A Very Wet Day

.
Talking with Sue on the phone the other day, she reminded me of an amusing (in hindsight) incident that happened to her in Tripoli when Emma was a toddler.

When she came home one afternoon, she had a little trouble parking because there was some minor construction work going on near our villa. As it was raining, she didn't go out again that day.

The next morning she got ready to leave for work. She and Emma walked down the front steps and opened the front gate. The rain had caused a big puddle to form right outside the gate. A nuisance but not at all unusual. So she tucked Emma under one arm, held her car keys in the other hand, and stepped out into the puddle.

Unfortunately, the puddle wasn't really a puddle. It was a seven-foot-deep hole full of muddy water. While Sue had been at home the previous afternoon, the construction crew had dug a huge trench all along one side of our street and this trench had filled up with water overnight.

Sue struggled to stay afloat and to keep Emma's head above the water. She shouted for help but the street was empty. Sue's clothes and Emma got heavier and heavier. She started to tire.

At this moment, a car drew up alongside. The Libyan driver opened his window and looked down at Sue. "What are you doing?" he asked. A reasonable question in the circumstances.

Sue didn't bother answering. Instead, she pushed Emma up and into the man's arms.

Then she started diving down to the bottom of the hole looking for her car keys. She couldn't find them. This meant there was no way she could get back into our house.

The only solution was for the man to drive her to his house so that she could use his phone to call a friend for help.

According to Sue, the man's wife was not pleased and was more than a little suspicious when he arrived home with a very wet European woman and blond child.

It all turned out well in the end, though. Sue called a German friend who was married to a Libyan man. He drove over, confirmed Sue's rescuer's story to the man's wife, and took Sue and Emma back to his house.
.

A Ferocious Dog

.
Our dog, Dopey, could be very ferocious. She was well aware that it was her job to protect us and our property from all threats, and she took her job extremely seriously. However, sometimes her conscientiousness got her into trouble.

Dopey Deals with Geese

We were living in a villa on a farm outside Tripoli. I was sitting on the front porch having tea. Dopey was sitting in her usual position at our garden gate, just waiting for intruders to appear so that she could tear them to pieces.

And intruders did appear, in the form of a dozen geese that waddled past our gate. Dopey hesitated for a moment and the geese disappeared around the side of our house. Then Dopey decided they were up to no good and raced after them. I couldn't see what happened when she met up with them but there was the most awful racket for a minute or two.

"Oh, no," I thought. "She's killed some of the bloody geese. Our landlord is going to be furious."

Then Dopey reappeared. She limped into our garden, staggered up the front steps and lay down under my legs.

After that, whenever the geese appeared, Dopey would immediately leave her position by the front gate and find some urgent matter to attend to inside the house.

Dopey Meets a Mother Cat

Our third house in Libya was a modern villa surrounded by a seven-foot-high wall. Whenever we went away on an overseas trip, we would take Dopey around to a friend's house and would pick her up when we got back.

After one trip, we picked Dopey up and drove to our house. I opened the gate. There right in the front garden was a small cat with three newly-born kittens. Dopey couldn't believe her eyes. The ultimate enemy had moved in while she hadn't been there to protect our property. She made a blood-curdling snarl and hurtled over to the cat.

The cat stood up and arched her back. Dopey stopped a foot away from her. The cat hissed. Dopey backed up. The cat hissed again. Dopey moved behind me and Sue.

To cut a long story short, Dopey decided that the only decent thing to do was to let the cat raise her kittens in peace. So she kindly volunteered to spend the next couple of weeks living in the back garden.

A Surprise Visit

It was a Friday and we got up early because Sue's mum, Connie, was flying in from London to visit us and our newly-born daughter in Tripoli. She would be arriving in the afternoon and we wanted to tidy up the house.

We had just started on the housework when someone rang the doorbell. Probably Mustafa popping in for breakfast, I thought.

I opened the front gate - and there was Connie, complete with suitcases! A Libyan man I didn't know was sitting in his car nearby. When he saw me greet Connie, he waved to us and drove off.

Once we'd brought her in and made her a nice cup of tea, she told us what had happened.

Somehow - and I still can't think how - we had got confused about the dates and so she had actually arrived the previous day. She waited for us at the airport but we never turned up. After an hour of two, she started to get worried.

She couldn't phone us because we didn't have a phone. The waiting period for residential phones in Libya at that time was about 11 years and it was in the era before cellphones.

She couldn't take a taxi either, since she didn't have our address. There were no residential postal deliveries in Tripoli and so, whenever she wrote to us, she sent her letters to a post office box.

Evening fell and still there was no sign of us at the airport. Now she was really worried.

She needn't have worried, though. This was Libya. As she sat waiting with her luggage, a Libyan couple approached her and the man asked her, in English, what she was doing. She explained. The man conferred with his wife and they both agreed that the only thing to do was for them to take Connie to their home for the night and then to bring her to our house the next morning.

And that's exactly what they did.

Of course, it wasn't quite as straightforward as that, because none of them had any idea where our house was. Connie didn't even know which district of Tripoli we lived in. However, she did remember that we'd once mentioned that there was a hospital nearby.

So in the morning the man loaded Connie and her bags into his car and started driving around the areas of the city that had hospitals. In each area, he went into the local corner stores and asked if anyone knew an English couple who had just had a baby. It didn't take long. The third or fourth store he visited was our local shop. The people there knew us and had a rough idea of where we lived. So they directed him to our area and he knocked on a few doors until he found someone who pointed him to our house.

Libya was a difficult place in many ways but the people were certainly nice.

A Border Incident

.
On one of our visits to the oasis village of Ghadames, two of our friends from the village wanted to show us some nearby ruins. They knew I had trained as an archaeologists and they thought the ruins might interest me.

We set off across the desert in one of their trucks. Sue, myself and Saleh squeezed into the front. Mustafa and Abdusalem sat in the back, with Dopey, our dog.

Mustafa had strict instructions to keep tight hold of Dopey's lead. Inevitably, though, as we hit a particularly large bump, Mustafa let go of the lead and Dopey leaped over the side. We stopped. Dopey stood and grinned at us. Then she took off across the desert. We chased her. She stopped. We stopped. She grinned at us. And then she took off again.

We played this game for quite a while.

Dopey Playing the Game

However, the game stopped when we almost ran headfirst into an army truck. An Algerian army truck!

Three extremely scruffy soldiers in Algerian Army uniforms got out of the truck and walked over to our truck. They had big guns. We were all under arrest, they told us. For illegally crossing into Algeria.

Saleh and Abdusalem were outraged. We were in Libya, they told the soldiers. And they said it was the Algerians who had crossed the border illegally and who were now under arrest.

Oh, no, said the soldiers. We were in Algeria and were under arrest.

Not at all, shouted Saleh and Abdusalem. It was the Algerians who were under arrest.

The arresting and counter-arresting went on for a while.

Dopey, a staunch patriot, played her part by crouching down and snarling ferociously at the Algerians every time our Libyan friends arrested them.

Eventually, everyone calmed down. We all shook hands. We all said goodbye. The Algerians got back into their truck and drove away.

"So was that an Algerian border patrol?" I asked Saleh. "Have we accidentally crossed into Algeria?"

"No, I'm sure we're in Libya. Well, pretty sure," he replied. "In any case, that wasn't an official patrol. They were smugglers."

"Smugglers?"

"Yes. Their truck was full of cases of whisky. They were smuggling whisky into our country. Algerian soldiers do it all the time."

I had long wondered how, in a country where alcohol was strictly prohibited, our Libyan friends' houses always seemed to be well stocked with bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Now I knew how they got their supplies.

BTW, as soon as the Algerians left, Dopey jumped back into our truck and sat there grinning, as if to say, "Now, wasn't that fun?"
.

Atheists Need Not Apply

When I went to the Libyan Embassy in London to get my first residence visa for Libya, I ran into a problem. I could not get a visa without producing my baptism certificate, because atheists were not permitted to enter the country. You could only get a visa if you could prove you were a member of an organized religion. Christians, Muslims or Jews - yes, Jews - were welcome but not atheists.

I was pretty sure that I had been baptised but I had no record of it. I called my mum. She was pretty sure I had been baptised but had no record of it.

So I popped into a local church and asked the vicar if he could give me a baptism certificate. "Have you been baptised?" he asked. "I think so," I told him. "Into which church?" he followed up. "Not a clue but probably Church of England," I answered.

It seemed that this information was not enough to justify his issuing me with a baptism certificate. The only way to do this, he told me, was for him to baptise me. I explained that I didn't want to be baptised; I just wanted a certificate. He wouldn't give me one. Very inflexible, some of these religious people.

I tried the Libyan Embassy again but they were still adamant that I needed to produce a document showing I was a member of a church or temple or something similar.

So I had to improvise. I went to Woolworth's and bought a John Bull printing set. These were wonderful little toys, consisting of wooden trays, little rubber letters and numbers, a pair of tweezers and an ink pad. You made words by assembling rubber letters on the wooden trays. You inked the letters and then printed them onto paper. Pretty much the same technique that they used to print the Gutenberg Bible, except I'm not sure they used tweezers for that.

I typed up a letter confirming that I had been baptised into the Church of England at St. Ollie's and St. Stan's Church on December 25th 1945, and I signed it with the name of one of my high school friends. (His dad worked at Carlisle Cathedral, so I thought this added an authentic touch.) I then made up a nice stamp for St. Ollie's and St. Stan's with an arbitrary address in Carlisle, my hometown. I stamped the letter and took it along to the Libyan Embassy.

I got my visa.

I think Ollie and Stan would have approved.

The Three Wise Men

.
Every few months I would have to drive out to Tripoli International Airport to collect books or other school supplies I had ordered from the UK. As often as not, I would return from these trips empty-handed. This was not usually because the goods hadn't arrived. It was not usually even because I didn't have all the correct paperwork. It was almost always because of problems with what I called the Three Wise Men.

Who were the Three Wise Men? They were three old men who worked in the customs office at the airport. Dressed in traditional Libyan clothes, they sat at a long table and they were responsible for one part of the processing procedure for imported goods. Anyone bringing goods into the country had to start the customs approval process by taking their completed import forms to the old men's table.

The first old man's job was to take the papers and shuffle them until they were in a tidy pile. Then he passed the pile along the table.

The second old man would carefully - and very very slowly - count the papers to make sure you had given in the correct number. He would then pass them along.

The third man was probably the oldest because he had the most important job. He would staple the papers together and then stamp them with the date before handing them back to you.

This all sounds like a well-oiled system. And it was - unless one of the old men was sick. If any one of the Three Wise Men was absent, your papers could not be processed, because neither of the two remaining old men was authorized to stand in for the missing official. So you had to drive back to town and return the following day, hoping that the absent member of the team had recovered and was now at work again. Sometimes he would be there the next day, and sometimes he would still be absent. I remember I once had to make five trips before the team was back up and running smoothly.

Towards the end of my time in Libya, I had a student who was fairly high up in the Libyan Customs Service. In the nicest possible way, I mentioned the Three Wise Men and hinted that it might perhaps be more efficient to replace them with one younger person. A younger man, I suggested, could probably handle the whole process himself - and he would be less likely to be ill and therefore absent.

My student looked puzzled. "But what would we do with the three old men?" he asked.

"You could give them a pension and they could stay home with their families," I said.

"But think of how they would feel," my student replied. "They would feel useless because they would not have a job. If men don't have a job, who respects them? These are very old men and they deserve respect. So we must give them jobs."

"Okay," I answered. "Maybe there is another solution. They could keep their jobs but someone else could step in if one of them was sick."

My student thought about this for a moment.

"No, that would not work," he said. "It would make the old men feel their jobs are not really important and so they are not important."

"But it would make the system much more efficient," I argued. "People like me wouldn't have to keep driving back and forward to the airport."

"True," said my student. "But which is more important - efficiency and your convenience or the feelings of those three old men?"

Maybe I had been in Libya too long by this stage, because I have to admit I was convinced by his argument.