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Leaving Libya

It is three years to the day since I arrived in Tripoli and one year to the day since I left. Twelve more hours and I will be three years since I landed in the baking hair-dryer heat of Tripoli airport and was taken by company mini-van to the Baab Al-Bahar Hotel, where I gazed out of my lonely hotel room on the eighth floor. The view was a familiar one　- the dull blue expanse of the Mediterranean Sea, tufted and ruffled slightly by balmy winds. I would have preferred a city view. In truth, the sight of the Mediterranean Sea bored me, though I was not that bothered. And so I looked out at a familiar sight from my past as I thought about my future in Libya. What was on my mind that day? Certainly, there was trepidation. I really did not know what I was getting myself into. There is a lot in the guidebooks about Leptis Magna, Ghadames, the Sahara, the Medina, the history of Libya but as to day- to-day life, what my life was actually going to be like, what my job would be like for the next
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Mustafa and Fatima

Mustafa had a preoccupation which was torturing him night and day. A teenage problem really, but in the Arab world, puberty seems to arrive ten years later. Or maybe not. Mustafa said that he was the only one from all his friends who was still a virgin. He said that it wasn't so much that he wanted to have sex but that he didn't want to be the only one left out. He said that all of his friends had had sex but I just didn't believe him. I would not normally be so dismissive a young person's account of what his own generation is up to, but when it comes to sex, you have to be wary. Lies are the nasty cold that sex caught and just can't shake off. People lie about sex, people lie to get sex and then lie and then say that they haven't had sex. Some even lie during sex. But more commonly people lie and say that they have had sex when they haven't. This is the most favoured lie amongst young men and it is a lie that is virtually one of the necessary pains of growi
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Funky Old Medina

When I first arrived in Libya, the company put me up at the Baab Al-Bahar (Door to the Sea) Hotel in Tripoli. The Baab Al-Bahar is a five star hotel which one must assume beat up a smaller hotel in a fight and took a few stars off it, as not all of its five stars seem to have been acquired through any legitimate means. But despite its modest service, its passable buffet and the unpredictably of its souvenir shop's opening times, it has a location on the Tripoli coastline unenvied even by Tripoli's genuine five star Corinthia Bab Al-Africa (Door to Africa this time). The Corinthia, by far Libya's plushest hotel, is a near-skyscraper of a building with a shadow whose radius reaches and almost hits the Bab Al Bahar and then turns to rest and fade on the Medina as the sun sets. While some of the Corinthia's residents' windows face the sea, others directly face the ancient limestone walls of the Medina, fronted by the fronds of massive palm trees. What the international
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Expatriation

Howard is dead. He didn't look well, it must be said. I saw him slumped unconscious on a plastic white table at a party a year ago and his face was as red as beetroot. Howard's favourite vegetables were chips and tomato ketchup. His daily intake of water was actually over the recommended amount at a healthy two litres. However, when you consider that this water was taken solely to dilute on a 50/50 ratio with the amount of Flash he consumed, the figure is less impressive. At least health-wise. Flash is the most common, only slightly ironic, euphemism given to the alcoholic tipple of Western expats who reside in gated camps and compounds all over the ostensibly dry outposts of the Muslim world. Actually, it is less a tipple and more pure, distilled alcohol, diluted with water according to personal requirements in order to decrease its toxicity. I have heard that some of the expats develop such a taste for it that they even make and drink it back home. Which is behaviour which m
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Basim and Ali

Before I knew exactly who or what human beings were and before I had mastered the cognitive skills needed to differentiate between personalities and even genders, estimate ages and judge characters I remember the warm nicotine-scented breath and the bristles of a cheek brushing against my face of a man bending down to hug me as I lay on a bed or maybe even a cot. My since errant, absent father perhaps? Another relative? I don't know who it was. But I think that it was a man like Basim. A large, bearded grizzly bear of a man, Basim is nominally the cleaner at work, but in reality he is a sort of general gopher, no-fixed-job-description, maintenance man, odd-jobber and donkey/dirty worker. Basim is a contract worker, not a direct employee of the company and is therefore not issued with the standard company coveralls and safety boots which normal employees, including desk-bound ones, get. Someone once gave him a green company boiler suit and, though now oil-stained and tattered, it is
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The River of Dreams

Geological surveys in the 1970s confirmed that there was more than 120,000 cubic kilometres of pure fresh water lying under the sand of the Libyan Desert. In an extraordinary session of the General People's Congress in October 1983, the leader of the Revolution suggested transporting this water to Libya's coastal towns and thus started the Great Man Made River Project, the "8th wonder of the world", an engineering project on a scale never seen before in human history. The pipes, the largest ever made, dwarf the transporters they are carried on and the pre-stressed steel in their manufacture would circle the earth 280 times. The quantity of aggregates used in the construction of the project would build 20 pyramids the size of the Great Pyramid of Khofu and the pipe transporters will have travelled a distance equivalent to going to the sun and back when the final phase of the project has been completed. It is envisaged that the 13000 wells that have been drilled will pu
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The Third Nalut Cultural and Tourism Festival

Of course, not all Libyans are Arabs. In the south, there are the nomadic Tuareg and the Toubou, who trudge the Saharan plains, often roaming past resented borders into Niger, Algeria and Chad. But small in number, these tribes forge their own path outside the mainstream of Libyan society. Then there are the Berber. Popularly known as Berber, though they prefer the term Amazigh to Berber, which is after all a Latin derivation of barbari, they predate the Arab settlers and their modern day population is spread across Northern Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. Some estimate that the Berber make up as much as five per cent of the Libyan population. Precise figures are impossible. Some are not even sure themselves. Last weekend, Mohammed took me to Nalut for the festival. Mohammed's parents are Berber and I asked him if he was also a Berber. He said that he didn't speak the language and that he identified more with being an Arab, having been schooled in Arabic, though he quickly added th
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