Happy Thanksgiving!

Lots to be thankful for this year – not least to have Ann and Cam’s house (and all our parents’ heirlooms) saved from the Rice Canyon Fire earlier in October. Plus, I have my first full-time job post-PhD in the Language Centre here with professional development possibilities and a decent income. And for the first time since selling my Urbana home in 2000, I have a place to call my own: my seaview condo in San Pedro back in LA.

This Thanksgiving found me at table in Muscat with old, old friends of my mother’s, Dr. Don and Eloise Bosch. After finishing Arabic language training in Bahrain in 1954, Mom was appointed by the Arabian Mission to work as the first RN in their hospital in Oman. She arrived by ship around Thanksgiving 1954 and was there just over a month before the Bosch’s and their three kids arrived from Iraq.

Although their period of overlap was short – January-June 1955 – the mission community was tiny and very close, and even after Mom get hitched to an “oil man” (in Mission parlance), she kept in close contact with Bahrain and Muscat – and the Bosch’s. As a child, I remember landing in a tiny prop plane in Muscat in the late ‘60s to visit her mission friends and once more in the early ‘70s. The most recent contact I had was in 1995, when I met up with Mom and Dad in Muscat before Christmas in the waning days of my Aramco teaching job in Jeddah. We were guests of Don and Eloise, this time in their palatial villa in Haramel. A lot had changed in the sultan’s 25-year reign!

The idea of a medical missions couple living in a palatial villa on the sea is a definite irony and needs to be understood in context. Don was one of the few early and longest-termed doctors in Oman when he retired, and in gratitude, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos gave him and Eloise the villa as a gift as long as they were alive. After all, they had done medical work (and teaching) in the days before AC, dependable electricity, blacktop roads, and airline contact with the outside.

Last night, Thanksgiving, I pulled up at the gate of their villa in my new Terios and was let in by their gate guard (appointed by the government). On their back patio overlooking their private moonlit bay were several earlier guests, mostly connected to the Protestant Church in Oman, such as Roxana, the wife of the former Indian pastor (now in Nepal) and her daughter. We were soon joined by a South African women, a consultant at the Ministry of Health, her daughter, and their guest, a former Scottish nurse in Oman now working with the opera house in London (can you say “career change”?); a German woman who is in charge of hospitality at the still-under-refurbishment Al-Bustan Hotel; and another young South African woman who plays and sings at the PCO in Ghala on Fridays. Last to arrive were Pastors Ed Schreur and his wife Tamera, Reformed Church people from Southern California. Interesting that only half of the dinner guests were even American!

After dinner, Don, Eloise, the Schreurs and I paged through a picture history book of the mission hospital Don had written a decade ago, which included a short bit on my mother, who, in addition to being a valuable medical asset, was famed for turning even the most basic pump organ into a “cathedral organ”! Don and Eloise signed their newest book for me, “The Doctor + The Teacher”, another photo-history collection, and with Don looking tired, we all gradually said our good-byes.

Don and Eloise, although retired these days, have been making their annual pilgrimage back to Oman every November-April (when the weather is bearable). Don’s Parkinson’s is progressing bit by bit, and he turns 90 (!) this December, so every year there is a question mark as to whether they will be back the next year. I lucked out that they made at least this one trip back during my SQU teaching stint.