UM SIEED'S ROOM

It was difficult to find rental accommodation in the town because if one rented one's home to someone then it was virtually impossible to evict them. The law at that time was totally in favour of the tenant and the landlord had little or no rights. We stayed with Esser for a week and then moved into Fawaz's uncle's home. His father's brother had died and his aunty, Um Sieed (Sigh-eed) shared a two storied, four roomed cement house with three families. She lived in one room with her young daughter Tamarsill. Her son Fararj and his wife Eptisam lived with their daughter Filly in the adjoining room. Um Sieed rented one of the upstairs rooms to a soldier and his wife from the neighbouring mountains. Fawaz rented the fourth room for our family. The toilet was at the end of a narrow verandah. It faced the street, was an arabic style hole in the floor, had no roof, its walls were made of broken bricks and the door was a piece of hessian cloth hung loosely with nails.
Our room had two windows, one made with a rusted steel frame and the second was boarded up with plywood. The door was made of decorated steel and the unpainted cement walls were very depressing. We rented the room for two years because Fawaz had bought a house about one hundred metres up the road and our room allowed him to be close to us as well as supervise the building of our new premises. We sold our rented house in Australia and used the money that was left after the mortgage was paid, to finance the building of our new home.
Fawaz was hoping for us to move into our newly purchased property but the tenant that came with the sale, refused to move without a payout that equalled the price of the house. It was an old building and Fawaz had plans to build our home on the roof.
He applied through the courts to have the tenant evicted, to no avail and there were many tense and stressful times between Fawaz and the tenant before he finally accepted a payment to move.
The two years that we spent living in the room were very difficult for me.
There was no kitchen or bathroom. A sink was built in one corner and a brick wall separated the metre and a half by metre and a half square room from the rest of the living quarters. Two double mattresses were piled in one corner, which were used for both the lounge and bedding and a fridge adorned the far right corner next to a cupboard, on top of which sat a gas stove. There was no space left for anything else except our soopeear (Kerosene heater).
Bath time was a family affair, because I thought if I was going to set up the room for one person to have a bath, then we would all take our turn at cleansing ourselves. A large aluminium container with a small stool positioned in the middle of it, replaced the customary bath. I would boil a pot of water on the gas stove and combine it with cooler water in a bucket, to be used with a cup and poured over oneself, followed by a good soaping up and a final rinse. The floor was made of cement, so any water spillage was of no consequence. Yasmin usually bathed first because Azzam had no interest in sitting still for any length of time, especially if it meant allowing me to clean him. I imagined it would of been a sight to watch, with me bare skinned and sitting on a stool made for a 2 year old, in a container less than a metre in diameter and tentatively directing the water that poured from my well worn frayed plastic cup. Luckily, a faded lemon curtain separated my humble bathroom from the daily toilet traffic that passed by my window.
The townsfolk often asked Fawaz, in front of me, how a foreigner could live in such a drab environment, as they could not themselves even contemplate living under the same conditions. I would ask Fawaz to translate to them, that we were lucky to be building our beautiful home made of sandstone and marble and that our accommodation was only temporary.

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