In the early morning you see smoke coming out of the houses’ vents, so you know the lady of the house is already up baking bread for the family using wood she gathered the other day, along with a few liters of ground water, which she walked for two hours carrying back to her home.

An hour later sunlight wakes up the other members of the household, in two minutes the man showers using the two-hour walk water, finds his breakfast ready, and later rides his donkey to the farms or the market, calling it just another day.

I do remember my grandmother proudly saying that she was the first women in the village to fire up her oven, she always wins when the other ladies see that Sumaya’s vent is already smoking – how does she manage to get up that early? My grandmother also had had her own donkey, which she used to ride to the spring to collect the water, and to surrounding areas to collect firewood.

My grandmother died over a decade ago, shortly after the village had received government electricity, my village also was lucky to have a water projects, with pipes going to every house up the hill and down the valley. There are several transformations that my village has seen since my mother’s death. There are many new houses, most of them don’t have wood ovens or vents, but instead a satellite dish and a car parking space instead of the barn. Kids used to herd the sheep and play with the mud, now they have a play station place where they gather, playing games for 10 Riyals a try.

Whenever we used to go to the village we used to pack our Tuna, Jam, and cheese and have an adventure in experiencing a different, calming, and stress-less lifestyle. Now the phone will hunt you down, you hear someone honking near by, and all sorts of noise will wake you up. I haven’t heard the sound of a living roaster in a very long time. Most shockingly, my uncle told me that there is a place for fried chicken just ten minutes down the road.

Where did my village go?

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