Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Bahrain (Two Seas)
Bahrain
Imagine standing at the edge of a burial mound field at
dusk. Behind you, the towers of the capital city shimmer like glass lanterns. Before
you, the desert breathes with ancient memory. And all around, the sea whispers
the stories of traders, poets, and pilgrims who once called this island home.
That is Bahrain. The name means “two seas” (bahr =
sea, ain = dual grammatical ending).
Bahrain is a shimmering archipelago in the Persian Gulf,
where ancient burial mounds rise from desert plains and the sleek skyline of
Manama glints across the water. It’s a place where Bronze Age silence and
21st-century ambition coexist—sometimes in the same breath.
It is also hot. By mid‑summer, Bahrain feels like it
has been placed under a glass dome.
Temperatures climb well above 40°C (104°F), and the humidity rolls in from the
Gulf like a warm, wet curtain. On the hottest days, the air itself feels
heavy—almost tactile. It’s the kind of heat that doesn’t just sit on the skin;
it presses.
In that season, life shifts indoors. People move from air‑conditioned
homes to air‑conditioned cars to air‑conditioned offices. Outdoor errands are
kept brief. Shade becomes strategy. Anyone who lingers outside too long—tourist
or local—can find themselves in trouble quickly.
The traditional head covering for men, the keffiya, has
a very practical purpose in Gulf climates. That keffiya never parted from my
husband, Carl, who accompanied me to Bahrain one summer to teach photography at
the New York Institute of Technology. A light-skinned, blue-eyed, obvious
American, he loved the shielding the keffiya provided his head and neck from
the direct sun, dramatically reducing the heat. The fabric created a layer
of air between cloth and skin, which slowed radiant heat; when worn
lossely, the keffiya created airflow that evaporated sweat; and the light
colors reflected sunlight rather than absorbing it. Centuries of desert living
have shaped the design: simple, breathable, and surprisingly effective.
Unlike Carl, I did not “go native.” No way! Women wear the abaya.
Long, black, and flowing, this deeply Muslim garment, rooted in modesty and
identity, can also be a furnace. My women friends navigated this by wearing
very lightweight clothing underneath, perhaps just a slip. Sometimes, one or
another would giggle to me: “If guys only knew what was underneath!”
Bahrain’s summers are not just a season; they’re an
environmental force that shapes architecture, daily rhythms, and clothing
traditions. The contrast between modern Manama’s glass towers and the ancient
burial mounds is striking—but the deeper contrast is between the climate and
the human ingenuity that has learned to survive it.
Bahrain played a fateful role in my life, one that I would
hardly have expected just days earlier than my first trip to Bahrain. I
traveled there from workshopping in neighboring Qatar with a young educator,
Fatima, a local working at the US Embassy in Manama.
Over time, Fatima and I had many interactions and became
friends. We jokingly called ourselves mother and daughter, names that came
about on that first trip from Qatar. We stopped at the duty free shop before
boarding the plane, and Fatima, being young and pretty, became absorbed with
the myriad products in the makeup section. A sales person, doing what those
folks do best, noticed. She came over and asked Fatima if she could help, and
somewhere in the conversation, she made the comment that we never forgot: “You
don’t need makeup, but your mother does.” I averred that makeup was of little
interest to me. After all, I was no longer young and pretty (and even when I
was, I chose not to wear makeup). From then on, we referred to ourselves as Mom
and Daughter, and Fatima referred to Carl as Dad.
We interacted on several trips I made to Bahrain, including
some very long stints requiring a work visa even when the assignment had
nothing to do with the Embassy. Through Fatima, I got to understood Bahrain,
its people, and its culture (even its politics) in more intimate ways than
otherwise possible.
To my delight, Fatima was once able to come to the US.
Through Carl and me and my students, she got understood the US, its people, and
its culture in more intimate ways than otherwise possible.
One linguistic anecdote still stay with me for a long time because
of the irony. My students were studying Modern Standard Arabic, called fusha.
I spoke Arabic dialect, specifically Urdinya (Jordanian dialect) and especially
Amaniya (the dialect of Amman, Jordan) and could manage the Barhain spoken
dialect of Arabic passably. Fatima gave an interview to my students for cultural
knowledge and language practice and development. She did it in fusha, which
differs enough from dialect that I could not understand it. (Arabic is
considered a diglossic language.) So, Fatima, also a professional
translator/interpreter, who could speak all three dialects that I recognized, interpreted
for me. She said it was her fist experience in translating from Arabic to Arabic!
The role that Bahrain played in my life, though, was far
more fateful than these encounters and endeavors. Bahrain brought me to the Middle
East for two years and kept me returning for brief trips for a number of years
afterward. How that happened was completely unforeseen.
When I came on that first trip to Bahrain, New York
Institute of Technology was constructing its Manama campus and placed an
advertisement in the local paper for teachers of English. I had a couple of
upcoming “gigs” in Bahrain, short-term with long spaces between but close
enough together to mean hopping back and forth between continents on multiple
occasions. My thought: instead of being based on a river in Arroyo Seco,
California, why not be based in the desert in Manama, Bahrain. So, I applied.
Then, things moved rapidly in a different direction. The
director of the global studies division in New York called me. Rather than a
teaching position in Manama, would I consider a deanship at the NYIT Jordan
campus in Amman? Long story short: an interview in New York City, followed by
my consulting my good friend Peter Abboud, professor of Arabic at the University
of Texas at Austin, resulted in a one-year contract (renewed a second year) in
Amman, and I began the Middle Eastern chapter of my life.
by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver
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For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.
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