Take me to another place, take to another land....

On Friday, we took a trip to Oman.  Oman is very close and only about a 10 minute drive to the border post...but really Al Ain and Oman are just divided by a fence.  Anyway, we went to a village about an hour away to visit this man. Let's call him Mr. A.  Trey met him at the hospital when he was having a baby about 2 months ago.  It was nice to visit. They were extremely welcoming and we had a great visit.

This cool thing was covering our breakfast so that the flies wouldn't get at it. 

Also, this is Dr. Shirley.  She is from Canada but did medical school in the States and is now a doctor here in our clinics.

This was part of our breakfast.  It was these little pancake/crepe like things with 

honey that they made on their own land.

We couldn't figure out if Trey looked like he was from Mexico 

or supposed to be out in the rice fields in Japan.

This boy Salah was awesome!  He knew a lot about life at his young age of 11. Guess what?  He is the uncle of Mr. A!  That's what happens when your dad marries 4 wives.  Salah and Mr. A's dad are brothers.  Now his dad has died.   Salah knew the whole process of how to make and sell honey.  He does the work to clear out the bee boxes, etc.  I asked him he gets stung a lot. He said yes and knew exactly how many he had in 2010 so far and how many he got in 2009.  I'm excited to see this kid again. 

The family has their own Oasis of date palms.  We took a little trip in the car to go visit the Oasis and the original village. Only about a 5 minute drive in the car. This is where Mr. A's grandfather and Salah's dad grew up with his parents. 

The dates are coming along nicely!  Look at how cool looking they are.  People pick them now and eat them half brown and half yellow. Personally I like them fully ripe and brown.  The yellow part is rather dry when you eat it but some really love it!

They also had a garden on the Oasis property. 

This is one of the old houses on the family property in the Oasis area. 

This is Mohammed. He was our tour guide in the old area where the family used to live back in the day. He must play in this area with Salah a lot. Even Mr. A doesn't go back there very often so didn't know where to go.  Mohammed was very quiet and sort of seemed sad.  He is also Mr. A's uncle.  He is the youngest of all the children of the 4 wives.  His dad died while his mom was still pregnant with hi.  It's funny to hear Mr. A call him and Salah uncle. In arabic you don't have to say your uncle's name, you can just call them "uncle".  It makes me laugh.  Pretty strange for us unless you're like my friend Joanna who is 1 of 16 kids.

I just thought this door was cool looking on the farm. They went through here to grab mangoes before we left.  There are a few mango trees straight ahead.  Salah climbed the tree barefooted as if he lived in the jungle.  Trey asked him if he needed help and he said he does it all the time and he climbed right to the top.  It's not a tree that has helpful branches to boost you up at the bottom.   You have to wrap your legs around it and pull yourself up.  They gave us about 40 mangoes that are green...we'll wait until they become good and yellow to eat them....but they eat them green with salt.

Mr. A has very good english and loved to use big words!  Any word he didn't know that we said, he'd ask Trey to write it down.  We had some great conversation with him and really enjoyed our day.