In Search of God

I am a loyal South African who has kept her sleeping patterns precisely as they were when I left SA, so when its 10:00pm and time for bed in SA it’s midnight here which means it must be bedtime for me too. The same happens in the mornings, I wake up at 9:00am (7:00pm South African time) and thus I feel I’m doing something for my country, paralleling my sleeping patterns and whatnot.

I like my sleep, many of you can attest to this, and so it was with a half baked heart that I woke up at 8:00am to go to Church this morning. It’s quite amusing – in Muscat there are two Churches, the Protestant Church and the Roman Catholic Church (there may be others but I haven’t heard of them yet). I have no doubt that the fact that the all the people who choose not to pray to the Virgin Mary are now all worshipping under the same banner would make the Methodists and the Anglicans of the Bergville and Winterton parishes squirm. Anyway, so I get up, eat my honey melt whole wheat Pronutro (yes people, Pronutro, remarkable, I know); I put on my mooi mooi Church outfit and head of to find my God in a country that certainly worships someone else.

As with most of my driving in this place I had my trusty diary on my lap with some quickly scribbled directions written in a corner somewhere. To cut a long story short it turns out that there are two Ghala offramps. I took the first one and apparently it was the wrong choice. My delightful little trip to Church turned out to be a delightful little trip into the desert. I then had to renegotiate my way back into the city via heavy road works and strange detours. Miraculously enough I managed to find my way home. At this point I would like to throw a few names of places out there – Al Khuwayr Ash Shamaliyyah, Al Khuwayr Al Janubiyyah, Al Udhaybah Al Janubiyah, Hayy Al Urafn, Al Wadi Al Kabir. I know my mom is laughing right now because I know that her spacial dyslexia just kicked in. Lets just leave it at this – I probably did more praying in my car trying to find my way home than I would ever have done if I actually went to Church.  

And now for something completely different. I went to Kickboxing on Wednesday night. There is something very awkward about being in a room full of sweaty men, in a Muslim country, doing pelvic thrusts. Perhaps the most distressing part was the noise accompanied by these thrusts.

An even more disturbing event, however, happened when I got home from kick boxing. If one may, just for a moment, consider the state of my body after doing an hour of kick boxing one will imagine how desperate I was for a nice hot shower. So I lathered up, shampoo and all, and was happily washing away when horror of horrors my shower died. Literally, it didn’t just slow down to a trickle, it died. Dripping in shampoo I decided to keep my composure and head to my other bathroom. Dead. Not a drop. With panic slowly rising I tried all the basins and even the funny toilet hoses. Nothing. I even tried to lift the cistern off the toilet but it wouldn’t budge. Now, when I shampoo my hair I take no prisoners. The froth was beginning to form puddles of bubbles around my legs and my entire flat had a trail of panicked to and fro movements of shampoo lather. I then remembered my last bottle of drinking water. With great dexterity I managed to meter out the water so that it just rinsed my entire head and my body. Needless to say I didn’t have that warm fuzzy feeling when I went to bed that night.

And now two days later I can barely move. When you have a body like mine, that considers a slow amble down to the farm yard with the dogs serious exercise, you can only imagine the agony I am currently in. From the amount of groans that accompany my every movement one could well imagine that I am back on the kick boxing floor joining in with the cacophony of men performing pelvic thrusts.      

‘And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.’ Matthew 6:5