2020

I am not very sure of what is the idea that people get when I tell them that I am working in Kuwait. I never say I am living there, the state of being at home is something I lost since I left my country four years ago and even when I come back to Spain I am not able to feel or discover again. There is a drastic contrast between the two worlds so when I cross the line I am not really sensible of where I should belong to. But at the moment and considering the circumstances that took me to write this story, I am now in Kuwait.

My mother tried once to explain in the grocery down from our building the location of the country, she said it was situated in the Middle East and a war against Irak took place in the 90’s. The owner of the business is a Moroccan woman who speaks the local language better than the locals so she probably helped her to clarify to the audience what are the idiosyncracies of this complex, chaotic and intense Arab world.

This country changed completely its economic status when the oil fields were discovered in the late 30´s and in the next decades it has become a job destination for expatriates from all over the world. Here there is plenty of job opportunities but the origin of your continent, the colour of your skin and the politic relationship of your country with this one will determine your position in the hierarchy.

Probably because of the existence in my everyday life of this vast cultural diversity, multiple identities and all kind of backgrounds and personal stories from foreigners working here, it is easier to observe from humans how do we behave in tricky situations, even, and I am still ashamed of it, from myself.

That happened three weeks ago when I woke up in the middle of the night. That´s not a big surprise, this time though, was because of a hammering noise coming from the neighbour who lives directly below my apartment. It was maybe 2 or 3 am and I just tried to continue sleeping.

The night after, also the same noise, not too repetitive but disturbing enough to wake me up and don´t let me sleep back again.

Next day I went down to ask him (I had the information from before that he was a doctor from Syria) if he knew the origin of this noise. He answered me in a very delicate and polite way . He he didn´t know where this noise could come from but he would tell me if he got any information.

The noise stopped for a week. Two weeks ago it started again so I decided to ask Mohammed, the Harris, a guy who comes from Egypt and whose family, wife with kids, live there and can only come to see him once in a year because he doesn’t have holidays , being sure that the noise from the hammering came from the Syrian neighbour.

I saw them talking to each other and then Mohammed came to tell me that he was not the person who was making that noise.

It stopped again and last week it started again. It was 3 am when I went down and knocked at the door showing that I was being disturbed. The Syrian doctor opened the door and I told him in a not very diplomatic tone “Do you know what I am doing here?”. In that moment is when I should have stop and realize what was really happening, but I didn’t.

Next day I called the HR guy from my work and I also wrote a letter to the Director to let them know about this unacceptable situation, the situation of not getting good sleep.

It was the following night when I went down again after the first isolated hammering noise that I heard. He opened the door and looked at me very surprised because I was furious this time. I told him I was going to call the owner of the building and make them investigate what was happening there. That was the moment when he started to shake and shout quite desperate. How did I dare to accuse him of something I was not sure of?

I am almost sure, I would say sure, since every visit to him was followed by a silent night or even three or four,that the noise was coming from his apartment. But is that really important? Is my sleep more important than what was happening there?

I remember now this documentary called “The cave” from the Syrian director Feras Fayyad. He has been recently interviewed by some international media regarding this production and the dreadful torture he suffered when he was arrested by the Al-Assad regime.

The film shows, through the story of female Dr. Amani ,who ruled this underground hospital, a cruel and devastating reality of what is happening now in Syria. Every moment is worse than last one. I also remember this little girl terrified by the sound of the bombs protected by the doctor. She told her “Cover your ears, that´s what I do when I start hearing the noise of the bombs, and don´t be afraid”.

Now I think the Syrian doctor is maybe working day and night to send some money to his family or even try to save it to try to bring them here. I said “think” and “maybe” this time, but I should say “I am almost sure”, that is what people from non Western countries mostly do here. Not even live. That is something reserved only for specific privileged type of skins.

2019

This is the story of an Amhara woman in a remote village, her coffee, her beer, her little cat and some other memories and experiences related to it. Sitting around the fire in that fragile hut in a remote village in Africa took me to a mesmerized state. I couldn’t take my eyes from the fire and the magnetizing noise from the coffee beans became the center of my attention. It happened almost three years ago but I still can smell the genuine smell and the natural taste of the most endearing coffee I have ever had. That was in Ethiopia.

With more than 150 ethnicities and around 86 languages, Ethiopia is located in the Horn of Africa and is a mosaic of people showing their semites origins, their Sabaean roots from Yemen and their Arab-Sudanese origin and black-nilotic. It is also well known in these days because of their unbeatable athletes in Marathons and other long distances. You must have heard the story of Abebe Bikila, who set a record while running barefoot at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. He was also the first athlete to win two Olympic Marathons. But as every other country in the world, although it remains completely unknown for every football lover I have asked, Ethiopia has a National Football Team and the locals are very passionate about that. That’s the magic of football, anywhere in the world you can see a kid playing with a ball on the street and also the national team t-shirts decorating the street markets, even in the most unexplored place in Africa.

I always liked football. When I was a kid I used to watch all the games on TV regardless the team, city, country or philosophy of the whole system included in it. My mother was not a fan, neither my father, but I was. When I was a teenager I always wanted to have a National Team T-shirt to wear with my jeans, but a very different one, not the typical t-shirt that all the boys used to wear, so I needed to wait more than twenty years to find the spot, the environment and the opportunity to get the right one for me. It’s been always said that good things take time to arrive. In April 2018, when I was still working in Kuwait, I had the chance to visit this country. My destination was Lalibela, famed for its 11 ancient rock-hewn churches dating back to the 12th and 13th Centuries. It was on the way to the hotel. The bus stop that took us from the airport to the village. I was walking and carrying my backpack and looking around to all this new exotic and colourful world that finally was in front of me. The street market was near the hotel, so I could do my first stop at the t-shirts stand and buy the gift of my dreams.

It was not easy to make a decision about where to stay since any hotel in Lalibela is an opportunity to experience the whole cultural sense. Food, music, language, religion or clothes are intrinsic to the Ethiopian daily life. Everything is so ancestral that makes you think how dehumanized and totalitarian is becoming our modern globalized world. I stayed on a hill top hotel with a spectacular view of the valley. Some other visitors used to sit on the benches at the terrace of the hotel and spent hours observing the birds and the clarity of the sky that the altitude and lack of pollutions brings to this wonderful village.

It was not an organized tour so every day was an unexpected adventure. One of the days we went for a hiking to the highest point of the Amhara Region, the peak is at an elevation of 4.260 metres and is called the Abuna Yousef. Hiking in Africa, or at least in Ethiopia, is not like in Europe: there are no beacons to follow or any sign of human trace like plastic, butts or just the presence of the European human being and his Western supremacy exploiting the continent. Sometimes you can see the Israeli soldiers with their heavy bags walking for hours and even days along tough and rough paths, just the way they looked like for me. The climbing to the Abuna Yousef was an intense experience and almost unreal, you see these places in pictures, but you never think that one day you are going to be there. The trail was uneven and wild, and the Gelada monkey’s screeching was the only background music there.

After the hike, Zinaibe, our guide, took us to a little village in the Amhara Region to see how the local families lived there and what they needed to do to survive. We arrived to the place. Barefoot kids playing with the animals and a little girl in her traditional dress looking at us with a shy grin. We came into the tiny hut and sat around the fire. The woman of the family, with her delicate hands and gentle smile started to roast the coffee beans in a big and rusty pan. The visual and aural spectacle was captivating and she quickly started to serve the coffee when she finished the ritual. I never have tried a coffee like that. Probably the slow pace f the process and the kindness of the woman made it so unique. That was in the Amhara region in Ethiopia by the Amhara woman who prepared coffee. And I always think about her, what she must be doing now, and that I would like to try again that wonderful coffee that I want to keep in my memories.

1982

I like to say that I am the granddaughter of peasants and the daughter of immigrants, which is, indeed, what I am.

My parents emigrated to the city in the mid 1970s and it was there that my siblings and I were born and raised. It was the post-Franco era and a small door, a very small door, opened for those looking to start a new life.

My parents were looking.

After several years of working in a well known restaurant, they decided to start their own and called it Luna Park. It was a time when Spain was taking its first small steps, then giant leaps, into an uncertain future of tourism.      

Interestingly, a regular visitor who came to savour my mother’s gastronomic wonders and father's bohemian company was no other than Michael Collins, one of the three crew of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

While astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, and so had each other for company, Collins spent 21 hours 36 minutes alone in lunar orbit in the command module Columbia, essentially making him the loneliest man in history.   

One night, my mother tells me, a little girl approached his table with the curiosity of a four-year-old girl. Holding up his dessert, an orange, he turned to her and asked what was the word for it in Spanish.

"Naranja", she replied.

 "Naranja", he repeated.

And that's how I taught Michael Collins his newest Spanish word and why I have been looking up at the moon ever since.