Kamon aso. Hello?

After two weeks, I feel perfectly at ease in Bahrain. I definitely like this place, the capital Manama, the people in general, the old-dirty-smelly town of Muharraq, the Indians' shops, the colours, the food... Muharraq is the town where the site is located, the Fakhro Amara. We have learnt some more bits about the project after meeting other people who are involved in other tasks. The overall project of recovering the memory of pearl trading aims to become a candidate for UNESCO's world heritage sites. The place where we are working used to be an ancient warehouse for pearl trading during the first half of the 20th century. Then, it was used as shops for getting and selling date juice. I expected to lift a flagstone and find millions of pounds in pearls so I could retire after this project, but all I find is old dates.

The site is right in the middle of the town, surrounded by houses, lively streets, the souk and plenty of shops in it with everything you may need. For the last 3 or 4 decades it has been an abandoned lot with a bad quality building with several phases collapsing gradually. People are used to walk through (and leave rubbish) so they are curious about what we are doing there. We receive occasional visitors, young and old neighbours with precious memories. But also some journalists or other people involved in the project. The site is huge and at the moment we are 7 people in the team, after the two new members who arrived last weekend. Fortunately, we've got an army of about 30 workers from Bangladesh who help us with the toughest jobs. I have to supervise most of them whereas there are other helping the Polish girl and other members of the team do other things. The guys are quite small and look young, not especially strong and they have to do the toughest job. I try to organise them in a way that they work on the shade as long as possible but that's sometimes difficult to achieve (there aren't many shady places after 9am). Besides, I've got the impression that their company doesn't treat them especially well. So we try to be as gentle as possible with them, making them feel useful and expressing our gratitude (something I am sure they are not used to).

Communication with them is very difficult as they don't speak any English at all and not much Arabic (we don't speak Arabic either anyway...) It is already difficult to make someone understand in your own language what the archaeological profession consist of so even more if the other person doesn't understand a single word of what you say, either you are speaking Spanish, English, Arabic or Basque. I am struggling but in two weeks I think we have done some progress and they are starting to see what we need and, most important under my point of view, to feel a bit more participative. Fortunately, there is one of them, looking older than the others, who can speak a bit of English and, best of all, he can write it too. I have asked him to translate few words and basic sentences into Bengali so I can communicate with them, even though some times it is just to tell commands... Anyway, so far I can already tell them things like hello (kamon aso), goodbye, thank you, thank you very much, leave it, clean it, dig it, well done, lunch time, stop, you're welcome, rest... Things that we think they will improve the communication for everybody's benefit. As a result, I am learning more Bengali than Arabic. There was also something I didn't feel comfortable with and it is that they have got the habit to call me 'boss' so I asked the guy who can speak English to write my name on my helmet in Bengali writing. I hope it is not an insult or something like that... I promise some photos soon!