peteg's blog - noise - books - 2017 04 16 Benyamin GoatDays

Benyamin: Goat Days.

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Kindle. Mostly read on the short (~6 hour) flight from Doha to Zurich. Somehow I mostly slept through the long leg (~14 hours) from Sydney to Doha. Qatar Airways must hire a lot of Russian pilots, and they seem less bothered about safety than any other airline I've flown with. The stopover definitely evokes this book, as did the previous one I read.

This is a tale of recent-day enslavery and possibly human trafficking in the Gulf states. It's at its best when talking about the harrowing conditions of the first-person goatherd / general dogsbody who was sold a visa for a construction company but got abducted by an opportunistic Arab ("arbab") with pens (essentially a feedlot) on the edge of the desert. The author claims to have sourced this from someone's direct experience (see Wikipedia for details). There's a lot of empathy demonstrated in his connection with the animals. My only real beef was the slow progress through the desert. I wonder if things are improving at all.

The Arabic translation was apparently written by an Indian expatriate in Doha.