Summer came quickly, too quickly, to a land that had barely glimpsed winter. As the days grew longer and the sun’s light beat down on the dusty earth, the people began to retreat back into their houses once more. As the guttural sounds of the call to prayer intersected and hung in the moist, stagnant air of early afternoon and the thick, sweet smell of ripening dates wafted through curtained windows, life took on a feeling of fatigue. The effort to speak sometimes became too much, and the people reclined in air-conditioned rooms after feasting on rice, greasy and warm, in silence. Even the mangy street cats felt with urgency the coming of summer, and lay sprawled beneath parked cars, lazily blinking slowly. All of life seemed slowed, as if God had not rewound the clock, and the seconds had stretched into minutes. As the sounds changed to the humming of flies and the sound of car horns, the shouts of playing children broke this new form of silence. As the sounds faded to the background, one hardly even noticed them. The melted makeup ran down women’s sleeping faces and the maids, squatting outdoors in the kitchen, shooed flies away impatiently. Their strong hands and arms, muscles pulled taut against hairless tanned skin, scrubbed at bowls. Their work began far before the sunrise, far before the men and women rose to pray. Irons pressed against clothes, tired backs arched in a vain struggle against soreness, and the daily life of these larger-than-life women began. Clothes must be washed, food must be prepared, floors must be sweeped, and petulant, querulous children must be tended. Their palm leaf brooms rushed across cold stone floors as their feet, firmly planted, supported them. 
These women were the backbone of the house, the unsung heroines. Their lives were filled with work and loneliness. Perhaps if they were fortunate they would have a brief moment to call their families on their cellphones and speak about life, reminiscing in their native tongues. As time went on, their sadness became hard, less of a weakness and more of a strength. Their strong shoulders supported a lifetime of struggle, of caring for pregnant daughters and newlywed sons. The regret of being torn from their motherland weighed down upon them, and they dreamed of a better life. The sorrow of not meeting their grandson or granddaughter simply fueled them as they worked every day, often late into the night, retiring to mattresses in unconditioned rooms to flip through photo albums of memories. Polaroids of children, parents, husbands, homes and native countries kept alive the joys of the past. Often they didn’t have this luxury, of having evidence that their life in the past, so different from the present, had even existed. Then they held tight to these insubstantial memories to help them through the hopeless nights, as they woke to greet their day unflinchingly, as they ran out of phone credit and were forced to go days without hearing their daughters’ or sons’ or husbands’ voices. Despite their hardships, they comported themselves in a quietly defiant way.
They were living proof of the strength hidden in vulnerability.