The ominous beeping of my phone gave way to a mid-morning siren alarm followed all too swiftly by a boom – and then a couple more.
Bahrain was in the cross-hairs of a foreign war and this time, the explosions had hit home.
The Juffair battlefront where the smoke and noise are emanating from, is also home to so many friends.
They have been navigating clogged roads with just a change of clothes hastily put together into carry bags with their travel documents and some money, rushing to friends’ homes away from this target zone.
At first there was disbelief – are we in danger in our Bahrain?
One friend told me her husband insisted on completing his gym session before realising that the danger was quite real and letting himself be rushed from the building.
It’s the kind of situation where we gravitate to friends’ and family’s homes and not to anonymous hotels where the luxury may be greater but the sense of shared crisis is absent and we feel isolated.
Since my family and I are in a relatively safer place – we think – we have been taking ‘at home’ precautions.
Drawing the curtains across all windows so that damage from flying glass is limited; keeping phones and devices charged, keeping one bath-tub filled with water for an unlikely emergency and basic kitchen supplies handy.
I realised with a start that in my lifetime, I have actually lived through seven wars, five that involved my home country and two in the Middle East.
Mind you, I am only counting the longer face-offs and not the skirmishes.
Every war brings us face-to-face with new technology.
During the Gulf War (1990-91), it was all about Scud missiles and gas masks and we even felt a twinge of pride when one Scud actually fizzled onto the Sakhir desert.
This time, the explosions are much closer but so is the reassuring growl of the Bahrain Air Force planes that streak across the sky.
Truth be told, we live through these conflicts in the same bubble that wraps around us in the Gulf at all times.
Except for little difficulties that are perhaps momentarily scary but hardly life-altering, we move relatively untouched through the troubled times.
The Bahrain government has planned for food security that will outlast our efforts to empty the shops with panic buying; our hospitals are all still in excellent working condition, fully equipped and with every medicine in hand.
Compare that to the bombing of schools and hospitals in other conflicts and the dire pleas by relief organisations for essential foods, nutritional supplements and medicines for babies and you can understand that even though we are worried right now, we have but a far seat from the real destruction, thank goodness.
Still my heart goes out to school kids worrying that they will miss their exams today because schools cannot take on the responsibility for their safety, to little ones who fail to understand why their Gerg’aoun fun is being cancelled and children like my friend’s son who is on the autism spectrum and is reduced to a screaming mess by sirens and the sudden disruption of routine.
Not all of us are lucky enough to be untouched by the war and it is the nature of the beast that it bites the most vulnerable youngsters the hardest.
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