of marriage that much more important. There is a desire to preserve the purity of the Emirati population in the face of cultural invasion.

  Indeed, Katya and Khaled would need to find their way through a system which was geared to prevent a mixed marriage. First, there are financial penalties. While Emiratis are given land and a house when they marry and large sums of cash, this is denied to those in a mixed marriage. This is set out in black and white in the UAE government’s official Marriage Fund book and is a way to encourage Emirati men to marry Emirati women.

  By tradition, getting married involves negotiating over the size of the dowry that the bride will bring to the marriage. This can be a large amount of money, which then goes to help the husband establish a home. The risk, though, is that if things don’t work out then the woman can be left in a precarious financial position. The two agreed that in this case Katya would contribute a nominal dowry.