Globe of Splendour: oman

Showing posts with label oman. Show all posts

Sunday, 10 March 2013

The thrill of the alien

I prayed last night for the return of my passport in order to be reunited with my family. At about 6 this morning, woken by the cacophony which is the night in the Seeb souk, and the idiot opposite who has the TV on really loud then starts playing Arabic disco at 3am. I went into the corridor and shouted to little effect.

Waking again at 5pm with the call to prayer amid strange and vivid dreams, I went online and saw cryptic messages from T sent while I was asleep boiling down to ‘You owe me big time’ and ‘Get you bag, you’re pulled’ which I had to assume meant she had found the passport. Another email from my mum this morning confirmed this although I will have to wait for a video call to confirm this. I walked along the beach today after spending an hour and a half in the office doing a bit of work to lessen the load tomorrow. P and K came in just as I left at midday.

The thrill of the alien. That is one way to describe the feeling of disorientation mixed with excitement, or rather a heightened sense of awareness, when one is in a strange country with very little that is familiar. There are ugly things about Oman – the shop signs, the scrabble roads, the litter on the beach, the industrial noise and endless traffic. In a sense it is both developed– in the sense of infrastructure and traffic – and underdeveloped in the commercial western sense. Where as we have endless sophisticated advertising and branding, they have brash, ugly shop signage that is all of the same ilk. They have endless ‘coffee shops’ that don’t sell coffee. If was to put on my entrepreneurial hat I would say two lines for tourism would be – a decent, Omani coffee chain to take on the limited inroads of Costa and Starbucks. Secondly, boutique western friendly hotels at reasonable prices. Oman is pitching at the high end market which makes perfect sense but means that many will not come here. For Oman, that of course could be a great blessing. But rather than leave the mid price hotels to Indian chains, an Omani-European chain could cater to those who don not like gloomy rooms and indifferent service. But then of course, you would need trained staff as well as well designed hotels.

My new room has what seems to be a permanent generator hum just outside the window. I am guessing it will continue into the night. Strange that when I came to look at the room earlier I did not hear it. We will see tonight whether it makes sleeping impossible. Shouting and the water truck, and perhaps less disco pounding would be nice, but I am suddenly aware of this incessant jangle. This part of town is the epitome of the hell of rapid modernization without thought for the peace of the people who are supposed to be benefiting from it.

Thursday, 17 January 2013

Staying calm while the world goes crazy

Oman, my current location, is an oasis of calm in a region that seems to be convulsing with violence. Bombs by Sunni extremists and mass killings by security services in Pakistan trigger a new form of protests - refusing to bury the dead; Syria each day a horror story; Iraq still hit by daily bombings and protests.

Further away in Mali a war with France against ‘terrorists’ is underway, with Britain in a supporting role; in Algeria militants seize hundreds at an oil installation in retaliation against the French. Weapon stockpiles looted from Libya after the fall of Qaddafi are now put to deadly use.

The Muslim world is in a process of violent and revolutionary change. America under Obama is like America under Clinton – reluctant to engage in conflicts in far flung places after a decade of wars. So Britain and France step into the breach. France is gung ho after staying out of Iraq and playing a small part in Afghanistan. But they have been humiliated 'Black Hawk Down' style in their botched rescue of a hostage in Somalia. It is truly extraordinary, exactly 20 years after Bill Clinton got burnt with a simliar operation to hear that French forces met with 'unexpected resistance' in Somalia. Meanwhile the Mali escapade already looks like it could escalate into something much more difficult. France would probably like to intervene in Syria, its former colony, but Russia stands in the way.

Meanwhile life here seems to go serenely on. Even when locals look at me strangely, I don’t detect hostility. But perhaps under the surface there is something there. Clients of the West like Jordan and Oman have to be nervous. That role of being stuck between big players is familiar to both – Oman between Saudi Arabia and Iran; Jordan between Israel and Egypt. If you don’t play it right, you end up like Lebanon or Syria.

Oman is what a friend called the Switzerland of the Middle East – it remains resolutely neutral and stays friendly with all its neighbours. It’s a small country and it pays not to take sides. Perhaps this commonality is partly why there are so many Palestinians and Jordanians here – but may be more because here there are paying jobs and prospects and in Jordan there aren’t.

A well connected Palestinian from Jordan living here told me that one in three Jordanian men were informers to the security services. I wonder what the proportion is here in the Sultanate? It’s not an accident that taxi drivers’ licence plates belong to the Royal Omani Police. And it may explain why cabbies are often so curious.

Sunday, 14 October 2012

Dreams of escape from a crowded world

Ever since I visited Iceland, I had a yearning for landscapes empty of human habitation. I no longer enjoy big cities like I used to. I live in south-east England, the mostly densely populated part of the UK, which is number 25 in the list of countries by population density. The UK is just behind Vietnam is density terms. As i discovered when I moved from London to Brighton, I felt my stress levels reduce even as the high buildings and police sirens were replaced by the sense of light and space afforded by the sea and the generally smaller scale of architecture and the city. In the life of human beings our typical group size was not larger than 150 until about 11,000 years ago. Large cities with more than 100,000 populations are probably not older than 5000 years. Rome is believed to be the first city to grow to 1 million - perhaps the first megapolis. Today, there are over 300 cities in the world that boast a population in excess of 1 million.

When I drove through the Icelandic wilderness, I was moved by the sensation of an unspoiled human-free environment that for our ancestors would have been their birthright. I get the same feeling in the Scottish highlands where human impact is minimal. The words that sums up my feeling is 'peace' and 'freedom'.

It was only in 2005 that the majority of the human population became urban dwelling, as rapid urbanisation across the globe finally made urban as against rural existence the norm for the human species.

In the British isles, the happiest people according to a recent survey live on the Scottish islands. These are sparsely populated with beautiful vistas of the sea and unspoiled nature. This to me is central to human happiness - living by the sea and close to the countryside is good for our mental well-being, even though some people are happiest in big cities. Some thrive on stress, but as a recent article explained:

Living in an urban environment is long known to be a risk factor for psychiatric diseases such as major depression or schizophrenia. This is true even though infrastructure, socioeconomic conditions, nutrition and health care services are clearly better in cities than in rural areas. Higher stress exposure and higher stress vulnerability seem to play a crucial role. Social stress may be the most important factor for the increased risk of mental disorders in urban areas. It may be experienced as social evaluative threat, or as chronic social stress, both of which are likely to occur as a direct consequence of high population densities in cities. As for the impact on mental health, social stress seems to outweigh other urban stressors such as pollution or noise.
Living in crowded areas is associated with increased social stress, since the environment becomes less controllable for the individual. Social disparities also become much more prominent in cities and can impose stress on the individual. Further, disturbance of chronobiological rhythmsis is more frequent in cities than in rural areas and has a negative influence on mental health and beyond. A recent meta-analysis showed that urban dwellers have a 20 per cent higher risk of developing anxiety disorders, and a 40 per cent higher risk of developing mood disorders. For schizophrenia, double the risk has been shown, with a 'dose-response' relationship for urban exposure and disease risk. Longitudinal studies on patients with schizophrenia indicate that it is urban living and upbringing per se, rather than other epidemiological variables, that increase the risk for mental disorders.

So I have put together this list of sparsely populated states and territories. Of course the reality is that many countries are combinations of inhospitable desert or tundra with a few densely populated urban centres. Some are poor and many, if not most, resource rich. I have not included some of the smaller islands and city states such as Lichtenstein or Monaco. These tend to have dense populations, mostly of rich tax exiles.

Countries with world's lowest population densities

1 Mongolia

2 Western Sahara

3 French Guiana

4. Namibia

5. Iceland

6 Suriname

7. Mauritania

8. Australia

9. Botswana

10. Guyana

11. Libya

12. Canada

13. Gabon

14. Kazakhstan

15. Central African Republic

16. Russia

17. Oman

18. Chad

19. Bolivia

20. Turkmenistan

21. Mali

22. Republic of the Congo

23. South Sudan

24. Saudi Arabia