TINA & THE PALESTINIAN MAIL DROP.

  This story happened back in the 1960s when I was working for Sammy Collins in the Neutral Zone, the buffer state between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This was before I joined Offshore Marine,  the Cunard company.
  When I was given command of the "Sarah", the Saudi-flag tug supply ship, I inherited a perfect Arab crew. This included the Steward/Chef, Aboud Yassin Abu Shama pictured above with the knife in his teeth about to fillet harmour or grouper. He was a magnificent chef and, not surprisingly, came from the ancient town of Nablus famous for its cuisine in Palestine. Now Nablus is about 40 miles north of Jerusalem on the West Bank occupied by the Israelis now, and at that time. Aboud had a wife and young son  in Nablus and could not communicate with them in those troubled times, he could not send a letter, money, or a gift from Saudi, the Neutral Zone, or Kuwait to Israel. Any communication would have been confiscated. Similarly his wife and family could not send anything from Israel to him. The Israelis would have tried but Arab interests stopped it. So Tina came up with the solution.
  Aboud sent his mail etc. to our home in Worle, Weston-super-Mare, and then Tina repackaged it neatly and addressed it carefully to the Israeli address for Nablus for Aboud's wife and family. His wife reversed the process sending letters and packages to Worle for onward transmittal to Ras al Khafji in the Neutral Zone. Some of the letters were poorly addressed from Nablus but Royal Mail, Weston got used to it and none were lost. Mind Tina was well involved.
  Later during my tour of duty out there Sammy Collins asked me to organise the passage of two small supply boats from Louisiana to the Arabian Gulf. This required sailing from Morgan City up the Mississippi  to Barbados, thence St. Helena, a call at Capetown, and and then to Hormuz and finally Jazirat Shaik Shoab Island off Iran. I agreed to do it if I could take my Arab crew and take a one day stop-over in London before landing in New Orleans. He agreed and so we stayed one night in Heathrow and I saw Tina and the boys. And so Aboud managed to meet Tina [and the boys] and thank her hence the other picture. We had an evening sight-seeing in London and it was fun.
 We parted our ways but later I did bump into him some time later in Dubai and he was working for the major American construction company J.Ray McDermott and was working on getting his family into the Emirates. Aboud was a fine guy.

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