At the very end of the year, I travelled back out to the Jiddat to find Hamad, our host of January 2012, and his helpers. I arrived at the Haima Tribal Centre and telephoned his daughter to ask her to locate him for me – the mobile phone number I had was not answering and the satellite phone seemed not to work.  She told me to wait and she would get back to me.  I sat at the café next to the new petrol station and sipped a sweetened Nescafe with milk. A few minutes later, Hamouda, the elected representative of the Harasiis at the Omani Consultative Council ( Majlis al-Shura), drove up and collected me and my team. He drove us to his majlis, a formal sitting room, made of tarpaulin cloth, but substantial enough to include wall-mounted air conditioning. While being offered coffee dates and tea we were joined by Hamad’s daughter, Ameera, who also assisted in the serving of coffee. In due course she informed us that we were to have lunch at her house and that she would arrange for us to be guided out to the ‘uzba’ [temporary camp] of her father.

Ameera had a house in Haima, which was built by the Ministry of Social Housing. She also kept a temporary camp of her goats deep in the Jiddat.  She had extended her house to meet her growing family needs; she had also built a formal majlis similar to Hamouda’s in the interior courtyard.  While we were eating she told us that her father had arranged for Musallem, his grandson, to bring us to the mobile camel camp. I wondered where they were as last January we had left them in Wadi Mukhaizana preparing to cross the major graded road connecting Haima with al-Ajaiz. Ameera told us that her father was about one and a half hours north and east of Haima in the Wadi Bu Mudhaibi. He had been there since January.

We set off mid-afternoon over a flat nearly featureless rock and gravel plain arriving at Hamad’s mobile camp late afternoon - an hour before sunset.  I recognized his three vehicles from a distance: the old Army surplus Bedford truck, the water tanker, and the kitchen on wheel. This time there was a fourth, a portacabin which I had seen before at other temporary camps. It had a refrigerator and also an air conditioner which ran off of a generator. We pulled our vehicle up as directed by Hamad next to the portacabin and Hamad strung a rope between it and the portacabin to extend the interior space of the camp – to keep out the camels when they returned at sunset.

We sat outside the tent on rugs and drank a welcome coffee followed by dates and tea and caught up on the news of the past year. As sunset approached we could see the camels returning and Hamad, two hired helpers, went out and organized them around the feeding troughs, singling out those with special conditions for hand feeding or separate feeding bowls. As night fell we continued talking and agreed that the next day we would film another interview.

That night we slept in the portacabin and a light was provided for us. I hadn’t realized that solar panels had become so widespread. The next day I asked to see the solar panels and the batteries they used to keep the lights on at night as well as to run the refrigerator when they had excess camel’s milk t and which hey anticipated sending out to family members spread out between Haima and Salalah and Muscat. When most of the morning tasks had been completed, we conducted another interview touching on current affairs of importance to him: the training and employment of Harsuusi young men in the oil industry, the competitiveness and corruption in some of the camel races where drugging of camels was becoming a common practice; the folly of fencing in the gazelle and the oryx and why some Harasiis were cutting the fencing in allow these animals to continue to move towards sources of new rainfall or water instead of dying of thirst when their movement towards sources of moisture were being blocked.

I asked Hamad how much longer he might remain in this particular location. He had been here for almost a year. He said he was now bringing in feed  by trailer from Haima and from the UAE. He was just waiting for rainfall so that his herds could once again feed on the natural graze and browse they so preferred