bottom of the well

On 9/10/07, Daily Issa <dailyissa@gmail.com >[http://cat.xula.edu/issa/ ]wrote:

since it's cool down there
take a little nap...
bottom of the well
-Issa, 1816

in sohar, in oman, virtually everybody has a back yard or front yard well

cleaning them is a major effort. usually when it is about 50+ degrees C outside.

In this kind of work, the men only wear a thin cotton wazir, about 2x1 meters of pure cotton cloth, with very narrow(1cm) bright red, green, blue and orange dyed or embroidered striping on the long edges and each side and decorative knots on the short side where the cloth is cut.

if the muck is really awful, they tuck it up like in an indian village.

most wells are deep and quite cold at the bottom.

waterworks of any kind, irrigation, underground water tunnels are a communal responsibility and have been built by local communities in oman for at least 10,000 years using locally organized and directed voluntary communal societies. the local community voted for a head man who did all the engineering, and logistics, collected the money, paid for things, and appointed teams and hours and work plans. If you decided not to join the society though, you didn't get any of the community water...

in my back yard, four men, the owner about 70 years old and three of his sons worked three days and had to stop collecting the dates in my garden. i think they collected about 300 or 400 grams of dates or more, after the electric pump in my well was repaired, and the pipes all cleaned out, and the muck and trash were hauled out of the well. i made ice tea. from bottled water since the well was all muck.

they found several goat heads and other goat bones, bits of plastic containers, and some toys, and some beer bottles and lot of cigarette butts, and some unidentifiable bones, (or at least they weren't going to identify any endangered species to me, as the penalties are really severe. the most severe anywhere. i believe.) pots, pans, and miscellaneous unidentifiable shards of stuff.

the father wouldn't allow any of his kids to shimmy up the tallest date trees because he didn't trust them not to fall down.