Best Buddies Picnic

Dec 01, 2006 18:16

Best Buddies had organized a picnic today at the Jumeirah Beach in Dubai so I hopped into a bus from school and went to Jumeirah Beach around 11:00. After much driving around Jumeirah generally, we finally found the spot where we set camp i.e. dumped all our food, shoes and sanity on a covered bench and dove straight into the fun.

We played volleyball a bit and then a game of dodgeball [boys vs. girls]. The special needs children seemed to be having a ball, thowing the makeshift dodgeball at people. Then a bunch of us went to the shore where Taaha threw wet sand at me.

On my second trip to the shore, one of the organizers, Mrs Gulshan and I found this fellow who was sitting in the sand with a canteen of water. He was clearly mentally challenged and [as we found out later when we saw him walk] physically challenged too. He wasn't part of our picnic group. He said he was all alone on the beach, his family or friends weren't with him. So Mrs Gulshan asked him for his mother's cell phone number. With a lot of difficulty, he sputtered out the seven digits of his mother's number, pronouncing 'seven as 'deven', 'three' as 'dee' etc. He talked to his mother [or someone else] and asked her to come pick him up.
Ignoring the stares, I escorted him from the sand to the sidewalk and he told me that his name is Mohammad. I asked him if he was an Arab and he said yes. So I spoke to him in my broken Arabic, but he replied in English so I guess he was more comfortable with English when talking to strangers. He said his mother leaves him every Friday at the beach all alone, apparently with just a heavy canteen of water which, I saw for myself, he lifts up to his mouth with a lot of difficulty and drinks water from it - nothing else. As we were talking, it started to rain, so I took him to a shaded place.. but that didn't help much. He kept asking me to go and he told me that he's ok, he's ok, he's fine. I didn't want to leave him.. I was sort of worried. Yousuf popped up from somewhere and we stood there talking to him. Yousuf whined a bit about the rain, but little did we realize how cold he must have been - he was wearing nothing but a pair of swim-shorts. I offered him food or something to drink, because we had plenty at our "camp", but he refused and just asked us to go [in the 'don't-worry-about-me' manner].
"You go.."
"I'm worried for you. Are you gonna be ok?"
"I'm ok.. the police here knows me."
"But I don't want to leave you alone."
"You go. I'm ok. I'm a man."
So Yousuf and I left. I kept watching him from a distance. When I turned to look once, he wasn't there anymore. I hope you reached home safe and sound, my man.
It's not my place to judge his mother or the rest of his family for leaving him alone at the beach every week, but still, one wonders why parents would do that.

Anyways, on to the pictures:



Abhishek and Yousuf, standing outside school, waiting to get on the bus.



Jumeirah Beach on a lovely, warm Friday afternoon.



A snap from the game of dodgeball.. I was knocked out of the game on the very first ball.. some of those girls have very good aim. But they sucked, for the most part. I mean, Aziz the enthusiastic special needs boy was playing better than them.



Ok, so my eyes are half-closed. Shut up, it looks sexy. It's a nice picture, this one.. because of the beautiful sea and the beautiful Yousuf.



Thanks to Vahid's trembly fingers, this picture with Abhishek, Yousuf and me got a tad shaken up.



The sun came out while it was still raining - warmth and cold at the same time! [something that Yousuf hates, apparently] - so there was a rainbow in the east. If you squint, you can see the rainbow right above the two towers in the mid-left of the background. I felt pretty gay after seeing the rainbow.

beach, friday, rainbow, best buddies, fun, friends, rain, odd, picnic

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