Bahrain: The Meeting Point

 

The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

 

 

 So, I actually read this book way back in May, just as things were getting crazy with the end of school year stuff.  I waited too long to write about it, then got distracted by several other books I read during the summer so I kept stalling.  I don't know if anything I write now, six entire months later, will accurately depict my experience of reading The Meeting Point.  But I'll give it a shot.  The six month break was good for my motivation to get back to my alphabetical, literary journey around the world.  I'd been feeling discouraged by a few duds and the lack of choices for many of the smaller countries, but I've recommitted and will continue to work my way through the B's.  I really am glad I didn't impose a timeframe on myself for this endeavor though.  I think I'm more the meandering type.

 

The Meeting Point is about a young woman, Ruth and her husband, Euan, who move to Bahrain with their young daughter so that Euan can serve as a Christian missionary.  Ruth believes their purpose is to provide pastoral care to a church that is attended by expatriates from Western Europe, primarily the United States and their own homeland, the United Kingdom.  But upon their arrival in Bahrain, she learns there is another, very dangerous mission that Euan intends to undertake, one that risks their physical safety and compromises what they have built together as a young family.  When her protests fall on deaf ears and Euan begins spending increasingly long stretches of time away from home, Ruth befriends a British, adolescent girl, Noor, who is living with her Arab father and recovering from a tragic incident at the boarding school she previously attended.  Through their friendship and through helping care for Ruth's child, Noor begins to heal from the past and from her loneliness.  She relies on Ruth to mentor her through the process of learning to trust again, but meanwhile, Ruth is distracted by Farid, a much younger man who acts as her tour guide and shows her the beauty of her temporary home in Bahrain.  As the relationships between Ruth and each of the other characters ... Euan, Noor, and Farid ... spin out of control, Ruth learns some painful lessons.  With Bahrain as a haunting backdrop, Ruth questions her faith in God, in her marriage, and in herself. 

 

The book's foundation in Christianity is important to the character development, the setting, and the context of the underlying themes and plot.  You do not need to be Christian to read and enjoy the novel, nor are you likely to find it to be preachy or theological.  In this sense, Caldwell did an outstanding job of exploring religion, history, and politics while focusing purely on how the collision of those three things impacts the humans at the vertex of those ideologies.  Goodreads rating shows just over three stars overall, but I gave it four.

 



 



Afghanistan: The Pearl that Broke its Shell

The Pearl that Broke its Shell
by Nadia Hashimi

One of the main reasons I set out to read a book set in every country is because I believe with all my heart that fiction opens up a window into the world and casts light on our shared human experiences, which we may otherwise never take time to consider.  As I searched for a book set in or about the provocative country of Afghanistan, I found that many of the bestselling and recently-written books focus on war.  This is similar to what I’ve discovered in my efforts to read about Vietnam, the country from which my husband and I adopted our youngest child.  But I hear plenty about war-torn Afghanistan on the news and have seen plenty of war-torn Vietnam in movies.  What I'm looking for are stories that bring the people of other countries to life in my imagination, make them more real in my mind, and remind me that no matter what's happening politically, we are more alike than different in our shared humanity.  I wanted to read a novel that would tell me something about the Afghan people through the lens of their daily lives. 

                          

The Pearl that Broke its Shell is a beautiful, heartbreaking story of two women, living in Afghanistan with 100 years spanning between them, who struggle to cope and survive with the hardship that plagues all women of that country.  The novel weaves back and forth in time, between the stories of Rahima, a young girl growing up in a small village in modern Afghanistan, and Shekiba, who is Rahima’s great-great-grandmother.  The clear and very compelling theme is the plight of women, how vulnerable and subjugated they are to men and by tradition, and how little has changed over the span of a century. 

Because Rahima is one of five daughters in a family without the all-important son, her mother decides to make her a bacha posh, a girl who pretends to be a boy and is treated, by everyone, as a boy.  Having a bacha posh makes life a little better for the family since Rahima, now called Rahim, can go out unchaperoned to run errands, to attend school, to work, and to interact more boldly with men without fear of shaming or dishonoring her parents.  Rahim finds intoxicating freedom in life as a boy, and when her time as a bacha posh comes to an end as she is married off at the age of 13, the cloistered life of being a woman in Afghanistan is all the more bitter a pill.  To help her to cope with the sudden and dramatic shift back to a life without freedom or affection, Rahima’s unmarried aunt tells her the story of Shekiba, whose journey through womanhood is hauntingly similar despite the 100 years that separates them.  After losing her entire family to cholera and being sold as a servant to repay her uncle’s debt, Shekiba is given to the king’s delegation as a gift.  Although she is frightened and lonely, she finds some solace when she is charged with guarding the king's concubines, a role she must play while posing as a man.  She, too, finds unimaginable freedom in shedding the burdens of womanhood, but everything falls apart when she is unfairly accused of allowing a strange man to visit the harem at night.  She narrowly escapes her consequence ... death by stoning ... when the stranger offers to take her as his second wife.  She, too, find the return to life as a woman to be stifling, frightening, and isolating.    

The women in Hashimi's novel face a brutal existence, one where they rarely take solace in friendship with one another as they all fight for the scraps of kindness and opportunity wherever they may find them.  There are momentary pockets of brightness, predictably in the love each woman has for her children, and for Rahima, in the small bit of progressive thinking that comes to Afghanistan via the Westerners who are there for war.  Despite a few scenes that seemed a little too dramatic, the novel is a beautifully written, haunting story that will stick with you long after the final page.

 

Other Books Considered for Afghanistan

•  The Swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra  (fiction)
• The Man Who Would be King, by Rudyard Kipling (fiction)
• The Secret Sky, by Leila Roy (YA fiction)
• Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez (memoir)
• The Places Inbetween, by Rory Stewart  (memoir)
• Sardar, by Abdullah Sharif (memoir)

 Previously Read - A Partial List

• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
• And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
• The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon