I was walking along the beach in Seeb. It was sunset and the beach and scenery was blanketed in a crimson glow from the massive red sun I’ve only had the privelege of seeing in the Middle East. We had been driving across the beach sands for a few minutes when my friends decided to stop and watch the waves crash quietly in a spot. I felt like venturing off. I could see birds flying in thousands just a few hundred meters away so I headed that way, walking through the shallow waves that washed my feet. I was hoping to get some photographs to bring home with my camera. Just then, two trucks came towards me. They were filled with men in the beds and they were waving. One guy was holding what looked like some kind of pet bird with a leash on it, something similar to what I’ve seen in the states when an animal specialist holds an eagle or special bird for an exhibit but doesn’t want it to fly away. A little nervous with the number of men in the two trucks, I kept walking towards the thousands of birds flying. They passed me and parked but the man who had been holding the “bird” came towards me from the truck. I stopped...unable to decide exactly what to do next, I knew my friends could see me and that it was probably okay. As he approached me I could see his hands covered in black ink, the sandy beach floor was oozing with this black liquid and I analyzed the fishy smelling dead animal the man was proudly displaying for me. It was a squid, but he couldn’t talk. I assumed he was just completely fluent in Arabic, Swahili, or another language besides English as it is common to meet someone like this in this vastly foreign land.
Just then, my friend came who is Omani and fluent in Arabic, he began talking to him, “Keif Halak”...but the man just smiled and nodded. Without saying a word, the man dressed in an Oman soccer team uniform (popular among some groups of Omanis) bent down to scribble the Arabic word for “squid” in the sand. My friend noticed right away, “Laurel, don’t know you know about the people who don’t talk? The ones who have no language to call their own?”. Being someone who wears hearing aides in both ears and has had to be taught at a young age how to pronunciate certain sounds because I am completely deaf to some sounds I naturally asked, “Oh, are they deaf?”. Thoughts immediately rushed through my head being aware of the lack of disability services that are available for people in Oman versus places such as America I realized that maybe these people are the ones that society failed because they never learned how to speak and were not taught to pronunciate like I was. My Omani friend answered with somewhat of an unclear explanation that has left me thinking and wondering what I had seen that day. He said “Yes, they cannot hear you and they are mute because they have a sickness and they cannot be taught to speak”. I wouldn’t consider my hearing impairment a sickness so I was left confused despite asking numerous clarification questions as we watched the men pull the tattered fishing boat onto the sands as the night began to fill in all the areas of the beach that were once pink from the sunset.
Who are these people of silence?
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