The Three Curses

Two years ago, my family and I left the Saudi Kingdom behind right in the middle of the Covid-pandemic. It was a highly-charged, truly epic departure, where we felt the presence of God himself as he worked a series of miracles to lift us out of Arabia against the odds and bring us back to our family house on Siargao Island, Philippines. Final deliverance itself was sweet enough, but once back on the isla we were able to build our dream house (using funds saved from my second Saudi season), surf every day and look forward to a five-year residency on an island we truly loved. Far from the mask-wearing and app-showing conformity of pandemic Saudi, life suddenly felt free again and the freedom was sweeter than the ripest date in the world. 

Quite frankly, the idea of returning to KSA for a third time was the furthest thing on my mind in those heady days. Indeed, I had written off ever seeing Saudi again for the rest of my days. Yet today, unexpectedly writing this blog from England, a return to Saudi has become far more likely in order to replace the nightmare that life on earth has become for me personally. So what happened and why is this blogpost called “The Three Curses”? Read on to find out …..

To start with, I’d like to recall a direct message I received on Instagram just as we were escaping Saudi. A Muslim foodie blogger from Australia, whose husband had just lost his Saudi job, suggested I stop posting stories about us leaving the Kingdom. She said people might be jealous of us getting out and be wishing (or cursing) us bad luck. While I retorted that the God I believe in would protect us from any supernatural attacks, I never forgot about her dark remarks. Did someone in Arabia wish us harm or want bad things to happen to us? I’ll never know. But life in the Philippines didn’t play out the way we expected it. Instead, three events, in quick succession, changed the course of our lives forever and forced us to leave our Siargao home and abandon all hope of a swift return less than two years after arrival.

The first event came in the form a super typhoon: twelve weeks after we moved into our newly built dream house, the worst typhoon to ever hit Siargao devastated the island in mid December 2021 and our home suffered particularly devastating damage. Having worked so hard to build the house in the first place, it was heartbreaking to see what the 300kph winds of Super Typhoon Rai (Odette) had done to our place. Furthermore, the entire village of General Luna was like a tsunami disaster zone and getting our lives back to some semblance of normalcy took nearly six months. Sadly, far worse was still to come.

While we were rebuilding our home, the second episode arrived in the form of a Chinese consortium, who began a 24/7 unprecedented construction site right in front of our home in February 2022. They were hell bent on keeping us awake with noise all day (and often all night) and also covering us with fumes, dust and other pollution from their relentless activities. In a flash, our simple Siargao life and wonderful ocean view disappeared forever to make way for the slow rise of the Siargao branch of the Lind, a famous hotel on Boracay Island. Whether it was illegal levels of noise or internal damage to our house and wall, all our complaints fell on deaf ears. Indeed, local politicians warned us to put up and shut up - they either cared more about local employment or were being paid off. The law didn’t matter anymore. And we definitely didn’t figure in any equation.

The final happening was by far the worst. It started innocuously enough with a tiny black dot appearing on my arm during the latter stages of our reconstruction - perhaps May or June 2022 - and slowly growing into a 5mm blue/black lesion, which looked more like a blood blister than anything more sinister. However, given my father’s history of melanoma, I consulted a doctor at a clinic in General Luna in September 2022, who dismissed my concerns and said I was far more likely to die of my slightly elevated blood pressure (140/90) and cholesterol. The lesion kept growing and bled a little in the autumn, which sent me online to an Arab doctor in November 2022, who said it was nothing to worry about. Just before Christmas, I consulted a third doctor on the island, who said it was definitely an abnormal growth, about 9mm in length by now, and he sent me for an urgent biopsy in Siargao City in January 2023. While the Surigao dermatologist also dismissed it, she agreed to cut it out and, an unbelievable 42 days later, she confirmed it was nodular melanoma - the deadliest skin cancer in the world. It was already invasive and completed what felt like a trio of post-Saudi curses. 

Despite being in a state of shock, we didn’t leave Philippines immediately after my diagnosis. Instead, after a traumatic month of skin surgery and recuperation in Davao City in February, we stopped by Ayoke Island for an epic three-week stay in March before returning to our noisy home on Siargao Island in April, which we quickly realised wasn’t going to be our home for much longer. Soon enough, our plans to flee from the Chinese took full shape and the next season in our lives, a totally unexpected one in England, came quickly into view. 

In early June 2023, we sailed away from Siargao unable to say categorically whether we were leaving the Philippines forever. Our journey back to UK was far more complicated than a simple long haul flight: Emirates Airlines kindly got us to Dubai for a 24-hour transit before the less luxurious, yet surprisingly efficient, Wizz Air flew us to Vienna, where we caught the first in a series of trains across Eastern Europe to eventually reach Talinn for our RyanAir flight to Stansted. 

I had just about managed to hold it together in Eastern Europe, despite receiving unclear news about two further biopsies (carried out in Surigao in May and Cebu in June) en route Talinn. I did fairly well ignoring all the uncertainties about the future and enjoying what might be our last trip for a long time or even forever. However, once we boarded our flight to London on July 1st (seven days before my 50th birthday) I could feel a new wave of deep depression sweeping over my body, and I wondered how much worse things could get.