Mama Mia – here we go again!

At the moment I’m living proof that stress does weird and bad things to your brain. A little less than 2 weeks ago, my husband and I boarded a flight from Dubai to the beautiful and magnificent AlUla in Saudi Arabia for a long weekend. Two days later the USA started a war with Iran and the UAE got caught in the firing range. And our flights home were cancelled. We rebooked our hotel and the flights were cancelled again, and we rebooked our hotel and the flights were cancelled again … and I got that “it’s just like covid” feeling. (The flight between AlUla and Dubai still hasn’t left).

A few photos from AlUla

Since my husband had meetings in the Netherlands and we could get a flight from Jeddah to Amsterdam, with the schools’ permission – as learning had moved online anyway, off we went. First an 8 hour taxi drive, another hotel and then the flight.

So far so good. Then we landed in Amsterdam to a phone call from our neighbour telling us that they thought we may have a water leak. That was the understatement of the year. Somehow the solar panels / water tanks had sprung a leak and disgorged between 400-800 litres of water from the third to the first floor ruining everything along the way. I won’t post pictures, suffice to say when I told this to my boss and then later sent some pictures she said she’d had no idea just how bad it was and thought I may be exaggerating, and apologized for that. Basically the place was uninhabitable and we sat around in a dripping mess for a few hours while the insurance and people with drying machines could jump into action. One just goes totally numb in those circumstances.

One of my friends, who, as a Ukrainian has been a victim of the war there, now in its fourth year was very empathetic, while alerting me to the following:

The Ukrainian phrase often used when a difficult situation is resolved, or a “debt” is paid in a monetary way, is: “Дякую, Боже, що взяв грошима” (pronounced: Dyakuyu, Bozhe, shcho vzyav hroshyma). It literally means “Thank you, God, that you took [it] in money,” implying the loss was just financial rather than something worse.

I keep reminding myself of that. We have insurance. It will take two months to completely gut and rebuild the house. We have lost furniture including some irreplaceable family heirlooms. But it is stuff. Just stuff. One of my husband’s closest university friends died yesterday after 18 months struggle with a brain tumor. Another of our friends is battling cancer.

Our problems are small potatoes. But it’s still hard to concentrate. Hard to focus on substantial work. I can neither be on holiday – our two week spring break was brought forward by a week, so officially I’m on holiday – nor can I do the work I “need” to do – prepare a presentation for an upcoming library conference, build some Libguides (ironically one on revolution), finalise some book orders, start reading books for my book award jury duty.

Instead I’ve been knitting socks and listening to audiobooks interspersed with some walks. I’m on my fourth and fifth pair since leaving Dubai (I usually knit at least two at a time. It’s mindlessly productive. I can highly recommend Arundhati Roy’s “Mother Mary Comes to Me”.

I want to cry but I can’t. I want to write, but this post has been open for nearly a week.

And so we move towards the end of week two. I didn’t get to hear the rockets and drones being intercepted. I wasn’t a worker who was killed as collateral damage. I’ve witnessed it through our compound and school WhatsApp messages and messages from my friends.

But I’m still feeling unsettled. Covid was one thing. War is something completely different.