The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  But Fatima could see that Katya was good at managing Hazza. She respected her for it and backed Katya on pretty well everything to do with raising the baby. For others in the extended family such changes were something of a shock. When the old matriarch of the Mazrouei family, Mama Dana, came up to visit from her traditional home out in the Liwa sands, she was horrified to find that Hazza was already asleep. At eighty-five years of age, Mama Dana had seen generations of Emirati babies enter the world and was accustomed to having the children up and part of the family until midnight if possible.

  Mama Dana liked to come and visit this unusual baby. There’s a photo that sums up in one frame the true extraordinariness of the marriage. It shows the small, wizened figure of Mama Dana swallowed in a huge armchair with her feet nowhere near the ground, and Hazza sitting on her lap, taking in this old desert woman with her traditional ‘beak’ face-covering. What could he be thinking?

  A lot of things are thrown up in unprecedented situations like these, but I tried not to overthink it. It turns out that, with goodwill, most humans can give and take and make things work.

  In the early years there was a difference of opinion over the question of a car seat for Hazza, after he outgrew his baby capsule. While car seats are legally required in Australia, in the Emirates it is not unusual to see two, three or four kids roaming around the inside of a car without any restraint as they hurtle along at 120-plus kilometres an hour. There have been some horrendous deaths as a result and this was a cultural battle Katya wasn’t going to lose. By and large though, there were no major clashes beyond that.

  I try to spend as much time as possible with Hazza, and one of the wonderful things about being the grandfather is that I’ve been brought closely into all the celebrations, like birthdays, where I am invited along with all the women of the extended family.

  Hazza might be Emirati–Australian, but really he was being raised as an Emirati child. As his grandfather, I would be on hand for the traditional Emirati milestones of Hazza’s early years. This was important, because I felt it was my job to be part of educating Hazza in the Bedouin ways. For example, there was the occasion of fitting out Hazza in his first dishdasha, the white robes which Emirati males wear every day.

  I bought Hazza his first toy practice rifle, which has a very different meaning to a toy gun for an Australian child. An Emirati boy needs to learn how to throw a rifle high into the air with a spinning action and then catch it cleanly as it comes back down. This harks back to the desert days when young men would be armed with the heavy colonial-era Martini-Henri rifles. Nowadays they are used ceremonially at weddings or national celebrations. There are traditional gun-dancing competitions and as a kid you are expected to be able to perform.

  Hazza also needed to learn the tradition of dancing with a camel stick, a thin, hooked cane used for keeping a camel in line or hooking goods down from the top of a camel. Young Emirati males dance together in lines, using the stick as a prop. This, too, is a cultural skill Hazza needed for weddings and other celebrations.

  Yet Hazza is very much a product of the new internationalised generation of Emiratis. Along with learning the traditional Emirati ways, he has seen a lot of the west. His father, Khaled, speaks English perfectly, so Hazza has grown up with Arabic and English in the home. Hazza speaks English at school, but when the older members of the extended family come around they speak Arabic. Indeed, the concern with Hazza, as for so many Emirati children, is that English is his go-to language and that his Arabic might not be good enough for communicating with the older generation.

  And along with the dishdasha, the ceremonial gun and the camel stick, I am just as likely to see Hazza wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and a pair of cool sunglasses, thumping away on a computer tablet.

  Of course, I have taken a keen interest in Hazza’s camel-riding abilities. As much as I can, I take him out to the camel camps to spend time in the meet-and-greet room, the majlis, that are so much a cornerstone of Gulf Arab life and where I have spent many hours of my professional life. I’ve learned that, for all the success we’ve had because of science, ultimately it is the trust built through relationships that really counts. If I could introduce Hazza to this dimension of Bedouin living then all the better.

  It’s here in the backblocks of the desert and away from the cities that you see the old Arabia, still operating and still very much part of the fabric of life. The word majlis literally means a place where you sit. It is set up with low, cushioned seating, all joined up and arranged against the walls, leaving a large open area in the middle of the room. Thus you can talk to those on the left or right of you or those opposite.

  This is a place where the camel men gather and talk, often for hours at a time. They might be locals or they might drift in from up-country. Visitors from Oman or Saudi Arabia, young men and old, they’re all welcome. Upon taking a seat, dates and coffee or tea will be offered. There might be a television in the corner and some people might fiddle on a mobile phone, but the majlis is all about the talk. If you think about the way the Bedouin related to each other in the old days, everything was about stories. Turning up out of the desert after days of seeing no-one, the first question would be, ‘What’s the news?’

  The conversations might not be about camels at all. Maybe it’s the problems you’re having with your kids. Maybe someone’s heard word of a new development going on. A lot of the time it is just yahoo-ing and funny stories, trading jokes and jibes. This is where I was nicknamed ‘Abu Sala’, ‘father of baldness’, in honour of my follicular challenges. In return I labelled one of my sparring partners ‘Abu Kalam’, ‘father of words’, in honour of his talkative ways. There’s not much that is politically correct about banter in the majlis. It is very much a men’s zone.

  At lunchtime the host will lay on an extravagant platter of rice and lamb or even baby camel, garnished with nuts and with perhaps some vegetable curry and yoghurt thrown in. You sit on the floor and dig in with your hand.

  Here in the majlis, enduring bonds are made. Trust is built. Men are measured. This is the soul of Arabia. There might be a Starbucks on every corner, where young Emiratis also sit and talk, but the majlis remains as relevant as ever as a preserve of the manners and formalities that dictate so much interaction in the Emirates.

  One of the most important roles I can play as grandfather is to help create a network of support for the future for Hazza. There is a very special term for this in Arabic. It is wasta and it’s one of the most important things a family can do for a child. Wasta has the sense of ‘connections’ and loosely translates into ‘clout’ or ‘who you know’. The west likes to think it has evolved to a point where it is not who you know that counts but what you know. Up to a point that is true, and it is possible to rise from a log cabin to the White House. Yet even in the egalitarian west, the connections of the old school tie are still relevant.

  In the Emirates, who you know matters greatly. And if I can help Hazza in this through my camel connections in some small way, then that is what I will do. That means making an effort to take Hazza along to functions with the sheikhs. I’m doing the job of the Emirati grandfather, helping to position him.

  Me being a westerner and the grandfather of an Emirati child has been confusing, it must be said, for some of the locals. On one occasion Hazza came with me to a gathering after a successful day at the camel races. It was a quintessentially Gulf Arab occasion. There were poetry recitals, where men would stand unbidden in the middle of the majlis, turn to the sheikh and deliver poems extolling the achievements of the camels and honouring the sheikh for owning such magnificent beasts. All the while Hazza was running around the room, hiding chocolates, and generally making mischief.

  Later, Sheikh Sultan was introducing Hazza to a visiting member of the Saudi royal family. There was little Hazza in his dishdasha, which made sense to the esteemed guest. What didn’t make sense was me, standing next to Hazza in my usual shirt, jacket and pants. The Saudi royal looked at H
azza, looked at me, then did one of the biggest double takes I’ve ever seen. Sheikh Sultan explained that Hazza was a mahajinat, the Arabic word for a mixed breed camel.

  Put like that, it was suddenly clear. Always back to the camels!

  Twenty-six

  Beauty and the beast

  Here’s a question for you: what makes a camel beautiful?

  After twenty years of working day in and day out on ways to make a camel faster, this was a question I had never contemplated. Now my boss, Sheikh Sultan, had come up with a new challenge. Plans were underway to stage the first-ever camel beauty contest in the Arabian Gulf. This was a whole new way of celebrating the importance of the camel.

  The sport of camel racing was undoubtedly a macho contest. It was a straight-out competition of speed, strength and endurance, with the animal acting as a proxy for age-old rivalries. But the beauty contest was something different. This was about the gentler side of the relationship between Bedouin and camel.

  Of course, most people find very little of beauty in a camel. But if you live and breathe them, you do. The Bedouin have always had a sense of what makes one camel more appealing than another, much as people have with horses. So to that extent, the idea of measuring a camel by its looks wasn’t a recent invention.

  If anyone can appreciate the nuances of the camel, it is the Gulf Arabs. There are reputedly a thousand names for a camel in Arabic. There’s a word to cover all sorts of eventualities and types of behaviour, including ‘a female camel that doesn’t drink from the watering hole when it’s busy, but waits and observes’. Another is ‘a bull camel that has completed the period of becoming ready to be bred, as demonstrated by his swelled belly’. Yet another is ‘a female camel that walks ahead of the rest by a long distance so that it appears to be fleeing’.

  In some ways the advent of the beauty contest showed a maturing of the society—it had evolved from the ancient days where you relied on a camel for survival, and Gulf Arabs now prized the camel for its sheer aesthetics.

  Sheikh Sultan was captivated by this new form of showcasing the camel, as were several members of the Mazrouei family. So there was no escaping my professional life taking yet another turn. As well as breeding for speed, now I would be breeding for beauty, too. This new challenge came at the right time as I had begun to think I had reached the limits of how science could be applied to the camel.

  Since producing the first calf from embryo transfer and the first calf from a frozen embryo, we had undertaken ever more sophisticated work. This had enabled us to know the sex of an embryo through biopsy and to produce identical twins from a surgically split embryo. At about the time beauty contests came along, we had also produced the first calf from frozen semen. These might sound like Frankenstein achievements, but each gave us more options to make best use of the camel genes at our disposal.

  Collectively, all these world-first achievements helped improve the camel’s speed, which had increased by more than thirty per cent, quite extraordinary when you consider that in the same time there has been little or no improvement in the horse’s speed.

  The first camel beauty contest was staged in mid-December 2008 near Liwa, where the Mazroueis had originally hailed from, on the edge of the Empty Quarter. This is the time of the year when the weather is at its kindest. It was also timed to follow on from UAE National Day, when the entire country celebrates what it means to be an Emirati. So it was very much tied in with national identity and the renaissance of the old ways.

  I drove down from Al Ain on a road that travels through the classic desert landscape of undulating dunes and sand out to the horizon. Turning off the main highway and coming over the brow of a hill, it was as though I had driven straight into the fourteenth century. Dozens of camel camps were set up in the sands. Camels had been brought from all parts of the Gulf, and outside each camp were the flags of different Gulf nations: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and, of course, the UAE. This was a gathering of the Arabian tribes.

  The camels and their owners had come in huge numbers. There were more than 25,000 camels in all and as many people. The major tribes had set up large traditional tents. Old Arabia was stretched out before me, recalling a time before arbitrary borders separated the families and tribes who roamed the desert. It was a demonstration of the irrelevance of national borders in Gulf Arabia.

  Makeshift roads had been fashioned through the desert sands. There was the occasional four-wheel drive, but these were routes intended for the camel handlers, leading their teams of camels behind them.

  Perhaps it was a brilliant form of marketing, dreamed up by a consultant, but it struck a chord. I could see why. This was a genuine celebration for and by the people of the deep desert. It was all dust, sand, sweat and braying animals.

  Along the perimeter of the camel camps were stalls displaying rural handicrafts, run by old women covered in henna tattoos and wearing the traditional desert burqa. There were contests for the best dates from different regions. There was nothing fancy about it all, no tricks or gimmicks.

  At the beauty contest I linked up with an old friend, Sheikh Diab, who had set up a very grand tent for receiving old sheikh mates. The sheikh took me to the show ring, where we took our seats in a rickety old grandstand to watch proceedings. If the United Kingdom has Crufts, the world’s largest dog show, then this was the Arabian equivalent for camels.

  The camels on show weren’t the slim brown racing variety I’d worked with. They were the huge black Hazmi camels, which are a milking breed most commonly found in Saudi Arabia but also in the Liwa oasis. I had worked with them in the early days of the embryo transfer program, when the Crown Prince decided they should be the first surrogates we used. Back then I found them to be moody, difficult customers and I was glad not to have anything more to do with them after the initial embryo work.

  In this setting, though, the Hazmi camels were something else. They had a grand bearing that lent them an air of arrogance and majesty. The Hazmi males are the Rolls Royce of beauty camels because, as I was to learn, size matters: the bigger the better.

  Under the rules, it was not permitted for a camel handler to lead them into the ring. Beauty camels are trained to prance into the ring by themselves. They are raised with a baby camel as their imprinted friend and best mate. If you want the Hazmi to go anywhere, lead the baby camel and the big Hazmi will follow. They are bred to show themselves off, holding their necks and heads high as if to say, ‘Check out how bloody good I look.’ This camel really does have tickets on itself.

  The term ‘beauty contest’ implies something frivolous, which this was not. Judging was done by a committee of ten experts, each of whom examined a different part of the body. Like judging an Arabian horse or a Hereford bull, they look at the length of the neck, the size of the head, the size of the ear, the shape of the eye, the formation of the eyelashes, the size of the udder, and so on. Droopy lips are important, the bigger and droopier the better.

  There are lots of categories: mothers and babies; fathers and babies; individuals; different ages. And different colours—from the natural-coloured, big boofy beige ones to the most prized jet black camels. The winner of each category was given a trophy as well as a large sum of money and/or a new car. It was serious stuff.

  Now I understood the dimensions of my new challenge. Our main rivals in this contest were not Dubai but the Saudi Arabian camels. In this case the prize money was even greater than for the racing camels, but for the sheikhs the prize money was secondary. It was the pride of owning the most beautiful beast in the Gulf that mattered.

  Sheikh Sultan had paid the equivalent of ten million dollars for three of the most beautiful camels from Saudi Arabia. That was way more than the sort of money you would pay for a top-flight racing camel. There were two females, Marayah and Naifa, and a male called Mabrokan. All three had the attributes of a champion beauty camel: jet black (the blacker, the better), big head, big feet, large droopy lips and small ears.

  On the technical
side, using embryo transfer to breed for beauty is much easier than breeding for speed. If you have good-looking animals, they will produce good-looking animals. Simple. Breeding for speed involves a huge number of factors that are not nearly as easy to control. But on a practical level, dealing with the Hazmis was a nightmare. These things were so big that I had to build a special elevated metal platform to get up high enough to do the routine rectal examinations and embryo flushing.

  A regular-size Hazmi can do well at a beauty contest, but the very best of them are giants. And Mabrokan was truly the biggest camel I have ever seen. Ever. He was like a T. Rex, the size of a house with a head like a dining table. He would have weighed more than a thousand kilograms compared to the three to four hundred kilograms of a racing camel. Mabrokan was so big it was close to impossible to do the most basic reproductive procedure, which begins with collecting the semen. The best technique is to use electro-ejaculation, however that means a general anaesthetic. Given Mabrokan’s size, and that he was worth five million dollars, I wasn’t keen on that idea should something go awry.

  To make matters more complicated, Mabrokan was a real pain when it came to mating. Try as we might, he just wasn’t keen on Marayah and Naifa, the beautiful black Hazmis. No, Mabrokan only ever wanted to mate with the milking camels from Pakistan, which are the real scrubbers of the camel world. We were constantly trying to find ways to increase his libido so he would perform where he was needed. The sheikh jokingly suggested we might want to try Viagra.

  The short of it was that Mabrokan was a moody and temperamental so-and-so. I could see this was not going to be fun.

  Twenty-seven

  Business and pleasure